Hi there,
Bored of AI stories yet?
What I'm Seeing in AI
The First Profit
Anthropic broke even last quarter, the first time a frontier AI lab has managed it.
Here’s some stats:
Q2 revenue of over $11.5 billion, a 14x increase from last year
$16.2 billion booked in the first half of 2026
Their finances now sit roughly two years ahead of their own plan
This was entirely unexpected, it’s a great sign for AI but ironically almost a bad sign for their company. Given the entire game is to grow as fast as possible, it means they weren’t aggressive enough.
So it reads two ways. They’ve built something people are paying a fortune for, and they might not be spending hard enough to win the race.
Meanwhile OpenAI is still spending like mad with Nvidia guaranteeing up to $105 billion of the lease and power bills (CNBC). Their formal notice of IPO will land any day now.
It seems that with so much money going to these big companies, first-grade AI intelligence is in-demand more than ever, and will continue to be extremely expensive in the future, whilst anything less will cost essentially just the price of the power needed to run it.
The Flip Side
On 10 August Meta open-sourced Muse Glimmer: A cheap but powerful AI model that runs on a Mac or a PC (Meta).
It’s built for agent work rather than chat. Writing code, organising files, calling tools.
It’s clear again that the level of intelligence you pay for today is free in a year. This is that, on schedule.
The newest and smartest models stay expensive. Everything below that line drops to the cost of the electricity to run it, because open source doesn’t charge you for anything else.
What makes this different from last year is what’s going free.
A year ago the free models couldn’t do your job. Now they’re close enough to a person on most of the work that it counts. Human-level intelligence is now free to copy.
Profitable at the top, free at the bottom.
What I'm Building
Running the Company From My Pocket
My coding sessions don’t live on my laptop anymore. They live on a small server that never sleeps, and the Claude app on my phone is the remote control.
I can close the laptop at 6pm and the agents keep building.
Work gets spun off onto its own “card”: it goes away, does the job, and messages me when it’s done.
It has changed how I work more than anything else this year, and I’m spending far less time sat at my laptop.
Cohort 2
We’re running our AI course again, and cohort 2 kicks off on Monday.
If you haven’t quite understood what I’ve been going on about in these newsletters, and you want to learn to use AI yourself, feel free to give it a crack (I can give you a discount cos I know a guy ;)) - course.thehourglass.ai
Thank you for your 2 minutes!
See you next Friday,
Finlay
Explore the rest of my writing here → finlayekins.com/writing
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