If China “beats” the US in the AI race, I’d bet two big reasons would be their outsized focus on open models and their massive renewable energy buildouts. China added 11x as much renewable power capacity as the US in 2025. Even adjusting for population differences, it’s still almost THREE TIMES our added capacity per person. This potential rollback from the EPA is sending us in the wrong direction. nytimes.com/2026/09/13/clima…

I do not know how Anthropic survives this. GPT 6 Astra costs $2.57 per task. Fable 5.1 costs $6.12. Astra is smarter, faster, and less than half the price of the model that burns your entire week in a day. Every Max user who hit their limit at 10am this week is looking at this chart right now. Anthropic's whole business is selling a model that costs more to run than the competition and charging you for it in usage limits. OpenAI just made that business model impossible.

Which industries are most prominent in @ycombinator batches over the years? 2016 top 3: 1) Consumer products & services 2) Healthcare & life sciences 3) Finance & insurance 2026 (partial) top 3: 1) Development & IT 2) Finance & Insurance 3) Manufacturing & Industrial The overall theme seems to be a shift from digitising services to automating work, increasingly including the physical world. It's worth noting that companies which have pivoted will be classified by their current industry rather than their initial pitch — so there is some "current-thing" bias.

Resy account deactivated with all future reservations canceled because of Instinct bot

AI power users are showing up outside tech. The fastest-growing Codex adopters since February: Legal: 108x Sales: 41x Recruiting: 41x Marketing: 26x Healthcare: 24x Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

"The way to get the very best startup ideas is not to look for startup ideas. If you’re consciously looking for them, you’ll be too conservative. You’ll lop off the outliers." Instead, work on projects with your friends. Build things you think would be cool. Paul Graham on How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

OpenAI's active agent users continue to climb, now at 20 million. CNBC reporting that OpenAI's run rate revenue has grown 35% quarter to date, with enterprise revenue up over 50%. Agent users are only 2% penetrated against the ~1 billion active user base of ChatGPT.

AI power users are showing up outside tech. The fastest-growing Codex adopters since February: Legal: 108x Sales: 41x Recruiting: 41x Marketing: 26x Healthcare: 24x Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

Humans are the minority user of AI Agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, up 14x since February Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…