CEO at Neurometric. Author of the book "Investing in AI." Still a believer in free market capitalism, globalization, and small government.
NYC mostly
Joined September 2007
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The world is going to move past us - we willing give business to competitors in the name of "america first" but it's really "america stupid"
Christina Cacioppo on why French software companies have stopped building on American models:
"I was very surprised to learn a lot of the French software companies are using Chinese models predominantly.
I was with our customers in France...and someone said, 'We all switched to Chinese models when Trump closed Fable off to non-Americans.
We just realized there's a huge business continuity risk.
We can't trust that if we build a business on one of these American models, it'll always be available, so we stopped doing that.'"
My company sells to large enterprises - and in almost every case, they find cutting edge AI models aren't yet good enough to do basic work tasks unsupervised. They are very brittle. How do you AI doomsdayers square that with this idea these machines will soon takeover the world
research.meta.ai/blog/muse-s… - this is a long long game. And everyone keeps remarking, when new models come out that this or that company is toast. No one is toast. It's the second inning. Meta was considered out of the race not that long ago.
Rob May retweeted
Econ 101.
Trump’s tariffs raised prices on more than imports. New York Fed researchers found they also pushed up the cost of American-made goods.
Full story here foxnews.com/politics/america…
With taskrouter.com, we parse through all of this, run the combinatorial options, and move you to what works best for your specific workloads.
Model Benchmarks Are Worthless
How can a model score 24% and 59% on the same 113 coding tasks?
It happens when you vary the harness that wraps it.
I’ve increasingly ignored most of the recent model leaderboard results. Partly from exhaustion and partly because improvements in a ranking don’t show up in the actual work.
So I asked the 8090 Labs team to measure what the leaderboards skip: the model and the harness together, on real bug fixes and features from open-source projects.
8090 Labs ran 7 models through 5 harnesses.
Here are a few results I didn't expect:
- Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 scored 41% in Claude Code and 61% in OpenAI's Codex. It made 28 tool calls at the median in one and 66 in the other.
- The cheapest runs weren't the cheapest work. GLM in Codex cost $0.22 a run and $0.93 per success. In Pi it cost $0.25 a run and $0.43 per success.
- GLM passed a task on both attempts 51 times in one harness and 16 times in another.
- GPT-5.6 Sol and Grok 4.6 barely cared which harness they were in.
The bottom line is that if you're picking a model/harness combo off a model-only leaderboard, you're making a critical decision based on only half the information.
8090.ai/blog/same-model-diff…
You should add in taskrouter.com, which chooses the smallest model that can complete the task. We typically see 90% savings and 3x latency improvements for customers.
We built a new harness using @typesafeai's Jev that cuts the cost of repetitive work by 90%. The harness learns the job as it runs, moving steps from LLM calls to code.
Running 100,000 compliance alerts costs >$290K on Opus 5.
With agentrun() we got it down to <$26K.
I still get the paper version of the Wall Street Journal. I have since 1998. It's sooo much more efficient to spread it out and skim than reading on a tiny phone, and I find stuff the algos wouldn't recommend to me.
Where's that 0.5% of you who are with me on these points?
Agree - we've already done this for a Fortune 100 company, saving them 90% while simultaneously outperforming the frontier model they were using. We launched taskrouter.com to do this for any company automatically.
We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case).
I think we'll see more of this pattern inside companies. The frontier models are amazing generalists. But increasingly you'll see specialist models out perform on more narrow tasks, either working on teams, or by themselves.
We're making it easy to fine tune models internally for our employees. We even have a skill for it in our internal harness that makes it easy to spin these up and start training them:
"/fine-tune-and-serve-llm I want to fine-tune Qwen for payments risk review. help me get started"
I imagine we'll have some backend services that could be replaced entirely by this new architecture.
Taskrouter.com is out of beta; auto-route to the best models per task AND push button creation of fine tuned SLMs when it makes sense for the task. blog.neurometric.ai/p/introd…
Rob May retweeted
New from the New York Fed: "By February 2026, tariffs had contributed 2.9 pp to goods price inflation, and without them goods prices would have fallen slightly."
About one quarter of every point in higher tariff rates shows up in consumer prices within one year.
• A 10% across-the-board tariff yields a 2.6% rise in consumer goods prices after one year.
• About two thirds of the increase comes from pricier imports, which get passed through quickly.
• Another third comes from U.S. made goods, as producers face higher input costs and less import competition. This takes longer, about 6-12 months, to filter through.
How Fast Do Tariffs Pass Through into Consumer Prices?
By Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein
nyfed.org/4j2HHcN
At least one AI leader is saying rational things. fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-go…
Rob May retweeted
Including today’s jobs report, here’s a breakdown of the jobs numbers since Reagan left office.
George H.W. Bush (Republican, 4 years)
02/89-01/90: +2.035M
02/90-01/91: -138k
02/91-01/92: -693k
02/92-01/93: +1.425M
Total: +2.629M
Bill Clinton (Democrat, 8 years)
02/93-01/94: +2.811M
02/94-01/95: +3.904M
02/95-01/96: +1.812M
02/96-01/97: +3.039M
02/97-01/98: +3.450M
02/98-01/99: +2.893M
02/99-01/00: +3.312M
02/00-01/01: +1.692M
Total: +22.913M
George W. Bush (Republican, 8 years)
02/01-01/02: -1.844M
02/02-01/03: -286k
02/03-01/04: +183k
02/04-01/05: +2.025M
02/05-01/06: +2.646M
02/06-01/07: +2.045M
02/07-01/08: +919k
02/08-01/09: -4.312M
Total: +1.376M
Barack Obama (Democrat, 8 years)
02/09-01/10: -4.277M
02/10-01/11: +1.035M
02/11-01/12: +2.409M
02/12-01/13: +2.011M
02/13-01/14: +2.304M
02/14-01/15: +3.007M
02/15-01/16: +2.642M
02/16-01/17: +2.418M
Total: +11.549M
Donald Trump (Republican, 4 years)
02/17-01/18: +2.032M
02/18-01/19: +2.400M
02/19-01/20: +1.971M
02/20-01/21: -9.168M
Total: -2.765M
Joe Biden (Democrat, 4 years)
02/21-01/22: +7.143M
02/22-01/23: +4.770M
02/23-01/24: +2.256M
02/24-01/25: +1.236M
Total: +14.169M
Donald Trump (Republican, 1 year, 8 months)
02/25-01/26: +324k
02/26-09/26: +452k
Total: +776k
Party Totals
Democrats (20 years): +48.631M
Republicans (17 years, 8 months): +2.016M
data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutpu…
#VoteBlueAmerica #VoteBlue2026
Rob May retweeted
And so it continues... Our economic debates seem utterly disconnected from the reality.
That reality: This is an economy mostly creating healthcare jobs, and it does so month after month, and everything else is just noise.
ALT Line chart titled "Effectively all of the net job creation has been in healthcare and social assistance, and jobs are shrinking in the rest of the economy" showing change in non-farm payrolls since January 2025 through September 2026. Healthcare and social assistance added 998,000 jobs with consistent growth throughout the period, while the rest of the economy lost 222,000 jobs, meaning all net job creation came from healthcare. The rest of the economy showed particular weakness from May through August 2025 when losses reached 218,000 jobs. This striking divergence reveals an unusual concentration where one sector's growth of roughly 48,000 jobs per month has offset persistent contraction across all other industries combined.
Rob May retweeted
Inflation numbers came out today, and the official story is that inflation went down. What the headline number doesn't tell you is that the government changed how inflation is calculated in the same release. A month ago, they said July inflation was 3.7%. Today, they recalculated July with the new formula and it dropped to 3.36%. If you measure August the same way as the months before it, inflation comes out around 3.8%, which means it went up. They didn't bring inflation down, they just changed how they calculate it.
Bessent did something similar with CPI last month. You only modify the way you calculate if they numbers are that bad. They genuinely thought we wouldn't notice...
