Monday Links 52

Software development is killer app for generative AI. Maybe it’s the only one?. Nope, the other killer app is charging a premium to not train on customers data.

It seems, though, that, using the robots well is causing problems for the model providers: using them effectively is costing too much.

Last week Microsoft stopped accepting signups for personal plans, added usage limits, and basically telegraphed that their “premium request” model was on its way out. Not surprising when a good developer can dump a sophisticated prompt into the Copilot CLI, burn hundreds of thousands of tokens, and only use a handful of premium requests.

Anthropic also seemed to be thinking about changing their model, A/B testing a pricing page that excluded their most popular plan.

Meanwhile people are experimenting with ways to reduce token usage. Prompting like a caveman shows promise. Learning Chinese doesn’t seem to be worth it. The most 5D chess suggestion: hire junior developers to do the menial tasks. Honestly, it’s enough to get on board with Milton’s plan at this point.

Let’s talk about something that’s actually cool: two people broke the two hour mark for the marathon in London today. Two people! Sabastian Sawe finished in 1:59:30 ahead of Yomif Kejelcha who finished in 1:59:41. Two hours has only been broken in carefully created conditions so to see it smashed by two people in the same race is unexpected to say the least.

If you want to read more about the two-hour marathon mark and the science that goes into pushing human athletic endeavours, Alex Hutchinson’s Endure is a great source.