Claude remains the GOAT and the publicly listed AI companies are starting to look less like companies and more like countries.

Nvidia's market cap is now bigger than the GDP of every economy on earth except the US and China. Meanwhile the US government is wiring AI into the systems that actually run the place, defence, immigration, social services, Coles fkn supermarket, and the same handful of companies are on both sides of that contract. They're selling the picks and shovels, they own the mine, and they bill you per swing.

I've been chewing on this and I still don't know where I land.

The bull case is real. AI stocks are going to the moon, capital is flowing, the productivity gains are not imaginary. I use these tools every day. Antoine, my accountant, tells me there's serious efficiency on his end of the desk too.

But the pattern underneath the chart, I think I've seen this before, in slower motion. The internet started as a commons and ended as four companies. Starlink can switch off a country's connectivity from a desk in Texas. A technology that became the nervous system of the world. The means to communicate, receive information, give unimaginable power to both the people and the powers that be, and it has worked both ways. It's swung elections, waged wars, told the truth, spread lies.

When new technology arrives it gets pushed on us, and then quietly turns into societal infrastructure. The dawn of the internet, social media, crypto. NFTs (lol), and now AI. Once it's fundamental, it becomes the lever. That was Uber's bet. And once it's a lever, someone is always going to pull it.

AI is following the same arc, faster, with fewer people at the top.

This one feels more evil than the previous rounds. More like an extraction. You could argue Polymarket and insider trading on wars in the Middle East and oil futures are par for the course, but watching this cash grab at scale while critical infrastructure gets consolidated into the same five companies going hell for leather to summon an artificial god feels a bit too apocalyptic for me.

I genuinely wonder whether there's an appetite to end the version of life that most people actually want. Most people want to do their job, feel useful, have a beer with friends after work, go home, hang out with family. That's not a small life. That's most lives, and it's a good one at that. The pursuit of efficiency at the scale these companies are pursuing it doesn't have an obvious off-ramp where that life still exists.

I might be wrong about this. I hope I am. I come at it from inside the system and I can see the cracks, while still using the tools that are widening them. And profiting from it. There isn't a clean position to take from here.

So I try to ignore it. Look local, to what I can control, not global. But the economics have shifted there too, and not in our favour. Service businesses have always had an exit problem. SaaS was build-once, sell-many. The credit-based model replacing it is build-once, charge-per-breath. Every prompt is a meter running. The costs go up while the marketing tells you things are getting cheaper.

I played with Claude Design last week. Chewed through five hundred dollars and a chunk of the rainforest in twenty-five minutes generating a broken Newton's cradle.

Compute is the new rent, and rent always finds a way to rise, particularly with a closed Strait of Hormuz on the cards. Cost of living is going to hurt and get worse.

To bring this back to something useful for the people who actually read this, and I'll cop the contradiction: AI seems to be coming for the work people actually like.

It forces a question I haven't been able to put down. We spend a lot of energy at Forge convincing clients to pay us to execute ideas we believe in. Every time I write that sentence I think: why don't we just do it ourselves. Can I consolidate some resources before the proverbial shit hits the fan? That's the instinct that pushed us into property development. Into Miira. Into Santi Capital.

If you actually believe in something, the most honest expression of that belief is to put your own money and time on the line and build it.

Service work is sometimes the cleanest way to fund that conviction. Sometimes it's the thing that prevents the greatness from ever being executed.

What I do know is that taste, judgement, and the willingness to put your own name on a specific thing in a specific place are getting more valuable, not less.

The rest of it: the chart, the credits, Ai overlords and the the satanist oligarchs, at least for a time, are going to do what they're going to do.