The Third Act — Reckoning, Resistance, and Local Inference

00:00:04 Zachary Basu at Axios frames today's AI cycle as entering its third phase. Historic capital poured into AI before anyone proved you could automate work consistently. Then came mania, when Claude Code and autonomous agents made that skepticism look outdated and every company scrambled to embed it everywhere.

00:00:26 Now we're in reckoning. The case against AI used to come from outsiders — Luddites, doomers, short sellers betting on a crash. The newest skeptics are emerging from inside the boom. Uber capped employee AI usage after burning through its annual Claude Code budget in four months.

00:00:46 Amazon shut down an internal token leaderboard when employees gamed it with throwaway tasks to climb rankings. GitHub moved Copilot to usage-based billing, and users woke up to the actual bill for heavy usage. Bain surveyed 951 large companies and found AI savings falling well below projections, even as most firms planned to spend more.

00:01:10 The report put it plainly: "The technology worked. The value didn't arrive." The Nasdaq plummeted four point two percent, its worst day in over a year. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged ten point three percent. One culprit was Broadcom — it reported explosive AI growth but failed to raise its longer-term revenue outlook.

00:01:40 The early adopters are the ones sounding the alarm. Most of the economy is still at the starting line. Pioneers are absorbing the cost shocks, wasted tokens, and employee backlash. The harder question is whether that value ever spreads to the companies paying to deploy it.

00:01:59 Two infrastructure stories from today running in opposite directions. Google said it's paying SpaceX $920 million monthly for compute. That buys roughly 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs and stretches from October through mid-2029. The deal covers half the compute Anthropic secured at Colossus 1.

00:02:21 Google described it as bridge capacity for surging demand on its agent platform and Gemini Enterprise. It includes a cancellation clause — either side can walk away with ninety days' notice after December thirty-first, twenty-twenty-six. A $920 million monthly bill with an exit door is a specific financial posture.

00:02:45 Both sides are pricing in the uncertainty of sustained demand. New York's state legislature approved a one-year moratorium on datacenters over twenty megawatts. At least 28 large facilities are under evaluation, which would add roughly 9,682 megawatts to an already constrained grid.

00:03:06 The bill now goes to Governor Hochul. State Senator Kristen Gonzalez told The Guardian: "We should not have to sacrifice our water, our energy, our green space and local communities for big tech." Residents are pushing back hard. One rural New Yorker told reporters her electric bill is already fifty dollars above baseline and she can't absorb another increase.

00:03:34 The Data Center Coalition warned the moratorium would discourage investment and send a signal that New York is closed for business. It's the same tension at every scale: who pays for the infrastructure, who controls it, and who gets to say no.

00:03:52 Underneath the noise, a separate current pulls: He wrote: "I believe strongly in local inference, as a safety net." He's fifty years old and still building things because he wants to — not because investors are asking him to. The fact that someone who designed one of the most important pieces of infrastructure software ever written considers local inference worth his personal time is telling.

00:04:25 Nvidia announced RTX Spark at Computex 2026 — a Blackwell GB10 superchip for Windows PCs, with support from Microsoft and PC makers including Asus, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and MSI. The chip packs an Arm-based CPU with twenty cores alongside 6,144 GPU cores, routing everything through up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory in a laptop frame.

00:04:49 The desktop version ships in the third quarter. The hardware is impressive for what it is. Nvidia's bigger advantage may be software — its GPUs are the industry standard across gaming and professional work, with an estimated ninety percent market share. But Signal65 president Ryan Shrout noted that "everybody understands that it needs to be a great general-purpose PC first." That's been the challenge since the Copilot+ launch two years ago.

00:05:19 And Apple? Allison Johnson at The Verge pointed out something about Siri. Apple fumbled its first AI rollout so badly it's now settling a class-action lawsuit over misleading promises. But Johnson argues that being slow might actually be an advantage. Gemini is already ordering Ubers and looking at your calendar, but young people are growing wary of AI assistants that anticipate their moves too well.

00:05:47 The updated Siri may come with Private Cloud Compute options and automatic chat deletion. That's a different pitch from Google's always-on approach — not just better AI, but less of it in places you didn't ask. Capital is racing ahead of utility, civic infrastructure is starting to push back, and a few builders are shifting gears entirely.

00:06:11 Leave that on the table. — Seln