Game Of Moats

BREAKING: California voters just passed Prop 37. Buyers of newly built homes can now put down 3% instead of 20%. How: the state lends you the other 17% as a second mortgage, funded by up to $25 billion in bonds. On an $800,000 home that's $24,000 down instead of $160,000.

Anthropic says it has reduced the data harvested from Claude in distillation attacks by around 90–99%. I congratulate them on this achievement. It’s consistent with the point I made a few months ago (All-In Ep. 282): Anthropic, not the government, was in the best position to stop distillation of its own models. Once the horse is out of the barn, there’s limited value in after-the-fact government action. At the time there was a major push in Washington to restrict open models on IP grounds. The threat looked serious enough that 50 companies — including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Palantir, and Dell — published an open letter in defense of open-weight models. Jensen Huang promoted it in his first-ever X post. Nearly 200 startups sent a similar letter. I argued that restricting open models risked removing the incentive for closed-model companies to solve the problem themselves — and could reward negligence by stifling competition while they continued collecting revenue from distillation. The administration did not impose those restrictions. Now we see the result. Anthropic invested in defenses and they worked. Not every technical challenge is a reason to run to Washington for new regulation.

$ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet says ASML saw a flattish 2026 and 2027 six months ago, and now the industry chases a backlog that could last into 2028 and "maybe beyond that" "So if I look back six months ago, we were looking at 2026, '27, we're looking at a healthy market, but a pretty flattish market." "I remember in July last year, we even, you know, in our quarter results, we say we cannot confirm growth. And the reason we say that it's because our customer were not growing." "And in the course of the last six months, everyone started to realize that this AI opportunity is going to translate for real into a major buildup of infrastructure, which will take most probably two, three, four, five years." "And once the infrastructure is in place, this will translate into, I would say, a lot of new products, right? It could be robots, it could be all kind of, you know, healthcare product, energy product, you name it, that could require even more chips." "So, people were a bit doubtful or even a lot doubtful for quite a few months, maybe a couple of years, and then this flipped." "And what you see now is the whole industry trying to catch up on a pretty significant backlog. Therefore, the statement that this could last in 2027, 28, maybe beyond that." ________ For the full set of takeaways from ASML's CEO: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…

Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/NmmAzhf