12 Jul 2026
Signal Headquarters

Field Notes · 12 Jul 2026

Best explained

Arvind Jain explains which analyst roles AI will eliminate. Task-based data analysts who build dashboards on request without business thinking are the most vulnerable, while those who reason about business problems are not.

By the numbers

Enterprise AI token spend follows a steep power law. Some Glean users spend $10,000 to $15,000 per month while most spend around $20.

New today — Evidence added

70% of Higgsfield's $300M ARR comes from agencies, not individual creators.

Alex Mashrabov

New today — Sharp calls

LTX Video's variable tokens architecture allows models to allocate more tokens to challenging areas of a scene such as physics.

Zeev Farbman

Osirion has collected the largest ever olfactory dataset for AI training, comprising 5.43 million sniffs.

Alex Wiltschko

AI token spend among enterprise users follows a power law distribution, with some users spending $10,000-$15,000 per month while most spend around $20.

Arvind Jain

Grok 4.5 costs one-tenth of Fable's cost for equivalent tasks.

Greg Isenberg

New today — Useful context

Jeff Currie explains how steep futures backwardation can generate large rolling returns even when spot prices fall, using oil as the concrete example.

Jeff Currie

'Super clipping' describes a frustrating power loss experienced by drivers when energy output is diverted to charge the battery instead of propelling the car.

Lewis Hamilton

Tool watch

Conductor introduced a pattern where a user-submitted prompt triggers an AI agent to implement a feature request directly, a workflow likely to spread to other products.

Worth quoting

“The moon's gravity on Earth is the same no matter what the phase of the moon is.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“40 to 41% of employees saying they ship AI work that they couldn't explain if asked. This is bot f***.”
Rebecca Hinds
“If you live in a state where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave.”
Ada Palmer
“Consensus 2027 EPS change for AI infrastructure stocks. Insane. 42%.”
Michael Zezas
“If I had a death wish, I would have just gone and done it. I would have spent nine years training for it.”
Alex Honnold
“You're spending a trillion dollars a year and the revenue on AI talk about maybe 70 80 billion.”
Rajiv Jain