Token Maxing, Model Sovereignty, and the One Percent Problem

Unfiltered with Matt & Nige | Episode 16 🎙️

Matt and Nigel, both in the UK. The English football team still in the World Cup. The sun is shining.

It’s the perfect start to another great episode.

First up, AI confidence theatre.

Depending on who you listen to, AI is either about to take every job, save every company, replace every app, destroy education, rebuild the economy and probably cut a hot dog in half if you ask nicely enough.

This week started with ServiceNow pencils, school picnics, emotional films, plane screens, and Nigel’s latest excellent Amazon gadget purchase.

Then we got into the real stuff.

Jobs.Models.Token spend.AI infrastructure.Meta.Palantir.Strava.Garmin.Whoop.The NHS.And whether any of us actually know what happens next.

TLDR: AI is moving fast, but most of the world is still catching up. The bubble we live in is small. The confidence is loud. And the real question is still how this becomes useful, valuable and trusted in normal life and normal work.

This week on Unfiltered, Matt and Nigel get into:

* US jobs numbers, tech layoffs, and Matt’s ongoing concern about what AI means for the next generation

* The White House, frontier models, release timelines, access, benchmarks and the bigger question of who controls this stuff

* Nigel’s reminder that we live in a bubble, and most people are nowhere near as deep into AI as the LinkedIn feed would suggest

* Eleanor Werners’ “AI confidence theatre” point, and why most people are still using AI for recipes and rewriting paragraphs

* Claude, Garmin, Whoop, Strava, and what happens when the interface changes

* Meta using excess AI compute as a cloud business

* Alex Karp, Palantir, token maxing, outcomes, and the difference between selling usage and selling value

* Uber and Coinbase cutting or peaking token spend

* The NHS walking reward plan, Vitality, YuLife, and why getting people moving is still one of the best ideas around

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