Are you measuring outcomes or outputs? Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo (@christinacaci) said it right in a recent interview. Every AI company claims to price on outcomes, but most of what gets called an outcome is actually an output: documents drafted, alert closed, account offboard. An output is something the software did. An outcome is something that changed for the customer because of it. How they are different: -- A drafted contract is an output. A deal that closed faster is an outcome. -- A closed alert is an output. A breach that didn’t happen is an outcome. -- An offboarded account is an output. Zero lingering access when the auditor shows up is the outcome. Outputs are easy to count, which is exactly why AI startups bill based on outputs. But billing on outputs rewards volume, not value. Pay per alert closed, and you’ve built a system that’s rewarded for closing alerts, not for making you more secure. AI Buyers: ask what you’d measure six months from now to know it worked. If the vendor’s pricing unit isn’t tied to that, you’re paying for activity. AI Startups: real outcome pricing means taking on risk you don’t fully control. That’s hard. Calling per-task pricing “outcome-based” is easy, and customers are starting to notice the difference. This goes to the recent discussion around CONSEQUENTIAL and VERIFIABLE. Buyers value (and pay the most for) consequential, non-verifiable (long horizon) outcomes. Outputs are what the software does. Outcomes are why anyone buys it.

with current token prices i wouldn't really say "cost of software is going to zero" our token cost is double our payroll which means even though we're 25 it's like we're 75 and i feel like our output is similar to a team of 75 pre-ai. we're just able to do it without all the downsides of a larger team this is still a good thing. we couldn't hire 50 more people. so much overhead and impossible to retain a high bar

So true. You see people churning hundreds of PR a day on different repos and many side projects and yet accomplishing nothing. It’s very important to know what you want to achieve and get there with as few PRs as possible.

i have no time to maintain all my vibe coded tools we need a business model where someone else maintains the code and i just pay a monthly fee

multiple big tech companies have essentially one (very well paid) person who really knows how to use AI, and this “AI fixer” is their great hope — taking on projects and educating others. problem is, some don’t have anyone, and a lot of those frontier people would rather work in a broadly AI-native company and find out what a team of people going this fast can do

This is going to destroy the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a few years. The most talented builders in the country just acquired generational wealth and now have zero incentive to build the next Anthropic.

It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now. The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way. But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now. I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either. With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.

I'm starting to sense a divide in the tech industry: - People thriving on autonomy who are reinventing how they work and what tools they use with AI: LOTS of work, but they're enjoying it and getting very efficient - People used to being mentored / trained / or simply told what to do and how. Frustrated with the lack of guidance from management on what to do with AI; also frustrated by seeing some of their peers thriving; increasingly bitter about AI and the state of the industry, as a whole Neither group seems to be aware that there's another group, or have empathy for the other group

I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically...introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, our next frontier model. Following Argon's release just two weeks ago, Carbon shows the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier, it ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index at 59. It also leads across key cybersecurity evaluations scoring 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation, and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching. We’re seeing significant improvements in long-horizon tasks even compared to Argon, and we’ve strengthened frontier safeguards. As we did with Argon, we’re going to roll it out gradually + responsibly. Some trusted cyber defenders will get access starting this week. We'll be expanding it to more partners through our Fairwind Program, ahead of wider availability soon, so hang tight!

release all the numbers. does 80% yoy become 65% when you remove passthru inference? what does it become when you remove ai natives? and how much of it is from one time software license --> service transition? fcf, RPO, cRPO? op margin non-gaap, gaap? dilution? curious ppls want to know ps: @alighodsi happy for your success. the world is big and life long. nitter.siddz.com/bhorowitz/status/21150…