r/opensource just banned any project that uses AI. By their own rule, that means the biggest open source project of all time, Linux, is now banned too. The kernel already accepts AI-assisted code. This is the real AI psychosis.

Task-specific inference engines are emerging, and will be one of the important and real scenerios for agentic coding/optimization for machine learning systems.

There is an absolute barrage of inference providers popping up that get to $1M/mo extremely quickly. This is the rough economics of inference providers: Even if you rent on-demand B300s at $8/GPU-hr, many open source models (GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash / Pro) can get you >$10-20/GPU-hr at reasonable throughputs (100tok/s). DeepInfer from DeepSeek directly shows they can get $38/GPU-hr on off-peak hours. Every chip / model has a different throughput / interactivity curve, but there is a lot of arbitrage between even high rental spot prices and token prices. New chips (Vera Rubins) also change this meaningfully. Your ability to be making gross margin relies on your utilization and how good your stack is. Gateways like OpenRouter, Vercel and more help solve that problem by aggregating demand to you. May inference providers discount their tokens to get longer term commits too. I've even heard stories of selling back Chinese model tokens to Chinese labs! One thorn in the economics of these players is that many Chinese open source model labs are now asking for rev share if you're at a certain scale, espp for pre-release access to their models for day 1 support. That further pushes the threshold to be in the money. The barrier to entry seems low and falling. There are even stories of smaller ones who can "vibe code" a way to stand up OSS models on a cluster they rent. And as a result, we're seeing 10s of such companies pop up almost every week and immediately skyrocketing revenue at low-ish gross margin and raising rounds on the back of that. Unsurprisingly, because the actual service provided seems commodity, this eventually drives up compute prices and drives down token prices. In theory, it would seem like neoclouds who have the lowest cost of compute and themselves have started inference businesses would win the race to the bottom (Crusoe Coreweave Nebius and GMI all have inference businesses), with larger players (Modal Fireworks Baseten) being second because they are well capitalized to make bigger compute commits cheaply and have demand (high utilization), but the reality is the pie is growing so quickly that even upstarts are absolutely crushing it and growing aggressively (inference dot net, DeepInfra, Wafer, Relace, Morph). Strategies vary across the board: neoclouds want to serve inference, inference players want to be neoclouds and do higher margin reserved instances / post training, and some want to go heterogeneous hardware or creatively flexible compute constructs. The risks are: do open source models continue to be competitive? Will their creators rent seek more? Will their shape change compute needs? How do different chips change economics? Who gets compute in a supply crunch? Below is a aggressive sketch of how gross margin scales with utilization for various models / chip sets. For now, there are many inference providers and they’re all ripping!

arxiv.org/abs/2609.40303 Summary : 🚨 Do AI agents really need complex harnesses? A new study on autonomous ML engineering agents finds that, under equal time budgets and using the same frontier LLM, sophisticated open-source harnesses offer no advantage over a simple coding agent with read, write, and bash access. The takeaway: The model may matter more than the machinery around it. Multi-agent orchestration, retrieval subagents, and elaborate workflows may add complexity without improving performance on current ML engineering benchmarks.

FINALLY

On Tuesday 10/23 I’ll demo the @datologyai Curation Studio and walk through what it takes to make that work: how do you configure a frontier data curation product, how do data pipelines scale across CPU and GPU compute, and how teams can change one piece of a run and rerun it without reprocessing everything! Demo + Q&A with @arimorcos @lukemerrick_ @josh_wills, 10am PT: events.datologyai.com/curati…

Today we release mammoth-1 and elephant-1! We post-trained mammoth-1, the #1 ranked best decision model in the world, and elephant-1, which is the best model under 15B (and beats Jev). We're open-sourcing all model weights and provide a technical report detailing all our training and data methods.