The Humans in the Loop: You Learn to Spend What's in Your Pocket
This Week in AI for Devs: AI's Pending Margin Call?
Welcome to The Humans in the Loop, your executive summary of AI news for devs. I’m Andrew, the [human] author, and I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please feel free to email me at andrew@heavybit.com with your thoughts. Thanks!
Our top story: That’s a Lot of CapEx. (And a Lot of OpEx, too)
Congratulations to the USA. Capital expenditures in the land of the free may meet or exceed 2% of GDP this year, recalling America’s last great national investment, the railroads, writes investor Paul Kedrosky. Is this a massive public-private stimulus package that will ward off economic disaster, or an endless pit of money which, instead of providing national infrastructure for generations to come, will be an expensive array of depreciating assets? Consider that MSFT, META, GOOG, and AMZN reportedly spent more than $125B on data centers last year. (OpenAI just announced Stargate Norway, an EU-only arm of Stargate, its ongoing public-private partnership with Softbank and the US federal government). Presumably, these companies’ intent was to own their own compute rather than rely on increasing third-party cloud compute costs, which reportedly increased 30% across the board last year due to AI programs. Except that OpEx costs might not be in companies’ favor either. In the short term, you can monitor your costs with handy new tools like PricePerToken, but long term, your budgets might be worn through due to spiraling token consumption. Founder Ethan Ding predicts an endless short squeeze on tokens as the AI ecosystem gets locked into a cycle of new SOTA model → consumes more tokens → leapfrogged by new SOTA model, which makes flat token fees virtually impossible. There are still many challenges in the AI space to solve for, and managing costs is headed to the top of the list.
And Now: The bottom line in AI news for busy devs.
⚡️ Breaking: ChatGPT-5 Released
OpenAI’s latest, along with GPT-5 for developers which edges out Claude Opus on SWE-bench Verified at 74.9%, is here, and emphasizes “software on demand” by way of vibe coding.
💻 Development
How 22 Early-Adopter Devs View AI
What happens after devs adopt AI? Some see it less as a codegen tool and more as a skillset for delegation/ops/product design.
Guide: How to Build Scalable and Secure MCP Servers
If you’re planning to build an MCP server soon, this might be handy.
[GH] Code Index MCP: Index, Search, Analyze Repos
...Or, you could quickstart your next MCP server project with this.
Guide: How to Train Models on GPU at Scale
This in-depth guide from Hugging Face covers what you need to know about memory, parallelism, and GPU architecture.
🤔 Interesting AI Projects, Research, and Updates
Reverse-Engineering Claude Code’s Update History
Veteran coder Mario Zechner reveals how Claude Code has evolved across more than 60 versions.
Coming Soon: Kaggle Game Arena
Kaggle, GOOG’s ML testing community, will launch a Game Arena that pits models against each other in simulated game tournaments.
Project Ire: MSFT AI Prototype for Reverse-Engineering Malware
The project, built for “fully reverse engineering a software file without any clues,” identifies 90% of malicious Windows drivers.
💼 Hiring and Community
Startups Hiring This Week:
- Lead Software Engineer, ML Service → Dynamo AI
- AI Software Engineer → Tamarind Bio
Mid-Markets Hiring This Week:
- Staff Engineer, Autonomy Apps → Shield AI
- Computer Vision Engineer → TCGPlayer
Enterprises Hiring This Week:
- Fraud Data Scientist → ID.me
- Data Scientist - UBER
The Billion-Dollar AI Talent Hunt
META reportedly pursued a dozen team members at Mira Murati’s nascent startup Thinking Machine Labs...to the tune of $1B+.
Using AI in Job Interviews?
META is also open to engineering candidates utilize AI during job interviews and has been running mock interviews internally.
💡 Spotlight: Newly Launched AI Startups
- Echo: $15M from Notable Capital for agentic container security
- Julius: $10M from Bessemer for AI-powered data science analysis
- Memories.ai: $8M from Susa Ventures for visual memory systems within AI
- RunReveal: $7M from Costanoa Ventures for AI-powered SIEM
- Resolvd AI: $1.6M from Spice Capital for IT ticket reconciliation
- Reshape Systems: $990K from Backbone Ventures for agentic software certs
🚀 New Model Launches
- ChatGPT-5
gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b: OpenAI’s first open-weight models since GPT-2
- Claude Opus 4.1: SOTA coding assistant at 74.5% on SWE-Bench
- Gemini 2.5 Deep Think: GOOG DeepMind’s newest reasoning model
- Seed-Prover: ByteDance’s new model is 3rd to win gold in IMO
- Hunyuan 0.5B, 1.8B, 4B, 7B: Tencent’s latest edge computing models for mobile
- XBai o4: MetaStone’s newest open-source reasoning model
🏭 Industry News & Trends
Anthropic Cuts OpenAI’s Claude Access
After discovering OpenAI was using Claude for benchmarking, Anthropic has revoked the company’s general access to the model.
OpenAI Raises $8B
The ChatGPT vendor announces it has also hit $13B ARR with 5M paying users.
Anthropic Leads in Enterprise Adoption?
New report: Anthropic is the #1 choice for AI among enterprises with 32% adopting Claude, compared to 25% for ChatGPT.
China’s Opportunity to Lap the US on AI?
Professor Andrew Ng points out how China’s more-open AI ecosystem could pave a path to AI leadership worldwide.
OpenAI Launches on...AWS?
Previously only on Azure, ChatGPT is now on AWS. A sign of OpenAI’s strained relationship with MSFT? Or maybe just a need to grow?
⚖️ Copyright, IP, Licensing, and Regulation
That Embarrassing Thing From ChatGPT Might Be on Google
Due to a poorly-marked checkbox, private GPT chats made their way to Google search results, but should be removed soon.
CloudFlare Accuses Perplexity of Scraping No-Crawl Sites
The web infra provider accuses the ambitious AI search engine of ignoring no-crawl settings and quietly scraping sites anyway.
Six Arrested in Taiwanese Chip Caper
Six TSMC employees have been arrested for leaking trade secrets in a sign of escalating competition in the silicon-for-AI space.
ChatGPT for Federal Agencies? I’ll Buy That for a Dollar
OpenAI offers ChatGPT Enterprise to agencies for $1/year. At these prices, how could Uncle Sam not adopt it across every single office?