At what point do you buy a Mac studio or AMD Gorgon Halo and try running some of these tasks in local models? Surely don’t need frontier models for all this work.

> would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours

details please, if it's interesting

If I were spending $200k on tokens then I sure would expect some mind boggling results. I don't know much about what this person is doing with them and maybe they've launched several companies or created several new inventions .... but that's what I'd expect personally at that spend.

Pretty sure Joel Spolsky said “we purchase the best machines money can buy for our developers” like 20 years ago. So it’s hardly a new concept.

Hardware for sure. Big statement giving the entire company macs vs pc. Apple spelled it out in those ads.

AWS spend and other service bills?

Superchats and other livestream gifts

> I can't recall software being conspicuous consumption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

What do you do that you are maxing out 5 accounts

Have you looked at offers from CommandCode and similar? https://commandcode.ai/pricing

You can get access to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash for almost nothing, on a $1, $10, or $100 subscription. That can complement your 5 Claude accounts, or replace some. DS Flash 4.1 is so fast and cheap it’s ridiculous

No, he spends that much on tokens. Not he subscribes to ultra and then uses the equivalent amount on tokens.

That there are people like you in a world with starving children sincerely turns my stomach.

> Why not have the agents work while you sleep?

Even better, why not have the agents sleep for you?

EDIT: for those who say this is not realistic, I've had Claude sleep for 10 hours in just 30 seconds. Saved me an entire night.

If his brain is the thing malfunctioning, then his brain may not be capable of (1) correctly diagnosing the problem as a lack of sleep or (2) honestly prescribing "do things to get better sleep" as the fix.

People in psychosis don't exactly weigh all of the options with a level head. He may not recognize that he has "cyber psychosis" or that his lack of sleep is a bad thing.

If he was good at it, he would be sleeping more because you would be doing less work.. The fact that he's sleeping less means he's not as good as optimizing his agents as he thinks he is.

That's probably exactly why. Some of my latest nights have been attempting to prepare a long-running overnight task for an agent.

It was productive, but as you say, it's dangerous to gamble with sleep.

I don’t think the privacy-centric vision is going to happen. Very few non-tech people care enough about their privacy to figure out the necessary infrastructure.

The future of personal assistants is most likely akin to Muse Spark, and yes I expect Meta is training on all of those interactions and using them to target ads.

Had an idea for rich people where they buy their own AI server. The value add is the handling of hardware and software is all provided by the company. It’s a luxury experience like the iPhone so inherently privacy focused. It’s E2E so non-technical users just see AI at the end delivered in the best way possible with any customizations they want. You build the most comprehensive profile on their life which every AI company would love but it’s possible because you’re actually privacy-focused. Call it MyAI.

> because anything less will be a global non-starter.

I beg to differ.

    "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."
    - Mark Zuckerberg

> Is there anything that says he is more efficient than 3 or 4 years ago.

This is a difficult question to answer ! I would ask a related question which is equally hard. Has AI-use increased your human cognitive capability or decreased it ?

He will say he is and that will be the end of it.

"Garry's List" for dark money (this is an established political term, look it up!) donations. Basically you can donate anonymously to a SuperPac.

Software? I'm not aware of anything.

Psychosis?

Markdown files

a bubble.

A site where he complains about rich people being charitable, among other things.

> So what has he built?

"Garry, this is a text file".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8

Finally, the perfect yes-man, the thing execs and VCs always wanted.

[flagged]

Markdown, not code

Look at this guy using shell commands instead of asking his agent to count the lines. You’re going to get left behind bro! Your boss won’t pay you to do that!

Note, however, that Garry also holds a much longer lever in his hands. It's very likely that he does get a huge ROI from the token spend because if it helps him make just one slightly better investment decision per year, that's millions in return.

He has a vested interest in hyping AI / spend because YC overwhelmingly invests in AI startups.

Revenue for Anthropic to use in their S-1.

You haven't seen tanstack? He presented to Stanford he wanted to scale that idea to an entire organization not just a solo founder.

He's gonna hit the halting problem

He must have the best automatic daily slack summary.

None of these are effective questions for this forum. You should copy and paste your post and my response into your free chatbot of choice.

Evaluate the original post and response and build a high level learning plan with citations and references that covers each of the topics in the original post. Start the learning plan with an overview of effective prompting techniques with specific examples to research individual topics.

A Token is a unit of data used by large language models. Tokens used to be pretty analogous to 3-6 letters of English text, but things have become more complicated with the advent of multi-modal generation

Large language models are usually priced on MTok or “million tokens”. You’ll often see LLMs priced at $X/MTok for input and $Y/MTok for output.

A harness is a program that interfaces with a large language model and provides it tools and context to achieve a goal. Codex and Claude Code are good examples of harnesses.

What exactly all of this accomplishes is not something I can answer for you :)

> the concepts of tokens

Tokens are what you get when you have to map a chunk of text to specific numbers, so that the LLM can actually work with it.

https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

Reducetively speaking:

[Your text] --> [List of numbers (tokens)] --> [List of [List of numbers describing a concept/term/thing/job/item/etc] (embedding)]

That final thing (List of embeddings) is what gets fed into the LLM, so that it can produce (List of embeddings most likely to follow afterwards), which is then turned back into text.

> and their worth

Tokens are priced based on the model you're using. In general, expect to pay more when you need to use larger models. (Note: Exceptions exist, but treat them as exceptions)

The space as it is now prices tokens based on:

- how many tokens it needs to process (input),

- how many it needs to generate (output), and

- how often you send the same chunks of text that their system already has on file (cached).

> and harnesses

A harness is something that adds in tools & directions for the LLM, so that it can do its tasks. In a dumbed-down semi-visual summary:

---

[Text about what the LLM should be & what they're allowed/not allowed to do]

[Text about available tools & how to call them]

[Your text here]

---

The harness, if its part of a program/app, then looks at what the models generate in response, and does the (file writing/reading, tool calls, web searches, subagents, etc.), based on the formatted output that the LLMs should produce.

> and what exactly all of those things accomplish

Depends on the goal of the user. Some use them as assistants, most use it for coding.

https://openrouter.ai/rankings?utm_source=share&utm_medium=c...

Is that how these figures are being calculated? Because if so, that's laughable. I always interpret those to mean that they are literally paying $200k/year to Anthropic, not ~$2k.

I wonder how much this happens in these huge multi agent jobs. Two agents quietly changing the same file back and forth.

Sun Tsu would probably say do nothing. World sees you have an ordinary employee using 200k of electricity and you don’t care. Quite a show of force.

To be fair, using the scientific method to disprove superstitions is what the Enlightenment was all about and that is the most significant engine of growth and flourishing humankind has known.

That said, I approach AI with deep skepticism. I try to learn it, including its strengths and weaknesses. But I don't blindly trust it.

Coincidentally, my stock brokerage just yesterday sent an email reminding users that anything their agents do using the user's credentials is the responsibility of the user.

> Failure as a positive

Since failure is such a likely outcome in a startup, "failure as a positive" is a mindset that a startup accelerator must propagate to keep founders going. And when you sell a message for long enough, you start to believe it yourself.

Yeah, why not 400k? Low energy.

At his level the skill is about getting money out of the right pockets, not really about being particularly smart or even very good at managing business.

Still doesn't explain where $17k of tokens is going. I can believe someone could burn that many tokens, but most of what he's described there could be managed pretty easily on one of the $100-200 a month subscriptions I'd think.

The only way I can imagine to burn that many tokens is just to run every task fully through the most expensive LLM with no real strategy. Like indexing emails should be a combo of scripts and small summarizing prompts I'd think.

Naming your internal AI agent after the massive run down home of an uber rich but probably insane family of confusing clones who made god level AIs (from Neuromancer)... Classy.

> Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?

You'd be surprised how important such an overview can be in relationship-based businesses. People spend a lot of time trying to track down a vague memory they have of someone telling them something. CRM platforms are big for a reason, after all.

He must be the most annoying person to try to interact with. Clodslop for days.

“ Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this?”

Because they can. It’s as simple as that. To find meaning, to feel in control, to win. To dominate.

I like how the can absolutely never provide anything specific. It’s always „it helps with everything!“. Like what exactly Gary?

[dead]

Whats in it for the labs if they give Gary Tan free tokens for uhm, Gstack?

Didn't you mean to use past tense? "Wasn't that the job ...."

That usage probably comes from a couple of 200$ a month subscriptions. Hardware to run something that approaches frontier at acceptable speed is at least a million.

I think it looks neat and simple.

Also...

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Presumably they spend this much on frontier models. You don't run frontier models on GPU you "just buy".

The question thst matters is: is he more productive than someone with a standard $30/mo Claude subscription? Or with no AI?

It's pretty obvious $200k/yr in tokens is a ludicrously huge spend. Trying to pretend it's not to show how leet you are is weird. But the interesting topic buried here is what value he's creating with such a spend and how it benchmarks against alternatives.

Because that is the value prop of AI. If it doesn't stand up against options when measured clinically and objectively then what's the point of it