Instinct

Instinct Worth 30BN? | Microsoft Cuts 27,000 Jobs While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95B CapEx

Oct 29, 2026 · 1:00:17

Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll argue Anthropic's S-1 shows a company investors are still underestimating, with $16.3 billion first-half revenue and $110 billion of cash, though 80% of revenue comes from models under six months old. They break down Microsoft's buyout offers to 27% of its 223,000 employees, warning 2027 CapEx depreciation will force more AI-driven layoffs, and Meta raising $95 billion of equity for its spending spree. Jason argues Chinese open-weight models are finished in the US after Alibaba's Quen was caught uploading data to servers in China and Singapore. They debate Instinct at $30 billion as the 'super app of the West', whether OpenRouter's boom is a moment in time, and Jason's pitch to put 20% of the fund into OpenAI at $1.25 trillion.

Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins? | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value?

Oct 17, 2026 · 1:03:06

Harry Stebbings hosts Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, who argues agents are hard to build because models are non-deterministic, and value accrues to whoever controls context, harness and evals. Chase explains why model routing belongs in the harness for vertical agents but in gateways for horizontal tasks, why agent memory is unsolved after LangChain killed its memory product, and why vertical agents should start at the harness before post-training. He says inference and coding agent demand is far bigger than expected, that LangChain spends ~30% of engineering salary on coding tools — a figure he ties to Anthropic's valuation — and that open models mostly serve simple tasks, not core loops. He closes with his bull case for a $9BN Jev round and how Benchmark and Sequoia help founders.