John Wix

Flows before price, price before news.
Trading journal, not financial advice

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

AI was good enough to hit white collar jobs with Opus 4.5 last year. Why is it only impacting now? Most large corporations are just starting to get internal access to 4.5 level models (non programmers may only have haiku) + models have gotten better with office suite

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

The AI layoffs are here:

*AMERICAN EXPRESS TO CUT 5% OF JOBS, ABOUT 3,500 EMPLOYEES

*BARCLAYS TO CUT 5,000 JOBS AS AI STARTS CREATING EFFICIENCY

*EBAY CONFIRMS JOB CUTS OF ABOUT 9%

*NETFLIX TO LAY OFF 6% OF GLOBAL STAFF, OR ABOUT 1,000 JOBS: WSJ

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

@shanbatla @Investor_NICK_ Bad take.
1. $AXP revenue has doubled since Covid. Employees are up ~20%? Not overhiring
2. Explain how high interest rates hurts Amex’s model
3. If consumers are spending less why are card balances up 8% YoY?

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

“It’s just a lightbulb, where is the IRR on this electricity thing? Will never catch on outside New York City” - Rev_Cap 1889

[Rev @rev_cap]

@buccocapital Where’s the ARR?

It’s a closed loop system of AI companies paying the labs to develop LLMs that are eroding the frontier model’s leadership position

It’s just a coding tool that has huge obstacles to implementation in other verticals

ARR decel. That’s the market speaking

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

@FlaMike84 @gvtcontractor @GrulkeLamonte A lot of large companies can fire people and get more productive?

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

FYI the $NFLX bull case is if new content head Peter Rice can get the output to an HBO-level consistency + Netflix’s global distribution advantage then subscribers can pickup again but you wont see his impact on the content for ~24 months

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

1. $NFLX’s rise was based on licensing content to streaming. In 2011, $1B got you the entire CW lineup for 4 years
2. Netflix today spends the same as WB/HBO on content (~$20B) but has had less “breakthrough hits”
3. Execs are overly concerned with time competition vs. social/UGC

[Sonia Baschez @SoniaBaschez]

A24 vs. Netflix shows the taste trap tech companies fall into: they want the results of good taste without investing in it.

Being a tastemaker means taking risks before the data comes in. Waiting for data means you're not setting trends, you're following them.

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

Man did u hear $CBRS final lockup is Nov 9th? Don’t think anybody is pricing this in. Stock will probably tank

[Nikhil Krishnan @nikillinit]

heading back to NY from SF - quick observations

1) Basically all the AI companies are starting to converge on the same spaces within their category. Vibe is way more cutthroat than collaborative now.

2) Was trying to explain to people that most of my friends in NY don't use LLMs at all, except maybe chatGPT to help write emails. Many didn't believe me. The tech vibe has never been more different between the two ciites.

3) Everyone seems much more hyper aware about money everyone else is making now. It does remind me of finance in New York where personal net worth is now very explicitly a driving force in people's decisions (vs. before where it was more veiled).

4) It is insane how expensive everything - talking to some people about housing market/childcare there made me gasp outloud. 1.5x-2x of even NY costs for something similar/

5) Agent swarm stuff seems to have increased doomerism amongst people who previously were pretty optimistic about AI in the last year

6) Like everyone seems to want to start a data labeling company to make a quick bag lol

7) very anecdotal based on a small number of convos, but I was surprised that some people are actively pushing out life milestones they wanted to do earlier (e.g. find a partner, have a kid, etc) because they think the AI window is short right now and they want to make sure they prioritize it

(personally I don't think those things are mutually exclusive but hard to convince people of that)

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

A lot of noise on Anthropic ARR. Seems clear that Opus 5.5 is good but our Opus 5.5 is what Anthropic had internally ~3 months ago. So the thesis of models helping models improve is not really broken if this merge trajectory is a leading indicator

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

$TSLA Roadster isn’t street legal but not sure if that’s important. There’s Ferraris that people buy just to have at track days. I think there’s still a market of 50 people that are ok with going to a Gigafactory or SpaceX to do a backflip in their Roadster

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

there’s an approaching threshold where models can handle most tasks ordinary people think of: emails, spreadsheets, presentations, coding.

So as Open LLMs get there, OpenAI and Anthropic need to shift the narrative toward biotech and net-new or risk getting cut via @GavinSBaker

[Daave “3 and 30” Tepper @institLP]

if open source is 6 months behind the frontier, we’re about to see an explosion in open source model and compute demand (0-3 months) and a complete shift in the LLM vs compute value capture narrative

Anthropic must get public no matter market conditions and I’m not sure that’s enough

Will need to do a huge primary follow
-on

OAI may be toast

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

Seems like you could structure a fun macro trade against developing countries debt on a 5-year time horizon.. how long until that other white color work is at risk...

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

A few elements here:
1. Anthropic sees API inference as a profit engine (~80% GM) and prefers ARR, so odd comp
2. $20 subs aren’t expected to use full value.
3. $100/$200 tiers subsidize the power-user tail: https://t.co/g9vrPidPBY

[Irrational Analysis @insane_analyst]

Monthly subs are still heavily subsidized.

Take a moment and think through (yourself, don't use fucking AI) what this means.

Why do subsidies exist?
Are higher subsidies good or bad in a severely supply-limited market?
Would ARR have grown at same rate without subsidies?

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

In a post agent world, the bottleneck is no longer the time to ship features… it’s instead ______?

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

Over the next 28 days, each day we’ll either ship one thing that is a clear improvement and relevant for most codex/work users or ship a full reset. Let the improvements begin.

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

Broke: $DASH is a 0 bc Muse will turn it into an API call and reduce the margin

Woke: $DASH is one of the few companies with a product/engineering culture and a real-world mandate that will be able to use agents successfully in its own workflows and enter new verticals

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

@maldofino Not really personal. Incentives are misaligned at the moment. Google makes money from search revenue paid by aggregators

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

Muse is cool and all but the average joe needs an executive assistant 10x more than a personal assistant.

Teams pings, emails, meetings, follow-ups are way more frequent than “I’ll find a cheap flight” or “I saved $2 on takeout”

Why hasn’t $MSFT gotten there yet?

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

We’re building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task. Today, we’re announcing our biggest update to Copilot to date, bringing four things together:

· Autopilot: proactive and long-running agent built for the enterprise
· Code: build apps with Copilot, hosted inside your company’s tenant
· Home: Chat + Cowork together
· Office: now fully embedded in Copilot (and Copilot embedded in Office, of course!)

Plus, you can invoke Copilot in Teams, and we’re introducing Today, a proactive experience that surfaces the most important information from across M365 without needing to ask for it.

The way we work is changing and so are our workflows. This update brings AI into that flow, from answering a question, to building an app, to getting work done on your behalf.

[John Wix @JimmyButlerCap]

There’s clearly a coordinated push right now from Anthropic, OpenAI, and parts of the left (Sanders) to regulate AI.

Most of it is self-interest. IPOs and midterms are coming. Open source is a threat. But Astra and Fable are powerful enough that they should be regulated?

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.