Todd Baert

Software engineer, nerd, political junkie, deadlift enthusiast. Working on OpenFeature. Opinions mine.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@HolylooPresents @hasanthehun Why does everyone who hates this Hasan guy have a weird entirely anime persona on all platforms?

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@incidentaltrade @RnaudBertrand Take a shower anarkiddy.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@pauljam12872659 @ryangrim Brother, if you think nutrition is going to save you from COVID or communicable disease in general, you have the most American brain ever, regardless of where you grew up. That's American pseudoscience right there.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@MariGO2thepolls Lol get rekt

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@BMcskellington @MasterTimBlais Bro it's a bug.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@JosephJoey62367 @Mike_from_PA She went on stage WITH A CHENEY.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@finger8 @RnaudBertrand Hey dummy, I like socialism.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@finger8 @RnaudBertrand That's a lot of words to say "socialism".

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Here's an interesting thought experiment: what would the world have been like had the U.S. decided to take towards electricity the approach it's currently taking towards AI?

Imagine if, say, the United States in 1890 had declared electricity a matter of national security, classified the designs of Edison’s dynamos and Tesla’s induction motors as export-controlled, integrated its electrical companies directly into the War Department, framed the generator as a strategic weapon rather than a general-purpose technology, and spent the following century building its foreign policy around ensuring that only it, and politically-aligned nations, had access to the light bulb.

Batshit insane, right? Well that’s pretty much EXACTLY the posture it’s taking towards AI.

Had that happened, it’s painfully obvious we’d ALL have been immeasurably poorer for it, materially and morally.

And the United States first and foremost, given that for electricity - as will undoubtedly be the case for AI - the real value didn’t lie in control of the technology but in its widespread diffusion and in what you built on top of it.

Think about the U.S.’s “electricity giants”: companies like GE, Whirlpool or RCA didn’t get rich by “owning” electricity - they got rich by selling what electricity made possible into a world that was electrifying as fast as it could. The U.S.’s electrical fortune was built on the world electrifying alongside it, not against it.

Does the analogy hold for AI? Yes, surprisingly well. I like Jensen Huang’s recent description of AI (https://t.co/XcLK2iJEsS) as a "5-layer cake" made of 1) energy, 2) chips, 3) infrastructure, 4) models and lastly 5) applications.

The implication of his point is that each layer save for the last one - the application layer - will ultimately be largely commoditized, and as such that’s where the real value lies: in the millions of specific products, services, and industrial processes that get built on top of the other 4 layers.

It’s typical network building: the layers underneath eventually become utilities, and utilities are low-margin commodity businesses. It happened with electricity, it happened with phones, it happened with railroads, it happened with the internet itself. The operators of each layer got commoditized over time, while the durable, century-defining fortunes accrued at the top of the stack: GE on top of electricity, Apple on top of the mobile and telecom infrastructure, Amazon and Google on top of the internet.

There's no reason to think AI - a general-purpose technology of the same order - will turn out any different.

And in fact, we're seeing this happening in real time: take the release of DeepSeek V4 today. What is it if not a commodification of the model layer in Jensen Huang's "5-layer cake"? A frontier-grade model, given away under an MIT license, running on non-Nvidia silicon - and shipped by a lab that explicitly frames it as "AGI belongs to everyone" (https://t.co/b40MxBf4NW).

When a product that cost tens of billions of dollars to develop can be downloaded for free and run on commodity hardware, that product is, by definition, a commodity.

This means that the whole notion of an "AI race" is now absurd on the face of it: you cannot race for control of a thing that is being given away for free by someone who isn't racing.

And doubly absurd because, as we just saw, the economics of general-purpose technologies actively punish "race winners": the value accrues at the application layer, which requires the maximum possible diffusion of everything underneath it. "Winning" by hoarding the model layer is like "winning" electricity by refusing to let people have a generator - you don't capture the value, you prevent it from ever being created.

That's the topic of my latest article in which I argue that the whole "AI race" framing isn't just wrong, it's one of the most successful regulatory capture operations in history.

Shaped by a handful of US companies - like Palantir, Anthropic and OpenAI - it's a perfect example of an industry convincing the public to cheer for its own enrichment by dressing it up as a civilizational struggle.

Link to the article here: https://t.co/Tw8rA2E8IF

Enjoy the read!

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@catehall Why does it go on SO LONG?

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@l_ratio97090 @Mike_from_PA @The_Davos_Man Ok let's have a Chinese style market economy then.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@sithhappens2025 @gracecamille_ You are too sensitive to be in a relationship.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@ChristofferPhil @Doveofwar @HotSotin Poor people had more kids historically. That's no longer true, at least in the Anglosphere. Millennials aren't having kids; they are having a hard time supporting themselves. In the last few decades the birth rate has decreased along with purchasing power. This isn't complicated.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@ChristofferPhil @Doveofwar @HotSotin Haha "good economics". Bro, every generation in the West is having a harder time buying houses and paying for children than the last. That's why our birth rates are plummeting.

Meanwhile, 70% of Chinese millennials own their own homes.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@ChristofferPhil @Doveofwar @HotSotin Ok then, let's all do economics the way they do. Call it whatever you want, let's use Xi's system.

[OpenFeature @OpenFeature]

Hey Amsterdam! Get some frites and come see us at the project pavilion booth this afternoon!

https://t.co/yvVpaL4Ubc

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@TheRabbitHole Ok now read the rest of Das Kapital.

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

Don't be confused. Despite this obviously good news, the unofficial Dynatrace Canadian engineering HQ continues to be my upstairs office.

[Dynatrace @Dynatrace]

Dynatrace has acquired @DevCycleHQ to strengthen how enterprises manage risk, resilience, and control in modern software delivery.

Dynatrace + DevCycle =
✅ Safer releases
✅ Smarter experimentation
✅ Faster remediation

Find more details here. https://t.co/RyI0JSUVg0

[Todd Baert @toddbaert]

@MyLordBebo @grok Why are you trying to make him cooler?