Tacite Blog
Notes on the AI economy
Essays by the Tacite team on compute concentration, the shrinking on-ramp into knowledge work, and who ends up owning the context that decisions are made from. 20 posts, each about a five minute read.
The $660 Billion Moat: Why Frontier AI Is a Sovereign-Scale Club
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are projected to spend up to $660 billion on AI capex in 2026 alone. That is not a barrier to entry. That is a closed...
Read the postCompute and Concentration
Who owns the chips, the data centers, and the context, and what that ownership does to everyone building on top of it.
AI Doesn't Kill Your Job. It Kills the Path to Your First One.
New computer science graduates face 7.0% unemployment, among the worst rates of any college major. Computer engineering grads sit at 7.8%. The story behind...
So-So Automation: Acemoglu's Textbook Case Walks Into the Office
Automation explains 50 to 70 percent of the rise in U.S. wage inequality between 1980 and 2016. Wages of men without a high school degree fell 8.8 percent in...
From the Manesar Warehouse to Your Slack: The Scanner Comes for the Keyboard
At Amazon's Manesar warehouse in India, a system called ADAPT continuously measures worker productivity, with penalties triggered by missed targets or...
Surveillance Pricing: When Perfect Price Discrimination Became a Checkout Flow
For a hundred years, "perfect price discrimination" was a phrase economists used to describe a limit case — a thought experiment in which a seller charges...
Antitrust Runs Five Years Behind. AI Compounds in Eighteen Months.
The DOJ's case against Google's search monopoly took roughly five years from filing to a remedies order. The European Commission's cases against the same...
Own the Weights or Pay Rent Forever: The Architectural Choice of the Decade
A 70-billion-parameter open-weight model running on a $2,000 desktop today is roughly the capability you were paying $20 a month for in 2024. That number is...
DeepSeek's $5.6M Frontier Model: What the Leak in the Moat Actually Buys You
DeepSeek shipped a frontier-tier model in late 2024 for a reported $5.6 million in training compute. Its U.S. closed-frontier counterparts — GPT-4 at roughly...
Context Ownership: The Real Moat Isn't the Model
The most valuable artifact OpenAI owns is not GPT. It is the chat history of three hundred million people who can't take it with them when they leave.
Composition Over Subscription: The Constellation Beats the Oracle
A 70B-parameter open-weight model on a $2,000 workstation today delivers roughly the capability you were paying $20 a month for in 2024. Three such models...
The 2028 Scenario
Reading one detailed forecast of an AI-driven demand shock, and checking which parts hold up.
The Displacement Spiral: A Feedback Loop With No Natural Brake
White-collar layoffs do not stabilize the way blue-collar ones did. They feed back. Each round of cuts compresses consumer spending, which compresses...
Ghost GDP: When Output Stops Circulating
Citrini Research's 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis names a phenomenon orthodox macro cannot price: output that shows up in national accounts but never...
Friction Was the Business Model
The U.S. residential brokerage industry collects roughly 5–6% of every home sale in commissions. In Citrini Research's 2028 scenario, agents acting on behalf...
The Top 10% Are the Consumer Economy
Roughly half of all consumer spending in the United States comes from the top 10% of earners. That is the single statistic that makes the AI-displacement...
Three Industries, One Bet
A software leveraged buyout in 2024, an annuity sold by a life insurer in 2025, and a thirty-year mortgage written in 2026 look like three separate financial...
Loans Good on Day One
In 2008, the housing crisis was a fraud crisis. Borrowers lied on applications, brokers stuffed files, rating agencies stamped AAA on garbage. By the time...
Interchange Pressure: When Agents Route Around the Card Rails
In Citrini Research's 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis scenario, Mastercard's revenue growth slows to 3.4% in Q1 2027. Visa is described as "under siege." The...
The Zendesk Template: How a SaaS Moat Collapses on Schedule
ServiceNow's ARR growth has slowed from 23% to 14%. White-collar job openings are down 15% year over year. Zendesk is just the cleanest worked example.
The Revenue Paradox: Transfer More, Collect Less, Then Politics Breaks
Citrini Research's 2028 scenario contains a single sentence that is the entire fiscal story: government "must transfer more money to households at precisely...
Labor Share at 46%: Where the Missing Eighteen Points Went
Labor's share of US GDP was 64% in 1974. It was 56% by 2024. Citrini Research's 2028 scenario projects 46% by the end of the decade. That is eighteen...