10% improvement costs 100% more tokens
Ben observed that to make an AI product 10% better than before now requires spending 100% more tokens, meaning optimisation gains are shrinking.
Snapshot · God Mode Podcast
SpaceX Down 35% From IPO | Cancelling Claude Max for Cursor and Codex | $800 in AI Subs, $50K of Code | DeepSeek Hikes Prices | 25 AI Predictions Graded | EP25
Explore episode
Aug 8, 2026
Where this was said
25 lessons, war three, the Elon corner deep dive
At 46:00 · chapter starts 45:52
The Elon Corner is the episode's most speculative and entertaining section, combining confirmed calls with forward-looking chess moves. The $380 billion compute contract between Anthropic and SpaceX gets recapped first — a deal that now looks like both parties building leverage over each other. The dark fiber analogy resurfaces: unlike the 2000s telecom bust, every GPU in production today is being utilized, which is why the bubble thesis doesn't quite fit. SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor is flagged as a sleeper story: Rik has been getting near-unlimited auto-mode use from Cursor since the deal, routing through both the Composer model and Grok 4.5. The most intriguing speculation is Ben's 4D chess framing around Grok: if Elon open-sources Grok, it instantly makes every proprietary frontier model look overpriced by comparison. Grok is already one-tenth the cost of Claude and ChatGPT. Combined with Elon feeding all of SpaceX's engineering history into the next model, the hosts suggest Grok could become the default go-to model for anyone unwilling to pay frontier prices.
Grok Open Source: Elon's Potential 4D Chess Move
If Elon makes Grok open source, it could be a decisive competitive strike: Grok is already one-tenth the price of Claude and ChatGPT, and open-sourcing it would let anyone run it on commodity compute. Ben calls it a 'badass 4D chess move'.
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