Jordi Visser has been making the case for months — in his weekly YouTube commentary and on his Substack — that we are living through an exponential transition that most people are measuring with the wrong instruments. I think he’s right. I found two data points this week that suggest why.
I was somewhere in the middle of an Invest Like the Best episode when Dylan Patel said it — almost as an aside, the kind of thing you drop to establish context before moving on to the point you actually came to make. His firm, SemiAnalysis, analyzes the semiconductor and AI industries for a living. And their usage of Claude, he noted, has been growing. The costs have been growing too.
Exponentially.
He moved on. I didn’t.
I think Patel’s API bill might be one of the more honest documents in the current AI moment — more honest than the analyst reports his firm produces, more honest than the earnings calls where every public company performs its AI fluency for shareholders.
Surveys bend. When you ask someone whether they’re using AI in their work, you’re asking them to self-report on a technology that has become a proxy for relevance, for not being left behind. The incentive to say yes is enormous. And even when the yes is genuine, it tells you nothing about depth — whether AI has become load-bearing in how someone actually works, or whether it’s an impressive thing they do occasionally.
Nobody pays exponentially growing API costs for show. Money is the honest witness.
What makes Patel’s situation quietly strange is the recursion in it. SemiAnalysis exists to help sophisticated investors and technologists understand this industry — and they cannot predict their own consumption curve. They are inside the exponential the same way everyone else is. They just happen to be watching their bill.
Then this morning, a different number arrived. Google announced it will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic — $10 billion committed now, another $30 billion contingent on performance milestones. This follows a separate $5 billion from Amazon, part of a broader arrangement under which Anthropic is expected to spend up to $100 billion on compute over time.
The temptation with numbers like these is to treat them as spectacle. Forty billion dollars is so large it becomes almost aesthetic — a statement about ambition, about the kind of bets that define eras. You feel the weight of the zeros and move on.
But I keep coming back to Patel’s API bill.
Because Google’s $40 billion and SemiAnalysis’s compounding monthly costs are saying the same thing, expressed at scales so different they almost don’t seem related. One is a research firm noticing that their tool usage has quietly escaped prediction. The other is one of the most sophisticated capital allocators on earth making a bet that strains comprehension. But both are pointing at the same reality: that this technology, wherever it takes hold, does not plateau. It compounds.
We have been waiting, I think, for the moment when AI adoption becomes legibly real — some threshold event that separates the signal from the noise, the press release from the actual change. The surveys were supposed to mark that moment. The enterprise announcements. The benchmark numbers.
Patel’s aside suggests we’ve been waiting for the wrong thing. You don’t arrive at the exponential. You just eventually notice you’re already in it — in an aside on a podcast, before moving on to the point you actually came to make.
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