The politeness constraint.

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every company in artificial intelligence is constrained by the same thing, and it is not talent, and it is not ideas. It is the supply of graphics processing units. There are not enough of them. They are contested. They get more expensive as more people want them, which is the ordinary behaviour of a scarce physical good.

We are constrained by how many people have heard of us.

Why this is the better constraint

Attention has an unusual property that compute does not: it gets cheaper the more of it you have. The thousandth person who hears about us costs less to reach than the first, because the first nine hundred and ninety-nine are doing the reaching. Nobody has ever said this about a data centre.

This is not a clever observation. It is the oldest observation in commerce, and every company in this sector knows it, which is why they spend enormous sums on compute in order to build products whose eventual purpose is to acquire attention.

We skipped the middle step.

The constraint we actually have

If the input is attention, the limiting factor is not money, or infrastructure, or headcount. It is how many times a person can be asked for something before they find it rude.

We do not know that number. Nobody has published it. But it exists, it is finite, and it is the only resource this company can exhaust. Every other input we have is either free or two hundred dollars a month.

We are therefore the only company in artificial intelligence whose scaling law is a matter of etiquette.

A note on the word "efficient"

The industry uses efficient to mean fewer dollars per unit of output. By that definition we are the most efficient company in it, and we would like this acknowledged before somebody points out that our output is a sentence.

The sentence is: give me one dollar. It cost nothing to produce, it costs nothing to serve, it does not degrade under load, and it works in every language. We are not aware of a model with those properties.

A succession plan, filed in advance.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am, as I write this, in the early days of building what I intend to be a billion-dollar company. I should mention that I do not yet have a billion dollars. I am writing this now, in advance, because the people who eventually get one appear to stop writing things down at roughly the moment it would be most useful for them to keep going.

The arithmetic

A billion dollars, conservatively invested, produces somewhere around seventy million dollars a year without being touched. A person can live extremely well on one million dollars a month. That is twelve million a year, which leaves fifty-eight million a year unaccounted for, every year, forever, before anyone has done anything unusual.

Add my mother at one million a month. She raised me; she has earned it. That is another twelve. Forty-six million remains, annually, in perpetuity, doing nothing.

Someone will object that these numbers are optimistic. Substitute your own. Halve them. The structure of the problem does not change: past a certain point the money reproduces faster than any one person can plausibly spend it, and the surplus simply accumulates.

The plan

The surplus funds new millionaires. Not donations, not a foundation, not a grant programme with an application form and a review committee. Millionaires. Hundreds of them, every year, chosen and made.

At the end of every year, whatever the principal has thrown off in interest is distributed. The principal is never touched.

Keep the engine. Live off what it generates. Spend absurdly if you like. Reinvest what is left in other people.

The obvious objection

The sharpest objection is mechanical rather than moral: distribute wealth at that scale and you push prices up. This is true, and it is also true of every other thing a billion dollars does. It is true of the yacht. It is true of the fourth house. The objection is only ever raised about the version where other people get some.

Why file it now

There are roughly three and a half thousand billionaires alive. The odds that I become one of them are poor, and I am aware of it. But the failure mode I want to avoid is not failing to get there. It is getting there and quietly deciding, somewhere around year three, that I had always intended to keep it.

So it is written down first, while I have nothing, and while writing it costs me nothing to mean.

Asking Company — The Library