What Happens When a Public Company Goes All In on AI

Bullish:

• $SQ - Block has restructured around AI, cutting 40% of workforce while maintaining growth trajectory, with AI tools enabling 10-100x productivity gains and new product capabilities like generative UIs.

  • “What we were seeing is that one or two engineers or a designer and an engineer who was on the tools, quote unquote, as we say, is able to be ten, twenty, 100x more productive.”

    Owen·0:26

  • “We're building world models internally and externally of, like, understanding who our customers are, but then also understanding how Block operates.”

    Owen·25:17

  • “Cash App went from when I joined Cash App in 2016, we had just just started to to figure out how monetize and had our first dollars of gross profit, and now I think Cash App's probably like, I don't know, 60 ish percent of like overall gross profit at the at the company.”

    Owen·17:56
• $AIMODELS - AI models have reached a binary inflection point in capability, fundamentally breaking the correlation between headcount and output in software development.

  • “And then late November, December, there was a binary change. You basically have Opus four six. You have Codex five three. And, essentially, you get this shift where I think the tools and the foundational models were pretty good at writing code, especially for new ventures and kind of, like, green space. It became clear almost overnight, maybe in a couple of weeks, that now they're incredibly capable working with existing complex code bases.”

    Owen·3:53

  • “Over time, it's pretty obvious that these systems are just going to be so much better than having a thousand humans who are doing that work.”

    Owen·0:33