---
title: "Notes from the periphery"
date: 2026-06-13
slug: notes-from-the-periphery
type: post
categories:
  - "Geopolitics"
tags:
  - "ai"
  - "anthropic"
  - "periphery"
  - "superai"
  - "singapore"
  - "plaud"
original_url: https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/06/13/notes-from-the-periphery/
author: Bridgewalker
excerpt: "SuperAI in Singapore, Claude Fable 5, US export restrictions, and the genius of Plaud — a view from outside the AI frontier."
---

*Originally published at [humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/06/13/notes-from-the-periphery](https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/06/13/notes-from-the-periphery/)*

Yesterday, [SpaceX stock began trading on the Nasdaq](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/spacex-stock-jumps-2-trillion.html), bringing in fresh capital for the rocket-AI-social media Frankenstein, and Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire. SpaceX's Starlink is a monumental achievement – the first new satellite broadband communications constellation of such scale and profitability in a lifetime, but by my own estimate, it may account for only 10–15% of SpaceX's $2 trillion valuation – the rest of the valuation is mainly from AI.

And the rest of the world is struggling to figure out what to do with AI, or harness it, like Musk has done.

Earlier in the week, the SuperAI conference kicked off in Singapore, aiming to bring the world together to explore and unveil developments in AI. [On the same day, Anthropic launched its largest public model yet](https://www.asiatechreview.com/p/anthropic-isnt-at-superai-in-singapore), Claude Fable 5, a version of its famous gatekept Mythos model with additional guardrails for cybersecurity, biology and LLM research questions. In the sea of attendees, many could be seen on their laptops, interacting with Fable as it launched.

Things are happening fast now.

And increasingly, they seem to be happening in the United States. Outside, the rest of the world feels like the periphery, months behind and mired in slow moving time.

The speakers at the conference were a mix of folks who had mostly found themselves at the periphery, even though they were involved in AI. Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, in his self-exile from the US and attempts to build a Network State from Southeast Asia, still talking about the last revolution – decentralization and NFTs. Mistral AI, Europe's shining hope, once close enough to the frontier to matter, but now visibly behind the US and China. And representatives from other lesser known firms, mainly from China, trying hard to fight their way to the frontier.

Notably, there were no current speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot or Google DeepMind, although the corporate side of Google Cloud was there to sell cloud capacity. Some investors who had put money into the leading labs at some point were present, and hardware providers such as Cerebras and infra builders such as Stripe, who build with everyone, were around.

The SuperAI conference is organized by the organizers of Token2049, a large scale crypto conference. I had taken some leave to walk the booths and understand what was going on in AI.

Quite a lot, it seemed, but everything was corporate, or at least start-up related. I've never thought seriously about this, but AI is fundamentally different from the hacker libertarian decentralized ethos of crypto, which was an agglomeration of souls seeking freedom from systems of control, seeking decentralization, building from the ground up from a single white paper from Satoshi. Unlike crypto conferences which had giveaways looking for users, most folks at the AI conference were corporates and startups, trying to sell to other corporates and startups.

AI, or at least how it has developed in its current form, is rapidly becoming a centralized vector of control, dominated by a few companies, which are currently pulling away from the rest of the world and imposing their norms top down.

An example of the norms being imposed top down is the kerfuffle around the guardrails in the Fable 5 release. Cybersecurity and biosecurity were off limits so biologists could not use Claude Fable 5 except in incognito mode, and the [model was guided to subtly limit effectiveness or degrade responses when used to conduct frontier LLM research](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-helping-you/).

Very worrying, for those of us on the periphery.

After the initial burst of activity with open source creations such as Llama.cpp and Stable Diffusion around 2022/23, the hacker-driven open frontier seems to have fizzled, not being able to generate sufficient economic rationale to drive the research and GPU investments needed to keep up to the frontier. The Chinese labs are doing what they can to seed open-weights models onto the internet and publishing their findings in journals for their own purposes, but unlike say crypto, most of the development is now in companies and not by independent hackers and programmers any more.

So the periphery is slowly fading. What of the core, and its latest development, Claude Fable 5?

Talking to Claude Fable 5 and seeing other folks' reaction to it was interesting. Benchmark saturation is a way of saying that a model is performing so well in its benchmark, that the benchmark can no longer be used to distinguish between models. The conversations this week confirmed a sense that I had been getting the last few months – that for me, that conversation had saturated as a benchmark, I couldn't use it to judge the intellect of a model, any more.

Purely from conversation alone, I could tell that Claude Fable 5 had good judgment, but I was unable to say whether it was smarter than ChatGPT 5.5 or even Claude Opus 4.8, despite the stronger benchmarks, simply because these models were becoming so much smarter than me. Some other folks (some of the smartest ones) on X.com were more shaken, perhaps because conversation had not saturated for them yet and they could tell Claude Fable 5 was smarter, or perhaps because they were using Claude Fable 5 in agentic harnesses where apparently its abilities shone and it could work independently for hours.

Claude Fable 5 still couldn't solve my personal test for AGI, to outline practical steps on how to grow a profitable, commercially viable, space company or economic ecosystem with negligible non-commercial subsidies. Arguably, in recent decades, only Elon Musk and SpaceX have done it so far through their Starlink system, but Musk is far from AGI, at the very least – he lacks the A.

Claude Fable 5 may have identified the same problems as I did, doing the work of maybe 6 months in 5 minutes, but Claude Fable 5 was equally incapable of solving the problems, because the solutions did not depend on raw cognition – they required culture change, coalition building, and a willingness to take on risk – none of which pure cognition can solve for. So in a sense, strategy work may be safe for now, with AI as an assistant and a researcher.

The other revelation to me was on personal economics. One of the X posters said he woke up to unbelievable progress in his projects, and an API bill of USD $655 overnight from Claude Fable 5, or about $15k-$20k per month depending on how many working days you account for – the price of a senior, experienced, white collar professional internationally. I had previously compared a [Claude Pro subscription to the salaries of graduates in developing Southeast Asian cities](https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/05/31/wonder-apathy-and-the-cost-of-intelligence/), but faster than even I expected, a frontier AI model is trending to be more expensive than me.

So while I can't compete head on in pure cognitive work like software engineering, and the cost of intelligence may go cheaper over time (debatable, if physical inputs like power and resources are necessary to generate the intelligence), I can be cost effective as a sales and strategy guy on the periphery of things.

And perhaps, the periphery is not such a bad place – it may be possible to scrape a living, perhaps even a good living, from the edge.

The main sponsor of SuperAI this year was a company called Plaud. A company I had not heard of until this week. Turns out they have an annualized revenue of 300m and growing fast.

What do they do? They produce devices that help you record meetings and conversations, and run a SaaS service to help you identify the speakers and transcribe conversations. Their devices are superior to using phones directly to transcribe because the battery life is long (40-60h) and they look pretty cool.

But Plaud takes devices that probably cost $20-30 in Shenzhen to build and sells them for $200 – $300 worldwide. They have a transcription service that sells for $20/month which probably can be hacked together for 90% of use cases by any local AI enthusiast with open models in an afternoon of work.

It's really very impressive actually. They started as a recording company in 2021, have survived and thrived in an AI-adjacent field without being drawn into the race to the frontier, and they seem to actually benefit their customers who are (1) executives and founders and (2) field personnel like repairmen and real estate agents, with more than 2m active users.

All the thinking in the world doesn't yet produce a business model that creates value from a cheap piece of hardware and simple speech-to-text transcription. This is the genius I admired in Musk / Starlink, and this genius lives on in companies like Plaud.

Perhaps that is what remains for those of us on the periphery: not to command the tide, but to build small boats that can survive it.

*Postscript: After drafting this post, a further development on Friday 12 June evening occurred that made the core-periphery dynamics even more obvious. The US government restricted access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign governments, foreign companies and foreign individuals, even those working for Anthropic in the US. State regulation or control of frontier models has been part of the company's policy recommendations, so I am not sure if this is an outcome, foreseen or unforeseen, of their own advice.*

*Anthropic was forced to temporarily pull access to Fable 5 for all users. I am not sure if this will be permanent. The users at the AI conference on the periphery were right to test the model while they could, as soon as it came out.*

*This should drive home the lesson, if anyone hasn't learnt it by now, that if you rely on American frontier models to augment your thinking, not only your model provider, but the US government, has a say in what you think, and what you can think.*
