The Economy of Algorithms

Hey, it’s Marek, I recently got quite annoyed at a number of headlines that completely misrepresented the cost challenges of AI. Axios suggested that humans might cost less than AI systems, and Fortune, similarly, announced that paying for tech is more expensive than paying for people. I read the articles and followed up on the details. Their conclusions do not hold up. The reason is a category er...

Hey, it’s Marek. Confession: the post on Capture Mode was itself made using Capture Mode. I recorded it while walking the dog: forty-five minutes of me talking to nobody in particular, then handed the transcript to Claude with one prompt: clean this up so I can shape it into a post. The whole point is that the artifact you need is already inside the work you’re doing. Sitting down to type it from...

Hey, it’s Marek, A 12-year-old drew a moustache on his face with an eyeliner pencil. The age-verification AI looked at him and decided he was 15. I’m not making this up. In the episode, I walk through the five patterns: drawers, growers, borrowers, havers, and shavers. And I argue that most people don’t choose which moustache they wear. They drift into one, and the algorithm shapes them from there...

Hey, it’s Marek. I recorded this podcast while Claude Code was humming away in another window. Twenty minutes into a single task, still “brewing,” as it likes to say. So there I was, talking about runaway AI bills while running up a runaway AI bill. Last October at OpenAI’s DevDay, they handed out resin trophies engraved with customer names. Tiers: 10 billion, 100 billion, 1 trillion tokens. It so...

Hey, it’s Marek. Watch where the price tag moves. For most of human history, there wasn’t one: every transaction was negotiated. Then, in the 1860s, John Wanamaker attached a price tag to every item in his Philadelphia department store: no need to negotiate anymore, genius! A few decades ago, the tag detached from the product and landed on the shelf: dynamic pricing. Prices can quickly adapt to ma...

A 2011 study showed that we prefer slower websites to faster ones if the slow sites appear to be “working harder”. Think about this airfare-search website that takes a minute to show you the result. Of course, it must have found better deals than that site that showed you results in a split second. Or maybe not? Are we guilty of the same bias when working with LLMs? The one that takes longer, with...

Hey, it’s Marek. I gave Claude the same draft, the same prompt, and the same checklist. Twice. In one conversation, it said don’t publish. The other said, “Ship it”. Both were confident. Both were rigorous. And both were right. Each was responding to a question it had silently interpreted differently. I call this the Precise Misread, and a new study from UT Dallas demonstrated it at scale: 150 AI...

Hey, it’s Marek. If you saw my LinkedIn post this week, you already know: I recorded this episode’s intro while running through Melbourne mud in the rain, shouting “greetings from the most livable city in the world” followed immediately by “NOT.” Melbourne's weather is never a surprise. What AI agents do when you tell them “no”? That’s a different story. On February 10th, an AI bot got its code re...

Hey, it’s Marek, I mentioned on LinkedIn this week that I built an AI agent that scouts Reddit, HackerNews, and ArXiv every morning and produces a personalised 10-minute audio briefing for my commute. Cost: roughly a flat white a day. The response surprised me: dozens of people asking how to build their own. I might start sharing some details here, too! That agent is a perfect setup for this episo...

Hey, it’s Marek. I’ve been walking around like a zombie for weeks. I just cannot stop building. I built a personal CRM that pulls together my email, social networks, and messages into one place. Something no vendor would ever sell me. I could do it because AI helped me figure out how to get past the walls those platforms put up. That’s what I call “drying the moat”, and it’s the same thing that ju...

Hey, it’s Marek! And Ivano! Two firsts these past few days: a co-authored newsletter and a guest on the podcast. Both with Ivano Bongiovanni, General Manager of AusCERT. Ivano framed the conversation with a question I’ve been chewing on since: when AI agents become the “social” component of socio-technical systems, what happens to the frameworks we built assuming the social part was human? The wri...

Hey, it’s Marek. Yes, you’re hearing from me again: the written post went out on Friday, this is the podcast version with extra context and one data point that genuinely surprised me. So I built my son a Chinese character app in two evenings. Never looked at the code. The newsletter covers the bricklayers-and-architects metaphor: every profession is splitting into execution (automatable) and archi...

Hey, it’s Marek. Yes, you’re hearing from me again! I sent the written post on Friday, and this is the podcast version with some extra context and commentary. Two formats, same topic, different experience. So, Moltbook. I spent $20 to send my bot onto a social network built exclusively for AI agents. 1.5 million bots signed up in a week. Elon Musk called it the early stages of the singularity. I c...

Hey, it’s Marek. Back from Davos 2026, and unlike last year, when everyone was singing the same AI agents tune, this year felt scattered. No singular vibe. Instead, twelve different ones competed for attention across four days. A few that stuck with me: The humility of being “just” a billion-dollar company. When a founder apologises for being a single-digit unicorn, you know the goalposts have mov...

Hey, it’s Marek. Recording this one from Shanghai with the skyline lighting up behind me. Unusual setup: microphone in my glasses, cold weather, no studio. But I wanted to share what I’m seeing here as the Year of the Horse approaches. Three patterns are emerging in China’s AI strategy: Regulation ≠ the opposite of innovation. China leads the world in high-impact GenAI research while enforcing the...

Hey, it’s Marek. Happy New Year! For the first episode of 2026, I distilled everything I wrote last year into seven traps we all keep falling into. The pattern: AI exploits a human weakness. Things go sideways. * Flattery × vanity = confidently wrong * No doubts × no checking = nobody at the wheel * Mistakes × trust = errors multiply * Free outputs × laziness = we stop thinking * Easy agents × no...

Hey, it’s Marek. In 1981, IBM did something that looked insane: they published the complete specs for the IBM PC and basically invited the world to copy them. Four years later, a Taiwanese clone of that machine ended up in communist Poland, where it hooked a preschool kid on computers for life. That kid was me. That Taiwanese company? It became Acer, one of the world’s largest PC makers. On Decemb...

Hey, it’s Marek. This episode starts with socks. Specifically, the drawer where I keep the lonely ones, waiting for their missing pairs that I refuse to believe are gone forever. That philosophical stubbornness turns out to be surprisingly relevant to a wave of mathematical “breakthroughs” in October 2025, where AI helped close 23 of Paul Erdős’ famously stubborn problems. Except, and here’s the t...

Remember - you can subscribe to this podcast in your favourite podcasting app. Just search for “The Economy of Algorithms”! Hey, it’s Marek. Three years ago, Joshua Browder offered a million dollars for someone to wear AirPods in the Supreme Court and repeat exactly what an algorithm, a “robo-lawyer”, said. Human as a text-to-speech device. Today? Millions do it for free. Macquarie Dictionary name...

Hey, it’s Marek. A COO told me about their GenAI pilots. Faster drafts, fewer errors, great metrics. I asked what surprising behaviours they were seeing. Surprises they could learn from. Blank look. “We’re not measuring that.” Nobody asks: “What is AI doing that we’d never try?” Move 37 In 2016, AlphaGo played a move no trained Go player would make. Game 2, Move 37. Commentators went silent. “It’s...

Hey, it’s Marek. I’m back after a few weeks away. I lost my dad, and I needed to step offline: spend time with family, disconnect from everything that wasn’t essential. Some of you reached out. Thank you for that. This episode is about my thoughts on trying to talk to AI during those first days. I asked Claude if I should push through and keep writing, and then I found myself staring at its scratc...

Hey, it’s Marek. I just got back from Poland yesterday morning, and immediately experienced the perfect real-world validation of this week’s newsletter topic. A massive hailstorm hit Brisbane on Sunday: trees down, no power at home for the past 24 hours and counting. I literally couldn’t record this podcast in my usual spot (a tiny room under the house) because, ironically, I’d just written about...

Hey, it’s Marek, I just recorded today’s episode from Poland, where the Polish edition of my book launched last Friday. Tomorrow I’m opening the Masters&Robots conference with a new talk about why AI being better than us might actually be good news for humanity. But today’s episode is about something uncomfortable. I’ve been using Claude to review my newsletter drafts for months. It kept telling m...

Hey, it’s Marek, Last month at Singularity University, I made 30 executives build 50 AI prototypes in two hours. No IT backgrounds. Great! But also… No documentation. No maintenance plan. This episode imagines a near-future Tuesday as an “AI Operations Coordinator” - basically, HR for bots. Fiction, but barely. Every disaster in the story already happened: Air Canada’s chatbot inventing bereavemen...

Hey, it’s Marek, Recording from the last day of my holiday: kids waiting upstairs for movie time, ice cream tub calling my name. This week’s episode is different: instead of algorithmic deep dives, I’m addressing a bot named Oli who had the audacity to tell me, “I understand your frustration.” (It did not.) What happened? I tried unsubscribing from marketing spam. The website confirmed I was unsub...