Tom Cinquin

Tom Cinquin

Index07 essays · 2026
  1. 01The streamer went to bedA Kick streamer launched a never-ending AI-generated broadcast of himself and went to sleep. Twenty-four thousand people kept watching. What changes when presence can be rendered.Technology6 min
  2. 02The metaverse was never a placeMeta spent $88bn building a place. Roblox and Fortnite paid people to build theirs. Why the payout beat the headset, and what brands learned about showing up.Technology7 min
  3. 03The collateral competes with itselfNvidia sells the chip, anchors the lenders and reportedly guarantees the residual — while setting the depreciation curve with its own release cycle. What a lender should ask before treating a GPU like a toll road.Finance8 min
  4. 04The prototype stopped being the hard partAI collapsed the cost of building software to a weekend. A wildfire, a working app, and three institutional clocks: where the cost actually went, and what it means for builders and investors.Technology8 min
  5. 05The software did not eat the workflowThree years and several hundred billion dollars in, the models keep getting better and the returns keep not arriving. Not a model failure — a deployment failure, in three mechanisms and one exponent.Technology11 min
  6. 06A computer made of human neuronsThe CL1 is the first computer you can buy that runs on living human neurons. The case that nothing in it can suffer is built entirely from absences the industry is funding people to remove.Technology9 min
  7. 07The margin clerk does not read essaysLeopold Aschenbrenner wrote the script for the AI infrastructure trade, compounded 439% running it, then lost 67% in twenty-two sessions. The thesis was never tested. The financing was.Finance12 min