Hi all,

Here’s our short Monday roundup of data signals across AI, energy and markets:

1. A GPU wave is ahead of us. More than 95% of the Grace-Blackwell GPUs have not yet been deployed, even though the chip has been shipping since December 2024.1 (h/t Air Street Press)

   

2. Freelance hunting. Fable 5 now completes 16% of real freelance projects at a quality just as good as that of human professionals, according to the Remote Labor Index. This is about double the previous best2.

   

3. David vs Goliath. A 35-billion-parameter model, trained differently3, now matches 1-trillion-parameter models on some long-horizon benchmarks.

4. Chinese pharma boost. Chinese biotech companies’ licensing deals are up 87% in the first five months of the year compared to the same period last year.

5. Wet-lab assistance. In a near-autonomous loop, GPT-5.4 helped Molecule.one’s lab run 10,080 reactions and increased the average yield in the Chan-Lam process4 by around 50%.

6. Holding swap. Central banks worldwide now hold more gold than US Treasuries – this is the first time since 1996.

   

7. Wealth concentration. Nearly half of all income earned in the US belongs to the top 10% of earners, the highest since WWII.

8. Fewer babies, richer adults? Across countries, a one-percentage-point lower birth rate in 1950 was associated with almost 27% higher GDP per working-age adult over 1970-2020, with no change to aggregate GDP.

9. Extreme heat. French utility EDF took almost 10% of its nuclear fleet offline (some 6.2 gigawatts) as river temperatures breached the threshold for cooling.

Thanks for reading!