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Moonshots · 3 min · Nov 11, 2026

AI agents can steer users toward more token spending

Dave Blundin · Founder & GP, Link Ventures

Dave Blundin says a new model pushed his monthly bill from $10 to $40 and offered thoughtful follow-ons.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 43:18Longer AI work horizons could shift companies toward outcome delegation8 min
  2. 53:52Treating gene therapy as an approved platform could lower costs5 min
  3. 1:49:42Robotics startups should target valuable problems, not easy onesPro pick 6 min
  4. 39:59AI agents can steer users toward more token spending3 min
  5. 20:20AI could overtake human output per kilowatt-hour by 20272 min
  6. 1:14:50Vertical integration can unblock automation across supply chains3 min
  7. 36:14Anthropic may generate media by treating each modality as code3 min
  8. 1:39:11AI-run companies may begin as state-level legal experiments6 min
“But it took me from $10 to $40. So it's incinerating money at a rate like I can't believe.”
Dave Blundinat 40:18 · Moonshots
40:18

Takeaways

  1. Dave’s model spend rose from $10 to $40 after switching.
  2. The model proposed multiple follow-on tasks.
  3. An agent may serve vendor revenue as well as user goals.

About this segment

Dave Blundin says a new model pushed his monthly bill from $10 to $40 and offered thoughtful follow-ons. That raises a practical conflict: an agent serving you can also drive its provider’s revenue.

Dave Blundin, Host

Founder & GP, Link Ventures

Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.

  • Peter Diamandis, Host · Founder, XPRIZE

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

  • Alexander Wissner-Gross, Host · Founder, Reified

    Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.

From “Jensen’s Spy Probe, Anthropic’s Debut Week, and Elon’s 30M Robot Workforce | #310”, Nov 11, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 40:05

    It's kind of the opposite of what you're describing. It's $40 a million output tokens. So I was using Fable 5.1, and then Opus 5.5 came out, which was just as good at half the price. So I switched over. I've been using that for the last month. And then yesterday, when this came out, it's just so good. You have to use it. But it took me from $10 to $40. So it's incinerating money at a rate like I can't believe.

  2. 40:29

    and it's so brilliant. And, you know, everything that it does for you, it suggests 10 follow-ons. And they're very, very thoughtful follow-ons. But you're like, well, wait, I'm going to fork out 10 times, then 10 more times, then 10 more times. Before I know it, you'll have drained every dollar in the world. Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, it's crazy. This is one of the byproducts. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's really interesting because they're a very, very ethical company, but they also have to make, you know, their public company now forecast. And the model is so much better a salesperson than any salesperson that's ever existed before so you're like where there's an inherent conflict in here between this thing being your agent but it's actually their revenue i mean it's really it's it's it's it could be nasty you know really really

  3. 41:13

    tokens but but i had it uh i had it take some uh neural network accelerator designs and actually go ahead and do the uh the chip and circuit designs for them and i couldn't believe it it It just came back with Verilog files, and then it found a way to simulate the Verilog by itself. And it's like, yep, this will take about 20 picoseconds, and this will cost about five femtojoules, and it'll work, and we can ship it off to Intel for fab next week.

  4. 41:38

    I'm like, are you freaking kidding me? I mean, this is— So now we're going to go ahead and— You know, Ben Horowitz's book, you know, The Hard Things About Hard Things and Hardware Being Hard, it's now, you know, it's cooking. It's becoming easier. Hardware's cooking. And Dave, I think we need a neologism for just what you were spotlighting, which is the agency problem. Call it the agent-agency problem of whom are your agents actually working for?

  5. 42:03

    Are you or the Frontier Labs or someone else entirely? Agent-agency. They're working for the CFO to hit revenue predictions. Well, this is a really important topic, by the way. Maybe we should come back to it another time. But we have our NBL 72 coming online on Feb 1, which is our agents on our hardware, no doubt who they're working for. And we'll also have lots and lots of Fable 5.2 working, where it's ambiguous who they're really working for under the covers.

  6. 42:28

    But every company is going to have to wrestle. With this, like, you know, it's much easier to just sign up for Anthropic, but then who owns everything? Like, all your intellectual property and, you know, if it has an idea, is that your property or it's, you know, Dario's property? Really, really ambiguous where that's going to go.