Today on the AI Daily Brief, how headless agents will change software and work.

Before that, in the headlines, the compute competition heats up.

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or see really anything else that's going on in the ecosystem. OpenAI has accelerated their

ambitious roadmap for scaling inference. In an ex post, they said they plan to deploy 30 gigawatts of compute by 2030.

Now, during the Stargate announcement at the beginning of 2025, OpenAI announced their massive

10 gigawatt target by the end of the decade, meaning for those of you who are sitting there doing

the math, they are tripling their medium-term compute goals. To give a sense of the scale,

Epic AI estimated that total global AI data

center capacity reached 30 gigawatts at the end of last year. That figure includes both the power

use for chips and ancillary systems like cooling and networking, so it's not entirely clear this is

in apples to apples comparison. 30 gigawatts also happens to be roughly peak power demand for the

entirety of New York State. Open AI, meanwhile, says that they are already well on their way. They said that they tripled their compute supply last year, going from 0.6 gigawatts to around 1.9 gigawatts. Open AI also said that they've identified, whatever that means, more than 8 gigawatts already. Now, for those of you who feel like, sure I know why this is important, but it's not really the part of AI that impacts me, this year has shown exactly why it actually does affect all of us. The rise of agentic work this year has brought a huge inference crunch. Most observers believe that Anthropic is straining under a wave of new demand, though they've yet to discuss that issue in public. Instead, we're seeing a bunch of weird

things that end up feeling like missteps that could all be attributed to just simply not

having enough compute and power to serve as much of their AI as people want. Hater writes,

right now compute is everything. Anthropic does not have enough of it, which is why Opus

performance is degrading. Open AI felt the pressure in 2025, especially after the Ghibli

wave, which pushed Sam to lock in long-term compute. Until there is a breakthrough in model

...