The Daily Receipts

Epoch AI tracks how much AI compute a dollar buys, measured in constant 2025 dollars across the chips companies actually purchased each quarter. Since 2023, AI chip price-performance has grown 49% a year, doubling every 1.7 years

TrendForce says a shortage of critical optoelectronic components — EML and CW lasers — is reshaping the AI optical transceiver supply chain, and projects the global market to grow from $16.5 billion in 2025 to $26 billion in 2026, an AI optical transceiver market up more than 57% year-over-year

A Census Bureau working paper using its 2026 BTOS AI supplement found that among US firms that adopted AI between November 2025 and January 2026, the scope of use stayed narrow: 57% of AI-adopting firms use it in three or fewer business functions

Datadog's own 10-Q filing shows AI is now a material swing factor in its growth: for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, its AI-native customer cohort — which includes its single largest customer — contributed high-single-digit percentage points of Datadog's total year-over-year revenue growth

NBER's Firm Data on AI paper found a striking gap in expectations: while executives surveyed expect AI to cut their firms' employment by 0.7% over the next three years, US employees surveyed separately in December 2025 predicted AI would raise US firms' employment about 0.5% over the next three years

Epoch AI had frontier models repeatedly play the board game Earthborne Rangers to test whether they improve with practice, and found GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 both mismanaged its core fatigue mechanic at 2.1 fatigue per round, versus 0.6 for expert humans and 3.5 for purely random play