Welcome to Drift Signal. I’m Nicolas, Head of Research at Vsquared Ventures, and this is my personal newsletter on markets and macro.
First, some recent work elsewhere that may be of interest: last Sunday, Marieke Flament and I published a new edition of our newsletter Currency of Power dedicated to Tether. We look at how it has evolved from a stablecoin issuer into a global financial institution sitting at the centre of dollar liquidity, and why most of traditional finance is still misreading what it has become. Read the full piece here: Tether Is Not a Stablecoin Company.
Now, in today’s edition, I react to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, spilling the beans on frontier model companies and why I think it signals an imminent turn toward local models — and, correspondingly, the bursting of the Big AI bubble.
My argument is that the economics of frontier models, the rise of strong open source alternatives, and the shift toward data and control at the edge are s…