Tiny Little Lab · AI Infrastructure Intelligence
Erin Brockovich's AI Data Center Map: Community opposition to AI infrastructure goes mainstream. 50,000 homes worth of power, millions of gallons of water daily. The companies that win won't have the best models — they'll have solved the permitting problem first.
Brockovich's map makes the geography of AI infrastructure visible to the people living inside it. Every zoning hearing is a cost center that didn't exist last year. The regulatory risk is asymmetric: it concentrates at the local level.
Anthropic + PwC/Deloitte/KPMG = ~1.1M professionals with Claude access by Sep 2026. Claude Opus 4.8 (May 28): 4x less likely to let bad code slide. Anthropic positioned for IPO October.
gpt-5.4-mini leads at 11.5 intelligence/$. gpt-5.5 scores highest at 70% SWE-bench. Using the most capable model for everything is economically incoherent — match tier to task complexity.