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Performance per Whose Dollar?

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  TPUs, agentic inference, and the end of the one-chip cloud Copyright: Sanjay Basu On November 5, 2026, SemiAnalysis published benchmark results that would have sounded strange two years ago. Google’s TPUv7, called Ironwood, matched or beat NVIDIA’s best on cost for several frontier open models. The test was not a simple chatbot prompt. It was long, multi-turn, agentic work. That is the kind of serving where inference spend is heading. For a decade, the case for staying on NVIDIA was never only about the silicon. It was about the software. CUDA, the kernels, and thousands of maintainers who tuned for NVIDIA first. That moat is now being contested. And it is being contested by the same open source people who helped build it. What changed in three weeks On October 20, at PyTorch Conference 2026, Google open-sourced TorchTPU under the Apache 2.0 license. It was built with Meta’s PyTorch team. It runs PyTorch natively on TPUs. You debug in eager mode. You compile with torch.compile fo...
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Bengalis — The Fourth Ancestor and the Missing Reference Panel

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu The fourth ancestor in Bengali DNA is real. But the two claims that made the video spread are not really about Bengali biology. They are about missing data. I watched a sixteen minute video on this last week. Most of it holds up. The East Asian piece is really there. The date is close to right. The way it rises as you move east across Bengal is a real finding. Someone did the homework. The two moments built to make you share it are the ones that break. A software tool that locates people by their DNA could not place Bengalis on a map. A team in Brazil looking for the closest living Asian relatives of Native Americans ended up pointing at Bangladesh. The video tells both stories as if the DNA were so strange that the instruments gave up. That is not what happened. In both cases the tool worked fine. The list it was comparing against simply did not contain the right answer. That difference is the whole point, and I run into the same mistake every week at work...
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The Turk Goes Quiet

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Why Amazon Really Shut Down Mechanical Turk On September 30, 2026, Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing marketplace Jeff Bezos once called "artificial artificial intelligence", closed for good after 21 years. The irony is hard to miss. A platform built to hand machines the work they couldn't do was retired just as machines became good at much of that work, and as the people training frontier AI moved on to a different kind of labor market. Amazon's official explanation was one sentence long: "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026". The company gave no usage figures, no migration path, and no successor. So the real reasons have to be pieced together from the timeline, from people who worked on the platform, and from where the market went. My reading is th...
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