The Most Important Number

Dan Davies asks how many words of AI output a manager can actually verify per day before judgment silently degrades, and the honest answer is that almost no organization has tried to find out. The self-driving car literature documented this vigilance decrement precisely; the same cognitive dynamic applies to anyone reviewing model outputs at volume, and unlike physical fatigue it's invisible to the person experiencing it. The Anthropic alignment paper this week hit the same wall at the research level: automated generation scaled, evaluation didn't, and the production failure on Sonnet 4 is the visible edge of that gap. The WSJ piece shows what it looks like at the infrastructure level: reliability became the competitive moat the moment generation capacity exceeded the enterprise's ability to trust it. Organizations are measuring tokens per second and cost per query; the number that will actually constrain their AI leverage is one nobody is tracking.