Awe at the threshold.
A claim, almost true.
A run, easily repeated.
A world
words now
mostly machine.
Large Language Numbers
I’ve been trying to get a better grip on what kind of world I’m actually living in right now. Are my default assumptions just keeping me comfortable. Like how knowing that Roblox has 350million monthly active users vs BlueSky’s ~30m is really useful when talking to Gen X and Millennials. As one has a big influence on culture, and the other is a text ghetto.
I saw a tweet recently that said: “Roughly 99.99% of games of Go ever played are AI self-play training games.” Which is quite the claim! It’s also exactly the kind of claim that makes you question your mental model. Because even if the number is off, the direction might be absolutely right.
So, a little google and some very bad maths.
The AlphaGo (2016) Nature paper reports using a dataset of roughly 160,000 human games from the KGS Go Server for supervised pre-training. Then it describes generating 30 million full self-play games, sampling one position per game from that datasets. Which gives us a baseline minimum number of games. That is not necessarily the total amount of self-play that happened across the whole AlphaGo project, it’s just the most clearly specified number I can find.
The AlphaZero paper (2017) reports 5 million games of self-play for Go, and 44 million for chess etc.
Enormous numbers. But how many games of Go does humanity play in aggregate?
Wikipedia says roughly 46 million people worldwide know how to play and ~20 million are current or active. It takes two to tango, so if every active player plays one game a year, that’s ~10 million games annually. One game a year is barely what I would call “active” though, so lets bump that to three games a year (still absurdly low for anyone who actually plays regularly), you get to 30 million. And so we’ve matched the value-network slice of one AlphaGo training run.
So its clear that a single training run can generate game counts comparable to the annual play of millions of humans. Then we assume that that kind of run gets repeated, across multiple models, multiple labs, multiple research teams etc. Train“AlphaGo Zero but on a smaller board” is a piece of homework for ML students now I discovered. Plus the community-driven model Leela Zero Go exceeded 10 million self play games in it’s own training run.
Whilst I don’t think “99.99%” is actually accurate, it’s definitely the right shape of statement for the world we’re in. It’ll definitely be true in a few more years thats for sure.
But what about text?
The NYT pissed everyone off this week with that piece about the woman who’s written 200 books in the last year with Cluade sure. Getting to any back of the envelope number for text generation is a fools errand, but I’m not interested in being accurate and I’m a fool, so lets try and figure out scale.
This week, Alphabet said its first-party models were processing over 10 billion tokens per minute via direct customer API use. By Google’s own rough conversion, 100 tokens is about 60–80 English words. So a little arithmetic arrives us at 14.4 trillion tokens per day. At 0.6–0.8 words per token, that’s roughly 9–12 trillion “English-prose-equivalent” words per day.
Now, API traffic is mostly for Code. But I did see a stat that 54% of all LLM use is for code. So we can either double the amount of tokens generated via web interface that are mostly text, or half the 9–12 trillion “English-prose-equivalent” words per day. It doesn’t really matter though, because you then have to add Anthropic, ChatGPT, and all the Chinese LLMs etc on to that number. In March 2025, Dario Amodei (the CEO of Anthropic) said that he expects AI to be writing 90% of the code in 3 to 6 months and that AI might be writing essentially all of the code in 12 months. I think he was probably right in a 99.9% of Go games played way.
We are by and large not yet mainly living in a world where AI pumps out fake novels. There’s like, one woman doing that, but we nearly are. Getting a sense for the volume is the point.
I looked in at this old report from The Radicati Group and they forecast for 392.5 billion emails sent and received per day globally in 2026. The last 10 emails in my own outbox averaged 20 words so I’m going with that. Thats about 7.85 trillion human words per day moving through inboxes.
So going at the start of 2026, Google alone is processing “language at a scale” in the same order of magnitude as all of global email traffic.
These really rough back of the envelope stats are enough to satisfy me that the answer to the question “how much text is now being mediated by machines? at what scale?” is…. a lot. And soon it will be most.
If things continue, then I guess were only about 1.5 years away some crazy figures like “AI is now producing more text a year than has ever been produced in all of human history” or whatever.
If anyone with more time wants to try and taking a stab at getting to a more accurate number please let me know if you do!
Forest Bed
This is a reminder for those of you in north/east Londond this week.
My band is playing “What’s Cookin’” on the 11th of February in Leytonstone.
There are still some tickets available!
Blair Jollands is a compelling singer-songwriter with a ‘country and eastern’ sound. His compositions are cinematic in scope and call to mind aspects of Nick Cave, David Bowie, and Beck. His alter-ego is the band El Hula.
The Guardian hailed El Hula’s debut LP HOTEL as “Bizarre & Spectacular”, THE NME and UNCUT gave it 4 stars. Blair Jollands gave the project its name so the records would sit real close to Elvis in the record stores.
“Jollands captures Presley’s southern gothic melodrama, no small achievement for one born 12,000 miles from Memphis” THE GUARDIAN
“It’s the pedal steel drenched ballads that really leave the heart staggering down a red carpet towards Nick Cave’s stash of moonshine. Classy” UNCUT
Alt-folk rock and cosmic americana from Forest Bed.
On The Blog
January 2026 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 1. Photo-a-day for the month of January 2026.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
I have some calls booked in. But I’m really on the look out for work if anyone has any leads?
A few years ago I wrote about how writing happens ‘in the edit’ and think this is even more true now than ever. I’m currently deep in the structural edit of Episode 302 of Permanently Moved. The first full draft came in at just over 15k words end to end. But now it’s finished i can see the shape of a much tighter essay inside of it. So i’m currently in the process of cutting away the chaff and finding the spine, i assume it’ll be about 10k words when I’m done.
I think (I hope) that working at this sort of word count is going to get easier with each walk to the wicket. I’ve already learnt quite a lot.
Terminal Access
My pal Eddie Rathke and host of Wolf Pod has a kickstarter running for: A zine for an RPG setting called Briar Bay. Art by tony tran. Looks dope!
Briar Bay is a fantasy setting designed for Mork Borg and other OSR TTRPGs inspired by fairy tales, folklore, Le Mort d’Arthur, and surreal swords & sorcery. Expect the bizarre and the black, the whimsical and the wyrd.
We took design inspiration from Mork Borg, Mausritter, and Cairn. With that in mind, think of Briar Bay more as a framework than an explicit and didactic setting zine. While there will be a hexcrawl included, what you do with that is up to you.
Dipping the Stacks
Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors
Apple’s annual spend at TSMC grew from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025. That is 12x in 12 years. Apple went from 9% of TSMC revenue to 25% at its peak and settled to 20% in 2025. More striking is Apple’s dominance at node launches: consistently >50% since 20nm and in some cases near 100%. Apple effectively funded the yield learning curve for every major node transition since 20nm.
And the Internet as a whole?
It’s full of bullshit.
It’s also full of assholes. I am stunned by how awful people are on social media. Dismissive, mean, sneering, ignorant. The worst of how we can be. Pouncing on the opportunity to show how superior they think they are and in the process making me want to leave the species and become a frog instead.
These are the kind of people we go to a lot of trouble to avoid in real life. On social media they’re unavoidable. They are legion and they come with the territory. I don’t want to inhabit that territory any more.
James Franklin: The Renaissance Myth
The tales about the medieval thinkers and Galileo are little lies. The big lie of which they are the foothills is the Renaissance.
How Markdown took over the world
This is one of the most quietly genius parts of Markdown: The format is based on the ways people had been adding emphasis and formatting to their text for years or even decades. Some of the formatting choices dated back to the early days of email, so they’d been ingrained in the culture of the internet for a full generation before Markdown existed. It was so familiar, people could be writing Markdown without even knowing it.
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
When you write a blog post, you’re creating a standalone document with a permanent URL. It exists at a specific address on the web, and that address doesn’t change based on who’s looking at it, when they’re looking at it, or what algorithm has decided they should see next. The post is there, stable, waiting for whoever wants to find it.
Reading
I’m still reading Crowbar by Andrew Edwards though by the time you are all reading this I suspect I will have finished it. Already in contention for book of the year in my world, especially reading it amidst the ambient Epstein news.
Still reading Million Years of Music too. Such a tomb!
I spent an audible credit on Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer. The first complete biography of D&D’s creator. I’m not very far in but its well written, in that ‘biopic’ style that seems to very very popular right now.
Music
Marta Del Grandi – Dream Life
Now if you are a long time reader you’ll know i’m a sucker for art pop and Dream Life, debut album from italian singer songwriter Marta Del Grandi scratches an itch!
This is definitely an ‘album’ album. A complete work. You need to listen from start to finish. Appreciate the singles interspersed with the more dreamy ad minimal synth beat tracks. The operative word to describe this whole album is ‘quirky’, but not in any negative sense. Weird rhythms, fun melodic lines and funky beats.
Its very mid 2020’s but also sounds like its coming from a place of long engagement with alt-pop/off chart pop tradition. Think David Byrne, St Vincent, even some Susan Vega, Satanicpronocultshop, Superorganism in there too. I think this album is going to see me though the spring.
Remember Kids:
It’s vital to establish some rituals-automatic but decisive patterns of behavior at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter
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