DataSynth&Co.
Vol. IV · No. 28
May 28, 2026
Computation · Data · Capital
Trading-floor monitors showing data dashboards
Photo · M. B. M. via Unsplash · trading floor, Frankfurt
Cover Story · Investing

Where Else to Put Money: Property, Metals and Factor Funds

Property, strategic metals, factor funds and inflation-linked bonds, mapped against the conditions where each one actually does work — and where each quietly fails.

By the Numbers
Q2 2026 · DataSynth research desk
1.7
Inference-cost gap
GPT-3 (2020) → SLMs of 2026, same MMLU bucket
38%
New papers using diffusion
arXiv cs.LG, Jan–Apr 2026 (n=11,442)
$214B
AI cap-ex announced
Hyperscalers, Q1 2026 earnings calls
0.62pp
Median fund alpha vs SPX
Equity long-short, trailing 12-month
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Field notesAll sections →
DataSynth & Co. is an independent publication on machine learning, data engineering and the markets they touch. Written and edited from Berlin by Lena A. Petrova. We publish first drafts; we update them when the world proves us wrong. Reader corrections are credited.
ISSN 2967-4118 (web) · CC BY-NC 4.0 unless noted
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Companion sites: pomegra.io · ai-tldr.dev
Tip line: [email protected]
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Where Else to Put Money: Property, Metals and Factor Funds

The Energy Footprint of Inference: A Back-of-Envelope

If GPT-class models answered every Google query, would we need a new grid? A first-principles calculation arrives at a smaller, weirder number than most press coverage.

What 12 Million Citations Tell Us About Which AI Papers Matter

We pulled the citation graph of every machine-learning paper indexed on Semantic Scholar between 2018 and 2025. The shape of influence is more uneven, more delayed, and less correlated with hype than the press cycle suggests.

The Investors Who Shaped Modern Markets

Investment Taxes: Keeping More of What You Earn

Building an Investment Portfolio as a Tech Professional

Open-Source AI vs Proprietary Models: Business Models and Developer Trade-offs

A New Benchmark Reveals What Frontier Models Still Can't Do

ARC-AGI-2 and the BIG-Bench-Hard 2026 refresh quietly shipped two months ago. The headline numbers are uninspiring; the per-category breakdown is genuinely informative about where the field is — and isn't — making progress.

Why Retrieval-Augmented Generation Quietly Stopped Working

Three years after RAG became the default architecture for grounding LLMs in private data, the systems shipping in production are quietly being unwound. A look at what's replacing them, and why most of the original promises were architectural illusions.

AI Pure-Plays Are Spending Four Times Their Revenue. Should You Care?

OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI together announced $51B of FY2026 cap-ex. Their combined annual revenue is approximately $12B. The ratio is unusual but not unprecedented — and the history of comparable spending booms is worth understanding before pricing the equities.