Harvey’s Margins, Are Insects Worth More Than Humans?, Meta Tests Human Help for Muse | Diet TBPN
September 22, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readHarvey’s Margins, Insects vs. Humans, and Meta’s Human-AI Hybrid
Harvey, the legal AI startup, saw its gross margins crater from roughly 50% to negative 50% in June as agent token usage exploded 20-fold on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models. That sounds catastrophic for any company selling a dollar for fifty cents. But the full story is more nuanced, and the company has already recovered.
The Harvey Margin Story
The negative margins came from a surge in product usage, not from declining revenue. Harvey’s annual recurring revenue hit a $400 million run rate, meaning about $33 million in monthly revenue. At negative 50% gross margins, they were losing roughly $16 million that month — painful, but manageable against $500 million in total funding. The real driver was that legal workflows shifted from simple one-shot prompts to reasoning models and then to full agents. A lawyer asking the system to “review this contract” now triggers an agent that fans out across the firm’s records, policies, and MD files, generating vastly more tokens per query.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:51) **Harvey's Negative Gross Margins Explained** - The hosts introduce the Bloomberg report that Harvey's gross margin fell to negative 50% in June due to a 20x spike in agent token use on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models.
- 2 (06:00) **Legal Industry Margin Comps** - The hosts compare Harvey's target margins against public legal software companies and law firm benchmarks.
- 3 (09:20) **Codex Ad Read and Video Demo** - Brief sponsored segment showing AI video generation capabilities.
- 4 (11:16) **Do Insects Matter More Than Humans?** - The hosts introduce a viral EA essay arguing that insect suffering in aggregate outweighs human suffering.
- 5 (17:33) **EA Movement Fragmentation** - The hosts discuss how this essay reflects the wide range of outcomes being lumped together under the EA rationalist umbrella.
- 6 (19:03) **The Old Way: An AI Doom Scenario** - John scripts a concrete AI apocalypse scenario involving a biological weapon released by a rogue superintelligence.
- 7 (23:20) **Meta Tests Human Concierge for Muse** - Meta is testing human contractors to handle phone calls placed by its new personal AI assistant, Muse.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.
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