• Citrini Research's "Analyst 3" is the toast of Wall Street over a wild report from the Strait of Hormuz.
• Market watchers praised the analyst's bravery after Citrini said it had sent him to the strait.
• They shared memes and compared him to everyone from James Bond and Ethan Hunt to Johnny English.

Finance types can't stop talking about Citrini Research's "Analyst #3" and what the firm says was a wild trip to the Strait of Hormuz.

Wall Street's denizens and market watchers across the globe rushed to X to commend the intrepid analyst with memes, GIFs, and kudos-filled posts.

Citrini's field report said that its analyst, who it says is fluent in four languages, traveled to the shipping channel at the heart of the US-Iran conflict with "a Pelican case full of equipment, a pack of Cuban cigars, $15,000 in cash and a roll of Zyn."

Analyst #3 wrote that he snuck recording equipment into Oman, faced questioning from border officials, intelligence agents, and the coast guard, and swam in the Strait of Hormuz with a cigar in his mouth and Iranian drones flying overhead.

Citrini included a disclaimer in its research note, saying that some names and details had been changed to "protect the safety of anonymous sources" and that quotes were based on the analyst's memory of conversations he had in Arabic.

The firm described this as "the best we could do from an accuracy standpoint," noting that the analyst's phone, which contained notes and photos from the trip, was held by authorities in Oman.

The analyst reported that there were significantly more vessels passing through the strait than tracking platforms show, and said the situation was closer to a "toll road" than a "blockade," with Iran demanding that every vessel secure its approval to pass through safely.

Citrini Research rose to prominence for betting against Silicon Valley Bank before the lender collapsed in early 2023 and helped trigger a regional-banking crisis. It also rattled markets this February when it warned AI could crash the stock market and spark a recession.

Roughly 20% of global oil and gas flows travel through the Strait of Hormuz, making it a key shipping channel for world energy markets and a major contributor to economic growth.

But traffic has plummeted since the breakout of the war between Iran and the US and Israel, as captains fear being struck by an Iranian drone, blasted by an underwater mine, or hit by a missile launched from the coast or a passing speedboat.

The disruptions have lit a fire under energy prices, stoking renewed fears of inflation and recession. Analyst #3's audacious decision to visit the contested waterway in the middle of a full-blown war has clearly impressed finance professionals, who've compared him to James Bond, Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt, and even the bumbling Johnny English.

Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame, hailed Citrini's on-the-ground coverage on his Substack, describing it as "remarkable stuff."

• Andrej Karpathy says he's focused on using up all of his AI tokens.
• He said he switched between tools like Codex and Claude to ensure he uses his entire budget.
• Tech leaders like Nvidia's Jensen Huang say heavy AI spending is becoming a workplace expectation.

Andrej Karpathy says he aims to use up his entire AI budget.

In an interview on the "No Priors" podcast, Karpathy — a former Tesla AI director and OpenAI cofounder — said he's shifted his mindset toward consuming every last AI token at his disposal.

"I feel nervous when I have subscription left over," he said on the pod, which was published on Friday. "That just means I haven't maximized my token throughput."

Tokens are the units AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic use to price their models. Roughly speaking, a token can be as small as a short word or a part of a longer word; a common rule of thumb is that four characters equal one token.

For consumers and employees, tokens function like a budget: the more you use, the more work AI systems can perform.

Karpathy said that changes how he uses his AI. The constraint is no longer how quickly he can type a line of code — it's how many tokens he can deploy.

That shift has changed his goal. He now aims to "maximize subscriptions," he said, even switching between competing products as limits approach. "If you're running out of quota on Codex, you should switch to Claude."

Karpathy's comments come amid a broader rethink of how developers approach AI usage. Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the "All-In" podcast that he expects employees earning $500,000 to use $250,000 worth of tokens.

"It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley," Huang said. "How many tokens comes along with my job?"

Box CEO Aaron Levie echoed that sentiment, writing on X that the surge in AI token spending will "eventually hit the rest of knowledge work as well."

The shift suggests that access to compute is no longer the main constraint on AI output. Karpathy compared the feeling to his time as a Ph.D. student.

"You would feel nervous when your GPUs are not running," he said. "Now, it's not about flops — it's about tokens."