Newsletter

Who's the Customer Here? There is a standard way that business relationships work. A company like Nvidia sells the essential tools—the picks and shovels—for a technological gold rush. Its customers, the giant cloud computing companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, buy those picks and shovels in

Vision Quest If a car drives itself down the street with no one behind the wheel, but it has a "safety monitor" sitting in the passenger seat and is only allowed to drive in good weather within a small, heavily-mapped area of Austin, is it really a robotaxi?

The Search for Search Apple, famously, does not do big deals. Its largest acquisition ever was buying Beats for $3 billion back in 2014, a deal that mostly seems to have been about getting Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre to come work there. So it is interesting that, according to

The Illusion of Thinking For the past year, the AI industry has been captivated by a new frontier: reasoning models. Led by OpenAI's powerful "o-series," these models promised to do more than just generate text; they could "think," breaking down complex problems and arriving

$13 Billion Alliance Can Be Fickle It is a weird feature of the modern artificial intelligence industry that a startup can be funded to the tune of $13.75 billion by a trillion-dollar behemoth and then, a few years later, reportedly consider suing that same behemoth for anticompetitive behavior. It

Google Splits With Scale AI One of the basic rules of a high-stakes, zero-sum competition is that you probably shouldn't let your biggest rival look over your shoulder while you're working on your secret plans. If you are, say, Coca-Cola, you don't hire a

Arming the Enemy One of the great themes of the modern AI era is that the need for raw computing power is so vast and so desperate that it makes for some truly strange bedfellows. The latest example is a particularly weird one: OpenAI, the company whose ChatGPT poses the

Stacking Them Up The US and China are in the middle of some very delicate trade talks this week, so naturally this was the perfect time for Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei to go on the front page of the People’s Daily and say that he isn’t worried about

Interconnects A thing that happens in any complicated business is that the bottleneck moves. Let's say you invent a pizza oven that can cook a perfect pizza in ten seconds. This is revolutionary. You are the pizza oven king. You sell your oven to every pizzeria in the

The race to build the biggest, most powerful AI models may be over. A technique called "distillation," which allows smaller models to learn from larger ones, is rapidly commoditizing cutting-edge AI, making it cheaper and more accessible than ever before. This increasingly becomes a challenge to the business