Newsletter

The Overconfidence Engine

Robot Forecasters One thing you might use AI for is to get stock tips. You have a powerful new technology that has digested the entire internet; surely it has some thoughts on where Nvidia is going? It seems some researchers, writing in Harvard Business Review, had the same idea, so
The Overconfidence Engine

Tesla the Narrative Company

DOGE Eats Its Own There are companies that you value by looking at their profits and cash flow and putting a multiple on them. And then there are companies that you value by listening to their story. You don’t buy the stock because it earned a lot of money
Tesla the Narrative Company

Off-Balance-Sheet AI Arms Race

The New Financiers of Tech You are a giant, world-dominating technology company with a market cap north of a trillion dollars and tens of billions in cash on your balance sheet. You have decided, out of a sense of "paranoia" and competitive fire, that you must spend even
Off-Balance-Sheet AI Arms Race

Nvidia's Landlords

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
Nvidia's Landlords

Tesla's Robotaxi Takes a Wrong Turn

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?
Tesla's Robotaxi Takes a Wrong Turn

Perplexity Has Apple and Google on Edge

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
Perplexity Has Apple and Google on Edge

Apple Challenges AI "Reasoning"

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
Apple Challenges AI "Reasoning"

Will OpenAI Risk a Legal Fight With Microsoft?

$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
Will OpenAI Risk a Legal Fight With Microsoft?

Meta's Deal Creates a New AI Chokepoint

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
Meta's Deal Creates a New AI Chokepoint

Google and OpenAI Are Frenemies Now

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
Google and OpenAI Are Frenemies Now