Normal Science

Electromagnetism Secretly Runs the World

Welcome to the 520 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 260,690 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:Subscribe nowHi friends  ,Happy Tuesday! Welcome to our newest installment in what has become an unintentional two-part series on non-LLM models that can do things that humans can’t, things that will give us superhuman abilities in the physical world. They’re also both co-written with founders you’d expect to find in SF but are building right here in the grea...

OpenAI Is a Once-in-a-lifetime Startup

by Evan Armstrongin Napkin MathChatpGPT/Every illustration.Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. Unprecedented doesn’t quite cut it. Unhinged is directionally accurate, but still a little casual.There has never, ever been a company like OpenAI: in growth and, yes, hubris. This week’s funding announcement—$40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation—is the largest ever capital raise by a private company. But what makes San Francisco’s brightest star so unusu...

Amazon Earnings, Trainium and Commodity Markets, Additional Amazon Notes

Amazon's earnings suggest that the shift away from training towards inference and agents means their bet on Trainium is paying off. Plus, additional notes on ads, agents, and sports rights.

Intel Earnings, Intel’s Differentiation?, Whither Terafab

Intel's earnings were very impressive, but the chief driver was a structural shift in demand for CPUs for AI. Plus, what is going on with Terafab?

An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman About Bedrock Managed Agents

Listen to this post: Good morning, As I noted yesterday, today’s Stratechery Interview is early in terms of my timing — Tuesday instead of Thursday — and late in terms of delivery — 1pm Eastern instead of 6am — because the topic was embargoed. That embargo created a bit of a weird situation for me over the last several days: Last Friday I conducted the following interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman about Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI; naturally, one of my ques...

AI Hardware, Meta Display, Redefining VR and AR

I finally tried the Meta Ray-Ban Display, and it completely changed how I think about AR and VR.

Unicorn Market Cap 2026: SF is the GenAI Super Cluster

Analysis below from Shreyan Jain. All data pulled on Dec 31st of the year, so “2025” means Dec 31 2025 / Jan 1 2026 in terms of market caps.In the past two years, we’ve seen a post-ZIRP market correction, the rapid breakout of frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and ongoing punditry on an “AI bubble.” Analysis suggests that San Francisco Bay Area has emerged as an AI super cluster, with 91% of global AI private market cap residing in a 1 hour radius.Analysis from previous years can be fo...

Discussion w Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI

Topics covered:MistralOpen and closed source AIFuture tech (small models, context windows, etc)EU AI & startup sceneEnterprise AI needsBuilding fast moving teamsVideo link:Transcript:DYLAN FIELDHi everybody. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I am so glad that we're able to host this at Figma. My name is Dylan Field. I'm the CEO and co founder of Figma. And a big welcome to everybody here, but also everyone who's joining us via live stream as well. And I'm really excited for tonight. I t...

Things I Don't Know About AI

In most markets, the more time passes the clearer things become. In generative AI (“AI”), it has been the opposite. The more time passes, the less I think I actually understand.For each level of the AI stack, I have open questions. I list these out below to stimulate dialog and feedback.LLM QuestionsThere are in some sense two types of LLMs - frontier models - at the cutting edge of performance (think GPT-4 vs other models until recently), and everything else. In 2021 I wrote that I thought the ...

Altimeter's Brad Gerstner on Macro, Tech and Startups

Brad Gerstner, Founder of Altimeter, and I discuss:What can we learn from tech and internet history?Technology cyclesAI, its impact, and how to invest in itMacro shiftsTech startup worldVideoTranscriptBrad GerstnerThanks for having me. I started four companies on the back of a napkin, like, day one. And so I get both excited and know the feeling of sitting where you all are sitting right now. Unfortunately, this guy gets to have all the day-one fun these days because Altimeter tends to invest a ...

Unicorn Market Cap 2023: Rise of AI

[This post co-authored with Shreyan Jain]We’ve previously explored the geographic distribution of global unicorn market cap in 2019, 2020, and 2021. In the past, we’ve used this analysis to highlight trends like the concentration of tech startups in specific industry-towns, a slowdown in new unicorn creation in China, and the prevalence of post-Covid remote work policies in the Bay Area. A lot has happened since early-2021, including public tech market and multiples highs, ZIRP (Zero Interest Ra...

Early days of AI (and AI Hype Cycle)

I worked on early ML systems and products at Google and later at Twitter (after they bought my company, Mixer Labs). I then spent a decade working as a founder and executive & investing in machine learning companies. Until the rise of new AI architectures (in particular transformer-based and diffusion-model based approaches), roughly all machine learning startups failed. Value in prior AI waves went largely to incumbents over startups - as the capabilities were not advanced enough to create new ...

How Claude Is Building A Unique Growth Engine Out of User-Created Apps

One of the things I’ve been watching closely is how AI is creating new types of Growth Loops that we haven’t seen before. Two years ago I wrote about LinkedIn’s AI enhanced content loop that generated 1M uniques per month in record time.A couple of weeks ago Anthropic launched a new Claude feature called “AI-powered apps.” There are some unique elements to this feature that creates a potentially new powerful growth model. and I broke it down on a recent episode of Unsolicited Feedback.Listen On:...

The Next Great Distribution Shift

Thank you to Casey Winters, Aaron White, Dan Hockenmaier, Fareed Mosavat and Adam Fishman for reading early versions of this and providing feedback. They are all smarter than me so you should go follow them.Note: Since publishing this post, my prediction has started to play out. ChatGPT launched the early version of their App SDK and is planning on a bigger launch sometime in late 2025/early 2026. To know what to do next, I suggest reading this post: How To Navigate The AI Distribution Shift.The...

Cursor and SpaceX: In search of a complete loop

Cursor and SpaceX have entered an agreement to co-develop coding and knowledge agent models together. With SpaceX having the right to acquire Cursor this year for $60B or pay them $10B instead. In coding–which is perhaps the path to general agents–being a top lab requires owning both the compute to train new models and capabilities and the product to recursively inform that process. Both believe they are falling out of orbit. Combined they can complete the loop. Alone neither can. With this stru...

Underutilized Fixed Assets

Every marketplace is unique. But every successful marketplace is unique in the same ways. Historically it’s very hard to find a successful marketplace that wasn’t built on an underutilized fixed asset. Airbnb is a canonical example of this. Someone has a guest bedroom. It’s always there, a fixed asset. But it’s unused and they make no money from it. Until Airbnb, they may not even have considered that they could make money from it. And then suddenly, with Airbnb it generates hundreds of dollars ...

Notes on Superhuman’s Acquisition Loops

Recently sent some notes on aspects of Superhuman’s acquisition loops and business model that interested me to some friends. Since I often ask people to write and send me more memos, thought I’d clean up and share this example. This essay is heavily focused on growth loops, and assumes familiarity with them. If you are not familiar with them recommend reading “Growth Loops are the New Funnels” on the Reforge blog. Companies in the productivity and collaboration space have been raising at high re...

The AI Signal to Noise Curve

A lot of people feel like they’re struggling to keep up with AI. It feels like things change every week if you read X or LinkedIn. In reality, meaningful capability changes only happen a couple times a year. What changes weekly is the noise level. The real question isn’t “How do you keep up with AI?” It’s where you choose to sit on the signal to noise curve.I think about AI adoption using a simple model: the Signal to Noise Curve.Thanks for reading Casey Accidental! Subscribe for free to receive...

When Agents Attack: How AI Collapses and Rebuilds Marketplace Moats

AI is coming for marketplaces. OpenAI launched its agent product last week. Agents in the future can take over discovery, transactions, and even supply workflows, undermining the network effects that made marketplaces defensible, leading to product/market fit collapse and completely changing how you need to think about your acquisition costs. Here’s how these agents will potentially work and the five moves founders should make to stay ahead.The Traditional Purchase FunnelA lot of unfulfilled exc...

Effective M&A Strategies for Marketplace Growth

I'm here to share some insights on using mergers and acquisitions as a strategy to grow marketplaces. This is particularly relevant to me as a couple companies I angel invested in have recently merged with other companies. This process, however, must be approached with caution to ensure it is productive and not merely a drain on resources or worse, value destructive.First, it's essential to understand the principal motivations for engaging in M&A. Generally, there are three main reasons. One, to...

Clouded Judgement 2.20.26 - The SSD / Memory Reckoning

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date!Subscribe nowThe SSD / Memory ReckoningMemory stocks have taken over recently. If the early AI “trade” was compute, the current trade is memory! Over the last year:SK Hynix is up >300%Samsung is up >200%Kioxia is up ~1,000%Sandisk is up >1,200%Micron is up >300%Western Digital is up >400%This is by no means an exhaustive list of memory related stocks, but it should give you a flavor ...

RL and The Era of Experience

I’m Tanay Jaipuria, a partner at Wing and this is a weekly newsletter about the business of the technology industry. To receive Tanay’s Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here for free:Subscribe nowHi friends,Over the last year, we’ve clearly entered a new era where models improve less from static human data and more from real experience. By “experience” I mean these models taking actions in environments, observing outcomes, getting feedback, and then getting better. When you look at what the f...

Two AI Lab IPOs: S-1 Breakdowns

I’m Tanay Jaipuria, a partner at Wing and this is a weekly newsletter about the business of the technology industry. To receive Tanay’s Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here for free:Subscribe nowHi friends,Two Chinese foundation model labs, Zhipu and MiniMax, went public over the past few weeks, with Zhipu becoming the first foundation model company to IPO globally. What stood out to me reading both filings is the different approaches they took to turn their models and capabilities into a re...

AI Agents That Work While You Sleep

I’m Tanay Jaipuria, a partner at Wing and this is a weekly newsletter about the business of the technology industry. To receive Tanay’s Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here for free:Subscribe nowHi friends,Most of us today use AI in a chat box. You type, it replies, everything happens in that one thread. That was the right starting point. It is the wrong place for a lot of the work we are now trying to hand off to agents.Refactoring a codebase, watching the web for changes or building a brie...

The AI Browser Wars Are Here

I’m Tanay Jaipuria, a partner at Wing and this is a weekly newsletter about the business of the technology industry. To receive Tanay’s Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here for free:Subscribe nowHi friends,A lot is happening in AI browser land, so let’s talk about it. Just this past week, Atlassian agreed to buy The Browser Company, the makers of Arc and Dia for $610M in cash and a federal judge declined to force Google to sell Chrome, which keeps the incumbent’s distribution power intact. P...

The Rise of Verticalized AI Coworkers

This is a weekly newsletter about the business of the technology industry. To receive Tanay’s Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here for free:Subscribe nowHi friends,A few months ago, I wrote about the rise of the agentic workforce, focusing on the agentic coworkers popping up across the key functional roles. Today, I’m breaking down the rise of verticalized agentic coworkers. These are AI agentic coworkers built for specific roles within industry verticals.What do verticalized agentic coworke...

Agentic Commerce is Coming: How AI Will Reshape Online Retail

This is a weekly newsletter about the business of the technology industry. To receive Tanay’s Newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here for free:Subscribe nowHi friends,Last time, I wrote about how AI agents are accelerating adoption cycles for developer tools and choosing tech stacks. But agents will play a role in the distribution of much more than just software products. They’ll fundamentally change how all commerce is done over time, and today I want to explore that idea: agentic commerce.I’l...

A Plan for Spam

Better Bayesian Filtering

Darwinian Specialization in AI

The inference market is the fastest growing market in the world & it’s splitting up. Each modality is developing its own inference stack. NVIDIA’s data center revenue was flat through 2022. Then ChatGPT launched. Three years later : 17x growth.1 Databases did the same thing. What started as one market fragmented into relational, document, key-value, graph, time series, vector, & others. Each category reflects different workload requirements : real-time transactions vs batch analytics, ACID compl...

GPU Spot Prices Surge 114% in Six Weeks

NVIDIA’s latest GPU rental prices on the Ornn Compute Price Index hit $4.95 per hour this week, up from $2.31 in early March : a 114% surge in six weeks.1 The price spread over prior-generation chips doubled from $0.28 to $1.80 per hour. The new chip is NVIDIA’s B200 (Blackwell); the prior generation is the H200 (Hopper). The B200 spot market since launch, with model release dates marked. The GPU market is becoming lucid - even if the fog hasn’t lifted. 1. Frontier model releases correlate with ...