There was a time period in recent internet history — call it the era of Big Data, or the platform era — when the large digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix) focused on optimization. The platforms had an immutable comparative advantage over their potential competitors. They had more data, more user ...
There are three big stories that one can tell about the dotcom crash. ...
Last week, on the decaying husk of X.com, a former Disney Channel actor posted a 90-second advertisement for his AI company, 2WAI. The ad centers around “Baby Charlie” interacting with the avatar of his deceased grandmother. ...
I was reading Casey Newton’s latest newsletter last night and got the feeling he had almost landed on a very big point. ...
“The average American,” Zuckerberg says, “has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.” ...
OpenAI’s release GPT5 feels like the end of something. ...
I do not believe it is possible to effectively report on the current AI boom without thinking hard about how tech has become finance, and finance has become an elaborate house of cards. ...
Elon Musk has a go-to move of sorts. I call it sleazy optionality. (1) He makes a dramatic proposal. (2) It is unclear whether he is serious or not. (3) That uncertainty causes a reaction from his counterparty. (4) It is only in the aftermath of their reaction that he decides whether to commit to the proposal or back off. He ...
A line from Ethan Mollick’s most recent newsletter (“Claude Code and What Comes Next”) caught my eye. Mollick tries out Claude Code and sees a step-change in AI capabilities: ...
