Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

Taking a Few Days Off

I am taking a few days off. No posts here, no newsletter, no notes from the road. Things will be quiet on om.co until I am back.

The last few months have been heavy on output. Essays, the newsletter with Fred, the long pieces on OpenAI and AI infrastructure, the photo work, the pen notes. It adds up. My brain needs a break. I need some exercise as well.

I will not be checking email. I will not be reading Feedbin. I will not be drafting in my head. Time to read some fiction. Mysteries, to be precise.

If you have written to me recently and I have not replied, I will get to it when I am back.

I will see you in a few days.

Be well.

Musings, Notes, Technology
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The Myth, the Mythos and the Man

For a while I have been wondering why Anthropic named its most powerful AI model Mythos. A safety company. A company whose entire justification for existing is that someone needs to tell the truth about what is being built. That company chose a name that, in the oldest sense of the word, means a story you receive rather than verify.

Mythos comes from ancient Greek. At its most basic, µῦθος meant “word” or “story.” Specifically the kind of story that carries meaning beyond the literal. Not a lie. Not a fable. Not history. A mythos was an account that explained how things are by narrating how they came to be. The origins of fire. The birth of the gods. The founding of cities.

The Greeks set mythos against logos. Reasoned argument, evidence, systematic explanation. The two were not opposites so much as complements. Logos tells you how something works. Mythos

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Technology
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Silicon Valley’s Biggest Payday. Yet!

The SpaceX cap table, what it is worth, and what happens next.

On June 12, a great many people become extraordinarily wealthy. Not one of them can sell a share until December — with one exception: up to five percent of the IPO shares are reserved for employees and executive-selected participants at the $135 offering price, with no lock-up. They can sell on day one.

This is the second piece in a series on the SpaceX IPO. Part one looked at Starlink, the cash engine behind the offering. .

What the latest S-1 reveals

The 555,555,555 shares being sold on listing day are new shares, issued by SpaceX. The $74.4 billion in proceeds goes to the company. No existing shareholder is selling anything. The full cap table is locked up for 180 days after listing.

Here is what it looks like at $135 per share.

The ownership table

Investor Est.

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Technology
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AI models are having their iPhone moment. What’s Next?

Lately there has been a lot of talk of how the foundational models are quickly becoming like every other iPhone release. They are ho-hum, till the next one comes around. But it is not the right analogy. I have a more boring, and more accurate, analogy that will explain the growth so far, and how it will evolve.

I have been fortunate enough to have been involved with the last five cycles of technology. As a result, I have been able to see patterns in the history of technology. It doesn’t matter what the technology is – we go from shock and awe to ho-hum, go-to-work. A technology eventually becomes invisible to us.

Remember when broadband came around? That was in the late 1990s, and it was magical. I had a DSL connection in my East Village apartment. By 2020 I was part of the gigabit society. Speed had faded

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Technology
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Clothes Are Nice. Fashion Biz, Not As Much!

Every morning I sit down and open Feedbin on my iPad. It aggregates my RSS feeds and newsletters – about a hundred sources – covering everything from AI to zeitgeist. One story stopped me recently. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed: “Menswear Is in Its ‘Nice’ Era.”

This comment from a personal stylist sent me down a rabbit hole about clothes, social media, and how the gatekeepers still don’t understand their own growing irrelevance:

“The clothes are inoffensive, but there’s no point of view. The downside isn’t bad taste, but the erosion of individuality.” – Turner Allen, personal stylist, New York

Menswear today is neutral tones, muted basics, everything well-cut and normal. Or as they say, nice. The Business of Fashion recently called this an epidemic. Everyone in the industry has an opinion about it. What almost nobody has is an explanation for why. The fashion media is smart enough to

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Musings, My Essays, Technology
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Truth is Fiction or is it?

Masayuki Amagai, Vice President of Keio University:

In this age of excess, truth and fiction are intermingled. Truth tends to be complex and challenging to grasp, while fiction is often simple and easy to understand. Moreover, truth can be painful, whereas fiction is comforting. Communicating truth requires significant effort and resources, while fiction can be created effortlessly inside a single person’s mind, at little to no cost. As a result, fiction spreads far more easily. And what drives this dissemination is no longer people, but AI-powered algorithms. These algorithms are developing at an extraordinary speed, making it increasingly difficult to predict their impact on humanity.

Via

Notes
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Anthropic, AI and The “Numbers” Problem

About a week ago I got a ping. Someone wanted to know if I knew someone who wanted $10 million of Anthropic common stock as a forward contract at $1 trillion. My first reaction was that we are so deep in a bubble that when we look up, all we see are sparkling, endless orbital data centers.

If you look beyond the bubble argument, you start to realize all the numbers — including what Anthropic has itself revealed — are so large and so ridiculous that you cannot tell whether anything is real. Unless we get to the SEC filing for an Anthropic IPO, buying common or contracts at $1 trillion today is buying the press release, not the financials.

Or you are believing that professional investors pumping money into Anthropic are doing their due diligence. My experience says they are not. There is nothing more dangerous than an investor

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Technology
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The Copy and the Guru

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” Aaron Levie, CEO, Box

About two months into first encountering ChatGPT, I decided it was time to create a digital version of “me.” Not me, but all my writing and all the work I had done. My dream was that I would train the AI, and then readers could come and ask for my opinion on new tech, trends. Everything except the writing itself could be on demand, highly personalized. I would keep feeding it my opinions on new developments, interviews I would do, and essentially create an ongoing conversation with OmBot.

Good idea in theory, but I couldn’t make it work until the emergence of OpenClaw, when a friend helped set me up on a Mac Mini. It has become very

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Technology
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We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World

I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.

In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time. It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it

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My Essays, Om Loves Pens, Technology
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