Om Malik

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

What to Read This Weekend

I have been missing in action for a couple of weeks. I apologize for my tardiness, but I have been busy with personal matters. Both my heart and mind were not in it. Anyway, this week I have some great (and fun) pieces that I enjoyed reading in between meetings.

One thing I noted is that both my reading and what I end up finding on the web these days are dominated by AI and everything related to it. I am going to try and make it a point to diversify my own reading and also what I share with you, the gentle readers.

I am working on two short essays, on fashion and one of my favorite writers in the age of AI. Hope you come back next week to read them.

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon — Current Affairs

I used to think I was the only

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Technology
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The Rocket That Runs on Broadband

SpaceX is in the business of rockets — how often they fly and what they do. The rest is imagination. The SpaceX IPO is a masterpiece of financial engineering. The prospectus is a perfect blend of reality, sci-fi, and skullduggery. I dug into the freshly filed 300-page IPO prospectus of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to find out how much imagination is required.

SpaceX is seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion, the largest IPO in American history, larger than anything Wall Street has previously been asked to absorb. In inflation-adjusted terms, SpaceX alone would rank second in history, just behind Saudi Aramco. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic together would raise more money than the entire dot-com bubble from 1995 to 2000.

Financial analyst Paul Kedrosky has a warning about where the money comes from. Most of that money will come from existing holdings. Passive funds will be forced buyers the moment these

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Technology
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Snowcaps

I love my snowcaps, in landscape photos and pens. I have been using Montblanc pens for a long time, about three decades now. Slowly the numbers have piled up. The newest pens have a sharper, more stylized white six-pointed star with rounded edges, representing the snow-covered peak of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. The shape is intended to depict the mountain viewed from above.

The vintage pens, of which I own many, don’t have as sharp a star, perhaps an homage to more snow cover on the peak. The logo first appeared in 1913. The number “4810” is often engraved on Montblanc nibs.

For me, nothing quite like the vintage pens, and nibs. The flex, the soft nibs, and the delicate and delicious feeling they bring to my writing.

May 20, 2026

Om Loves Pens
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AI in Everything, Everywhere

After I published AI is the New Netflix, Surj Patel, a former colleague, intellectual sparring partner, and long-time reader, asked a sharp question. Given my argument that AI will drive the next wave of upstream traffic, are we headed toward more of a superscaled peer-to-peer model, away from the hub-and-spoke, client-server architecture that underlies the web? And what technologies or business models does that require?

AI, as we have come to know it, will seep into everything the way cloud and mobile did. It has to, because we are incapable of processing the machine-scale information, data, and processes of the post-digital world at a human scale.

The client-server model was built for human-scale consumption. A person makes a request. A server answers. The session ends. That worked for so long. But now it doesn’t. Everything is always on, and needs to be in touch with other devices, software, storage and

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Notes
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AI is the New Netflix

At my 2008 NewTeeVee conference, I asked Reed Hastings, then CEO of Netflix, whether streaming video would become the first killer app of broadband. It seemed obvious: video would consume capacity. And eventually it did. Streaming became the thing that made people care about downstream speed, drove the upgrade cycle, and reshaped how operators planned capacity. Now I think we’re watching a rerun of the same movie.

AI is becoming the killer app of the next broadband era. Not because of what it downloads, but because of what it uploads.

If you have been following my writing on how broadband traffic is changing (the upload nation piece from March and the Internet of AI piece from earlier this month), you know I have been watching this. The Q1 2026 report adds more weight to it.

Earlier this year, when I wrote about fiber upstream averages crossing 100 GB for the

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Technology
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Signing off in a world of what’s next

Before turning in last night, I saw a video by Pete from Just a Few Acres Farm YouTube channel. I have followed him for a while. Reflecting on his goodbye, I felt a tinge of sadness every time one of my favorite creators signs off.

I have zero interest in being a farmer. But I still watched him. why? Because I like folks who find a new way forward. And today after 6-odd years of being on the YT, he said that was it. He and his wife, both in their 50s, are now going to find a new way of doing things. It is not clear what that means.

“It occurred to both of us that we didn’t need to know,” Larson said. Similar to when he left architecture.

He was an architect, who decided that being in the 9-to-5 grind wasn’t for him. He wanted to do something

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Musings, Technology
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How AI Is Changing the Network(s)

As is always the case, this started with a simple question: Will AI change how networks work? Will it impact the speeds we need at home and on our phones?

My assumption was that AI would accelerate this — personal AI agents querying the cloud all day, your house talking constantly to a model (or models). A lot of this is still wishful thinking.

My attempt to find an answer led me down a whole new path of inquiry, with surprising results. The real action is happening far away from the madding consumer crowds. None of this was surprising, considering I have covered the evolution of the internet and its innards since the early 1990s.

Internet 1.0, Internet 2.0, the cloud, mobile, data and machine learning, and now AI are all part of a continuum that has challenged and scaled the network, helped evolve new technologies, and introduced new ways

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Notes
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Say Hello to the Internet of AI

Every so often, I would notice that our upstream bandwidth consumption was going up. Average upload usage is growing 21.7% year over year, more than twice the rate of downstream growth. The network is finally tilting toward something symmetrical, after thirty years of being optimized to deliver television to couches. Every new piece of data from OpenVault made me wonder how AI would change the consumer internet. And as an old networking nerd, what really occupied my mind was how AI would impact the network itself.

My assumption was that AI would accelerate this. Personal AI agents querying the cloud all day. Smart-home devices streaming sensor data. Wearables, cameras, robots, and eventually cars, every endpoint a continuous source of upload traffic. The next bandwidth hog wouldn’t be Netflix in reverse. It would be your house, talking constantly to a model (or models.)

A lot of this is still wishful thinking.

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My Essays, Technology
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What to read this weekend

First, a short apology. I was unable to send the newsletter last weekend. Life and sniffles got in the way — OM

As has been the case lately, I have been writing a bit too much about AI, and its two most visible examples, Anthropic and OpenAI, either on their own, or as a counterpoint to each other.

OpenAI seems to be making news for all the wrong reasons, while Anthropic is slowly transforming into the boy who cried wolf. Either way, even my online homestead is not an AI-free zone.

This week I tried to explain the crazy spending by Hyperscalers, and how they are actually benefiting from the circular economy of AI. And I dug into the 10-Q of Microsoft to figure out why it was okay to set OpenAI free from its exclusivity clause.

I enjoyed writing about how Apple’s chip design decisions made over half a

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My Reading Picks, Technology
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