Om Malik

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

Software Eats Its Own

Another day another deal which makes you question the meaning of money itself. SpaceX said this morning it has an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay the coding startup $10 billion for the work they are already doing together, Elon Musk said on his bully pulpit. Chasing the “code” opportunity has been top priority inside xAI, so this adds up.

SpaceX isn’t alone.

Over at Google, Sergey Brin has come out of semi-retirement to personally drive a DeepMind “strike team” whose job is to catch Anthropic in coding. (He wants Gemini to start writing Gemini. Recursive, that.) OpenAI just rolled out a Codex revamp last week with desktop control, memory, and multi-agent workflows aimed at the same target.

And they are all coming to the same conclusion because they are looking at Anthropic with lustful jealousy.

Anthropic says Claude Code is now growing revenues

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John Appleseed

Tim totally cooked as the seventh CEO of Apple. But effective September 1, the hot seat belongs to John Ternus, the company’s eighth chief executive. Also, a great day for being a John at Apple. Johny Srouji moves up to chief hardware officer at the same time. Two solid moves for a company that still makes great hardware.

The challenge for Apple is still software, an increasingly cluttered interface across multiple hardware devices and platforms, and a distinct lack of clarity about what role AI will (or will not) play in its future. Ternus’s other task will be to repair an incredibly fragile relationship with developers, who have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Cupertino.

His ascension to the top is no surprise. He has been the heir apparent for a while, way more noticeable at every product launch. This handover is typical meticulous planning by Cook, who knows how

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What to Read This Weekend

I am sending this out a day early as I have a new mystery book I want to finish this weekend, uninterrupted. Priorities, people!

Also, I have decided that this weekend’s reading list has to be decidedly less technology. I mean, we get enough of it already. There is a lot of great non-tech writing these days, and it is worth highlighting. Plus you can get your heart’s fill of “AI” writing from me.

What to Read This Weekend

Corruption, Crime & Cricket Canada | CBC / The Fifth Estate

A months-long Fifth Estate investigation has found that a violent criminal group have been threatening cricket players in British Columbia to influence team selection all the way up to the national squad. This is scary and sobering. Great investigation, regardless whether you love, understand or care about cricket.

3D-Printed Homes, an Abandoned $590,000 Deposit, the FBI | ProPublica

Two men

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Wishes for Ron Conway

Ron Conway, the longtime Silicon Valley investor and founder of SV Angel, announced on X that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Conway declined to disclose the specific type of cancer, saying he does not want speculation about his prognosis. Ron is optimistic and said that the treatment will run about a year. He is being treated by a team at UCSF in San Francisco. Conway said that while he is stepping back from some activities, he will continue working with SV Angel founders.

Ron is affectionately known as the godfather of Silicon Valley, and not just for his investments in startups. He is one of the most politically, socially, and intellectually connected people in the valley. He was one of the key people who helped avert the disaster that came with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse a few years ago.

I have known Ron since

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Eat Your Words

The New Yorker articulated something that has been on my mind for a long time. AI’s self-inflicted messaging crisis. This is as clear an example of my long standing argument that words have consequences.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetoric around artificial intelligence, days after a Molotov cocktail hit the gate of his San Francisco mansion and bullets were fired at his home. He is certainly the most high-profile of targets, but there have been others who have earned the ire of those who are threatened by AI and the rhetoric around it.

The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka says that Altman is at fault himself. After all he did say that AI would “most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies created.” You cannot spend years telling people your product is an existential threat and then ask them

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Newbird.AI! Or Loony.AI

Every speculative era has its favorite suffix. In the 1960s it was “tronics.” In the 1990s it was “dot-com.” Today, of course, it is “AI.” Nothing typifies a crazy, gambling, speculative degenerate economy like our present moment than what happened to Allbirds today.

The San Francisco maker of wool sneakers, once valued at more than $4 billion, sold its brand and intellectual property last month to brand management company American Exchange Group for $39 million. The stock had fallen more than 99 percent since its 2021 Nasdaq IPO. And then it decided to pivot to AI compute infrastructure, with a new name: NewBird AI.

An unknown investor did a $50 million convertible. Every filing and press release describes the counterparty only as “an institutional investor.” Maybe we will find it in the proxy statement, due before the May 18 shareholder vote. The press release itself reads like the white papers

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Human Error is OK! Machine Madness is a No-No! Why?

We forgive human error as if it were weather. We treat machine error as if it were heresy. That thought has kept nagging at me as I read about three recent technology screw-ups. Anthropic exposed unreleased files. Anthropic then shipped 512,000 lines of internal code, roadmap and all, to the public npm registry. Axios got hit through a compromised maintainer account. Different incidents, same explanation. Human error.

And that left me with a question. Why are we able to absorb big technology failures when they are blamed on people, but respond so differently when the failures come from machines?

I mean, we fret a lot about AI error. There is a whole cottage industry around AI errors. Debates rage about the risks of machines making decisions, writing code, and running autonomously. No one can deny the gravity of the issues and their wide-ranging consequences. Certainly not me. That said, the

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What To Read This Weekend,

It was a week of mostly quiet work, that involved focusing on some personal matters, whether it was paperwork (tax day is approaching) or some annual medical check ups, like keeping tabs on my vision. Life was mundane. And that was reflected in my writing this week as well. Just a solitary essay and two short notes. Even my reading was sporadic and intermittent.

Here are a few articles that I did read, and thought were worth sharing. Hope you get to enjoy them this weekend.

The Biggest Scandal in Chess — Vanity Fair

I am looking forward to Ben Mezrich’s new book, Checkmate. Vanity Fair’s excerpt about the time 19-year-old Hans Niemann beats Magnus Carlsen in 2022 has me waiting in anticipation. Chess is brutal. (There is a documentary on Magnus on TubiTV and PlutoTV, if you want to watch something.)

Leave Big Tech Behind — The Guardian

It

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Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse

First Banksy and then Satoshi. Something about their unmasking is not sitting right with me. I am bothered by it. I am annoyed by it. And even more annoyed with myself because as a former journalist I should understand, but I don’t. I am referring to Reuters’s meticulous investigation and unmasking of Banksy, and John Carreyrou’s in-depth report labeling Adam Back as Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin.

Both investigations are technically impressive. Both raised the same question I keep turning over: what exactly was accomplished here, and for whom?

The journalist gets a career-defining scoop. The subject loses something they can never recover. Anonymity, once broken, doesn’t come back. There’s no correction that restores it.

What if Carreyrou is overreaching? We have seen what it means to be a big player in crypto. It comes with personal risks. What is gained by the unmasking of Satoshi? The cryptocurrency ecosystem has

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My Essays, Technology
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