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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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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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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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What I Learned about Hyperscalers’ AI Spend

The four biggest hyperscalers reported earnings this week. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively told investors they will spend roughly $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. That is nearly double what they spent in 2025. Three of the four raised capex guidance during this week of reporting. Only Amazon held its number, and only because it had already published a $200 billion forecast in February 2026. Some of the bump in capex is coming from rising component prices. Microsoft said roughly $25 billion of its $190 billion 2026 capex is component price inflation.

The rest of us measure inflation by what gas costs at the pump. The hyperscalers measure it in billions of dollars of chip and component price increases.

Psst. Did you know that the visible capex line tells a partial story?

There is a reason no one wants to talk about forward commitments, or about lease obligations

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Memory Is the Machine

It is late April 2026. If you want to get a Mac you want, you cannot go into any Apple Store and pick the Mac you want.

A Mac mini with 64GB of RAM, ordered today, ships in sixteen to eighteen weeks. A Mac Studio with 256GB of RAM ships in four to five months. The 128GB and 256GB Mac Studio configurations are listed as “currently unavailable” on Apple’s online store. Apple removed the 512GB Mac Studio option entirely earlier this year. As of last week, even the base $599 Mac mini is sold out.

Have you wondered why?

The easy answers include a global memory shortage thanks to the AI boom. And that Apple has devices that are good for AI work.

Both are true. And yet, that is not the whole story.

For instance, if you want a maxed-out M5 Max MacBook Pro with 128GB of RAM and

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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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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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‘Astound’ed. Google Flips Its Fiber To PE.

I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility.

Then Google bought it.

That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things it should have no business touching. It launches products without a plan. Its decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition.

I watched the service slowly get worse. More outages, stagnant speeds, the kind of indifference that sets in when a product becomes a line item rather than a mission. Like it was for Charles Barr, founder of WebPass. When Barr was running the show, the speeds went from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. All for less than $50 a month. Eventually the speed went to

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