On my Om

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends. We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn. To learn more about Om’s life and work, you can visit his About page or read more on Wikipedia. — Om’s Family

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…

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…

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 third piece in a series on the SpaceX IPO. Part one looked at Starlink, the cash engine behind the offering. Part two…

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…

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.…

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…

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.…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Buried on page nine of Microsoft’s 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 is a paragraph worthy of attention. Why? What does it reveal? A lot. For starters, Microsoft now holds approximately 27 percent of OpenAI on an as-converted basis, accounted for under the equity method. The total funding commitment is $13 billion, of which $11.8 billion has been funded as of March 31, 2026. The October 2025 OpenAI recapitalization produced a dilution gain. Microsoft recorded $5.9 billion of net gains…

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.…

Oh boy. Over the past few days, an article has been doing the rounds as a testimonial for the ludicrousness of AI versus human costs. From that piece, one specific quote (originally from another article) has gone viral and is now under scrutiny all over the internet. Fortune, Tom’s Hardware, TechSpot, Futurism, Yahoo Finance. Reddit. Twitter. LinkedIn. The whole AI-and-jobs cycle this week is resting on this one comment. “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the…

After my previous post about why we accept human errors but are harsher on machines, two longtime readers and pillars of the resilience engineering community reached out to point out the error of my ways. Courtney Nash of the Resilience in Software Foundation wrote a long response, pointing to errors in my thinking and framing. John Allspaw, the former CTO of Etsy who also worked at Flickr in the Yahoo years and at Friendster, made the same point in an email to me. Your premise isn’t an…

I have been writing about the growing need for uploads and how they are redefining the broadband landscape — first in We Are Now An Upload (Broadband) Nation and then in a quick follow-up. As a follow-up to those pieces, today I wanted to highlight research from Omdia, which predicts that residential households subscribing to gigabit broadband will nearly double from about one-third in 2025 to 60% by 2030. That is a majority of American homes on gigabit pipes within five years. The implications…

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.…

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”…

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…

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…

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 …

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 …