Recent articles
June 24, 2026
Om Malik, 1966-2026
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 th...
om.co
June 8, 2026
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 newslette...
om.co
June 7, 2026
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 ...
om.co
June 5, 2026
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: ...
om.co
June 2, 2026
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 ana...
om.co
June 1, 2026
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....
om.co
May 31, 2026
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 ...
om.co
May 30, 2026
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 d...
om.co
May 27, 2026
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 mo...
om.co
May 25, 2026
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 mo...
om.co
May 24, 2026
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 g...
om.co
May 21, 2026
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 r...
om.co
May 20, 2026
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 s...
om.co
May 15, 2026
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 w...
om.co
May 13, 2026
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....
om.co
May 12, 2026
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 ...
om.co
May 4, 2026
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...
om.co
May 4, 2026
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...
om.co
May 3, 2026
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...
om.co
May 1, 2026
What Microsoft’s 10-Q Says About OpenAI
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 ...
om.co
May 1, 2026
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. Th...
om.co
April 30, 2026
With AI, Headline isn’t the story
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 ar...
om.co
April 30, 2026
What’s wrong in my thinking about Errors?
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 m...
om.co
April 27, 2026
Gigabit First Nation by 2030
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 fol...
om.co
April 27, 2026
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 week...
om.co
April 22, 2026
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...
om.co
April 20, 2026
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. Jo...
om.co
April 18, 2026
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 deci...
om.co
April 18, 2026
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 canc...
om.co