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Articles

Research and reporting on tech, AI, early-stage investing and the startup ecosystem.

101 articles

  • 7 min read

    Why Tech Cares About the Bond Market

    The 10-year Treasury is back around 5%, making the cost of capital impossible to ignore. Higher yields raise the hurdle rate for everything from venture capital to AI infrastructure, even as strong growth and massive investment help keep those yields elevated. The result is a strange cycle where the forces driving the tech boom may also be making it harder to finance.

  • 8 min read

    Pacing the Frontier

    A researcher walks out of Anthropic. Dario Amodei publishes an essay about slowing down. Altman and Musk agree. David Sacks does not buy the altruism. Somewhere underneath the posts is a quieter argument about whether superintelligent agents belong on the public internet at all.

  • Markets & Strategy5 min read

    Oura’s IPO and the Business of Wearables

    Oura’s S-1 makes a strong case that wearables are becoming much more than hardware businesses. The ring gets customers in the door, but the value is really in subscriptions, years of health data, and the software that turns that data into something useful. Four months after our Fitbit piece, Oura looks like a much stronger counterexample to the idea that standalone wearable companies cannot compete with Apple and Google.

  • AI & Models8 min read

    Why AI Needs Open Models

    Open-source AI gives startups, developers and businesses an alternative to relying entirely on a small group of closed model providers. Restricting access to open models could reduce competition, increase costs and limit how companies build and deploy AI, while doing little to stop the technology from advancing elsewhere. That matters even more as the model itself becomes just one component of a larger system that increasingly determines how useful an AI product actually is.

  • 15 min read

    The Situational Awareness Blow-Up

    What a $16 Billion Fire Sale Did and Did Not Prove About AI Equities. Prices and filings current as of the close on Friday, August 14, 2026.

  • Markets & Strategy6 min read

    Airtable Didn't Fail

    Airtable’s acquisition by Bending Spoons looks like a major step down from its 2021 valuation, but that misses much of the story. The company still built a product used by hundreds of thousands of organizations, reached nearly half a billion dollars in recurring revenue and generated exceptional returns for early investors. The bigger lesson is what happens when a great company is priced as if it needs to become a generational one.

  • 8 min read

    A New Ventures Edge

    How we turned Ventures Edge from a rented Squarespace site into a custom publication with its own code, visual language, and point of view.

  • The Kimi logo — a rounded black tile holding a white K with a blue dot, beside the KIMI wordmark in white.
    AI & Models4 min read

    Kimi K3

    DeepSeek showed that frontier-level intelligence could be built and served far more efficiently than the market expected. Kimi K3 takes that disruption further by combining competitive performance with open weights, giving developers and enterprises more control over how models are hosted, customized and deployed. The right response is not to restrict access, but to build stronger open alternatives and compete in a model market that is becoming cheaper, more open and far less defensible.

  • AI 2040
    AI & Models7 min read

    AI 2040

    "AI 2040: Plan A" proposes a radical blueprint to prevent a reckless global race to superintelligence through full research transparency and enforceable U.S.–China cooperation. By pausing AI capability growth at human-expert levels until 2040 using "mutually assured compute destruction," the plan ai

  • China May Be Ending the Open-Model Era
    AI & Models4 min read

    China May Be Ending the Open-Model Era

    For years, China’s leading AI labs used open-weight models to catch up with their American rivals. Now that some of those models are approaching the frontier, Beijing may be reconsidering whether the rest of the world should have access at all. The next phase of the AI race may be shaped not just by

  • A Better Way to Decide Which AI Model to Use
    AI & Models11 min read

    A Better Way to Decide Which AI Model to Use

    The best AI model is no longer simply the smartest one. As providers flood the market with frontier, mini, flash, reasoning, coding, long-context, closed, and open-weight models, the real question is how much useful intelligence each model delivers relative to cost, latency, compute, context, and op

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