Ben Thompson

“He described the LLMs as the most scaled artifacts humans have ever developed”

“Merlin Mann — Creator of 43folders website and productivity commentator. Cited as Thompson's introduction to GTD, and as a cautionary tale about the gap between systems and execution.”

“Biological evolution is the slowest and most permanent form of learning, but it takes millennia; oral communication is like a context window, effective but lossy; actually writing things down is what made learning extendable and scalable.”

“Once it clicks that you can make anything, you want to make everything... The answer was simple: create an agent that wrote things down... I had the agent create a status board that neatly categorized everything.”

“one I pressed OpenAI President Greg Brockman about in a Stratechery Interview.”

“The expected value for a hacker's automated attack is always positive. If the offensive agent finds a vulnerability and creates an exploit, and that exploit fails or is itself buggy, then nothing has changed about the status quo... The attack only needs to work once for the entire endeavor to have a positive payoff.”

“Right now defenders are effectively banned from using Fable or Sol for cybersecurity because of Trump administration directives; that means the best alternative is using models from a country which has been trying to weaken our cyber defenses for years. This is insane!”

“Ben Thompson of Stratechery had a similar idea today — basically, how do we find a way to make distillation acceptable in any number of ways.”

“Moonshot was forced to pause taking on new subscriptions late on Sunday to manage overwhelming demand.”

“We are rapidly approaching a state in which intelligence for many economically beneficial tasks is in fact a commodity.”

“Participants: Ben Thompson”

“A dedicated Stratechery video titled 'The Google Capital Company' signals a framing shift — Google's deal to buy compute from SpaceX and Broadcom's earnings are both read as bullish signals for Nvidia.”

“Anthropic released...a set of very visible guardrails on cybersecurity and biology topics, and silent nerfing around LLM creation capabilities. The latter decision was reversed on Thursday after public outcry.”

“Episode titles: "A Working Siri" and "WWDC Follow-Up."”

“An interview with Ben Bajarin about WWDC and the status of the AI compute industry.”

“Siri isn't state of the art, but as long as it works — and it appears it does — it's good enough for the consumer market.”

“consumers don't want to work. There's not a big market for consumers in their non-working life to do a whole bunch of complex research or kind of using AI for productivity. They just want delightful experiences because they want to relax and attain.”

“Apple Intelligence will know more about you than any other AI, because your phone knows more about you than any other device...Apple is addressing a space that is very useful, that only they can address, and which also happens to be 'safe' in terms of reputation risk.”

“OpenAI failed to capitalize on their consumer market penetration by refusing to build an advertising product.”

“Agents help you do work and be more productive, and consumers don't want to work or care about being productive.”

“OpenAI is betting that this compute constraint — and the deals they have made to overcome it — will matter more than Anthropic's current momentum with end users… I'm less certain that this will be dispositive.”

“Perhaps the primary utility is as a signaling mechanism. On Google's side, the signal is that the expected demand is actually far greater than anyone thinks, and that the company is ready and willing to fund supply using all means at its disposal, including equity.”

“What if the ultimate battle — the one that determines who gets compute — becomes a matter of who can bring the most cash to bear? And what if that advantage compounds, such that the company with the most cash capacity ends up with the most compute capacity... driving the ability to generate more cash?”

“There isn't a financial model that justifies the SpaceX IPO, but data centers in space are plausible, and that might be enough.”

“I think digital ads, particularly Meta-style ads that introduce you to things you never knew you wanted, [are] a societal good.”

“An Interview with Eric Seufert about building models for generative AI, why Meta's foundational models are so important, and why understanding advertising leads to optimism about humanity's future.”

“Agentic inference will be the largest market by far, because that is the market that won't be limited by humans or time...the market size scales not with humans but with compute.”

“Google is now a nearly $5 trillion company and its transformer architecture supercharged the AI era... for all of Google's faults and misses, they do in fact have plenty of historic hits.”

“AI, however, depends on data centers in the physical world, and building data centers needs permission. This gives normal people the sort of veto power over AI they didn't have in the face of globalization.”

“When Ben highlights a DeepMind approach to building AGI that's distinct from the approaches at OpenAI and Anthropic, I'm compelled to both pay attention, and remember: for all of Google's faults and misses, they do in fact have plenty of historic hits.”

“Bill Bishop... Co-hosts Sharp China; covered US-China stability dynamics and Trump's Taiwan comments... Referenced in episode: 'Constructing US-China Stability; Trump's Taiwan Comments and More Summit Takeaways.'”

“John Gruber... Co-hosts Dithering with Ben Thompson; discussed data center unpopularity and Google... Referenced via episode titles 'Data Center Unpopularity' and 'Google Being Google.'”

“This week's Stratechery video is on [The Inference Shift](https://stratechery.com/2026/the-inference-shift/).”

“Very different trade-offs in architectures...good news for both China and space (but maybe not Nvidia).”

“I find the case both boring and insulting...even as it's clear that win or lose, Elon has already succeeded.”

“The Anthropic xAI deal is shocking but not surprising: Musk should double down on serving other companies.”

“OpenAI is forming a new company to deploy AI, and the other labs aren't far behind, reinforcing the thesis that AI's impact will require top-down implementation.”

“AI compute has been divided into two categories: training, and inference. However...there are two kinds of inference: the one we know today is 'answer inference', where humans are in the loop, and speed matters; the inference that will matter most in the future, at least in terms of market size, will be 'agentic inference', where humans aren't involved at all.”

“The first inflection point was the emergence of LLMs — call this the ChatGPT moment… The second inflection point was the emergence of reasoning models — call this the o1 moment… The third inflection point was the emergence of functional agents — call this the Opus 4.5 moment…”

“Amazon, more than any other company, actually operates with decade-long timeframes, consistently making real-world investments at massive scale that (1) convert their marginal costs into capital costs and (2) gain leverage on those capital costs by selling them to other businesses.”

“Episodes: 'Meta Ray-Ban Display' and 'OpenAI, Musk & Microsoft'”

“Ben's Daily Update on Monday traced his experience with the Meta Display glasses and culminated with an epiphany on what the future of AR should look like.”

“I finally tried the Meta Ray-Ban Display, and it completely changed how I think about AR and VR.”

“The Mac...is poised to massively expand its market share as Apple Silicon...makes the Mac the computer of choice for both the high end...and the low end (the iPhone chip-based MacBook Neo significantly expands Apple's addressable market).”

“Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things — going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.”