Ben Thompson

“I have had the good fortune of becoming friends with Patrick and John Collison”

“Stripe cannot tell me what _not_ to write either”

“ad sales for a one-person business with a small audience was a waste of time”

“one of our most-used and most-beloved pieces of technology”

“John and I bemoaned Apple's exit from home appliances in the 2010s; now the company is back and John doesn't see the point.”

“Ben broke down the implications of both the latest deal, as well as recent deals that mobile carriers (and airlines) have done to avoid reliance on SpaceX.”

“calling consumer agents 'the aggregator of aggregators'”

“Ben Thompson was on TBPN a few days ago talking about how most consumers aren't looking for productivity in their lives. They're looking to spend time, not save time, which I agree with.”

“the number of apps I look at are plummeting”

“Ben Thompson — Author of Stratechery, host of Dithering and Sharp Tech.”

“Ben considers him 'the best profile writer working today.'”

“Slowing model improvement would reduce the overhangs.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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