My work

New presentation: AI eats the world, Spring 2026

Twice a year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. I published the latest edition last week. LINK

Predicting AI job exposure

Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, and you can’t measure work like that anyway. LINK

News

Google’s AI blizzard

Google held its annual ‘IO’ developer event/product launch, and as ever there were hundreds of different announcements. It’s probably worth watching the entire two-hour keynote, but there are two things worth calling out. First, incumbents always try to make the new thing a feature, but sometimes they’re right: Google has a huge number of products and surfaces, and it’s adding AI features to all of them.

But second, Google is pushing all the way to change search from navigation to synthesis and summary. Search results haven’t been the plain vanilla ’10 blue links’ for a long time, as Google created vertical structured products around eg restaurants, but now the search box itself will become dynamic, morphing and changing into new forms and generating its own little widgets and tools. On the other side, you’ll be able to set up your own ‘agents’ that keep track of new results and tell you when things change (though this demo seemed extremely geeky).

For all of this, Google continues to shift emphasis from taking you to a resource made by someone else to generating its own summary or version of the answer, made from everything it’s seen on the web. Google will tell you the answer, based on the averages of everything other people have made. If you search for a ‘how to’, YouTube will take you to the right place in the video (YouTube itself has replaced a lot of web pages for content that doesn’t necessarily need to be video, because content creators can access a network, a recommendation system, and of course, a direct revenue payout). Next year, it might make you a video.

As many people have discussed in the last year or two, this is a pretty direct challenge to the implicit social contract of search: that publishers let Google index their content (and make money from ads on that) and in exchange, Google sends them traffic. Now every publisher is thinking about ‘Google Zero’ - no traffic from search at all. But then, how does the web work? Ironically, this is a function of competition: if Google doesn’t do this, OpenAI will, if this is where the users are going. But I don’t think anyone really knows what this means. KEYNOTE, SEARCH

SpaceX

SpaceX filed for an IPO. You can read the document here, and see this week’s column.  LINK

For reference, a useful paper on the case for AI data centres in space. LINK

Quarterly numbers

Over the last two years, OpenAI and Anthropic have from time to time given numbers for ‘annualised revenue’, which generally takes the previous four weeks and multiplies by 13, though OpenAI gives a number net of payments to its partners and Anthropic has been giving a gross number. Now, as they both (especially OpenAI) get close to filing for an IPO, quarterly numbers are leaking. The WSJ says Anthropic has $4.8bn revenue in Q1 and will hit $10.9bn in Q2, with a small operating loss in Q1 and $559bn operating profit in Q2. (Meanwhile, it’s been widely reported that the annualised revenue number has now hit $45bn.) The Information reports OpenAI had $5.7bn revenue in Q1, with a negative 122% ‘adjusted operating margin’. None of this is GAAP, obviously. These companies are still burning enormous amounts of cash to deliver that revenue, but if you’re thinking that this isn’t really useful, this level of customer spending should wake you up. ANTHROPIC, OPENAI

Tokenmania

The tech industry is in a severe supply/demand crunch, as agentic coding works so well that usage is suddenly massively ahead of available capacity (I touched on this in my new presentation - I think this is temporary and will play out like mobile data). This week, Marc Benioff at Salesforce says he expects to spend $300m on Anthropic tokens this year (though really, who knows?), OpenAI announced an option to buy guaranteed capacity (which is probably a good buy in the short term and a bad buy in the long term), and OpenAI also said it would give $2m of free tokens to every company in the current YC batch (customer acquisition). SALESFORCE, CAPACITY, YCOMBINATOR

Unwinding Manus

Last month, the Chinese government ordered the cancellation of Meta’s acquisition of Manus, but given it has already been completed and the tech and team absorbed, it was hard to know how to comply. Now Bloomberg reports that the three founders are in talks to raise at least $1bn from Chinese investors to buy it LINK

The week in AI

Donald Trump’s AI regulation executive order was suddenly postponed, apparently after a bunch of tech execs grabbed the phone. (Just a thought, but perhaps the US court could try having one of those ‘legislature’ things, where you could elect a bunch of thoughtful and moderate people to spend time working out what laws should be and then passing them, in some kind of coherent, transparent process?) LINK

Bloomberg says that Cursor, the coding company now in a deal with xAI, reached $3bn annualised revenue in late April. LINK

Andrej Karpathy, a leading AI researcher and a prominent independent voice, decided to take a job at Anthropic. LINK

Google and Blackstone are doing a $5bn JV to create an AI neocloud built on Google’s TPU chips. Google wants more volume on TPU production and more developers using them, plus this is a way for Google to serve more AI demand without taking the infrastructure onto its own balance sheet. LINK

Ideas

Outside interests

Data

London and New York public transport use seems to have settled at 70-80% of the pre-pandemic peak, reflecting (mostly) WFH. Fridays are down 40%. LONDON, NYC

AI has resulted in a surge of people representing themselves in court. This is probably all about the balance - how much is this increased access, versus frivolous cases with no cost threshold or legal errors wasting court time or worse? LINK

A third of Walmart operating income now comes from the third party e-commerce marketplace, advertising and membership. LINK

Omeda’s media audience report. LINK

Global entry-level (<$100) smartphone markets are shrinking as the AI capex surge means the OEMs can’t get memory at the right price. LINK

Preview from the Premium edition

SpaceX

First, let’s start with the TAM chart for SpaceX’s S1 filing, because that’s what everyone is looking at, so you need to have seen it too. 

Now let’s talk about what this means. 

Tesla and SpaceX are pretty much the same company. Each of them started from the idea that something people had talked about for decades might actually work now, and then Elon Musk turned that idea into an actual working product and a real company operating that idea at scale. This is really, really hard. 

However, in both cases, it also turned out that while this was amazing, it wasn’t actually an amazing business, but meanwhile, there’s a lot else being promised.