capital-allocation
The Picks, the Shovels, and the Mine
Anthropic bought the dev tools startup that OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare were already paying for. Read that sentence again. The company selling you the model now owns the workbench you use to build with everyone else’s model too. That is not vertical integration in the gentle sense. It is a frontier lab quietly making rent…
Everyone Wants the Layer Below
Apple has begun applying an old App Store rule to a new species of software: the thin client wrapped around a frontier model, the “wrapper” in the dismissive shorthand the industry has adopted. The rule itself is unremarkable. The application of it is the news, because it forces a question nobody in this business has…