Labs
OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for a Jony Ive smart speaker. The real product is you.
The device could connect biometric identity, targeted ads, and commerce into a closed loop Anthropic can't touch
// ISSUE-01
April 19, 2026
// The Cover
Labs
Claude's compute crunch
The lab that built the most wanted model did not build the capacity to serve it to the masses
Read the cover story →
// Labs
01
// State
02
// Dry Powder
03
Dry Powder
Silicon Valley's favorite metric is measuring the wrong business
Under standard accounting rules, much of what AI startups book as "recurring revenue" is closer to gross merchandise value — and ought to be reported that way
Dry Powder
Does "Kingmaking" actually work?
Venture's biggest firms are flooding AI categories with capital before product-market fit exists — and the historical precedents aren't encouraging
// Atoms
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// Bits
05
Bits
Alpha School's billion-dollar experiment has never been graded
The AI school charges $75,000, claims students learn twice as fast, and has declined months of requests for independent access
Bits
OpenAI's "once-in-a-decade" browser only got three weeks
ChatGPT Atlas was on 1.7% of corporate Macs within three weeks of launch. Five months later, it still hasn't shipped on a second platform.
// Energy
06
Energy
Bring your own electrons
The hyperscalers have stopped waiting for the grid. The cost of replacing it is being quietly transferred to ratepayers.
Energy
The Iran war is squeezing AI's power supply
Cheap gas was supposed to bridge AI to a nuclear future — the bridge just got a lot more expensive