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There Will Come a Time When All of This Seems Small
SpaceX hit $3 trillion this week. Let that sit for a moment. Not the number itself — numbers like that are hard to actually feel. But the context around it. Four days ago, SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, raising $75 billion in the largest public offering ever recorded. By Tuesday it was touching $225. The market cap crossed $3 trillion before the ink on the prospectus was dry. Anthony Pompliano put it simply: Elon Musk made more money in the last 24 hours than Warren B

Rich Washburn
15 hours ago5 min read


The Token Is Not the Point
Three companies went public in the span of two weeks. SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO on record. Anthropic filed confidentially, coming off a valuation that touched $965 billion. OpenAI followed days later, targeting somewhere north of $1.75 trillion. None of this changed the models. None of it moved a data center. The infrastructure is where it was. The research is where it was. But something did shift — and it's worth being precise about what. When a private co

Rich Washburn
2 days ago5 min read


We Already Knew This Would Happen
Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman dropped on June 1st. Eighty-three pages. First state in America to do it. The AG named the CEO personally, held a press conference in West Palm Beach, and said he expects other states to follow. He's right. They will. But here's the thing: none of this should surprise anyone. We have seen this movie. We have seen exactly this movie, with different actors, and we watched it play out over a decade — the internal documents, the sup

Rich Washburn
Jun 37 min read


Alpha Raccoon Had a 22-for-23 Record. That Was the Confession.
Michele Spagnuolo is 36, Italian, lives in Switzerland, and works on Google's security team. That is, as someone noted online, an excellent dating profile. It is also, as it turns out, the beginning of a federal rap sheet. In late 2024, Spagnuolo allegedly logged into an internal Google tool — one available to all 180,000 employees — that tracked what people all over the world were searching for in real time. He wanted to know who would top Google's annual Year in Search rank

Rich Washburn
Jun 35 min read


The Gravity Is in the Ground
There's a pattern running underneath three separate AI headlines from the last 90 days, and if you're only reading them as individual stories, you're missing the one thing they all agree on. Anthropic took operational control of Colossus 1 — xAI's 300-megawatt Memphis supercomputer complex, 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs — through a deal reportedly running $1.25 billion per month through May 2029. The same week, they doubled Claude Code's session limits and removed peak-hour throttling.

Rich Washburn
Jun 15 min read


The Three-Way Mexican Standoff That Nobody Wins — Except the Builder
There's a tension running through every product team in Silicon Valley right now, and it goes something like this: The engineer thinks they don't need the product manager anymore. AI can do product thinking. The product manager thinks they don't need the engineer anymore. AI can write the code. The designer thinks they don't need either of them. AI can generate both specs and interfaces. And here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody in this standoff wants to say out loud: Th

Rich Washburn
May 314 min read


The Last 300 Days of Work — Or the First 300 Days of Something Harder to Name
A quote is making its rounds. Kevin Roose — New York Times tech columnist, Hard Fork co-host, author of multiple books on AI — posted this on May 29th: "Overheard at an AI lab: 'How are you spending the last 300 days of work?'" That's it. No attribution. No lab named. No context beyond the quote itself. And yet it detonated. 487,000 impressions. Hundreds of replies. A full weekend of debate across tech Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Which tells you something important — not a

Rich Washburn
May 315 min read


The Unemployment Number Is Lying to You
Andrew Yang went on camera recently and said what a lot of people in this industry have been saying quietly for months: hundreds of thousands of white-collar jobs are going away in the next twelve to twenty-four months. He cited Verizon's 13,000 cuts, Amazon's 16,000, Accenture's waves of reductions. He said he'd spoken to a senior Fortune 500 executive sitting on thousands of layoffs that haven't gone public yet. His debate opponent pushed back with the standard rejoinder: u

Rich Washburn
May 275 min read


AI-NATIVE OPERATIONAL THEORY: A Field Manual for Operating in the Age of Synthetic Cognition
Full Audio (approx 2 hrs) Introduction A while back I ran a thought experiment. It started with a chip lab in Belgium — Imec, one of the most secretive semiconductor research facilities on earth — and a question that sounds simple until you sit with it: what happens when Moore's Law actually hits the wall? For fifty years, Moore's Law was the metronome of the entire technology industry. Transistors doubled every two years. Processing got faster, cheaper, smaller, on a schedul

Rich Washburn
May 2468 min read


The Ant Hill Learned to Think
Six months ago I called the open source AI explosion a TCP/IP moment. I got some of it right. I got some of it wrong. And what I missed entirely is the part that actually matters.

Rich Washburn
May 245 min read


May 2027: What I Think We're Walking Into
I'm writing this to be read a year from now. Six predictions, grounded in what's actually happening today. The device. The agents. Physical AI. Quantum. Governance. And the one nobody sees coming. Hold me to it.

Rich Washburn
May 226 min read


The Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Confession
There are two deals this week that every executive, investor, and technologist needs to understand. Not because of the dollar amounts — though the dollar amounts are staggering — but because of what they reveal about where AI actually lives. Hint: it's not in the model. It's in the infrastructure. Deal One. Apple is paying Google approximately $1 billion per year to license a custom 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini model to power the next generation of Siri and Apple Intelligenc

Rich Washburn
May 214 min read


Most of the World Has Never Touched AI. That Sounds Crazy to Me.
Somewhere around 84% of the world's population has never used an AI tool. Not once. And that is the real story — but I have to be honest with you, it also just sounds crazy to me. Like, genuinely. We have access to something that can think alongside us, that can help us navigate the most complicated moments of our lives, that can make us smarter and faster and more capable at almost anything we put in front of it — and most people have just... not tried it. I don't say that t

Rich Washburn
May 195 min read


The Dead Zone Deal: What the AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon JV Actually Means
Three days ago, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon announced something that doesn't happen often: they agreed to work together. The joint venture — still subject to final paperwork — is designed to end wireless dead zones in the United States. The mechanism is direct-to-device satellite connectivity, pooling spectrum resources across all three carriers into a unified platform that satellite providers can plug into. The stated goal is to nearly eliminate coverage gaps in areas curren

Rich Washburn
May 185 min read


The Money Move: Why AI Just Declared War on Finance
Coding was the opening act. Everyone saw it happening in real time — the benchmarks shifted, the startups multiplied, the tools proliferated, and within about 18 months the entire software engineering profession had to reckon with a permanent change to its operating model. The people who paid attention early got leverage. The people who ignored it got disrupted. The same playbook just started running again. Same labs. Same signals. Different industry. The target is finance. H

Rich Washburn
May 166 min read


90 Days of ARIA: What Treating Content Like Infrastructure Actually Does to Your Business
I want to show you what 90 days of consistent execution actually looks like. Not a course. Not a strategy deck. Not a pitch. Real numbers from my real businesses — and a clear explanation of exactly how the system behind them works. Where This Started About three years ago I wrote a post called Advanced Prompting: My Growing Staff for the Modern Era. It was an early sketch of what I was building — AI personas functioning as specialized staff across different domains. Jordan t

Rich Washburn
May 165 min read


The Most Expensive Plane Ride in History Just Landed in Beijing
President Trump landed in Beijing today for the first visit by a sitting US president to China in nearly a decade. Walking down the steps of Air Force One beside him: Elon Musk. Jensen Huang. Tim Cook. Larry Fink. And twelve more CEOs representing the full weight of American industry — semiconductors, finance, defense, agriculture, energy, and consumer tech — all in one place, at one moment, for one conversation. A brass band played on the tarmac. Flag wavers lined the runway

Rich Washburn
May 134 min read


This Tweet Just Wiped Out $500 Billion
Not a market crash. Not an earnings miss. Not a Fed announcement. A warning page update from a private AI company — and a tokenized pre-stock market lost 27% in hours, with implied valuations evaporating so fast the math stopped making sense. Welcome to the new pre-IPO secondary market. Where retail investors buy shares that don't exist, in companies that never authorized the sale, through structures that a corporate lawyer could void on a Tuesday afternoon. What Anthropic Ac

Rich Washburn
May 124 min read


The GPU Market Is Sending a Signal Nobody's Talking About
The headlines say GPU prices are dropping. That's true, but it's also the least interesting part of what's happening right now. What's actually happening is a market sending distress signals that have nothing to do with consumer generosity — and everything to do with inventory fear, demand collapse, and a quiet technological arms race that most people haven't noticed yet. Pay attention to all three at once, because they're connected. Signal One: The Price Drops Aren't a Sale.

Rich Washburn
May 124 min read


The Angstrom Era: Why the Physics of Chips Is Rewriting the Rules of AI Infrastructure
We've left the nanometer era. What comes next changes everything about how AI gets built — and who controls it. I've been watching the semiconductor industry from the infrastructure and AI strategy side for a long time. And what TSMC just announced — the A14, A13, and A12 process nodes — sounds like another incremental press release until you understand what the "A" actually stands for. Angstrom. One tenth of a nanometer. We are now building transistors at a scale where indiv

Rich Washburn
May 115 min read
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