NYTimes: “There is a puzzling contradiction at the heart of America’s economy. Investors are sinking more and more money into the stock market. Indexes are reaching record highs. But a growing number of American companies are refusing to participate in public markets at all. Over the past 30 years, the number of companies that sell shares on markets such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq has fallen by roughly 50 percent. Fast-growing big-name companies like Anthropic, SpaceX, Databricks and Anduril — companies that in all likelihood would have gone public in the previous decade — are choosing to remain private instead. The impact can be felt in every corner of our economy. The decline of our public markets goes hand in hand with the meteoric rise of private equity, which too often weakens companies and leaves them less committed to their employees, customers, suppliers, lenders and communities. Most everyday investors can no longer buy into some of the country’s fastest-growing businesses. The stock market’s impressive performance, on which so many retirements depend, is growing increasingly tenuous, as its returns rely on an increasingly narrow slice of the economy. Innovation is declining. Economic concentration is increasing.”
WSJ: “Underpinning the boost is artificial intelligence’s voracious consumption of digital storage and rising prices for higher-capacity drives. In its latest financial report, Western Digital said the number of exabytes of storage it shipped—an exabyte is a billion gigabytes—rose to 190, up 32% from a year earlier. Seagate shipped 45% more of its own exabytes in the same period. As long as the AI story stays intact—and most recent signs point to it sustaining for a while—there’s little doubt the trajectory for hard drives will keep rising. There will likely be some lumpiness over the next few years as companies rush to buy hard drives and then spend time filling them up. But AI is different in important ways from other tech transitions that have lifted sales.”
FT: “The way Ukraine is defending itself has undergone an unexpected (and still often unrecognised) shift. Back in 2022, when Russia started its full-scale invasion, Kyiv had to use its existing Soviet-style kit plus Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles. Then came western donations of weaponry like Abrams tanks and Himars (high mobility artillery rocket systems). Next, Ukraine’s army of software engineers started using hobby drones, made by Chinese companies such as DJI, first for surveillance, then attacks and defence. Now they are innovating to dramatically extend drone flight range, increase attack capabilities, “swarm” and avoid electronic jamming by using fibre optic cables, balloons and (most crucially) AI. The Russians are doing the same. And that has transformed the nature of war: a world where cheap drones can destroy ultra-expensive ships and planes changes the power dynamics and economics of combat. “Western systems which were impactful initially are now of very mixed effectiveness,” David Petraeus, a former US army general, told a conference in Kyiv.”
SaaStr: “On one hand, token costs are plummeting. What cost $50 last year might cost $5 next year. The efficiency gains are real and dramatic. On the other hand, we’re finding ways to use 10x, 100x, even 1000x more tokens per use case as we discover what’s actually possible when you throw more and more AI horsepower at complex business problems. As Amjad Masad CEO of Replit noted, we’re in this odd economic moment where we’re simultaneously: driving unit costs down by orders of magnitude, [and] driving usage up by orders of magnitude.”
