ET: “Menlo Ventures, which first backed Anthropic in 2023 when the company was pre-product and pre-revenue, said a slowdown in frontier model development will not significantly affect foundation model companies or the overall market. Partner Matt Murphy, who led Menlo’s investments in Anthropic, called the slowdown “a bit of a red herring,” saying compute, not intelligence, is the real constraint.”
Michael Magoon: “The average American taxpayer moves from roughly the 20th percentile of the income distribution at ages 18–25 to the 75th percentile at ages 55–64, simply as they move through the normal life cycle.” [via Arnold Kling]
Andrew Chen: “We are seeing a new wave of general purpose consumer-friendly agents, and it’s causing many thousands of AI startups to re-evaluate their place in the market. Some questions: Will these new horizontal players take over completely? Will it be winner take all? Can products that focus vertical use cases survive? The new wave of products – Muse, Town, Instinct, Grokbot, etc – come from taking the power and magic of Openclaw/Hermes but wrapping it in polished, secure, consumer-friendly experience. This is only the beginning, and soon every major tech company will throw their hat in the ring and thousands of startups that have been working on vertical agents in X (travel, shopping, family, work, SMB, etc etc) have big existential questions to answer. The simple case against winner-take-all dynamics: These agents are tools, not networks. They inherently provide a solo experience, and although packaged as chat experiences, they don’t have network effects the way that Whatsapp or phone networks do.”
NYTimes: “Microdramas, sometimes called “verticals,” are TV shows for your phone. They are typically described as soap operas for Gen Z: hypersexual, over the top and — most important — short, with episodes rarely exceeding two minutes in length. The format was born around 2018 in China, where its revenue now exceeds that of the conventional film industry. America is lagging behind, but it is putting in the work…The form is on track to take in $1.5 billion in revenue in the United States by the end of the year.”
BCG newsletter on China’s next five years: “Beijing knows where it wants to go. But the journey won’t be simple. The government aims to lift consumption through wage growth and expanded social benefits in health care, childcare, and eldercare, and by focusing on health, wellness, and leisure services for an aging population. It is also moving against industrial overcapacity, though provincial leaders—judged on local GDP growth and job creation—sometimes continue to add factories. And it’s making choices about which high-value industries to double down on, while opening further to foreign investment and deepening trade and investment ties across the Global South.”
