It has been a week of inference. I started the week writing about OpenClaw and its growing popularity. And I end the week with a recap of Nvidia’s GTC event. A lot has been written about the event, especially about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s big claims of quadrupling his revenues to above a trillion dollars, the question that wasn’t asked, why?

Sure, we can dismiss this as a bluster of a bull-market darling, but in reality, if we believe that AI is going to be the new way of interacting with information (as I do) and will impact all sorts of industries, then you have to give his claim some thought.

As I explain in my breakdown of Nvidia GTC, Jensen’s Trillion Dollar Token Factory, for CrazyStupidTech, his boast makes sense for two reasons. First, this is indeed an inference inflection. What that means is that AI goes from being in the “capex” phase to being in the “opex” phase. That key distinction is why you see Anthropic adding a billion or so in revenue every week or so. And that is why OpenAI is in a tizzy. And that is why Elon Musk has made “coding” a top priority for his Grok.

I am hoping to shift gears next week and write longer essays, eschewing news and daily goings-on. I have a few personal pieces that remain unfinished, including reviews of a new photography geegaw and of course the MacBook Neo.

Till next week. For now, enjoy these lovely articles.

• Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste. Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker on Silicon Valley’s latest borrowed virtue. Silicon Valley is a taste dead zone. I have written about this many times. Now the same people without taste are arguing that because AI levels the playing field, and anyone can build anything, so the only edge left is knowing what’s worth building. That’s “taste.” Don’t look for it in these parts. Chayka makes my point without me losing my hair. [New Yorker]
• We Have Learned Nothing. Jerry Neumann is my favorite venture capital and startup writer. None better. In his latest piece he makes a point to remind us that the whole edifice of the science of entrepreneurship is just that, an edifice. So, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, think different. And do different from whatever the current advice says. [Colossus]
• In Search of Banksy. Reuters spent a year using what they call a “reverse forensic” approach to unmask the world’s most famous anonymous artist. Wow. What a great story. I mean, make this a documentary. The journalism is meticulous. [Reuters]
• Russia’s Self-Inflicted Communication Crisis. Politico maps the race to cut Russia off from the global internet. Telegram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Signal, Discord, X, FaceTime, LinkedIn, all blocked or throttled. Russian President Putin signed a law letting the FSB shut down cellular and internet access on demand. The twist is that the Kremlin’s own military depends on Telegram for frontline communications and crowdfunding. They’re destroying the infrastructure their war machine runs on. What an amazing story. [Politico]
• The Repricing of Time: Equity in the Age of Agents. Jordi Visser makes the financial argument for what many of us feel intuitively. AI doesn’t just disrupt business models. It compresses time. When competitive half-lives shrink from a decade to months, equity stops representing ownership of a durable franchise and starts resembling a call option on execution velocity. This is the best thing I’ve read on what AI actually does to market structure. I wish I had written this piece. [Visser Labs]

Things I wrote this week, ICYMI:

• Lobster Boil
• OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
• How Not to Interview Interesting People
• Why Fraud Is the Boring Problem
• Jensen’s Trillion Dollar Token Factory

In Memoriam.

Miles Rose, who passed away on March 1, 2026, in Puerto Rico. He was 72. And he was a friend from the Internet’s halcyon days and ran SiliconAlley.com. I lost touch with him over the past decade or so, but he was and will remain a cherished friend and a reminder of happier, more innocent times in the evolution of the internet. Rest in peace, Miles.

Len Deighton, one of my favorite authors and a master of the spy genre, passed away. I enjoyed this recap of his work. In the end, this is the best way to remember someone who made words his everything.

March 22, 2026. San Francisco

An update to More Magic Math from OpenAI

The final mad dash to IPO is on for the big AI companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all made their intentions clear. And nothing could be more obvious about OpenAI’s intent than today’s new funding announcement. A few things have changed since I wrote that piece. Some confirm my thesis, and one surprise, though not really.

So, the company says the round closed. $122 billion in committed capital, up from the $110 billion announced in February. Does committed mean money has passed the transom? We won’t know. What we do know is that at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the anchors are Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Microsoft participated again, though not clear for how much. The additional $12 billion came from a who’s who of institutional money, including a16z, Sequoia, BlackRock, Blackstone, Fidelity, Temasek, D1, and Dragoneer. The FOMO gang!

So many brand-name investors show up at the last minute because none of them want to miss out on the sweet IPO pop. It surely will win them points with their own (limited partner) investors. I guess FOMO is also an affliction for the super rich.

By the way, nothing puts more in “t “less is more,” than more itself. In 2024, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion and sold about 4 percent of the company. In 2026, they raised $122 billion, twenty times more, by selling roughly 14 percent. Existing insiders and early employees must be in heaven.

To be clear, the circular financing problem hasn’t gone away. Amazon’s $50 billion is tied to an eight-year AWS contract. Nvidia’s contribution is compute, not cash. When I wrote about this in March, it was just an observation. Now it has a name. Bloomberg, Reuters, and others are now calling it “circular financing.”

OpenAI says it now has a $4.7 billion credit line from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. That’s not a lending syndicate. That’s an IPO underwriter roster auditioning for the job. It reminds me of those lining up outside Don Corleone’s room on his daughter’s wedding day. The credit facility is the gift they bring to get in the room.

Now let’s talk about the fix. The $3 billion in investments from individual investors. Axios reports that they are customers of three of the largest banks. Wait, the same three large banks that extended the credit facility and want to be part of the IPO underwriting syndicate. More circular economy at work.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told Axios, “We are really trying to take to heart our mission, which is AGI for the benefit of humanity and thinking about access. Not just access to the technology, but also access to the economic upside that it’s driving.” That’s a nice line. It’s also an IPO marketing strategy.

OpenAI said it will be included in several ARK Invest ETFs. Cathie Wood, who previously invested in OpenAI through her venture arm, now gets to channel her retail base into pre-IPO OpenAI shares. Think about what that is. A private company, not yet public, getting into retail ETFs. That’s a new thing. It’s smart, too. You create demand before the IPO. You distribute the story. You make millions of people feel like they have skin in the game before you even file. That’s the fix.

ARK is overrated, to put it mildly. ARK’s flagship fund peaked in February 2021, then fell 75 percent. Five years later, a thousand dollars invested then is worth about $573 today. And ARK is the vehicle OpenAI chose to democratize the upside. Make of that what you will.

One last thing. OpenAI is quietly pivoting, shutting down Sora, its much-hyped video app, and concentrating resources on a “superapp” for developers and business users, with coding assistants at the center. Why? Because enterprise is exactly where Anthropic is eating their lunch. The $122 billion has bought more time to beat the competition. And did you notice that CFO Friar is doing all the press versus Sam?

You focus this hard because you want to go public. Fast. After all, you don’t want to be the one without a chair when the music stops. Your move, Dario!

Previously on this topic:

• More Magic Math from OpenAI?
• OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
• $110 Billion in Name Only
• The Debt Beneath the Dream