Azeem Azhar

Watch here: youtu.be/Up7oumnUZ80

Listen here: open.spotify.com/episode/4E7EHb…

I changed my mind about Apple and AI... Apple has been conspicuously slow to deliver on AI. It isn’t spending hundreds of billions on data centers. Capital expenditure has been reasonably flat. Siri, the feature we all love to turn off, hasn’t meaningfully improved in a decade. No one expects major breakthroughs from Apple in research AI or applied AI in the near future. Then I put an AI agent on my Mac Mini at home. Within a week it was consuming everything the machine had. The audio system and CCTV cameras had stopped working reliably. I bought a second Mac Mini specifically for the agent. That machine, I call it R Mini Arnold, now runs full-time. By the time I ordered it, delivery had stretched from three days to seven or eight weeks. The 64GB RAM config was running that long everywhere. Best Buy shelves were empty. This is a demand story. There is a structural reason behind this. Apple's Neural Engine runs nearly 40 trillion operations per second and is optimised for matrix multiplication which is, precisely, what every transformer model actually does. Unified memory shared across CPU, GPU and Neural Engine gives it bandwidth consumer devices almost never have. The stack was built for something else entirely. It turns out to be almost perfectly suited for running AI locally. But the silicon is only one layer. Apple also controls the OS, the App Store and a privacy architecture. It is embedded within the enclaves, the software and the operating system. And because of that, they have something rare – genuine consumer trust. Think about everything you own, from your socks to your wallet. What do you touch the most? Your wedding band if you have one, your glasses if you have them and then an Apple device. That is the degree of consumer intimacy Apple has built. When local is good enough for the task, the question is no longer "which model" but "whose device"? And Apple has been building that device, with the unified memory, the Neural Engine, the privacy enclave, the consumer trust for two decades. /Chart via WSJ

this is LinkedIn right now. claude is becoming the default AI for businesses. from Ramp's March 2026 AI Index: → Anthropic wins 70% of head-to-head matchups against OpenAI among first-time AI buyers → One in four companies on Ramp now pay for Claude (a year ago, it was one in 25) → OpenAI just posted its largest single-month adoption decline ever → Anthropic's adoption grew 4.9% month-over-month (biggest gain on record) revenue picture: Anthropic went from $9 billion ARR at the end of 2025 to over $19 billion in early March. Claude Code alone is at $2.5 billion ARR, more than doubling since January. OpenAI is still ahead on total revenue at $25 billion. But consider this. OpenAI has 900 million weekly users and just started running ads. Anthropic has a fraction of that consumer base. Every plan still has rate caps because they can't meet demand. They're charging more, with stricter limits, while literally turning away revenue. And they're still growing faster. Both companies are eyeing IPOs. OpenAI at $750 billion valuation on $25 billion revenue. Anthropic at $380 billion on $19 billion. The valuation-to-revenue math actually favours Anthropic. And Anthropic projects positive cash flow by 2027, while OpenAI's own documents project $14 billion in losses for 2026. About a year ago, everyone said AI models would commoditise. Performance gaps would shrink, pricing would race to the bottom, no one would build a moat. The opposite happened. Anthropic built its moat not on benchmarks but on becoming the model that engineers and early adopters chose first. That early-adopter wave is now going mainstream. Ramp's economist called it a "cultural moat." Choosing Claude vs ChatGPT is becoming like a signal of identity. Image credit: Magali De Reu

I hadn’t thought about this dimension. All that Sora stuff, in addition to a general lack of focus, potentially deprives the more important business lines of scarce compute

876m tokens yesterday. RMA is a hungry hippo.

@hsu_steve drone-zone.replit.app !

This is the math. Iran still has thousands of MRBMs and tens of thousands of drones?

@drterrysimpson Here's causal evidence they lower the risk of dementia: x.com/cremieuxrecuei…

@JMGlachant @FT hope you enjoy solar.exponentialview.co

Even the ‘’Old Wise Man’’ at Financial Times @FT Martin Wolf comments the Iran War by finding ‘’Investments in Renewables’’ a credible tool for European Sovereignty and Resilience.

Watch here: youtu.be/GKpHGAxZ9pM

From this week's episode about how I think well with AI: open.spotify.com/episode/4KATU6…

"Writing is thinking" is one of the most repeated and least examined ideas. @ezraklein with @david_perell: writing can also be a process of persuading yourself. You need to be careful not to get trapped by your own argument.

Several records on the Texas grid the last two days: 🔋1st time batteries met 20% of demand (!) and went over 10 gigawatts 🥇 Renewables provided 79% of power demand at 1:10 day, highest ever 😎 Solar exceeded 32 GW and met 65% of demand, both firsts. #txenergy #txlege

@Stefan_1961 Read the essay

@azeem We have now reached a point where the cost of assembling the panels and the labor involved in installation are at least as high as the price of the panels themselves. In this respect, the hope for further drastic price drops on complete systems is unrealistic.

Solar panels cost $1,000/watt in 1958. Seven cents today. That's Wright's Law: every doubling of production cuts costs by 23.7%, holding over 50 years. We built an interactive model of the solar supercycle to show what happens next: solar.exponentialview.co See which markets unlock as the price falls – green steel, desalination, direct air capture, synthetic fuel... and run the scenarios towards abundance. cc @JavierBlas @GavinJMaguire @hgloystein @Ed_Crooks @ColumbiaUEnergy @MaxCRoser @_HannahRitchie @KHayhoe @JanWurzbacher @johnarnold

why did we need to know?

@joshdr83 you might enjoy this solar.exponentialview.co

Looks like a 2nd state (after Utah) has approved balcony solar! #asdistributedasitgetsyall utilitydive.com/news/virginia-…

Full analysis exponentialview.co/p/solar-superc…

Punch gently cleans his little plush toy, brushing off the dust and fixing its tiny ears. To everyone else it may look like just a toy… but to Punch, it’s his best friend — the one that has always been there through every adventure, every nap, and every lonely moment. 🧸 He takes care of it the same way it takes care of him.