Crazy Stupid Tech

Om – I hope this finds you well. Your post about Wired tickled just the right group of neurons to make me write something. It’s kind of a rant. But also something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Would love to reconnect. best fv Hi Fred Thanks for the note. I would love to chat — where are you posted up these days? More importantly, it would be great just to see you. Also, where did you publish this piece, so I can link to it? It will be fun to respond to you on this one.

Silicon Valley has been trying to come up with solutions to the U.S.’s health care bureaucracy for generations. But the administrative burden on patients, doctors … everyone, really, has only gotten worse. Myriad studies over the years have identified doctor burnout as a critical problem. It’s been so hard to fix partly because software historically hasn’t been good at transcribing and analyzing one of healthcare’s biggest data sources: doctor/patient conversations.

I have been crowing about OpenClaw for a few months now. It is AI’s democratization moment. Why it matters isn’t  the actual software, but more about the possibility it represents: intelligence on the cheap. Then Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent two hours at his company’s GPU technology conference (GTC) anointing it as the new Windows. And then the new Linux. And then HTML. The man likes his hyperboles. And he likes to do a leather-jacket imitation of Steve Jobs.

It’s easy to be skeptical when you first hear about Enveda and its 30-something founder Viswa Colluru. The business he’s in – making medicines from plants and other natural products – is filled with charlatans. And Colluru lately has been making not just bold claims but ones that seem flatly ridiculous. He says his five-year old biotech company has found a way to develop medicines from nature four times faster and for a tenth the cost of traditional pharmaceuticals.

The artificial intelligence revolution will be only three years old at the end of November. Think about that for a moment. In just 36 months AI has gone from great-new-toy, to global phenomenon, to where we are today – debating whether we are in one of the biggest technology bubbles or booms in modern times. To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then.

Every so often, we find ourselves in the middle of a massive technological wave that starts to upend our presumptions and our ideas about the past, present, and future. These waves come with excess—optimism, excitement, hype, and speculation. Since non-believers don’t invent the future and speculators are always on a hustle, I often turn to practitioners to get a fix on the coordinates of reality.

Every morning nearly 100,000 geeks world wide, including some of the richest tech barons in the universe, fire up one of the most dated-looking websites online to find out what’s going on in their world. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai at Google, Satyla Nadella at Microsoft, Matthew Prince at Cloudflare along with investors Mark Cuban and Bill Gurley have all acknowledged being fans over the years. Gabe Rivera started this experiment working as a developer at Intel in the early aughts.

Sixteen years ago Matthew Prince and classmate Michelle Zatlyn at Harvard Business School decided there was a better way to help companies handle hacker attacks to their websites. Prince and a friend had already built an open source system to help anyone with a website more easily track spammers. What if the three of them could leverage that into a company that not only tracked all internet threats but stopped them too?

Eighteen months ago as the AI chatbot revolution was taking hold, Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi both realized something profound was happening to the way the internet worked. AI web crawlers had begun inundating news and information websites with thousands of requests a day compared to the handful they typically saw from search engines. Not only was the explosion in traffic ballooning hosting costs for these sites, the bots supplied zero traffic to them in return.

By Om Malik There are no two ways to say it — OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in  Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew  bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion. It is an all-stock deal for io Products, a 55-person company that is building an “amazing AI device.” The Information first reported the likelihood of this deal in April 2025.