Soren Larson

Earlier this month Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter for $7.5B.

Last week Google beat out Mercor in acquiring a complete operational dataset from Spirit Airlines, reportedly including internal document, email, workflow and codebase for $10mm.

Motivation Link to heading An AI provider does not merely sell an answer.

Summary: Lab margins and value participation fall out of the distribution of task complexity, but these present conflicting incentives for the labs. ⚠️ Fair warning this blog is more technical – feel free to copy as markdown to a LM.

Clay Christensen has two theories of disruption.

Judging by the last few months of AI-econ discourse, apparently the firm is dead.

This technology cycle has been particularly interested in economist Ronald Coase.

Judging by public markets, the future of software looks bleak.

Summary: Agents earn not from routing but from capturing inefficiencies at the edge––creating new supply, capturing latent context, or productizing uncertainty buffers.

Summary: For labs to capture durable value, the world has to be meta-surprising.

Summary: Software modularized nouns; AI modularizes verbs, migrating profit from enabling middleware to asset owners bearing structurally non-deferrable liability.

Summary: AI commoditizes intelligence, forcing profits to migrate to asset-heavy Cybernetic Rollups that own context at the edge.

We shut down Crosshatch.

💡 Knowledge and action are the central relations between mind and world. -– Timothy Williamson “Programmability is eating the world.” declared USV’s Nikhil Raman.

Silicon Valley will not stop talking about outcome-based pricing.

SaaS and vertical AI are getting squeezed.

The diffusion of AI into the economy is too slow and too concentrated.

In Friedrich Hayek’s cornerstone “The Use of Knowledge in Society” he introduces the “man on the spot.”

Introduction Link to heading High-intelligence applications make dumb businesses.

Agentic commerce is a mirage.

The worst software businesses are smart.

This piece was originally published on Medium.