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Midweek greetings to all, as we unveil the 303rd chapter of Weekly Olio — a delightful concoction of laughter, insight, and a sprinkle of mystery. Within these pages, you'll discover a handpicked selection of fascinating finds from the vast realms of the internet.
Keep your eyes peeled for this week’s Publisher’s Parmesan, arriving this Sunday!
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The Quote 💭
“Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.”
The Tweet 🐦
Anthropic's S-1 filing for its historic upcoming IPO on the Nasdaq (ticker symbol ANT) reveals a company with explosive growth, massive financial losses, unprecedented infrastructure commitments, and philosophical risk disclosures that have drawn intense market commentary.
The Infographic 💹
Open-weight models now handle ~73% of the tokens processed on OpenRouter, up from ~31% a year ago. Yet in mid-September, they accounted for only ~27% of spending.
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Blu Dot used Roku Ads Manager to drive incredible results for its furniture sales event. Its strategy hinged on custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
“Roku has been a top performer,” said Blu Dot’s Claire Folkestad. “We have seen…CPMs lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
The Short Read 📝
Services: The New Software - by Julien Bek
Julien Bek is a seed and early-stage venture capital investor and Partner at Sequoia Capital based in London, England.
Bek's claim: the next $1-trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm, because for every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services - and the way you capture the six is to sell the work, not the tool. His machinery: split every job into intelligence (rules, however complex - translating a spec into code, testing, debugging) and judgement (experience and taste - what to build next, when to ship). AI crossed the intelligence threshold in software engineering first - which is why more than half of all AI tool usage is still coding while every other profession sits in single digits - and it is now crossing in each profession in order of intelligence ratio. Read more…
The Long Read 📜
Why Hardware Specialization is Back - by a16z
The semiconductor strategy question underneath every AI trade right now, answered with the one precedent that actually applies: the early-1990s death of the specialized architectures (vector processors, MPPs, Lisp machines - ETA, Multiflow, Alliant, Symbolics, Thinking Machines, Cray all gone between 1989 and 1995) at the hands of the "killer micros."
Asgar's mechanism is a three-step virtuous cycle: generality drove volume (tens of millions of desktop CPUs against one-workload specialists), volume drove performance (Hennessy-Patterson: single-processor performance grew >50% a year from 1986-2003, a Moore's-law free lunch only high-volume players could fund), and performance drove generality (specialist capabilities - DVD decoder cards, vector units - got absorbed into the general chip within about two years). Read more…
State of Product reveals what AI still hasn’t solved
80% of product professionals say AI helps them ship faster, but customers aren’t seeing value any sooner. Atlassian’s State of Product 2027 explores the gains AI is delivering and the challenges that remain, from decision-making that hasn’t kept pace to gut instinct overriding customer evidence.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this edition, we’d really appreciate if you shared it with a friend, family member or colleague.
We’ll be back in your inbox 2 PM IST next Wednesday. Till then, have a productive week!
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.