Hi all,
Welcome to the Sunday edition. This week:
Is Anthropic a real business? We dissected Anthropic’s IPO pitch in 39 charts.
The new company: bigger, smaller, faster.
Sunrise in America
Also: New materials, GLP-1s & psychedelics++
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The unbounded firm
Every firm has its boundary. Back in 1937, Ronald Coase argued that the limit is defined at the point when the cost to do a task in the market is lower than doing it inside the firm. Most inventions- the ledger, telegraphy, copy paper, the internet- cut internal and external costs, so the boundary can move in both directions. Now, Alex Imas and colleagues ask what happens when we introduce AI agents in the mix.
Unlike humans, AI agents could share the same reasoning patterns (the model weights) and the same working state. Nothing leaks in handoffs from one agent to the next (and nothing is angling for a promotion). This might give rise to “supercooperative firms”, where bigger becomes better at every scale, possibly leading to giant AI-run firms in deep, large markets.
Arguably, this trend is long underway, as Kwon and others point out. The largest 1% of American firms held 97% of corporate assets in 2018.
AI might amplify this. AI-capable firms will be able to enter many markets, as Anthropic is in coding, bio, legal, and finance, and be able to scale horizontally past the traditional Coasian boundary. AI is a technology more likely than not to accentuate this trend. We might need new rules for dealing with such enormous entities.
See also: Microsoft is making way for the machines where I explore what be behind the tech company’s massive voluntary exit program.