COMPUTE! The AI industry, overheard · Est. 2026
Fortnightly
frontier circular

The Frontier Circular · №3

A palace gazette of trivial movements, recorded with the gravity they deserve.

  1. Mr. Altman appeared on CNBC and informed the host that OpenAI had filed an S-1. The host, who had read the press release forty minutes earlier, professed surprise.
  2. Mr. Amodei did not appear on CNBC. The Anthropic communications team was, as ever, busy.
  3. Mr. Musk attended the SpaceX roadshow opening in person. He brought, per a person who was in the room, a Diet Coke and a small folder. The folder was, by all accounts, the prospectus. He did not open it.
  4. Ms. Friar declined to specify the inference gross-margin trajectory for calendar 2027, pointing to a shortage of compute: “there’s just not enough tokens available.”
  5. Mr. Ghodsi has long said Databricks will go public but has avoided committing to a firm date. Recent reporting points to 2027 as the likeliest window.
  6. Mr. Wang, of Meta Superintelligence Labs, formerly of Scale AI, was at filing both — and his X biography wears both name tags: “chief ai officer @meta, founder @scale_ai.” It closes, “rational in the fullness of time.”
  7. The strategists at Bank of America, on 5 June, advised clients in writing to “take profits,” noting that seventy per cent of the firm’s own bear-market signposts had triggered. The Nasdaq fell roughly seven per cent that week. The clients, per the syndicate sheets, remained in the queue for SpaceX.
  8. The corkboard has, for the first time in three issues, been re-felted in green, used to indicate valuations above $500bn. Red string remains for cap-table relationships; aqua for cloud commitments; yellow for NVIDIA, which is in everything.