Author Archives: Vijay Vijayasankar

From AI-Augmented Capitalism to the Race Between Frontier Creation and Rent Extraction For 250 years, capitalism has gotten progressively better at exploiting what it already knows. AI may compress the useful life of some forms of advantage, but not necessarily the advantage of the firm itself. Capitalism has repeatedly reinvented itself around new forms ofContinue reading “When Exploitation Becomes Abundant”

A service starts timing out intermittently after a routine deployment. Nothing looks particularly alarming. The deployment itself appears clean, the underlying systems are healthy, and latency has increased but not enough to trigger the usual alarms. An engineer eventually notices that the slower requests are interacting with a retry policy. The policy is perfectly sensibleContinue reading “Every Lesson Creates Another Judgment”

Klarna is an interesting AI story partly because the AI worked. When the company launched its AI customer-service assistant in 2024, the early numbers were extraordinary. After its first month, Klarna said the assistant was handling two-thirds of customer-service chats and doing work equivalent to 700 full-time agents. Average resolution time had fallen from 11Continue reading “The Normal Case Was the Company”