★ A standing column · a bulletin of trivial movements ★

The Frontier Circular.

The palace gazette of the AI industry: who attended, who was Not Present, who declined to specify, and who brought a small box. Filed fortnightly, in order of triviality.

Issue №3 · fortnight ending 16 June 2026

From Issue №3 →
  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 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.

Issue №2 · fortnight ending 1 June 2026

From Issue №2 →
  1. Mr. Karpathy attended a stand-up at Anthropic's San Francisco office. He brought a small moving box. The box was, by all accounts, the same one.
  2. Mr. Altman was Not Present at the stand-up. He was, per his brother's podcast, "not worried" about it.
  3. Ms. Murati was, at filing, still raising. The round is structured as equity. The equity is, by all reports, in her.
  4. Mr. Schulman was reported to be, at filing, still at Thinking Machines. Compute! is unable to confirm this beyond the close of business.
  5. Mr. Nordeen, late of xAI, was observed walking past a Tesla showroom without stopping.
  6. Mr. Zuckerberg opened a new Slack workspace. Seven people from OpenAI were already in it.
  7. The Anthropic comms team was, as ever, busy.