The Collection

Gary Marcus wrote overnight about an acronym the boosters will not unpack. ARR, as they say it, is supposed to sound like Annual Recurring Revenue: subscriptions that will be there next year. What they mean is Annualized Run Rate. Take a good month. Multiply by twelve. Call it a year. You might never have a year that is twelve times your best month.

He does not give a dollar figure. Saturday we printed one, as a run rate, from other people’s mail. Today the letter is the definition. After the collapse of what he calls tokenmaxxing, companies like ATT are moving to open-source models to save costs. The second-quarter kind of revenue, he writes, may well not recur at the same scale. Netscape had a meteoric 1995. Then Microsoft gave the browser away.

They took the best month, multiplied by twelve, and called it recurring.

Marcus’s Sunday letter is short on purpose. Annual Recurring Revenue is the thing you want: subscriptions, next year likely the same or better. It recurs. Annualized Run Rate can mean as little as the best month times twelve, then a hope that this month becomes next year’s average. That could happen. Or the best month is not typical, and you never print a year that matches the cover.

When people tell you Anthropic had this or that ARR, he writes, you need to know which meaning they are talking about. They rarely tell you. They really mean the latter. Annual Recurring Revenue recurs. Annualized Run Rate does not have to.

Yesterday the backyard. Today the recurring trick.

They took the best month, multiplied by twelve, and called it recurring.

Tom Krazit’s Saturday Runtime opened on a Product Saturday: Cursor unveiled a version-control host in the same week GitHub kept struggling to stay online. Origin, in Cursor’s own docs as he quotes them, is a git forge for storing and sharing code. 2008 was a long time ago. Anyone shipping in 2026, Krazit writes, knows GitHub is straining under AI-driven software from agents.

NVIDIA’s general-purpose coding agent AVO scored a perfect 100.00 RHAE on the ARC-AGI-3 public set. Claude Opus 5 alone scores roughly 30 percent on the same benchmark. Wrap it in AVO and it goes to 100 percent. NVIDIA frames that as system design, not model capability alone. The model at 30 percent. The harness at 100. Do not confuse them.

Ken Huang’s Saturday letter maps the Model Context Protocol against the six domains of Proof-of-Control. His finding is not that the protocol is sloppy. It is that the controls are thorough and the record is held by the party being checked. A careful log written by the operator is still a month. It is not a year you can audit.

Salesforce shipped Slack Code in the same Runtime. Anyone with access can @-mention coding agents like Claude Code or Codex inside Slack. Origin stores the repo under a load git was not built for. Slack Code makes the agent session a room other people can walk into. Neither one is a year of recurring revenue.

The model at 30 percent. The harness at 100. Do not confuse them.