Meta does 'super-intelligence' Mark Zuckerberg's 'beast mode' push to hire and buy his way back into LLM leadership produced a big announcement this week - a new 'SuperIntelligence Labs' unit, run by acquihired Alexandr Wang (Scale) and Nat Friedman (GitHub) with about a dozen senior researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. (A side-note - 'super-intelligence' is this year's buzzy-but-ill-defined term. It seems to mean something like: systems that can manage much more complex multi-faceted tasks with some autonomy (unlike, say, an ERP or today's LLMs) without rising to the level of actually being 'alive' and 'intelligent', for which we still use the term AGI (though really, all of these terms are more thought experiments than specific technologies or benchmarks). LINK Revenue surges The Information reports that Anthropic is now at an annualised revenue run-rate of $4bn, up from about $1bn at the beginning of the year. A month ago OpenAI said it was at $10bn ARR, up from $5.5bn in December. LINK Oracle does infrastructure with OpenAI Oracle has talked a lot about cloud without actually having much, but it's now adding a lot of cattle to match the hat - capex rose from $6.9bn in the year to May 2024 to $21.2bn in the year to May 2025, though with a much smaller increase planned this year. That's a long way short of the leaders (Google, Meta, Microsoft, and AWS will spend over $300bn between them in CY 2025) but makes the ambition to be 'one of the world's largest cloud infrastructure companies' more credible. Backing that, it now, apparently, has a $30bn cloud deal with OpenAI, which is desperate for its own, non-Microsoft infrastructure. CAPEX, OPENAI AI TV ads The UK broadcaster Channel 4 will offer AI-generated ads on its streaming services, as a way to expand TV advertising to SMEs. If a TV ad doesn't have to be national, you can open up a whole new advertiser base, but you also need a way for them to make the ads. LINK Billing for scraping Cloudflare, a CDN, got a lot of attention by launching a 'pay to scrape' service that will block AI crawler access to its clients unless the AI companies pay a fee. LLM aggregation of the web brings us back to all the arguments about paywalls 15 years ago, including the challenge of how you could create one single point of payment for a fragmented publishing industry. Charging the crawlers at the infrastructure layer is a different turn on the same questions, but also prompts the same problem - if the crawlers refuse to pay, do you want to be out of the index, even if, now, you don't get links? LINK Apple models? Bloomberg reports that Apple might be thinking about using models from Anthropic or Claude to power the on-device AI assistant (branded 'Siri', but not the Siri we have today) that it announced last summer and then failed to ship. That would not be simple - would Apple really give a third-party access to user data? Or would it use a low-fat model that can run on the device (or on Apple's own 'private cloud compute'?) Either way, giving up ownership of primary tech like this would be a major reversal for Apple. LINK Uber returns to autonomy Uber sold its autonomy research unit to Aurora back in 2020: it got $4bn in Aurora stock but also invested $40m cash back into Aurora, so really, Uber paid to get rid of it. Uber got into autonomy back in 2015, when it looked like full autonomy might be only a couple of years away, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars on the basis that this was going to transform the economics of ride-hailing, making it an existential issue. But it turned out that Uber was investing both not enough and too much, and Dara Khosrowshahi dumped it as he cleared house. In the last nine months though, it's become clear that autonomy might finally be starting to scale, at least at Waymo, and Uber has been putting pieces back on the table. Now the NY Times says it's looking at partnering with its founder Travis Kalanic (who was fired back in 2017) to buy Pony.ai, a (mostly) Chinese autonomy company with a market cap of $4.5bn. LINK Figma files for IPO 18 months after Adobe was blocked from buying Figma at a $20bn valuation (a classic case of the incumbent buying the insurgent challenger), the company has filed for IPO. $500m revenue in 2023 and $750m in 2024 (Adobe's Creative Cloud was $12.7bn). LINK Regulation follies The EU is still pushing its idea that Meta must offer an option to use its products wth neither a fee nor advertising based on your interests, which means effectively for free. This is a heroic extrapolation from GDPR. LINK Brazil's Supreme Court has declared that social media companies are liable for anything any user ever posts. There's a lot of local political context here, but taken at face value that would mean shutting down social networks. LINK | 
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