Benedict's Newsletter: No. 611

AI Infra, Tiktok deals, Amazon dark patterns, cane collections, measuring AI.

NO. 611   FREE EDITION   SUNDAY 28 SEPT 2025 SPONSORED BY ATTIO AI-native CRM Attio is the CRM for the AI era. Connect your email and Attio instantly builds your CRM - with every company, every contact, and every interaction you've ever had, enriched and organized. You can also build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex business processes, freeing you to focus on what matters the most: building your company. Join industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, Modal and more. Try the CRM that's built for the future. Start a free Attio trial today News OpenAI + Nvidia Nvidia will invest up to $100bn in OpenAI over the next few years, with the cash going towards Nvidia chips for data centres with 10GW of capacity, which could cost $5-600bn in total. This is in addition to the $300bn, 5-year deal that OpenAI announced with Oracle earlier this month. Taken together (and at face value), this is an ambition for OpenAI to spend as much or more on infrastructure as any of the hyperscalers are spending now: Microsoft will probably spend $100bn in 2025 and Google $85bn, and that's with huge existing cloud businesses and cash flows. OpenAI wants to join the club. For Nvidia, this looks a lot like vendor financing (apparently OpenAI might lose rather than buy the chips), a popular option in the telecoms bubble and, like a lot of the other deals it's done lately, a way for it to turn its exploding cash flow into a stimulus for more AI and more cash flow. This is also, though, a form of leverage, and leverage goes well when things go well and tends to unwind painfully when they don't. Also - remember Microsoft? LINK OpenAI makes its first product? Something like 10-15% of US consumers are daily active users of generative AI chatbots, so everything is still to play for. But how do you differentiate when the underlying models keep converging on roughly the same experience? You can add incremental features, but those are easily clues. You can go for distribution (hence all the browser assistants, and see Google adding Gemini to all its surfaces). And you can try to unbundle the core experience into products dedicated to specific use cases. Indeed, it's reasonable to argue that the raw LLM chatbot itself isn't really a product, only a technology, and that we need a product on top. So, now we have OpenAI Pulse, an AI assistant that you're supposed to connect into all of your other platforms, and that can proactively make suggestions. This looks a lot like Google Now from a decade ago, except now LLMs could make it work. But it's also a symbol of all the ex-Meta product and growth people flooding into the company right now. LINK Tiktok resolution? After almost a year of uncertainty, Donald Trump now claims to have a TikTok deal. We don't quite know what that is, however. TikTok's US operation will be run by a new JV, with a majority of US investors including Oracle, which will run it. Bytedance will retain a share of no more than 20%. However, the US Vice President, JD Vance, said that the JV would be valued at only $14bn, where most estimates were anything from $20bn to $100bn. Bloomberg reported one possible answer: that Bytedance will get 50% of the profits. LINK, VALUATION Meanwhile, this means Larry Ellison is now (almost) a major power player, in both tech and US politics. Oracle is an important part of a lot of big company legacy tech stacks, but it hasn't been relevant to any broader tech conversation since the 90s - now it's becoming a significant AI cloud provider, and will control a major US online media platform with the power to shape what Americans see (the reason that Bytedance is being forced to sell in the first place). Meanwhile, his son, David Ellison, owns Paramount and CBS and is reportedly about to bid for Warner (which includes CNN). That poses a lot of fun anti-trust questions. LINK The week in AI Distribution, distribution, distribution: last week Google added Gemini to Chrome, and this week it's adding it to Google TV. The launch video does a pretty good job of showing realistic use cases. LINK While Google Labs launched an LLM-enabled mood board tool. LINK Apparently, Meta is now working on software for humanoid robots, as an 'AR level' bet (meaning tens of billions of dollars). LINK OpenAI is hiring an ad team. LINK And running its first brand ads. LINK Jony Ive may be, perhaps, working with OpenAI on a new device, but meanwhile, his LoveFrom firm continues to create random luxury objects with none of the constraints and commercial imperatives that the people there spent their lives working within. This week, a limited edition sailing lantern for $4,800. Lifestyle business? LINK Accenture reported $1.8bn new 'generative AI' bookings in the last quarter. It will also lay off 11k people it thinks can't be 'upskilled to AI', which got a lot of attention, but it's also only 1.4% of headcount and might just be a cover. LINK, LAYOFFS Amazon pays $2.5bn for dark patterns The Amazon checkout-flow used to be full of deceptive 'dark patterns' that tried to trick you into subscribing to Prime without realising you were doing it (I remember posting on Twitter about how customer-hostile this was). The FTC eventually sued, and this week, just as it was about to go to court, Amazon settled for $2.5bn. LINK The New York network plot? Apparently, US police stopped a plot to swamp US cellular networks during the annual 'UN Week' conference season, finding 200 SIM servers and 100k SIM cards. LINK About What matters in tech? What's going on, what might it mean, and what will happen next? I've spent 25 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. I'm now an independent analyst, and I speak and consult on strategy and technology for companies around the world. FIND OUT MORE Ideas OpenAI published a paper trying to create a library of discrete tasks done by expert, experienced white-collar workers, and then benchmarking LLMs against them. Conclusion: AI will have parity with industry experts sometime next year. There's a profound naivety in these kinds of analyses, that act as though you can reduce the job of someone in their mid or late 30s to 'how well did they make that PPT/XLS/DOC?' and ignore everything else they do, and why they do it, and indeed what exactly went into that document. It reminds me of the joke about the physicists who are asked to predict which horse will win a race, and they say "First, we presume the horse is a perfect sphere…"  See the next link. LINK A detailed analysis of why Geoff Hinton (godfather of machine learning) was completely wrong when he said that ML would replace radiologists. Expert work is almost never about how well you process a file. LINK Apparently Brussels wants to try to clear up the cookie mess. Meanwhile, Google and Apple have mounted a lobbying push to get Brussels to understand just how many trade-offs and costs have come with the DMA and DMA. Yes, this is self-serving, but in every other kind of policy we understand that there are trade-offs, and tech is no different. COOKIES, APPLE, GOOGLE Unilever is spending half its ad budget with influencers. Trying to, anyway… LINK A profile of MrBeast's efforts to turn $450m a year in revenue into a profitable company that might IPO. LINK 'Foom' - a continuous feed of interesting AI-generated videos. LINK Online gambling in the Philippines has half the population as users, $1bn of fees to the government and plenty of human wreckage as a consequence.  LINK The on-device models in iOS 26. LINK Today in hacking - a criminal group hacked a UK nursery chain, stole information about the children it looks after, and published that information on the web as part of an extortion plan. LINK Outside interests A medieval church on stilts. LINK Vertical Art - the Eddi van Auken cane collection. Seriously. LINK Data Sometimes micro data is the best - how is the pet food industry using AI? Not much, yet. LINK IAB Europe on ad industry deployment of AI. LINK Meta has a $10bn business messaging business. LINK Deloitte and BCG studies on corporate AI deployment challenges. BCG, DELOITTE Bain's annual state of tech report. LINK And useful Deloitte data on US consumer AI adoption. LINK Someone leaked an Andreessen Horowitz LP deck: $25bn returned to LPs since founding and the 2012 fund had a 9x return (the industry aims for 3x minimum). LINK According to Similarweb, ChatGPT is 20% of Walmart's referral traffic. Great headline! Context, though: referral is 5% of Walmart traffic. "ChatGPT, what is 20% of 5%?" LINK Pew released a new report on consumer use of and attitudes to 'AI' in the USA. However, it makes no attempt to define 'AI' or distinguish the current wave of generative AI systems, meaning that much of the data is worthless. Hence, the last page claims that over half of Americans were weekly 'AI' users in December 2022 (ChatGPT launched in November). This kind of thing is widespread and frustrating: if you have data on AI use but do not define AI or use (Daily? Monthly? Once?), you have no data. LINK Preview from the Premium edition AI PhDs and the measurement problem People in Silicon Valley are prone to the disease of thinking that they're the only clever people, and that their jobs are the only hard jobs. It's a little like the way first-year undergraduates think or pretend to think that their subject is the only hard one and the others are easy. You're supposed to grow out of this at about the age you can buy alcohol, but in the SF Bay Area you find plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who never did. Of course, that's the attitude that gets you Uber, but it's also the attitude that gets you WeWork.  Meanwhile, one of the basic conceptual challenges in AI research is that we don't have a coherent and systematic way to measure human intelligence, nor an equivalent way to measure machine intelligence. We have dozens or hundreds of ways to measure something, but they're effectively the equivalent of putting something into a black box and then looking at what comes out - you don't really know what the box did, or why, or what it was trying to do.  Part of the problem is to ask what you're measuring. There's a whole class of experiments into animal intelligence that were eventually realised mostly to be testing how close the animal is to a primate. "Is this creature failing the test because it lacks cognition, or because it lacks opposable thumbs, binocular vision and fine motor skills?" Conversely, does your test show that your subject is very good at something that isn't really intelligence, or perhaps a different kind of intelligence to whatever you think you're testing? In the famous case of 'Clever Hans', a man thought he'd taught his horse to do simple maths, tapping out the answer with its hoof, but in fact, it was reading his body language and counting until he relaxed.  Upgrade to Premium You're getting the Free edition. Subscribers to the Premium edition got this two days ago on Sunday evening, together with an exclusive column, complete access to the archive of over 600 issues, and more. SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE THIS WAS SENT TO abdulkerim.bosnia.business@blogger.com ON 30 September, 2025, BECAUSE YOU SUBSCRIBED AT BEN-EVANS.COM. You can UNSUBSCRIBE, OR READ THE PRIVACY POLICY. OUR MAILING ADDRESS IS Benedict Evans, 2 Golden Square, London, W1, United Kingdom.   COPYRIGHT © 2013-2025 Benedict Evans, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.