OpenAI tries a browser Some things are so predictable that you could ask ChatGPT what will happen. Two weeks ago it tried an app platform, and this week it's trying a browser. See this week's column. LINK Anthropic does TPUs Anthropic joined the AI infra shuffle, doing a deal with Google for 'tens of billions of dollars' for access to up to a million of Google's bespoke TPU AI chips and 'well over a gigawatt' of capacity in 2026. Google is an investor in Anthropic (at least 14%), but so is Amazon, and to date Anthropic has been using TPUs, Amazon's Trainium and Nvidia GPUs, which sounds like a headache. LINK Meta has layoffs in AI?! There have been two stories for Meta AI in the last six months: Llama 4 was a fumble and it's fallen badly behind; and Mark Zuckerberg is paying seven and eight figure salaries to hire more AI researchers. That makes it seem strange that this week the new head of new AI is cutting 600 people. The story seems to be that it's the old AI unit being cut - there had been some suggestions that this was bloated with managers and politics, but some big names have apparently been cut even so. LINK OpenAI pays ex-bankers to create proprietary training data Bloomberg reports that OpenAI has a project paying over 100 former investment bankers $150/hour to create new training data that reflects the grunt work done in PowerPoint and Excel by junior bankers, so that ChatGPT can automate it. This is the tip of an iceberg - much (most?) professional work of the kind that people talk about LLMs automating isn't on the Internet and isn't in the training data that any LLM can use (the same goes for the data flows in enterprise software), so if you can get it for yourself you have an edge, and paying to create this de novo is a competitive advantage if you can afford it. Remember when people were surprised that Google paid people to drive down every street in the developed world to feed Google Maps? Note also, though, that Excel didn't mean junior bankers got to work shorter hours. LINK Conversely, Reddit is suing Perplexity (them again) and a set of little-known data scrapers for using its content as training data without permission. LINK Oracle's funding puzzles A story from last week: Oracle held a big investor day to talk about its AI datacentre plans. Last year it forecast $104bn in its fiscal 2029 (meaning the 12 months to May 2029, since the company has an annoying year-end), but now it says that will be $185bn and $225bn in 2030 - up from $57bn in the 12 months to May 2025. In other words, it's forecasting revenue will quadruple in five years, almost all driven by the new business building and renting out cloud infrastructure. This is backed by a $300bn contract with OpenAI plus a hope for at least $200bn more to come. This came without much clarity on capex, which is admittedly difficult given how much uncertainty there is for so many moving parts, but it seems pretty clear that this implies capex comparable to the hyperscalers, which in turn would imply levels quite close to Oracle's current revenue. The credit analysts are getting busy, but stepping back, there is a classic story to tell of a very cash-generative legacy business that was on the wrong side of first cloud and now AI, leveraging that cashflow to jump to the new thing. Silicon Valley is paying attention to Larry Ellison for the first time since the 90s. ORACLE, CAPEX?, DEBT? Meta locks chatbots out of WhatsApp Distribution seems like the new frontier for LLMs (browsers!), and WhatsApp is the global platform outside the USA and East Asia: this week Meta quietly changed its TOS to block third-party chatbots, including ChatGPT, from using the API to serve users inside the app. LINK The week in AI Google's AI infrastructure is becoming more explicitly global, with the announcement of a $15bn investment in a 1GW datacentre and associated hub in India. LINK Amazon is working hard on automating more warehouse tasks with robots, targeting 600k jobs and 30 cents cost saving per item shipped. (In other news, Pope is Catholic, bears…) LINK Meta did an SPV with investor Blue Owl Capital whereby Meta will own and fund 20% of its planned 5GW, $27bn 'Hyperion' data centre and Blue Owl's funds will take the rest. Meta is very cash-generative, but not as much as Microsoft or Alphabet, and they may well do deals like this too. LINK Youtube is launching its tool to let you use AI to search for content using your face so that you can take copyright action, much as for a long time it's let music and video right-holders search for use of their content. Yesterday's AI is today's automation. LINK Remember VR? Samsung launched the 'Galaxy XR', a mixed reality headset on Google's platform with a spec somewhere between Meta's Quest and Apple's Vision Pro (it's priced at $1800) and an experience that owes a lot to Apple and a lot to Gemini. It's hard to say anything about this space that we didn't say two and five years ago, but every now and then I get my Vision Pro out of the cupboard and power it up, and then put it away again. We are still a long way from the optics, price, and form factor that could make this a real mass-market consumer product, but what concerns me is that even if the Vision Pro was light and cheap, I'm still not sure that it would be useful. LINK | 
No comments:
Post a Comment