Amazon to invest $1.25B in Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, with an option to increase it to $4B. Anthropic will now run the majority of its workloads on AWS.
Anthropic’s foundation models will be made available via Amazon Bedrock to AWS cistomers to use to add generative AI capabilities to their apps.
First Google and now Amazon has had to scramble to respond to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI.
As Satya said about Google, he’s making Amazon dance.
When Apple vocally switched sides to support California’s “right to repair” law, I knew there had to be a catch. Cory Doctorow explains the catch eloquently.
Apple uses VIN locking or parts pairing which is a process also used by car makers, printer manufacturers & Medtronic ventilators that requires a secret code from the manufacturer to enable replacement parts to be recognized. Bypassing it violates the DMCA which as a federal law beats state laws.
Tim Cook laid it out for his investors as to why the company will always be against users repairing gheir devices. When people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple.
Making cringe inducing skits about how much they care about the environment while doing everything they can to make iPhones disposable is thr kind of corporate duplicity that’d make oil companies blush
It’s mind blowing to me that Netflix grew to 2,000 engineers over the course of 25 years and only had one level; senior software engineer.
It seems the system finally hit a wall when trying to hire college grads and they realized their engineering career ladder (or non-existent career ladder) was only designed for experienced hires.
The system also meant while some junior people were overpaid, they couldn’t hire senior engineers either (> $800K/year folks).
The money big tech spends trying to find the next big platform or dreamy business is jaw dropping.
Matthew Ball estimates Amazon has lost $43B on Alexa from 2012 through 2022. He estimates Meta is out at least $44.5B net on AR/VR hardware. While Google Cloud has lost $35B since 2008.
He also talks about why these companies can afford these massive losses with no end in sight. Their core “dreamy” businesses are platforms that have created self reinforcing ecosystems that generate billions more
Twitter/X created an ad intended to show advertisers that the product is still worth their time and money.
Unfortunately the ads include real tweets criticizing Elon Musk and Twitter/X. It’s rumored that the company has fired the people involved in creating the ad. 🤦🏾♂️
Linda Yaccarino originally shared then deleted the ad but not before it made the rounds on social media and news site. This company is truly a clown car that crashed into a dumpster fire.
@enthraxxx Do you think people got promoted for canceling Stadia or Google Reader or the opposite in that newly promoted people now had the power to shut down projects they saw as failures?
The theme of 2023 is enshitification comes for us all. Zero interest rates created business models where there was a lot of consumer surplus (i.e. people got lots of great products for free or extremely low costs) and now businesses are beginning to either charge the real price (see Uber prices) or stuffing products with ads to make up the difference (see streaming services, Instacart, Uber, etc).
This Unity change makes sense given that trend and we should expect more of these across tech.
There are so many complaints about Cruise & Waymo’s robotaxis yet quite often the substance of the negative articles looks like making mountains out of molehills (e.g. claims that an ambulance was blocked by Cruise robotaxis when videos show it drove around them).
The societal value of autonomous vehicles is that they are safer than human driven cars. We should judge them on that criteria instead of the media’s incessant desire to pain tech as the bad guys.
@morecowbell No. The claim was Cruise robotaxis delayed the ambulance from arriving at the hospital on time with the victim (who was hit by a human driver by the way).
It’s really the end of the linear TV dynasty at Disney.
Charter Communications is in its second week of a blackout of Disney owned channels like FX, ESPN and Disney Channel because the company argued Disney’s price increases are excessive.
Both companies have told customers to subscribe to streaming services if they want to watch those channels and people are pissed. Why should they subscribe to streaming services to watch channels they already pay for on cable?
The EU has listed the initial set of companies and products that qualify as gatekeepers under the digital markets act (DMA).
The DMA triggers automatic antitrust style remedies on companies that have 45 million EU users and €7.5 billion in revenue or €75 billion in market cap.
Messaging apps need to be interoperable, operating systems offer alternate app stores, default apps need to be uninstallable, consent required for showing targeted ads and there’ll be more scrutiny on acquisitions.
Instead of fighting antitrust lawsuits one by one, the EU’s philosophy is now that a particular level of business success is automatically a gatekeeper/monopoly and should trigger antitrust style enforcement.
A key reason AI will disrupt white collar work is that many of these jobs require knowledge but not intelligence.
Jobs like HR, law, marketing, software development, writing yet another Fast & Furious or Sharknado sequel, etc don’t need original thinking like 80% of the time. They just need you to know the rules of the system.
Several years ago at Microsoft, I saw an observation that there were 3 primary business models in big tech. Selling
Software
Hardware
Ads
The challenge for companies was that your core business was being given away for free by someone with a different business model. You sell Windows and Google gives away Android for the search ads revenue. Lots of hardware sold at a loss to make up the difference in subscriptions.
The key question for Bob Iger is whether Disney+ is intended to be a real business which means higher prices, more ads and cheaper shows or is it enough if they can get usage of Disney+ to lead to increased likelihood of going to Disneyland or taking a Disney cruise.
The former is the Netflix model while the latter is the Amazon Prime model.
Found a great collection of wonderful insights about online payments. In general, there’s no more low hanging fruit and truly revolutionary products are few and far between.
PayPal and its copycats was probably the last major consumer payments revolutions.
Crypto turned out to revolutionize grifts & scams not payments.
Stripe has had two down rounds in a year.
Apple is becoming a major fintech player and could eliminate a bunch of payment industry middlemen.
I did find it a fun coincidence that the article argues that Apple isn’t becoming a bank and then they announced a savings account the day after this article was posted.