New post format: a weekly rollup of links, comments on those links, activity updates and attempts at humor. The intention is quicker hits in addition to the less frequent big posts and more timely hammering on my favorite themes. This is my primary hangout until the contours of the post-Twitter world become clear. Be sure to subscribe below and to the right to receive all my output via email.
Note that my poor, overtaxed server struggles to serve up all the images to email users at the same time, so if you don’t see images, be sure to click through. Server upgrade in the works.
Nuclear Powered Cloud Approaching Critical Mass?
Previous: Cloud Power Up, Nuclear Powered Cloud Data Centers Are Happening, A Nuclear-Powered Cloud, When Nuclear-Powered Data Centers?, No Team at Amazon is Working on Nuclear Power
Related: U2 Joins Nuclear Bandwagon
FTC Suit Against Amazon Continues to Befuddle
This case looks like it will come down to the FTC jumping up and down about some (currently redacted) “bad email” to distract from their incoherent case.
Ben Thompson brings the heat trying to explain how the Internet (and business) work to the FTC. His interlocutor commits the common sin of invoking the Microsoft antitrust case without any clue what he is talking about (but that’s antitrust for you).
Previous: The Incoherence Doctrine: The FTC Strikes Again, Amazon’s Awesome Antitrust Adventure Approaches, A New Antitrust Doctrine, A Glimmer of Antitrust Sanity, Another Glimmer of Antitrust Sanity?, Taking a Modest Victory Lap on Antitrust, Google’s Turn in the Antitrust Hotseat
Amazon Pauses Lectures on Generative AI
After months of talking incessantly about nothing, Amazon’s generative AI PR teams (all of them, as we were told) seem to be about three days into a long-overdue vacation. No lectures this week on their three-step tier strategy, how it is very early days, the many concerns of enterprises about the technology, that there will be so very many models, homages to Switzerland, how renting GPUs is a perfectly adequate play, and that Amazon has always led in AI (at least in their own minds). They’re no doubt moving onto the task of turning re:Invent into the Anthropic developer conference. Hopefully no more than half the sessions will be about existential risk thumb-sucking.
Previous: Three Steps into a 12-Step Program, Culture Clash Conjecture: Amazon and Anthropic, AWS: “It’s Day 0.1 in generative AI”, AWS: “We’re three rankles into a 10k rankle”, “Every Single” Amazon PR Team is Working on Generative AI (Part I’ve Lost Count), “Every Single” Amazon PR Team is Working on Generative AI, Titan or Titanic?, Amazon Pioneers LLM-less Generative AI, A PR Campaign About Nothing: AWS and Generative AI, Day Two of Amazon’s PR Campaign About Nothing, Amazon’s Relentless PR Campaign About Nothing
Related: Anthropic in Talks to Raise $2 Billion From Google and Others Just Days After Amazon Investment
The Utilification of Cloud Continues
KYC growing beyond just Chinese companies
Bureaucrats have ideas how the cloud should work
Previous: Know Your Customer Comes to the Cloud
Can We Just Stop with “AI-Powered”?
Media who write stories like this will get no sympathy when real AI comes for them. At least drill down one level, preferably more. I did not check, but assume SoftBank is involved in this deal.
