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The OpenAI Soap Opera
Good thing I was off last week and didn’t add to all the effervescent interim takes on this saga. What a clown show.
My guess is season 2 of everyone’s favorite new hit show, Governance, will focus on Anthropic. The dramatic tension rests on whether they still want to be the doomer-i-est of AI companies (they left OpenAI seeing it as completely cavalier about AI risks), or if the OpenAI board absurdity cured them of that.
Previous: Culture Clash Conjecture: Amazon and Anthropic
The AI Doomer Soap Opera
Even Nick Bostrom, the father of the paperclip maximizer, “is worrying he may have yelled “Terminator!” in a crowded theater.”
Previous: Why Not Cut Out the Middleman and Just Name AI Safety Rules After Dystopian Science Fiction Movies?, Existential Risk Now Has a Precise Threshold, You Can’t Spell Alien Invasion Without A and I, Existential AI Risk + Twitter-level Nuance
The AWS Generative AI Soap Opera
ChatGPT launched a year ago on November 30th, right in the middle of AWS’s annual re:invent developer conference. AWS has been talking incessantly about generative AI ever since, but because their release cycle is wrapped around re:invent, we’ve been waiting for this last week to see if their bits match their words. The short answer is no, and re:invent was another episode of talking way too much about generative AI relative to what was delivered. The claim to be “reinventing generative AI” with a bunch of late and me-too announcements just hurts their credibility. We got a lot of “three-tier strategy” arm-waving (note there is no actual foundation model tier) and glorification of fondue and cuckoo clocks (i.e. ye old Switzerland strategy). I’m not alone in being underwhelmed:
It is totally fine to say you’re just going to be an infrastructure provider for generative AI (especially if that is what you’re doing). But claims to leadership in all things when you’re manifestly not competitive (or even present) don’t help your cause. And the more you talk about generative AI, the more you distract from your palpable plumbing prowess, where you are the leader and what the vast majority of your customers care most about. In other words, don’t overindex on your weaknesses, yet here we are.
There were also a bunch of IBM vibes, between the repeated reminders of long-past glories and vague claims that “only we can provide enterprise capabilities”, like IBM made about cloud computing (except for the having an actual cloud part).
In terms of the announcements, the Q “spokesmodel” looks to be a RAG chatbot of AWS documentation, presumably on Anthropic (and the q about the NYT story on Q being for general information workers is whether that was Amazon exaggeration or just the Times’ traditional struggles with understanding technology). Titan Image Generator I suspect is Stable Diffusion under the hood. Guardrails is the AWS version of the Copilot stack. And still no sign of a competitive LLM of their own (and it gets harder and harder to catch up with every passing day). But most of all, the “three steps into a 10k race” metaphor seems to have finally been deprecated, for which we are all thankful.
Previous: re:Invent or irrelevant?, Scuttling Titan(ic), Scaling Olympus?, Anthropic Adds Billions For More Existential AI Hand-wringing, Culture Clash Conjecture: Amazon and Anthropic, Titan or Titanic?, The Amazon AI Inferiority Complex
Instability AI
Previous: Stability AI: Not So Stable, Seeing Post Facto Red Flags Ex Ante
Private Equity Shot: VMware
Private Equity Chaser: VMware
Broadcom isn’t a private equity firm, but they’re absolutely running the private equity playbook. History strongly suggests price increases are next. RIP VMware.
Software Migration Alert: VMware
When private equity comes amalgamating, it is time to start migrating. Why? Because private equity ruins software companies.
Previous: Perfidious Private Equity, Software Migration Alert: Avid Technology, Software Migration Alert: EngageSmart, This Week’s Software Migration Alerts
Software Migration Alert: Rover
When private equity comes amalgamating, it is time to start migrating. Why? Because software companies go to the dogs under private equity ownership.
“We Have the GPUs!!!”
I don’t know this research firm but interesting if true.
And the claim “server unit shipments for 2023 could crash by up to 20 percent” isn’t auspicious for Team Repatriation. Nor are Dell (servers and networking +9%) and HPE’s (“The Compute division, which contains HPE’s traditional server business, dropped 31% to $2.6 billion, a steeper fall than analysts projected“) latest results.
Previous: Cloud Repatriation: The Search Continues, Cloud Repatriation: Still Not a Thing, Platformonomics Repatriation Index™ – Q1 2023: Surf’s Up?, The Inexorable Attraction Between Terrible Things: Cloud Repatriation and Private Equity
Company Killed By Its Customers
Elon wants you to know that eX-Twitter’s problems have absolutely nothing to do with erratic 3am decisions by a part-time CEO who doesn’t understand the business for which he drastically overpaid.
Related: Elon Tries to Cheer Up Linda Yaccarino After Her Trainwreck Code Conference Interview, Says “Hold My Beer” (watch the whole interview with Jonathan — there is so much more than than Elon telling advertisers to f*ck off)
Technology and the Liberal Arts
Apple’s control freak censorship proclivities make it very hard to be “the new HBO” and perhaps signal the end of the golden age of television.
Previous: Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Apple