Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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News
NVIDIA Q2 Earnings
NVIDIA’s definition of a “cloud service provider” remains fuzzy (I think they include their boutique GPU cloud buddies), but those customers bought $11.84B of data center gear in the most recent quarter:
Cloud service providers represented roughly 45% of our Data Center revenue, and more than 50% stemmed from consumer internet and enterprise companies.
Meta is consumer internet?
NVIDIA’s 10-Q provides some information on their biggest customers, but it is hard to untangle as some purchases are direct and some are indirect through box builders:
Where is GPT-5?
The biggest question for generative AI is whether scaling will continue to work and how big a leap we get from the next generation of models Originally rumored for summer, there is no sign of GPT-5 on the horizon. Meanwhile everyone else has largely caught up to GPT-4 (except, of course, for Amazon, who are still training for an ultramarathon). Possible explanations include:
- GPT-5 is just late — new scale brings new challenges to surmount
- It took time to get that much hardware in place
- Scaling has plateaued
- The organizational chaos at Open AI had consequences
- Open AI is doing more than just another scaling turn of the crank with GPT-5?
What think? Comment below or send private thoughts.
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Existential Corner: Floor Wax or Dessert Topping?,
Existential Corner: What is OpenAI This Week?, Existential Corner: What is OpenAI?, We Will Talk About AI, Existential Corner: How Many Steps into the 10K are We?, Amazon Desperately Seeks Compression Algorithm for Experience, The AWS Generative AI Soap Opera, The Amazon AI Inferiority Complex
The Durov Affair
Two things can be simultaneously true:
1.) The Europeans remain delusional in their censorious beliefs they both can and should control all speech on the Internet, that “inadequate moderation” is a crime (at least in France), and their continued war against encryption that makes them an Advanced Persistent Threat (despite Telegram not being particularly secure or encrypted), and
2.) Telegram is popular with Russians because it was compromised by Russia. Hence the freakout about Durov’s arrest by both Russia and Russia’s Western stooges. It definitely undermines the narrative that Durov fled Russia to protect Telegram users from the Kremlin.
The combination of these two points also suggest more might be going on behind the scenes than we realize.
And heavy Telegram user and French President Emmanuel Macron is an idiot.
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Getting Out of China: IBM Edition
IBM closing their China R&D operations will no doubt be spun as another glorious chapter in IBM’s “growth” story, but in this case they’re not alone. Given the writing has been on the wall now for years, there is no excuse for being caught unaware as decoupling continues to play out.
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“Bronny” Ellison Beats “Bronny” Bronfman
(“Bronny” is a term to describe male nepo babies.)
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Private Equity in Action: “How PE Keeps Planes in the Air”
Bit of a mystery how the PE playbook of slashing jobs and raising prices helps aviation safety…
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Private Equity in Action: OtterTune,Private Equity in Action: PluralSight, Private Equity in Action: Not Every VMware Customer Was Screwed, Private Equity in Action: The VMware Saga May Never End, Software Migration Alerts, Private Equity in Action: VMware “Unease” Continues, Perfidious Private Equity, Private Equity in Action: VMware Yet Again, Private Equity in Action: VMware (Continued), Private Equity in Action: VMware, Private Equity Will Buy and Ruin More Software Companies, Software Migration Alert: VMware (Continued), Software Migration Alert: VMware, Private Equity in Action: VMware Customer Complaints “Unwarranted”
Private Equity in Action: Any Given Sunday
Some predictions: the NFL shifts to eight-man football and ticket prices go up up up!