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
Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Anthropic Edition
Space Twitter continues its transition from self-proclaimed frontier lab to neocloud.
The statement emphasizes the speed with which Colossus 1 was deployed, which is an odd value proposition. Being able to stand up infrastructure quickly doesn’t matter if you can’t write software to take advantage of it. Elon has promised leading edge software so many times (Full Self Driving is into decade two of promises, the next version of Grok is always going to be superlative, etc.) yet never delivered. One might almost conclude he’s just not a software guy. When he says “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up”, who is that on? Why will the next effort go better?
But Elon the IPO salesman got what he needed out of the announce:
As part of this agreement, Anthropic also expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.
100x revenue valuation (aka the Price-to-Elon ratio) here we come!
And Elon the schizophrenic AI safety enthusiast (aka “safety for thee, but not me”) also made an appearance:
Would it be cynical to conclude his oft-professed philosophical and political views are entirely contingent on his commercial interests?
And in case the risks of taking an Elon dependency were not already abundantly clear, he made it explicit:
(I’d invite you to define “harm humanity”, but clearly that is reserved for Elon).
Previous:
Private Equity in Action: “We’re ‘AI Winners’, Really”
Good way to extract whatever cash is left at all those software companies PE bought!
Previous:
Perfidious Private Equity, Software Migration Alerts for Private Equity Owned Companies, Private Equity in Action: You Can’t Spell Extraction without AI, Private Equity in Action: Medallia, Private Equity in Action: Come for the Subpar Returns, Stay for the Illiquidity v2, Private Equity in Action: Come for the Subpar Returns, Stay for the Illiquidity, Private Equity in Action: From Famed to Fraught, Private Equity in Action: I’m Lovin’ It, Private Equity in Action: Narrative Collapse?, Private Equity in Action: The Great Garage Door Service Wars, Private Equity in Action: Having to Show Their Math is New Experience, Private Equity in Action: Underperforming
The Necessity of Billionaires
Don’t progressives logically have to make the leap from “billionaires shouldn’t exist” to “sport teams shouldn’t exist”?
