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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Summer is flying by…
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Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Oracle
We’ve written at length about the financial risks of Oracle’s Hail Mary scramble to catch up with the hyperclouds, but less about the treasonous aspects:
With the Biden plan dead, Oracle was free to operate its data center complex in Malaysia as it saw fit. By the end of June, the facility was on track to become the second-biggest in the world. Oracle doesn’t release the names of its customers there, but by studying its output, an independent A.I. research firm, SemiAnalysis, determined that the facility was feeding most of its computing power to ByteDance. An analyst at the tech-focused think tank ChinaTalk, Aqib F. Zakaria, ran his own numbers and arrived at a startling conclusion: Oracle was providing a staggering 22.6 percent of China’s known A.I. computing power.
The TikTok travesty is one of the most sordid episodes of a sordid era.
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Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Apple Part II, Angelist, Elon Musk Part II, The Donald, Jeff Yass, Microsoft Bing, DC Lobbyists Part III, Hollywood, DC Lobbyists Part II, NBA, Warner Bros. Discovery, Germany, DC Lobbyists, Elon/Twitter, The Hugo Awards, Harvard University, Wall Street, Apple; Bronny’s Boffo Bid
Code Really Really Red at Google
As major turbulence rocks Google AI, I’m coincidentally almost done with Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. It is a good look at the emergence of the AI labs, not just Deep Mind. And it has some nice tidbits on the hypocrisy of AI safetyists (hello Elon!). But the book strongly suggests Demis is not a wartime leader.
The frequency and amplitude of the AI cycle is just insane.
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Software Migration Alert: Airtable
Bending Spoons, the Uri Geller of private equity, buys Airtable.
Two! Four! Six! Eight! Migrate!
SaaSmageddon requires the services of private equity (every ecosystem needs a scavenger), but it is still a disaster for users.
Yet Another Reason to Let AI Run the Federal Reserve
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Federal Reserve Issues Federal Agentic Market Committee Statement, Bringing the Federal Reserve into the Agentic Era, Hoping for Change: Monetary Policy Edition, Forget Summers and Yellen: Let a Bot Run the Federal Reserve, Nominating a Bot to the Federal Reserve Doesn’t Seem So Crazy Now Does It?, Let a Bot Run the Federal Reserve: 2021 Edition