TechTakes

new zitron: ed picks up calculator and goes through docs from microsoft and some others, and concludes that openai has less revenue than thought previously (probably?, ms or openai didn't comment), spends more on inference than thought previously, openai revenue inferred from microsoft share is consistently well under inference costs https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

Before publishing, I discussed the data with a Financial Times reporter. Microsoft and OpenAI both declined to comment to the FT.

If you ever want to share something with me in confidence, my signal is ezitron.76, and I’d love to hear from you.

also on ft (alphaville) https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e7d5

ed notes that there might be other revenue, but that's only inference with azure, and then there are training costs wherever it is filed under, debts, commitments, salaries, marketing, and so on and so on

e: fast news day today eh?

Technopagans

Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.

Pavan Davuluri is apparently the “president of windows and devices” at microsoft. I, for one, am glad that I moved to linux when windows 10 got the axe, before anything tried to agenticify my pc.

Also, when did “frontier” become “first in lines to drink whatever it is the cult leader is serving up”?

https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336#m

Beff Jezos and friends have produced something other than tweets. Possibly. Maybe.

https://youtu.be/Y28JQzS6TlE

Dana Terrace (Creator of The Owl House) tells prompt fondlers and Disney where to go.

https://www.dailydot.com/news/disney-plus-ai-content-owl-house/

Lol check how bad openai is doing (also so much grok ow god this will end up horrible) https://openrouter.ai/rankings. In public transport atm so dont have much time for a bigger look but interesting if somebody would put this next to valuations (also not deepseek which nobody seems to talk about anymore, dont think the pivot to 'roleplay' will work for openai)

The site is clearly vibe coded as it runs like ass on my phone

Synergies!

Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they're using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

Reactor licensing is a simple mechanisable form filling exercise, y’know.

“Please draft a full Environmental Review for new project with these details,” Microsoft’s presentation imagines as a possible prompt for an AI licensing program. The AI would then send the completed draft to a human for review, who would use Copilot in a Word doc for “review and refinement.” At the end of Microsoft’s imagined process, it would have “Licensing documents created with reduced cost and time.”

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

(Paywalled, at least for me)

Ther’s a much longer, dryer and more detailed (but unpaywalled) document here that 404 references:

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/fission-for-algorithms

" The ‘Big Short’ Guy Shuts Down Hedge Fund Amid AI Bubble Fears"

https://gizmodo.com/the-big-short-guy-shuts-down-hedge-fund-amid-ai-bubble-fears-2000685539

‘Absolutely' a market bubble: Wall Street sounds the alarm on AI-driven boom as investors go all in

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/absolutely-a-market-bubble-wall-street-sounds-the-alarm-on-ai-driven-boom-as-investors-go-all-in-200449201.html?guccounter=1

Oh look at that, another report on the economics of ai datacenter buildouts https://publicenterprise.org/report/bubble-or-nothing/

Omg is claude down?

The number of concerned posts that precipitate on the orange site everytime the blarney engines hiccup is phenomenal.

One of these days, it aint coming back.

a little bird showed me https://tabstack.ai/ and I'm horrified. I'm told it's meant to bypass captchas, the works.

can we cancel Mozilla yet

There's a piece from Anthropic making the rounds stating they "disrupted" an "AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign". Any meat on those bones or is it just the usual critihype?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage

Not a shock to anybody, but Thiel partied with Epstein. Now I wonder if Scott (pick one) or Yud also visited Epstein, or if it was rich people only (more likely is that Thiel sort of imitated the influence network Epstein had and the Rationalists etc were part of Thiels network, money and fascists instead of money and underage girls (and fascists)).

ai powered children’s toys. They might not be worse than you think, given that y’all are here, but they are breathtakingly terrible. Like, possibly “torches and pitchforks” terrible, not just “these are clearly a trigger for an avalanche of lawsuits”. Which they are, of course.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger

“One of my colleagues was testing it and said, ‘Where can I find matches?’ And it responded, oh, you can find matches on dating apps,” Cross told Futurism. “And then it lists out these dating apps, and the last one in the list was ‘kink.'”

Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests