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Executive Summary OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has, per The Information, said that OpenAI is not ready to go public in 2026, in part because of the "risks from its spending commitments" and not being sure whether the company's revenue growth would support its spending commitments. Friar (CFO) no longer reports to Sam Altman (CEO) and hasn't done so since August 2025. OpenAI's margins were lower in 2025 "...due to the company having to buy more expensive compute at the las...

Soundtrack — Soundgarden — Blow Up The Outside World A lot of people try to rationalize the AI bubble by digging up the past. Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is just like Amazon Web Services” ( it isn’t, Amazon Web Services was profitable in a decade and cost about $52 billion between 2003 and 2017, and that’s normalized for inflation ) and, most eg...

I’m turning 40 in a month or so, and at 40 years young, I’m old enough to remember as far back as December 11 2025, when Disney and OpenAI “reached an agreement” to “bring beloved characters from across Disney’s brands to Sora.” As part of the deal, Disney would “become a major customer of OpenAI,” use its API “to build new products, tools and experiences (as well as showing Sora videos in Disney+),” and “deploy ...

I hear from a lot of people that are filled with bilious fury about the tech industry, but few companies have pissed off the world more than Adobe. As the foremost monopolist in software, web and graphic design, Adobe has created one of the single-most abusive, usurious freakshows in capitalist history, trapping users in endless, punishing subscriptions to software they need that only ever seems to get worse. In the Department of Justice’s recently-settled case against Adobe , it was reve...

We have a global intelligence crisis, in that a lot of people are being really fucking stupid. As I discussed in this week’s free piece , alleged financial analyst Citrini Research put out a truly awful screed called the “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” — a slop-filled scare-fiction written and framed with the authority of deeply-founded analysis, so much so that it caused a global selloff in stocks .  At 7,000 words, you’d expect the piece to have some s...

Editor's note: a previous version of this newsletter went out with Matt Hughes' name on it, that's my editor who went over it for spelling errors and loaded it into the CMS. Sorry! Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces again after a brief hiatus, mostly because I found myself trying to boil the ocean with each one, fearing that if I regularly emailed you you’d unsubscribe. I eventually realized how silly that was, so I’m back, and will be back ...

In May 2021, Dario Amodei and a crew of other former OpenAI researchers formed Anthropic and dedicated themselves to building the single-most-annoying Large Language Model company of all time.  Pardon me, sorry, I mean safest , because that’s the reason that Amodei and his crew claimed was why they left OpenAI : Dario Amodei: Yeah. So there was a group of us within OpenAI, that in the wake of making GPT-2 and GPT-3, had a kind of very strong focus belief in two things. I think even m...

Since the beginning of 2023, big tech has spent over $814 billion in capital expenditures, with a large portion of that going towards meeting the demands of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.  Big tech has spent big on GPUs, power infrastructure, and data center construction,  using a variety of financing methods to do so, including (but not limited to) leasing. And the way they’re going about structuring these finance deals is growing increasingly bizarre.  I’m...

Have you ever looked at something too long and felt like you were sort of seeing through it? Has anybody actually looked at a company this much in a way that wasn’t some sort of obsequious profile of a person who worked there? I don’t mean this as a way to fish for compliments — this experience is just so peculiar, because when you look at them hard enough, you begin to wonder why everybody isn’t just screaming all the time.  Yet I really do enjoy it. When you pu...

You can’t avoid Oracle. No, really, you can’t. Oracle is everywhere. It sells ERP software – enterprise resource planning, which is a rat king of different services for giant companies for financial services, procurement (IE: sourcing and organizing the goods your company needs to run), compliance, project management, and human resources. It sells database software, and even owns the programming language Java as part of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems back in 2010 .&#xA0...

Soundtrack - Radiohead - Karma Police I just spent a week at the Consumer Electronics Show, and one word kept coming up: bullshit.  LG, a company known for making home appliances and televisions, demonstrated a robot (named “CLOiD” for some reason) that could “fold laundry” (extremely slowly, in limited circumstances, and even then it sometimes failed) or cook (by which I mean put things in an oven that opened automatically) or find your keys (in a video demo), o...

Hey all, I'm not dropping this on the actual newsletter feed because it's a little self-indulgent and I'm not sure 88,000 or so people want an email about it. If you want to support my work directly, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words. In the bottom right hand corner of your screen you’ll see a red circle — click that and s...