Turkey Day tech thoughts

Some readers may recall that around the July 4th holiday, rather than do my normal column where I take a deep dive into a subject that’s been on my mind, I instead paid homage to Dan Shaughnessy, the long-time sports columnist at the Boston Globe, who regularly writes columns with his random thoughts about the goings-on in sports news. With another holiday upon us, I decided to revisit the idea.

So here goes: Picked up enterprise tech news pieces while zipping through a short week and waiting for Turkey Day, time with family, feasting and football.

*It struck me kinda funny, struck me kinda sad when I read Satya Nadella’s benevolent, kumbaya piece about our AI future on LinkedIn recently. The title alone brought forth visions of rainbows and unicorns: A Positive Sum Future, Nadella’s idealistic view of our AI future as he steps back from his day-to-day CEO role and responsibilities to hang with the technical teams more. As Dan would say, swell.

He put forth this lovely thought: “Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits.” It sounds so great, it almost makes you forget he works for a company with a $3.5 trillion market cap, one that clearly hopes to dominate the AI market. I guess both things can be true.

It reminded me of another comment Nadella made in 2015 when he appeared on stage at Dreamforce with Marc Benioff, ending years of litigation and general hostility between the two companies. On that day he said, “It is incumbent upon us, especially those of us who are platform vendors to partner broadly to solve real pain points our customers have." It was all about working together, except when it wasn’t, at which point he would compete hard — and compete hard he has.

There’s nothing wrong with that of course. It’s what companies do, and when done well customers can benefit from the ensuing innovation. Just don’t pretend it’s anything more than that or it’s all about everybody winning because it rarely is.

Quiz (answer below): Name the company that is fourth in the cloud infrastructure market behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google. 

*Some VC firms must be countin’ on a miracle when it comes to investing in AI startups, if the latest data from PitchBook is any indication. The firm found that investors plowed almost $55 billion into so-called AI startups in Q3, up from $49 billion the prior quarter. Four deals accounted for 46% of that amount: Anthropic scoring $13 billion, xAI landing $10 billion, Mistral pulling in $1.5 billion and finally Nscale nabbing $1.1 billion — for a total of $25.6 billion for those four deals.

That’s a lot of capital concentrated in four companies, and it left the remaining 1,082 startups to split $29 billion or an average of around $27 million each.

There’s a strong belief that investors can win by investing in the biggest large language models because these will be the platforms where future software gets built. That’s probably a good bet, but there’s also a chance that these models become commodified over time and have less value, while costing billions and billions to operate. It’s clear that not everyone can win and some investors will get lost along the way.

*It seems that for Jeff Bezos, being founder and chairman of Amazon, a space company and owner of assorted yachts and a major newspaper isn’t enough. He needs a new toy to keep his head expanding, and he recently announced that he has a shiny new AI startup. He put up some of the $6.2 billion in initial funding, and named himself co-chief executive. Hard to believe he’s sharing the title, but it’s probably because he’s a little busy with his other responsibilities to devote full-time to his newest venture.

According to the NYT, the company is known as Project Prometheus and will focus on AI engineering with a manufacturing bent, specifically computers, cars and spacecraft. You can see how this might fit in with his other ventures.

The company, which has mostly stayed under the radar until recently, already has 100 employees. It will be interesting to see if Bezos has the Midas touch more than once or if billionaire impatience gets in the way.

On that note, go off and enjoy the holiday, be safe and we will be back next week reporting from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.

Quiz Answer: Alibaba with around 4% market share, per Synergy Research.

~Ron

Featured photo by Ron Miller.