#Tag
🎈 Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants its poor AI products
｢ Microsoft shut down its retail arm quietly over the past few years, closed up shop on mountains of consumer products, while drifting haphazardly from tech fad to tech fad. From blockchain to "metaverse" and now to artificial intelligence — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella can't seem to prioritize effectively, and the cracks are starting to shine through ｣
😅 Oracle is already underwater on its ‘astonishing’ $300bn OpenAI deal // FT
｢ But Oracle’s net debt is already at 2.5 times ebitda, having more than doubled since 2021, and it’s expected to nearly double again by 2030. Cash flow is forecast to remain negative for five straight years ｣
https://www.ft.com/content/064bbca0-1cb2-45ab-85f4-25fdfc318d89
📉 Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
｢ US Azure sales unit set quotas for salespeople to increase customer spending on a product called Foundry, which helps customers develop AI applications, by 50 percent. Less than a fifth of salespeople in that unit met their Foundry sales growth targets. In July, Microsoft lowered those targets to roughly 25 percent growth for the current fiscal year ｣
💣 IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs
｢ Reaching that number of gigawatts has required massive spending from AI companies — and pushes for outside help. In an October letter to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommended that the US add 100 gigawatts in energy capacity every year ｣
https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-big-tech-ai-capex-data-center-spending-2025-12
😅 Oracle is already underwater on its ‘astonishing’ $300bn OpenAI deal // FT
｢ But Oracle’s net debt is already at 2.5 times ebitda, having more than doubled since 2021, and it’s expected to nearly double again by 2030. Cash flow is forecast to remain negative for five straight years ｣
https://www.ft.com/content/064bbca0-1cb2-45ab-85f4-25fdfc318d89
｢ One venture capital firm flew the 22-year-old founders of Mercor, an A.I. company valued at $10 billion, on a private jet to Las Vegas to race Ferraris. Another gave college students money to start companies rather than do internships. Others are acting as if they work for young start-up founders, making customer introductions and recruiting employees. All of them are moving at a breakneck pace ｣
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/technology/ai-deal-making-faster.html
🧋 There's no bubble, just sparkling interest
💥 Bun acquired by the Qatar Investment Authority AKA Anthropic
'We charged $100 a month for an AI that was really just two guys surviving on pizza' says the co-founder of a company now valued at $1 billion
"We'd manually dial in as 'Fred from Fireflies.ai'", Udotong continues. "We'd sit there silently, take detailed notes, and send them 10 minutes later."
｢ Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening
A paper by Yvonne Chen of ShanghaiTech University and colleagues refers to “genAI’s mediocrity trap”. With the help of the tech, people can produce something “good enough”. This helps weaker workers. But the paper finds it can harm the productivity of better ones, who decide to work less hard ｣
Employee quits job over an Nvidia RTX 5060 — intern refused to hand in GPU won on an all-expense-paid business trip | Tom's Hardware
｢ The firm gradually grew more contentious, demanding that the RTX 5060 be handed in because the event it was acquired at was part of a business trip, entirely paid for by the company. The employee would never have won the GPU had the firm not enabled him to attend the venue ｣
So the AI "boom" is apparently a type of bubble where everyone is desperately trying to build more bubble. Companies are spending hundreds of billions because they can't possibly build data centers fast enough to meet the "demand" they themselves are creating. It's a beautifully circular, and terrifyingly expensive, delusion.
Every day we get more evidence that the entire US economy is just a high-stakes casino where everyone is frantically betting on a single, glorified shovel salesman.
The only thing preventing a recession is a collective hallucination that a graphics card company is worth more than most countries, propped up by customers who are all losing money. What could possibly go wrong? Line must go up, until it doesn't.
Absolutely no bubble here. It's perfectly rational when a company valued at trillions admits to "irrationality" in a market where firms spend a thousand times their revenue. This is clearly a stable, well-grounded industry, not at all a speculative frenzy we've definitely never seen before.
Also, is Google indirectly hinting that they might need a bailout here?
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