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Software giant Oracle corporation is laying off thousands of workers and killing their Texas data center plans, per Reuters and Bloomberg. It appears that their capital expenditures have gotten ahead of their ability to pay for them and now they face the regrettable need to say it out loud shortly before markets close on a Friday afternoon.
This may be indirectly tied to the Iran conflict as Mid East sovereign wealth funds have begun pulling back from investment.
I'm interested to see the fallout of this one. My understanding is that the Ellison clan is fairly tight with the Trump admin.
Beyond that, I have concerns that this may be the match that lit the fuse on AI spending. I have spent the last six months trying to figure out why these valuations made any sense whatsoever. The expense profile of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI looked a lot more like Caterpillar to me than Salesforce. When it came to Oracle, I couldn't make sense of it at all.
In terms of explanations, I only had three explanations I had were that I was:
I still don't know which one it is.
Some of you here are clearly smarter and more educated than me. What do you think I'm missing here? My gut prediction is that this spirals into an even bigger flight from capital in the next six months, which causes holy hell on the retail market because the average investor is more leveraged now than they have been at any point in my lifetime. I'm also assuming it'll kill quite a lot of "LLM Wrapper" companies, like the one run by fear porn expert Matt Shumer.
I assume Google will be OK.
Beyond that, I don't have any idea.
Any predictions?
How many important actors in the AI space need to be religious fanatics for it to start to alter the spending patterns?
There's some subset of people you run into who genuinely believe in the Singularity, that the moment AGI is cracked nothing else matters. The whole concept of worrying about debt load after your company cracks AGI is silly, if another company cracks AGI first then having good profit margins won't save you. If it ushers in the end times, or Gay Luxury Space Communism, worrying about whether you lied to shareholders? Stupid.
The religious fanatics will say whatever they need to in order to push ahead.
Son of a bitch. I hadn't even considered that.
The entire Oracle trajectory makes sense to me. Oracle was very profitable for a long time because they were a legal extortion company that grudgingly shipped a database. Once MS SQL Server and Postgresql got good enough to compete, and once new companies wised up enough to avoid Oracle in the first place, the writing was on the wall. If they didn't diversify they'd die. This mapped to the increasingly wild hail Mary throws they've been making. Each attempt that failed to materialize hyper growth made the next attempt even more important. After their cloud offering ended up a distant fourth place and nfts didn't pan out, what was left? AI, obviously.
Completely ignoring the potential of the technology, Oracle really has no place in the market. They don't have a foundation model: they aren't even trying to make one. At best, they seem to be aiming for some kind of position as a utility company for GPGPU compute. Less charitably, they seem to be selling their credibility by laundering dodgy debt through their corporate credit rating.
I'd assumed that everyone involved in this was as greasy as Ellison, and much like most of the tech industry, I have learned not to make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
Doing some more reading, it looks like Anthropic employs a disproportionate number of rationalists and effective altruists. Even if you think those two philosophies have some good parts, they definitely have some peculiar failure modes, and some are worse than others. This is the same philosophy that Anthropic's chief philosopher holds.
I'm not a fan of this at all. I grew up around true believers. I even held the snakes. They're scarier than a con man, because at least the con man has predictable goals.
In short, thank you for bringing this to my attention, and fuck you for putting this evil in my head.
I know this is an aside, but can anyone explain NFTs to me in a way that makes sense? I look at things like the linked article and I still can't figure out why anyone thought they were a good idea or even a workable idea. There must be some steelmanned case for "this is what they can be used for", I just haven't stumbled across it. 'Here's a thing that's totally digital. You can own a piece of it, except you won't own it. It's more like you have a licence for it. Yeah, just like paying Microsoft that subscription fee every month. But you can still make money off it by...' and that's the step where I break down.
If I squint, I can see that "I pay for the right to pixel number three thousand of this digital image" is kinda like owning a limited edition engraving or print. Fine. But it's still not the original. Maybe I can sell my print and get the price or even a bit more for it, but it's not the original drawing that is still in the artist's possession and that holds all the value. If the token is non-fungible, then my pixel three thousand can't be replaced by a swapped-in pixel.
Except it can? Or am I completely stupid? I can sell my token for money because nobody else can own a token like it. It's like selling a house.
But I can own a house to sell. I can't own the original digital piece of art that I'm selling my token from. Or can I?
This is what I'm struggling to understand.
There's NFTs as in "monkey pictures" and NFTs as the technologies. NFTs enable digital property that escapes the issue of control over the database. Right now, digital ownership is based on a) the database admins will not tamper with "your property" and b) if they did, courts will adjudicate the issue and force the database owners to restore your property. In that context, it being your actual property is debatable, it's more of a contract you entered with the company to get certain services that is kept by that same company. The contract's original, binding version is not yours, the original is in the company's control and possession. NFTs means that this contract, for instance, digital show tickets, is inscribed onto a public ledger that is hardened against tampering, not just an entry in Ticketmaster's database. A house is actually a great example of what an NFT could represent; owning a house is not having the house in your pocket, it's having the deed in your name. An NFT could be the deed to a house; it would be unique, impossible to (practically) forge, kept on a public, safe ledger (again, not just an entry in someone's database), and there's all sort of neat stuff you could do with it; keys and locks that unlock with proof of ownership (or a revokable proof of access from the owner). Legal and financial transactions (like mortgages) that are adjudicated automatically by code, etc... Whether we'll get there anytime soon is questionable, but that's what the technology enables. Anything unique could be represented as an NFT.
The monkey picture kind of NFT is mostly just playing around with the economic effect of introducing exclusivity to a market, untethered from any other inherent usage value. The image is typically not even part of the NFT (as in, it's not written into the blockchain, as that is expensive, at least if you want to keep it on the base chain; it's kept externally), so what you're paying for is more like certificate. Often the image is created by an algorithm, so if you have the code and your token's properties you can recreate the image. You could recreate any of the other images too, but you wouldn't have the certificate to them. You can then use proof of ownership of that certificate programatically, for instance your ownership of a monkey could be verified by anyone and used as a ticket to access a party where you get your retinas burned.
An NFT ticket gives an unforgeable token, but this token only means anything as long as venues accept it, which they'll contract out to ticketmaster anyway, and they can revoke any access rights from a token as easily as if it was in their database.
NFT house ownership is a great example of something only useful for weird speculation. Otherwise, property rights only mean anything at all if enforced by violence, generally a state monopoly. But if you trust the state to respect that right, the state can just as well maintain the database. If you don't, the token being secure doesn't make the house any more secure.
Not that an NFT house deed is very secure, since by their nature they're bearer deeds. Which might be a useful concept to have for various legal purposes, but I don't think most people would be very comfortable with their house ownership being susceptible to burglary or 5$ wrench password cracking, since to the extent that they function as NFTs, transactions made under duress should be irreversible by courts.
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