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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.
It might be good to start with the much older fungible tokens(erc-20 tokens) that have at times been called colored coins. A fungible token is any token where every one is just as good as any others. A lot of erc-20s are used like stock certificates or company bucks, in polymarket bets for instance use the USDC erc-20 token which is pegged to the USD in transactions. There's all sorts of uses for these tokens in the crypto ecosystem, some great like stable coins, some silly, most meme coins you've heard of are erc-20 tokens. With an erc-20 you could sell general admission tickets to a concert so any who shows up can prove their wallet owns at least one concert coin.
Now, what if instead of general admission tickets you want to sell tickets for specific seats? You could create a new erc-20 token for every individual seat and only issue one for each, so whoever has that coin is the owner and no one else is, but that's a lot of overhead if you want to issue a lot of tickets. Enter ERC-721 the NFT. Now you can make unique tokens for unique assets.
Am I understanding this correctly, is the NFT not really "you can sit in this particular seat" because there's one seat but a zillion tokens? or is there some item that backs up the NFT so that you could cash it in or translate it into physical assets?
No, each nft is unique so you can address it to a particular seat. Fungible tokens are not unique so you can only use them for general admission.
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