Charlie Williams

“Technology will just get better”

idk but I liked the Internet better 25 years ago

The renewable energy transition goes very slowly, then all at once

How did the hype get so far ahead of reality?

It’s time for scientists to publicize the research that is being cancelled. Enough silence in hopes of evading the axe! Disease communities (and others) are organized & can be activated!

If I'm Wrong, How Am I Wrong Exactly? I dunno man, all of this sure seems like the hyperscalers are reducing their capital expenditures at a time when tariffs and economic uncertainty are making investors more critical of revenues. It sure seems like nobody outside of OpenAI is making any real revenue on generative AI, and they're certainly not making a profit. It also, at this point, is pretty obvious that generative AI isn't going to do much more than it does today. If Amazon is only making $5 billion in revenue from the literal only shiny new thing it has, sold on the world's premier cloud platform, at a time when businesses are hungry and desperate to integrate AI, then there's little chance this suddenly turns into a remarkable revenue-driver. Amazon made $187.79 billion in its last quarterly earnings, and if $5 billion is all it’s making at the very height of the bubble, it heavily suggests that there may not actually be that much money to make, either because it's too expensive to run these services or because these services don't have the kind of total addressable market as the rest of Amazon's services. Microsoft reported that it was making a paltry $13 billion a year — so the equivalent of $3.25 billion a quarter — selling generative AI services and model access. The Information reported that Salesforce's "Agentforce" bullshit isn't even going to boost sales growth in 2025, in part because it’s pitching it as "digital labor that can essentially replace humans for tasks" and it turns out that it doesn't do that very well at all, costs $2 a conversation, and requires paying Salesforce to use its "data cloud" product. What, if anything, suggests that I'm wrong here? That things have worked out in the past with things like the Internet and smartphones, and so it surely must happen for generative AI and, by extension, OpenAI? That companies like Uber lost money and eventually worked out (see my response here)? That OpenAI is growing fast, and that somehow …

Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. Silicon Valley is dominated by management consultants that no longer know what innovation looks like, tricked by Sam Altman, a savvy con artist who took advantage of tech’s desperation for growth. Generative AI is the perfected nihilistic form of tech bubbles — a way for people to spend a lot of money and power on cloud compute because they don’t have anything better to do. Large Language Models are boring, unprofitable cloud software stretched to their limits — both ethically and technologically — as a means of tech’s collapsing growth era, OpenAI’s non-profit mission fattened up to make foie gras for SaaS companies to upsell their clients and cloud compute companies to sell GPUs at an hourly rate. The Rot Economy has consumed the tech industry. Every American tech firm has become corrupted by the growth-at-all-costs mindset, and thus they no longer know how to make sustainable businesses that solve real problems, largely because the people that run them haven’t experienced them for decades. As a result, none of them were ready for when Sam Altman tricked them into believing he was their savior. Generative AI isn’t about helping you or me do things — it’s about making new SKUs, new monthly subscription costs for consumers and enterprises, new ways to convince people to pay more for the things that they already used to be slightly different in a way that often ends up being worse. Only an industry out of options would choose this bubble, and the punishment for doing so will be grim. I don’t know if you think I’m wrong or not. I don’t know if you think I’m crazy for the way I communicate about this industry. Even if you think I am, think long and hard about why it is you disagree with me, and the consequences of me being wrong. There is nothing else after generative AI. There are no other hype…

Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. The tech and business media must change their ways, or risk repeating these cycles forever.
www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Oh, By The Way, The Bubble Might Be Bursting Hey, remember in August of last year when I talked about the pale horses of the AIpocalpyse? One of the major warning signs that the bubble was bursting was big tech firms reducing their capital expenditures, a call I've made before, with a little more clarity, on April 4 2024: While I hope I'm wrong, the calamity I fear is one where the massive over-investment in data centers is met with a lack of meaningful growth or profit, leading to the markets turning on the major cloud players that staked their future on unproven generative AI. If businesses don't adopt AI at scale — not experimentally, but at the core of their operations — the revenue is simply not there to sustain the hype, and once the market turns, it will turn hard, demanding efficiency and cutbacks that will lead to tens of thousands of job cuts. We're about to find out if I'm right. Last week, Yahoo Finance reported that analyst Josh Beck said that Amazon's generative AI revenue for Amazon Web Services would be $5 billion, a remarkably small sum that is A) not profit and B) a drop in the bucket compared to Amazon's projected $105 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, its $78.2 billion in 2024, or its $48.4 billion in 2023. Is That Really It? Are you kidding me? Amazon will only make $5 billion from AI in 2025? What? 5 billion dollars? Five billion god damn dollars? Are you fucking kidding me? You'd make more money auctioning dogs! This is a disgrace! And if you're wondering, yes! All of this is for AI: CEO Andy Jassy said in February that the vast majority of this year’s $100 billion in capital investments from the tech giant will go toward building out artificial intelligence capacity for its cloud segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Well shit, I bet investors are gonna love this! Better save some money, Andy!

Oh, shit! A report from Wells Fargo analysts (called "Data Centers: AWS Goes on Pause") says that Amazon has "paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side...[and while] it's not clear the magnitude of the pause...the positioning is similar to what [analysts have] heard recently from Microsoft, [that] they are digesting aggressive recent lease-up deals...pulling back from a pipeline of LOIs or SOQs." Some asshole is going to say "LOIs and SOQs aren't a big deal," but they are. I wrote about it here. "Digesting" in this case refers to when hyperscalers sit with their current capacity for a minute, and Wells Fargo adds that these periods typically last 6-12 months, though can be much shorter. It's not obvious how much capacity Amazon is walking away from, but they are walking away from capacity. It's happening. But what if it wasn't just Amazon? Another report from friend of the newsletter (read: people I email occasionally asking for a PDF) analyst TD Cowen put out a report last week that, while titled in a way that suggested there wasn't a pull back, actually said there was. Let's take a look at one damning quote: ...relative to the hyperscale demand backdrop at PTC, hyperscale demand has moderated a bit (driven by the Microsoft pullback and to a lesser extent Amazon, discussed below), particularly in Europe, 2) there has been a broader moderation in the urgency and speed with which the hyperscalers are looking to take down capacity, and 3) the number of large deals (i.e. +400MW deals) in the market appears to have moderated. In plain English, this means "demand has come down, there's less urgency in building this stuff, and the market is slowing down. Cowen also added that it "...observed a moderation in the exuberance around the outlook for hyperscale demand which characterized the market this time last year." Brother, isn't this meant to be the next big thing? We need more exuberance! Not less!

It is now actively illogical to act as if generative AI is a real movement. Analyst Josh Beck said last week that Amazon will only make *$5bn* from AI in 2025 - after spending $105bn in capex. And they're pulling back on data centers too. This isn't a revolution!
www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Mark Halperin hasn't seen a "clever and invigorating joke" since the 2004 presidential election cycle.

We are definitely at peak market moment for “Andreesen seems brilliant for spending 20 hours a day on signal chats.” Gonna be a fast slide from here - joining Elon in the heap at the bottom.

We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All The vast ‘brains’ of artificial intelligence models can memorize endless lists of rules. That’s useful, but not how humans solve problems.

This is a good rundown of some research about how AI thinks. Big bags of heuristics do not “generalize” to new problems very well. AGI may be much farther away than industry leaders claim. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...

Cool graph. If you had asked me, I would not have correctly predicted that the slope was steepest for Latin America

Powerful. But not “intelligent.” A transformative technology. But not going to replace all human & organizational intelligence in a matter of years. We’re like the 18th C audiences mesmerized by batteries attached to twitching frog legs thinking the font of life had been discovered.

Essay | The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions Shortly before Daniel Kahneman died last March, he emailed friends a message: He was choosing to end his own life in Switzerland. Some are still struggling with his choice.

I had not seen the revelation last month that Daniel Kahneman ended his life with medical assistance in 2024.

I wonder if it was at the same location in Switzerland where my mother ended her life this January. Reading the article I was back there, living her choice.

www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Not a lot of people know that manufacturing generates just 10% of U.S. GDP and employs 10% of workers.

Ag + mining is about 2% of GDP.

The rest comes from various services. The U.S. is a service economy like most other developed nations.

So much bravery. So much integrity.

That post is getting passed around a lot (as pics at the other place), so it's worth knowing it's probably wrong.

‘The Terror Is Real’: An Appalled Tech Industry Is Scared to Criticize Elon Musk A huge swath of Silicon Valley is horrified by what Elon Musk is doing — but they’re increasingly afraid to say so.

So I guess there is no such thing as "fuck you" money - more money just makes you more fucked.

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

“Sinks in” - Could there be a funnier headline about “efficient” markets? Like the market is Homer Simpson slapping his forehead, “doh!”

photo of a bodysuit filled with garbage and a taped portrait of Elon Musk hangs upside down on the gate near piazzale Loreto in Milan, Italy. Photo from Ansa Italia 2025

Today in Milan, a student activist group hung a trash-filled effigy of Musk upside down on a gate outside of piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini's body was displayed in 1945.
They left the message: "C'è sempre posto a piazzale Loreto, Elon" (There's always room in piazzale Loreto, Elon)

It’s because of the crackdown in New Jersey.

Exactly!! 😆 Great show, so much insightful history.

Alright, here's a more #strategy specific question. What do academic strategists think of Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy? I've just come across it and it seems like a pretty good synthesis of defensible sources of advantage, which he calls power. Your thoughts?

Actually, the interesting question is how the case of BlueSky fits or doesn't fit the analogies and models people are offering here. @kissane.bsky.social seems to be right that no amount of moderating tools or "federated" systems will keep a commuinity safe once it becomes popular. That tracks.

Is anybody else I know reading and thinking about this analogy of the social web as a dangerous "dark forest"? I do wonder where and how quality human interactions can be supported in digital societies. Anyone got a favorite "cozy web" corner we can spoil? (don't say BlueSky - too late!)

Of course, this morning on Trenitalia for my commute is an absolute shit show with my train (currently) running 30 minutes late & a broken down train in a station just ahead.

Mind the gap! Europe’s Rail Operators: a Comparative Ranking Europe’s leading advocates for clean transport & energy

Here is the underlying report with rankings: www.transportenvironment.org/articles/rai...

Eurostar the worst-performing rail service in Europe, campaigners find Firm disputes Transport and Environment’s findings, which also ranked Deutsche Bahn as one of the least reliable

Guess who just edged Switzerland in an independent rating of train services in Europe? Way to go, Trenitalia.

www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d...

How annoying that these announcements follow the cardinal sin of abstracts and pronounce the research as dealing with “important questions” without saying what they are or what has been found. Grrr