RightSignalWeek in review
Week in review
Oct 26 – Nov 1
The cost of AI showed up in this week's earnings. Big Tech kept spending heavily while cash flow turned negative and share prices fell, and Anthropic's IPO filing gave the first detailed look inside an AI lab's finances. Crawlers taking content to train AI were another thread, as sites, Reddit and the big AI companies each acted on scraping. On the security side, a record crypto theft and a tampered coding add-on stood out.
The stories that mattered
- Big Tech has over $3 trillion in AI spending planned and returns less cash to investorsFive tech giants have committed more than $3 trillion to AI and return less cash to shareholders than at any time in 15 years, and that worry fed the week's stock falls.
- Anthropic's stock market filing shows an 85% gross margin from running its AI modelsAnthropic's filing to go public shows an 85% gross margin from running its models, alongside large losses, and is a key test of whether selling AI can pay.
- Alphabet loses a record $500 billion in value as AI answers slow its search growthAlphabet lost a record $500 billion in value as AI answers slowed search revenue growth and its AI spending pushed cash flow negative.
- Intel expects PC sales to keep shrinking into 2027 as memory prices riseIntel's shares had their worst day since the 1970s because AI demand is driving up memory prices and shrinking PC sales, even as its server chip sales grow.
- Binance restarts withdrawals as the FBI blames North Korea for its $6.3 billion hackThe FBI blamed North Korea for the $6.3 billion Binance theft, a record crypto heist, and Binance has covered 95% of it with its own money.
- OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic back one way for sites to refuse AI trainingThe four largest AI companies agreed on one signal that lets websites refuse AI training, in a week when Roblox's crawler and Reddit's login wall made scraping a live issue.
- OpenAI says its AI models produced new results in maths, computer science and physicsOpenAI says its models reached new results in maths, computer science and physics, including a preprint arguing that the Exponential Time Hypothesis is false, and says how researchers can check them.
- Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to about a quarter of its staffMicrosoft offered voluntary exits to about 60,000 staff, roughly a quarter of its workforce, while it also spends heavily on AI.
Concepts this week
- SoftmaxConcept of the day, Mon, Oct 26
- Byte-pair encodingConcept of the day, Tue, Oct 27
- Shamir's secret sharingConcept of the day, Wed, Oct 28
- Edit distanceConcept of the day, Thu, Oct 29
- Audio fingerprintingConcept of the day, Fri, Oct 30
- Differential privacyConcept of the day, Sat, Oct 31
- Discrete cosine transformConcept of the day, Sun, Nov 1