Charlie Williams
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pontifc8.bsky.social
Charlie Williams
@pontifc8.bsky.social
400 followers 650 following 91 posts
Professor at Bocconi University in Milan. Amiable dabbler posting about business research, business education, strategy execution, human impact of business, and maybe a few other things.
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pontifc8.bsky.social
The idea that concern with “pedantic details” identifies a review from an LLM is pretty funny. Human reviewers are all too capable of this!
November 27, 2025 at 5:44 PM
pontifc8.bsky.social
So that changed fast
November 23, 2025 at 9:08 PM
pontifc8.bsky.social
Do you give yourself mad-lib like reference challenges when you have to write about the same depressing thing over & over again?
November 19, 2025 at 5:48 PM
pontifc8.bsky.social
Good lord, that is so true. Let’s hope it gives us the strength to resist completely performative “scandals” in the future. @nyt I’m looking at you!!
November 18, 2025 at 7:45 AM
Reposted by Charlie Williams
edzitron.com
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/
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…
April 28, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by Charlie Williams
edzitron.com
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/
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!
April 28, 2025 at 5:11 PM