❌

Normal view

Zuckerberg v. Amodei in AI Marketing

11 August 2026 at 01:01

If at first people don’t pay attention to what you say, say it again. That appears to be Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy. About two weeks after publishing a roughly 1,000-word opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word version of the same piece on Meta.com on Monday. (Today’s essay carried a nearly-identifical headline, while the first half-dozen paragraphs were almost word for word what ran in the WSJ opinion piece.) Hint to Zuckerberg: Shorter is better.

Zuckerberg’s opus was part of a growing number of lengthy essays, published under the bylines of AI leaders, that discuss AI and society. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a frequent contributor to the genre, with his most recent publication “Policy on the AI Exponential.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has his own blog, supplemented by weighty posts from his company like this one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posts on X. For the most part, these essays are long and dry. In other words, they’re perfect for an AI chatbot to summarize. It makes you wonder if they’re meant to prove to consumers the value of AI!

Monday.com Projects Revenue Growth Slowdown in Q3

10 August 2026 at 16:43

Enterprise software firm Monday.com reported a 22% lift in second quarter revenue, but projected a slowdown in third quarter revenue growth to between 16% and 17%, partly because of the impact of a big layoff it undertook last month. Monday shares fell 9%.

At the same time, Monday.com said it ...

AI’s Software Winners and Losers Are Becoming Clearer

9 August 2026 at 23:00

After last week’s earnings onslaught, things will likely quiet down this week. Aside from neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius, no major tech earnings announcements are scheduled, which gives us a chance to assess what we learned in the past week. One big takeaway is that the enterprise software sector has bifurcated between those firms that are getting something out of AI and those that are not. 

It’s no secret Palantir is a winner—its revenue leapt 89% in the first half of this year. As we wrote, Palantir has succeeded in winning lots of business with AI agents and human consultants that help clients make AI work for them. Then there’s Shopify, whose software powers online storefronts for merchants. The company last week reported 34% revenue growth for the quarter, in line with the first quarter—but an improvement on last year’s growth rate, which in turn was faster than 2024’s. Shopify is benefiting from AI chatbots that are giving shoppers recommendations on what to buy, pulling in many cases from its catalog of merchant products. 

SoftBank’s OpenAI-Backed Loan Highlights Risks in Financing Strategy

7 August 2026 at 01:00

If you’re one of those executives at Alphabet, Meta Platforms or Amazon who deals with investors, here’s an idea: Put a large photo of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son on the wall of your office. Next time a visiting investor complains about your AI spending, point to the photo. That should end the discussion.

As much as big tech firms are spending on AI, at least they’re financing much, if not most, of it through internally generated cash. SoftBank in contrast has so far spent $54.6 billion on OpenAI shares by raising money through a combination of various kinds of loans and asset sales. And it’s now gone even further: On Thursday, SoftBank revealed that this week it had borrowed $10 billion using its OpenAI stake as collateral. As SoftBank has committed to put a further $10 billion into OpenAI in October, there’s a good chance it will make that payment using money borrowed against other OpenAI shares. 

Amazon’s Cloud Surge Wins Over Wall Street

31 July 2026 at 01:01

There’s no doubt about it: AI gave the big cloud firms a lift in business in the June quarter. We’ve already heard that from Google and Microsoft, and on Thursday, Amazon, the biggest cloud firm, followed suit by posting 37% growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud unit for the quarter. That’s 9 percentage points faster than it reported for the March quarter, and more than double the growth rate for the same period last year. 

Just as strikingly, AWS’ operating profit margin also rose, to 39.4%, the highest since the start of last year. To lift its operating margin while grappling with rising depreciation expenses on new chips and servers is an accomplishment. Amazon stock jumped 9% in response, suggesting investors were more focused on AWS’ accelerating growth than on the huge capital investments it is making to drive future growth. As a reminder of the size of those investments, Amazon burned $7.6 billion in cash in the quarter and raised its 2026 capital expenditures projection by $20 billion to $220 billion. 

❌