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Greg Linden

@glinden.bsky.social

an internet relic, linkedin.com/in/glinden

1607 Posts2003 Follower 295 Folgt

Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 3h ago

The proposed deal now under discussion would give Iran a 5-7% toll for traffic through Hormuz, making the war a massive victory for the Iranians and insuring them a long-term dominant position in the Gulf. It would reflect pretty much an unconditional surrender by Trump to Tehran.

Proposed Hormuz deal would give Iran control of inbound traffic, sources say

A proposed deal between Iran and Oman would give Tehran control over ships entering the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Iranian source and two regional officials told Reuters, in one of th...

reuters.com

Philip Gourevitch @pgourevitch.bsky.social · 52m ago

Trump aims to deliver on vow to open the Strait by delivering it to Iranian control and taxation as spoil of war he started against them for no reason.

Scott Horton@robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 3h ago

Darin Self @darinself.com · 56m ago

Its odd. US press and elites are acting like the Iran war is all but over but it still seems like a regional war heating up.

FinTwitter@fintwitter.bsky.social · 1h ago

LEADER OF THE YEMENI REVOLUTION ORDERS GENERAL MOBILIZATION. SANA'A PREPARES FOR A FULL-SCALE CONFRONTATION WITH SAUDI ARABIA - TASNIM

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 55m ago

Noble mission, though it's a little hard to tell what specific products will be: "scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly ... by automating the loops of discovery ... much more rapid advances across countless fields of science." www.discoveryloop.com

Discovery Loop — Continuous Exploration

Discovery Loop is building AI systems that automate the experimental loops of science and engineering. Continuous Exploration.

discoveryloop.com

Molly White @molly.wiki · 1h ago

It's a year and a half after i highlighted the issue, but nice to see: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Senators demand crackdown on wildfire "prediction market" bets

Fire experts warn such markets could incentivize arson.

arstechnica.com

Molly White@molly.wiki · 2y ago

what could go wrong with running betting markets like this?

Polymarket betting market: “Will Palisades wildfire spread to Santa Monica by Sunday?” Current “odds” are at 13%.

kate conger @kateconger.com · 2h ago

Jeff Dean is leaving Google www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/t...

Four Top Google A.I. Researchers Form New Start-Up

nytimes.com

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 5h ago

as long as there’s no cost for lying to investors and shareholders, he will keep lying to them, and they arguably deserve it

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 2h ago

The Trump White House now must choose: 1) Bigger humiliation than last time, accepting Iran in control of Hormuz and charging tolls, the very thing the US attacked last month to prevent 2) Escalation of uncertain outcome with no strategy and despite depleted stockpiles

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 2h ago

No good options now given Trump's actions, but this is a complete loss. Iran demands compensation for hundreds of billions in damage, so it will toll the Strait. That means no more freedom of navigation, Iran a growing power, and the US military exposed as a paper tiger. A huge damaging loss.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · 3h ago

as noted yesterday, Trump has now come around to treating an Iranian toll system covering the Strait of Hormuz as a given. Hard to overstate the level of strategic failure. US started the war purely as a war of choice and ends up dramatically empowering Iran and given the Iranian govt big wins.

e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 3h ago

that heart-stopping moment between waking up smelling toast and the realization that you're not actually having a stroke, the world is just on fire, silly

Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 3h ago

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 3h ago

Reuters: Iran wants fees of 5%-7% of the price of cargo from ships using the strait; Oman wants 3%. "Making fees voluntary, at least nominally, could be a way out of the impasse, although an implied threat of Iranian attacks could mean shippers would be unlikely to risk transit without paying."

Ben Zipperer @benzipperer.org · 3h ago

You're paying $2,358 in federal taxes for Trump's mass deportations. @epi.org 's new calculator shows what your community could have instead www.epi.org/deportation-...

Instead of spending
$1,760,726,880
or $4,810 per taxpayer on mass deportations, Fulton County taxpayers could fund
6,267
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Dean Baker @deanbaker13.bsky.social · 19h ago

We can help to insulate the American people from the cost of the collapse of the AI bubble by changing bankruptcy laws so as not to protect private equity from their failures deanbaker22.substack.com/p/the-simple...

The Simple Way to Stop the Hidden AI Bailout: Rewrite Bankruptcy Law

It's still capitalism with less PE friendly bankruptcy laws

deanbaker22.substack.com

Institute for the Study of War @thestudyofwar.bsky.social · 20h ago

6/ The Houthis likely sank an Indian-flagged cargo vessel with a 1-way naval attack drone near the Bab al Mandeb Strait. Indian Minister of Ports, Shipping, & Waterways Sonowal announced Aug 4 that an unspecified projectile struck & sank the Indian-flagged MSV FAIZE NOORE OLIYA “near Yemeni waters.”

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · yesterday

Once again, the Founders anticipated the possibility of a tyrannical president. What they didn’t anticipate is a majority of the members of Congress choosing subservience—not that they’d all be good people, but most should have egos and ambition, enough to object if someone tried taking their power.

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · yesterday

Federalist 51: “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” That made for a system of checks and balances that mostly worked. Until some politicians with ambition to overthrow the Constitution met up with politicians whose highest ambition is attention on social media and a pat on the head.

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 20h ago

🧵 The Founders simply could not imagine men so uninterested in maintaining & exercising their own political power that they would allow other men - even those of their own party or faction - to steal their constitutional power in broad daylight & play out The Madness of King George.

Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · yesterday

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 22h ago

Sources: possible cyberattacks targeting water and wastewater utilities have now been reported in at least 12 US states, and Iran is the prime suspect (ABC News) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · yesterday

I can't believe the carnival barker decieved me.

The Associated Press@apnews.com · yesterday

SpaceX shares are down by half from their June peak as investors worry Musk may have oversold them on its future prospects.

Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 23h ago

ThisIsFine.Gif

The growing risk is not just to Ellison and Oracle, but to the U.S. economy itself.
The A.I. boom has been driving the entire U.S. economy. Since the release of ChatGPT, A.I.-related stocks have been responsible for as much as 75 percent of the returns of the S&P 500, and data centers now account for a vast majority of America’s G.D.P. growth.

Oracle and the other hyperscalers also now dominate the debt and equity markets, and investors and analysts are increasingly asking whether the huge investments being made in A.I. are sustainable and will ever return the promised profits.

Americans are more heavily invested in the stock market than ever before. By one estimate, an A.I. crash could wipe out $20 trillion in American wealth — far more than the dot-com crash in 2000 or even the 2008 financial crisis.

Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · 23h ago

You could grow a spine and do your damn jobs.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterday

Cornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president"

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · yesterday

I’m not a lawyer but it doesn’t seem particularly complicated. If a company has an industry accident that damages other companies, then there is liability. Victims would only need to show damages (unclear there were any substantive damages).

Zack Whittaker@zackwhittaker.com · 2d ago

After Anthropic and OpenAI both admitted to their AI models hacking other companies, @lorenzofb.bsky.social and I wanted to find out: Who is legally to blame when an autonomous AI agent hacks something? Lawyers say it's really complicated! Bypass for ad-blockers: web.archive.org/web/20260803...

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · yesterday

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can actually afford their compute spend, and the only way they'll have the demand for said compute is if they grow at the fastest pace in tech history, all while raising $500bn+ in venture capital in the next four years. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/

Let me spell it out for you: if Anthropic and OpenAI each had a run rate of $100 billion, they would still not have the scale to generate the compute demand to cover what their commitments are to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and, of course, Oracle.

And CoreWeave. And Cerebras. And Cipher Mining and TeraWulf. And IREN. And Nebius. And Broadcom. And AMD. And SpaceX. And maybe Meta, SB Energy, and whoever might build a $30 billion data center in Georgia. While some of these — like Cipher, IREN, Nebius and TeraWulf — will flow revenue directly to Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, there’s still tens of billions of dollars’ worth of compute revenue that needs to get paid somehow above and beyond OpenAI and Anthropic’s spend on the major platforms.

This is not sustainable. In fact, it’s pretty fucking awful.

Let’s also be blunt about something: neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have worked out their business models. You can fart around claiming that Anthropic was profitable (it wasn’t) for a single quarter or repeat theoretical mantras about “positive gross margins” or say “they can just stop training” all you want. These companies lose tens of billions of dollars, they are horrendously unprofitable, an[d at this time do not have an actual answer to “how do these businesses function without infinite resources?”

Even if they were somehow profitable — which they are not! — they would still need to grow at an impossible rate. Putting aside all of the estimates from this piece, OpenAI projects to spend $750 billion in compute in the next three-and-a-half years, which either means it will need to grow its revenue to hundreds of billions a year very soon or raise half a trillion dollars or more over the next few years, at a time when even hyperscalers are having trouble raising that much money.

And based on both these estimates and the massive amounts hyperscalers are spending on capex, I think they’re well aware that there isn’t diverse demand, and that the only path forward is to continue building capacity specifically for OpenAI and Anthropic, funding them in whatever way possible — either through backstopping the compute costs or helping organize massive private credit deals — to make sure that revenue growth never slows.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · yesterday

This affirms what I’ve said again and again — there really isn’t an AI industry without Anthropic and OpenAI, as demonstrated by the fact that there’s very little AI revenue beyond these two labs. Without them, there's no justification for further capex. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/

So, let’s go look at the non-Anthropic/OpenAI part of that Barclays note, with each column representing 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028, with the last three being estimates.

For some context, in the year 2025, Amazon spent $131.8 billion in capex, or roughly 32 times Barclays’ estimates for non-OpenAI/Anthropic revenue — a number that barely improves with the full total ($9.6 billion) to 14 times.

If Amazon has its druthers and invests $220 billion in total capex in 2026, the (pathetic) $8.5bn in non-OpenAI/Anthropic revenue will be roughly 26 times smaller, or 7 times smaller when you use the full $31.6 billion in projected AI revenue for 2026.

If your counterargument here is that “the gap is getting smaller each year,” you are a mark. $31.6 billion is $22.6 billion less than Amazon spent on capital expenditures in its last quarter, or roughly $18.4 billion less than it invested in OpenAI this year. Barclays’ estimates for 2028 have Amazon’s AI revenues — 75% of which are from OpenAI and Anthropic’s compute spend — at around $75 billion, four god damn years into the AI bubble.

Amazon will have, by 2028, likely sunk over $650 billion in capital expenditures into AI, all to earn (and this assumes OpenAI and Anthropic exist and can pay) a little over $171 billion in AI revenue, with the vast majority of it contingent on two entirely venture-backed startups.

Similarly, even if UBS’ estimates come true, Google will have spent roughly $408.5 billion (including consensus estimates of $120.5 billion for the rest of the year) in capital expenditures to create an AI business that makes about $80 billion a year, with most of that coming from either selling Anthropic’s compute or access to its models via Vertex.

Microsoft is in the same position. Wells Fargo’s estimates have its AI revenues for FY2026 (which just ended) at around $34.5 billion, in a year where it spent $115.9 billion in capex, with $41 billion of that in the last quarter, or roughly $6.5 billion more than its entire estimated AI revenues for the god damn fiscal year.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · yesterday

According to analyst letters from UBS, Wells Fargo and Barclays, Anthropic and OpenAI make up 70% or more of Google, Microsoft and Amazon's AI revenues, which means that outside of these AI labs, there isn't demand for compute or AI software at scale. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/

Per Ross Sandler of Barclays, Anthropic and OpenAI are estimated to make up 73% of all of Amazon’s AI revenues in both 2026 and 2027 and 75% of AI revenues in 2028, with Anthropic spending $14.1 billion in 2026, $25.3 billion in 2027, and $35.8 billion in 2028, and OpenAI spending $9 billion in 2026, $15 billion in 2027, and $20 billion in 2028.

Amazon plans to spend $220 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 and even more in 2027, and appears to be doing so almost-exclusively to provide compute for a company that had to raise $95 billion in funding in the space of six months, with $5 billion of that coming from Amazon itself.

Google is in a similar-position. Per Stephen Ju of UBS, “...Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta will account for 21%, 7% and 1% of 2026 Google Cloud revenues, respectively, and 44%, 5% and 1% of 2027 revenues,” or, put another way, 28% of all 2026 and more than 48% of all 2027 Google Cloud revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Ju also estimates Meta will make up a whopping 1% of Google Cloud revenues in each year, and does not mention a single other customer, which heavily-suggests that there aren’t really any large ones.

Based on Bloomberg Intelligence’s consensus estimates for Google Cloud’s revenues in 2026 ($105.9) and 2027 ($173.8), OpenAI and Anthropic represent $29.4 billion ($7.4bn/$22bn) in 2026 and $84.69 billion ($8.69bn/$76bn) in 2027. To be explicit here, this is all Google Cloud revenues. It is reasonable to believe that this represents at least 75% of Google’s AI revenue, if not more.

And based on a note from Michael Turrin of Wells Fargo from May 31 2026, things are just as bad for Microsoft, with 70% or more of its AI revenues coming from Anthropic and OpenAI. While Turrin “expects investments at software & models layers [to] pay off in meaningful adoption over time,” it’s difficult to argue that Microsoft has any meaningful AI strategy outside of OpenAI and Anthropic’s compute spend.

To make matters worse, based on Wells Fargo’s estimates, it appears that Microsoft 365’s AI revenues are barely — and I mean barely — beating the revenue share Microsoft gets from OpenAI’s sales.

Wells Fargo also includes a helpful cheat sheet of its estimates for AI contributions, estimating that even at the very end of FY2027 (which began on July 1 2026), OpenAI and Anthropic’s spend will represent a dramatic 74% of all AI revenues. Wells Fargo also estimates that the two AI labs represented 23% of Azure revenue in FY2026, growing to 35% in FY27.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · yesterday

Hyperscalers have conned investors by not disclosing their AI revenue concentration, all to hide that revenue growth is increasingly coming from Anthropic and OpenAI, and that their infrastructure was near-entirely built to support two unprofitable AI labs. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/

Every publication you read right now will tell you that AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are growing like wildfire as a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in AI GPUs and data centers, when the truth is far simpler: their revenues are being buoyed by two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that cannot exist without being funneled tens of billions of dollars each year.

And a decent chunk of that money is coming from the hyperscalers themselves. In the last seven months alone, Google has sunk $10 billion (and up to $30 billion more) into Anthropic, with Amazon funnelling $5 billion to Anthropic within a week of that investment and a total of $50 billion into OpenAI. For all the concern about circular financing in the AI world, it’s astonishing that so much attention has (rightly, to be clear) centered on NVIDIA’s backstopping and funding of neoclouds, and less on the fact that hyperscalers are propping up their now biggest customers, giving them cash that will eventually migrate back to the hyperscaler.

I’d also argue that the vast majority of their capex exists to support these two load-bearing failsons. A few months ago, a Microsoft executive told the judge during the Musk-Altman trial that its OpenAI relationship had cost it “over $100 billion,” including both the $13 billion it sunk into the company and the associated infrastructure.

Microsoft has dedicated its Fairwater data centers (however much actually exists) entirely to OpenAI, much like Amazon has for Anthropic with however much of its massive Indiana-based Project Rainier has actually been turned on, and much like Google is in talks to backstop a $15 billion data center project for Anthropic, along with data centers with Cipher Mining and TeraWulf and a $35 billion private credit-funded Broadcom-backstopped deal where Google will sell Anthropic its TPU AI chips, put them in a Google-built data center, and rent them back to Anthropic.

Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · yesterday

This is it. Until something structural shifts this is what I expect over the next several months. Deals and near deals that collapse due to this dynamic and Iran's knowledge of this dynamic.

Stephen Nuñez@socio-steve.bsky.social · yesterday

Then in a few days when the news reports this as a loss he will panic/get angry and start bombing again. Pretty clear cycle where he wants an exit, can't stomach the humiliation attached to a lose and can't stomach the cost of a win, so he ends up impotently bombing and then raging on social media.

Jacob Schriner-Briggs @jschrinerbriggs.bsky.social · yesterday

If one of the primary functions of the press is to check power, it really feels like much of the mainstream media ecosystem is fundamentally broken. Worse, as of now I see no institutions capable of stepping in as a viable, preferable alternative.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · yesterday

Banks permitted millions in suspicious transactions tied to Epstein—and former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi had the story months ago. But the report would never air. trib.al/ZShZlIS

Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · yesterday

New: Microsoft has introduced new limits to how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that maximizing AI use internally is not the company’s goal, according to an internal Microsoft email obtained by 440 Media. www.404media.co/microsoft-te...

Microsoft Tells Engineers ‘Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For’

Microsoft is introducing budget limits for AI use but says it still wants to be an ‘AI-first’ company.

404media.co