"All I know is I'm in good hands with my $80 billion."
"All I know is I'm in good hands with my $80 billion."
Rarely does a one-liner, thus capturing the moment perfectly. Here you have the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella Said he was "out of details" on Stargate, the multi-billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project said to be powered by his commodity investment Openai.
That Nadella didn't read the details of Stargate's mythology illustrates how much Microsoft and Openai have grown apart. Since Openai's model remains unique to Azure, Microsoft was mentioned in the Stargate press release. But the most compelling aspect of Stargate isn't that the money isn't there yet. It’s exactly what Openai’s biggest backer decided not to participate in Sam Altman Called "the most important project of our time." As Nadella made clear on CNBC this week, he runs his own $80 billion AI infrastructure buildout, and moving forward, Openai can get more compute elsewhere and get him blessing.
While there are fewer headlines this week, I found Nadella to be Elon Musk More enlightening on X. Nadella responded: "Satya, on the other hand, does have money."
The post can only be interpreted as a dig at Altman. Nadella could have funded openai. He didn't. Does he know that the rest of us don’t?
The White House's splashy Stargate unveiling certainly achieved its goals, which clearly got everyone talking about the big numbers. the headlines it generates Mark Zuckerberg To make sure everyone knows about the week his data center even big Than Stargate.
Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page on Friday that the 2GW data center planned by Mehta in Louisiana is "so large it will cover a large portion of Manhattan" and spread across the city. Up the square footage map to send points to houses. .
From his post (my emphasis added): "We will be carrying ~1GW of computers in 2025 and we will end the year with over 1.3M GPUs. We plan to invest 60-65B in CAPEX this year while also growing significantly our AI team, and we have capital Keep investing in the coming years. "
I have no doubt that Altman, Masayoshi sonand Larry Ellison will be able to raise the billions of dollars they need to reduce Openai's dependence on Microsoft for computing. (The U.S. government isn’t giving Stargate a look, which makes the announcement alongside Trump even more bizarre.) Ultimately, this all points to the theme that’s quickly defining 2025: Big Tech is the biggest AI. The technology exists for the coming era and will continue to be spent like hell to make sure Openai doesn't disappear completely.
There are few companies as good as Reddit. The company's shares have soared 300% since going public last March, valuing the social network at $32 billion.
This was the position Reddit was in before it went public, when its moderators raged about its acute platform changes and had backlash against companies selling their data to Google and Openai.
With these controversies now seemingly in the rearview mirror, Reddit is focused on growing its user base, staying profitable, and using AI to help people search its site more easily. I caught up with the CEO Steve Huffman A few weeks ago at CES, hear about his priorities for 2025, how he leads Reddit, his thoughts on the AI scaling debate, content moderation, and more…
The following interview has been edited to elaborate:
Your IPO is doing well. What have the past nine months or so been like for you?
We have a say about Reddit, there are a lot of people who hold good meetings. So we had some good meetings.
Preparing to go public is intense. It's telling stories over and over again, which I love doing, but it's a lot of work. I think more than most new companies, we're already in the rhythm of a public company: closing the quarter, doing reviews, having board meetings, earnings and all of that. So from an operational perspective, this is not a significant change for us.
This is a very exciting time for new investors and employees. You won't make us complain. What I tell companies all the time is that everyone should be proud of the work they do and not take these moments for granted. I just tell them, look, enjoy the view. If you look at our history, there are a lot of ups and downs. There are undoubtedly challenges ahead for us.
With your current market cap, are you considering making a swing that you didn't think you could have made a year ago?
We do two categories of things. One is to execute the core strategy. We must hire. We must build. I think the size of our investment is very reasonable. A one-sentence strategy for us is to grow the product and stay profitable.
What can you do with a high stock price? Maybe you can look at mergers and acquisitions that you wouldn't otherwise have. I would say that's not really the direction we're heading right now because the acquisitions we've made over the past two years are these $2.5 million deals. For us, it's a favorite to get the technology and the team. I would say we're always watching the market, but we're not pursuing anything big or crazy right now because I like the core strategy. I think we can do what we want in the current functionality.
What is Reddit’s main product focus this year?
The first is the core of Reddit, which is community conversation. Everyone has a Reddit home, but did you see this one in your first session? There is another dimension to our work, which is Reddit as a source of information. Reddit has all this incredible information. For users who have questions that need answers, can we give them answers? We just started testing Reddit answers. I find this really helpful when searching for current events. A year from now, this is a monetized product. This is one of the few products that is itchy, so it will be a focus.
What do you think of the debate about whether the AI industry has run out of data?
I think we get a different answer to this question every month. We hope to build good relationships with others in this area. We are willing to do business.
At the same time, we want to maximize the value we get from our data. At this point, we have yet to experience a conflict between the two. I like the (data licensing) relationships we have - primarily Google and Openai. At this point, we don't need to enter into any specific partnership. I would say they are all good, but nothing for us.
One of the challenges is that AI companies don't know what product they are building. This isn't a bad thing. They are iterating on themselves. Chatgpt itself is the core product in this conversation and is a demo. Then, a year later, it's the most important piece of enterprise technology on the planet with questionable economics. This makes it very exciting. I don't think any of these companies would be offended to hear me say that.
You're one of the social media CEOs that I think is very critical of Tiktok. How does the US ban affect Reddit?
If you look at Reddit's traffic graph over the past 19 years, you won't see the rise and fall of any specific platform. I think every content type should be used on Reddit. Videos on Reddit are very much about the camera - what am I looking at - rather than the camera, or who am I? That's social media. I think the ban is the right thing to do for the reasons I mentioned, which have nothing to do with competition.
With Meta's moderation changes, the broader conversation around social media feels like it's changing right now.
For the past decade, people have been talking about whether words are the problem, which is a crazy idea. Without speech, you cannot be free. I think by questioning and valuing America's core values, hopefully that era is coming to an end.
Are people playing politics? Of course, people always are. On the topic of moderation, we always try to do things the right way, and those ways are not incidentally consistent with American values. This is a democratic platform. We believe very much in the power of the people and the wisdom of crowds and the voting process. That's reddit. So I'm happy to see a return to where we've been for most of our lives, which is an appreciation for free speech.
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