TechCrunch’s Ozempic era
And: One more note on software pricing
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
Happy Tuesday, friends. We’re counting down to earnings reports from Asana, Yext, CrowdStrike and HPE today. In the meantime, we’re digging into TechCrunch’s Ozempic era, the Token Wars, software pricing and more. Tomorrow we’re looking at fintech user data (H/T Sar), as it’s far beyond time that we did so. To work! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Chip startups … worries about AI job loss … brain-computer funding rounds closing (also, did you miss this last year?) … hyperscaler-nuclear power deals … India-Europe trade ties? … chip pain in China … petty bullshit …
An M&A boomlet? Snowflake is buying Crunchy Data, Salesforce is acquihiring Moonhub, Hims is buying Zava — it’s busy out there!
Funding rounds of Note: NomuPay … Treefera … Ciroos.AI … Zero Networks … Manex AI …
📉 Trending Down: AI prices … humor … single-product companies … Tesla-India relations … manufacturing in China … manufacturing in the United States … chances of TSMC setting up show in the Middle East …
TechCrunch, Crunched
Out of respect for privacy, I’ve kept quiet about the recent exodus of talent from TechCrunch. Now that Sifted has covered the defenestration of TC’s European team, I think it’s fair game to say a few things.
TechCrunch’s new owner Regent wants the brand and its residual SEO juice, but not the talented team that made the site what it was. The special sauce that kept TechCrunch alive and kicking through a string of disinterested — at best — owners was its people. People like Ingrid Lunden, who worked around the clock and wrote like the world was running out of letters.
She’s gone, now. I won’t list all the names that were recently cut or who left of their own accord, but it wouldn’t be a short recitation. The upside is that rival publications now have a feast of unsigned talent to scoop up. The downside is simply that Regent is doing the opposite of investing in, and building up, my home publication.
When EIC Connie Loizos wrote up the sale of her site from Yahoo to Regent, she struck a positive note. I don’t have any insight into what she was promised — I reiterate here that Connie is good people and I want her to succeed — but I don’t think that the lived reality has matched her hopes for the transaction. At the time she wrote:
This deal is structured to ensure minimal disruption to TechCrunch’s operations. You can almost think of it more like a software update rather than a system overhaul. […] But here’s what really matters: The same team of expert journalists you know and trust will continue bringing you the must-read stories of the tech world. Without a doubt, this is the strongest TechCrunch team we’ve ever had, and we’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing talent over the years.
Given the publication jettisoning, or allowing some smart folks to leave, I don’t think that Regent is in investing mode.
What a shame. I think with better ownership, things could have turned out differently. Hindsight and all that, but I miss the era when GigaOm had a fleet of blogs, Engadget was part of a vibrant family, and TechCrunch and VentureBeat and others dueled for startup scoops.
Replacing the old blogging days of technology journalism are shows like TBPN, which are great if you are apart of the Silicon Valley conversation already. It’s a shame that there are now fewer people looking at the small companies that have yet to make their mark. Here’s hoping we’re through the worst of the changes, and TechCrunch can get back to hiring and breaking stories instead of being the subject of them.
All Hail the Token Wars
Back in its latest earnings report, Microsoft reported that a neat fact about its token processing rate. Redmond told the world — and I know we’ve gone over this statistic before, bear with me — that it processed:
over 100 trillion tokens this quarter, up 5X year-over-year – including a record 50 trillion tokens last month alone.
A 5x gain is a lot, and it appears that the growth in token processing at Microsoft appears vertical given that it managed half of its record MRQ haul in a single month.
But perhaps we gave Microsoft too much credit. Here’s a Google statistic from I/O that I missed at the time (H/T Tanay):
This time last year, we were processing 9.7 trillion tokens a month across our products and APIs. Now, we’re processing over 480 trillion — that’s 50 times more.
I do not know how each company counts, or how their workloads differ or are similar. So the 480 trillion tokens processed by Google versus the 50 trillion by Microsoft could be apples::carburetors to some degree. But now that both companies are sharing the tokens processed statistic, and we can compare their numbers we have a neat proxy metric for how fast is market demand for token processing. Which is a good way to understand how quickly the AI wave is cresting.
Meta, Amazon, CoreWeave — where’s the data?
Back when Nvidia pitched the AI factory concept, it made sense in a future context; this is what tomorrow could look like, but not the present. I wonder now if I was thinking too conservatively. With Microsoft and Google handling a half quadrillion tokens per quarter, and growing we’re going to need a lot of fucking AI factories./
Speaking of which: The Meta nuclear deal we linked to above is for 1.1 gigawatts of power. That’s an entire nuclear reactor’s output at the site in question. It’s pretty cool to see us get extra busy smushing atoms to power our artifiical brains. It will be even cooler when we get fusion working and we use lil artificial stars to power our silicon overlords. But this is a good stop-gap power generation mechanism.