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Welcome to the Church of Claude, today’s reading is from the gospel according to Altman...
It’s only a few months since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was putting his firm on a Code Red alert level as he watched competitive advantage bleeding away. The air of internal panic doesn’t appear to have died down if a new leaked memo from Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser is to be believed. In it, she criticizes $13 billion (so far) paymaster Microsoft for holding OpenAI back (!), claiming:
[Microsoft] limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many, that’s [AWS] Bedrock”
And she makes it pretty clear that Anthropic’s Claude lives rent-free in the minds of the Altman empire with declarations like:
Claude has become a religion, that's the level of that mania
And:
Their story is built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control Al. Our positive message will win over time: build powerful systems, put in the right safeguards, expand access, and help people do more.
But don’t worry, she adds to anyone thinking by now about getting their resume in front of Dario Amodei on Monday morning - it’s all still to win for OpenAI:
[Anthopic’s] strategic misstep to not acquire enough compute is showing up in the product. Customers feel it through throttling, weaker availability, and a less reliable experience. We saw the exponential compute curve earlier, acted on it faster, and now have a real structural advantage.
My take - You know, framing buyers adopting their tech in the context of religious fanaticism is rather insulting to a large tranche of people you presumably would like to lure back into your camp?
Dresser also accuses Anthropic of juicing its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) numbers:
Their stated run rate is inflated. They use accounting treatment that makes revenue look bigger than it is, including grossing up rev share with Amazon and Google. Our analysis shows that this overstates their run rate by roughly $8 billion (at the current $30 stated). We report Microsoft revshare net, which is more inline with standards we would be held to as a public company.
Hmmmm....my reckoning is that Anthropic just crossed $30 billion ARR, over-taking OpenAI at $25 billio, and with roughly 80% of its revenue coming from all-important enterprise rather than the larger consumer base that buy into OpenAI.
Whatever the math, writing panic memos about your main competitors isn’t a good look and says rather more about the internal mood at OpenAI than it does about anyone else...
He said what?
I think it's a bad idea to think you're going to deploy AI and improve your efficiency ratio because in the competitive world, I'm going to do it, everyone else is going to do it, and the benefits will be passed on to the marketplace. It's not like you're entitled to have your ROI go to 50%, and that will stay there because you do it better than everybody else. You may get a head start, you want a head start, but I think that's just not a rational thing that somehow that will be the ultimate outcome.
Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase
Drinking up the java
All I want is a cup of over-priced coffee, but Starbucks is now intent on turning my cup of Joe into a conversational experience, courtesy of, inevitably, a partnership involving ChatGPT. Apparently this hinges on a tool that will allow me to describe my mood - oh, I dare you, I really, really double-dare you to ask before I’ve had my coffee! - and an AI-enabled app will then pop up for a chat about what my best drink options for the day would be based on that mood. (Neat gin’s a fairly safe bet most days when I’ve had a busy morning farming through more AI hype and nonsense like this!) According to Starbucks, all of this will meet me at “the moment of inspiration”, rather than forcing me to look at a menu - or indeed just ordering my usual drink?
My take - I’ll have grande hype to go!
Ensuring a solid tech future at Standard Life
Financial services giant Standard Life has announced an agreement to acquire Aegon UK to bolster its credentials as a retirement savings and income business. The purchase will also beef up its digital advice capabilities, according to CEO Andrew Briggs:
Aegon UK will materially strengthen customer engagement through AWS-enabled data capabilities and digital tooling, supporting more informed decision-making and optimized customer experiences....We will integrate their Mylo technology platform with our own, enabling consolidation, personalized communication and pre-retirement guidance.
The overall platform strategy is unchanged, he insists:
It's all focused on simplification, automation and digitization, and that doesn't change here. So we will be bringing on board a number of platforms. Underpinning the synergy numbers, there are a number of assumptions around what we would do. But in practice, the way we run these acquisitions is we make assumptions that underpin the synergies. And then when we actually take control of the business, the combined teams come together and work out what is the best way forward...Aegon UK have very strong capability with AWS, with data and telephony, a lot of digital tooling as well. We think that the suite of kind of tech and digital capability is enhanced as a result of the acquisition, which is exciting for us.
My take - as ever, one of the trickiest follow-ons from any corporate merger isn’t bringing the businesses together as one, but integrating the tech stacks. One to keep an eye on.
He said what?
If you look in 2007, before we bought Merrill and Countrywide to give you a sense, we had more employees at Bank of America than we have today. The application of technology, the process and the customer utilization of our technology has led us basically run the company 19 years later on less people...We’re doing it through attrition. Each month, we have to hire 1,300 people round numbers to stay neutral in the company. And so you can adjust the headcount by just being careful on hiring and let attrition be your friend, that’s how we got down to 1,000 people. But it comes from eliminating work and applying technology and consumer and commercial customers using those technologies, and AI gives us places to go, we haven't gone.
Brian Moynihan, CEO, Bank of America
When AI valuations really are for the birds - and the Red Braces Brigade on Wall Street!
Remember the good old/bad old days - delete according to commonsense - of the early days of the World Wide Web when everyone became an internet company just by sticking dot com on the end of the company name? That was before the collapes of the markets and horrible recessionary crisis for everyone, of course, so we won’t be daft enough to do that sort of thing again, will we boys and girls?
Well, you say that, but...
Back in 2016, a San Francisco show company launched with a single product, the Wool Runner from Allbirds. It became hugely popular with Silicon Valley types and other foot-based offerings followed. This enabled the firm to go public during the pandemic with a staggering $4 billion valuation.
But that was then and this is now. As of this year, everything seemed to have gone wrong. The shoe didn’t fit anymore. The firm’s North American stores were shuttered and last month it sold its IP and brand for a mere $39 million, less than a quarter of its revenue.
Then suddenly, mid-week, its share price shot up by nearly 600%. Why? What triggered the surge was a press release saying that the company would now be known as NewBird AI and would be spending a $50 million convertible financing facility from an unnamed institutional investor to pivot away from competing with the likes of NIKE and instead going up against the likes of NVIDIA and becoming a GPU-as-a-Service provider.
You can see the logic here - from sneakers and sportswear to mission-critical AI infrastructure, it’s a move I’m frankly surprised the likes of Banana Republic or Old Navy haven’t thought to make! Certainly it apparently makes sense to the good men and woman of Wall Street, who stopped punishing the likes of Meta and Google are spending on data centers and threw their weight behind the shoemaker instead!
And it’s not just Allbirds that have pulled off this trick this week. Social media firm Myseum saw its share price shoot up 146% as soon as it re-named itself Myseum.AI. In one move, it ceased to be essentially a penny stock to looking ahead to an AI-enabled bright future, apparently, and all it took was a change to the masthead!
My take - what a load of old cobblers!
Human intelligence in action at Manpower
As we’ve said time and time again, human intelligence has to sit alongside its artificial counterpart if the real benefits are to accrue. It was good to have that tenet reinforced by Manpower’s Chief Strategy Officer Becky Frankiewicz this week whe n she talked about “monetizing new human-plus-agentic solutions” and said:
I am delighted to share how we are bringing AI capabilities to market and creating a future where people can build more impactful careers and where companies can achieve greater profitable growth. Human-plus-agentic workforces are not a future concept. They are already here.
Manpower’s philosophy and approach here are simple:
Automate which should be automated, augment what should stay human and create entirely new ways to deliver workforce solutions to our clients....we're looking to automate what we can and should and keep human what we know our clients and our candidates want to keep human, with a very heavy dose of governance on top of it to make sure that we meet the needs and demands of our clients and our candidates.
My take - preach it!
He said what?
By the end of the first quarter of 2026, we de-commissioned 60% of IT applications we no longer required, taken 76,000 of 106,000 servers offline and closed 10 of 16 data centers...not only are we working to complete the integration and implement our short- and medium-term priorities, but we also want to prepare UBS for the coming decade....Technology and Artificial Intelligence play an important role in this context. This is why we are investing heavily in transformative programs in the field of AI.
Sergio Ermotti, Group CEO, UBS