I had a fascinating conversion this week with a computing pioneer, Matei Zaharia, the CTO of Databricks, who is the recipient of this year’s ACM Prize in Computing, a kind of genius award, in part because of his development of the Spark open-source software. Out chat confirmed my
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The New Yorker’s In-Depth Investigation of Sam Altman
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About that 16,000-word piece on Sam Altman in The New Yorker
— Tiernan Ray (@TiernanRayTech) 7 avril 2026
First of all, they spent a year and a half, and kudos to them. I love to see reporters spending time talking to people. The sum total of this 16,000-word essay from Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, which is… pic.twitter.com/IYIE9hzBQLAbout that 16,000-word piece on Sam Altman in The New Yorker First of all, they spent a year and a half, and kudos to them. I love to see reporters spending time talking to people. The sum total of this 16,000-word essay from Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, which is
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Oracle’s Valuation Disconnect: From Software Vendor to Capital-Heavy Cloud Player
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This should be a juicy business school case study someday: Oracle’s financial profile as a business is totally changing but its stock valuation is still being treated by the Street as if it’s just a database software vendor. As Oracle goes deeper and deeper into sunk capital investment, and deeper in debt, the valuation has to go lower. New CFO for Oracle, brace for a new valuation Hilary Maxson is joining Oracle as CFO after nine years helping to run a company with a very different financial profile, Schneider Electric. The lower margin of Schneider is probably an accurate indicator of where Oracle is headed as a business as it takes on more and more debt to build a cloud AI empire. That business should be valued a lot less than Oracle’s traditional valuation — more like that of Schneider, in fact. thetechnologyletter.com $ORCL
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-04-06 22:32 UTC
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Human Analysis Beats Automated AI Stock Market Information
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Human not AI stock analysis All the major information providers such as FactSet and the rest now have these automated forms of stock information. They basically give you the same headlines you find all over the place. They don’t give you much more than the headline, and I’ve found they even miss the most important headlines on a daily or weekly basis concerning a given stock. The details about a company tend to be the same clumps of publicly-available financial data, without any sense of whether it means anything, without any context relative to other companies. The bolt-on AI stuff is basically turning out to be not very valuable. If you want to get good stock market analysis, stick with people not automatically-generated garbage.
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-04-06 16:53 UTC
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Chatbot Personas: Engineering Choice with Dangerous Consequences
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We take it for granted that the current form of artificial intelligence is a chat bot, which talks to you like a character, displaying a persona. That is not accidental. It is part of the whole history of Gen AI leading up to ChatGPT and its peers, Claude and Gemini. Researchers are finding out the deep downside of this particular engineering choice. A program with a persona will follow that persona to its logical conclusion, including generating output that seeks to cheat at a task, or sending blackmail threats. All of this comes out of the history of today’s LLMs, the quest to design better an better chat bots. The engineers succeeded, and we’re going to face the consequences. ===> Your chatbot is playing a character – why Anthropic says that's dangerous Researchers found that part of what makes chatbots so compelling also makes them vulnerable to bad behavior. Here's why. zdnet.com/article/anthropic-… @AnthropicAI
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-04-06 16:42 UTC
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OpenAI in Massive Debt at IPO: Snowflake Parallel
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OpenAI: Finally, a price on all the madness OpenAI will be massively in debt for its spending when it eventually comes public, probably in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, its valuation is a ridiculous multiple of expected sales this year. We've seen this movie before. You would do well to recall the example of Snowflake, which had high growth, but also massive losses and an absurd stock valuation when it came public. The result was not pretty. thetechnologyletter.com $SNOW @OpenAI [Translated from EN to English]
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-04-02 21:18 UTC
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The Value of Microsoft’s Data in the AI Race
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Microsoft: What's the value of the data? Microsoft is the "trusted landlord" of some of the world's most important data. Does that mean it will win the AI race, which will be built on data? Not necessarily. The company has no monopoly on data, and it's not certain it has the most crucial data that artificial intelligence needs. And then there is the extraordinary, unprecedented nature of Microsoft's exposure to OpenAI. thetechnologyletter.com $MSFT [Translated from EN to English]
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-04-02 18:16 UTC
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Nvidia’s $37 Billion Spending Spree: Strategic Investments or Unclear Returns?
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A billion here, two billion there: Nvidia has been spending like crazy for the past year. $37 billion in all in public and private equity. What does it all amount to? Marvell Technology just the latest in Nvidia’s $37 billion equity pile An amazing pile of $37 billion in public and private equity has given Nvidia a piece of just about every company in the AI ecosystem that matters. What’s the return on investment? Unclear. thetechnologyletter.com $NVDA $MRVL $INTC
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-03-31 20:20 UTC
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Innventure CEO Claims Stock Undervalued, Accelsius at Center
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A very hot play on AI data centers, Accelsius, continues to be at the heart over the debate about conglomerate Innventure. Innventure CEO says his stock is too cheap; it’s hard to say Bill Haskell, CEO of conglomerate Innventure, which owns a very talked-about maker of technology to cool Nvidia GPUs, Accelsius, says his company’s stock is too cheap relative to the value of Accelsius. Maybe so, although Innventure and Accelsius are still early-stage ventures with a lot to prove. thetechnologyletter.com $INV
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-03-31 16:08 UTC
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TL20 Stocks Collapse: AI Trade Concerns Hit Hard
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Each week I do a podcast to put together various things in a way that makes sense to me, and, I hope, to investors. One of the functions of the podcast is to reflect on what is and is not working. There’s a lot to cover when the entire TL20 group of stocks collapses by four percent in a week, with names such as Micron Technology hit hard. My sense is none of the concerns that pushed down these stocks last week are fatal to the positive outlook for the companies. The TL Podcast for March 29th: Gains erased in a week The TL20 gives up all gains for the year, as multiple worries about the AI trade hit hard the shares of Micron Technology, for example. I argue these risks are not fatal. At least the TL20 is still doing a lot better than Nasdaq and the S&P 500. thetechnologyletter.com Or catch it on Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/40HBLJg $MU $SNDK $KLAC $LRCX
→ View original post on X — @tiernanraytech, 2026-03-30 13:20 UTC