Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own services companies, challenging traditional IT firms and service providers. Anthropic's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman is valued at $1.5 billion, while OpenAI's venture, The Development Company, is valued at $4 billion.  * "Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn. Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.  It’s a wake up call to all companies  to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe." - Uday Kotak * "One reason that the atrophy of coding skills is concerning is the “paradox of supervision” ... effectively using Claude requires supervision, and supervising Claude requires the very coding skills that may atrophy from AI overuse." - Anthropic * “People who go all i...

Amazon is the quintessential, textbook example of the "blitzscaling" model, where massive user growth is prioritized over profits for years. The term was popularized by Reid Hoffman (the co-founder of LinkedIn), and when he wrote the definitive book on the subject ( Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies ), he explicitly pointed to Jeff Bezos and Amazon as the pioneers of this exact strategy. Here is why Amazon fits the definition perfectly: The 3 Core Rules of Blitzscaling To be considered a "blitzscaler," a company must check three specific boxes, all of which Amazon did aggressively: Prioritize Speed Over Efficiency : In a normal business, you try to grow carefully to minimize mistakes and stay profitable. In blitzscaling, you grow as fast as humanly possible, even if it means wasting millions of dollars fixing bugs, over-hiring, or building inefficient warehouses. The goal is to capture the market before anyone else can re...

The Data Formulator tool from Microsoft Research blends natural language and visual interfaces to help analysts explore and visualize data with AI agents. With AI agents recommending exploration ideas, transforming data and presenting results in interactive visual interfaces, users can deep dive into data in control without coding expertise.  The research prototype is open source  and there’s a demo available to explore its features.  It currently supports generation of the following chart types -