Dear Jeff, You’ve never been afraid to spend aggressively when the economics justify it. But even a 19th-century railroad baron would have balked at the way AI compute is being provisioned today. Amazon was built on a simple idea: anything that scales must get cheaper. WTF: 6 AI
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Dear Tim, There’s more hype and heat around AI than at any time in modern tech history. * Anthropic is valued at $350B on a growth story that doesn’t survive a reality check. * OpenAI is in recurring governance hot mess. * Google is
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Dear Satya, Microsoft did not just bet on AI. It bet the farm on a founder. And now it has a L'enfant terrible on its hands. WTF: 6 AI giants, 6 giant messes While every other hyperscaler built or retained direct
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Dear Sundar, You should be winning this. Gemini 3 is widely regarded as the strongest reasoning model in the field. On benchmarks, on logic, on structured problem-solving, Google has finally reclaimed technical superiority. WTF: 6 AI giants, 6 giant messes You also
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Apple is outsourcing Siri to Google’s Gemini 3.0 — a model that hallucinates 88% of the time when it doesn’t know the answer. Hallucinations already sank Gemini 1.0, and now Apple is baking them into its brand. But Apple built
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Everyone else built their own AI. But Microsoft outsourced its future to Sam Altman. They bet on a startup founder with no product experience, no revenue model and no history operating systems at scale. It was always a risky call. Now the risk
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst An 88% hallucination rate would be unacceptable in almost any other domain: * A medical device that was wrong 88% of the time would be banned. * A navigation system that invented roads 88% of the time would be recalled. * A financial model that hallucinated
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Dear Mark, Like Jacob Marley, LLaMA is dead as a doornail. No growth since Spring 2025. Miserly Scrooge & Marley would never tolerate this expensive cost center. WTF: 6 AI giants, 6 giant messes Distribution is not the problem. Distribution is never a
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Joni Mitchell never accepted a guitar as it was handed to her. She tuned it. And then she tuned it again. And again. Over her career, she used dozens of custom guitar tunings, some so unconventional they barely resembled standard tuning at all.
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst Nov. 18, 2025 — Initial warning I published the first explicit warning that U.S. tech and AI valuations were being mispriced, with risk materially understated by Wall Street. The coming AI reckoning: why Wall St. is mispricing the largest unreported risk in modern
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst And now…for all you nerds out there… GPT-5. Gemini 3. Opus 4.5. Every few months the labels change, the charts refresh, and the story is the same: bigger models, longer context, more “magic.” But if you look under the hood,
By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and