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Tom Jones

Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary today

There’s only a handful of companies in the world that, should our collective global memory of them be wiped overnight — as happened with the songs of The Beatles in the broadly fine 2019 movie “Yesterday” — the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe would alter almost immediately. Microsoft, which was founded 50 years ago today, is without doubt one of those businesses.

The house that Bill built

The world runs on Excel Spreadsheets. Everyone in a corporate job has made, or sat through, a mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation. Even Teams, much maligned though it is by almost anyone who comes into contact with it, was clocking 320 million monthly active users by 2023. Yet the suite of Office products and associated cloud services made up just over 20% of Microsoft’s total revenues last year.

Microsoft at 50 chart
Sherwood News

The company, which is hosting a 50th anniversary/Copilot event today (because why simply celebrate five decades when you could shoehorn your flagship AI product into proceedings?), hauled in $245 billion in revenue last year, from an impressively vast array of services and products.

Still, going into the big day almost 5% down this week probably isn’t the present that Microsoft was hoping for.

Microsoft at 50 chart
Sherwood News

The company, which is hosting a 50th anniversary/Copilot event today (because why simply celebrate five decades when you could shoehorn your flagship AI product into proceedings?), hauled in $245 billion in revenue last year, from an impressively vast array of services and products.

Still, going into the big day almost 5% down this week probably isn’t the present that Microsoft was hoping for.

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FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

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FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

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Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Streets most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to neutral from underweight and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

  • Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential rather than near-term speed bumps.

  • Unmatched vertical integration: Teslas control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.

  • The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

skynet terminator

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

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