Sherwood News

Nearly half of all internet sites run on WordPress software

Who profits from the open-source ecosystem remains contentious

9/23/24 10:20AM

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Co-founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg has come down hard on WP Engine, a company that essentially offers WordPress-as-a-service, describing the business as a “cancer” to the content management system he helped to create over 2 decades ago.

Mullenweg — also the CEO of Automattic, which owns Tumblr and also provides similar services to WP Engine — made the remark in a recent blog post, expanding on comments he’d made at a WordPress conference. In short, the entrepreneur feels that WP Engine profits excessively from the open-source WordPress software, without contributing enough to the CMS’s ecosystem, offering a watered-down version of WordPress to customers to maximize profits.

Although Mullenweg might not be a household name, the software at the center of this dispute is a critical cog in the internet’s infrastructure. Developed back in 2003 by Mullenweg and fellow blogger Mike Little, the software’s open source nature allows others to easily build on top of it, with tens of thousands of “plug-ins” available. Today, WordPress counts Meta, Samsung, and USA Today as customers, and powers over 43% of all sites on the internet. The next most significant single player in the space is e-commerce giant Shopify, which powers just 4% of all sites tracked by W3Techs.

Rani Molla

AI AI AI

What Amazon’s latest data center announcement says about AI right now

The first Amazon data centers in Louisiana will cost $12 billion and require a lot of preemptive defense.

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Jon Keegan4h

Anthropic says that a group of Chinese AI startups are “distilling” their models by setting up huge numbers of fake accounts for Claude AI. In a blog post, Anthropic said that it disrupted “industrial-scale” campaigns by Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. The company said that the group had over 16 million exchanges with Claude, after setting up 24,000 “fraudulent” accounts. Anthropic said it is developing countermeasures to prevent such attacks in the future.

Jon Keegan6h

Report: OpenAI’s Stargate has been a chaotic mess

Just over a year ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stood alongside President Trump, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce an ambitious $500 billion plan to build massive data centers in the US — Project Stargate.

While today an actual Stargate 1-gigawatt data center is certainly well under construction in Abilene, Texas, it turns out there wasn’t much of a plan in place at the time of the announcement, according to a new report from The Information.

The past year has been full of partner disputes, debt problems, and scuttled plans as the loosely defined project races to build the AI computing infrastructure that OpenAI is craving as competition heats up.

Per the report, OpenAI tried to build its own data centers as the project stalled, but lenders balked at funding the risky project. They eventually settled on the current plan, in which partner Oracle borrows the money and leases capacity back to OpenAI. OpenAI was still able to control the design of the facility.

The slow start for the project resulted in OpenAI missing its own goal of 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity from Oracle and SoftBank by the end of 2025.

Inside OpenAI’s Scramble to Get Computing Power After Stargate Stalled

The slow start for the project resulted in OpenAI missing its own goal of 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity from Oracle and SoftBank by the end of 2025.

Rani Molla8h

Ives says AI represents huge opportunity for cybersecurity firms as losses mount

Cybersecurity stocks continued to slide Monday, after Anthropic unveiled a new security feature for its AI model Friday. The company’s AI advancements have been wreaking havoc across software firms, and its latest foray appears to be doing the same to cybersecurity leaders, including CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Cloudflare.

But similar to Dan Ives’ broader thesis on the software sell-off — which he has called “overblown,” arguing that the companies getting hit may ultimately become “core participants in the AI Revolution” — the Wedbush Securities analyst says AI is actually a positive for cybersecurity stocks.

“Anthropic going after this market with an initial tool validates our thesis that cyber security is the next frontier for the AI Revolution,” Ives wrote Monday morning, arguing that AI is elevating the risk environment — and the need for cybersecurity firms in the first place.

“AI will be a major tailwind to the cyber security sector over the coming years as protection of use cases, data, and endpoints expand markedly,” he said, adding that companies including CrowdStrike and Zscaler are well positioned to capitalize on the shift by incorporating AI into their strategies.

Rani Molla10h

Analysts slash Salesforce price targets ahead of Wednesday earnings, as narrative of AI eating its lunch persists

A number of analysts have significantly lowered their price targets for Salesforce, citing growing fears that AI workforce tools, including Anthropic’s Cowork, could threaten parts of its core business. According to reports, here are some of the recent cuts:

Morgan Stanley cut its price target nearly 30%, to $287 from $398.
Jefferies slashed its forecast 33%, to $250 from $375.
Barclays reduced its price target to $265 from $338.
Evercore ISI went to $260 from $340.
Last week, Citigroup also reduced its price target to $197 from $257.

Earlier this month, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives offered a different view, adding Salesforce to his list of top 30 AI companies and calling the stock a “core participant” in the “AI revolution.” He described the recent software sell-off as “overblown.”

Shares of Salesforce, which reports earnings Wednesday, are down 30% year to date and 1% premarket today.