Mentioned in today’s edition: Cam's last edition, Microsoft, Maduro, Palantir, SpaceX, Chrome and Aussie. Plus, deals on Ecovacs robotic vacuums, LG OLED TVs and Apple Watches.

The News

The bill has come due for the AI industry

AI companies are tightening their belts. OpenAI shut down Sora, Anthropic has launched a new model with "adaptive" thinking that automatically routes your requests to smaller models. It's also "testing" limiting Claude Code and third party harnesses (like OpenClaw) to higher subscriptions or pay-as-you-go models. Microsoft is shifting enterprise to token-based billing. xAI is being slurped up into SpaceX. Companies using these models now say they're burning through their AI budgets. Meanwhile, it's getting more expensive and fraught to build data centres that AI companies need to pay off the money they've already raised. Frontier labs are spending enormous amounts of money training more powerful models so they have an advantage over the free AI models released by labs which, the US government claims, are mooching off the improvements of the frontier labs by distilling their models. 

The Sizzle: It's fucking nut crunch time. For the past three-ish years, big tech has promised that LLMs were going to change everything, be part of everyone's lives, and that meant these companies were going to be paid by everyone. The state of play now is that there's still no killer consumer AI app — like the LLM version of the iPhone or Facebook — but clearly some businesses are finding value using it, mostly in coding. The AU$10 trillion question (a number based on analysts' prediction of revenue needed to cover its buildout for the rest of the decade) is about the survival of the AI industry. These companies are unprofitable, enormously leveraged, their expenditure is going up and not down, there's near-zero switching cost between companies and their products are getting commoditised within months of launching. The unknown is whether people and companies will accept them increasing their prices or squeezing users onto more expensive plans. 

AI (as in generative LLM AI) is clearly here to stay, but the people and companies who built it might not be. For all the talk of SkyNet and AI bioweapons killing everyone, it's the AI makers who are facing existential risk. And if they go down, a lot of other people — probably you and me — could be dragged down with them. 

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People keep finding ways to cheat on prediction markets

There are a few different ways to cheat get an edge in gambling prediction markets. You could, for example, allegedly use your inside knowledge as a soldier involved in capturing Maduro to win more than half a million AUD on bets that the Venezuelan president would be removed from office by the end of the month. This does come with the downside that you will probably get caught (US Department of Justice). Or, you can think smart, not hard, and win a bet about Paris' top temperature by locating the temperature sensor whose readings are used to adjudicate the claim and, maybe, just blast it with a hairdryer so it records a higher temperature? (Engadget). Good to see the "truth machines" working as intended!

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Email is under attack

The bad newsletter company, Substack, said on the bad site, X, that Google has fiddled with its tracking pixels which means that people's open rates on emails have just plummeted (X). It's just one of the latest changes to the way popular email clients are treating emails. Increasingly companies like Google and Apple are sorting emails, prioritising some, hiding others, bringing that same black box algorithmic decision making into one of the few sources of information that people still control. 

If there's one thing we should do, I think it's to try use the internet like it's still 1999. 

Related reading: here's a retrospective of how the email format was developed, and how it could've had more features built in from the start

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

The (maybe true) story of the long-lost one-man Aussie OS

There was a deleted post on Imgur (of all places) in 2014 from a guy that claims he coded his own DOS clone operating system, called Aussie, and a video game engine. The story goes that he was isolated in rural NSW and, armed with little but a 486 computer and a few 1980s BASIC books he got from the school library, built his own filing software, text-based adventure games and a CLI for his local TAFE. This does seem a little too good to be true but, if it's not, what I would give to have a go on the Aussie system. 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders past and present.