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S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

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Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#151

Post by tmp10423288442 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #96
LaurensBER wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we tried to do a pilot with their cloud we couldn't even sign-up. None of the corporate credit cards were accepted. In addition to that the form basically only worked in Edge. We emailed support, they changed something on the backend. It still did not work. We gave up. In retrospective that was a very clear warning sign that their priorities were misguided. I'm glad we did not waste any further time and effort o…

Oracle Cloud sometimes feels like an elaborate prank that I'm not in on. I know people and companies on AWS (obviously), Azure, Google Cloud, Hetzner, CloudFlare's various PaaS offerings, etc., but I can't name a single thing running on Oracle Cloud. Somebody out there is clearly using but I'll be damned if I know who it is.

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Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#152

Post by moduspol »

amlib wrote: post #104
solatic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS and Google at least own their own hardware (Trainium and TPUs, respectively). It's a moat in the sense that designing, building, and deploying your own chips at scale is quite a feat and not easily replicated. The vertical integration will allow them to continue to be profitable once the models get good enough and competitors' prices race to the bottom. Google has Gemini; AWS may not deploy its own models (yet?),…

Isn't specialized hardware also a big risk? GPUs are more amenable to any big changes that may happen in the next 5, 10 years of AI research. Maybe we won't even be talking about LLMs anymore. Maybe matrix multiplication won't even be the main primitive.

If matrix multiplication isn't the main primitive, I think we have a lot of pain coming our way.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#153

Post by echelon »

tptacek wrote: post #138
cmiles8 wrote: post #31

Market signals on an impending AI bust are broader than just Oracle’s woes. For example, Amazon just had a challenging bond offering where the market is clearly starting to seriously question the ROI on all this money being pumped into AI buildout. That does not bode well at all for AI-only companies without broader cash flow from other businesses. And when the cash dries up this whole thing comes crashing down like…

This is a pretty Oracle-specific situation, isn't it? They bet the company on an AI infrastructure buildout and levered hard to do it. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft aren't in comparable situations. Oracle is transforming itself into a value-added CoreWeave (not just in terms of product packaging but also the financial structure of the company), in a way the other hyperscalers aren't. This story has been playing out f…

Fable and Seedance are wildly good products, and they're creating lots of opportunity for disruption.

Oracle is in a weird shape.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#154

Post by LarsDu88 »

lelanthran wrote: post #71
boron1006 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat. But I switched from ChatGPT to Claude 3 months ago because my account was down for like 6 hours. I haven’t used it since. It’s too easy to switch away from chatbots on a whim. There is no moat for that.

> I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat. But... Anthropic doesn't have a moat. It's clear at this point that SOTA models are not a moat, and Opus 4.6-level (or GLM 5.2) is sufficient. Google, though... they own the entire vertical, from the semiconductors to the end-user software. They may have a moat.

The narrative that superintelligence is imminent is partially at fault here.

There are competing definitions of what intelligence even is, and the one that I find most striking is from Francois Chollet which is that intelligence can be boiled down to skill acquisition efficiency. This type of definition makes intelligence more akin to polishing a ball than growing a watermelon.

The superintelligence doomers warn that the watermelon is going to start growing exponentially and crush everyone. But what might actually be happening is that we are not growing a watermelon but rather polishing the ball until its really smooth and shiny. There's a point where you can get it to micron levels of polish but for most tasks (white collar text domains tasks), it's smooth enough! You will be able to go to the ball store and buy a low cost made in china ball for most tasks.

The real challenge is actually branching out domains and modalities to tackle things like blue collar labor. Over time, white collar work automatable or able to be made hyperefficient by LLMs will see LLM commoditization.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#155

Post by lelanthran »

wmf wrote: post #17
unreal6 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Bedrock a "middleman?" I believe that they run all inference inside of AWS data centers, on their own infrastructure. Their new endpoint even promises zero operator access [0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/exploring-the-...

Weights are worth far more than data centers.

> Weights are worth far more than data centers.

I dunno, hey. After all, I can't distill my competitors datacentres :-)

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#156

Post by turbonaut »

gruez wrote: post #128
someuser54541 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best way to hedge against this, considering many of us have significant savings in the market? A few puts on SPY dated a year or two out?

>A few puts on SPY dated a year or two out? You think the hedge funds selling SPY options don't have this priced in already? Of course, you can still make money on this bet, just like you can win money at a roulette table, but unless you think have some special insight that hedge/quant funds don't have, buying options should be negative EV.

The ask was not how to make money, it was how to hedge.

I’d argue that it is very normal for hedging to be giving up expected value in return for a reduction in volatility of returns.

If you have a lot of exposure to the market already one could say not buying the option is more akin to roulette.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#157

Post by the__alchemist »

someuser54541 wrote: post #117
lelanthran wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Market signals on an impending AI bust are broader than just Oracle’s woes. It's worse than that - I believe that Oracle is one of the (many) companies right now that, if their AI experimentation fails, will stop the music, and everyone will be running for a chair. Oracle is one of a few foundational components in the circular-investing group of AI companies. If they fail to make their commitments they're the first…

What's the best way to hedge against this, considering many of us have significant savings in the market? A few puts on SPY dated a year or two out?

#1: Great question, and I would love to hear the answers (And am learning from the ones posted)

#2: What I've done so far: Haven't bought stock in a year. Have moderate short positions on Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla. Have big short positions in the most popular Quantum computing companies. (Scams IMO). I have sold most of my positions ("profit taking"?) in stocks which have gone up a lot in the past year. (Nvidia, Broadcom etc), and am no longer using margin; about 1/3 of my brokerage value is now "cash", generating ~3% interest.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#158

Post by cmiles8 »

xienze wrote: post #143
semiquaver wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing says “full of shit” like someone saying “market is signaling an impending X”. Why not make a huge levered bet and get wildly rich if you think so?

Knowing "what" will happen is different from knowing "when" it will happen.

Bingo

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#159

Post by bhouston »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #151
Analemma_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle Cloud sometimes feels like an elaborate prank that I'm not in on. I know people and companies on AWS (obviously), Azure, Google Cloud, Hetzner, CloudFlare's various PaaS offerings, etc., but I can't name a single thing running on Oracle Cloud. Somebody out there is clearly using but I'll be damned if I know who it is.

TikTok for US users

When your customers are government mandated, are they really customers or hostages?

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#160

Post by lelanthran »

anon291 wrote: post #30
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD Instinct is their direct competitor for compute and they are better per dollar, better per watt, and out competing on raw performance. Only thing holding them back is fab capacity which nVidia keeps buying in bulk to keep them small.

Have you ever actually had anyone work with these chips? Developer ux on amd is terrible.

> Have you ever actually had anyone work with these chips? Developer ux on amd is terrible.

Just how much of dev ux do you need? A foundational library, of course, but as the AI companies keep saying, their models can vibe-code what's needed for those chips anyway.

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