A Simple Definition Of “Platform” - “a product that supports the creation and/or delivery of other products."
Inside Oracle’s New AI Agents - Moor Insights & Strategy - Getting the robot to do annual performance reviews: “Oracle is also leveraging AI to improve the performance review process itself. By aggregating and distilling information from check-ins, feedback and goal progress throughout the year, the AI agent can generate a first draft of a performance review. This should save managers time and effort while fostering a more comprehensive assessment of employee performance.” // Performance review are notoriously bullshit in the first place. What’d be interesting here is to have the robot go over the past five years and make a performance review and then compare it to what the human managers did. Which ones are (1) more correct, and, (2) better connect employee performance to organization goals (profit, growth, customer service, productivity/lower cost, etc.)
No Rules Are Implicit Rules - The European view on enlightened American management policy: “Greg, I hate to bring it to you, but working for ten fucking hours a day is not the normal hour. I don’t care if you live in America or not. The section continues with other “grand” examples of managers taking “up to” 14 days a year off to show their employees they should to so too. Let’s assume the best here: 14 workdays are almost three weeks. A year. The statutory minimum for full-time employees working a forty-hour week is 20 (thus 4 weeks) in Belgium. Oops."
On European Defence, Energy and Growth - Imagining big changes in European priorities: changing policy to get more energy, more emphasis on militaries.
AI Agents and the CEOs - “At the risk of saying the quiet part out loud, the way CEOs are talking about agents sure sounds like how they talk about employees–only cheaper!” // “Companies are dedicating significant spend to AI–approximately 5% of the revenue of large enterprises (revenues over $500 million) according to one survey by Boston Consulting Group, and yet only 25% claim they are seeing value from their AI investment."
What is AI Middleware, and Why You Need It to Safely Deliver AI Applications - AI middleware is the glue that holds your AI-driven apps together, making sure models, data, and existing systems actually talk to each other instead of breaking everything. It saves developers from reinventing the wheel, adds security layers, and keeps AI projects from becoming yet another unmaintainable mess.
The danger of relying on OpenAI’s Deep Research - Some valid critiques of Deep Research. Though, none of them really amount to “it’s not good.” To sum-up: it can’t do complex research, let alone come up with original ideas nor cover obscure topics. It can’t only tell you what the Internet knows. This is actually not fully accurate: you can also upload your own files and put in your own knowledge. For me, the main problem is the readability of the reports. While they are long and detailed, they’re not written in an engaging way they makes it easy to read. I have a pile of them that I’ve yet to fully pick through. // Yeah, these robots have little creativity and original thought and father own, they can only do the predictable. But, man, they sure can do a lot of it.
New estimates have ChatGPT using 10x less power than previously thought - ”it would actually be more energy efficient for you to have an LLM turn off your furnace than to walk across the house to manually turn the dial.”
[Learning from my mistakes…](https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisduncania/p/learning-from-my-mistakes?r=2d4o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false) - It’s tough to monetize content that has near zero value or originality, and be easily pirated. This especially true if the price is wrong. That sort of applies to every product. // “In the end though, you can’t optimise your way out of a black hole, the gravity is too heavy. We were marketing a product at a price point that was material to our customers, and giving them content which was largely available from our competitors for free. All the tweaks in the world couldn’t change that."