Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research
Larry Dignan photograph

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Steve Jobs and NeXT needed sales and the CIA needed some advance compute. So goes a story in The Wall Street Journal about how the CIA helped fund NeXT initially with the purchase of 20,000 computers. Later, Jobs said he was going to move on to reinvent music (head back to Apple to launch the iPod).

While Jobs is most associated with Apple, the NeXT and Pixar eras are just as important to me. Here's a DisrupTV episode on the NeXT era.

Poolside AI, an AI model-builder, is reportedly in a non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia for $6 billion. Per Eric Newcomer, Nvidia will also invest $1 billion in Poolside. The deal rhymes with an acquihire in that 109 employees are joining Nvidia, but the founders are staying behind.

Newcomer's newsletter has the details, but the big takeaway is that Nvidia is adding some talent for its open LLM plans. Nemotron may improve more with Poolside.

WD-40 CEO Steven Brass recently talked growth strategies including social influencers, digital sales and navigating the supply chain. But the big takeaway is that WD-40 is an AI and robotics play.

See: WD-40 touts commerce, ERP overhaul

Brass said:

"So AI data centers, drone technology around the world, particularly in agriculture is a massive growth area for us. And so tapping into that growth opportunity, again for the core product and for the more Specialist products. Growth areas like robotics, automation also need significant lubrication, et cetera. And so lots of growth opportunities across robotics, automation, drone technology. And actually, another big kind of trend out there is aging capital equipment. And so older equipment tends to need and even the automotive fleet today in the medium term is aging around the world. And so they are trends that are also kind of driving further kind of consumption. And then you've got some of the other big ones, right, growth of emerging markets. And so we're certainly tapping into that."

Marvell said Google has the right to buy nearly 59 million shares of the chipmaker at a price of $206.58 a share. In an SEC filing, Marvell said the warrants are related to an expanded partnership between the two companies.

"The expanded partnership spans a comprehensive range of custom silicon programs that attach to the TPU ecosystem, including AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute."

OpenAI reportedly told investors that its second quarter revenue grew 18% sequentially with larger losses. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI's second quarter revenue was $6.7 billion, up from $5.7 billion. The second quarter operating loss in the second quarter was $12.3 billion.

Simply put, OpenAI's financials are a bad look compared to Anthropic's doubling of revenue to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Meanwhile, OpenAI said it was hitting pause on reinforcement learning for its frontier model development.

Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus have begun to question what happens to the AI ecosystem if OpenAI fails.

Home Depot's second quarter results included a bevy of items focused on customer experience. Sales in the second quarter were $47.9 billion, up 5.7% from a year ago. CFO Richard McPhail said the company's customers continue to engage in home improvement projects, but are refraining from big projects.

What Home Depot can control is its experience. Here's a look at the takeaways:

  • Magic Apron is evolving. Associates are using the Magic Apron app to navigate stores, find products and answer questions quickly.
  • Home Depot is stepping up Express Delivery efforts.
  • Digital sales in the second quarter were up 11% from a year ago.