Larry Dignan

Meta rewards you to consume tokens. This is the same as IBM way back when rewarding you for lines of code. and bloat. Outcomes not tokens.

Also see: Where’s tokenomics for the rest of us?

Coupa and AWS said they have signed a 5-year deal to partner on spend management data and apps. Under the partnership, the two companies will combine Coupa's business intelligence network with AWS AI tools. The goal is to deliver autonomous direct and indirect spend data across sourcing, payment to supply chain.

The two companies said AWS customers will be able to deploy Coupa Navi AI agents, which are built on Amazon Bedrock, to automate procurement workflows.

Wipro announced an 8-year deal with Olam Group, a food and agri-business company, worth at least $800 million. The total deal is expected to top $1 billion in contract value. As part of the deal, Wipro will take over Olam's Mindsprint unit, which will combine domain expertise with the Indian services company's AI services.

Oracle appointed Hilary Maxson CFO. Maxon was previously CFO at Schneider Electric. She will report to CEO Clay Magouyrk.

The big takeaway from this announcement is that Maxson's previous role was at a data center and utility electrification provider. The hiring of Maxson highlights that Oracle is more about AI infrastructure over applications.

Today’s reading list has a common theme: Turmoil in the land of AI infrastructure. Here’s a trio of links:

The Information: OpenAI CEO and CFO Diverge on IPO Timing: The gist is this: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to go public ASAP to fund his GPU promises. CFO Sarah Friar has argued that the company isn’t ready.

WSJ: An Inside Look at OpenAI and Anthropic’s Finances Ahead of Their IPOs: The money paragraph: The costs are set to be so mind-bogglingly high that both companies report two different measures of profitability—one that includes training costs, and one that leaves them out.

In other words, all you have to do is strip out the compute costs and these companies look pretty good. I just spit out my coffee writing that.

How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars: A Substack from former Microsoft engineer on Azure’s architecture and scaling problems.

Here's an interesting post on org charts in the agentic AI age from Block's Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha. A few observations after a lot of long talking:

• Block sees three roles in the org chart. Individual contributors, directly responsible individuals on the hook for outcomes and player coaches.
• "There is no need for a permanent middle management layer. Everything else the old hierarchy did, the system coordinates, and everyone is empowered, with a role that's much closer to the work and the customer."
• "At Block, we're questioning the underlying assumption: that organizations have to be hierarchically organized with humans as the coordination mechanism. Instead, we intend to replace what the hierarchy does. Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a copilot, which makes the existing structure work slightly better without changing it. We're after something different: a company built as an intelligence (or mini-AGI)."

Amazon said it will add a 3.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge across Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) in the US and Canada as well as to Remote Fulfillment with FBA from the US into Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. The surcharge starts April 17.

Buy with Prime in the US and Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) will wee the surcharge kick in on May 2. The surcharge applies to fulfillment fees not the sale price of items.

Cursor launched Cursor 3 and will more directly compete with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex by giving developers the ability to manage multiple AI agents. In a blog post, Cursor said:

"The new Cursor interface brings clarity to the work agents produce, pulling you up to a higher level of abstraction, with the ability to dig deeper when you want. It's faster, cleaner, and more powerful, with a multi-repo layout, seamless handoff between local and cloud agents, and the option to switch back to the Cursor IDE at any time."

The interface of Cursor 3 provides access to multiple workspaces, runs agents in parallel and hands off between local and cloud environments.

OpenAI said it will buy Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) to have big conversations about AGI and how AI changes society. I've always said every vendor is a publisher. Now OpenAI is proving out the case.

Box said its new Box Agent is generally available and applies multiple AI models to unstructured data to carry out tasks. Box Agent will be able to search across content libraries, create files in various formats, analyze documents, summarize and complete multi-step tasks.

Box also added a bevy of features to Box AI Studio to create custom AI agents for workflows.

Cloudflare said it has used AI coding agents to create a content management system in two months. The CMS, called EmDash, is designed to be "the spiritual successor to WordPress."

The company said in a blog:

"EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites. EmDash is fully open source, MIT licensed, and available on GitHub."

Cloudflare's core pitch is that EmDash solves security issues with plugins.

EmDash is another interesting project from Cloudflare worth watching.

Microsoft launched 3 new models from its in-house AI team. The company rolled out MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2. The models are available in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground.

But the big takeaway from this launch needs to be viewed through a directional lens. Microsoft is building its own models and intends to be able to compete at the frontier levels in 2026 into 2027. In interviews with The Verge and Financial Times, Microsoft's AI head Mustafa Suleyman said the company is pursuing superintelligence, AI independence and reaching frontier model levels.

In other words, Microsoft's trio of models are a nice first installment but more of an indicator of where it's headed.