Larry Dignan

Arm's third quarter results were better-than-expected and the follow-up earnings call yielded a few takeaways. Here's what Haas had to say.

• "Outside the data center, AI is now moving to everyday devices. The edge and physical AI markets are opening up new growth opportunities. These systems operate in real time under strict power, safety and reliability constraints, where efficient and predictable general-purpose compute is essential."
• "In Cloud AI, the shift towards inference is reshaping data center design. And increasingly, that inference is agent-based. These workloads are persistent, always-on and power constrained. This is a fundamental change in how AI systems operate. This is because agent-based AI requires coordination across many agents running continuously, and that the CPU can only do coordination. As this model scales, customers need CPU chips with higher core counts and better power efficiency to operate continuously within tight power and cost constraints."

CoreWeave launched ARENA (AI-Ready Native Applications) to help enterprises test workloads on the AI cloud provider's infrastructure. According to CoreWeave, ARENA replaces traditional sandbox and demo environments and replaces it with production compute for evaluations.

The general idea is to give CoreWeave customers proof before production with real workloads.

Indeed, ARENA provides access to an NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack. ARENA also features CoreWeave Mission Control, SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes) and CKS (CoreWeave Kubernetes Service) as well as object storage using LOTA (Local Object Transport Accelerator). Integration into tools such as Weights & Biases for tracking and understanding model behavior are also available.

Qualcomm's first quarter results were strong, but the outlook fell short of expectations. Qualcomm topped estimates with fiscal first quarter earnings of $2.78 a share on revenue of $12.25 billion, up 5% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $3.50 a share. Automotive revenue in the first quarter was up 15% and IoT sales grew 9%. Handset revenue was up 3%.

As for the outlook, Qualcomm projected non-GAAP second quarter earnings of $2.45 a share to $2.65 a share with revenue between $10.2 billion to $11 billion. Analysts were expecting $2.90 a share in earnings and $11.1 billion in revenue.

Memory shortages and customers stockpiling inventory were cited for the outlook. Memory shortages and higher prices for smartphones are going to be a headwind.

Anthropic in a blog post said Claude will remain ad free and its users won't see sponsored links adjacent to conversations. The move highlights how Anthropic and OpenAI are carving out different strategies with the former focused on business usage.

"We want our users to trust Claude to help them keep thinking—about their work, their challenges, and their ideas.

Our experience of using the internet has made it easy to assume that advertising on the products we use is inevitable. But open a notebook, pick up a well-crafted tool, or stand in front of a clean chalkboard, and there are no ads in sight.

We think Claude should work the same way."

Uber's fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 71 cents a share missed estimates by 9 cents. However, revenue of $14.37 billion, up 20% from a year ago, topped estimates. The company ended the year with more than 200 million monthly users. Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said in prepared remarks: "As a result of our focus on cross-platform engagement, 40% of Uber customers are now using multiple products, driving frequency higher and building long-term loyalty."

The company also addressed autonomous vehicles concerns and impact on Uber.

Texas Instruments said it will buy Silicon Labs for $231 a share, or $7.5 billion. TI will pay all cash. TI's plan is to leverage Silicon Labs embedded wireless portfolio and become an leading IoT player.

Qualtrics said it has named Jason Maynard CEO. Maynard joins Qualtrics from Oracle where he was EVP of Revenue Operations. He joined Oracle via the 2016 acquisition of NetSuite. Maynard's mandate is to accelerate growth, drive product clarity and position Qualtrics as an AI-driven experience intelligence layer.

Constellation Research analyst Chirag Mehta outlines India's strategy for AI and building an ecosystem. "This strategy is clear: make India a base for global compute, deepen the build ecosystem behind it, and let the partner economy scale on top. The question is not intent. The question is execution," said Mehta.

Enterprise software vendors are bonkers for forward deployed engineers as the model to deliver value. Palantir, which pioneered the FDE model, is on the AI version. On Palantir's earnings call, CTO Shyam Sankar said Palantir's AI FDE is developing well. Palantir has created an AI agent FDE. "AI FDE continues to delight. AI FDE is now capable of powering complex SAP ERP migrations from ECC to S/4, years of work now done in as little as 2 weeks. And we are generalizing AI FDE's capabilities to do this for a broader and broader set of problems at our customers," said Sankar.

SpaceX acquires xAI in move aimed at accelerating space-base AI data centers. We assume the negotiation went well between Elon Musk and himself. Elon Musk said in a SpaceX post that the goal of the xAI merger is to "form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform."

OpenText said it will sell Vertica to Rocket Software for $150 million in cash to reduce debt. OpenText said it is selling off non-core assets to improve its balance sheet and focus its efforts. Vertica contributed $80 million in annual revenue to OpenText. In January, OpenText sold its eDocs business to NetDocuments Software for $163 million.

Anthropic released a paper on disempowerment usage in AI by analyzing Claude conversations.
The paper examines beliefs, values and actions in a dataset of 1.5 million Claude.ai conversations. Disempowerment, where a user's autonomous judgment is fundamentally compromised, occurs in roughly 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 conversations. Although that's rare, there's a large number of people affected. If you were to lump in all usage across models, the number of humans affected swells. here's what disempowerment looks like in practice.