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Ryan Specialty: The Unconflicted Middleman
Programming Note: I will take the next two days off. MBI Deep Dives will be back on Monday next week.
You can listen to the Deep Dive here
Pat Ryan, currently 88-year old, is a living legend in the insurance industry. Soon after graduating from college, he entered insurance industry
Nadella's Flip-Flop
There are perhaps few things in the current AI revolution that keeps my opinions grounded than watching Microsoft’s evolving position in the post-ChatGPT world. It can be tempting to imagine investors just frenetically changing their labels to Microsoft as “AI winner” or “AI loser” every few months, but the
Survival of the Fastest
More than a decade ago, Peter Thiel wrote:
“Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly—usually
OpenAI's Dilemma
WSJ yesterday had an interesting reporting on why OpenAI is pondering to focus more on enterprise. Some excerpts from the piece:
“OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a “do everything all at once”
The Neocloud Trojan Horse
One of the most frequent pushbacks that I have received to my recent posts on AWS (see here, and here) is that the neoclouds are not a legitimate concern for hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure in the long term. Frankly speaking, I myself operated under this assumption for the
Veeva Model Update
As I have promised earlier, I have updated my Veeva model yesterday. If you are not familiar with the company, I suggest you read my Deep Dive (September 2024), and an update on the company from December last year. I will briefly go through the model and share some thoughts
Meta at the AI Crossroads
A couple of days ago, NYT reported that Meta will delay releasing its new foundational AI model to May this year. While Meta never really publicly disclosed when they would likely release their new model, it was widely believed to be sometime in March. However, NYT’s reporting indicated that
Editing Adobe
At first glance, everything seems to be chugging along just fine at Adobe. Their earnings yesterday continued to show that revenue is still growing at double digit rate with operating margins remaining quite stable.
In fact, Adobe mentioned their ARR from “AI first” offering tripled YoY with monthly active users
Meta's Chip Resilience
AWS, Google, and Microsoft have all deployed a similar chip strategy with varying degree of success. Google has its TPUs, AWS has Trainium, and Microsoft has its Maia chips. The success of their chips so far are also in that order with TPU being ahead of the pack and Maia
Follow-up on "AWS: Pre and Post-ChatGPT"
Last Saturday, I published a piece outlining my reasons for nervousness about the long-term future of AWS. This led to a noticeably more constructive feedback from readers which I would like to address in this follow-up piece. I will also expand on a couple of points further behind the paywall.