Anthropic Fable 5 'Blipped' Out, Elon & Zuck Cloud 'Plan Bs', & More. AI-RTZ #1137

1. Anthropic Freed to Release Fable 5: Anthropic was allowed by the US government after two and a half weeks, to re-release its latest frontier model Fable 5 back globally. Its companion Mythos model is still on a gated release approved case by case by the US Government. Much as it’s gating OpenAI’s comparable GPT 5.6 model. The Anthropic ‘stop and go’ ruling, what I call ‘The Blip 2.0’ based on ‘The Blip 1.0’ over three years ago when OpenAI founder/CEO Sam Altman was fired and then re-hired over a weekend and a day. The tell of the gated stretch: Anthropic spent it shipping everything else — Claude Sonnet 5, Claude Science, Claude Tag — while its flagship sat parked, as the WSJ reported on the administration deal. And the redeploy arrives bundled with a July 7 flip to à la carte usage-credits, even for $200/month subscribers. What both labs need now: a clear US release policy, while China’s open-source models race around the logjam. More here and here.

   

2. Elon & Zuck aim for Cloud Web Services (CWS): Meta is following in Elon’s footsteps, and contemplating a cloud business a la Amazon AWS. Semianalysis had a useful analysis in “Everyone wants to be a Neocloud“. Investors flashed green: Meta jumped almost 10% — over $100 billion in market cap in a day — on the ‘ZWS’ (Zuck Web Services) rumblings, something I flagged as a possibility back in August 2024, while neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius fell double digits. Elon’s ‘EWS’ already booked $70 billion-plus in pre-IPO compute deals — renting its Memphis data center to Anthropic and striking a $30 billion-plus deal with Google. Markets are rewarding incumbents acting like startups — But plans for ZWS and EWS (my take on Elon Web Services), both off Amazon AWS, remain dynamic and fluid. Much depends on the success of Meta’s AGI efforts with MSL (Meta Superintelligence Labs), under Zuck’s $14+ billion acquihire Alexandr Wang. It’s either massive additional use of Meta’s immense AI Data Center builds, or rental opportunities to Anthropic, OpenAI and hopefully others at profitable prices. Or not. More here.

   

3. Global RAMageddon gets more Real: The ‘RAMageddon’ global memory crunch is starting to take a global bite out of consumer electronics. And there are no easy solutions, as even Apple has exhibited with its recent price increases. Memory is swinging from ~5% to 40-60% of the bill of materials on some gadgets — CNBC calls it an “existential crisis for the smaller players”; the trillion-dollar memory trio (Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung) is sold out years ahead at 85%+ margins, even as Samsung and SK Hynix pledge ~$600 billion in new capacity and China’s CXMT wins a $3 billion Tencent deal. When the best supply chain in the business answers with 15-25% price hikes, that’s the tell — relief takes years and hundreds of billions, with little cavalry before 2028. Lot depends on the US deciding how to negotiate with China on its rising domestic memory chip supplies. The canary in the coal mine will of course be Apple. If they’re allowed access to chips from China. More here and here.

   

4. Nvidia leans into Revenue Share deals: Nvidia’s founder/CEO Jensen Huang is cleverly leveraging the company’s balance sheet with revenue share deals with customers and partners. The new ‘AI Compute Partnership’ (ACP) formalizes what CoreWeave got pre-IPO (a $6.3 billion backstop, with billions more in rent-back deals since): Nvidia guarantees to rent back unsold GPU capacity — financing both the chips and the data centers, up to and including talks to backstop OpenAI’s proposed $500 billion Ohio build-out — for a cut of the cloud revenues. The Information’s framing: the world’s biggest AI pickaxe and shovel seller, becoming a kind of a ‘silent partner’ to its chip buyers. The AI merchant to every side of this week’s ‘Us vs Them’ wars now finances the merchandise with a piece of the revenues too. ‘Circular’? Sure — But ‘win-win’ deals for now with one of the biggest balance sheets in the game. More here.

   

5. Anthropic/Amazon relationship evolves: The other two iconic partners in the Frontier Lab race, Amazon and Anthropic, are also evolving their relationship. Anthropic renegotiated its deal with one of its earliest backers from compute-hours to per-token pricing — flexing its pole-position pricing power ahead of its trillion-dollar-plus mega-AI IPO, the same usage-based shift hitting its other customers this year. Amazon — which also agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI (alongside up to $25 billion more in Anthropic) — is evaluating OpenAI’s and its own Nova models as hedges, after CEO Andy Jassy’s reported role in triggering ‘The Blip 2.0’ itself. Both sides say costs aren’t rising; the meter tells the story. Echoes of how Microsoft and OpenAI evolved their original partnership — ‘it’s complicated,’ the sequel. More here.

   

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. An AI Bubble collapse scenario for Global Economy, by the BIS. More here.

2. Yet another AI Chip Bottleneck, CoWoS developed by TSMC, in Asia. More here.

(Additional Note: AI Ramblings Daily on YouTube, is now a weekday Daily podcast called AI Ramblings Daily (ARD). Just passed the #100 podcast milestone mark. Different content than AI-Reset to Zero (AI-RTZ) substack, which remains a daily morning substack write-up. With now over 1130+ ‘MY TAKES’ on key AI events and issues turbulently flowing by. ARD is typically a 20 minute afternoon podcast every day, on my take on additional AI developments. Both daily substack and podcasts typically discuss different AI issues and items. There is a daily text summary of the daily podcasts here on the substack, as well as one minute YouTube ‘Shorts’ video clips on the key topics discussed. And all are free to subscribe for now. Try this week’s series with ARD Episodes 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 here.)

Also, how the US/Soviet Russia 50+ year ‘Space Race’ has implications for current US/China ‘AI Race’:

Happy 250th Birthday indeed, America!

Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Happy July 4th Weekend all!

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)