Week 37: Oracle Scores $300B, Perplexity Steals Dictionaries, Lights Dim Everywhere
THE INFRASTRUCTURE WARS
Everyone's fighting over AI's plumbing, and the casualties are mounting. This week saw Oracle secure the deal of the century, Perplexity get caught red-handed stealing dictionaries (yes, dictionaries), and the entire power grid groan under AI's bottomless appetite. We're not building the future anymore — we're strip-mining the present to keep it running.
THE GOLD RUSH FOR PIPES
Oracle Wins Infrastructure Lottery with a $300 billion OpenAI cloud deal that transforms yesterday's database company into tomorrow's AI landlord. Dictionary Thieves Get Caught as Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity for literally stealing the definition of stealing.
THE ADULTS TRY TO INTERVENE
California Writes New Rules as lawmakers pass SB 53 demanding AI companies explain themselves before they break more things. Even AI Needs Sick Days when Anthropic's Claude crashes, forcing developers to remember how coding worked in 2019. The Lights Start Flickering as MIT reveals AI's electricity appetite has grown 80% since 2020, because intelligence apparently runs on coal.
Curious what it all adds up to? Let’s break it down. Keep reading below.
Tell Me More
Larry Ellison's Last Laugh. Oracle landing a $300 billion deal is like your dad's minivan winning a drag race. While everyone focused on sexy AI companies, boring old Oracle quietly became the landlord everyone needs to pay. Oracle just monopolized the toll booth everyone needs to cross. Expect every legacy tech company to pivot from "digital transformation" to "AI picks and shovels."
The Dictionary Defense. Perplexity getting sued for stealing dictionary definitions is peak 2024 absurdity. They literally plagiarized the definition of plagiarism. Peak existential comedy. When your AI search engine can't even create original definitions of words, maybe the problem isn't the technology but the business model. Encyclopedia Britannica waited centuries to stay relevant, and it took AI precisely 18 months to steal their lunch money.
California's Speed Bump. SB 53 isn't regulation — it's California's admission that they have no idea what AI does but it scares them. "Transparency requirements" is government-speak for "please explain this before you destroy everything." This won't stop AI development; it'll just add a checkbox to the deployment process. The real impact? AI companies will hire more lawyers than engineers. Progress will now be measured in compliance reports.
When the Machines Need a Nap. Anthropic's outage revealed our dirty secret: we're completely dependent on systems we don't control. Developers "coding like cavemen" for a few hours exposed how quickly we've forgotten basic skills. We've built entire workflows around tools that can vanish without warning. The scariest part? Most developers' backup plan was "wait for it to come back online."
The Meter's Running. AI's 80% electricity surge since 2020 amounts to planetary-scale resource extraction. Every ChatGPT query burns coal somewhere. We're literally setting the planet on fire to argue with chatbots. Data centers are the new steel mills, except they produce nothing tangible. The solution isn't efficiency — it's admission that maybe infinite AI scaling has finite planet problems. But that conversation won't happen until the brownouts start.
Below The Fold
Want to make $750K+? Just build AI agents, says PM who definitely isn't trying to justify their own salary. Aakashg.com
Spotify mad that 10,000 users sold their Wrapped data, as if user data wasn't Spotify's entire business model. Ars Technica
HumanAlarm sends actual humans to wake you up, solving a problem nobody had with a solution nobody wanted. HumanAlarm.com
Essay explores how writing about life prevents you from living it, hitting every writer where it hurts. Tommy Dixon
Grey-market Chinese peptides create a $100B DIY pharma industry, because healthcare failed that badly. The Leverage
New game turns doomscrolling into actual gameplay, making our worst habits "fun." Ironic Sans
Scientists claim pre-humans buried their dead 120,000 years early, rewriting history based on questionable evidence. Interesting Engineering
Digital media workers forced to train their AI replacements, the modern equivalent of digging your own grave. Justine Snacks
Nina Dobrev and Shaun White cancel wedding, proving even celebrities can't commit to anything anymore. Gossip Time
TDK electrifies Indian motorcycles, because nothing says progress like battery-powered traffic jams. CleanTechnica
Looking Ahead: The infrastructure wars are just beginning. Next week, expect more legacy companies to discover they're sitting on AI gold mines, more lawsuits over who owns human knowledge, and more brownouts as we trade electrons for intelligence.
Thanks for reading Briefs — your weekly recap of the signals I couldn't ignore. This week that meant reading 1,023 stories from 53 sources. You're welcome.