Late last year, OpenAI was frantically signing deals for hundreds of billions of dollars! Six gigawatts of GPU chips from AMD! A hundred billion dollar deal with Nvidia for ten gigawatts of GPU chips!

The press went wild! Stock prices got quite the boost! Line went up!

It turns out this impossible data centre deal wasn’t possible. The Wall Street Journal broke the news that “The $100 Billion Megadeal Between OpenAI and Nvidia Is on Ice.” Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not impressed with OpenAI: [WSJ]

At the time, the ChatGPT-maker expected the deal negotiations to be completed in the coming weeks, people familiar with the plans said. But the talks haven’t progressed beyond the early stages.

… Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized … He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic.

Jensen Huang is now playing down the non-deal and only wants to talk about the future, where he loves OpenAI and definitely wants to invest! [Reuters]

Jim Cramer of CNBC asked Jensen about this $100 billion not a deal. Jensen says everything is fine: [YouTube]

No, there’s no controversy at all. It’s complete nonsense. We love working with OpenAI. We are incredibly honored and delighted to be able to invest in their next round. And so we’re privileged that they’re inviting us to invest for each one of their rounds. We would love to be invited and we would consider of course investing in it.

Hope that makes everything clear.

OpenAI didn’t lash out in Reuters, their unnamed sources did: “OpenAI is unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and looking for alternatives, sources say”. [Reuters]

Sam Altman tweeted: [Twitter, archive]

We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from.

First answer was from noted computer scientist Grady Booch: [Twitter, archive]

Hands Sam a mirror.

These were never going to be deals. The announcements were to get big numbers into the headlines. That made the stock numbers go up. Job number one!

But the wheels are falling off the vaporware deals. The wheels were always going to fall off, they couldn’t not fall off. But now the bubble investors are getting a glimmering that perhaps this is … vapor.

• Video — Podcast

When it comes to furniture design, lightness is usually a metaphor. For Isomi’s Knit One Chair, designed by Paul Crofts, it’s a material reality. Gone are the layers of foam and heavy upholstery. In their place, a 3D-knitted skin is all that’s needed to balance comfort, structure, and sustainability in equal measure.

Removing the materials that traditionally add plushness might sound counterintuitive, but Knit One proves that comfort doesn’t rely on excess – it comes from smart design. “With the Knit One chair, we wanted to break away from wasteful, resource-heavy upholstery,” shares Paul Crofts, Design Director at Isomi. “The frame simply bolts together on site, while the knit sleeve, woven with mono-filament structural fibers, drops into place –minimal waste, maximum impact.” It’s proof that comfort doesn’t depend on layers, but on the integrity of materials and the innovation behind them.

The chair’s knitted sleeve is made from Camira’s SEAQUAL® Collection, a textile crafted from post-consumer marine plastic waste – up to 35 recycled bottles per meter. The material is shaped using advanced 3D knitting technology, which eliminates excess fabric waste and ensures precise construction. Fully recyclable and replaceable, the sleeve extends the chair’s lifespan while removing the need for adhesives or foam. A lightweight metal frame supports the knit structure and allows the chair to be shipped flat-pack, further reducing the overall carbon footprint and making local assembly effortless – a rarity when it comes to large-scale furniture.

The Knit One Chair is part of a modular seating system that includes a lounge chair, straight ottoman-style module, angled module, and a solid wood side table. Together, they form a flexible arrangement that adapts to any space, from open-plan offices to relaxed residential interiors. Each piece is fully reversible, allowing endless configurations that shift from solo lounging to group seating with ease, reflecting the same thoughtful versatility that defines Isomi’s approach to design.

Sustainable design can take many forms. Sometimes it requires redefining what is “excess,” removing it entirely, and reimagining how we can still experience comfort through simplicity. The Knit One Chair embodies a less is more philosophy, where designing with minimal materiality creates more space – for innovation, longevity, and a lighter impact on the planet.

To learn more about the Knit One Chair designed by Paul Crofts for Isomi, visit isomi.com.

Microsoft hasn’t been having the greatest month or two.

In November, Pavan Davuluri,President of Windows and Devices, proclaimed Microsoft’s Agentic Operating System future! Users told him nobody wanted this, and what they wanted was a Windows that worked properly. Davaluri disabled replies on the tweet. [Twitter, archive]

Davuluri tweeted a few days later: “We know we have work to do.” Sure do, mate. [Twitter, archive]

Windows 11 had a teensy problem in January where you’d do a system update and your PC wouldn’t even boot any more. Microsoft released, not one, but two out-of-band patches which they hoped would fix the problem. Eventually they figured the booting problem happened if the December update hadn’t installed properly. [Bleeping Computer; Bleeping Computer]

Then the Microsoft stock price crashed last week after they issued quarterly numbers full of AI squirrels and confetti.

Time for a new Microsoft marketing perception initiative! Davaluri vibe-marketed a press release into the Verge: [Verge]

Microsoft is redirecting engineers to urgently fix Windows 11’s performance and reliability issues, aiming to halt the operating system’s death by a thousand cuts.

Even better — they’re talking about winding back on the AI spam! [Windows Central]

Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review.

Probably because those two in particular are the most ridiculous AI integrations in history.

To be clear, Microsoft’s actual plans are to “streamline” the AI experience — not remove it. They don’t really want to do a single thing differently. This is only about perception.

All of this is a reaction to the user backlash, the fact that gamers are even talking about Linux, and the stock price going down. I would believe any of what Microsoft’s babbling as and when I see it. And not one moment before.

One actual change to AI in Windows is that Windows 11 now has an option to remove Copilot in the group policy editor! It’s only for Pro, Enterprise or Education versions. They started rolling this out to the beta channel in January and it looks like it’s live now. So there you go, a tiny bit of change we can believe in. [Bleeping Computer; Bluesky]

The problem, though, is that Windows 11 doesn’t … work. I’m no fan of Windows, but I’ve used Windows 10 and it basically works? If you need a Windows, 10 is fine. Windows 11 is buggy trash.

We don’t know that Windows 11 was vibe coded. There were a lot of headlines last year that 30% of Microsoft code was AI now! Based on something the CEO, Satya Nadella, said in a podcast. But of course, what he actually said was a carefully hedged claim in CEO speak: [YouTube, 45:00-45:08]

maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software.

“Maybe 20 to 30 percent”? In “some projects”? “Probably?” I think that means not really.

So we don’t have smoking gun evidence that Windows 11 is broken trash literally because of vibe coding. But Windows 11 feels like the most vibe coded thing ever. Nobody cared about Windows 11 working. Microsoft, where quality is job number 55 or so!

• Video — Podcast

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. 

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades. 

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.

The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no. 

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwinds—an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwinds is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwinds head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”

Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.

According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”

The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”

This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”

He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.

The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software. 

“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”

In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of low-earth orbit, internet-providing satellites.

I saw this at the time as a step toward a kind of everything company. SpaceX was working on reusable rockets that would drastically lower the cost of flying things to space, and I imagined at the time that, if successful, being able to fly things to space for a far lower cost than his competitors would give Musk incredible power and wealth. This was in part because of SpaceX’s potential ability to become a telecom company in addition to a space launch company.

“If he can successfully develop the reusable launch vehicles, that gives him a tremendous dominance over the mode of getting to space. Once you can do it relatively cheaply and in high volume, instead of launching five or six times a year, you’re launching [and] putting stuff into orbit once a week. That’s the hard part,” Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst, told me at the time. “All the other stuff is really dessert, in a way. It’s the satellites, the services that’ll make you the real money.” SpaceX said at the time that Starlink would have 4,000 satellites. Today, it has more than 9,000 satellites, and the majority of all satellites in space have been launched by SpaceX and are owned by SpaceX. 

I imagined a world in which SpaceX essentially became a telecom company in addition to being a space company, and the type of power that would give Musk. A decade later, at least this part is more or less coming to pass. SpaceX is a company that has been extremely boosted by tax breaks, subsidies, and government contracts. It also has become critical, quasi-governmental infrastructure not just for the United States but for companies around the world. And Starlink itself now essentially has a monopoly on fast internet access in rural areas, on boats, in conflict areas, and, increasingly, on airplanes. Starlink is very much a real thing—an international flight I was on recently had free Starlink internet and it felt like half of the plane spent most of the flight on video calls.

My article from 2015 is full of Musk boosterism that makes me embarrassed now, and Musk promises things every five minutes that are either wildly overhyped by the media, never happen, or happen on much longer timescales than expected. But the article was directionally accurate: SpaceX figured out how to launch rockets routinely and inexpensively, and it is now wildly powerful because of this. Starlink exists because it is easy for SpaceX to put satellites in space, and Musk’s unfettered access to low-Earth orbit has allowed him to literally dominate a space (sorry) that should be shared by all of humanity. 

SpaceX has always been a political project, one in which Musk seeks to colonize space, expand his bloodline, and/or become god emperor of the universe. It is perhaps his most political project. And yet, of his companies, it has flown under the radar as an explicitly political project because Musk has been so goddamned annoying, destructive, and fascistic on X and within the federal government. SpaceX, meanwhile, has always been the most competently run of his companies, and is one that under Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership had, til now, largely not been fucked with by Musk in the ways that Tesla, Twitter, and xAI have been.

That’s not to say Musk hasn’t meddled at all: He ordered the shutdown of Starlink in Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s war there, and literally this week the company announced he would crack down on Russia’s use of Starlink for drones. That this company and this man have this power at all highlights my point: Starlink, and SpaceX, have become geopolitically important in ways that most people have not thought about, that we have not grappled with, and that the Trump administration is almost definitely not going to do anything about.

And so it feels both important and quite alarming that SpaceX is acquiring xAI in what appears to be a highly complex financial scheme that I cannot even begin to pretend to understand. Musk’s announcement of this deal, which appears to have been the result of a protracted “negotiation” between himself, is batshit crazy, first of all: “SpaceX has acquired xAI 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. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

Musk goes on to say that SpaceX and xAI will launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers,” and signs off “thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness.” 

There are many reasons that “AI data centers in space” may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of space junk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating low-Earth orbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in elections, allowing people to generate CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to Epstein’s island, implanting chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build humanoid robots, SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly colonized and dominated low earth orbit. 

Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about light pollution, satellite collisions, and telecom monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his AI bullshit machines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea.

A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.

404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work. 

“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”

“Thankfully the overlap is zero, but I did find that a previous co-worker who I purposefully chose not to keep in touch with appears in the files, and not in an incidental way. Trusting my gut on him paid off, I suppose,” he added.

Finke said the tool is based on the work of Patrick Duggan, who made an API to easily search the files.

“Search the publicly released Epstein court documents for mentions of your LinkedIn connections,” the GitHub repository for the tool reads. 

The tool can output a report that shows each result’s name, company, and their position; the total number of mentions across all the searched documents; excerpts from each matching document, and links to the original material on the Department of Justice’s website.

In my case, the tool found 22 connections with mentions in the Epstein files. But, many of these are likely false positives. Some of them were very common names. The tool also found 5 hits for “Adam S.” Obviously, there could be a lot of people with that name and initial. The repository acknowledges this: “Common names may produce false positives—review the context excerpts to verify relevance.” 

Last week the DOJ published 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The massive dump also contained videos, images, and audio recordings. 404 Media found it included multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls, with the DOJ only taking them down days after their upload. We also covered Musk’s inclusion in the files.

The dump contains a wealth of other tech elites, WIRED reported. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many others all make an appearance. 

But a mention does not necessarily mean those people were up to anything nefarious (although many, many were, obviously). Jeff Moss, the founder of the DEF CON hacking conference, is mentioned in the files because Vincenzo Iozzo, a well-known hacker, offered to introduce Epstein to the DEF CON founder.

On Reddit, Moss wrote, “Vincenzo approached me for free badges and I said no, and pointed him to the Epstein Wikipedia page and tried to warn him to stay away from any involvement. I didn’t realize how deep it went. As far as I know Epstein never attended. All this other behind the scenes stuff is wild, but not surprising.”

Moss’s LinkedIn post is also where 404 Media first saw the EpsteIN tool.

Update: this piece has been updated to include information from the tool's creator.