AI Embraces the Ethos of Enterprise Search
October 9, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
In my files, I have examples of the marketing collateral generated by enterprise search vendors. I have some clippings from trade publications and other odds and ends dumped into my enterprise search folder. One of these reports is “Fastgründer John Markus Lervik dømt til fengsel.” The article is no longer online, but you can read my 2014 summary at this Beyond Search link. The write up documents an enterprise search vendor who used some alleged accounting methods to put a shine on the company. In 2008, Microsoft purchased Fast Search & Transfer putting an end to this interesting company.
A young CPA MBA BA (with honors) is jockeying a spreadsheet. His father worked for an enterprise search vendor based in the UK. His son is using his father’s template but cannot get the numbers to show positive cash flows across six quarters. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
Why am I mentioning Fast Search & Transfer? The information in Fortune Magazine’s “‘There’s So Much Pressure to Be the Company That Went from Zero to $100 Million in X Days’: Inside the Sketchy World of ARR and Inflated AI Startup Accounting” jogged my memory about Fast Search and a couple of other interesting companies in the enterprise search sector.
Enterprise search was the alleged technology to put an organization’s information at the fingertips of employees. Enterprise search would unify silos of information. Enterprise search would unlock the value of an organization’s “hidden” or “dark” data. Enterprise search would put those hours wasted looking for information to better use. (IDC was the cheerleader for the efficiency payoff from enterprise search.)
Does this sound familiar? It should every vendor applying AI to an organization’s information challenges is either recycling old chestnuts from the Golden Age of Enterprise Search or wandering in the data orchard discovering these glittering generalities amidst nuggets of high value jargon.
The Fortune article states:
There’s now a massive amount of pressure on AI-focused founders, at earlier stages than ever before: If you’re not generating revenue immediately, what are you even doing? Founders—in an effort to keep up with the Joneses—are counting all sorts of things as “long-term revenue” that are, to be blunt, nothing your Accounting 101 professor would recognize as legitimate. Exacerbating the pressure is the fact that more VCs than ever are trying to funnel capital into possible winners, at a time where there’s no certainty about what evaluating success or traction even looks like.
Would AI start ups fudge numbers? Of course not. Someone at the start up or investment firm took a class in business ethics. (The pizza in those study groups was good. Great if it could be charged to another group member’s Visa without her knowledge. Ho ho ho.)
The write up purses the idea that ARR or annual recurring revenue is a metric that may not reflect the health of an AI business. No kidding? When an outfit has zero revenue resulting from dumping investor case into a burning dumpster fire, it is difficult for me to understand how people see a payoff from AI. The “payoff” comes from moving money around, not from getting cash from people or organizations on a consistent basis. Subscription-like business models are great until churn becomes a factor.
The real point of the write up for me is that financial tricks, not customers paying for the product or service, are the name of the game. One big enterprise search outfit used “circular” deals to boost revenue. I did some small work for this outfit, so I cannot identify it. The same method is now part of the AI revolution involving Nvidia, OpenAI, and a number of other outfits. Whose money is moving? Who gets it? What’s the payoff? These are questions not addressed in depth in the information to which I have access?
I think financial intermediaries are the folks taking home the money. Some vendors may get paid like masters of black art accounting. But investor payoff? I am not so sure. For me the good old days of enterprise search are back again, just with bigger numbers and more impactful financial consequences.
As an aside, the Fortune article uses the word “shit” twice. Freudian slip or a change in editorial standards at Fortune? That word was applied by one of my team when asked to describe the companies I profiled in the Enterprise Search Report I wrote many years ago. “Are you talking about my book or enterprise search?” I asked. My team member replied, “The enterprise search thing.”
Stephen E Arnold, October 2025
Slopity Slopity Slop: Nice Work AI Leaders
October 8, 2025
Remember that article about academic and scientific publishers using AI to churn out pseudoscience and crap papers? Or how about that story relating to authors’ works being stolen to train AI algorithms? Did I mention they were stealing art too?
Techdirt literally has the dirt on AI creating more slop: “AI Slop Startup To Flood The Internet With Thousands Of AI Slop Podcasts, Calls Critics Of AI Slop ‘Luddites’.” AI is a helpful tool. It’s great to assist with mundane things of life or improve workflows. Automation, however, has become the newest sensation. Big Tech bigwigs and other corporate giants are using it to line their purses, while making lives worse for others.
Note this outstanding example of a startup that appears to be interested in slop:
“Case in point: a new startup named Inception Point AI is preparing to flood the internet with a thousands upon thousands of LLM-generated podcasts hosted by fake experts and influencers. The podcasts cost the startup a dollar or so to make, so even if just a few dozen folks subscribe they hope to break even…”
They’ll make the episodes for less than a dollar. Podcasting is already a saturated market, but Point AI plans to flush it with garbage. They don’t care about the ethics. It’s going to be the Temu of podcasts. It would be great if people would flock to true human-made stuff, but they probably won’t.
Another reason we’re in a knowledge swamp with crocodiles.
Whitney Grace, October 9, 2025
Google Gets the Crypto Telegram
October 7, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Not too many people cared that Google cut a deal with Alibaba’s ANT financial services outfit. My view is that at some point down the information highway, the agreement will capture more attention. Today (September 27, 2025), I want to highlight another example of Google’s getting a telegram about crypto.
Finding inspiration? Yep. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
Navigate to what seems to be just another crypto mining news announcement: “Cipher Mining Signs 168 MW, 10-Year AI Hosting Agreement with Fluidstack.”
So what’s a Cipher Mining? This is a publicly traded outfit engaged in crypto mining. My understanding is that the company’s primary source of revenue is bitcoin mining. Some may disagree, pointing to its business as “owner, developer and operator of industrial-scale data centers.”
The news release says:
[Cipher Mining] announces a 10-year high-performance computing (HPC) colocation agreement with Fluidstack, a premier AI cloud platform that builds and operates HPC clusters for some of the world’s largest companies.
So what?
The news release also offers this information:
Google will backstop $1.4 billion of Fluidstack’s lease obligations to support project-related debt financing and will receive warrants to acquire approximately 24 million shares of Cipher common stock, equating to an approximately 5.4% pro forma equity ownership stake, subject to adjustment and a potential cash settlement under certain circumstances. Cipher plans to retain 100% ownership of the project and access the capital markets as necessary to fund a portion of the project.
Okay, three outfits: crypto, data centers, and billions of dollars. That’s quite an information cocktail.
Several observations:
- Like the Alibaba / ANT relationship, the move is aligned with facilitating crypto activities on a large scale
- In the best tradition of moving money, Google seems to be involved but not the big dog. I think that Google may indeed be the big dog. Puzzle pieces that fit together? Seems like it to me.
- Crypto and financial services could — note I say “could” — be the hedge against future advertising revenue potholes.
Net net: Worth watching and asking, “What’s the next Google message received from Telegram?” Does this question seem cryptic? It isn’t. Like Meta, Google is following a path trod by a certain outfit now operating in Dubai. Is the path intentional or accidental? Where Google is concerned, everything is original, AI, and quantumly supreme.
Stephen E Arnold, October 7, 2025
Telegram and EU Regulatory Consolidation: Trouble Ahead
October 6, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Imagine you are Pavel Durov. The value of TONcoin is problematic. France asked you to curtail some content in a country unknown to the folks who hang out at the bar at the Harrod’s Creek Inn in rural Kentucky. Competitors are announcing plans to implement Telegram-type functions in messaging apps built with artificial intelligence as steel girders. How can the day become more joyful?
Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough pair of goats. One an actual goat and the other a “Greatest of All Time” goat.
The orange newspaper has an answer to that question. “EU Watchdog Prepares to Expand Oversight of Crypto and Exchanges” reports:
Stock exchanges, cryptocurrency companies and clearing houses operating in the EU are set to come under the supervision of the bloc’s markets watchdog…
Crypto currency and some online services (possibly Telegram) operate across jurisdictions. The fragmented rules and regulations allow organizations with sporty leadership to perform some remarkable financial operations. If you poke around, you will find the names of some outfits allied with industrious operators linked to a big country in Asia. Pull some threads, and you may find an unknown Russian space force professional beavering away in the shadows of decentralized financial activities.
The write up points out:
Maria Luís Albuquerque, EU commissioner for financial services, said in a speech last month that it was “considering a proposal to transfer supervisory powers to Esma for the most significant cross-border entities” including stock exchanges, crypto companies and central counterparties.
How could these rules impact Telegram? It is nominally based in the United Arab Emirates? Its totally independent do-good Open Network Foundation works tirelessly from a rented office in Zug, Switzerland. Telegram is home free, right?
No pesky big government rules can ensnare the Messenger crowd.
Possibly. There is that pesky situation with the annoying French judiciary. (Isn’t that country with many certified cheeses collapsing?) One glitch: Pavel Durov is a French citizen. He has been arrested, charged, and questioned about a dozen heinous crimes. He is on a leash and must check in with his grumpy judicial “mom” every couple of weeks. He allegedly refused to cooperate with a request from a French government security official. He is awaiting more thrilling bureaucracy from the French judicial system. How does he cope? He criticizes France, the legal processes, and French officials asking him to do for France what Mr. Durov did for Russia earlier this year.
Now these proposed regulations may intertwine with Mr. Durov’s personal legal situation. As the Big Dog of Telegram, the French affair is likely to have some repercussions for Telegram and its Silicon Valley big tech approach to rules and regulations. EU officials are indeed aware of Mr. Durov and his activities. From my perspective in nowheresville in rural Kentucky, the news in the Financial Times on October 6, 2025, is problematic for Mr. Durov. The GOAT of Messaging, his genius brother, and a close knit group of core engineers will have to do some hard thinking to figure out how to deal with these European matters. Can he do it? Does a GOAT eat what’s available?
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2025
AI Service Industry: Titan or Titanic?
October 6, 2025
Venture capitalists believe they have a new recipe for success: Buy up managed-services providers and replace most of the staff with AI agents. So far, it seems to be working. (For the VCs, of course, not the human workers.) However, asserts TechCrunch, “The AI Services Transformation May Be Harder than VCs Think.” Reporter Connie Loizos throws cold water on investors’ hopes:
“But early warning signs suggest this whole services-industry metamorphosis may be more complicated than VCs anticipate. A recent study by researchers at Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs that surveyed 1,150 full-time employees across industries found that 40% of those employees are having to shoulder more work because of what the researchers call ‘workslop’ — AI-generated work that appears polished but lacks substance, creating more work (and headaches) for colleagues. The trend is taking a toll on the organizations. Employees involved in the survey say they’re spending an average of nearly two hours dealing with each instance of workslop, including to first decipher it, then decide whether or not to send it back, and oftentimes just to fix it themselves. Based on those participants’ estimates of time spent, along with their self-reported salaries, the authors of the survey estimate that workslop carries an invisible tax of $186 per month per person. ‘For an organization of 10,000 workers, given the estimated prevalence of workslop . . . this yields over $9 million per year in lost productivity,’ they write in a new Harvard Business Review article.”
Surprise: compounding baloney produces more baloney. If companies implement the plan as designed, “workslop” will expand even as the humans who might catch it are sacked. But if firms keep on enough people to fix AI mistakes, they will not realize the promised profits. In that case, what is the point of the whole endeavor? Rather than upending an entire industry for no reason, maybe we should just leave service jobs to the humans that need them.
Cynthia Murrell, October 6, 2025
What a Hoot? First, Snow White and Now This
October 3, 2025
![green-dino_thumb_thumb[3]](https://www.arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/green-dino_thumb_thumb3.gif "green-dino_thumb_thumb[3]")
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read “Disney+ Cancellation Page Crashes As Customers Rush to Quit after Kimmel Suspension.” I don’t think too much about Disney, the cost of going to a theme park, or the allegedly chill Walt Disney. Now it is Disney, Disney, Disney. The chant is almost displacing Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.
Somehow the Disney company muffed the bunny with Snow White. I think the film hit my radar when certain short human actors were going to be in a remake of the 1930s’ cartoon “Snow White.” Then then I noted some stories about a new president and an old president who wanted to be the president again or whatever. Most recently, Disney hit the pause button for a late night comedy show. Some people were not happy.
The write up informed me:
With cancellations surging, many subscribers reported technical issues. On Reddit’s r/Fauxmoi, one post read, “The page to cancel your Hulu/Disney+ subscription keeps crashing.”
As a practical matter, the way to stop cancellations is to dial back the resources available to the Web site. Presto. No more cancellations until the server is slowly restored to functionality so it can fall over again.
I am pragmatic. I don’t like to think that information technology professionals (either full time “cast” or part-timers) can’t keep a Web site online. It is 2025. A phone call to a service provider can solve most reliability problems as quickly as the data can be copied to a different data center.
Let me step back. I see several signals in what I will call the cartoon collapse.
- The leadership of Disney cannot rely on the people in the company; for example, the new Snow White and the Web server fell over.
- The judgment of those involved in specific decisions seems to be out of sync with the customers and the stakeholders in the company. Walt had Mickey Mouse aligned with what movie goers wanted to see and what stakeholders expected the enterprise to deliver.
- The technical infrastructure seems flawed. Well, not “seems.” The cancellation server failed.
Disney is an example of what happens when “leadership” has not set up an organization to succeed. Furthermore, the Disney case raises this question, “How many other big, well-known companies will follow this Disney trajectory?” My thought is that the disconnect between “management” staff, customers, stakeholders, and technology is similar to Disney in a number of outfits.
What will be these firms’ Snow White and late night comedian moment?
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2025
PS. Disney appears to have raised prices and then offered my wife a $2.99 per month “deal.” Slick stuff.
Hiring Problems: Yes But AI Is Not the Reason
October 2, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read “AI Is Not Killing Jobs, Finds New US Study.” I love it when the “real” news professionals explain how hiring trends are unfolding. I am not sure how many recent computer science graduates, commercial artists, and online marketing executives are receiving this cheerful news.
The magic carpet of great jobs is flaming out. Will this professional land a new position or will the individual crash? Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
The write up states: “Research shows little evidence the cutting edge technology such as chatbots is putting people out of work.”
I noted this statement in the source article from the Financial Times:
Research from economists at the Yale University Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution think-tank indicates that, since OpenAI launched its popular chatbot in November 2022, generative AI has not had a more dramatic effect on employment than earlier technological breakthroughs. The research, based on an analysis of official data on the labor market and figures from the tech industry on usage and exposure to AI, also finds little evidence that the tools are putting people out of work.
That closes the doors on any pushback.
But some people are still getting terminated. Some are finding that jobs are not available. (Hey, those lucky computer science graduates are an anomaly. Try explaining that to the parents who paid for tuition, books, and a crash summer code academy session.)
“Companies Are Lying about AI Layoffs” provides a slightly different take on the jobs and hiring situation. This bit of research points out that there are terminations. The write up explains:
American employees are being replaced by cheaper H-1B visa workers.
If the assertions in this write up are accurate, AI is providing “cover” for what is dumping expensive workers and replacing them with lower cost workers. Cheap is good. Money savings… also good. Efficiency … the core process driving profit maximization. If you don’t grasp the imperative of this simply line of reasoning, ask an unemployed or recently terminated MBA from a blue chip consulting firm. You can locate these individuals in coffee shops in cities like New York and Chicago because the morose look, the high end laptop, and carefully aligned napkin, cup, and ink pen are little billboards saying, “Big time consultant.”
The “Companies Are Lying” article includes this quote:
“You can go on Blind, Fishbowl, any work related subreddit, etc. and hear the same story over and over and over – ‘My company replaced half my department with H1Bs or simply moved it to an offshore center in India, and then on the next earnings call announced that they had replaced all those jobs with AI’.”
Several observations:
- Like the Covid thing, AI and smart software provide logical ways to tell expensive employees hasta la vista
- Those who have lost their jobs can become contractors and figure out how to market their skills. That’s fun for engineers
- The individuals can “hunt” for jobs, prowl LinkedIn, and deal with the wild and crazy schemes fraudsters present to those desperate for work
- The unemployed can become entrepreneurs, life coaches, or Shopify store operators
- Mastering AI won’t be a magic carpet ride for some people.
Net net: The employment picture is those photographs of my great grandparents. There’s something there, but the substance seems to be fading.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2025
The EU Does More Than Send US Big Tech to Court; It Sends Messages Too
October 2, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The estimable but weird orange newspaper published “EU to Block Big Tech from New Financial Data Sharing System.” The “real” news story is paywalled. (Keep your still functioning Visa and MasterCard handy.)
The write up reports:
Big Tech groups are losing a political battle in Brussels to gain access to the EU’s financial data market…
Google is busy working to bolt its payment system into Ant (linked to Alibaba which may be linked to the Chinese government). Amazon and Meta are big money outfits. And Apple, well, Apple is Apple.
Cartoon of a disaster happily generated by ChatGPT. Remarkable what’s okay and what’s not.
The write up reports:
With the support of Germany, the EU is moving to exclude Meta, Apple, Google and Amazon from a new system for sharing financial data that is designed to enable development of digital finance products for consumers.
The article points out:
In a document sent to other EU countries, seen by the Financial Times, Germany suggested excluding Big Tech groups “to promote the development of an EU digital financial ecosystem, guarantee a level playing field and protect the digital sovereignty of consumers”. EU member states and the European parliament are hoping to reach a deal on the final text of the regulation this autumn. [Editor’s Note: October or November 2025?]
What about the crypto payment systems operating like Telegram’s and others in the crypto “space”? That financial mechanism is not referenced in the write up. Curious? Nope. Out of scope. What about the United Arab Emirates’ activities in digital payments and crypto? Nope. Out of scope. What about China’s overt and shadow digital financial activities? Nope. Out of scope.
What’s in scope is that disruption is underway within the traditional banking system. The EU is more concerned about the US than the broader context of the changes it seems to me.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2025
Deepseek Is Cheap. People Like Cheap
October 1, 2025
![green-dino_thumb_thumb[1]](https://www.arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/green-dino_thumb_thumb1.gif "green-dino_thumb_thumb[1]")
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read “Deepseek Has ‘Cracked’ Cheap Long Context for LLMs With Its New Model.” (I wanted to insert “allegedly” into the headline, but I refrained. Just stick it in via your imagination.) The operative word is “cheap.” Why do companies use engineers in countries like India? The employees cost less. Cheap wins out over someone who lives in the US. The same logic applies to smart software; specifically, large language models.
Cheap wins if the product is good enough. Thanks, ChatGPT. Good enough.
According to the cited article:
The Deepseek team cracked cheap long context for LLMs: a ~3.5x cheaper prefill and ~10x cheaper decode at 128k context at inference with the same quality …. API pricing has been cut by 50%. Deepseek has reduced input costs from $0.07 to $0.028 per 1M tokens for cache hits and from $0.56 to $0.28 for cache misses, while output costs have dropped from $1.68 to $0.42.
Let’s assume that the data presented are spot on. The Deepseek approach suggests:
- Less load on backend systems
- Lower operating costs allow the outfit to cut costs to licensee or user
- A focused thrust at US-based large language model outfits.
The US AI giants focus on building and spending. Deepseek (probably influenced to some degree by guidance from Chinese government officials) is pushing the cheap angle. Cheap has worked for China’s manufacturing sector, and it may be a viable tool to use against the incredibly expensive money burning U S large language model outfits.
Can the US AI outfits emulate the Chinese cheap tactic. Sure, but the US firms have to overcome several hurdles:
- Current money burning approach to LLMs and smart software
- The apparent diminishing returns with each new “innovation”. Buying a product from within ChatGPT sounds great but is it?
- The lack of home grown AI talent exists and some visa uncertainty is a bit like a stuck emergency brake.
Net net: Cheap works. For the US to deliver cheap, the business models which involved tossing bundles of cash into the data centers’ furnaces may have to be fine tuned. The growth at all costs approach popular among some US AI outfits has to deliver revenue, not taking money from one pocket and putting it in another.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2025
AI Will NOT Suck Power Like a Kiddie Toy
October 1, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The AI “next big thing” has fired up utilities to think about building new plants, some of which may be nuclear. Youthful wizards are getting money to build thorium units. Researchers are dusting off plans for affordable tokamak plasma jobs. Wireless and smart meters are popping up in rural Kentucky. Just in case a big data center needs some extra juice, those wireless gizmos can manage gentle brownouts better than an old-school manual switches.
I read “AI Won’t Use As Much Electricity As We Are Told.” The blog is about utility demand forecasting. Instead of the fancy analytic models used for these forward-looking projections, the author approaches the subject in a somewhat more informal way.
The write up says:
The rise of large data centers and cloud computing produced another round of alarm. A US EPA report in 2007 predicted a doubling of demand every five years. Again, this number fed into a range of debates about renewable energy and climate change. Yet throughout this period, the actual share of electricity use accounted for by the IT sector has hovered between 1 and 2 per cent, accounting for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions.
Okay, some baseline data from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2007. Not bad: 18 years ago.
The write up notes:
Looking the other side of the market, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is bringing in around $3 billion a year in sales revenue, and has spent around $7 billion developing its model. Even if every penny of that was spent on electricity, the effect would be little more than a blip. Of course, AI is growing rapidly. A tenfold increase in expenditure by 2030 isn’t out of the question. But that would only double total the total use of electricity in IT. And, as in the past, this growth will be offset by continued increases in efficiency. Most of the increase could be fully offset if the world put an end to the incredible waste of electricity on cryptocurrency mining (currently 0.5 to 1 per cent of total world electricity consumption, and not normally counted in estimates of IT use).
Okay, the idea is that power generation professionals are implementing “logical” and “innovative” tweaks. These squeeze more juice from the lemon so to speak.
The write up ends with a note that power generation and investors are not into “degrowth”; that is, the idea that investments in new power generation facilities may not be as substantial as noted. The thirst for new types of power generation warrants some investment, but a Sputnik response is unwarranted.
Several observations:
- Those in the power generation game like the idea of looser regulations, more funding, and a sense of urgency. Ignoring these boosters is going to be difficult to explain to stakeholders.
- The investors pumping money into mini-reactors and more interesting methods want a payoff. The idea that no crisis looms is going to make some nervous, very nervous.
- Just don’t worry.
I would suggest, however, that the demand forecasting be carried out in a rigorous way. A big data center in some areas may cause some issues. The costs of procuring additional energy to meet the demands of some relaxed, flexible, and understanding outfits like Google-type firms may play a role in the “more power generation” push.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2025
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
