Enshittification

Denyer spitballs on betting

This podcast has been one of our best performing. Not a surprise, Simon Denyer is one of the smartest guys in the room.

Part of the conversation was about betting.

A question I've asked a few times on the podcast is about where betting sits in the private equity playbook.

I was struck by how bullish George Pyne was on TGL, and how explictly he referenced it as a potential betting product.

The p/e money likes betting for semi-obvious reasons to do with risk diversification and revenue predictability.

As Denyer notes, when evaluating

🧵 OpenAI's ad pivot

You'll have seen the Anthropic Super Bowl ad.

I did a quick data scrape of this FT article.

Main bits:
'I would just disclose, as a personal bias, that I hate ads, they would be like a last resort for us as a business model. Advertising had its place as a way for the early internet to make money...'but i think they sort of somewhat fundamentally misalign a user's incentives with the company providing the service'

That was Sam Altman in 2024.

OpenAI has asked advertisers to commit an initial £200k in order to appear in ChatGPT

🤖 Briefing: How digital platforms degrade over time

Note: 🤖 indicates the following material is derived using Chat_UP, Unofficial Partner's language model trained on our podcasts and newsletters.

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term to describe the cyclical degradation of online platforms. The central thesis is that the decline of digital services is not an accident or a result of corporate incompetence, but a deliberate, multi-stage process driven by a policy environment that has eliminated the traditional disciplines of competition, regulation, and user empowerment.

Enshittification follows a predictable three-stage lifecycle:

Attract End Users: Platforms begin by offering

Enshittification

Denyer spitballs on betting

🧵 OpenAI's ad pivot