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Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Here’s the plan:

• Tech News Takes — super-short analysis and commentary

• Tool of the Week — tools you’ll find useful

• Strategy Tips — strategy nuggets (for business and life)

• F/T Shoutouts — sharing launches, tech events, and other reads

Tech plays the game with Trump

Plus: Microsoft's Re-org; The Biology LLM

⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

The Biology LLM

• What’s up: Bioptimus is a French startup creating a ‘GPT for biology’, and they’ve just raised $41M to build their model. To train the model, they’re using publicly available data as well as huge troves of privacy-sensitive, ultra-valuable patient data. Their goal is to allow scientists and researchers to more accurately simulate biology in new conditions. Similar to how LLMs predict the next word, Bioptimus’ models will predict the next biological outcome given a series of inputs.

• So what: This is a great reminder of the value of data in the age of AI. As we’ve covered before, companies like Reddit, Quora, and others have recognized the value of their traditionally public data. So they put it behind paywalls — safely hidden from bots crawling the web for AI training data. But this Bioptimus story shows another example — taking traditionally private data (patient records, etc) and using that to train models. I can definitely see the value in more accurate simulations of biological outcomes and a better understanding of how our bodies work, but my biggest doubt is about competition. For example, it’s not hard to imagine OpenAI buying the data sets needed to be the winning LLM for everything — health, creativity, learning, productivity, etc. So I’m interested to see whether those winner-take-all dynamics win out, or if niche use cases (with ultra-privacy-sensitive data) can hold off the incumbents.

Microsoft burns the non-AI boats

• What’s up: Microsoft is creating a new engineering group focused on AI. It will be called the CoreAI — Platform and Tools division, and it will consolidate several teams, including the Microsoft Developer Division (which creates developer tools), existing AI platform teams (which create AI-centric developer tools), and parts of the office of the CTO. The team’s mission, according to CEO Satya Nadella, will be to “build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents.”

• So what: This is a big deal. Whereas before, Microsoft teams might each need to develop their own AI tools (playing the politics to keep those prioritized, duplicating efforts, etc.), now that will be done centrally for them… by a team that owns all dev tools and reports directly to the CEO. So it’s great if you’re one of the “first party” teams within Microsoft that Satya alluded to. But this is also great for “third party” customers outside Microsoft, because AI won’t be constrained to a single-application, single-user existence. Instead, AI will travel with you accross multiple Microsoft-enabled apps/experiences. And it sounds better in Satya’s words! As part of his announcement he said developers should be able to build AI agents, “with memory, entitlements, and action space… across roles, business processes, and industry domains.”

Tech plays the game with Trump

• What’s up: There are several tech stories unfolding thanks to the start of Trump’s second term. First, tech companies and CEOs are visiting Trump in Mar-a-lago and/or donating to Trump’s inauguration (Tesla, Microsoft, Google, Apple). Second, companies are making policy changes to align with Trump. For example, Meta is 1/ abandoning company-owned moderation in favor of “community notes” (where users can flag/report each other), and 2/ ending DEI programs.

• So what: We should look at all of this with game theory glasses on. These execs and companies are smart, and they have (correctly) calculated that it’s a real competitive advantage to be visibly supportive to Trump. Plus, some of the specific changes being made also cost less (ex. Meta’s policy changes). But the real value of the visits and the changes is what it buys them, which is Trump’s favor. For example, Meta is apparently recruiting Trump to push back on the EU’s regulatory campaign against big tech. And Elon is apparently angling to get involved in several ways — Twitter acquiring TikTok, SpaceX facing fewer regulatory obscacles, etc.

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🧭 Strategy Tips 🧭

Tech plays the game with Trump

Today’s strategy tip is all about playing the game.

Specifically, we’ll explore how tech companies are navigating Trump’s second term, using game theory to break it down.

Let’s start with a quick re-fresher on game theory.

So here’s a simple example.

Let’s say you and a friend are trying to decide what to eat. You want pizza, but your friend wants sushi.

• If you agree, you’ll go together.

• If you disagree, you’ll both eat alone.

• Both of you would rather eat together than alone.

Here’s a summary of the situation and payoffs for each person (you, your friend).

To predict what might actually happen, we look at each row and column in isolation. And we ask something like “if your friend does X, what’s your best response?”.  And we highlight that best response.

After all the highlighting, if a single cell in the table is a best response for both of you, that’s an equilibrium (a very likely, payoff-maximizing outcome). Here’s a highlighted version.

So no matter what, you and your friend are better off together. Just make sure to coordinate and you’ll both be happy!

Now what the hell does all this have to do with Trump and the tech companies?!

Let’s simplify the tech/Trump situation and assume there are only two players – Meta and Microsoft.