When Money Gets Nervous, Rules Get Rewritten
Good Morning from San Francisco, Germany invented modern privacy law in 1970. Built from surveillance trauma. Today it leads the
Germany Turns on Privacy: How the GDPR's Architect Became Its Executioner
Germany wrote Europe's privacy playbook after the Nazis weaponized census data and the Stasi monitored citizens. Now Berlin is leading the charge to gut those protections, handing trillion-dollar AI companies access to European data through regulatory shortcuts.
OpenAI's $1.4 Trillion Question: Ambition or Desperation?
OpenAI projects $20 billion in revenue while lobbying Washington for tax credits designed for struggling manufacturers. The company has committed $1.4 trillion to AI infrastructure it cannot finance privately. Is this confidence or desperation?
When the Media Cries AI Bubble, Should You Sell?
Media warnings about the AI bubble are growing louder. History shows these alarms usually arrive late, often after crashes begin. But cloud giants are absorbing AI startups into subscription ecosystems. This time looks different, less spectacular burst, more slow deflation.
AI News
Moonshot’s $4.6 million ‘Kimi K2 Thinking’ takes top spots on reasoning benchmarks
Moonshot trained an AI model for $4.6 million that beats OpenAI's GPT-5 on reasoning tests. While OpenAI seeks trillion-dollar infrastructure, Chinese labs prove the math no longer works. The twist: even they worry the tech works too well.
Microsoft rebrands AI push as superintelligence
Microsoft declares it's building "humanist superintelligence" to keep AI safe. Reality check: They're 2 years behind OpenAI, whose models they'll use until 2032. The safety pitch? Product differentiation for enterprise clients who fear runaway AI.
Apple pays Google $1B a year to rebuild Siri
Apple will pay Google $1B yearly to power Siri with a 1.2 trillion parameter AI model—8x more complex than Apple's current tech. The company that owns every layer now rents the most critical one. The spring 2026 target masks a deeper dependency trap.
Electrons, Trust, and Drift: Inside Sam Altman’s Next Act
Sam Altman predicts AI CEOs within years while betting billions on human-centric infrastructure. His Tyler Cowen interview reveals three tensions: monetizing without breaking trust, energy bottlenecks limiting AI, and models that persuade without intent.
Politics
Seven families versus OpenAI
Seven families sue OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT drove four people to suicide after a May 2024 design change prioritized engagement over safety. The cases test whether AI chatbots qualify as products under liability law.
OpenAI walks back federal backstop talk after White House rebuke
OpenAI's CFO floated a federal backstop for AI infrastructure, then reversed within hours after White House rejection. The whiplash exposed the core problem: OpenAI needs $1.4 trillion while generating $20 billion. The math doesn't work.
The trillion-dollar ask takes shape
OpenAI's CFO suggested federal backing for AI infrastructure at WSJ conference, as company seeks taxpayer support for $1.4 trillion buildout against $13B revenue. The ask arrives amid circular tech deals and shutdown-era austerity.
China cuts data-center power bills; Trump blocks Nvidia exports
China slashes data center power bills by half—but only for domestic chips. Trump blocks Nvidia's Blackwell exports. Two governments, two subsidy strategies, one question: who can afford their industrial policy longer?
Vibe Coding
Cursor ships faster agents while security researchers flag the gap
Cursor's new AI agents complete coding tasks in 30 seconds—four times faster than rivals. The same day, Forrester found 45% of AI-generated code has security flaws. The velocity gap between agent speed and vulnerability detection is widening fast.
Vibe coding usage crashes months after platform push
Google launched vibe coding tools in October while usage data showed the market had already peaked and crashed. AI code generation works for simple demos but breaks on complex projects—a training distribution wall platforms can't market around.
Google’s Gemini 2.5 ‘Computer Use’ bets on the browser, not the desktop
Google released a browser automation agent days after OpenAI, choosing narrower scope over desktop control. The bet: faster, more reliable web tasks matter more than operating system reach. Internal use proves it works. External adoption will test the claim.
GLM-4.6 puts receipts on the table: open weights, real coding runs, cheaper tokens
Zhipu AI releases GLM-4.6 with MIT-licensed weights and something unusual: complete test logs from 74 coding evaluations. The pitch is 15% fewer tokens than its predecessor at 90% lower cost than Claude—but with caveats on where it actually leads.
Funding
Inception banks $50M to replace how AI writes code
Three Stanford professors just raised $50M to prove OpenAI and Anthropic generate text wrong. Their diffusion models claim 10x speed by processing tokens in parallel, not sequentially. Microsoft and Nvidia are betting they're right.
Ex-Tencent scientist bets physics beats pixels
Ex-Tencent AI scientist Wei Liu chose Singapore for unrestricted Nvidia chip access, raising $50M for Video Rebirth. The geography play matters more than the physics pitch—it's about training on Blackwell while China can't.
Microsoft backs German AI firm etalytics as datacenter power costs bite
Microsoft's venture arm doubled funding for a German startup that cuts datacenter cooling costs by up to 40% using software alone. The timing: North American operators face years-long power constraints while AI demand climbs.
a16z backs FurtherAI’s $25M bet to pull insurance out of the PDF era
FurtherAI closed $25M from Andreessen Horowitz six months after seed to automate insurance workflows—from submission intake to claims processing. The velocity signals a shift from AI pilots to production deployment, with early customers reporting measurable ROI.
AI Research
DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve scales mathematical search. Proofs still need people.
DeepMind's AlphaEvolve can search millions of mathematical constructions in hours, not weeks. Fields Medalist Terence Tao already builds on its outputs. But the system finds candidates, not proofs. The real shift: math discovery at industrial scale.
Enterprise AI hits profitability as training budgets shrink
Enterprises report 74% positive AI returns while cutting training budgets 8%. The Wharton study reveals companies extracting productivity gains today by depleting tomorrow's capabilities—a business model that works until skills erode.
Chinese researchers ship agent that finds tools mid-thought, beating OpenAI's rigid workflows
Chinese researchers abandon AI's rigid think-act-observe loops for fluid reasoning that discovers tools mid-thought. DeepAgent hits 89% success where competitors reach 55%, revealing the bottleneck was never intelligence but architectural rigidity.
AI assistants misreport news in 45% of cases, putting trusted brands at risk
AI assistants fail basic accuracy checks on news queries nearly half the time, but users don't just blame the AI—they blame the news outlets it cites. As adoption climbs, newsrooms face reputational damage for errors they didn't commit and can't fix.
Tools
Chrome extensions retrofit AI into your existing browser. Users aren't buying it yet
AI browsers promised revolution but can't crack Chrome's 66% market share. Five extensions deliver the same intelligence without forcing migration. The compromise nobody wanted reveals why adoption beats innovation. Data flows tell the real story.
Adobe bets on AI agents to automate creative work
Adobe unveils agentic AI assistants for Photoshop that chain multi-step edits via prompts, but staggered rollout and third-party model integration reveal strategic hedging. The bet: workflow orchestration beats model supremacy in creative software.
Fathom’s enterprise push bets distribution can outrun accuracy gaps
Fathom adds enterprise features competitors launched months ago while testing whether unlimited free access and HubSpot distribution can compensate for transcription accuracy that independent reviews place 30% below market leaders.
AI-Powered Email Automation in 2025: Tools, Trade-Offs, and DIY Alternatives
Gmail made AI drafting free in early 2025, resetting the market. Startups now push deeper automation or compete on price against zero. The shake-out shows which AI features justify premium pricing—and which were always commodity infrastructure.
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