While the AI industry chases reinforcement learning, Essential AI made the opposite bet. Their new 8B model embodies a thesis about where machine intelligence originates. The transformer's co-inventor is calling the shots on research.
Tim Cook built Apple's leadership into a monument of stability. In 2025, that monument cracked. Meta poached AI and design chiefs with $25M packages. The chip architect may follow. What broke inside the world's most valuable company?
OpenRouter's 100 trillion token study was supposed to prove AI is transforming everything. The data shows something else: half of open-source usage is roleplay, enterprise adoption is thin, and one account caused a 20-point spike in the metrics.
Thinking Machines seeks a $50 billion valuation four months after raising $2 billion. The OpenAI spin-out has one API in private beta. Investors aren't pricing the product—they're pricing the fear of missing out on Mira Murati's next move.
Baidu's ERNIE 5.0 matched GPT-5 on benchmarks and undercut OpenAI on price. Investors sold anyway, dropping shares 9.8%. With 1,500+ AI models competing in China, technical excellence stopped being enough to win.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Google wants to handle your entire holiday shopping journey. No more clicking through to stores
Microsoft led AI infrastructure with 60% market share in 2023, then froze 3.5 gigawatts of planned capacity. OpenAI signed over $400 billion with Oracle instead. Nadella calls it strategic repositioning. SemiAnalysis data suggests Microsoft blinked first.
Good Morning from San Francisco, OpenAI just shipped a major model update without publishing a single benchmark. Unprecedented? Sure. Surprising?
OpenAI released GPT-5.1 without publishing benchmarks, leading instead with "warmer" personality controls. The shift reveals how 800 million users push the company toward engagement metrics over technical capability, mirroring social media's path.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Yann LeCun built Meta's AI lab for twelve years. Then Mark Zuckerberg hired
Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun reports to a 28-year-old after twelve years building FAIR. Now he's leaving to raise billions for the exact research Meta couldn't afford. The death of corporate AI labs and the VC arbitrage replacing them.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Germany invented modern privacy law in 1970. Built from surveillance trauma. Today it leads the
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?
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.
Good Morning from San Francisco, OpenAI needs a trillion dollars but can't get a federal backstop. Seven families
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