Sunak’s dual AI roles; 250-doc backdoor; $2B Nvidia buyer faces China rare-earth squeeze
Good Morning from San Francisco, 👉 Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now advises Microsoft and Anthropic. Both roles cleared under
Amazon launches new Echo devices with its generative AI assistant baked in—seven months after Alexa+ debuted to cautious early access. The hardware is ready. The question is whether daily use has actually improved enough to justify the rebuild.
OpenAI added buy buttons to ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users. Merchants get sales but lose website visits, email lists, and retargeting. The real story isn't checkout convenience—it's who controls commerce when AI becomes the primary shopping interface.
DeepSeek's sparse attention technique cuts long-context AI inference costs by 10x while slashing API prices over 50%. The technical breakthrough intensifies pressure on OpenAI and Chinese rivals as architectural innovation becomes pricing power.
Nvidia commits $100 billion to fund OpenAI's expansion—money that flows right back to Nvidia through chip purchases. Smart strategy or dangerous circular financing? Analysts split on whether it's brilliant or bubble territory.
OpenAI's new benchmark claims GPT-5 matches human experts 40% of the time on real work tasks—a 3x jump in 15 months. But the test reveals as much about what AI can't measure as what it can. The productivity promise meets measurement reality.
Alibaba promises to exceed its $53B AI spending target while burning $2.6B quarterly—and investors love it. The launch of trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max signals China's bid to control the entire AI stack, profits be damned.
Voice typing finally rivals keyboards—if you choose the right balance of privacy, speed, and cost. New AI-powered apps transform rough speech into polished text, but the local vs. cloud decision shapes everything else.
Alibaba releases open-source AI that speaks back while Nvidia and OpenAI plan $100B closed infrastructure. Enterprise choice between free control and premium APIs reshapes multimodal AI landscape as geopolitical competition intensifies.
California's two AI bills reveal how industry shapes regulation: AB 1018 faces coordinated resistance while SB 53 enjoys selective support. The contrast exposes regulatory capture in real-time as federal preemption threats loom.
Musk's xAI raises $10B at $200B valuation while burning $1B monthly and laying off 500+ staff. Middle Eastern sovereign wealth joins the AI arms race as infrastructure costs force harsh operational choices.
Google drops paywalls for Gemini in Chrome, transforming the world's dominant browser from exploration tool into AI assistant. The shift from searching to delegating reshapes how billions discover information online.
Cameron's Meta partnership signals a bigger shift in entertainment. As box office craters and production costs soar, two camps emerge around AI: enhancement vs disruption. The winner determines if Hollywood adapts or gets replaced.
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