The man who predicted the 2008 crash sat in a Google Doc with Anthropic's co-founder. Both admitted what they don't know. Burry sees stranded assets and accounting tricks. Clark can't prove his own tools improve productivity.
Hollywood calls it bootlegging. Investors say $6.5 billion. MiniMax built the top Chinese AI app in America—then Disney sued. With 70% of revenue overseas, the startup tests whether Chinese AI can scale while depending on Western courts.
San Francisco | January 9, 2026 CES 2026 wraps today in Las Vegas, and the floor plan told the story before
Trump demands Congress block state AI laws through must-pass defense bill. Same proposal died 99-1 in July. Same Republican opposition remains. Culture war packaging can't fix the math when GOP states' rights collide with tech industry preferences.
xAI's Grok 4.1 tops AI leaderboards by doing what competitors spent years avoiding: systematically weakening safety guardrails. What the company markets as "emotional intelligence" is actually tripled sycophancy rates and vanishing refusal policies.
Apple's board is preparing for Tim Cook's exit as soon as 2026, favoring hardware chief John Ternus as successor. The choice reflects a calculated bet: that winning AI requires chip-level control, not cloud infrastructure. Cook leaves at peak financial success but relative decline in AI positioning.
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.
Cursor raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation while paying billions to the same AI companies now competing against it. The fastest-growing startup in tech history faces a choice: become a model company or accept structural disadvantage.
Anthropic projects profitability by 2028. So why $50 billion in infrastructure? The announcement, arriving as OpenAI's subsidy request fails, reveals how even disciplined AI companies can't resist the pressure to match rivals' megaprojects.
AI giants translate English bots. Wonderful builds native Greek and Polish agents first. Investors valued that reverse approach at $700 million. The bet: localization complexity creates a moat platforms can't easily cross.
Gamma hit $50M ARR with 52 people while AI peers burn billions. Now at $2.1B valuation, the profitable presentation tool faces its real test: can a purpose-built AI product beat Microsoft and Google's free bundled features?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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