Tech journalist. Lives in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Got his start writing for his high school newspaper. When not covering tech trends, he's swimming laps, gaming on PS4, or vibe coding through the night.
Anthropic's 470,000-employee Deloitte deal isn't a software contract—it's a distribution machine. By embedding Claude inside a Big Four consultancy, Anthropic gains reach into 90% of Fortune 500 boardrooms while Deloitte builds billable AI expertise.
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.
BlackRock's $40 billion bet on AI data centers collides with stubborn physics: chips demand exponential power, cooling consumes half the energy budget, and grids struggle to keep pace. The construction boom is real. So are the constraints.
How can an AI master a complex game without ever playing it? DeepMind's Dreamer 4 learns by watching, then trains in imagination. This shift from big data to efficient world models could be key for real-world robotics and autonomous systems.
OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion at a $500 billion valuation—but left $3.4 billion authorized shares unsold. The company calls it confidence. It could be caution about a restructuring still awaiting regulatory approval while burning $2.5B per half.
Six OpenAI veterans including Mira Murati raised $2B at a $12B valuation to build Tinker, an API that democratizes frontier model fine-tuning. The bet: customization matters more than scale. The tension: access is curated, not open.
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.
Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers raised $300M to build AI that discovers actual materials, not just benchmarks. The bet: autonomous labs where robots synthesize what models design. The tension: venture timelines collide with furnace speeds.
California just made voluntary AI safety pledges legally binding—the first state to do so. OpenAI and Meta cautiously support it. Venture capital opposes it. Congress remains paralyzed. Now 49 other states face the same choice, and the industry's nightmare patchwork begins.
Anthropic ships checkpoints, VS Code integration, and an agent SDK with Claude Sonnet 4.5—betting developer tooling matters more than benchmark wins. As frontier models converge on capability, deployment polish becomes the real competitive moat.
OpenAI launched parental controls for teen ChatGPT users Monday—but also quietly routes emotional prompts from paying adults to more restrictive models without notice. The humanized design that drove adoption now creates safety risks the company is retrofitting.
Apple's internal 'Veritas' chatbot reveals the company's struggle to catch up in AI. While competitors ship live products, Cupertino tests internally for a March 2026 Siri launch that could determine its AI future.
