China's surveillance tech, originally built with IBM and other US companies in the 2000s, is now being sold as 'control-tech-as-a-service' globally. Geedge Networks ships turnkey censorship systems to Pakistan, Myanmar, and others—all while avoiding sanctions.
Good Morning from San Francisco, 👉 The job market broke. Both sides armed themselves with AI and shot each other in
AI has trapped job seekers and employers in a dysfunctional arms race. Workers mass-produce applications with ChatGPT; companies use AI to screen them. Result: record-low hiring confidence and a market that serves nobody well.
Good Morning from San Francisco,
Europe just made its boldest AI bet yet. ASML dropped €1.3 billion on Mistral AI, becoming the largest shareholder in a €10 billion valuation. The Dutch chip monopolist wants to own AI, not just enable it.
Meanwhile, OpenAI pushes into Hollywood with "Critterz"—a feature film heading to Cannes next May. Nine months from concept to festival premiere. Traditional studios spend three years and $100+ million on similar projects.
Disney sues AI companies while OpenAI collaborates with established studios. Europe chooses vertical integration over venture capital velocity. Silicon Valley crashes the film festival circuit.
Stay curious,
Marcus Schuler
ASML is investing €1.3 billion in Mistral AI's €2 billion Series C round, becoming the largest shareholder in Europe's most valuable AI company at €10 billion pre-money valuation.
The Dutch semiconductor equipment maker secures a board seat in a partnership designed to fuse Europe's chip monopolist with its AI champion.
The alliance addresses competing pressures. From ASML's perspective, owning AI capabilities could optimize its $180 million EUV lithography machines while providing visibility into workloads driving chip demand. Mistral gains industrial legitimacy and compute access from a company that works with every leading chipmaker. European policymakers see a template for technological sovereignty through managed dependencies rather than complete independence.
The timing reflects strategic calculation. Against Anthropic's $183 billion valuation and OpenAI's $300 billion price tag, Europe is choosing vertical integration over venture-fueled scaling. The approach acknowledges that European companies cannot match American capital deployment but can potentially achieve superior technical integration.
Why this matters:
• Stack control emerges as scale alternative: European companies prioritize deep integration over platform dominance, potentially creating sustainable advantages through technical convergence
• Sovereignty strategies evolve toward resilience: Focus shifts from complete autonomy to securing critical capabilities while diversifying rather than eliminating external dependencies
Robert Brown
Prompt:
demonic undead evil child smiling with sharp teeth, claws, and glowing eyes in a dark evil forest at night + horror + digital art high detail
OpenAI is lending computing resources and generative tools to produce "Critterz," a feature-length animated film targeting theatrical release in 2026 following its planned Cannes Film Festival debut next May.
The project compresses traditional animation timelines from three years to nine months on a sub-$30 million budget—fractions of the $100-200 million typically required. Chad Nelson, OpenAI's creative specialist, developed the forest creature story using the company's DALL-E image generator before expanding into feature production with GPT-5 and Sora video tools.
The timing creates strategic tension. Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. are actively pursuing copyright lawsuits against AI companies while OpenAI demonstrates collaborative production models with established studios Vertigo Films and Native Foreign. The hybrid approach maintains human oversight through scriptwriters, voice actors, and concept artists while AI accelerates rendering and iteration cycles.
Why this matters:
• Production cost compression could democratize animation access while threatening studio advantages built on capital intensity and specialized talent pools
• The Cannes showcase functions as OpenAI's highest-stakes proof-of-concept for skeptical entertainment executives weighing AI adoption against creative displacement concerns
Maria Garcia
Qodo offers an agentic AI platform that helps developers write quality code through automated test generation, code reviews, and intelligent coding assistance. It integrates directly into your IDE and Git workflow to catch bugs, generate meaningful tests, and improve code integrity across multiple programming languages.
Tutorial:
URL: https://www.qodo.ai/
The US proposed annual approvals for Samsung and SK Hynix to ship chipmaking supplies to their China factories, replacing Biden-era waivers that expire at year-end with a system requiring exact quantities spelled out in advance. The shift creates a new control mechanism that keeps Korean chipmakers' massive Chinese operations running while giving Washington tighter oversight over every component shipped to an adversary nation.
Google updated its Help Center to specify that free Gemini accounts get five prompts daily with Gemini 2.5 Pro, replacing previous vague language like "limited access" with exact numbers across all subscription tiers. The change gives users clear expectations about AI service boundaries, ending confusion about when they'll hit usage walls.
Anthropic settled copyright claims from book publishers for $1.5 billion, despite stating they didn't use the disputed training data in their current models. The settlement amount—far higher than typical tech copyright deals—effectively creates a financial barrier that only well-funded companies like OpenAI, major tech giants, and Anthropic itself can afford, potentially eliminating smaller AI startups from the competitive landscape.
Databricks increased its revenue forecast to $4 billion for the fiscal year ending January, up 50% from the prior year, as the company closes a $1 billion funding round at a $100 billion valuation on Monday. The growth puts another data infrastructure company at valuations that dwarf most public tech companies, with 650 customers now paying over $1 million annually as AI workloads drive enterprise spending on data processing tools.
Ross Ulbricht, who created the Silk Road dark web marketplace and was serving life for drug distribution until Trump pardoned him in January, has embarked on a cross-country speaking tour while receiving about $31 million in cryptocurrency donations from supporters. The transformation from federal prisoner to crypto celebrity shows how the industry's growing political influence can now rewrite criminal justice outcomes, turning a convicted drug marketplace operator into a movement figurehead.
Netskope filed to sell 47.8 million shares at $15 to $17 each, seeking a $6.5 billion valuation in its US public debut as the cloud security company capitalizes on growing cyber threats. The IPO signals renewed market appetite for new listings after April's slump, with cybersecurity companies drawing investor interest as the secure access market grows from $7 billion in 2022 to a projected $25 billion by 2027.
Salesforce laid off 262 employees in San Francisco this week as CEO Marc Benioff told investors that AI now handles 50% of the company's work and eliminated the need for 4,000 customer support "heads." The cuts turn San Francisco's largest private employer into a test case for whether tech leaders' promises about AI productivity gains will reshape white-collar work or just provide cover for cost-cutting amid falling stock prices.
Alibaba Cloud led a $100 million funding round for Chinese humanoid robot startup X Square Robot, the company's eighth financing round since launching in December 2023. The investment pace signals venture capital's bet that combining AI with robotics will create the next major technology platform, with X Square targeting $10,000 consumer robots within five years.
X Square Robot builds wheeled humanoids that actually work. The Shenzhen startup ditched bipedal theatrics for dexterous hands and end-to-end AI that perceives, decides, and acts.
• The Founders Founded December 2023 by CEO Wang Qian, a Tsinghua/USC robotics PhD who shut down his quant fund because he "couldn't sleep" away from robotics. COO Yang Qian handles operations. Based in Shenzhen's Bao'an District tech hub with access to China's hardware supply chain.
• The Product WALL-A powers everything—a 10+ billion parameter model that maps vision and touch to action. The Quanta X2 flagship (172cm, 62 DoF, sub-millimeter precision) tackles service tasks with 20-DoF hands. Open-sourced WALL-OSS in September to seed developer ecosystems. Core strength: tight hardware-software integration plus end-to-end learning that generalizes across tasks.
• The Competition Faces Figure AI's $39.5B war chest, Tesla's vision-first Optimus, and Unitree's $16K price bombs. X Square sidesteps bipedal battles by betting on manipulation over mobility. CEO Wang calls factory demos "PR stunts"—his robots learn in messy, real environments.
• Financing Raised ~$280M across 8 rounds in under 2 years. Alibaba Cloud led latest A+ round ($100-140M), Meituan doubled down from Series A. HongShan, Legend Capital aboard. No disclosed valuation. Planning IPO next year while booking revenue from schools and hotels.
• The Future ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Strong technical foundation meets pragmatic execution. Current $80K price must hit $10K for mass adoption—doable with Chinese supply chains and volume. The bet: superior manipulation beats flashy walking. Risk: embodied AI still lags text models significantly.
If X Square's robots can fold laundry without starting a revolution, they might just win the household wars.
Good Morning from San Francisco, 👉 The job market broke. Both sides armed themselves with AI and shot each other in
Good Morning from San Francisco, Tech executives lined up Thursday to shower Trump with billions in AI pledges. Microsoft promised
Good Morning from San Francisco, Google's antitrust victory writes the playbook for Big Tech's future defenses.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Cybersecurity tools turned weapons overnight. Anthropic's valuation soared past $183 billion. Google dodged
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