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.
The New York Times sued Perplexity for copyright infringement—months after signing an AI licensing deal with Amazon. Perplexity built revenue-sharing programs for publishers. The Times declined to join any of them. Now lawyers are involved.
A former AI researcher left his Munich lab to chase what he calls the "holy grail" of artificial intelligence. His startup just raised $13 million with barely more than a demo video. What convinced investors to bet big on something that doesn't exist yet?
💡 TL;DR - The 30 Seconds Version
💰 Former Synthesia cofounder raised $13 million for SpAItial, which builds interactive 3D worlds from text prompts.
👥 His team includes ex-Google and Meta researchers who built 3D teleconferencing and text-to-3D systems.
🎮 The goal: let a 10-year-old create a video game in 10 minutes using text commands.
Matthias Niessner took a break from his AI lab at Technical University of Munich to solve what he calls the "holy grail" of AI models. His startup SpAItial raised $13 million to build AI that creates interactive 3D worlds from text prompts.
The seed round, led by Earlybird Venture Capital, is unusually large for a European startup with little more than a teaser video. But Niessner assembled a team that knows 3D AI. His cofounders include Ricardo Martin-Brualla from Google's 3D teleconferencing team and David Novotny, who led Meta's text-to-3D project for six years.
SpAItial faces competition from Odyssey, which raised $27 million, and World Labs, already valued over $1 billion. But Niessner thinks the real challenge isn't just creating 3D worlds—it's making them behave like reality. He wants virtual glasses to shatter properly and objects to react with physics accuracy.
The plan is to license the foundation model to developers who build specific applications. Video games seem obvious, but the technology could work for construction visualization and robot training.
Why this matters:
Anthropic hired IPO lawyers the same day it announced its first acquisition. The company claims efficiency while burning $2.8B annually. Its safety positioning has won enterprise customers—and alienated Trump's White House. The math is complicated.
Inception Point AI produces 3,000 podcast episodes per week with eight employees, spending roughly $1 per episode and breaking even at 20 listens. The Venice startup doesn't compete on quality. It competes on coverage, treating audio as infrastructure for programmatic ads.
Voize raised $50M for nursing documentation AI. Abridge raised $300M at $5.3B valuation. The 10× gap reveals what healthcare really values—and what happens when efficiency gains hit an industry that already cuts corners on staffing.
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.
Get the 5-minute Silicon Valley AI briefing, every weekday morning — free.
