Think AI is replacing workers? The reality is more ironic: humans labor behind the scenes to build AI meant to replace them. The gap between hype and reality reveals uncomfortable truths about innovation, investment bubbles, and the actual human cost of chasing artificial intelligence dreams.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff learned that $1 billion in local donations doesn't buy permission to call federal troops into San Francisco—not when 25-year friendships end and fellow billionaires publish op-eds on moral laundering.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Salesforce answered an RFP you didn't know existed. The pitch: use AI to
OpenAI's Sora 2 demands permission for your face but lets Spider-Man appear unless studios opt out. The split policy arrives as year-end conversion deadlines loom and competitors launch rival video feeds—testing fair use through product, not precedent.
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.
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.
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.
CoreWeave landed a $14.2 billion Meta contract, its second massive deal in a week. The customer list is diversifying. The risk profile isn't. All growth still depends on the same AI flywheel—and the debt markets that fund it.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Anthropic shipped their fastest coding model yet—days before OpenAI's developer conference. Coincidences
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.
Anthropic launched Sonnet 4.5 claiming it's the best coding model, with 30-hour autonomous runs and major infrastructure updates. Released days before OpenAI's event, early tests reveal a gap: benchmark wins don't automatically translate to deployment success.
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.
Good Morning from San Francisco, OpenAI launched parental controls for ChatGPT this week. Parents can monitor teen usage. Adults discovered
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.
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.
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