OpenAI eliminated its vesting cliff entirely. The official line: encouraging risk-taking. The reality: AI companies now pay employees in database rows that may never become money, while burning $115 billion before profitability.
Oracle says "no delays to contractual commitments" on its OpenAI data centers. But that careful hedge reveals a structural problem in the $300B deal that credit markets have already priced in. Equity investors haven't caught up.
San Francisco | December 12 Sam Altman's memo about Gemini 3 triggered a ten-day sprint to ship GPT-5.2.
Federal judges ruled Meta faces fierce competition from TikTok and YouTube. The same day, PyTorch's creator left for a startup. Meta won its antitrust case while losing the researchers who determine whether it can compete five years from now.
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.
Google claims Gemini 3 delivers PhD-level reasoning. The fine print admits 72% accuracy and minute-plus generation times. Early testing reveals graduate-student errors. OpenAI's GPT-5 disaster opened the door, but can Google's benchmarks justify $7T spending?
Good Morning from San Francisco, When the CEO warning about investment bubbles is spending $75 billion on the very thing
Google's CEO warns investors about AI bubble risks while Alphabet commits $75 billion to the same markets. The company ships error-prone systems requiring self-verification, delays climate targets despite record profits, and tells workers to adapt alone.
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.
AI labs post safety assurances weekly, but pharma learned decades ago that trust requires structure, not statements. OpenAI's shift from withholding GPT-2 to blitz-scaling GPT-4 products reveals the cost of episodic messaging over narrative discipline.
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.
Good Morning from San Francisco, When Jeff Bezos warns about industrial bubbles, listen to his checkbook, not his speeches. When
Six weeks after calling AI an 'industrial bubble,' Bezos commits $6.2 billion to Project Prometheus. Not contradiction—strategic positioning. The physical AI startup may be less about commercial AI than vertical integration for Blue Origin's ambitions.
OpenAI's CEO celebrated getting ChatGPT to avoid em dashes after three years of trying. The "fix" shifts probabilities, not guarantees. Writers face AI accusations for using punctuation correctly. Meanwhile, the company raises billions promising superintelligence.
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.
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