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.
Elon Musk's AI venture, xAI, has thrown down the gauntlet. The company's newest AI model, Grok 3, emerged from its digital cocoon on Monday, backed by an arsenal of 200,000 GPUs.
Elon Musk's AI venture, xAI, has thrown down the gauntlet. The company's newest AI model, Grok 3, emerged from its digital cocoon on Monday, backed by an arsenal of 200,000 GPUs.
This isn't your average AI upgrade. xAI claims it pumped ten times more computing power into Grok 3 than its predecessor. Think of it as giving steroids to a chess champion who was already beating grandmasters.
The model comes in different flavors. There's Grok 3 mini for the speed demons. And for the deep thinkers, there's Grok 3 Reasoning.
What's turning heads is Grok 3's performance. It's strutting around with top scores on benchmarks like AIME and GPQA. That's fancy talk for "it's really good at math and science." It even broke records on Chatbot Arena, where AI models duke it out in front of human judges.
But here's where it gets interesting. Musk is marketing Grok 3 as a "maximally truth-seeking AI." It's supposedly unafraid to speak uncomfortable truths, even if they ruffle some politically correct feathers. Bold claim from a bold billionaire.
Access isn't cheap. Premium+ X subscribers ($50/month) get first dibs. There's also a new SuperGrok subscription in the works, rumored at $30 monthly or $300 yearly. For that price, you get extra reasoning power and unlimited image generation. Think of it as a VIP pass to the AI club.
The future looks busy for Grok. Voice mode is coming next week. An enterprise API is around the corner. And in a surprising twist, xAI plans to open-source Grok 2 once its successor is stable. That's like giving away last year's Ferrari when you get the new model.
Why this matters:
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?
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.
Chinese hackers operated inside U.S. VMware servers for 17 months undetected. The malware repairs itself when deleted. It hides where most security teams don't look. CISA's December 4 advisory exposes an architectural blind spot in enterprise defense.
Werner Vogels ends his 14-year keynote streak by handing out printed newspapers and warning developers about "verification debt." His parting message: AI generates code faster than humans can understand it. The work is yours, not the tools.
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