California granted Waymo permission to operate across 47,493 square miles—but the company runs just 2,500 vehicles in five cities. The gap between regulatory approval and actual deployment reveals unit economics Waymo won't disclose and local opposition the state ignores.
Google kept AI Mode ad-free for a year to compete with ChatGPT. Last week, ads appeared. The retreat reveals more than monetization strategy—it shows Google's $175B advertising business makes competing structurally impossible.
Google must double AI compute every six months to meet demand, but capacity limits are already capping product rollouts and revenue. As bubble concerns mount, the company bets that underinvesting poses the greater risk in the infrastructure arms race.
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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.
Baidu's ERNIE 5.0 matched GPT-5 on benchmarks and undercut OpenAI on price. Investors sold anyway, dropping shares 9.8%. With 1,500+ AI models competing in China, technical excellence stopped being enough to win.
Google's AI shopping features promise convenience: automated tracking, inventory calls, checkout. But they remove everyone between you and purchase—reviewers, influencers, store staff. What's lost when one company owns the entire shopping journey?
Microsoft led AI infrastructure with 60% market share in 2023, then froze 3.5 gigawatts of planned capacity. OpenAI signed over $400 billion with Oracle instead. Nadella calls it strategic repositioning. SemiAnalysis data suggests Microsoft blinked first.
OpenAI released GPT-5.1 without publishing benchmarks, leading instead with "warmer" personality controls. The shift reveals how 800 million users push the company toward engagement metrics over technical capability, mirroring social media's path.
SoftBank just posted record profits driven by OpenAI's soaring valuation. So why is Masayoshi Son selling $15 billion in assets, expanding margin loans, and converting paper gains into cash? The answer reveals uncomfortable truths about AI's peak.
Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun reports to a 28-year-old after twelve years building FAIR. Now he's leaving to raise billions for the exact research Meta couldn't afford. The death of corporate AI labs and the VC arbitrage replacing them.
OpenAI projects $20 billion in revenue while lobbying Washington for tax credits designed for struggling manufacturers. The company has committed $1.4 trillion to AI infrastructure it cannot finance privately. Is this confidence or desperation?
Moonshot trained an AI model for $4.6 million that beats OpenAI's GPT-5 on reasoning tests. While OpenAI seeks trillion-dollar infrastructure, Chinese labs prove the math no longer works. The twist: even they worry the tech works too well.
Microsoft declares it's building "humanist superintelligence" to keep AI safe. Reality check: They're 2 years behind OpenAI, whose models they'll use until 2032. The safety pitch? Product differentiation for enterprise clients who fear runaway AI.
Apple will pay Google $1B yearly to power Siri with a 1.2 trillion parameter AI model—8x more complex than Apple's current tech. The company that owns every layer now rents the most critical one. The spring 2026 target masks a deeper dependency trap.
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