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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Sam Altman predicts AI CEOs within years while betting billions on human-centric infrastructure. His Tyler Cowen interview reveals three tensions: monetizing without breaking trust, energy bottlenecks limiting AI, and models that persuade without intent.
Palantir beat earnings but fell 8% at 250x forward P/E, triggering global risk reset. Banking chiefs gave cover for year-end de-risking while AI capex outpaces revenue visibility. When leaders wobble, concentration risk becomes system risk.
Amazon sues Perplexity to block its AI shopping agent from making purchases autonomously. The first major legal clash over whether AI assistants can act as user proxies sets precedent for the $20B question: who controls the future of online commerce?
Coca-Cola's 2025 AI holiday campaign cuts production from a year to a month, replacing 50-person crews with 5 specialists. Consumer opposition softens as creative industry backlash intensifies. The workforce math reveals what efficiency narratives obscure.
Musk's "you stole a nonprofit" jab masked the real story: Sutskever's deposition reveals OpenAI's board tried to oust Altman for lying and manipulation, while Anthropic attempted a takeover within 24 hours. The governance theater collapsed fast.
OpenAI signs $38B AWS deal days after Microsoft's exclusivity ends, adding to $1.4 trillion in compute commitments. The startup loses $12B quarterly while betting trillions that AI demand will explode. It's circular financing at cosmic scale.
GitHub isn't building the best AI coding agent—it's building the layer beneath all of them. Agent HQ bets enterprises value coordination over specialization. Platform strategies that extract value from ecosystem competition reshape markets more durably.
OpenAI commits $1.4T to infrastructure; Nvidia projects $500B in chip sales. Same day, same pitch: AI requires sovereign-scale capital. The tension: revenue is still catching up to the rhetoric, and someone will hold expensive capacity if demand falters.
OpenAI's restructure puts a $130B nonprofit in control of a $500B for-profit. Microsoft locked in 27% and access through 2032. But a year of regulatory review produced new numbers, not new transparency—and Microsoft's accounting gaps remain unaddressed.
Anthropic's $7B revenue run rate trails OpenAI's $13B, but the gap narrows when accounting for customer mix. New Excel integration and financial connectors target Wall Street as Microsoft embeds both AI providers—hedging infrastructure bets in an uncertain market.
Qualcomm's stock jumped 11% on inference chips that won't ship until 2026. The company landed a Saudi buyer but still needs a Western hyperscaler. With Nvidia and AMD shipping today, the question is whether a two-year runway leaves room to catch up.
China restarted robotaxi permits and its companies are racing into Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. Cost matters: Baidu builds vehicles for $29,000 using EV supply chains while US firms refine premium markets at home. Strategy follows economics.
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