Chinese manufacturers shipped 39% of global humanoid robots in 2025. Tesla shipped 1%. At CES 2026, the gap between American roadmaps and Chinese products defined the exhibition floor. The supply chain tells a story pricing alone can't explain.
Boston Children's Hospital is deploying OpenAI's new healthcare product. The executive leading the rollout says an AI casualty is "very likely." He's doing it anyway. The math behind that decision reveals how hospitals are thinking about risk.
Cursor just paid a premium for a code review startup to fix what it calls the new bottleneck in software development. But a July 2025 study using Cursor's own tools found AI made experienced developers 19% slower. The math gets uncomfortable from there.
Chinese scientists built a working EUV prototype using former ASML engineers and secondary-market parts. The machine generates light but hasn't produced chips. ASML took 18 years from prototype to production. Beijing wants 3-5. The math doesn't add up.
Zuckerberg paid $14 billion for Scale AI's founder to lead Meta's AI push. But Wang built a data labeling company, not a research lab. The Financial Times reports tensions mounting as Turing Award winner Yann LeCun heads for the exit.
Google calls Gemini 3 Flash "a fraction of the cost." Compared to Pro models, sure. Compared to the Flash model it replaces? Prices rose 67%. The real story: what happens when the industry stops subsidizing API access.
Amazon wants to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. But the deal requires OpenAI to spend that money buying Amazon's chips and cloud services. When your investor is also your vendor, where does the capital actually go?
Mozilla's new CEO promises users can "easily turn off" AI features. Five sentences later, he commits to building an "AI browser." With 34 months of runway and a Google contract renewal looming, the contradiction may not matter for long.
Ford's $19.5 billion EV retreat includes a pivot to energy storage, but the plan relies on Chinese battery technology, faces an 18-month worker gap, and depends on tax credits that could vanish. The math behind the messaging doesn't add up.
Nvidia released open AI models the same week reports surfaced that Meta is abandoning open source. Coincidence? The real story: Nvidia's best customers are building their own chips. Open models create dependencies that survive hardware defection.
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.
OpenAI declared a code red after Gemini 3 launched. The response: a 40% price hike, benchmark improvements in single digits, and a system card admitting the model lies 1.6% of the time. The scaling era may be over. What comes next looks expensive.
Google launched a research agent and wrote the test that grades it. Unsurprisingly, Google's tool leads the leaderboard. Competitors must now replicate Google's search infrastructure or accept permanent disadvantage on web research tasks.
