Meta is talking to Google about buying TPUs. Wall Street panicked. But the real story isn't supplier defection—it's ecosystem politics, negotiating leverage, and the complicated game every AI company plays when chips are this scarce.
Ilya Sutskever helped prove that scale works in AI. Now he says it doesn't—and his $3 billion company is betting the future belongs to researchers with ideas, not labs with the biggest GPU clusters. The industry isn't ready for this argument.
Silicon Valley promised AI would democratize creativity. New research tracking 442 participants found the opposite: people who were more creative without AI produced better work with it. The gap didn't close. It may have widened.
Explore Waymo's Robotaxis revolution in Silicon Valley. Get the latest updates on autonomous driving technology and its real-world applications.
Waymo just unleashed its self-driving cars on Silicon Valley. The company's robotaxis now operate 24/7 across a 27-square-mile zone including Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and parts of Sunnyvale.
It's a homecoming of sorts. Waymo began here as Google's quirky self-driving experiment in 2009. Back then, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page dared their engineers to complete ten 100-mile autonomous routes. Those engineers delivered, probably fueled by a mix of caffeine and Silicon Valley optimism.
The rollout starts small. Only select locals with the right zip codes can summon these driverless chariots. Meanwhile, Waymo keeps expanding elsewhere - they've already partnered with Uber in Austin and plan to hit Atlanta next.
Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi calls it a "special milestone." That's a modest way of saying they've come full circle: from testing secretive prototypes in Google's backyard to letting residents actually sleep through their commute.
Why this matters:
Meta is talking to Google about buying TPUs. Wall Street panicked. But the real story isn't supplier defection—it's ecosystem politics, negotiating leverage, and the complicated game every AI company plays when chips are this scarce.
Ilya Sutskever helped prove that scale works in AI. Now he says it doesn't—and his $3 billion company is betting the future belongs to researchers with ideas, not labs with the biggest GPU clusters. The industry isn't ready for this argument.
Anthropic's Opus 4.5 reclaims coding leadership and cuts prices 67%. But security tests show 22-point variance between evaluations, and one developer couldn't distinguish it from Sonnet in real work. Here's what actually matters.
Anthropic cut Opus prices by 67% and claimed benchmark leadership. But confused usage limits, a Microsoft paradox, and user expectations of post-launch degradation reveal competitive pressure reshaping AI economics.
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