The Tech Rundown
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and GitHub all launched flat subscriptions, then walked them back once power users cost more than they paid. That convergence is the real story.
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I think the AI industry stopped being about AI a while ago and started being about keeping a very large story alive long enough to cash out. Here's the math that makes me think that.
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Google's emissions are up 80% against its own 2030 zero pledge, and the AI industry is turning to on-site gas plants because renewables can't move at capex speed.
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Salesforce, Sierra, Glean, and Harvey are four of the best-funded companies in enterprise AI agents, and each has landed on a completely different answer to what they're actually selling.
4th July
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and GitHub all launched flat subscriptions, then walked them back once power users cost more than they paid. That convergence is the real story.
3rd July
I think the AI industry stopped being about AI a while ago and started being about keeping a very large story alive long enough to cash out. Here's the math that makes me think that.
3rd JulyThe EU's highest court dismissed Google's last appeal, making a 4.1 billion euro Android antitrust fine permanent after eight years of litigation.
2nd July
Google's emissions are up 80% against its own 2030 zero pledge, and the AI industry is turning to on-site gas plants because renewables can't move at capex speed.
2nd July
From outsourced AI product reviews to fully synthetic local news networks, each incident has been treated as isolated. Lined up in order, they show a clear progression.
2nd JulyThe new round more than doubles Together AI's valuation to $8.3 billion, on the strength of a simple pitch: run open-source models cheaper than the closed frontier labs can.
1st July
AI capex drove roughly 75% of US GDP growth in Q1 2026, while 95% of enterprise AI pilots show no measurable financial return. Those two facts describe different phases of the same cycle.
1st July
Tech layoffs and AI capex are rising together, not trading off against each other. That pattern undercuts the story companies are telling about why they're cutting staff.
1st July
I don't think large language models are a path to general intelligence, and I think the architecture itself is the reason why. This is my case for that, not a settled fact.
30th JuneNano Banana 2 Lite generates images in four seconds for $0.034 apiece. Gemini Omni Flash prices video at ten cents a second. Neither is Google's best model, and that's the point.
30th June
Anthropic's new model lands near-frontier benchmarks at a fraction of the price. That pricing move matters more than the scores.
30th June
President Lee Jae-myung unveiled a decade-long, corporate-funded plan to turn southwest Korea into a global semiconductor and AI data center hub.
29th June
A WIRED investigation found Meta contractors sent tens of thousands of minor-perspective crisis prompts to competitor chatbots without those companies' knowledge.
28th JuneSam Altman floated giving the U.S. government a slice of OpenAI worth roughly $42.6 billion, modeled on Alaska's sovereign wealth fund. It's a proposal, not a deal, and the distinction matters.
27th JuneDHS confirmed intruders had access to its Homeland Security Information Network, the unclassified system agencies use to coordinate event security, for up to five weeks.
26th JuneA $100 million Series B pushes TwelveLabs from video search toward a full agentic system, a narrower and less crowded bet than the general-purpose AI agent race.
25th June
Qualcomm is acquiring software startup Modular in an all-stock deal aimed squarely at breaking developers' dependence on Nvidia's CUDA platform.
24th June
The Five Eyes intelligence alliance issued a joint warning that frontier AI models capable of dramatically escalating cyberattacks are close to public availability.
23rd June
SpaceX will supply $6.3 billion in compute to startup Reflection AI from its Colossus 2 data center, its fourth such deal in months.
22nd June