Good morning 👋 Move over, Patagonia vests. Silicon Valley’s latest flex is AI merch, and it’s harder to get than Taylor Swift tickets. Suddenly, tech insiders are scrambling for exclusive Anthropic “thinking” caps, OpenAI glowing plaques, and oddly specific Cursor custom keyboards. The secret behind the frenzy is simple: scarcity and insider status. Getting your hands on these items is a subtle brag that you’re part of the tech revolution.
🥧 China’s cheap little AI models are eating America’s lunch. While US tech giants chased after supersized LLMs and billion-dollar data centers, China’s low-cost, easy to modify open source models took off globally. Now a US startup called Prime Intellect thinks America’s future lies in crowdsourcing open AGI. Like Napster for model training, Prime lets anyone anywhere run reinforcement learning without big tech. By democratizing AI, this distributed approach could unlock the next wave of all-American innovation.
🐢 Europe is falling behind in AI. Alarmed by its growing dependence on American and Chinese tech, the EU is rolling out two big strategies to catch up fast. The plan fast-tracks homegrown frontier models and autonomous AI agents, while giving researchers direct access to powerful datasets, computing resources, and funding. At the same time, Europe’s doubling down on regulations, betting strong oversight is how you build an AI industry people can actually trust. Looks like sovereign AI is trending, and boring just became the new disruptive.
🛰️ Could satellites deliver clean power to the entire planet? Sounds like sci-fi, but space-based solar power (SBSP) is already here. Prototypes are in orbit, beaming small bursts of energy back to Earth using microwaves and ground antennas. The goal is to scale up into satellites that capture sunlight nonstop and transmit continuous power to cities anywhere on the planet. With energy-hungry data centers driving record demand, maybe it’s time to stop burning dinosaurs and start orbiting silicon.
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💸 SoftBank just overpaid for another robotics company. This time it’s ABB Robotics, the industrial giant famous for its high-tech factory robots and automation systems. Analysts pegged ABB Robotics around $4 billion, but Masayoshi Son casually dropped $5.4 billion instead. It’s all part of Son’s latest vision to fuse advanced AI with robotics. Sure, his Pepper robot never quite sparked the revolution he hoped, but why let reality stop him from chasing another shiny robot dream?
💭 AI hit puberty and started asking “why?” Instead of simply following orders, AI agents now analyze millions of data points in real time, constantly questioning what’s happening and why. Forget relying on one giant model. These AIs collaborate at superhuman speed and scale, moving beyond basic automation into independent reasoning and judgment. Independent reasoning is great until AI figures out self-improvement and floods LinkedIn with posts about how failure leads to growth.
fun stats
of the world’s top 25 most valuable public companies are in the US 🇺🇸 The AI boom has catapulted big tech hyperscalers like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google to new highs, landing 20 American companies in the top 25.
China has 2 in the top, while Europe only has 1: Dutch chip maker ASML squeaking in at #25.
[Sherwood]
🏸 Embodied AI revolution: A new video shows off China’s full-sized humanoid robot Oli’s autonomous agility – all learned, without human control *cough Tesla*