Good morning. Cats have spent thousands of years convincing us that we work for them. We buy the food, clean the litter box, and pretend the furniture is still ours. Naturally, we decided to outsource our one remaining job to the cloud. That went about as well as expected. Internet connected smart feeders went down last week, and some scheduled meals stopped coming out. Now owners are pointing cameras at the feeders just to make sure their pets get fed. We’ve reached the part of the future where cats need an IT department.
In today’s dose:
- AI startups build on borrowed time
- Aging may have an off switch
- Amazon destroys rare books for AI
- Self driving construction equipment
- Silicon Valley returns to defense
OpenAI and Anthropic could wipe out thousands of AI startups overnight. Most AI startups rent a frontier model and wrap it in a harness built for one specific job. That leaves an entire industry dependent on intelligence owned by someone else. The companies behind those models are also turning them into products of their own. Once the labs compete for the same customers, giving startups their best tech looks like a bad business decision. Founders are wondering how long that deal will last. If AI labs decide to keep their smartest AI for themselves, startups could wake up selling weaker products against the companies they depend on. Every API bill could help fund the company coming for your business. (The Information)
Scientists think aging is code they can rewrite. Researchers studied 21 million cells from mice of different ages and found that the body appears to age on a schedule. Only about a quarter of cell types changed dramatically. Cells that maintain the body disappeared first. Later, inflammatory cells multiplied and started damaging tissue. Each stage was driven by the same genetic switches turning on and off. Scientists can now see when those changes happen and what triggers them. Rewriting those instructions could slow aging before it turns into disease. If scientists pull this off, the retirement age is going to need three digits. (Quanta)
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👀 closer look
Amazon got caught red handed destroying rare books to train AI. Booksellers started receiving large anonymous orders for random titles and suspected AI companies were behind them. So 404 Media teamed up with a seller who got an order for 1,000 books through Biblio. The seller slipped an AirTag inside one and watched it travel to an Amazon AI facility in Las Vegas. Workers there cut off the spines, scan every page, then throw away what remains. Many of the books are rare, so every copy Amazon destroys makes that title a little harder to find. Knowledge becomes much more valuable when fewer people have access to it. (404 Media)
Self driving tech is coming for construction equipment. Waymo spent years teaching cars to understand the road and react to everything around them. Now some of the engineers behind that technology are using it to run excavators. Their startup, Bedrock, has machines digging without drivers on three commercial construction sites. Gravis is building similar systems that let one person supervise several machines at once. Fully autonomous construction sites are still years away, but more than 40% of the construction workforce could end up “retiring” by 2031. The ones that do stay will be skilled operators who can tell the machines where to dig. (Forbes, Business Insider)
Silicon Valley is going back to its roots. The Pentagon helped bankroll the tech industry in its early days. Then consumer tech created a much bigger market, and China became a huge part of it. Now China is harder to sell into, while Washington is spending billions on AI and military technology. That’s pulling investors and tech companies back toward defense. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia are backing weapons startups. Google is putting AI on classified Pentagon networks, while Meta builds military headsets with Anduril. Silicon Valley always gets more patriotic when the Pentagon starts writing checks. (NY Times)
fun stats
✈️ 600 million. Spirit Airlines emails and Teams chats Google bought in a bankruptcy auction for $10 million to train AI. As labs hunt for fresh real world data, even bankruptcy leftovers are valuable.
✨ 1 in 6. How many 3D models uploaded to CGTrader are AI generated. Buyers aren’t biting. All that AI slop brings in just $1 of every $90 in revenue. Cheaper to make doesn’t mean it’s worth much.
🐳 355%. DeepSeek’s price hike for V4 Pro output during peak hours, jumping from $0.87 to $3.96 per million tokens. Cheap AI officially has rush hour pricing.