TWS #012: Meta "acquires" Scale; Honda goes to Space; WhatsApp's getting Ads; AI Chip Bans, Exercise helps with Cancer
and much more...
Join 2,300+ curious minds who, every week, get the latest curated high signals on news, insights, and ideas around technology, science, and business to help you become a better builder and thinker. Please fill out the survey so we can deliver the best content to your inbox. Thanks for reading!
Did you know...
In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer in Floriday, spent 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) to buy two pizzas. It was the first real-world Bitcoin transaction. His offer was accepted, who ordered the pizzas for about $41 at the time. This would have valued one BTC at $0.0041. At the time, Bitcoin had no clear market value, traded among enthusiasts as a novel digital token. This basic exchange, which was done on May 22, 2010, proved Bitcoin’s potential as a currency, but its true significance finally showed later as Bitcoin’s value skyrocketed. At its peak, 10,000 BTC would have been valued at $1.1B, making those pizzas the most expensive in history. This will be forever known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day,” 🫠 😭 🍕
Here’s this week’s scoop:
How China is Dealing with AI Chip Bans
Meta “acquires” Scale AI for $15B
Honda Enters the Space Race
Waymo’s Breakthrough in AI Scaling Laws
Deloitte: Digital Consumer Trends Report 2025
WhatsApp is Getting Ads!
Exercise is Helping Colon Cancer Survivors
Podcast / Tutorial: How to Use NotebookLM and Gemini to build a research assistant
Let’s dive in.
🔥 Nuggets for the Road
An archive of helpful bookmarks I’ve collected over the years to help builders and operators in their startup journey — the document will continually get updated [LINK]
Air traffic control is still using floppy disks! 💾 🤣— The FAA is bringing US air traffic control systems into the 21st century. [LINK]
Google’s AI Overview feature is killing traffic to publishers [LINK]
Ancestra — a cinematic film (by Darren Aronofsky) created using AI (Veo) [GOOGLE]
“We used Gemini to develop our prompts, and used Veo and our image generation model, Imagen, to create a series of potential shots, organized by mood, color and emotion.”
Interview with Terrance Tao — widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. [LEX FRIDMAN]
MIT Study: Does AI lead to Cognitive Debt? — The TLDR on this is that using LLMs like ChatGPT for essay writing reduces cognitive engagement, memory, and even originality compared to traditional search engines or unaided writing. (I’ll do a deeper dive in next week’s edition) [MIT, PAPER]
📡 The Signal
How China is Dealing with AI Chip Bans
Four engineers flew from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, each carrying 15 hard drives with 80TB of data to conduct AI model training on rented Malaysian servers with US chips. The data included spreadsheets, images, videos, etc. The engineers registered a local entity in Malaysia, listing local directors to obscure origins, and returned with refined AI model parameters. There’s been a 366% surge in chip exports to the country, showing how hard it’s becoming to monitor these types of operations. [WSJ]
Meanwhile, Huawei and SMIC have been blacklisted and chip exports have been banned by Taiwan. It appears that Huawei deceived TSMC (The world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer) into producing two million AI chiplets, bypassing US sanctions. TSMC is facing a $1 billion fine for unknowingly supplying Huawei via shell companies. Taiwan currently produces 60% of the world’s chips. Its dominance is forcing Huawei and SMIC to accelerate domestic chip production in China. This could spark some sort of innovation in China or deepen its reliance on less advanced, costlier methods. [LINK]
Meta “acquires” Scale AI for $15B
Meta gets a 49% stake in the company. So technically, it’s not really an acquisition since they don’t have a controlling stake, but it’s enough to have a decent amount of control over Scale’s resources. The move includes bringing Scale’s CEO into Meta to head the new Superintelligence lab. This is Meta’s second-largest investment after WhatsApp ($19B). It’s clear that Meta is trailing behind the other models with Llama 4 underperforming, so it’s ready to up the ante by absorbing additional AI support. Scale AI specializes in data labeling that’s critical for training advanced AI models. It does this by employing thousands of global workers to annotate specific data types, ensuring better accuracy and ground truth for the data. It’s better known as “human-in-the-loop” feedback or RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. [SCALE, LINK]
Honda Enters the Space Race 🚀
Leave it to Honda to diversify into space. The company has been quietly building out its space infrastructure. In April, Honda shared its plan to test a renewable energy system for the Moon on the ISS. The interesting thing here is that Honda believes that this new venture could help its other business units, just like how SpaceX uses its own rockets to operate Starlink or how Amazon is doing the same with Blue Origin. [HONDA, LINK]
“Honda started rocket research based on the belief that it has the potential to contribute more to people's daily lives by launching satellites with its own rockets, that could lead to various services that are also compatible with other Honda business," the company said in the statement.”
Waymo’s Breakthrough in AI Scaling Laws
Waymo has discovered that by training its AV (Autonomous Vehicle) models on 500,000 driving hours, they were able to show that increasing the model size, data sets, and compute power leads to predictable power-law improvements in both simulation and real-world driving performance. This means that, just as in LLMs, the notion of “bigger is better” equally holds for self-driving models, with larger models not only excelling at regular benchmarks but also handling complex, edge-case scenarios much better. This is important because it shows that self-driving cars have a predictable path when it comes to making them much more smarter and safer. Ultimately, the more quality and diverse data and computation you have, the better these AVs will perform. Until now, it was only assumed. This behavior could eventually be mirrored in robotics as well. [WAYMO, PAPER]
Deloitte: Digital Consumer Trends Report 2025
Another week, another report. This time it’s from the folks at Deloitte, and it’s a pretty good one on Digital Consumer Trends. Here are a few key takeaways that I noticed:
Gen Z leads in GenAI adoption: 76% have used a tool, compared to only 20% of Boomers.
21% of GenAI users now use these tools at least weekly or daily—a 66% year-on-year increase.
Search has become the most common workplace use for GenAI
Awareness of GenAI limitations (like hallucinations or bias) is improving slowly, but many still believe AI is always accurate or unbiased.
Boomers are more likely to believe GenAI will reduce jobs, but are less concerned about their own roles being replaced.
Consumers remain hesitant to use AI-based customer service, with 59% saying they would be less inclined if they knew they were talking to an AI.
Gen Z is increasingly using mobile data as their main home internet connection.
76% of respondents report seeing online misinformation, with younger groups more likely to notice it.
Digital subscription growth has stalled, showing “subscription fatigue” among consumers.
[REPORT]
WhatsApp is Getting Ads!
The world’s most popular messaging app, with over 1.5 billion daily users, is introducing ads in its Status updates tab, marking the end of its ad-free experience nearly 11 years after Meta’s $19 billion acquisition. The way it’ll work is that ads will be labeled as “sponsored” content and appear alongside users’ status updates and channel posts, like that of Instagram’s stories ad model. Meta is also rolling out paid channel subscriptions and promoted channels to boost monetization, though personal chats will remain ad-free and thankfully end-to-end encrypted. Meta should play this game carefully, otherwise it could drive users to more privacy-focused competitors like Signal or Telegram. [VERGE]
Exercise is Helping Colon Cancer Survivors
A new study shows that exercise has significantly improved survival for colon cancer survivors. The trial involved 889 patients across 55 centers, and those who followed a tailored exercise program after chemo had a 28% lower chance of cancer returning or dying compared to those given only health-education materials, tracked over nearly eight years. This is HUGE because it’s the first major study proving exercise can act like medicine for cancer survivors, offering a cheap and accessible way to improve survival rates. Previous research has already shown that exercise is 1.5 times more effective than medication and therapy at treating depression and anxiety. This is just another step in the right direction and showcases how powerful the simple act of exercise can help with your overall well-being. [LINK]
🎧 Podcast: Practical AI
🧐 Poll of the Week
If you liked this, here are a few more popular posts:
🙋🏻♂️ Survey
To build the best newsletter for you all, I’d love to get some feedback. If you have some time, please fill out the following survey.
🤩 Deals, Discounts & Affiliates
You can find carefully selected offers and deals here.
🙏🏼 Connect with Me
Are you new to the newsletter? Subscribe Here
Check out my YouTube channel (and subscribe!)
If you’re a founder, apply here (Metagrove Ventures) for startup funding or contact me directly at barry@metagrove.vc
If you think this could be helpful and informative to others, please share it :)
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Barry.