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Did you know...
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, cosmonaut (and mechanical engineer) Sergei Krikalev was considered the “last citizen of the Soviet Union”. He became stranded on particular mission to the Mir space station at the same time the USSR dissolved in 1991. He basically launched as a Soviet citizen and returned to Earth 311 days later as a Russian citizen on March 1992. This was because his mission was extended due to political and logistical turmoil on the ground. Go figure.
TikTok is building a new version of its app for its US sale — the current app will keep working until March 2026. earlier plans to spin off TT’s US business stalled when China pushed back after Trump’s new tariffs. [LINK]
Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) is working on a Bluetooth messaging app: Bitchat — it lets people send messages using Bluetooth mesh networks instead of Wi-Fi or cell service. It means you stay connected at crowded places like music festivals, where cell networks are usually bottlenecked. [LINK]
The perverse incentive behind Lovable's growth — as quickly as a company can go from $0 to $100M ARR, it can also go back in the opposite direction. It’s a strong reason why Lovable needs to grow so fast. [LINK]
Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality [LINK]
OpenAI is planning on building its own web browser [LINK]
Half of managers use AI to determine who gets promoted and fired [LINK]
📡 The Signal
CoreWeave (AI Data Center Compute) acquires Core Scientific for $9 billion
You’d be forgiven if you had never heard of CoreWeave. With the growing demand and surge in AI computing, CoreWeave is riding a very powerful wave. The company provides high-performance cloud infrastructure, especially GPU computing, for AI/ML workloads. The acquisition of Core Scientific (CS) is a big deal because it’s now getting access to over a gigawatt of data center capacity, which is enough to power more than 850,000 homes. They plan to lease it out for AI training and inference. The funny thing is that CS used to be all about Bitcoin mining, but now the same GPUs are being repurposed to run training AI models. It’s a clear sign of how the industry is shifting from crypto to AI. The fact they’re willing to spend $9B in stock to lock down this capacity tells you they see massive growth ahead. [TECH CRUNCH]
Apple Considering Outsider AI for Siri
Apple is seriously considering swapping out its own AI models for those from outside players like Anthropic or even OpenAI to power its new version of Siri. The plan would be to ask them to train Apple’s language models that could run on their own infrastructure. Apple seems to be desperate to catch up with the rest of the others; they’re sacrificing their own ‘develop everything in-house’ tradition to stay relevant. Apple still has a strong moat in the mobile, computer market, but it’s hard to say whether they can keep it with or without doing well in AI. Will they really lose market share if their AI models aren’t up to par? The bottom line is if the partnership works, it’s a big deal because it could change not just Siri, but the whole way Apple approaches software and partnerships in the future. [LINK]
My big hunch: Apple acquires Anthropic. Let’s see if this ages well…
ChatGPT News Referrals are on the rise
Before, most people found news by searching on Google, seeing a list of links, and clicking through to news sites to read the full story. The publishers relied on organic traffic from readers and the ad revenue it brought in, so getting a high search ranking was crucial. Now, with AI chat (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI overviews, etc.), users are getting direct answers without ever leaving the search page. This is particularly the case with ChatGPT. Referrals to news sites are growing fast. Now, almost 7/10 of news searches end without anyone visiting the actual news site. It’s crazy to see that ChatGPT’s news-related prompts have exploded, up 212% in 18 months, and its actual referrals to news sites jumped from under 1 million to over 25 million. But it’s still a drop in the bucket. On the flip side, some sites like Reuters and Business Insider are seeing bigger boosts from ChatGPT. There’s also a shift where people are starting to use AI for deeper news, not just quick updates. The big takeaway is that AI is making it easier for people to get information, but it’s also making it much harder for people to create that information to survive. [LINK]
Is Uber getting back into self-driving cars?
With all the developments around self-driving cars and their scalability, as already proven by Waymo and now Tesla’s Robotaxi, Uber is looking to get back into the ring for another shot at this. Funnily, Uber is in early talks to join forces with its ousted founder, Travis Kalanick, to help buy the US arm of Pony.ai; a self-driving company with roots in China. Currently, Pony.ai is valued at around $4.5 billion after going public last year. As a quick recap: Uber began its self-driving efforts in 2015, but it abandoned the project in 2020 and sold the rest of it to Aurora and also invited another $400 million in Aurora instead. All of this shows just how urgent the threat from driverless competitors has become. [NYTIMES]
Mysterious Bitcoin Whale Moves $8 Billion of BTC
A massive Bitcoin holder just moved $8 billion BTC that was untouched for 14 years. It appears to be the largest-ever daily shift of this kind. The wallet had a stash of around 80,000 coins, which was first mined in 2011. At one point during Bitcoin’s peak, the wallet held $21.5 billion! Whether it was a simple reshuffle or if they were preparing for a sale is still unknown. With all the banter around BTC lately, it’s clear a lot of people are making moves into the crypto space. On a similar note, a few big funds are planning out strategies to double down on building large positions and reserves in Ethereum. The plan is to capitalize on what has proven to work for Bitcoin. [LINK]
2025 State of AI Report: The Builder’s Playbook
AI has moved past the buzz to become a practical/valuable tool for business [LINK]
A few key takeaways:
AI-first companies are scaling way faster than expected, compared to those just adding AI features.
Agentic workflows and multi-modal architectures are driving innovation
Hybrid pricing is becoming the norm. This means more businesses are moving to hybrid models that mix subscriptions and usage to get the best bang for their buck.
Hiring top AI/ML talent is slow and remains a major bottleneck. Crazy to see that companies across the entire revenue spectrum have some sort of AI leadership in place, and it gets larger in proportion to revenue size.
Companies are dedicating around 10-20% of their R&D budgets to AI. There’s a clear sense of FOMO here, but with strong justification that AI will pay out dividends in the long term.
Companies that deploy AI across many internal use cases see the biggest productivity gains.
The AI tooling ecosystems are really fragmented but maturing quickly, with everyone trying to experiment to find what works best
🧐 Poll of the Week
This week’s poll:
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Last week’s poll:
Do you think humanity will successfully meet global energy demands by 2050 without widespread shortages or environmental collapse?
50%: Yes, through renewable energy 0%: Maybe, but it depends on policies 50%: No, demand will outstrip supply 0%: Unsure, too many variables
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