Your daily AI briefing.
All signal, no noise.
One concise email a day on the AI stories that matter — what shipped, who's hiring, what to ignore. Curated by Anthony Batt & Harry DeMott.
Latest briefings
This Time It’s Different
AI valuations are headed for a 50 to 70 percent correction. Scott Galloway called it. Here's why the bubble pops and the technology wins in the same crash.
Ignorance Is Bliss
The state moved on AI this week — a toothless order on top, a populist revolt underneath. Everyone wants the steak. Nobody wants to watch the cow get butchered.
The Meter’s Running
Subsidized intelligence is over. The meter that finally priced the machine is turning toward the seat next to it.
Earlier briefings
Someone Made Fire
Anthropic filed the first big pure-play AI IPO this week. But the model is the lotion, not the cure. What they're really taking public is the operation.
Knowing Where To Hit It
Two firms spent $500 million on AI last week. One did it by accident. The other did it to bury a moat no vendor could ever sell them.
Your Company Needs A Harness, Not An Upgraded chatbot
Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 yesterday. Apple is going to ship a chatbot in June. Neither matters because the side of the agentic transaction that matters, the side you control, can't be bought off the shelf.
I Know Kung Fu and AI
AI's biggest success is the coldest thing it does. What people actually want from it is the warmest. The gap between those two is the most important business problem nobody has named — and the only skill that closes it is knowing which program you need.
Magnifica Humanitas
The Church lost the printing press to the Reformation, the university to the Enlightenment, the broadcast tower to the network executives, and the internet to the technologists. They might not lose this one. The handshake is the news. Whose hands are on the wheel is the bigger news.
Mr. Irrelevant
Two hundred and sixty-two players got drafted to the NFL in April 2022. The last one was a quarterback from Iowa State whose draft profile read "limited arm strength, average athleticism, unlikely to develop into a starter." His name was Brock Purdy.
Emmet’s Roof
Two hundred and twenty-two years ago Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton on a field in Weehawken, and an Irish exile stepped into the empty chair five months later and built a roof that lasted longer than the Russian Empire. I walked under that roof this morning with a pen in my hand. The lights were on but the life was off. The walls were stripped. A marble bust watched me from a shelf and I didn't recognize the man. This afternoon a CEO in San Diego published the playbook for tearing the roof down. Twenty-two percent of the staff are gone. A million dollars a year is the new band for the ones who stay. The duel is back.
Musical Chairs
The trillion-dollar club in public markets has eight seats. All of them are full — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Aramco, Berkshire. Three labs in San Francisco hoodies are circling the floor trying to be the ninth. The music hasn't stopped yet. Everyone in the room can feel where it is in the song.
The Right Stuff
Chuck Yeager broke Mach 1 with two cracked ribs and a sawed-off broom handle taped to his right arm. Andrej Karpathy quit a running company on Tuesday morning to take an individual-contributor research role. Six CTOs went before him. Anthropic's Mercury Seven is complete. The only question left is whether you have it too.
Days Of Thunder
Fred Thompson told a parable about Japanese inspectors letting a fish rot on the dock while the clipboard caught up. Monday morning the court took two hours to dismiss Musk on a technicality. Anthropic bought the rails in the same news cycle. Twenty-nine years to break up Standard Oil. The next one finished before lunch.
Q: What’s Up, Doc? A: Succession
THE NUMBER: 86 years — that Bugs Bunny has been a movie star, an Academy Award winner, the face of a billion-dollar...
You’re Not In The Hamburger Business
Anthropic took the enterprise crown today, then raised the meter on the agents using it. Mintlify killed seat-based pricing the same morning. Claude Opus 4.7 scored 90.9% on Harvey's BigLaw Bench while Harvey itself got wrapped inside Claude. This isn't a model war. It's a real estate play.
Sully: Brace for impact.
Three frontier labs killed the prompt box this week. Theory Ventures' Tomasz Tunguz killed the inbox the same morning. Jason Lemkin published a job posting for a senior demand-gen executive who would be reporting, in the org chart, to an artificial intelligence named 10K. The unoptimized layer in the loop is the only one that can land the plane.
I Am Iron Man
THE NUMBER: 200 milliseconds — the latency budget Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab chose for its first product, Interaction Models, released to...
Lucy
At Ascend, one COO grew ARR 38 percent in six months with zero growth hires and a stack of Claude Code slash commands. Microsoft just published the data showing why most companies can't. The Musk–Altman trial just made clear why their boards won't.
Groundhog Day
Eight days separated two Linux root exploits — and the second was deliberately built on the first. AlphaEvolve doubled Klarna's training speed using its own models. Sean Frank says only two company shapes are working anymore — and there's no hybrid. Most of the economy is stuck in February 2nd.
What Would You Say… You Do Here?
OpenAI's first enterprise data shows AI-native firms are now 3.5x more productive per worker than their peers, up from 2x a year ago. The Q3 earnings-call question is no longer "who uses Claude?" It's "which of your engineers are pulling away from the average, and how fast is that count growing?"
No One Set Off My Evil Detector
Three months ago Elon Musk said Anthropic hates Western Civilization. This morning he leased them 220,000 GPUs and said the senior team didn't trip his moral alarm. Number Two has a new face. The orbital data center is the moonbase. The casino is open.
I Drink Your Milkshake
For three years the labs were selling picks and shovels. This morning Anthropic started selling the miners engineers trained on the model, embedded inside your operations, paid for by Wall Street. The labs did not just walk into the consulting industry today. They walked into the part of your own company where the analysts you laid off used to sit. Phase one was you firing them. Phase two is them coming back through the front door, on Anthropic's payroll instead of yours.
Karpathy Says Agents Are A Decade Out. Good — Your Data Isn’t Ready Either.
The architects keep telling us the architecture isn't there yet. They're right. They also just bought every operator a window. The buyers panicking about AGI in two years are the buyers who got handed Cameron Frye's father's Ferrari and are afraid to take it out of the garage.
AI Heat
Last night the hyperscalers committed three-quarters of a trillion dollars to scaling LLMs. Yesterday, the man who built AlphaGo raised a billion to bet against scaling — with checks from the same investors funding the hyperscalers. The smart money is hedged. The retail money is paying full sticker.