Zuck goes beast mode Last week Meta paid $15bn for 49% of Scale.ai, plus the CEO (while most of the clients will now leave). This week we hear that it's trying to hire Nate Friedman (formerly GitHub CEO) and Daniel Gross (Ilya Sutskever's co-founder at Safe Superintelligence) and buy out their AI venture fund. Sam Altman claimed Meta is making hiring offers worth $100m each to OpenAI staff. And it was reported that Meta has talked about buying Safe Superintelligence (which last raised at $32bn), Thinking Machines ($10bn), and Perplexity. Even if all of those deals came off, that would still be less than the 10% of Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg paid for WhatsApp. Companies that are led and controlled by their founders have an arguably unique ability to make moves like this: generative AI is the future, Llama 4 was a disappointment, and Zuck is determined to get to a leading position, whatever it takes, because the alternative might be to get Blackberryed. (Remember, meanwhile, that Meta's investment in AV and VR is now close to $100bn after more than a decade and still years from traction.) ALTMAN, FRIEDMAN, SSI, OTHER DEALS Placing stories Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Apple also looked at buying Perplexity - again, a giant tech company that needs to catch up with AI, but Apple doesn't do big acquisitions and it's hard to see what Perplexity has that would get Apple where it wants. Perplexity puzzles me - I know people who like the product, but it doesn't have its own models, it struggles to rank in the top 200 in the App Store and Google Trends tells a similar story: the CEO is good at saying interesting things in public, but it's hard to see that this has traction. So, when you see two M&A stories attached to its name in the same week, you wonder if the bankers are flying a kite. LINK Another case where the leaks might be telling more than one story: the WSJ reports that OpenAI is so upset with its Microsoft relationship that it thought about making a competition complaint. Who placed that call to the WSJ, and why? And does Jony Ive have a WSJ subscription? LINK Anthropic made another play for regulatory attention with a paper claiming that LLMs will 'lie, steal and blackmail' - which actually means that they asked an LLM what it would do in a situation where most people would do X, and the LLM returned the result 'I would do X'. Yes, well done. All of these stories have the same intellectual validity as writing 'I'm alive!' on a piece of paper, photocopying it, and then saying "Look! In our analysis, the photocopier says it's alive!" LINK The week in AI Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy got a lot of attention by stating the obvious: generative AI will change what kinds of white-collar jobs there are at Amazon. LINK I don't normally cover valuations, but it's worth noting that Anysphere, which makes the super-hot coding assistant Cursor, is apparently being approached by investors offering a $20bn valuation. It raised $900m at a $10bn valuation earlier this month(!), and it's one of the fastest-growing startups ever, with $500m ARR. LINK Equally, Mira Murati's pre-product AI lab 'Thinking Machines' raised $2bn at a $10bn valuation. LINK Midjourney has launched a video model. LINK OpenAI appears to have a US Department of Defence deal worth up to $200m. It feels like a long time since Silicon Valley companies had employee rebellions against defence work. LINK Two noteworthy releases of curated training datasets this week: Harvard is publishing a collection of around 1m books, which is 394m pages and 242bn tokens, and Essential-Web is a structured dataset of the open web with 24tr tokens. For context, Llama 4 was trained on 30tr tokens. BOOKS, WEB Bundling and unbundling TV advertising As TV advertising goes smart, Disney and Amazon have formed a partnership to link their TV ad inventory, while in the UK the three biggest legacy networks (ITV, Channel 4 and Sky) have done the same. DISNEY, UK Netflix streams linear A fascinating story from Cannes: Netflix will distribute linear channels and on-demand content for TF1, the leading French legacy TV channel. This reminds me a tiny bit of Borders outsourcing 'online' to Amazon. LINK Re-regulating crypto One of the things that drove parts of Silicon Valley to vote Trump was Biden's attempt to treat crypto as nothing more than a branch of the securities industry, prosecuting anyone trying to turn it into software. Now the policy flips, with a bill creating a formal regulatory regime for so-called 'stablecoins' (tokens that are pegged to a currency and don't fluctuate on their own). Coincidentally, Trump has enriched himself by issuing all sorts of crypto assets of his own since the election, which is probably something that the writers of the US Constitution had thoughts about. LINK No ads, no games, no gimmicks WhatsApp famously had a sign on the wall saying that back when Meta bought it, but now Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps as part of the 'beast mode' seen above, will add advertising. The inevitable hand-wringing interests me less than how this will work - WhatsApp has far less data about what you're really interested in than Facebook or Instagram. LINK Tesla 'robotaxis' Waymo is doing hundreds of thousands of full-self-driving robotaxis trips every week, but with a very expensive LIDAR/RADAR/camera sensor stack, while Tesla's dream has always been to make this work with nothing but cheap cameras plus the brute force of raw data from all the cars it's already sold. Deterministically, that has always sounded great, but as a simple matter of fact, it hasn't actually worked yet: Tesla has been promising without delivering for a decade. Now it will launch a very limited full self-driving (as opposed to 'Full Self-Driving') taxi service in Austin - with a handful of vehicles in a geofenced area, using current Model Y vehicles, each with a human safety driver, much as Uber and Waymo were doing this back in the 2010s. LINK | 
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