OpenClaw OpenClaw is almost the only topic in Silicon Valley this week. It's a bundle of open-source software that lets you run a personal assistant on your Mac that calls, runs, and controls all sorts of agents running across all of the big cloud models, doing work for you autonomously. Magic. At least, the demos are. And then 'Moltbook' is a forum for all of those agents to 'talk' to each other, which gets some people even more excited (but looks to me mostly like the old fallacy of writing "I'm alive" on a piece of paper, photocopying it, and then saying 'OMG look what the photocopier says!") See this week's column. OPENCLAW, MOLTBOOK Meta! Meta plans to almost double its capex this year - from $72bn last year to between $115 and $135bn. For context, revenue in the last 12 months was $201bn - the company could be spending over half of its revenue on capex in 2026. You can do that when the founder has control. Q4 revenue was up strongly, and the company spent most of the call talking about how AI is improving its recommendations and ad business - it forecasts 30% (!) year-on-year revenue growth in Q4. Meanwhile, Reality Labs will continue and lose ('invest') the same amount again this year - so, about $20bn - but focus on glasses and wearables. LINK Genie Last autumn, Google announced Genie 3, a model that lets you generate a 'world model' game just by typing in a prompt. Now it's live, for people paying $250/month for the Gemini ultra mega megaplan, and the results are very cool. Early, still (worlds aren't always persistent), but at a minimum, you can see how the underlying tech could completely change the economics of big AAA games, and perhaps expand that creativity a lot further. LINK Amazon closes stores Last week we heard about Amazon's plans for a giant big-box physical retail outlet in Chicago - this week Amazon announced that it's closing the Go and Fresh stores entirely, leaving only Whole Foods. In with a bang, out with a whimper - a decade ago it seemed like it might be possible to make a real 'just walk out store' with cameras seeing what you'd picked up in the aisles and charging you automatically, so you didn't need to check out. It was worth a try, but didn't work. LINK The week in AI Microsoft announced its latest AI accelerator chip. LINK Oracle says it will raise up to $50bn in new capital (debt and equity) this year to fund its datacentre build-out. Gearing up a legacy, cash-generative business to burn your way into the new thing at the top of the cycle always ends well. LINK An interesting entry in ChatGPT's latest release notes: the company is starting to build a knowledge graph, which might even (gasp) be deterministic. LINK The UK's competition authority, the CMA, has proposed a new set of rules for Google search, including requiring that it let publishers opt out of AI Overview without (as Google presently requires) opting out of search entirely. Google says it's considering applying this globally, not just in the UK (the fallacy of 'the Brussels Effect'). A lot of publishers have asked for opt-outs, but it seems to me that's a bit of a false choice - if consumers are using (or just being given) AI overviews anyway and you opted out, then you just lose the traffic anyway. GOOGLE, CMA Tesla autonomy? The challenge in following Tesla is that Elon Musk has over-promised and over-claimed so consistently for so long that if it ever did get something working, for real, without faking the demo yet again, you might miss it. This week, Tesla's 'robot taxi' pilot in Austin, a town in Texas, started doing rides without a human safety driver sitting in the car. Waymo has been doing this in 2023, but it also needs tens of thousands of dollars of sensors where Tesla is only using cameras. But then, Waymo is also doing over a million rides a month in California alone. LINK Speaking of which, Waymo is apparently raising $16bn at a $110bn valuation. LINK Tesla robots Tesla is shutting down the line that makes the Model S (the 'EV for meat-eaters' that really started the whole thing) and the Model X (the premium SUV), both of which are now selling in very low volume, to shift the plant to making humanoid robots instead. Tesla's market cap today is about $1.6tr, but most auto analysts value the actual car business at no more than $200bn or so, and that's even though it's shrinking in the face of tired models, Chinese competition, and the CEO's enthusiastic endorsement of white supremacists. (Yes, really. Don't look away.) All the rest depends on solar (remember that?), robot taxi services, and now robots. This company was always about the promise, but that used to be the promise of the next car - now it's the promise of things beyond cars, as Tesla itself no longer has an edge. LINK Hence, Tesla is also investing $2bn in Elon Musk's xAI, and some people are suggesting merging Tesla, SpaceX (and hence Starlink), and xAI into one company. I feel sorry for anyone who has to present serious financial analysis of this: as Harrison Ford famously said to Mark Hamill, "Hey kid, it ain't that kind of movie." HARRISON, XAI, MERGER Ford and Xiaomi Back in legacy-land, where all the OEMs are struggling massively to change their operating model to deliver decent EVs at good prices, the FT reported that Ford is looking at partnering with Xiaomi, which makes a well-received premium EV. Ford denied it, though the CEO has been vocal in his admiration for Chinese EVs in general. FORD, WSJ, MKBHD Renault does drones More lateral thinking: Renault will make drones for the French military. This is one place you don't have to worry about competition from Chinese manufacturers anymore (unless you have to use them, of course), and the thinking is that defense aerospace companies know how to do expensive, sophisticated, and low-volume, where auto companies know how to do reliable, repeatable, mass-manufacturing at a cost (hundreds of thousands of units, not hundreds). See also the story from Ukraine under 'Data'. LINK Apple does a big wearable deal Apple bought Q.ai, an Israeli tech company in stealth, apparently for $2bn, which would be its second-biggest acquisition ever (after Beats). The team previously created the tech behind Xbox Kinect and FaceID: not much is public about Q, but Apple says it works on sensing audio and Reuters says it works on detecting speech that is whispered or only mouthed. LINK Trump crypto, China and chips The WSJ reports that just before Trump's inauguration last year, the UAE made a $500m 'investment' in the Trump family's crypto company. Half was paid up front, giving $187M to Trump family entities and $31M to Steve Witkoff, who was just named US envoy to the Middle East. The next spring, Trump allowed the UAE to buy hundreds of thousands of AI accelerator chips that had previously been blocked (from fear they'd be diverted to China). The same UAE entity that did the deal has a $2bn investment in Binance. Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao, Binance's founder, was pardoned by Trump in October, after being convicted, amongst other things, of enabling money laundering by Iran and drug trafficking networks. LINK | 
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