Salesforce goes global with AI agents and voice while its stock sits 25% down. The pitch: coordinate everyone's agents through Slack. The problem: fewer than 5% of customers pay for it. Three platforms now fight to be work's front door.
Slack's replacing keyword search with AI conversation and opening its platform to competing agents. The rebuilt Slackbot orchestrates work instead of just sending reminders. But multiple AI assistants in one workspace creates a new problem: which one should users actually ask?
Good Morning from San Francisco, 🟡 Meta offered a co-founder enough money to leave his eight-month-old startup just three months after
Salesforce goes global with AI agents and voice while its stock sits 25% down. The pitch: coordinate everyone's agents through Slack. The problem: fewer than 5% of customers pay for it. Three platforms now fight to be work's front door.
Slack's replacing keyword search with AI conversation and opening its platform to competing agents. The rebuilt Slackbot orchestrates work instead of just sending reminders. But multiple AI assistants in one workspace creates a new problem: which one should users actually ask?
Meta hired Thinking Machines co-founder Andrew Tulloch weeks after the startup raised $2 billion and shipped its first product. The timing reveals a brutal dynamic: even well-funded AI startups can't hold talent against platform-scale compensation packages.
Germany's most famous tech investor brings a €175M fund and a contrarian thesis to San Francisco: enterprise AI wins through contracts, not demos—and precision psychiatry can crack depression's trial-and-error curse if Phase-3 data holds.
Google's 1.3 quadrillion token milestone sounds massive—until you see growth rates halving and realize tokens measure server intensity, not customer demand. The slowdown reveals something uncomfortable about AI economics.
ASML fills an 18-month CTO vacancy as the chip monopoly races to expand Eindhoven capacity, deploy AI tools, and navigate China export bans—while every AI model depends on machines only it can make. Succession meets systemic risk.
Microsoft licenses Harvard Medical School content for Copilot health queries while training models to replace OpenAI's infrastructure. The healthcare play addresses a billion-download gap and builds switching costs where credibility trumps speed.
Jacob Silverman's Gilded Rage argues Silicon Valley's Trump embrace wasn't about wokeness or Biden hostility—it was about money. When free credit ended in 2022 and regulators pushed back, tech billionaires chose Trump over constraints.
The Netherlands seized control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia through coordinated executive rebellion and emergency law—without taking ownership. Three European managers triggered the intervention. Wingtech keeps the profits, loses the power. A new template.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called for National Guard troops in San Francisco from his private plane, shocking his own PR team. The theatrical Trump embrace—timed before his big conference—tests whether loud loyalty beats quiet accommodation.
China's rare earth export controls collapsed a Trump-Xi summit and sent markets down 2%. Beijing's processing monopoly—not just mine output—gives it leverage tariffs can't quickly counter. The pattern: announced deals, staggered supply, repeat.
Google released a browser automation agent days after OpenAI, choosing narrower scope over desktop control. The bet: faster, more reliable web tasks matter more than operating system reach. Internal use proves it works. External adoption will test the claim.
Zhipu AI releases GLM-4.6 with MIT-licensed weights and something unusual: complete test logs from 74 coding evaluations. The pitch is 15% fewer tokens than its predecessor at 90% lower cost than Claude—but with caveats on where it actually leads.
Anthropic ships checkpoints, VS Code integration, and an agent SDK with Claude Sonnet 4.5—betting developer tooling matters more than benchmark wins. As frontier models converge on capability, deployment polish becomes the real competitive moat.
OpenAI launches GPT-5-Codex with dynamic reasoning that works autonomously for 7+ hours, targeting GitHub Copilot in the $500M+ AI coding market. The specialized model promises enterprise appeal but faces fierce competition from Cursor and Claude Code.
FurtherAI closed $25M from Andreessen Horowitz six months after seed to automate insurance workflows—from submission intake to claims processing. The velocity signals a shift from AI pilots to production deployment, with early customers reporting measurable ROI.
A16z analyzed what 200,000 startups actually pay for in AI tools—and the results diverge from traffic rankings. Replit generated 15x more revenue than Lovable despite lower visibility. Copilots outnumber autonomous agents twelve to five. Budgets reveal what clicks conceal.
Six OpenAI veterans including Mira Murati raised $2B at a $12B valuation to build Tinker, an API that democratizes frontier model fine-tuning. The bet: customization matters more than scale. The tension: access is curated, not open.
Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers raised $300M to build AI that discovers actual materials, not just benchmarks. The bet: autonomous labs where robots synthesize what models design. The tension: venture timelines collide with furnace speeds.
Security teams assumed attackers needed to taint a percentage of training data. New research shows a fixed number of documents can backdoor models regardless of scale—upending detection strategies built around dilution assumptions.
How can an AI master a complex game without ever playing it? DeepMind's Dreamer 4 learns by watching, then trains in imagination. This shift from big data to efficient world models could be key for real-world robotics and autonomous systems.
Tech CEOs warned AI would spike unemployment to 20%. Yale researchers tracking 33 months of labor data can't find the disruption. Either the measurement tools are wrong, adoption is slower than claimed, or the apocalypse is just delayed.
AI adoption doubles across companies, but 95% see no returns. The culprit: "workslop"—polished AI content that shifts real work onto colleagues. Each incident costs $186 in hidden labor. The productivity promise meets workplace reality.
Fathom adds enterprise features competitors launched months ago while testing whether unlimited free access and HubSpot distribution can compensate for transcription accuracy that independent reviews place 30% below market leaders.
Gmail made AI drafting free in early 2025, resetting the market. Startups now push deeper automation or compete on price against zero. The shake-out shows which AI features justify premium pricing—and which were always commodity infrastructure.
Google transforms search from typing queries to live conversations with AI. The feature exits experimental status and becomes standard across US mobile apps, forcing competitors to match conversational capabilities or risk appearing outdated.
Voice typing finally rivals keyboards—if you choose the right balance of privacy, speed, and cost. New AI-powered apps transform rough speech into polished text, but the local vs. cloud decision shapes everything else.
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