Bombíng a country on Christmas Day? So much for winning the FIFA Peace Prize.

How AI startup acquisitions work in 2025

60% of U.S. adults reported that societal division is a significant source of stress in their lives. I don’t see any fixes on the horizon. The internet connected us but instead of creating empathy it just exposed how much we disagree with half the country.

In Austin, Tesla has 30 self driving taxis with safety monitors in them in while Waymo has 200 fully autonomous taxis. Waymo has 2,500 deployed nationwide. Yet Tesla is at all time highs as its EV business collapses because Wall Street believes in Elon Musk. The market is irrational.

The idea that if you join a hot AI startup that a big tech company can show up to hire away the founders & top engineers, pay out the investors and leave the rest of you with nothing but broken promises seems bad for the startup ecosystem.

The Broncos v Chiefs score being 6-7 has been utter chaos in my household for straight fifteen minutes.

My son thanking me for the gift my wife bought and I had no idea what it was until he unwrapped it.

The kids who were too full to move after eating their Christmas meal once it’s time to open presents.

This is supposed to be satire but I wouldn’t be surprised if this op-ed shows up someday 😭

Whenever I hear about a huge Powerball lottery jackpot, I think to myself that’s a lot of money people wasted on lottery tickets to give that one person a huge winning.

Larry David on Bari Weiss.

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

Chamath Palihapitiya just won big on Nvidia’s acquihire of Groq for $20B. His VC firm Social Capital invested $10M in 2016 when the company was valued at $30M with a $52.3M follow on investment in 2018. This is a massive win that makes up for a lot of failed investments from the SPAC king.

The Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025, is falling apart as its most prominent staffers jump ship to a rival think tank run by Mike Pence. The reason is staffers are upset its president defended Nick Fuentes (an unapologetic anti-Semite and racist) and considered it to be a line crossed.

I’d seen some stories about Microsoft replacing all of the C & C++ in Windows with Rust using AI. It turns out this was taken out of context from a job posting from a team building language translation tools. The job listing has the slogan “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code” by 2030.

With billionaires in a contest to be the next Rupert Murdoch and move mainstream media further rightward, I’m annoyed that it’s coming down to The NY Times as the last major news site I can trust to not be 100% right wing propaganda. Note: This doesn’t mean they aren’t full of right wing propaganda

Nvidia just acquihired Groq’s senior leadership team for $20B in a licensing deal that’s become the norm in the AI space. Just like Windsurf -> Google & Inflection AI -> Microsoft, they get the benefits of an acquisition without antitrust woes. I wonder how much Google TPU pressure played a part?

OpenAI is working on showing ads when users ask about products in ChatGPT. This is the most obvious choice for ads especially in the recently launched Shopping Research mode. Google Search has a Shopping tab for the same exact need. Better than random ads unrelated to the conversation.

If you fight Nazis online then you’re banned from visiting America is a wild thing to even say let alone now being official U.S. government policy.

The right wing’s war on online content moderation has reached its final form. The U.S. government has banned EU officials and non-profit heads who have been involved in regulating hate speech on social media in the EU from visiting America.

One thing that continues to confound me is how deeply unpopular Joe Biden was in his last year. I consider Trump’s first year to have been an utter disaster yet Americans feel about the same about Trump as they did about Biden last summer. I can tell if I live in a liberal bubble or financial one?

It’s kind of funny to argue people can’t be both cartoonishly evil and bumbling incompetents on the day the Feds released the Epstein Files and redacted them in such an amateurish way you can copy & paste into Adobe Acrobat to see the hidden text.

Another story along the lines of “Cheap, Fast and Good: Pick Two”. Salesforce’s Agentforce to rely less on LLMs to “eliminate the inherent randomness of large models." AI is cheaper and faster than human workers but it’s not as good. This will be the primary challenge for AI tool vendors in 2026.

A true queen

Results from a survey of 1,750 AI-using tech workers: • 55% say AI beat expectations; ~70% say their work quality’s up. • >50% save at least ½ day/week. • PMs get most value from AI help with PRDs (21.5%), mockups (19.8%), comms (18.5%). • 92.4% report at least one significant downside of AI

Quite the coincidence that the QAnon movement died just in time to miss this moment.

Fast, cheap or good: pick two. The promise of AI tools is that they are much faster and cheaper than people and almost as good. AI generated code has 1.7x the bugs of human authored code. The key question is will businesses increase quality control of AI output or will they tolerate lower quality?

We went from the first Black president to unapologetic white nationalism in the White House in less than ten years. It’s been one heck of a pendulum swing.

Disney must be really scared that Avengers Doomsday might flop to waste this reveal on a teaser.

The actual DOJ posted on Twitter that they’ve released the Epstein Files and sure Trump is all over them but it’s all lies because if it was true Biden’s DOJ would have gone after Trump. I rest my case.

One of the most startling statistics from OpenRouter’s State of AI report is that there is more usage of Open Source models like DeepSeek and LLaMa for AI girlfriends than for programming. I’m sure selection bias plays a part but it seems the loneliness epidemic and AI is an under-explored subject.

MAGA have nowhere left to hide when it comes to holding Trump accountable. Hillary Clinton was right, it’s deplorables all the way down.

I find the generation gap in AI chatbot usage fascinating. Millennials tend to treat them as a better Google with some disliking the tech due to hallucinations. Gen Z and younger often treat them as a partner which they pour their hopes and dreams into.

MechaHitler is joining the army. It’s incredible how Elon Musk keeps finding new ways to get government handouts.

The fun thing about the AI as dotcom crash metaphor is that it's bullish for AI. While companies like Webvan, Kozmo & Pets. com failed - today we have Amazon, DoorDash & Chewy. We also have Netflix, TikTok, Uber and lots of other companies we couldn’t have imagined in 2001. AI will be similar.

I’m shocked at how high the approval numbers were in February and still are in December. 3 out of 10 approving of the job he’s done this year is wild.

Italy has fined Apple $116 million over its App Tracking Transparency feature. The App Tracking Transparency rules are "disproportionate," and "harmful" to app developers and advertisers. Ultimately, it found that Apple abused its dominant position in the EU market. I’ve said this for years.

Expedition 33 lost its Game of the Year and Debut Game awards from the Indie Game Awards. I’ve argued fighting using Gen AI in games is a losing battle because this is now the norm. If they built an award winning game using Gen AI one could ask why we should want worse Gen AI-free games instead?

Recent Big Tech earnings calls confirm power, not GPUs, is the bottleneck in meeting AI demand. Google’s Intersect acquisition addresses this by co-locating generation with data centers, effectively bypassing grid limitations. This won’t be the last investment in power generation by Big Tech.

Many people want to be managers to grow their careers but in reality being a leader is more important in the long run. A leader is someone whose authority is earned and people choose to follow as opposed to someone people have to follow because it’s their job. Good leaders are…

A thread of tech/investment trends I’ve been wrong about and what each thought me.

McKinsey's layoffs due to a AI are a sign of things to come. Jobs that are mainly about doing analysis and producing slide decks & documents based on that analysis are prime tasks for being replaced by AI. The question is whether their customers figure this out or continue to pay a premium?

Despite billions in fines and a jailed CEO, Binance still seems addicted to money laundering. My big mistake in assessing the crypto industry was assuming the government wouldn’t legitimize institutional money laundering and fraud. I thought the industry would eventually collapse. I was wrong.

The dotcom era was 25 years ago. iPhone launch was 18. This means there are now adults whose only “big tech hype cycle” memory is crypto/NFTs. This is why many draw a connection between AI and crypto as scam bubbles. They missed the hype cycles that were also real, disruptive, and world-changing

The "innovator’s dilemma" take on Google is strange. This isn't like Microsoft clinging to Windows as users form new habits around ChatGPT. Google is pushing Gemini & AI overviews while search still grows. OpenAI missed the window to disrupt. Now, it’s just head-on competition. A war of attrition

In 2025 MAGA taught us that the opposite of DEI isn’t merit, it’s mediocre people running institutions into the ground.

So Netflix buying Warner Bros would make them too powerful so instead it and CNN should be sold to the family that recently bought CBS and 60 minutes, and put Bari Weiss in charge? How could that go wrong? 🤷🏾‍♂️

⊹₊ ˚‧︵‿₊୨🎄 Happy Holidays! 🎄୧₊‿︵‧ ˚ ₊⊹

San Francisco had a citywide power outage yesterday. Traffic lights went dark. Waymos stalled mid-street. It’s likely an under-tested edge case and one without a simple fix despite criticisms from the anti-tech crowd. When traffic lights die at a busy intersection, humans struggle too.

When using AI chatbots to perform complex tasks, a simple trick is to ask the AI to generate the detailed prompt for you to edit instead of crafting it from scratch yourself. An example prompt: Craft an AI prompt that can be used to perform detailed SWOT analysis of a company by a seasoned investor