Economist: “You might imagine that lumbering leviathans would be too tied up in bureaucracy to make use of the technology. In fact, their scale allows them to invest far more in it than smaller rivals. According to a survey in December by Bain, a consultancy, American companies with more than $5bn in revenue had an average annual budget for generative-AI projects of $27m, five times the level in the preceding February. Those with between $500m and $5bn in revenue, by contrast, had set aside $9m, up by two-thirds over the same period (see chart 2). JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, says that it has rolled out AI tools to most of its 320,000 employees. UnitedHealth, the country’s biggest health insurer, claims to have 1,000 different applications for the technology. Sanjin Bicanic of Bain notes that getting AI to work well is proving more expensive than for other types of digital technology, as it requires companies to organise their data and tinker with models. Big firms have the added advantage of larger data sets that can be used to refine the AI systems they build.”
Luther Lowe: “What’s happening in AI is the opposite of the antitrust debate, in a way — because actually what you want to see in the technology space is vibrant competition, because that’s what’s producing all this innovation. So we’re really excited by that. We should not be parachuting in with lots of heavy-handed regulation in a market where there is incredible competition. When there’s not competition, when competition fails, then you want to enforce the antitrust laws. And then when that fails, then you regulate, because you failed to enforce the law. And we’re not close to that stage when it comes to AI. It’s the open source projects that are giving the other firms a run for their money and putting competitive pressure on them to keep innovating. And so it just moves the whole ecosystem forward in a highly competitive direction. Like if you’re working at these [AI foundation model] companies, you’re barely clocking out. Everybody just feels like they’re in a race to build [artificial general intelligence, a kind of AI that surpasses human ability in any given field]. And so that’s super exciting.”
FT: “Using a unique combination of industrial policy, subsidies and other state support coupled with private sector entrepreneurialism and ferocious competition in China’s vast market, the country was able to sharply increase the share of Chinese producers domestically and internationally in many of the sectors, in some cases matching or exceeding foreign competitors’ technology. The strategic aim of China’s industrial policies — to build supply chain self-reliance to resist western interference while encouraging foreign dependencies on China — was put to the test this month when President Xi Jinping stood his ground against Trump in their tit-for-tat trade war. The US president ultimately backed down, reducing tariffs that had risen to as high as 145 per cent. In the view of many analysts, the US perhaps realised that it needed Chinese imports too much to risk an embargo. “It was Chinese exports that were the weapon,” says Gerard DiPippo, acting associate director of the Rand China Research Center. “[China] was able to arguably fight the US to a draw through . . . export dominance. From a national security perspective, that very much feeds into Xi’s worldview.””
SaaStr: “The 2026 Sales Team: 50% Humans, 50% AIs. All 1 Team.” More: “Every question you would typically ask during a discovery call should now be asked of AI before the meeting.”
TIME on Orb: “As the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity.”
