NYTimes: “Founding a company has always been prestigious in Silicon Valley. Pivoting a struggling company is less glamorous. So lately, as artificial intelligence has scrambled operations for many businesses, some executives are announcing that they are “refounding,” essentially rebranding, as A.I. start-ups.”
Menlo Ventures: “Our data indicates companies spent $37 billion on generative AI in 2025,3 up from $11.5 billion4 in 2024, a 3.2x year-over-year increase. The largest share, $19 billion, went to the user-facing products and software that leverage underlying AI models, aka the application layer. This represents more than 6% of the entire software market, all achieved within three years of ChatGPT’s launch. Growth extends far beyond a handful of AI chat apps, touching every domain in the economy. By our count, there are now at least 10 products generating over $1 billion in ARR and 50 products generating over $100 million in ARR, led by the model APIs powering applications (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), but increasingly distributed across departmental solutions in coding, sales, customer support, HR, and verticals from healthcare and legal to the creator economy.”
FT: “[Space scientist] Aderin-Pocock says her great hope is that humanity’s relationship with planet Earth will be transformed as a consequence of commercial space travel. She mentions “Earthrise”, the first colour photograph of Earth from space, taken during the Apollo 8 mission, on Christmas Eve 1968. She details the poignant beauty of that image — Earth a blue-and-white-swirled miracle, suspended above the grey lunar dust — and how it galvanised environmental activism in the years that followed. “When we see our planet from space it changes our perspective of it. We see it as smaller and vulnerable and in need of protection, whereas when we’re here we drop bombs and argue and squabble. It can be a unifying thing.” As the clamour of the new space era grows ever louder, Aderin-Pocock’s is a rare voice. One that speaks of ambition, yes — but reason and humility, too. “We’re on the cusp of something really exciting,” she says. “It would be lovely to get it right.””
Bloomberg: “There’s growing recognition among many in the AI field that additional breakthroughs are needed to build more powerful artificial intelligence systems that truly rival or exceed humans. Increasingly, some AI leaders are focusing on pursuing an approach called continual learning that mimics the way people learn and become more skilled over time. Today’s leading AI models currently learn by creating a neural network loosely modeled off the human brain that’s then fed large datasets — a process referred to as unsupervised learning, or pre-training. But those systems are limited by the cut-off date of the last time they were trained on new data. ChatGPT, for example, can retrieve newer information by searching the web, yet that process doesn’t actually make the underlying AI model smarter…Google DeepMind considers continual learning to be among a handful of research areas that, if solved, could help achieve artificial general intelligence, according to a person familiar with the company who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.”
