Anthropic's win is good for everyone in this era - Cautious Optimism

Friday. Stocks are lower around the world as the Iran War continues to plague shipping, keeps energy prices elevated, and creates fresh kinks in global supply chains. There's talk of some peace discussions, though we're also seeing rumblings of troop buildup. The financial malaise is also impacting the value of crypto assets and the companies that service them.

But there's good news, too. A tiny lab claims to have cooked up self-improving AI, and White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks is done with his time in government.

Today, we're looking at upcoming AI models, X's latest efforts to make its service harder to use, and Anthropic's win over the DoD. To work! -- Alex

Anthropic, OpenAI: American AI labs are busy beasts. As OpenAI exits its side projects (Sora, erotic chat), some of its recent endeavors are bearing fruit: Its advertising pilot has reportedly generated annualized revenue of about $100 million, which seems like a win. Anthropic, meanwhile, is said to be considering an IPO early in the fourth quarter that could raise as much as $60 billion.

All that is interesting, but more importantly, the two companies are busy putting together new AI models that could bring another set of performance gains to the technology market.

Anthropic recently goofed and left some of its internal materials accessible via its CMS. Fortune, which informed the company of the issue, discovered information about "an unreleased AI model that Anthropic said in the documents is the most capable model it has yet trained." Anthropic politely confirmed the leak, saying that the new model will bring a "step change" in performance for key AI tasks like programming and cybersecurity.

Meanwhile, OpenAI's upcoming 'Spud' model is being touted by Sam Altman, who says it could "really accelerate the economy."

Big claims from the two labs, but given that their recent releases have been so warmly received, it's a little difficult to doubt the enthusiasm.

Open source American AI? News that American neolab Reflection AI is set to raise $2.5 billion at a pre-money valuation of $25 billion is a bit puzzling. Why? Okay, name an AI model from Reflection AI. I couldn't, because it doesn't have many.

Yet, the company is being hailed as the 'DeepSeek of the West' for its purported ability to bring state-of-the-art, open-source AI models to market.

It's weird. The only thing I can find to support the perplexing amount of funding is that Reflection AI is part of Nvidia's new "Nemotron Coalition" that will develop an open model to let folks specialize AI for their industries, and also build the foundation for the chipmaker's Nemotron 4 family of models.

Sure, but that coalition also includes Perplexity, Cursor, Mistral and other companies. What makes Reflection so special? Reply to this email and explain it to me if you can.

Twitter: News that X (Twitter) cut more staff was paired with news that the social media service is moving Tweetdeck (X Pro) behind its most expensive subscription tier. As someone who previously paid $84 per year to access Tweetdeck (thanks, Elon!), I now have to choose between a $40 monthly fee to use the tool (or nearly $400 if billed for the full year) or going back to the default interface.

The WSJ, which reported X's most recent round of staff cuts, writes that workers still at the company have been told to "focus on growing X's revenue since xAI brought on a chief revenue officer," and cut costs. I doubt that serving Tweetdeck was a major expense for X, but making it costlier is certainly one hell of a way to get some folks to upgrade.

I have decided not to. It was annoying to pay for a tool that was once free and helped me use Twitter more. But it's just insulting that they've quadrupled the price.

X product head Nikita Bier said what the company is launching in the next couple of weeks "will be much more powerful than XPro," and that it is only "keeping XPro for people that absolutely need it for hyper-specific business workflows."

Tweetdeck fans disagreed. Apart from the egregious removal of a feature that some people had paid for and now cannot access, the lack of communication ahead of the change rankled users.

Us X fanatics tolerate being shit upon because we lived and died on the service. Tweetdeck was my home online, my base of operations, my digital domicile. Now I need a new home. Hell, maybe it's time I started reading email!