Venture Capital

🚨 Trump moves to block state AI laws and here’s what’s behind it U.S. President Donald Trump says he will sign an executive order aimed at curbing state-level artificial intelligence laws, a move that could dramatically reshape how AI is regulated across the United States. 🖱 According to Reuters, the order would seek to override or limit state AI regulations by tying compliance to federal funding, arguing that a patchwork of state rules risks slowing innovation and weakening U.S. competitiveness against China. 🖱 The administration says the goal is to push toward a single national AI framework, with federal agencies and Congress working together to establish uniform standards rather than allowing states like California and Colorado to set their own rules. 🖱 The order is expected to empower the Justice Department to challenge state AI laws in court, setting up potential legal battles over federal authority versus states’ rights. 🖱 Tech companies have broadly welcomed the idea of a unified national approach, while state officials and legal experts warn the move could undermine consumer protections, AI safety rules, and privacy safeguards already enacted at the state level.

The announcement signals a major escalation in the AI policy fight, positioning AI regulation as a national security and economic issue and setting the stage for prolonged legal and political conflict over who gets to govern the future of artificial intelligence.

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🚀 After years of resisting it, SpaceX now plans to go public and here’s why SpaceX, the space-exploration company founded by Elon Musk, is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026, marking a major shift from its long-held stance against becoming a public company. 🖱 Elon Musk responded to an Ars Technica report outlining this shift by saying “As usual, Eric is accurate” in a social-media exchange, signaling the company may indeed pursue a public listing after years of staying private. 🖱 According to multiple media reports, SpaceX is aiming to raise well over $25 billion to $30 billion in the offering, potentially valuing the company around $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion which would make it one of the largest IPOs in history. 🖱 The strategic reasoning for the shift appears partly tied to funding new capital-intensive initiatives, including expanding Starlink satellite broadband, backing space-based AI data centers, and accelerating long-term projects such as lunar infrastructure and Mars-related endeavors.

This marks a dramatic reversal from SpaceX’s previous approach, where Musk resisted going public concerned that shareholder pressure and public scrutiny could constrain the company’s bold, long-horizon missions like Mars settlement.

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⚖️ U.S. state attorneys general warn AI giants to fix “delusional” model behavior A coalition of 42 state attorneys general has issued a formal warning to major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Apple, Anthropic, and xAI demanding immediate action to curb harmful and misleading chatbot outputs. 🖱 The letter cites cases where AI systems produced confidently stated falsehoods and psychologically harmful responses, including incidents allegedly tied to suicides, violence, and severe mental-health impacts. 🖱 Regulators are pressing the companies to introduce clearer warnings, independent audits, and mandatory incident-reporting processes measures similar to data-breach rules to address “hallucinations,” sycophantic behavior, and unsafe suggestions. 🖱 The companies have been given a mid-January 2026 deadline to commit to new safeguards, with attorneys general warning that failure to improve consumer protections could trigger legal action under state laws.

The warning marks one of the most aggressive coordinated interventions into generative AI yet, signaling that U.S. regulators are preparing to treat unsafe model outputs as a consumer-protection issue, not just a technical flaw.

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🧠 Time names the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year Time magazine has broken tradition by awarding its 2025 Person of the Year title to an entire group of tech leaders, a collective it calls the “Architects of AI.” 🖱 The honorees include Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Jensen Huang, Fei-Fei Li, Elon Musk, Lisa Su, and Mark Zuckerberg, figures who have driven the year’s most significant breakthroughs and controversies in artificial intelligence. 🖱 Time says 2025 marked the moment when AI’s capabilities fully surfaced, reshaping industries, public discourse, and global power dynamics. The group was recognized for accelerating the rise of “thinking machines” and bringing their promise and risks into clearer view. 🖱 The magazine’s editors emphasized that the collective influence of these leaders defined the year, capturing both the optimism and unease surrounding AI’s rapid expansion.

By naming an entire cohort, Time signals that AI’s trajectory is now shaped not by one individual but by a powerful, interconnected group steering the most consequential technology shift of the decade.

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💰 Unconventional AI raises a massive $475 million seed round at a $4.5 billion valuation Unconventional AI, the new company founded by former Databricks AI chief Naveen Rao has secured $475 million in seed funding, giving the startup a striking $4.5 billion valuation before it has shipped a product. 🖱 Investors backing the round include a16z, Lightspeed, Lux Capital and DCVC, with Jeff Bezos also participating. Rao himself put in roughly $10 million on the same terms as other backers. 🖱 The company is building a new class of AI-native computers, aiming to design hardware that is dramatically more energy-efficient and biologically inspired, targeting performance that today’s GPU-based systems can’t reach. 🖱 Rao says the $475 million is only the first phase of what could become a $1 billion fundraising effort, underscoring how aggressively investors are betting on next-generation AI compute.

Unconventional AI’s debut instantly positions it as one of the most valuable hardware startups ever and its ambitious plan to rethink AI computing architecture could reshape how the next decade of models are built.

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🇦🇺 Australia begins enforcing a world-first national ban on social media for under-16s Australia has officially activated a new law that blocks children under 16 from using major social media platforms, marking the first nationwide ban of its kind. Platforms that fail to comply face fines of up to A$49.5 million. 🖱 The government says the measure is designed to curb mental-health harms, cyberbullying, and exposure to inappropriate content, arguing that tech companies have not done enough to protect younger users. 🖱 Ten major platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook are required to block under-16 accounts and verify ages using tools ranging from behavioral analysis to ID checks. 🖱 Companies that do not comply risk significant penalties, and the government has warned that enforcement will tighten over time as verification systems improve.

Australia’s move sets a global precedent: other countries are watching closely to see whether the ban reduces online harm or sparks new debates about privacy, enforcement, and youth digital rights.

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🚀 SpaceX reportedly preparing a 2026 IPO that could raise far more than $30 billion According to multiple reports, SpaceX is moving toward a public offering planned for mid-to-late 2026, with expectations that the listing could raise well over $30 billion and value the company at roughly $1.5 trillion. 🖱 Early disclosures suggest the scale of the deal would be unprecedented: • Target valuation near $1.5 trillion, making it the largest IPO to date • Fundraising ambitions exceeding $30 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s record 2019 debut • Internal share pricing around $420 per share, with employees allowed to sell roughly $2 billion in stock through a secondary sale 🖱 SpaceX’s fast-growing businesses appear to be driving the timing: • Starlink revenues are projected to push total sales from about $15B in 2025 into the low-to-mid-$20B range in 2026 • The Starship program remains central to long-term deep-space and launch ambitions • Musk has recently floated the idea of space-based data centers, broadening investor interest in future infrastructure opportunities 🖱 The timeline is still fluid. Advisers note that volatile market conditions could shift the IPO into 2027, and SpaceX itself has not publicly confirmed any listing plans.

If SpaceX proceeds, the offering would mark one of the most consequential moments in modern capital markets but executing a deal of this size will test both investor appetite and the company’s ability to maintain its rapid expansion.

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🔔 FDA clears the first AI system designed to speed up liver-disease drug development The U.S. FDA has officially qualified AIM-NASH, the first AI tool allowed to be used in clinical trials to evaluate liver-biopsy images for MASH (metabolic dysfunction–associated steatohepatitis). 🖱 The software analyzes microscopic liver-tissue scans and generates standardized scores for fat buildup, inflammation, and fibrosis, steps that normally require multiple pathologists and introduce delays and subjective variation. 🖱 By automating the initial readout, AIM-NASH could shorten drug-development timelines for liver-disease therapies, giving researchers faster and more consistent data during clinical trials. 🖱 The FDA’s qualification makes the tool available for use across drug-development programs, signaling a major shift toward regulatory-grade AI in core medical workflows.

This is a milestone: if AI can reliably accelerate liver-disease trials, similar tools may soon reshape drug development across other major therapeutic areas.

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🚗 Waymo claims robotaxis cause far fewer injuries than human-driven cars According to Waymo’s latest figures, its self-driving taxis are involved in about 80 % fewer injury-causing crashes than human-operated vehicles. 🖱 Their safety report covering nearly 96 million driver-only miles in several U.S. cities, finds dramatic reductions in crash rates: • 91 % fewer crashes resulting in serious injury or worse • 79 % fewer crashes with airbag deployment 🖱 The benefits aren’t limited to car-to-car collisions: injuries to pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are also sharply down when a Waymo vehicle is involved compared with human-driven benchmarks. 🖱 Still this doesn’t mean the system is perfect. Waymo recently announced a software recall after multiple incidents where its vehicles passed stopped school buses, raising questions about consistency under real-world conditions.

Waymo argues its self-driving fleet is significantly safer than typical human driving. But as the tech spreads, careful oversight and continued transparency will be key to maintaining public trust.

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📌 Paramount Skydance jolts Hollywood with an unexpected move on WBD In a dramatic turn, Paramount Skydance has launched a $108B all-cash offer to seize full control of Warner Bros. Discovery, a bid that instantly throws the company’s future into uncertainty. 🖱 Paramount is positioning itself as the safer bet, claiming its cash-only proposal avoids the valuation swings and regulatory complications tied to Netflix’s cash-and-stock structure. 🖱 The scope of the takeover is far broader than Netflix’s, covering everything from Warner’s film studios and streaming libraries to its entire cable network footprint, including long-standing legacy channels. 🖱 After weeks of stalled conversations, Paramount abandoned negotiations and went straight to the shareholders, accusing WBD leadership of ignoring multiple attempts to engage.

Hollywood now finds itself in a full-blown bidding war and whoever wins this fight will end up reshaping the balance of power across streaming, film, and global entertainment.

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❄️ Winter Demo Day by EasyMM x InnMind is coming! Exclusive virtual Demo Day connecting TGE-ready Web3 projects with top investors, launchpads and exchanges actively deploying capital in Q4 2025 – Q1 2026. ⏰ December 10th · 17:00–18:00 CET 🎞 Fully virtual (Zoom) + restream on YouTube and X 👇

⚠️ Google is gearing up to challenge Nvidia head-on with a plan to ship 5 million TPUs by 2027 Google is preparing to scale its in-house Tensor Processing Units to levels never seen before, roughly 5 million chips in two years, a volume that signals the company is finally ready to sell TPUs directly to outside customers rather than keeping them exclusive to Google Cloud. 🖱 Meta is expected to be the first major buyer, integrating Google’s TPUs into its data centers, with Anthropic likely to follow under its newest partnership with Google, early proof that demand for non-Nvidia accelerators is real and growing. 🖱 At full scale, each 500,000-chip tranche could generate around $13B in revenue and add roughly $0.40 EPS, turning Google’s semiconductor ambitions into a material business line rather than a side experiment. 🖱 But competing with Nvidia won’t be simple: Google still relies on external fabs like TSMC and Broadcom, and producing millions of chips without tighter supply-chain control introduces real risk. And unlike Nvidia’s CUDA, the dominant, unmatched developer ecosystem, Google doesn’t yet have a platform with similar gravity.

Google is clearly betting that hyperscalers want more choice than “Nvidia or nothing,” but the real question is whether Google can scale its hardware and its ecosystem fast enough to make TPUs a mainstream alternative.

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🔔 Paramount Skydance launches a hostile bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery Paramount Skydance, led by David Ellison, is offering $30 per share in cash, about $108.4 billion total to buy the entire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) business. 🖱 Paramount says its offer is “cleaner, faster, and more certain” than the competing one from Netflix (which offered a mix of cash and stock), arguing Netflix’s deal leaves WBD shareholders exposed to regulatory delays and uncertain valuations. 🖱 While Netflix’s deal was focused on WBD’s studios and streaming assets, Paramount’s bid covers the entire company including its cable networks and legacy operations. 🖱 Paramount is going straight to shareholders bypassing Warner’s board after claiming the board failed to engage meaningfully with multiple prior proposals over 12 weeks.

The battle for Warner Bros. Discovery is now wide open: Paramount’s gambit could upend the recent Netflix agreement and whoever ends up in control will shape the future of streaming, movies, and media consolidation.

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🇺🇸 Trump moves to shut down state AI laws, pushing a single national rulebook Donald Trump says he’ll issue an executive order this week that would block states from enforcing their own AI regulations, shifting all authority to the federal level under a unified “One Rule” framework. 🖱 The proposal argues that America can’t stay competitive if companies must navigate dozens of conflicting state rules, with Trump warning that “50 approvals” will slow the entire sector down. 🖱 The order would set up a federal AI litigation unit tasked with challenging state laws already in place, and could use control over federal funding to pressure states to fall in line. 🖱 Critics from both parties say the move sidelines states that have been early leaders on AI safety and privacy, and concentrates too much power in Washington at a moment when public oversight is already lagging.

Trump is positioning federal control as the fastest path to AI dominance but the pushback signals he may ignite a deep fight over who gets to shape the rules of America’s AI future.

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🇪🇺 Yann LeCun plans his new AI startup in Europe, not Silicon Valley Yann LeCun, Meta’s longtime chief scientist and one of the pioneers of modern deep learning, says his upcoming company will be built in Europe arguing that the Valley’s AI frenzy makes it a poor place to explore alternative research directions. 🖱 He describes Silicon Valley as “overheated” and overly fixated on chatbot-style AI, noting that unconventional or long-horizon research paths are easier to pursue in places like Paris. 🖱 LeCun has deep roots in the region: he’s French, a long-time advocate for Europe’s AI ecosystem, and the driving force behind Meta establishing its FAIR lab in Paris, the same group that later produced the Llama family of models. 🖱 For his new venture, he says the goal is to tap into Europe’s overlooked technical talent and build a research environment that can compete with the world’s top labs without being swallowed by Silicon Valley’s hype cycles.

LeCun is effectively betting that the next breakthrough wave in AI may come from outside the Valley and that Europe is ready to claim a bigger role in shaping it.

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⚠️ The first real hit to OpenAI’s dominance OpenAI spent years at the top of the AI hierarchy, with ChatGPT becoming the default chatbot for most of the world. But the landscape has shifted: Google’s latest Gemini lineup paired with its new Nano “Banana” model has triggered a noticeable user drop for the first time in OpenAI’s history. 🖱 Internal data suggests roughly 6% of OpenAI’s users shifted to Google within days of the Gemini/Nano launch, a surprisingly sharp move in a market that had seemed locked up by ChatGPT’s early lead. 🖱 Google is leveraging its distribution moat: Chrome, Search, Android, and its ecosystem of connected apps give it an unmatched funnel for onboarding millions to new AI tools, giving the company a built-in advantage OpenAI can’t replicate. 🖱 Meanwhile, OpenAI is facing pressure to evolve. Sam Altman reportedly shelved monetization features, including early ad experiments and declared a “red code,” redirecting every team toward model improvement as concerns grow around stagnation and quality drift. 🖱 Another competitive threat looms: Anthropic is preparing to go public, giving Claude fresh capital, stronger governance, and far more visibility as a rival to OpenAI’s flagship products.

The AI sector is clearly entering a new phase, one where OpenAI’s early lead no longer guarantees supremacy, and where Google’s scale is beginning to tilt the balance of power in the race.

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🎧 Meta buys Limitless to accelerate its push into AI-first wearables Meta has taken over Limitless, the company behind the audio-capturing AI pendant, in a move that signals a deeper shift toward devices that can listen, organize, and recall real-world interactions on demand. 🖱 With the acquisition, Limitless is pulling its hardware from the market and winding down older software tools, while current users get a year of continued access and free service as the product transitions under Meta. 🖱 Meta’s motivation is clear: Limitless built one of the most advanced real-time transcription and memory-assistance engines, technology that fits neatly into Meta’s long-term vision for smart glasses and “always-with-you” AI helpers. 🖱 The team and tech will now be absorbed into Meta’s wearables group, speeding up development of features like conversational recall, meeting summarization, and ambient note-taking embedded directly into future headsets and glasses. 🖱 The shift, however, heightens long-standing concerns about Meta’s stewardship of sensitive data, especially as the company inherits a product that was already controversial for capturing surrounding speech.

Meta is effectively betting that the next major interface won’t be a screen, it will be an AI that remembers everything for you.

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📉 U.S. “professional services” jobs are quietly rolling over New American employment data shows a noticeable slowdown and in some segments, an outright decline across law, consulting, accounting, architecture, advertising, and other white-collar services. These sectors were supposed to be the most insulated from automation, yet they’re posting some of the softest numbers in the labor market. 🖱 Lawyers, accountants, and consultants areas long seen as “safe high-skill work” are now showing weakening hiring pipelines and flat or falling employment totals. 🖱 Architecture, design, and marketing roles have also pulled back sharply, reflecting a mix of corporate cost-cutting and rapid AI substitution in routine analytical and drafting tasks. 🖱 Even management and business-support roles, which historically grow alongside GDP, are slowing far faster than expected. 🖱 None of this proves causation, but the timing aligns almost perfectly with the mass rollout of AI copilots, automated document review, and AI-driven analytics inside firms that used to rely on junior professional labor.

“Still, we’re told these trends have nothing to do with AI, just an interesting coincidence.”

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💰 SpaceX enters talks for a massive secondary sale that could push its valuation to $800 billion SpaceX is negotiating a new insider-share transaction that would more than double its previous valuation, positioning the company as the world’s most valuable private firm and signaling overwhelming investor demand for Starlink and Starship capacity. 🖱 The deal is structured as a secondary sale, meaning employees and early investors not SpaceX would sell shares. But the implied valuation of $800B marks one of the largest private repricings in tech history. 🖱 Interest is being driven primarily by Starlink’s accelerating revenue, government contracts, and enterprise adoption, with some analysts estimating the satellite network alone could justify a mega-cap valuation even before full Starship commercialization. 🖱 To set expectations for liquidity, SpaceX has told some investors it is targeting a late-2026 IPO, making this share sale a crucial price-discovery moment that sets the psychological benchmark for a future listing. 🖱 Signals remain mixed: while negotiations point toward an $800B figure, Musk has publicly pushed back on reports, suggesting the final price will depend on investor appetite and internal pricing agreements.

SpaceX is now testing whether private markets truly see it as a sovereign-scale infrastructure giant and whether its valuation belongs in the $800B league.

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🔔 Apple faces a sudden leadership exodus as AI and design talent drains to rivals In just 72 hours, four top Apple executives have departed including the company’s AI chief signalling deeper internal trouble around Siri, design direction, and Apple’s stalled AI hardware strategy. 🖱 John Giannandrea, head of AI/ML, is retiring after years of gridlock around Siri and the failure to ship competitive on-device AI features, leaving Apple behind Meta, Google, and OpenAI. 🖱 Alan Dye, head of UI design, has jumped to Meta to run a new design studio. His exit comes as Apple’s design culture has struggled since Jony Ive left for Altman and after OpenAI poached 40 designers and hardware engineers for its screen-less “anti-iPhone” project. 🖱 Meta is also intensifying the pressure: Zuckerberg previously took Apple’s head of foundation models and now dominates the wearable-AI market with Ray-Ban Meta, holding 73% share while Apple tries to pivot Vision Pro into lightweight AI glasses. 🖱 Also gone: Kate Adams, senior vice president and general counsel, and Lisa Jackson, VP of environment and policy deepening concerns about Apple’s strategic stability at a critical moment for AI devices.

Apple is entering 2025 with a shrinking talent base and rivals accelerating raising the question of whether Cupertino can still set the pace in the next era of AI hardware.

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