Cursor’s two years to a billion
Cursor, the red-hot AI coding assistant, raised its seed round less than two years ago - this week it raised $2.3bn on a 29.3bn valuation. More significantly, it passed $1bn in annualised revenue. Valuations may be frothy, but people are buying products. LINK
Agentic shopping from Google
Google launched a range of new AI and agentic shopping tools this week. It’s a lot easier to say that people will use agents to shop than to work out how (or even if) that would work, and how it would reshape existing funnels, but obviously enough Google isn’t waiting for someone else to work it out first. So, it’s building new tools but also, mostly, making this a feature and leveraging its existing distribution (one reason Gemini has grown so strongly). LINK
Agentic ad assistants
Again making the new thing a feature, Amazon and Google both launched new agent assistants for their ad and analytics platforms. This really is what Clippy was trying to help with: the more features you add, the harder it is to work out how to do anything. This applies to all SaaS, but especially to self-serve products aimed at SMEs - how can you help more people to access the power of the tools without making them go on courses? GOOGLE ADS, ANALYTICS, AMAZON
Cheap power for Chinese AI?
The FT reports that local governments in some Chinese provinces are offering subsidies of up to half of energy costs for AI data centres that use Chinese chips. The catch, of course, is that those chips use 30-50% more energy than their Nvidia equivalents (if you can smuggle them in). Still, apparently China has significantly less constraint on new supply and connectivity than the USA, where energy suppliers are now backed up for years; some hyperscalers have said access to electricity is now a bigger problem than access to chips. China is pulling levers for industrial policy. LINK
LeCun leaves Meta?
The FT reports that Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist and OG of machine learning, is planning to leave to do his own startup. This would not be very surprising. On one hand, he has argued forcefully that the LLMs that have taken over the tech industry are limited and won’t lead to AGI (as OpenAI and many other labs think). INstead, he argues for a new approach of more embodied systems that can learn from observation instead of being ‘retrained’ on vast amounts of static data. On the other, Zuck layered him, and has been spending billions to hire lots of new researchers for a whole new lab. LINK
The week in AI
So far, Anthropic has rented cloud AI infrastructure from Amazon and Google (both investors), but now it’s decided to join the rush itself and will spend $50bn building its own data centres, all in the USA. I’m old enough to remember when a $50bn infra plan would be big news. See the next story. LINK
Meanwhile, ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s ‘Thinking Machines’ is apparently raising again at a $50bn valuation, still pre-revenue and pre-product. Only 50? LINK
OpenAI’s product rush continues, with group chats in ChatGPT. It’s almost as though Sam hired a bunch of growth people from Meta. LINK
Google quietly announced its own version of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, wherein a model running on the big, heavy compute in the cloud processes your data in a secure enclave with Google never seeing it. Google calls it ‘Private AI Compute. LINK
Rightmove, the UK property aggregator, made the market happy by announcing a new AI investment plan. Wait, not like that - the stock fell almost a third. LINK
Amazon discounts
Amazon is expanding its ‘Haul’ discount bundled shopping concept with a new app called Bazaar, targeting a range of middle and low-income countries, with an interesting overlap with the Chinese expansion data linked below. LINK
Apple’s WeChat deal
Today in headlines from 2015, Apple has done a deal with Tencent over payment for ‘mini-apps’ within the WeChat ‘super-app’. There was a time when everyone in tech was very interested in every part of that sentence, but now only Tim Sweeney cares. LINK
Anthropic as a hacking tool?
Anthropic claims it discovered that Chinese hackers used Claude to build and run a cyberattack on ‘roughly 30’ targets, and a ‘small number’ succeeded. This might be a big deal, but it also fits a pattern of Anthropic making scary-sounding claims that don’t withstand scrutiny. Yann LeCun thinks they are saying this just to try to get regulation (and shut out competition), but it might also be self-selection - this is the company that says ’come work here if you’re scared of AI but also want to build it’. Either way, security professionals are pretty sceptical. ANTHROPIC, REACTION
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