The Social Community forThe Most Important Thing

Nica took a screenshot of the discussion · 2 days ago

Guess who likes the idea of an AI development slowdown? Software investors! Stocks of enterprise software firms, such as Salesforce, Shopify, ServiceNow and Figma, all gained ground on Monday—ServiceNow jumped 7%, for instance, while Salesforce rose nearly 5%. Software firms, of course, have been seen as threatened by AI. Meanwhile, stocks of neoclouds and chip firms fell by similar proportions—and, these companies might be seriously hurting if the pace of AI development really slows. Wall Street’s reaction gives some sense of the winners and losers in a real AI downturn, for what it’s worth. But this is likely to be a one-day investor reaction. The chances of a coordinated AI development slowdown, of the kind advocated by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and others on Saturday, seems to be zero. You’ve got both President Donald Trump and the Chinese government dismissing the worries about AI safety as a “hoax” or “fearmongering” (it’s nice they agree on something!). Meanwhile, one major AI firm, Meta Platforms, has stayed conspicuously quiet, aside from this indecipherable X post from Meta's Alexandr Wang. https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2099015997525291211?s=20&utm_campaign=article_email&utm_content=article-17818&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sg

Sam Altman said OpenAI will not go public in 2026, suggesting investor pressure could complicate safety decisions as increasingly powerful AI requires cooperation between companies and governments. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/ipo-delayed-sam-altman-says-150828134.html?_bhlid=cb88a38eb9c21edbbb76d64c3849cb16f65e4c12

Corporate cybersecurity budgets are shifting to AI-powered defense against new threats Companies are boosting spending on models from AI leaders Anthropic and OpenAI for vulnerability detection and patching Traditional penetration testing and legacy software face reduced budget allocation https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-threats-reshaping-companies-spend-cybersecurity-budgets?utm_campaign=article_email&utm_content=article-17784&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sg&rc=gzsl71

Apple unveiled a much anticipated foldable iPhone at its first product launch featuring brand-new Chief Executive John Ternus. #Gadgets The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable smartphone—a product category that competitors have been selling for years, but has remained mostly a smaller, niche part of the broader market. While folded, the Duo is around the size of a passport and can fit easily in one hand, with an exterior screen. It unfolds to a length of a 7.6-inch display, closer to the size of an iPad. A video showed how users could use two apps at once while unfolded—texting in iMessage while watching a video, for example. Developers could adapt their apps to fit the new format, such as Netflix letting users browse videos clips on the outer display while closed and then opening up the Duo for the full-video experience. The Duo starts at $1,999 for a version with 256 gigabytes of storage and climbs to a whopping $3,199 for one with  2 terabytes. Apple also unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro, starting at $1,199, and 18 Pro Max, starting at $1,299. That’s $100 more than the prior generation’s Pro models, a price hike the company forecasted publicly a few few months ago that it would need to compensate for surging costs for memory and storage chips. At the beginning of the pre-recorded video, Ternus repeatedly talked about the “intelligent personal hub,” a new term Apple is invoking to describe how AI is used to understand users’ personal context. “There’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone,” Ternus said, touting Apple’s on-device AI and privacy features. He also added: “Others see that data as something to collect and store. They move it to their servers and ask you to trust them. But honestly, trust only goes so far when your data is no longer yours to control. ” Apple has long emphasized its privacy practices but it is especially focused these days on OpenAI, which aims to launch a family of new AI devices, starting with a portable speaker and later phone sometime in the future. Apple sued OpenAI in July, alleging theft of trade secrets alongside its aggressive poaching of Apple employees with backgrounds in hardware engineering and operations. OpenAI has denied the claims. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/apple-unveils-iphone-duo/

TSMC is developing an advanced chip-packaging technology similar to what Intel offers, a sign that the Taiwanese giant is worried about Intel. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tsmc-develops-ai-chip-packaging-tech-counter-intel?offer=rtsu-engagement-25%2Crtsu-featured-articles-pro&utm_campaign=RTSU%3A+TSMC+Develops&utm_content=14355&utm_medium=email&utm_source=cio&utm_term=9983

Hugging Face is a popular archive of open-source AI models—yes, the name is a distraction—used by developers to make applications and tailor them to specific AI chips. The purchase could theoretically give Nvidia the power to influence the chips those developers use, although Huang insisted in a blog post on Thursday the company won’t do that. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” he said. Still, as one commenter on X pointed out Thursday, Nvidia could set things up so that models work fastest on its hardware, giving it an edge over its rivals. There’s no question chip rivals aren’t thrilled. As one executive at a rival firm told Phoebe, Hugging Face is “100%” important to hardware designers, which might find it hard to trust the business once Nvidia owns it. Those rivals are likely to be the ones complaining the loudest to antitrust authorities, we’d bet. (The U.S. Department of Justice started looking into various other complaints from Nvidia competitors a couple of years ago, but that didn’t seem to go anywhere.) The argument in favor of the deal is that American business needs a thriving open-source AI sector, if only to keep a lid on costs. Given how hard it is to make money in open source, there’s no guarantee the sector would thrive on its own. But Nvidia is emerging as an open-source champion—with this deal; with the Nemotron open-source models it is developing; and with billions of dollars it has handed over to open-source AI developers such as Thinking Machines Lab, Poolside, Reflection and others so they can continue to afford its pricey chips. That makes Nvidia a counterweight to the rich closed-source AI firms, namely Anthropic and OpenAI, which also depend on Nvidia hardware but are racing to develop their own alternatives (with Broadcom’s help). Indeed, Hugging Face hopes Nvidia will help it expand its user base to 100 million from 18 million currently, according to Clem Delangue, Hugging Face CEO. Still, there’s no getting around the amount of power Nvidia is amassing, with sizable stakes in neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Nebius; AI firms OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX; hardware makers such as MediaTek and Intel; and a slew of firms in the data center field that are helping it lock in its hardware bundle. Chances are Nvidia will get this deal past U.S. regulators, given the Trump administration’s focus on AI progress. How it fares with regulators in other countries—particularly in Europe, where Hugging Face has a big presence—is a whole other question. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-faces-doj-antitrust-probe-over-complaints-from-rivals?utm_campaign=article_email&utm_content=article-17768&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sg&rc=gzsl71

Anthropic’s economists think we can maybe keep our jobs What happened:  Anthropic economists released a new interactive model (https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios?ref=platformer.news) of AI-based economic disruption. The model takes in predictions about the trajectory of AI capabilities and outputs scenarios about how the economy and jobs will fare in 2030 as a result. The researchers present a “moderate,” a “substantial,” and an “extreme” scenario. Interestingly, the team’s “extreme” scenario, which predicts GDP growth rising to a truly bonkers 15.4% per year in 2030, would lead to an 8.9% increase in unemployment from AI.  Meanwhile, their “substantial” scenario, which relies on AI predictions based on a recent survey of 10,000 Americans, predicts a still-high 5.4% growth rate in 2030, but only an 0.7% increase in unemployment from AI. The forecasts are substantially more conservative than the warnings CEO Dario Amodei has issued regarding AI-related unemployment. Last year, Amodei told Axios (https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic?ref=platformer.news) that he worries about a scenario where “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs.” Why we’re following: It’s interesting to see Anthropic’s economists being (relatively) optimistic here. One reason why: they expect AI-related economic growth to increase demand and wages for manual labor, offsetting losses in computer-based work like software engineering. One of the authors' main conclusions, though, is that, given a range of all seemingly reasonable parameters, “the range of outcomes is wide.” So we could see a scenario with substantial growth and modestly higher unemployment, or crazy growth and crazy unemployment.

Two Chinese DRAM ventures launched in 2016 with government backing. A decade later, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Fujian Jinhua (JHICC) offer sharply different stories about what it takes to build a memory chip business under U.S. technology restrictions. #Podcasts We ❤️ #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 #Artificial Intelligence #A Glance of China 行摄中国 https://voiceofcontext.substack.com/p/how-us-tech-restrictions-helped-build?utm_source=multiple-personal-recommendations-email&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, is getting a lot of attention for the lawsuit he and 11 other state attorneys general filed to block Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The state attorneys general are operating under the delusion that we’re still in the 1990s—they allege that Paramount would get too much power in the slowly dying cable television industry and the film industry.  Someone needs to remind the attorneys general that strength in streaming video, not cable, is what matters now, and in streaming both Paramount and Warner are behind leaders like Netflix. It is possible Bonta is trying to do Paramount CEO David Ellison a favor. After all, the best thing for the company would be to jettison many of the cable channels it would inherit if the Warner deal goes through. And since Paramount is taking on a lot of debt—the combined business would have $79 billion of debt at closing—raising money by selling a few declining assets wouldn’t be a bad idea. Ellison should thank Bonta for the idea and dump as many cable channels as he can!

Worries that Waymo will take business from Uber have pummeled the stock this year. But sellers are overlooking the value of its delivery business. #The Most Important Thing Sellers are overreacting. Uber can still sustain rapid growth and expand its profit margins while staying competitive in the autonomous-driving race #Auto Future in the years to come. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-bears-taken-wrong-turn?offer=rtsu-engagement-25%2Crtsu-featured-articles-pro&utm_campaign=%5BClaude%5D+RTSU%3A+Uber&utm_content=14538&utm_medium=email&utm_source=cio&utm_term=10159&rc=gzsl71

Shares of Chinese online fashion giant Shein ended flat on its first day of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange, capping off the company’s convoluted multiyear quest to go public. Shein’s shares opened at HK$48.56 on Tuesday, and dropped as much as 10% before shedding the losses and closing at HK$48.5, according to Hong Kong stock exchange data. By comparison, the benchmark Hang Seng Index dipped 0.93%. As of Tuesday market close, Shein had a market capitalization of $26 billion, a far cry from the height of $100 billion reached during a private funding round in 2022. The company raised HK$13.6 billion ($1.7 billion) in the initial public offering. Shein for years tried to downplay its China roots and position itself as a global company, as its fashionable, ultracheep clothing gained popularity among consumers in the West. The company tried to go public in both New York and London, but the attempts were thwarted by criticism against its labor and environment practices and China’s straining ties with the U.S. Wearing a white, Shein-branded T-shirt like other employees, Sky Xu, the company’s elusive founder and CEO, attended the listing ceremony in Hong Kong but stayed out of the limelight most of the time. He didn’t deliver a speech or participate in the iconic Hong Kong-style gong-striking ritual on stage to mark the beginning of trading. Shein’s employees struck the gong and CFO Leigh Gui delivered a short speech. https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/shein-set-lacklustre-debut-after-setbacks-cause-huge-drop-valuation-2026-08-31/