Google unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF, with Shopify, Walmart, and twenty other partners. The "open standard" routes AI shopping through Google's surfaces. Merchants trade customer relationships for visibility.
Microsoft says one in six people now use AI. The methodology: counting clicks on Microsoft products. The US ranks 24th despite hosting every major AI lab. South Korea's surge? A viral selfie filter. The company selling AI infrastructure has appointed itself scorekeeper of AI adoption.
A developer gave Claude Code access to 100 books and a simple command: "find something interesting." What came back wasn't summaries. It was connections no hand-tuned pipeline could find.
San Francisco | December 11 China spent 15 years wiring the grid while Silicon Valley burned cash on training runs. The
San Francisco | December 10 Anthropic, OpenAI, and Block just handed their agent protocols to a new Linux Foundation entity. MCP
64% of teens use AI chatbots. But which ones? Higher-income teens cluster around ChatGPT for productivity. Lower-income teens are twice as likely to use Character.ai—the companion bot facing wrongful death lawsuits. The technology is sorting kids by class.
Trump approved Nvidia's H200 chip sales to China with a 25% government cut. Beijing's response: limit access to those same chips. Two superpowers racing to prevent their own companies from buying technology that serves their strategic interests.
San Francisco | December 9 Sergey Brin is back with glasses that can't handle a sunny window. Google announced
A Fortune 500 engineer deleted 47,000 lines of code, replaced them with 212 lines of YAML. AI costs dropped 63%. The routing layer between enterprises and their AI models is quietly becoming the most strategic chokepoint in tech.
Google announced AI glasses for 2026. But the real story is the third product: wired XR glasses running Samsung's $1,800 headset chip in a pocketable form. Google doesn't want to sell you glasses. It wants Android on your face.
OpenAI claims ChatGPT saves workers an hour daily. MIT found most AI deployments return zero value. Harvard researchers coined "workslop" for AI output that looks professional but advances nothing. Whose data should enterprises trust?
Good Morning from San Francisco, The AI industry loves its narratives. Apple built an impenetrable talent fortress. AI is transforming
OpenRouter's 100 trillion token study was supposed to prove AI is transforming everything. The data shows something else: half of open-source usage is roleplay, enterprise adoption is thin, and one account caused a 20-point spike in the metrics.
Hugging Face's Skills tool lets Claude fine-tune competing models for thirty cents. A 7B parameter cap and subscription fees complicate the democratization pitch. The deeper issue: access to a button isn't access to understanding.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Werner Vogels printed sixty thousand newspapers and walked off the Re:Invent stage for the
Get the 5-minute Silicon Valley AI briefing, every weekday morning — free.
