AI: Apple's 2nd post Steve Jobs CEO, Elon's revealing SpaceX/xAI IPO filing, Anthropic passes OpenAI to $1+ trillion valuation, & More. Weekly Summary. AI-RTZ 1067

Michael Parekh AI: Reset to Zero

2 days ago

6 MIN READ

Apple turns to Ternus as 3rd CEO post Cook & Jobs: As expected, 50 year old Apple and its CEO Tim Cook, 65, officially appointed hardware head and 25 year Apple veteran John Ternus, 50, as the second CEO after founder/CEO Steve Jobs. John takes on the role September 1st, as Tim Cook then moves on to the Executive Chairman role, where he’ll be able to be the Apple global diplomat to heads of state here and abroad on Apple critical issues. Apple also promoted Apple Silicon maestro Johny Srouji into Ternus’s role, expanding it to Chief Hardware Officer. Together these moves cement the hardware side of Apple’s business, taking the baton from the supply-centric global behemoth that Tim Cook built post Steve Jobs in 2011. Those 15 years saw an Apple stock appreciation of close to 2000%, making it one of the best investments ever made by non-techie investor Warren Buffett for Berkshire Hathaway. Similar performance by the new CEO Ternus over the next 15 years would imply an Apple valuation of over $80 trillion vs its current $4ish trillion. An unlikely outcome even in an AI fueled age, when the global economy today is around $125+ trillion. But there’s headroom. More here.

Anthropic & OpenAI grind-on pre IPO with Opus 4.7 & OpenAI ‘Spud’ GPT 5.5: The week saw a flurry of new LLM AI models from Anthropic with Mythos and its cybersecurity challenges, and its Opus 4.7, an upgrade from Opus 4.6, which has been powering forth its world beating Claude Code and Claude Cowork coding and productivity AI software applications. OpenAI also released it’s long awaited ‘Spud’ model, now officially known as GPT 5.5. Both Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 are initially shown as highly competitive with each other on various key benchmarks. The pricing for both sets of models is higher in AI tokens against preceding models, underlining the ability of these vendors to adjust the a la carte pricing away from ‘all you can eat’ subscription pricing for the latest models. Especially given the current supply constraints of fast ramping AI data centers. Enterprise customers are rapidly coming to terms with these pricing shocks. Uber’s CTO is a recent example, citing how fast its developers are crashing through the company’s AI budgets, with the current ‘tokenmaxxing’ culture amongst developers. Expect this ‘velvet rope’ pricing dynamic to continue to play out this year, as both Anthropic and OpenAI plan mega-AI IPOs later this year. Anthropic is already crossing a trillion valuation in private secondary markets given its momentum with Claude Code in particular. More here.

Google flexes with new TPUs vs Nvidia et al: Google continues to improve its core vertical tech stack AI TPU (tensor processing unit) chips, which provide one of the main competitive offerings against Nvidia’s global market leading AI GPUs chips and attendant infrastructure architecture. Google, which has used TPU based AI data centers for its own global infrastructure, is making available its TPU infrastructure to third parties like OpenAI, Meta and others. It’s #3 ranking Google Cloud unit headed by CEO Thomas Kurian, is vocal on how Google plans on building TPU powered AI infrastructure vs not just Nvidia, but other competing chips architectures from #1 cloud provider Amazon AWS and others. Microsoft, the #2 cloud providers with Azure also have its own chip architecture in the works. Google’s TPU infrastructure gives it an edge in its global distribution deals for Google Gemini, with partners like Apple and others around the world. More here.

SpaceX/xAI IPO filing reveals xAI wagging the dog: The SpaceX/xAI confidential S-1 IPO filing highlights the boundless AI ambitions of founder/CEO Elon Musk. Across the range of businesses beyond SpaceX/xAI with its Starlink unit, and into the AI priorities of sibling public entity Tesla. Revelations include the open-ended AI capex investments needed for AI Data Centers for SpaceX, far beyond the needs of just its core rocket launching and Starlink internet communications businesses. Elon executed a creative $60+ billion merger with AI Coding company Cursor in 12 months, with a $10 billion walkaway fee if no merger is concluded by then. This is to accelerate xAI’s multi-gigawatt data centers with circular ‘paying customer’ Cursor, as it ramps up its global AI coding software business against Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, OpenAI’s Codex, Microsoft’s Github Copilot, and other entrants. All this makes it challenging for investors to assess the SpaceX/xAI IPO against its intended $1.75+ trillion valuation expectations. More here.

DeepSeek drops next open source LLM AIs: As expected, DeepSeek released its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash, nearly matching state of the art closed US models by about 3-6 months. With globally competitive AI token pricing. At 1.6 trillion parameters, it’s one of largest open source models, with both versions having 1 million token context windows.M This after DeepSeek seared into global attention early last year. Chinese AI companies private and public race to take a global lead in open source LLM AIs. Wresting away that crown from Meta with Llama back then. Meta under founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg of course choosing to go its own direction with mega AI Talent hires, and ramped up AI Data Center spend to over $135+ billion a year. More here.

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