AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #1004

Michael Parekh AI: Reset to Zero

21 hours ago

5 MIN READ

OpenAI Beats Meta to OpenClaw: OpenAI ‘acqui-hired’ OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, agreeing to support an open source version of the virally popular AI Agent platform in a separate Foundation. Peter Steinberger moves from Austria to San Francisco, a loss for Europe. He will, presumably helping OpenAI leverage its core LLM AI products, especially its AI Coding tool Codex, with secure, commercial versions of OpenClaw’s AI Agent platform. The deal is a loss for Meta, where founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg was personally trying to bring Peter over to Meta. Also, Anthropic had a rare missed opportunity here, given that OpenClaw started in November literally leveraging its Claude models and even started with the name ‘Clawdbot’, which Anthropic objected to. Meanwhile, Sam Altman gave Peter his blessing to use ‘OpenClaw’ as the new name, before his decision to go with OpenAI. More here.

Amazon’s Peer Leading AI Builds: Amazon is racing with its peers on a multi-hundred-billion-dollar AI infrastructure commitment across AWS, custom silicon, robotics, and AI services. Its $200 billion commitment on this front for this year topped the numbers from Microsoft, Meta, Google and others. CEO Andy Jassy had full-throated support and confidence in Amazon having more than sufficient demand for AI services across AWS by businesses small and large. And AWS is also making headway running its equity partner Anthropic’s latest Claude products on its Trainium GPU chips. Away from AI, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the World’s Biggest Revenue Company. Overall AWS remains positioned to maintain its leading share of Cloud business vs peers, even though Microsoft Azure is making headway on the AI side. More here.

Apple’s AI Wearables will leverage the iPhone: Apple apparently is on a nearer term schedule this year and next to include more AI features in its market leading AI Wearable platforms. These of course include Apple Watch and Airpods to start. Bloomberg reports that AI pendants, Smart glasses and other AI devices are in the offing. Investors have been concerned about OpenAI with Jony Ive, and Meta in particular continuing to build a lead vs Apple here. OpenAI’s 200 person team here in particular is planning a portfolio of AI Devices, that include smart glasses, a pendant, and a lamp amongst other forms. These reports indicate Apple has clear plans to accelerate these efforts. Important here is Apple’s intention it seems, to leverage its iPhone devices as an integrated adjunct to its AI Wearables devices, as and when they are available. This is different from peers like OpenAI in particular. Who seems to be focused on more standalone devices that leverage its ChatGPT cloud based offerings. Notably there is a disclosure in some separate filings, that OpenAI’s first devices won’t be available later this year as had been expected, but will launch closer to early 2027. More here.

India’s AI Summit highlights a ‘Frugal AI’ strategy: India hosted its AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi this week, hosted by Prime Minister Modi, and senior members of his government. Also attending were the leaders of most of the US big tech and investment companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. Even though the two rival founders couldn’t clasp hands together in the big photo-op with Prime Minister Modi (see below). Also present were global leaders from around the world. The event had over 250,000 attendees over the week, with over 300 exhibitors. A number of AI investment deals were announced totaling over $200 billion, with major Indian industrial groups like the Adani Group, the Ambani’s Reliance Group, Tata, Infosys and other participants. Many were in partnership with US companies with OpenAi and Anthropic in particular also announcing offices in India. OpenAI highlighted its 100 million+ users of ChatGPT in India, with the majority being under 30, and using its products for professional services applications. India overall is deploying a ‘frugal AI’ strategy relative to China in particular, who is far more aggressive in rolling out AI Data Center Compute and Power investments, relative to India. This despite the two countries having almost equivalent populations of over 1.4 billion folks each. More here.

Prepping for 3 daunting $2.5+ Trillion Mega AI IPOs in 2026: As expected, Anthropic and OpenAI both closing additional investment rounds this week at higher valuations. Anthropic closed $30 billion on $380 billion post, and OpenAI is closing $100 billion on $850 billion, with Nvidia coming in for a $30 billion slug rather than $100 billion indicated earlier. This is after Elon Musk’s SpaceX a few days ago merged xAI valued at $250 billion with the SpaceX/Starlink entity valued at a trillion. This amounts to three companies collectively valued almost $2.5 trillion, with each mega-IPOs expected for this year. SpaceX is targeting June, around Elon’s birthday, while the other two are more likely in the second half. The investor case for all of them, while positive on raw revenue growth metrics for OpenAI and Anthropic in particular, are challenged by the far larger levels of AI Compute and Power investments that will be required of each of them, for the rest of this decade at least. Anthropic, with its enterprise focused model, is the only one with a possible profitability window before the others. Possibly by 2028 vs 2029 at the earliest for OpenAI. More here.

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