AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #625

Michael Parekh AI: Reset to Zero

2 months ago

3 MIN READ

Big Tech Earnings & AI Capex trends: This week saw strong quarterly results, and reaffirmed commitments to AI capex spending, by big tech companies Amazon, Meta, Google and others. Big tech companies including Microsoft, have lined up over $300+ billion in AI spending for 2025. This particularly came through in Amazon’s earnings results reported this week, and is part of the Amazon’s $100+ billion AI capex investments going forward. Meta, Google and others were not far behind at $70, $75 and $80 billion respectively. And that’s not including OpenAI and Softbank committing over $100 billion in its Stargate JV together this year alone. The AI Scaling spend trade is in play for 2025, despite Wall Street debates. More here.

AI Reasoning products from OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek et al: This week continued to see OpenAI and Google announced upgraded AI Reasoning products, following DeepSeek’s R1 and other releases last week. OpenAI released both Deep Research, along with Operator in separate releases. And Google had its Gemini 2 Flash Thinking product release. OpenAI also revealed more of its AI Reasoning product o3-mini’s thought process, to bring it more in line with DeepSeek’s capabilities. The AI Reasoning model race, Level 2 in the AI road map to AGI, is strongly underway. More on user reviews of AI Reasoning products here.

Google Cloud’s resurgence: Google has made strong progress in seven years of turning around Google Cloud into a formidable competitor vs no 2 Microsoft Azure and no. 2 Amazon AWS. The unit under CEO Tom Kurian, has managed to scale up the AI cloud services for businesses, as well as improved the financial metrics of the business towards breakeven. All the while delivering top line growth and services innovation. ALl this in the broader context of Google’s overall $75+ billion investments in AI infrastructure, following its earnings release this week. More on Google’s broader AI opportunities here.

Amazon Alexa’s AI revamp 2/26: Amazon is planning to unveil its long awaited AI revamped Alexa on February 26, according to new reports. This project has seen several ups and downs, and is a concurrent effort with Apple doing the same with Siri, and Google applying Gemini Voice LLM AI technologies to Google Assistant and Nest products. Of course AI native companies like OpenAI are also in the race, along with new AI device startups like former Apple designer Jony Ive’s AI efforts, along with startups like Rabbit, Humane and others. More here.

Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (SSI)’s new round: Former OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskever’s SSI is raising additional funds at a valuation up to $20 billion. This follows its $1 billion raise last September at a $5 billion investment from leading VCs like a16z, Sequoia, DST and others. The trend of foundation LLM AI companies raising more funds continues, with OpenAI raising another $40 billion from Softbank at a $300+ billion valuation, up from its $6.6 billion raise at $157 billion last fall. And of course Anthropic raising billions more from Google and Amazon AWS in recent weeks. AI Scaling continues in both software and hardware terms. More on Ilya and SSI here and here.