Happy Holidays From All of Us At the Daily Outsider

 

WE will be going dark throughout properties here at the Daily Outsider through the end of the year.  We leave you with the sentiment above and close out the year with the following courtesy of Ryan Holiday, as we look forward to being of service in 2026

Happy Holidays!!!

​The Secret To Better Habits In 2026​ Here we are…past the halfway point of the 2020s. With another year looming before us, I’ve been thinking, if I could flash forward to December 2026, what would it take for me to look back and call it a good year? What challenges will I have taken on? What changes will I have made? What will I have learned? What good will I have done? I don’t know what 2026 has in store, but I do know that if it’s going to be a good year, it won’t be an accident. It won’t just happen. It will take work. “First tell yourself what kind of person you want to be,” Epictetus said, “then do what you have to do. For in nearly every pursuit we see this to be the case. Those in athletic pursuit first choose the sport they want, and then do that work.” Here are some habits, some best practices, some of the work I am going to do to try to make 2026 a good year. Many of these were inspired by The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which starts on January 1st . It’s a big part of my year each year—kicking things off with something that challenges me—and I hope you’ll join us on January 1st. (Sign up here, and learn more about the challenge below). Protect The Best Part Of Your Day This is where it all starts: with how you spend the best part of your day. The novelist Philipp Meyer​ (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) told me on the Daily Stoic podcast, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” Well-intentioned plans fall apart as the day progresses. Our willpower evaporates. The world makes its demands. So it’s key that we prioritize the important things and that we habitualize doing them early. Personally, I fiercely protect my mornings—family first, then writing. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings don’t just take time—they sap the energy needed for the essential work. I want to give my best self to my most important things. Everything else can come after. Think Small The writer James Clear talks about the idea of “atomic habits” (and has a really good book with the same title—it was actually the first book someone bought from The Painted Porch). An atomic habit is a small habit that makes an enormous difference in your life. He tells the story of how the British cycling team transformed themselves by focusing on 1% improvements in every area—tiny adjustments that, over time, added up to extraordinary results. It’s a simple but powerful concept: small actions, done repeatedly, accumulate into something significant. Accept Mediocrity It's counterintuitive but having high standards can be the enemy of improvement, causing you to avoid or abandon everything that feels beneath those standards. As Churchill said, another way to spell “perfectionism” is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s. One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder). Jerry Seinfeld once said that if he were to teach a writing class, “I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. You know, no one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put a tremendous amount of hours into it.” It's the same with self-improvement. The first draft of a new habit, a new discipline, a new you—it’s going to be clumsy and awkward and imperfect. Accept that, and focus on just making a little progress each day. Do Less, Better When I talked to the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Stoic podcast, he told me the story about a moment a few years ago when he realized he was doing too much. “I had five proverbial campfires on my desk,” he said. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, and his family. “What I did was I got rid of two of the campfires.” He called his lawyer and shut down the production company and the music label. “I was left with the three things that were most important to me. And those three campfires turned into bonfires…I had been making C’s in five things, but when I concentrated on three things, I started making A’s.” Marcus Aurelius talked about how doing less brings a double satisfaction: you get to do less and you get to do those things better. As we enter 2026, consider what you might need to say “no” to in order to say “yes” to what matters most. Figure Out Your Defaults Another one from James. On the podcast, we were talking about in-between moments in life. The lulls. The waiting in lines or between meetings. The extra time you weren’t planning to get. What do many of us do in these moments? We get occupied by mindless and meaningless distractions. We check email. We look up at the TV. We gossip. We just sit there waiting for it to be over. Which is why we have to have “good defaults,” James said. “The way I sometimes phrase it is, What do you do when you have nothing to do? … What I’ve really tried to do—I’m still working on this, I definitely don't have this figured out—is have a better answer to, what do I do when I have nothing to do?” My default is reading. I carry a book everywhere. Yours could be meditating. Or stretching, taking a walk around the block, or calling a friend. Whatever it is, figure out what you do when you have nothing to do. Because those in-between moments? They’re not insignificant. They are your life! It’s time, time you won’t ever get back. So use it. Because it adds up, shaping not just our days but our lives. Don’t Be Ashamed To Ask For Help Whenever I speak to military groups, I like to share one of my favorite lines from Meditations: “Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” I love how Marcus Aurelius delivers that line—with a shrug. So what? There’s no shame in needing help. Whether it’s therapy, asking for advice, or hiring someone to support you, seeking help is often the key to breakthroughs, growth, and success. Tim Ferriss has a great question that ties into this: What would this look like if it were easy? Often, the answer involves creating support systems or finding the right kind of help. Building habits, achieving goals, or even just making progress isn’t something you have to do alone. Use Commitment Devices At a critical moment in The Odyssey, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the sirens, Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship. In doing so, he became the first to hear them without steering and crashing into the rocks—where countless sailors before him had been lured to their deaths. On the podcast, behavioral scientist Katy Milkman talked about this as the original example of what’s known in behavioral science as a “commitment device”—a way of deliberately constraining ourselves to help us achieve our goals. What made Odysseus different from every other sailor who had been lured by those beautiful Sirens was not that he had more willpower or discipline. It was that he was wise enough to know he didn’t. He understood that in the moment, with those beautiful voices calling, he’d be just as weak as everyone else. So he came up with a way to protect himself from himself. It’d be wonderful if we always did what we know we want or need to do. But that’s not how the world is. It is filled with temptations, distractions, and forces tugging us toward the rocks. We need commitment devices. We need constraints that protect us from our weaker selves, that keep us on the right course. In 2018, we ran the first Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It was packed with challenges and exercises inspired by Stoic philosophy. Even I, the person who designed the challenge, found it transformative. Why? Because being part of a group, all working together, created a sense of accountability and momentum. Knowing others were pushing themselves alongside me made it easier to stay committed and go further than I might have on my own. As we kick off 2026, we’re doing another Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge—a 21-day program to build momentum for the rest of the year. If you’re looking to improve your habits, consider finding a similar challenge. It doesn’t matter what it’s about or who’s doing it with you; what matters is having a structure and a community to support you. Do It Now Seneca said that it’s the one thing fools all have in common: they are always getting ready to start. It’s pretty funny actually, we see this every year. Starting in early December, we start talking about the New Year, New You Challenge​, but you know what day—year after after—always has close to the most sign ups? January 1st…after it’s already started! Our customer service team spends the first 3-4 days of the year filtering through emails from people saying something like, “I know I’m late but I’d love to do this. Can you still let me in?” (So if you’re considering joining us in this year’s Challenge, don’t wait, sign up now!) To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now). It’s not going to be any easier later. It also might not be that difficult right now. That’s the funny thing you find about the stuff you put off—when you finally get around to it, you realize you’ve been dreading something that was actually pretty simple, that only took a few minutes. So in 2026 and beyond, constantly remind yourself: Later is a lie. It’s only going to get harder the longer you wait. Stop putting it off. Do what you need to do. Not Later. Now. Make Time For Strenuous Exercise Adopting a new habit, making a change, doing anything challenging always seems daunting at first. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. To do the big things that scare you, start with smaller things—start with developing the ability to push yourself to do stuff you’re reluctant to do. To be able to endure the cold reception of a bold idea, start with enduring a cold shower. To be able to step forward when the stakes are high, regularly do that when the stakes are low. To be able to embrace the discomfort of a major life change, accustom yourself to minor discomforts. We treat the body rigorously, Seneca said, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life. By methodically and deliberately exposing ourselves to small challenges, what once seemed daunting becomes manageable, even routine. Go The F*ck To Sleep All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. We have to follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. In the military, they speak of sleep discipline—meaning it’s something you have to be good at, you have to be conscious of, something you can’t let slip. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person knows this and guards it carefully. A smart person knows that getting their 7-8 hours of sleep every night does not negatively affect their output, it contributes crucially to their best work. Get Back Up When You Fall The path to self-improvement is slippery, and falling is inevitable. You’ll sleep in and not be able to read that page, you’ll cheat on your diet, you’ll say “yes” and take on too much, or you’ll get sucked into the rabbit hole of social media. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You’re only a bad person if you give up. It’s wonderfully fitting that in both the Zen tradition and the Bible, we have a version of the proverb about falling down seven times and getting up eight. Even the most self-disciplined of us will stagger. All of us have fallen short in the last year…and the years before that. We broke our resolutions. We lost touch with people we care about. We made the same mistakes again and again. We were “jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” as Marcus said. But now it’s time to pick ourselves up and try again. It’s time, Marcus continues, to “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better group of harmony if you keep on going back to it.” In other words, when you mess up, come back to the habits you’ve been working on. Come back to the ideas here in this post. Don’t quit just because you’re not perfect. No one is saying you have to magically transform yourself in 2026, but if you’re not making progress toward the person you want to be, what are you doing? And, more importantly, when are you planning to do it? I’ll leave you with Epictetus, who spoke so eloquently about feeding the right habit bonfire. It’s the perfect passage to recite as we set out to begin a new year, hopefully, as better people. “From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember…The true man is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material.”

On Our "Virtual Route 99" (Final Session End Edition)

 

Jensen Huang is the Financial Times Person of the Year, but the Information provided some guidance on the battles ahead-an excerpt of it is noted as follows:

The narrative of Nvidia’s unquestioned control over the AI chip market is fracturing. The AI arms race has moved from a high-stakes shadow war centered on custom silicon, with Broadcom solidifying its position as the Kingmaker in Silicon by serving as the premier design partner for tech giants. Rather than competing with GPUs, Broadcom helps clients like Google, Apple, and OpenAI create bespoke chips (ASICs) to break their costly dependence on Nvidia.

This shift is accelerating: Broadcom's AI chip business is surging, projected to generate centered on custom silicon, with Broadcom solidifying its position as the $6.2 billion this quarter, a 66% rise year-over-year. However, this success is defined by tight, often fraught, partnerships with a few massive customers who are constantly exploring alternatives, creating immense pressure on Broadcom to deliver. The competition with rivals like Marvell Technology for these few, powerful clients adds another layer of risk to Broadcom's lucrative strategy.

On Our "Virtual Route 99" Around the World (Special Mid-Week Edition) : Time Person of The Year Is....

 ... Artificial Intelligence: 

##OutsiderVibes Plesae Enjoy Invictus courtesy the Team at Warner Bros Discovery & YouTube Movies

Please enjoy Invictus with Matt Damon; & Morgan Freeman, as it rememembered the momentous achieved by South Africa having won the Rugby Word Cup 

On Our "Virtual Route 99" (Special Edition): Yuval Noah Harrari Reflects......

Our team chose this from Chris Hunt's "Code of the West" Manual to have us think about our purpose in life (an interesting point made about the story of life) as we are proud to present Yuval Noah Harrari on Making Sense of our World as he made a startling comment:  The latest book he's working on may be his last as he believes AI (what he deems Alien Intelligence) will take over as Algorithms will drive the World:   

 

On Our "Virtual Route 99" (Weekly Edition): On The Tech Scene

 

Our team presents a snapshot of the latest on the Tech Scene, courtesy of the team at The Information on Oracle, Broadcom, Microsoft and other thoughts:  

Step aside, young folks of tech. This week we hear from the industry’s, ah, elder statesmen—specifically Larry Ellison at Oracle and Hock Tan from Broadcom, whose combined age is about 150. Oracle and Broadcom are each reporting their latest quarterly earnings this week, when the status of their newish AI businesses will be in the spotlight. In the case of Oracle, we’ll be looking for an update on its AI-related cloud expansion while Broadcom will be reporting the latest numbers for its AI chip business. Both businesses, to be clear, are in their early days of expansion—at least if we believe Ellison and Tan.

Take Broadcom. Its AI-related revenue grew by more than 60% in the first three quarters of its 2025 fiscal year, and it has projected slightly faster growth in that segment for the October quarter, which it’s reporting on Thursday. That should bring AI revenue to $19.9 billion for fiscal 2025, compared with $12.2 billion in fiscal 2024. That’s peanuts compared with Nvidia, whose AI chip business made up most of the company’s $57 billion third quarter revenue. Broadcom isn’t likely to catch up to Nvidia—well, probably ever—but it will certainly grow. Its chip customers include Google, whose AI chip business appears to be taking off. Tan last December forecast that the AI chip and networking market he is aiming at will explode to between $60 billion and $90 billion by 2027, implying that Broadcom’s business can expand enormously in the next two years. We'll be watching for updates this week. (For more on Tan, see our Weekend profile, published on Friday.)

AI is only a minority of Broadcom’s business, by the way, but it is a growing portion, lately representing about a third. Overall, Broadcom’s revenue is expected to grow 24% to $17.5 billion, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Oracle is in a similar position. Its cloud business, which is tiny compared with giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, has started growing at a 50%-plus rate in the past few quarters. It’s still small—quarterly revenue has been running at just above $3 billion, about a fifth of the total company’s. But Oracle’s disclosure in September that deals it has booked will lift cloud revenue to $144 billion by 2030—which sent its stock soaring—implies that its real inflection in growth is yet to come. By 2030, analysts expect the cloud business will account for the majority of its revenue.

Of course, 2030 is a long time away. Oracle’s customers include OpenAI, which still has to raise the money to pay for its future cloud commitments. Oracle, meanwhile, has to finance its data center expansion. So investors are a little nervous. Their mood, which has dragged down the stock in recent weeks, may not change after this week’s earnings update. Analysts estimate that overall revenue will rise 14.8%, according to S&P, which is an uptick on the single-digit percentage growth rate Oracle was reporting a few quarters ago but is far from the growth Oracle should deliver in the next few years. What we’re really looking for on Wednesday, when Oracle reports, is an update on its efforts to raise financing for its new data centers and the latest on the size of its long-term customer commitments. And given how bears have crowded into Oracle stock lately, Ellison may want to try to dissipate some of the skepticism.

The Ellisons, Warner and Netflix

The Ellisons have a lot on their mind these days, and it’s not all about data centers. On Friday, Netflix beat out the Ellison-controlled Paramount Skydance in the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. This contest is far from over, however. There’s a very good chance the Trump administration will block the Netflix-Warner tie-up on antitrust grounds. And given that the elder Ellison is close to President Donald Trump, there’s also a decent chance that Paramount would win approval for any deal it does.

On Friday, CNBC reported that Paramount was considering making an offer directly to WBD shareholders. Paramount’s regulatory edge would likely weigh heavily on the minds of shareholders. There may be some shareholders in WBD who held the stock back in 2016, when AT&T agreed to buy the company formerly known as Time Warner—only to see the closing delayed until mid-2018 as the Justice Department unsuccessfully fought the deal in court. It’s doubtful WBD investors want to go through that again.

In Other News

• Microsoft’s shareholders approved the board’s proposed compensation for CEO Satya Nadella and other top executives on Friday, raising his pay to $96.5 million, up from $79.1 million last year. The majority of his compensation will come from stock awards, while his base salary is $2.5 million.

• Japanese conglomerate SoftBank is in talks to acquire DigitalBridge, one of the largest publicly traded investors in data center companies, Bloomberg reported.

• The New York Times sued Perplexity for copyright infringement, adding to a mounting pile of lawsuits against the AI search startup.

• The EU hit Elon Musk’s X with a $140 million fine on Friday, citing several issues with the design and maintenance of the social media service. It’s the first time the EU has levied a fine under the Digital Services Act, a sweeping set of tech regulations it passed in 2022.

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX is considering an IPO in 2026, The Information reported on Friday.

• Google cannot require partners like Apple or Samsung to distribute its generative AI products like Gemini as a condition of licensing Google’s other apps such as Google Maps, a federal judge ruled on Friday as part of the final remedies judgment governing how Google must address its illegal search monopoly. More here.

• Meta Platforms has postponed the launch of its next-generation mixed-reality glasses, code-named Phoenix, from the second half of 2026 to the first half of 2027, Business Insider reported.

• The executive in charge of Apple’s hugely successful in-house chip design efforts is eyeing an exit from the company, Bloomberg reported. Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, has told the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, that he is “seriously considering” departing Apple in the near future, the publication reported.

• X has cut off the advertising account of the European Commission days after the agency imposed a €120 million fine on the platform for breaching the Digital Services Act, a set of regulations governing internet companies. More here.

#OutsiderVibes (Special Sunday Edition) : Please enjoy In The Line Of Fire

We have the pleasure to present "In the Line Of Fire" starring Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo courtesy the team at YouTube Movies & Warner Bros (Soon to be taken over by NetFlix in a 83 Billion Blockbuster Merger)

On Our "Virtual Route 99" On the Tech/AI Scene

  

We present the following on recent discourse courtesy the team at the Information on the latest on the drama around Warner Brothers Discovery (as it has put itself up for Sale) and other thoughts: 

The Ellison family will have plenty to talk about when they convene for Thanksgiving this week (assuming they do!). The price of Oracle has plummeted in the past six weeks, for one thing, reflecting AI bubble jitters centering on Oracle. In the same period of time, Larry Ellison and his son David have been—by all accounts—busy plotting the roughly $90 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Their interest—conveyed through the company they now control, Paramount Skydance—sparked a bidding war that is now coming to a head. Bids were reportedly due last Thursday, with both Netflix and Comcast reportedly in the mix, which means we could see some developments this week.

Could the Ellisons’ eagerness to buy WBD be affected by the diminishing value of Larry Ellison’s 41% stake in Oracle? It’s not crazy to imagine that at the very least, the Ellisons may be less willing to overpay than they might have been. A recent securities filing showed that as of mid-September, Ellison had pledged about 30% of his Oracle stake—or 346 million shares, worth about $69 billion currently—as collateral for personal loans taken out “to fund outside personal business ventures.” That’s up from the 277 million shares he had pledged a year earlier. As Ellison backed his son‘s purchase of Paramount this past summer, he may well have done so by borrowing against his Oracle shares. Even if he didn’t, the loans suggest Ellison would be sensitive to swings in Oracle’s stock price. And it certainly has been volatile. 

You might recall that word of the Ellison family’s interest in WBD emerged a day or so after Oracle shares had rocketed 36% to as high as $327 in the wake of the company’s disclosure that its cloud unit had signed hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of business extending over the next few years, mostly with OpenAI. That translated to an increase in the value of Ellison’s stake of about $100 billion, enough to pay for WBD. But Oracle shares have fallen 39% from the high to just below $200 on Friday—costing Ellison about $149 billion. 

The holidays are coming up, which means it’s time for another surge in SpaceX share prices. 

The Elon Musk-founded company is planning to keep up its tradition of a twice-annual tender offer, with the new price expected to be set in December, according to multiple people familiar with the space giant’s plans. 

It was last valued at $400 billion this summer in a sale of existing shares. At the time, it was the most valuable startup, but it wasn’t long before OpenAI surpassed that with its $500 billion valuation. 

Rumors abound about how investors will next value the space and internet business. Could it be $420 billion, one of founder Musk’s favorite numbers? Or would it be $500 billion, tying the record for most-valuable startup, on par with Musk-rival Sam Altman? The company is surveying demand from investors but has not yet decided on a price, I’m told.  

One thing that has become clear is that SpaceX’s formula of regularly allowing investors and employees to sell shares does not appear to be ending anytime soon. Demand is high and a potential public offering is a long way off, insiders say. 

That’s a change from the past. A few years ago, Musk said he expected SpaceX would eventually spin off satellite internet service Starlink and take it public. But executives haven’t been working towards that outcome lately and a spinoff may never happen, the people said. 

That’s because SpaceX’s rocket business is in better shape relative to Starlink than it once was. A few years ago, Starlink’s margins from selling subscriptions for $120 a month were expected to be higher than those for SpaceX’s rocket launches, making a spinoff of the stronger business more attractive. But its core rocket launch revenue has grown and there is ample demand from investors to buy part of the combined business. 

Jared Carmel, founder and managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners, which owns SpaceX shares sold by existing shareholders, said that he sees continued demand for the business “because it’s delivering on both proven revenue and moonshot potential.” 

He pointed to strong market share, with SpaceX launching the vast majority of satellites and other payloads, by mass, into space globally. SpaceX’s overall business is on track for $15.5 billion in annual revenue, Musk posted on X in June. It has about $3 billion in cash, The Wall Street Journal reported in July. 

“It’s rare to find a private company that’s both printing money today and positioned to define the trillion-dollar space economy tomorrow,” Carmel added.

​​Last year around this time, SpaceX received a large jump in demand from investors, which pushed up its valuation to $350 billion from $180 billion, in part due to Musk’s ties to newly-elected President Donald Trump after Musk poured $250 million into his re-election campaign.  

The two now have a complicated relationship. Earlier this year, Musk publicly slammed Trump on the president’s landmark budget bill, prompting Trump to threaten to revoke some federal subsidies to Musk's companies. Musk was back at the White House last week for a dinner with Saudi officials. 

But SpaceX has been unaffected by Musk-related drama, with investors saying they like the business fundamentals: namely that it’s growing, generates cash and has high barriers to entry. One person familiar with SpaceX’s business pointed to growth in the government business, like its recently reported $2 billion deal with the Pentagon.  

Would SpaceX ever need to raise more money through private financing or an IPO? Possibly some day, said one insider. SpaceX has recently been buying costly spectrum, like the $17 billion it purchased from EchoStar to enhance Starlink’s mobile coverage for cell phones in hard-to-reach areas. The business could also spend money on artificial intelligence initiatives, with Musk tweeting in October that SpaceX will build data centers in space.

For now, SpaceX investors are still forecasting, dare I say, rocket ship-like growth.Now, there’s no guarantee the Ellisons’ Paramount will win the bidding for WBD. It’s a good bet WBD CEO David Zaslav would prefer not to sell to Paramount, which wants the whole company. After all, most public company CEOs don’t want to give up their job. Selling part of WBD to Netflix or Comcast, or sticking with previously announced plans to split WBD’s studio and streaming operations from its slowly shrinking TV channel business, would likely keep Zaslav employed. But the WBD board has to consider the interests of all shareholders, which means a sale of the entire company to Paramount can’t be ruled out. It also could make a difference to the board that the Ellisons—thanks to Larry’s closeness to President Donald Trump—will have the edge when it comes to getting regulatory approval for any deal. 

No one could blame either father or son if they chose to pull back a little. After all, few other companies would buy all of WBD for the simple reason that half of the business is slowly evaporating. The risk that the Ellisons will be taking on in buying it, so shortly after acquiring Paramount, is not insignificant. It doesn’t help that Oracle is taking on enormous risk with the cloud expansion. At some point, maybe Larry Ellison will stop to wonder what on earth he’s doing.

Amazon’s AI Crackdown Hits More AI Search Startups By Ann Gehan

Exclusive Google Further Encroaches on Nvidia’s Turf With New AI Chip Push By Amir Efrati, Erin Woo and Anissa Gardizy Exclusive OpenAI Forecasts Nearly as Many ChatGPT Subscribers as Spotify by 2030 By Sri Muppidi Exclusive Cyber Startup Veza in Talks With Potential Buyers for $1 Billion-Plus Sale By Valida Pau and Katie Roof Sunday Insights Nvidia’s Mushrooming Cash Pile Spotlights Spending Choices By Martin Peers

The narrative that OpenAI has an insurmountable lead and Nvidia a monopoly is fracturing. The dynamic in AI is shifting from a sprint for supremacy to a battle of attrition defined by financial staying power and vertical integration.

Google is waging a two-front war against incumbents. On one front, Google is leveraging $70 billion in free cash flow to pressure OpenAI—whose CEO recently warned of “rough vibes.” On the other hand, Google is deploying TPU infrastructure to erode Nvidia's dominance, convincing players like OpenAI and Meta to adopt its hardware.

We present the Minds of Modern AI courtesy the Financial Times' FTLive to close out, and also a tribute to the great Tesla (Nicholas Tesla that is) along with an admonition from Reid Hoffman: