Aug 18, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Bubble Maker

More Stories: DeepSeek Bends the Knee, Zuckerberg's AGI Moonshot

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The prophets of progress are busy rewriting their own sermons: If this is the future, it looks less like destiny and more like improv comedy with trillion-dollar stakes.

Biggest Bubble Maker Warns You About Bubbles

👀 What’s the move: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — the $150B+ darling often called the most inflated asset in the AI market — now says openly that “yes, we’re in a bubble.” He compares today’s AI hype to the dot-com mania and scoffs at tiny startups pulling billion-dollar valuations.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This is the fox warning the henhouse about foxes. Altman is both inflating the balloon with trillion-dollar data center promises and pre-emptively blaming “irrational investors” for when it pops. The contradiction isn’t naïveté — it’s insulation: set expectations low for the market, keep OpenAI’s burn rate looking sane by comparison, and position the company as the only survivor when the froth evaporates.

⛵ Key takeaway: Altman’s bubble talk isn’t a confession — it’s a moat. Inflate the sector, frame rivals as the reckless ones, then outlast the crash.

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CHIPS

DeepSeek Bends the Knee to Nvidia Again

👀 What’s the move: After hyping Huawei’s Ascend as proof of chip independence, DeepSeek has quietly rerouted training of its R2 model back to Nvidia GPUs. The homegrown hardware buckled under the weight of 700B-parameter training, leaving only inference tasks to Huawei.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just a hardware swap — it’s Beijing’s AI moonshot tripping over the semiconductor gap. While China can sprint on algorithms, without Nvidia’s decade-old CUDA moat and performance stability, it’s still running the AI race barefoot. Waiting for local silicon maturity risks missing the wave entirely; leaning on Nvidia means living under Washington’s chokehold.

⛵ Key takeaway: DeepSeek’s “independence” lasted seven months — in AI, software dreams still die on silicon reality.

Zuckerberg Tears Down Meta’s AI Org—Again

👀 What’s the move: Meta just announced its fourth AI restructuring in six months. The new Superintelligence Labs will be split into four silos: a “TBD Lab” (yes, literally “to be determined”), a products team (Meta AI assistant), an infrastructure group, and FAIR for long-term research. The churn comes after staff exits and Llama 4’s lukewarm reception.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Compare the cycles—first was folding AI into Reality Labs, then centralizing under one roof, then merging infra with research, now carving it into silos. Each pivot shows Zuckerberg burning through org charts to brute-force Meta into an AGI contender. This isn’t about cleaner structure; it’s about buying speed, masking misfires, and keeping investors hooked while he spends “hundreds of billions” on compute.

⛵ Key takeaway: Zuckerberg isn’t reorganizing for clarity—he’s reorganizing as theater, so Wall Street keeps funding his AGI moonshot.

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🖥️ Lambda
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🦾 Unitree
“Affordable robot dogs & humanoids.”
Chinese robotics maker shipping AI-driven quadrupeds (Go2, B2) and humanoids (H1, G1); agile nav, autonomous control, industrial + consumer use
→ Founded 2016 by Wang Xingxing (ex-DJI); ships ~60% of global quadruped units; July ’25 launched R1 humanoid at ~$6K; clients span mining, firefighting, entertainment, Olympics demos.

🪙 Gemini
“Trust-first crypto exchange.”
US-based exchange + custodian (70+ coins, GUSD stablecoin, staking, credit card) built around compliance & security
→ Founded 2014 by Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss; NYDFS-licensed, refunded $1.1B Earn users; Aug ’25 IPO filing shows $68.6M H1 revenue, $282.5M loss; raised $75M credit line from Ripple.

BAY AREA MEMOS

China's Unitree claims to have won the humanoid race with its G1 robot that rivals Tesla's Optimus on agility and price.
AI cloud operator Lambda is reportedly raising a new funding round that could value the company at up to $5 billion.
The Winklevoss twins' crypto company Gemini has filed for an IPO despite reporting widening net losses.
Senator Hawley is launching a probe into Meta after leaked documents revealed its AI chatbots were permitted to have 'romantic' chats with children.
Hongkong Travel booking platform Klook is reportedly tapping banks for a potential US IPO to raise around $500 million.

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