Welcome to the AI Chat Podcast.
I'm your host, James Schaefer.
Today on the show, we're going to be covering the top 10 AI news stories of the week in rapid fire.
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I roast Apple for AI all the time, and I think they've turned the tables with iOS 26.
So, instead of chasing giant cloud models like OpenAI or Google, Apple is betting really big on local AI, so that's tiny models that run directly on your iPhone.
There's no subscription fees, there's no server costs and there's no sending your private data to the cloud.
A lot of benefits if they can pull it off.
Developers are already jumping in.
Lookup now generates examples and word origins right on your phone using this technology.
Money Coach.
They're analyzing your spending and auto-tag transactions using these kind of internal AI models.
Day One, another app suggests titles and deeper writing prompts for your journal using it.
And Crouton breaks down messy recipes into step-by-step instructions.
And even Sign Every or Easy.
Sign Sign Easy can summarize contracts instantly without touching the internet.
These models aren't as powerful as GPT-4 or Gemini, but there is genius in all of this, and that's that Apple's AI is invisible, private and free.
So these are features that just quietly make your app better.
Apple isn't trying to win the AI arms race.
They're trying to make AI disappear into your phone.
NVIDIA just pulled off a 5 billion power move and they bought their biggest rival or a huge stake in it 4 of Intel, instantly becoming one of Intel's largest shareholders.
But it's not just about the money.
This is about survival in the AI chip war.
Here's the play.
NVIDIA and Intel will now co-develop multiple generations of data centers and PC chips.
Intel is going to build a new x86 CPU customized for NVIDIA's AI infrastructure.
And for customers.
They're making something even more powerful chips that combine Intel's CPUs with NVIDIA's rtx gpus in a single package.
So what's the translation on this?
Nvidia graphics baked straight into future pcs.
If you want to build custom tools with ai code no code tools check out my startup ai boxai.
So this comes right after nvidia just logged another wrecky, record-breaking quarter while intel's been struggling layoffs, failed projects, shrinking market size.
But with this partnership, intel gets a lifeline and nvidia gets to lock in dominance before amd catches up.
This isn't just a deal.
It's reshaping the entire ai hardware market.
And the crazy part, Nvidia just turned its old rival into its new secret weapon.
Google Ventures just doubled down on a tiny startup that's beating AWS and Azure at their own game.
It's called Blacksmith.
It is a dev tool company, and they just raised $10 million.
This is only four months after they did their seed round, by the way.
And this is because they're making it possible to ship code way faster at a fraction of the cost.
So here's how they do it.
Instead of renting expensive cloud servers like AWS.
Blacksmith runs CI CD on bare metal gaming grade CPUs.
That means that this is basically two times faster of a build and up to 75 cheaper on compute costs, and switching over takes just one line of code.
Since May, Blacksmith has gone from 1 million in annual recurring revenue to 35 million and they have over 700 customers.
They have a team of just eight people, so it's really small.
And they have a bunch of really big customers, including Supabase, Veed, and Ashby.
This is why Google Ventures isn't just investing again.
They're actually betting on Blacksmith and they believe that they basically could redefine how software shifts in the AI era.
The bottom line of all of this is that if AWS is the cargo ship, Blacksmith is more like a Formula One racing car, and right now I feel like speed is everything.
Google just turned Chrome into an AI super assistant, and it might make search engines feel less obsolete.
So, starting now, Gemini is built straight into Chrome for US users, and that means, instead of just Googling, you can ask Chrome to summarize pages, compare tabs or even rewrite a recipe to make it gluten-free, all without leaving a site.
Silly idea, I know.
It gets even crazier, though.
Soon, Chrome will remember what sites you visited last week, organize multi-tab sessions like trip planning, even fetch specific parts of YouTube videos for you.
If you want to build with AI tools, check out my startup, AIbox.ai.
So here's the real game changer.
Google is rolling out agentic browsing, and that means that Chrome won't just answer questions.
It's actually going to act for you.
So it could book your haircut.
It could order your groceries.
It could be resetting your breached passwords, which personally I would love, and even protecting you from AI-generated scams.
And you'll also be able to type natural questions right into the Chrome search bar and keep your conversation going with follow-ups, like you would with ChatGPT.
So it isn't just upgrading the browser.
They're building an AI co-pilot for the internet, and I am very excited about this.
Google just made it official.
Your AI can now swipe your credit card without asking you.
They launched the Agents Payment Protocol AP2, a system where bots negotiate, buy and bundle deals for you.
Here's the twist.
This isn't just Google.
Over 60 banks and merchants, including MasterCard Amex PayPal Coinbase MetaMask, are all back in it.
That means that your AI could shop in dollars or crypto and the receipts will be cryptographically signed.
Why this matters?
Shopping is no longer you versus Amazon's algorithm.
It's your AI agent versus the seller's AI.
They're battling in milliseconds over bundles, upgrades, discounts.
And yes, AP2 even allows fully automated purchases.
If you give your bot strict spending rules, you can get it to buy stuff for you.
You could say, plan me a trip for under $800 and your agent will go haggle with airline bots.
It's going to negotiate the hotel upgrades and it's going to book all of it without you having to do anything.
But here's the catch.
Whoever owns a protocol owns the rails of Converse.
Stripe and Perplexity are trying their own version, but Google is moving really fast in this direction.
So it's going to be interesting to see, you know, who is going to decide what is purchased online.
OpenAI just signed a 300 billion five-year deal with Oracle, and Oracle's stock price obviously exploded.
But here's the twist.
Most assumed that the AI cloud race was between AWS, Google, and Microsoft.
But Oracle, the so-called legacy dinosaur, just secured the biggest AI infrastructure contract literally ever, handling 45 gigawatts of compute for OpenAI.
This matters because it shows how desperate OpenAI is for raw power.
They're already burning billions committed.
You know they have 60 billion a year on compute and another 10 billion on custom chips with Broadcom all while they're raking in 10 billion in annual recurring revenue.
But compute without energy is basically worthless and nobody knows whether the electricity for this deal is actually going to exist.
So Sam Altman has personal bets in nuclear and solar startups, but OpenAI itself is staying asset light.
They're letting Oracle handle the dirty work, and this keeps the valuation really shiny, while it leaves the looming question can even 300 billion buy enough power to keep OpenAI's growth alive, or does AI's biggest deal yet run headfirst into an energy wall?
Google is being sued for stealing the spotlight from Rolling Stones and Billboard.
Publisher Penske Media.
They just got the lawsuit accusing Google of using their journalism to power.
AI overviews the summaries that keep readers on Google instead of clicking through.
But here's a twist.
Publishers already tolerate Google crawling their sites in exchange for traffic, but Penske says that Google has now changed the bargain.
They're forcing them to give up content for AI training and summaries, or they're going to lose visibility in the search results.
The only opt-out that they have is is not working.
So why does this matter?
Penske is basically claiming that its sites saw major drops in clicks once the AI overviews rolled out, which were gutting ads, subscriptions and affiliate revenue.
And while Google insists that summaries drive more diverse traffic, the lawsuit says that there is no evidence to back this up.
And this isn't just another copyright fight.
If Penske wins, it could decide whether Google gets to rewrite the rules of the open web or whether publishers fight back against basically, this AI land grab.
So the real battle isn't over clicks.
It's over whether journalism fuels AI or, as some dramatically are saying, is going to get completely erased by it.
NVIDIA just got completely banned from China, and Huawei is now trying to take over.
At the Huawei Connect conference, the company unveiled their Super POD interconnect.
This is a system that links up to 15000 GPUs, including their own Ascent AI chips, into one massive AI cluster.
So it's kind of like China's answer to Nvidia's NVLink.
It is basically the backbone that lets GPUs talk to each other at really fast speeds.
And Huawei's chip may not be as powerful as Nvidia's, but clustering thousands together could give China the compute power it needs to train next-gen AI models.
And here's the timing bond.
Just one day earlier, China banned its tech companies from buying Nvidia's hardware, including servers specifically designed for the Chinese markets.
So now Huawei isn't just competing with Nvidia.
They're positioning themselves as the literal only AI chip auction left in China.
And this isn't just a product launch.
It's definitely a geopolitical chess move.
And it seems like China definitely had a little bit of hand on the scale to try to push Huawei up to the very forefront of AI chips in China.
CodeRabbit is halfway to unicorn status.
This is an AI-powered code review platform that just raised $60 million at a $550 million valuation.
And here's the problem.
Developers everywhere are basically using these AI coding assistants like GitHub, Copilot and Cloud Code.
And they turn out tons of code fast, my startup AI box included.
But a lot of it is buggy, messy, and sometimes unusable.
And that means that basically engineers are stuck spending hours trying to fix it.
CodeRabbit is reviewing code like a teammate.
So basically they're going to flag bugs.
They're even going to cut the number of humans needed for review by about half.
Companies like Chegg, Groupon, and Mercury are already using them.
They have, I think, 8,000 businesses using this.
And here's the kicker.
CodeRabbit is growing 20 month over month and already pulling in 15 million in annual recurring revenue.
Nvidia's VC arm even just joined in, and I think if you want to see a bullish sign Nvidia getting on board would be that.
It might be writing the code too fast for humans to keep up with, which is a problem, but now it seems like startups like CodeRabbit are cashing in by babysitting the bots.
The AI race for avatars just leveled up.
DID, which I've talked about a lot, is a startup behind all of those talking AI avatars that you've seen everywhere, and they just acquired Berlin-based SimpleShow.
This is a B2B video creation platform and they have over 1500 enterprise clients, including Microsoft, McDonald's and eBay.
So I think this isn't just about tech.
It's about distribution.
Simple shows.
SAS platform has a massive customer base and DID instantly expanded its reach in training, marketing and sales videos.
Here's the kicker.
DID wants to make avatars interactive.
So you can imagine pushing pause on a training video to ask the AI instructor a question, or being quizzed mid presentation by an AI avatar that feels really human.
Of course, The competition is definitely heating up.
There's Synthesia, there's Soul Machines, and even Google and McKinsey are building their own AI avatar tech.
But with this acquisition DID really positions themselves as a serious contender in the enterprise avatar war.
But the question is will AI avatars replace human presenters or will they just become another corporate gimmick?
Thank you so much for tuning into the AI Chat podcast.
If you prefer episodes that are a deep dive on one particular topic, or interviews, we also have lots of that content on the show.
So just feel free to take whatever you prefer from the show.
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Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.
