✂️ Cisco cuts 4,000 jobs while reporting record revenue

Cisco is laying off nearly 4,000 employees, about 5% of its workforce, even as it reports record quarterly revenue and double-digit growth.

The company says the cuts will help shift spending toward AI and cybersecurity. Cisco also plans to expand internal use of AI across the business.

The move follows a broader pattern in tech. Companies are using strong earnings to fund larger infrastructure bets while reducing headcount.

More revenue no longer means more employees.

✔️ @venture

🤖 OpenAI Considers Legal Action Against Apple

OpenAI is reportedly preparing to sue Apple over a stalled partnership that began in 2024. The deal promised deep integration of ChatGPT across Apple's ecosystem and new subscription revenue, but sources say ChatGPT's presence remains limited and renegotiations have stalled.

Apple integrated ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence and Siri, allowing ChatGPT subscriptions via iPhone settings. However, Apple is now testing AI models from Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, aiming for a multi-model platform.

OpenAI's claims are not about exclusivity but about broken expectations. The shift risks reducing OpenAI from a key partner to just one of several AI providers in Apple's ecosystem.

✔️ @venture

🤖 Anthropic forecasts US-China AI race to 2028

Anthropic says AI leadership depends on access to compute, chips, and infrastructure, not just model quality. The US holds an edge but China is close to the frontier.

They outline two scenarios: the US keeps its lead through export controls and infrastructure growth, or China catches up and shapes global AI standards.

Anthropic notes frontier AI is dual-use tech, impacting chatbots, cybersecurity, military systems, and scientific research acceleration.

✔️ @venture

On this day in 1997: Amazon went public.

A $1,000 investment in the IPO would be worth $3.5 million today.

✔️ @venture

SpaceX is now expected to raise up to $75 billion in its IPO, potentially debuting as soon as June 12.

This would be 2.5 times larger than Saudi Aramco's IPO, the current largest IPO ever.

Nothing in history has come close to what SpaceX is about to achieve.

✔️ @venture

😺 OpenAI sued over alleged sharing of ChatGPT data with Meta and Google

A new class action lawsuit claims OpenAI shared user chats and personal data with Meta and Google through tracking tools such as Meta Pixel and Google Analytics.

The complaint says this may have included chat queries, email addresses, and user IDs. Plaintiffs argue OpenAI did this without proper consent and violated California privacy laws.

The case matters because people use ChatGPT for deeply personal conversations, including mental health, legal, and financial topics.

AI products are starting to look more like the rest of the internet.

Private conversations may not be as private as users assume.

✔️ @venture

🤖 Anthropic nears $900B valuation in new $30B funding round

Anthropic has agreed terms for a $30 billion round that would value the company at $900 billion, according to the Financial Times.

The round is expected to be led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter. Each could invest more than $2 billion.

The deal comes just 3 months after Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $350 billion valuation.

Anthropic’s annualized revenue is reportedly close to $45 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of last year. That pace has pushed the company ahead of OpenAI on some revenue measures.

The company is turning growth into capital almost as fast as it turns capital into compute.

AI financing is now moving in $30 billion steps.

✔️ @venture

Trump purchased up to a $1 million worth of Nvidia $NVDA stock on January 6, 2026.

This is a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China.

✔️ @venture

⚖️ Elon Musk loses his lawsuit against OpenAI

A California jury ruled against Elon Musk in his case accusing OpenAI of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The jury said Musk waited too long to bring the lawsuit.

Musk claimed OpenAI misled him into contributing $38 million before shifting toward a for-profit structure backed by Microsoft and other investors.

The verdict removes a major legal overhang as OpenAI prepares for a potential IPO that could value the company at around $1 trillion.

One of the most closely watched battles in AI ended in less than 2 hours of jury deliberation.

✔️ @venture

Anthropic and OpenAI now capture 89% of all AI startup revenue, per The Information.

The data places Anthropic and OpenAI among 34 of the most mature startups selling AI apps or models.

✔️ @venture

Donald Trump Jr's venture firm 1789 Capital grew from $200M to $3.5B AUM in one year.

The firm bought stakes in Databricks, Ramp, Deel, Groq, Anduril, SpaceX, xAI, and Reflection AI.

It is targeting $10B and positioning itself as the new Carlyle Group.

✔️ @venture

🔥 OpenAI Co-Founder Joins Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, has officially joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher, helped found OpenAI in 2015 and later led AI efforts at Tesla.

He now says he wants to "return to R&D" during a critical time for large language model development.

✔️ @venture

✖️ xAI promised employees $420 for tax returns and hasn’t paid

xAI asked employees to submit their personal tax returns as training data for Grok and offered $420 in return, according to Bloomberg.

The company wanted to improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 filing deadline as users increasingly turned to ChatGPT and Claude for accounting tasks.

Two months later, employees are still waiting for the payments.

Even training data can end up as an unpaid invoice.

✔️ @venture

🤖 OpenAI had 11 founders. Only 3 are still there.

The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.

🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment.

🖱 Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX.

🖱 Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI.

🖱 Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic.

🖱 Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic.

🖱 John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.

🖱 Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed.

🖱 Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator.

🖱 Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems.

OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI.

The original team ended up shaping the entire industry.

✔️ @venture

GameStop $GME raised its stake in eBay $EBAY from 5% to 6.6%.

Ryan Cohen is still keen to acquire GameStop and may even launch a hostile takeover bid (half cash, half stock).

✔️ @venture

🤖 Altman Offers Startups $2M in Tokens for Equity

Sam Altman proposed giving each YCombinator startup $2 million in tokens for about 7% equity, roughly YCombinator's usual stake.

The tokens come from Codex, which Altman aims to promote by tying new startups to his ecosystem amid competition with Anthropic.

✔️ @venture

🤖 DeepMind Founder Holds Stake in Anthropic

The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, secretly invested early in Anthropic as an angel investor.

Anthropic is an AI startup competing closely with DeepMind.

Despite this rivalry, Google recently agreed to invest $10 billion in Anthropic, possibly influenced by Hassabis.

✔️ @venture

🤖 OpenAI to File for IPO Soon

OpenAI plans to submit its IPO application to regulators within days, according to WSJ. The company waited for the conclusion of its legal dispute with Elon Musk before moving forward.

The IPO review process will take several months, making a public offering possible in Q4 2026. It could become one of the largest IPOs ever.

✔️ @venture