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There’re some insane numbers from the Cloud 100 report, with private AI companies now worth over $1.1T. Protesters are hunger striking outside Anthropic and DeepMind
What are on FIRE 🔥
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AI INSIGHTS
The 2025 Cloud 100 Benchmark Report just dropped, and it’s not subtle: cloud + AI = $1.1T in private company value, a +36% leap from last year, driven almost entirely by AI-native companies.
Cloud 100 just celebrated its 10th birthday by breaking every chart.
AI companies = 22
AI category value = $464B (up from $176B in 2024)
Top 10 companies = $598B, with OpenAI at $300B and Anthropic not far behind
And these aren’t speculative unicorns. Nearly all Cloud 100 companies are now at or near $100M ARR. In fact, the average AI company gets there in just 5.7 years. That’s a full year faster than last year, and nearly 2 years faster than the average cloud startup.
And the talent war is real.
Meta acquihired Scale AI for $14B
Founders are poaching each other’s researchers weekly
Some top AI engineers are now getting nine-figure comp packages
In 2023, AI was a feature. In 2024, it was a category. In 2025, it’s the cloud success.
Why It Matters: Multiples are compressing, but AI companies still command 24x (vs. 19x for non-AI). Cloud 100 companies are scaling faster, raising bigger than ever. This whole wave is being powered by the 1% of the 1% and there’s not enough of them.
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TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
🍌 A user just built a Nano Banana-powered browser that generates real websites based solely on the URL you enter. You can even navigate to other links. Here it is.
😍 Google’s big Veo 3 updates! We finally get vertical format outputs (9:16 ratio), 1080p HD output, and new, lower pricing. See some examples of new updates here.
📺 Higgsfield AI has unveiled Ads 2.0, a new tool it says can replace entire production, marketing, and creative teams to solve product placement. Let’s see it in action here.
🎧 Spotify launched AI DJ, Amazon Music dropped “Weekly Vibe”. Every Monday, you get a fresh playlist based on your mood & habits. Even with social features like this.
⚠️ Meta is “disgusting”. Why? Because Meta allegedly ignored a clear warning about a full ban on AI chatbots for teens after reports of harmful chats with minors.
🌍 There are 2 hunger strikes happening outside AI labs: one at Anthropic, one at Google DeepMind. They want to completely stop development of more powerful AIs.
💰 AI Daily Fundraising: ASML just invested $1.5B in Mistral AI’s $2B Series C, becoming its top shareholder. Mistral now holds a $11.7B valuation, making it Europe’s most valuable AI startup.
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NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
🎬 VidAU turns product images into scroll-stopping video ads
🖼️ Tripo creates free AI 3D model with text & image in seconds
📈 SynthMind.app is your AI agent to go viral on social media
⚡ FlowAI turns your AI agent ideas into action within minutes
AI QUICK HITS
🌐 Google’s AI Mode just added 5 new languages including Hindi
🤖 Sam Altman said that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’
📚 Authors sued Apple over alleged use of pirated books to train AI
🧪 OpenAI announced OAI Labs, dedicated to invent new interfaces
💰 Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5B+ to settle a lawsuit with authors
AI CHART
Alibaba just released Qwen-3-Max-Preview, its biggest AI model yet and the company’s first to cross the 1T+ parameter mark. That officially puts them in the same weight class as GPT-4.5 and Claude Opus.
The model is:
Text-only (for now), with a “thinking” version coming soon
Expensive to use, $0.861 per 1M input tokens, $3.441 per 1M output tokens (≈3x pricier than Qwen-235B, and higher than Kimi K2)
It’s built to outperform not only its own Qwen-235B, but also rivals like MoonShot’s Kimi K2, DeepSeek V3.1, and Claude Opus 4 (non-reasoning).
According to Alibaba’s own tests, Qwen-3-Max shows:
Better complex instruction following
Handling of subjective, open-ended tasks
More robust tool invocation
They didn’t drop a full technical report yet, so independent benchmarks are still TBD. Alibaba wants to show it can match U.S. labs in sheer size, even if OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 is still bigger (5–7T params).
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Founded by a former Zillow exec, Pacaso’s co-ownership tech reshapes the $1.3T vacation home market. They’ve earned $110M+ in gross profit to date, including 41% YoY growth in 2024 alone. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.
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