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Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On May 18, 2012, Facebook held its IPO on Nasdaq at $38 per share, raising $16 billion, the largest tech IPO in U.S. history at that point. The debut was immediately marred by a technical glitch at Nasdaq that delayed trading by 30 minutes and confused investor orders; more than 80 million shares changed hands in the first 30 seconds once trading finally opened. The stock closed its first day at just $38.23 and fell below the offering price the very next session, leading the Wall Street Journal to call it a "fiasco", though Meta's market cap today exceeds $1.4 trillion.
What’s happening:
🤖 Anthropic and OpenAI control 89% of paid AI revenue
🍎 Apple to relaunch Siri with privacy-first features at WWDC
🎓 Eric Schmidt booed at Arizona commencement over AI remarks
🖥️ Microsoft spent billions on AI that nobody actually uses
🤖 LinkedIn to limit reach of AI-generated posts in feeds
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
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Hand-picked news:
🤖 2 companies control 89% of paid AI revenue ↗️LINK
Thirty-four major private AI startups generated $80 billion in annualized revenue this month, a 112% jump in six months, but Anthropic and OpenAI alone claimed 89% of that total.
OpenAI leads at $55 billion in annualized revenue, Anthropic follows at $15 billion, with Cursor a distant third at $2.7 billion. Elon Musk's xAI didn't crack the top five.
Top VC firms including Sequoia and Founders Fund are hedging by investing in both companies simultaneously, which analysts say is actively reinforcing the oligopoly rather than challenging it.
🍎 Apple to relaunch Siri at WWDC ↗️LINK
Apple will unveil a standalone Siri app at its June developer conference, offering a ChatGPT-style chatbot experience with auto-deleting conversations after 30 days or one year.
The app runs on Google Gemini under the hood, though Apple plans to lead with privacy messaging, including stricter limits on how long user data is stored compared to rival chatbots.
Bloomberg's Gurman notes Apple may be using privacy as cover for Siri's capability gaps, which gets complicated when Google is the one actually handling some of the security.
🎓 Eric Schmidt booed at Arizona commencement ↗️LINK
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was jeered by roughly 10,000 University of Arizona graduates after acknowledging fears that AI would eliminate jobs and leave their generation inheriting a broken world.
The backlash follows a near-identical scene at the University of Central Florida days earlier, where a real estate exec was booed for calling AI the next Industrial Revolution.
Pew Research finds about half of Americans feel more concerned than excited about AI, which puts commencement speakers urging graduates to "shape AI" in an increasingly awkward position.
🖥️ Microsoft spent billions on AI that nobody actually uses ↗️LINK
Less than 3% of Microsoft 365's 450 million users actively use Copilot despite it being pre-installed in Windows 11 and Office, and only 15 million have paid for premium AI features.
Former Microsoft VP Mat Velloso, who also held senior AI roles at Google and Meta, says Microsoft missed the AI wave like it missed mobile and internet, calling for an internal factory reset.
OEMs built NPU chips into laptops at Microsoft's urging specifically to run Windows AI features, and Velloso says not a single valuable use case was ever built for those chips.
🤖 LinkedIn to limit reach of AI-generated posts in feeds ↗️LINK
LinkedIn will stop recommending posts it identifies as AI-generated slop, including engagement bait, recycled thought leadership, and telltale AI phrases like "it's not X, it's Y."
The platform won't remove flagged posts entirely but will hide them from recommendations, keeping them visible only to a user's direct connections and followers.
LinkedIn still offers its own "rewrite with AI" button in the post composer, so the crackdown targets content without original ideas, not AI assistance itself.
Today’s Poll:
Do you feel more concerned or excited about AI's impact?
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think Europe can actually build its own AI infrastructure in just two years?
A) Yes - 41%
B) No - 59% 🏆
Reader’s opinion:
“Four years, but it can be done. Energy first — but Europe has been forced to pivot since the invasion of Ukraine. Note that Russia seems to be disappearing in the rear-view mirror when it comes to AI.”
“Europe will waste the 2 years squabbling amongst each other.”
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