The Apple/xAI antitrust dispute has been resolved. But I think the more important question it raises is only beginning. xAI and X have dropped their antitrust claims against Apple “with prejudice” after saying the claims had been “resolved.” The terms are confidential. So, for customers, there is no obvious immediate change. - No announced Grok integration into Siri. - No new AI model selector. - No publicly disclosed change to Apple’s App Store rules. But the underlying issu

Trump and Vance have said No to strong regulation of AI. Vance’s response has some inherent clarity to it – the big guys asking for regulation as a way to prevent smaller players from getting a foothold in the market. Trump’s response has been framed more as a 'we've got to beat China' one. Setting aside the question of what a “win” in AI by either nation actually means, what I really question is what happens if the race to win is itself what prevents anyone (not just the US

So, Dario Amodei is now calling for a slowing of the pace of development at the AI frontier, with the others giving their blessing to the proposal. Setting aside what’s in it for them - yes, it would give them an opportunity to consolidate their positions - and the always valid questions around safety, given that capability is advancing faster than our ability to understand, control and govern increasingly powerful AI systems, I’m interested in looking at the proposal from th

Mistral has just raised another €3 billion, valuing the three-year-old French AI company at more than €21 billion. What caught my attention wasn't simply the size of the round. It was who provided the money. Samsung Electronics led it. NVIDIA, ASML, BNP Paribas, Salesforce Ventures and other investors also participated. Given the questions about increasingly circular AI financing, I wanted to understand whether the same thing was happening here. The answer: partly. NVIDIA is

I have to admit that I’ve felt my trust in AI builders slipping lately. The steady accumulation of credible reporting about questionable practices can’t be overlooked. The list involving OpenAI (none of which have yet been proven true, to be clear) includes questions about whether significant safety incidents were disclosed candidly, whether benchmark results had sufficient context, whether published performance claims were later changed, and allegations involving academic re

Last night, I helped my son with some last-minute preparation for an English assessment he is completing today. The task was to compare opposing views on a topic presented by two different sources. On his own, he chose the use of AI by students in schools as the subject. I dutifully helped him work through the arguments on both sides. But I do have a strong view on this topic. Every person should learn how to think critically and develop strong cognitive capability, without t

The masthead of my original hometown The Seattle Times has joined with Newsday to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over scraping paywall news content to train their AI models. The latest in a series of similar suits already ongoing. And Journalism is far from the only subject on which AI builders and major tech vendors are facing legal and legislative pressures. OpenAI just recently expanded its senior policy team to address all of the headwinds. But I think there is a bigger enterpr

AI is moving fast. Keeping up shouldn’t feel like a full-time job or require filling an inbox with a flood of newsletter messages. That’s why Affarico has begun publishing an AI News Archive, a growing library of daily editions that bring together the key news, developments and signals shaping the AI sector. Easily discoverable and searchable. This archive library is publicly accessible with no subscription required. https://www.affarico.com/ai-news-archive AI News Archive ed

AI may democratise capability without democratising power. Yesterday I spoke about the infrastructure underneath AI: data centres, chips, energy, cloud platforms and capital required to build them. But infrastructure does more than enable technology. It concentrates power around those who own and control it. The original promise of the internet was that technology would distribute power outward. It lowered the cost of publishing, communication and access to information, allow

One of the more interesting things in today’s AI news isn’t about which company may have the best model. It’s what is happening underneath the models. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra. Anthropic, Meta and Google are all pushing competing models. At the model layer, competition is increasing and leadership looks increasingly temporary. At the same time, though, Nvidia is moving to acquire Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, potentially bringing one of the most important open-model

One of the largest factors shaping the AI arms race is that it isn’t being fought on a level playing field. For now, maybe. Google has an advantage that is easy to underestimate: it is funding AI investment from the enormous cash flows generated by its existing businesses. That is very different from AI companies that remain dependent on external capital, long-term infrastructure commitments and increasingly complex financing arrangements to sustain the cost of model developm

“Hey… you wanna see something really scary?” That line from 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘡𝘰𝘯𝘦 often comes to mind when I see an AI demo. AI demos are everywhere right now. And don’t get me wrong, many of them are impressive. They show agents completing tasks. They show models summarising information. They show content being generated in seconds. They show automation replacing manual effort. But too many AI demonstrations still fail to answer two critical questions: Who is actu

"Don't explain. Show." Every product demonstration should have this as its core objective. How do you anchor that? With personas. There is a principle from product development that should form the foundation of every product demonstration, but is very frequently missing: User Stories. In product development, we frame requirements around a person: As a [user], I want to [do something], so that [outcome]. That structure forces technology to be connected to human use. Who is usi

Sales is the most important function of any commercial business. While this holds true for every company, it is especially obvious in B2B environments, where revenue generation is rarely the result of simple transactions or marketing campaigns. The same reality applies even to early-stage companies executing a product-led growth playbook; the moment a human conversation is required to cross the chasm into a closed B2B sale, the lack of an operational sales system can break