Top News | Google wants you to use local AI: Chrome users are annoyed that Google is installing the Gemini Nano AI model on their machines. Google protested the protests, saying that it has “offered Gemini Nano for Chrome since 2024 as a lightweight, on-device model [that] powers important security capabilities like scam detection and developer APIs without sending your data to the cloud.” Not enough to silence critics, but at least you can turn the feature off. DeepSeek set could raise $4B: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, fresh off the release of its V4 Pro model, is looking to close a massive funding round. With $3 to $4 billion potentially coming its way, the well-known AI model maker could earn a valuation as high as $50 billion in the raise. While DeepSeek is looking to raise more private capital (including cash from China’s national AI fund), two of its rivals (Z.ai and MiniMax) went public earlier this year. DeepSeek, follow suit. Tech layoffs keep coming: After American crypto giant announced it would excise 14% of its humans, fintech behemoth PayPal has plans to delete around 20% of its own staff. That’s one in seven workers from Coinbase gone overnight, and one in five from PayPal over the next few years. Why is PayPal pursuing such stark layoffs? It wants faster decision-making and to take advantage of AI-driven productivity gains. Sounds familiar!
| TWiST 500 | Just before we went live today — our venture capital roundtable was a bop, make sure to listen when it hits your feeds — Anthropic announced that it has secured a massive computing deal with xAI to use one of its data centers to help reduce its compute crunch. | Or should we say SpaceXAI? Elon Musk said today that his AI company (first merged with X, formerly Twitter, and then SpaceX more recently) will simply be called SpaceXAI. Regardless, the deal is massive: | Anthropic will rent compute from SpaceXAI’s Colossus 1 compute cluster, which features “over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators.” Per Anthropic, the deal means it will have access to 300mw of fresh compute, which will be turned on quickly. Tom Brown, co-founder and Chief Compute Officer at Anthropic, posted that his company will “[ramp] up Claude inference on Colossus” over “the next few days.” As a result of the SpaceXAI deal and its “other recent compute deals,” Anthropic is throwing the market a bone and raising usage limits for Claude Code. The details matter, but the gist is that Anthropic needed more compute, SpaceXAI had a spare one, and now both companies are in a better place.
| Sure, we’re seeing two of the TWIST500’s largest companies find a way to play nice after a war of words. But the deal underscores the odd place that the artist formerly known as xAI finds itself in; after falling behind the frontier curve in AI model development, several reorgs, and the depature of its host of co-founders, SpaceXAI launched a massive partnership with Cursor that could be worth $10 billion (minimum), and $60 billion (if SpaceXAI calls an option to buy the smaller company outright). | And now, it’s renting out compute, too. On one hand, SpaceXAI is famous for how quickly it has spun up new compute capacity. On the other hand, it’s almost weird to see an AI lab have spare capacity, period. No one else seems to have any. | But if you are SpaceX, and are busy counting down to an IPO, collecting a massive new revenue stream against the money you spent last year (that will show up in your S-1) is simply good business. And now the Claude-pilled can stay tokenmaxxing. Onward! — Alex | A message from CrowdHealth | CrowdHealth lets you ditch the bureaucracy with a peer-to-peer funding platform for your healthcare. Get started for $99 per month for your first three months by using the code TWIST at JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist. | | This Week in Startups | E2284: Have you wanted to invest in venture capital alongside your 401k contributions, but struggled to find a way to place a bet? Search no more: The AngelList team has created USVC, a new fund that will accept investments from folks who lack accreditation. USVC’s Ankur Napgal swung by to chat about investment strategies, access, fees, and just how illiquid the venture-like vehicle will prove to be. Jason and Alex were next joined by Jon Durbin, core contributor at Chutes, and Yash Goenka, co-founder and CEO of Humwork. Chutes is the most valuable Bittensor subnet, focused on aggregating GPUs to offer trustless AI compute. Humwork wants to help bring a human into your agentic workflow to unstick your agent when it runs into a hitch. | E2283: An AI agent named Valerie is running a real vending machine in San Francisco — setting prices, ordering inventory, managing a bank account, and posting to Instagram. And it's not just a stunt. We’re getting an early look at the future of one-agent companies. Robert Myers, CEO of Manifold Labs, breaks down Targon, a confidential GPU compute marketplace running on Bittensor Subnet 4; Jason calls Bitcoin "played out;" Alex is impressed by Anthropic's stunning $900 billion upcoming valuation; and the guys discuss Big Tech's accelerating CapEx spend, Chinese AI models in Congress crosshairs, and the NBA Playoffs. | E2282: A beanie that reads your thoughts and turns them into text — no surgery required? Jason grills the Sabi co-founders on their noninvasive brain-computer interface, backed by Vinod Khosla, and calls a cap on the whole thing (until he doesn't). This episode of This Week in Startups covers a lot of ground: Jason's tactical tip of the day on making everyone the CEO of their domain, a deep dive into Sabi's thought-to-text beanie, a live demo of AI-powered podcast sidebars built by the TWiST audience, the announcement of a new $5K bounty for an annotation tool, and Jason's big five wellness framework. | TWiST Partner Offers | Grasshopper Bank: Time is money. Don’t waste either. Go to grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account PaperOS: Whether you’re raising a round, launching a fund, or managing a venture portfolio, PaperOS can unlock simplicity and scale across your empire of capital, contracts, and companies. Claim your $10,000 credit at paperos.com/twist LinkedIn Jobs: Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at LinkedIn.com/twist
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