A small team open-sourced Needle: a 26-million-parameter model that mimics Gemini's tool-calling decisions well enough to slot in as a router for agent frameworks. The cost story (orders of magnitude cheaper inference per call) is what the thread keeps circling.

OpenAI is spinning up a separate company whose only job is deploying AI inside other businesses. Thompson reads it as the labs admitting they can't ship transformation by selling raw model access — and predicts every other frontier lab does the same.

Cerebras priced at the top of the range — a $5.55B raise, valuing the AI-chip startup well above its last private round. First major AI-infra IPO since the Anthropic round reset expectations.

Cowen accepts that mass unemployment is unlikely but flags three quieter frictions: AI lowering the floor for entry-level work without raising it for older workers, sectoral mismatch in re-skilling, and managerial reluctance to restructure around AI even when the math says they should.