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I've been keeping a running doc of AI developments, funding rounds, and new tools I think actually matter, partly to stop drowning in the timeline, partly because every AI newsletter I came across was either high-noise or links with no take.

Some of you started asking me to forward it. So: same doc, slightly polished, once a week. If you're reading this, you're on it because I sent it to you.

What lands in your inbox:

- One lead item with a thesis I'll defend.
- 8–15 blurbs on what actually moved: models, money, infra, agents, robotics, tools.
- Fluff watch when the week earns one.

What won't: cheap PR rewrites, "AI is transforming [industry]" fluff, founder thread theatre, paid placements. Nobody pays for this. The bar is the one I had when I was the only reader.

5 minutes. Weekly. Opinionated. Occasionally wrong. Never padded.

Reply anytime. To push back, cover something I missed, to tell me I called something wrong. Forward freely to anyone you'd actually want in the room.

— Mike

Cerebras IPO priced 30M shares at $185 (above $150-160 range), raising $5.55B. Sets reference pricing for upcoming SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic listings - Link

DeepMind’s co-founder Demis Hassabis raises $2.1B Isomorphic Labs Series B to “solve all disease”. Given Hassabis’ drive and focus demonstrated so far (i.e. AlphaGo, AlphaFold) it’s definitely one to watch! - Link

Recursive Superintelligence raises $650M. Founder pedigree spans DeepMind, FAIR, OpenAI, Salesforce AI. Will neolab models get to self-improving AI before established ones evolve into AGI? - Link

Exaforce raises $125M Series B at $725M for agentic security operations. Real-time security knowledge graph vs LLM-wrapper alert triage. SF based, founded in 2023, ~130 employees - Link

Judgment Labs raises a combined $32M (Seed + Series A) from Lightspeed only 6 months apart to surface agents failure patterns across thousands of interactions for the team to fix - Link

Config raises $27M oversubscribed seed (Samsung-led) for 'TSMC of robot data'. Underexplored vertical (robotics training data infra) with anchor strategic customers across Korean industrial giants - Link

ChatGPT Finance launches with Plaid links to 12,000+ US institutions. Connections to Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, Amex, Capital One. Spending dashboards, net-worth tracking, portfolio analytics - Link

Anthropic Claude for Legal ships 12 plugins, 20+ MCP connectors. MCP connectors include Thomson Reuters, DocuSign, Box, Harvey, Relativity, Everlaw. First frontier lab to ship vertical MCP-connector suite that calls existing legal-tech apps as tools - Link

Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business: think QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot inside Cowork. 15 pre-built workflows (payroll, monthly close, invoice chasing, lead triage), 15 reusable skills, connectors for Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack - Link

PwC commits to roll out Claude Code and Cowork starting US, expanding to 364,000-person global workforce - Link

Figure 03 humanoid run 24+ hours sorting 28,000+ packages with zero teleoperation (allegedly). First public multi-day continuous humanoid shift. Sets the deployment-credibility benchmark for warehouse/logistics - Live Stream

OpenBMB MiniCPM-V 4.6 (1.3B parameters) ships sub-2B SOTA multimodal with up to 262K context for phones. First credible on-device VLM with video and up to 262K context inside a phone thermal envelope, it unlocks offline assistants and edge document workflows - Link

Notion ships Developer Platform: Workers, External Agent API, DB sync to Salesforce/Zendesk/Postgres. It’s repositioning from note-taking tool to programmable agent orchestration hub. Direct competition with Zapier/n8n on workflow execution surface - Live announcement

Cursor 3.4: multi-repo cloud agent environments, Dockerfile layer caching 70% faster. Cloud agents now support multi-repo environments with shared config. Materially changes how teams parallelize coding agents - Link

Higgsfield introduces Supercomputer to complete end-to-end tasks, powered by Hermes. It can analyze your video, evaluate virality, produce novel channel specific content and iterate. Autonomously, on a schedule - Link

Claude can work autonomously for hours towards a specific outcome with the new /goal function - Link

Claude Agent View simplifies multiple sessions orchestration - Link

Your Hermes Agent can now search X posts (with X Premium, via Grok) - Link

Codex available in the ChatGPT app, finally a mobile remote control - Link

Stumbled upon VoiceBox, an open-source alternative to ElevenLabs. Not quite at the same quality output yet, but just fine to get your agent speak to you for free - GitHub repo

Circle announced the Circle Agent Stack, a suite of tools designed specifically for AI agents as autonomous economic participants. Agent Wallets, Circle CLI, Agent Marketplace, M2M Nanopayments. This positions USDC as core payment rails for AI agents - Link

Venice AI secured a strategic partnership with StrikeRobot, positioning itself as AI backend infrastructure for humanoids - Link

Former a16z partner Katie Haun's firm closed a new $1B fund targeting the agentic economy. Direct competitor to a16z crypto's $2.2B fund announced May 5 - Link

Did I miss anything? Hit reply and let me know.

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