🪴 Last Week in Tech
xAI has no original co-founders left, a shoe company is now a GPU farm, robots outrun humans, and more
ICYMI, reading time: 5 minutes
A humanoid robot just broke the human half-marathon world record
On Sunday in Beijing, a humanoid robot built by smartphone maker Honor finished a half marathon in 50 minutes 26 seconds. The human world record is 57 minutes. Last year’s winning robot took 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Three times faster in one year of progress.
The humanoid robotics market is projected to hit 1 billion machines by 2050. Sunday’s race is what the early stages of that look like.
The NSA got caught using the AI the Pentagon banned
Anthropic released Claude Mythos earlier this month, a model powerful enough to find zero-day vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser. They refused to release it publicly. Instead they locked it down to around 40 organisations under Project Glasswing.
The Pentagon responded by labelling Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and banning its tools across the Department of Defense.
Then Axios reported that the NSA, which sits inside the Pentagon, is one of the 40 organisations quietly using Mythos to scan its own networks for vulnerabilities.
The Department of Defense is suing Anthropic in court while its own intelligence agency uses the model. The DoD found out from a news article.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with the White House chief of staff and the Treasury Secretary last Friday to discuss government use of Mythos. Both sides called it productive.
Allbirds sold its shoe brand for $39M and pivoted to GPU cloud
Allbirds was once a $4 billion company. The Silicon Valley crowd loved the wool trainers. Then the hype faded, the stock collapsed, and last week the company sold the entire Allbirds brand and its shoe assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million.
What’s left of the company is rebranding as NewBird AI, a GPU-as-a-service and AI compute cloud provider. They raised $50 million from an undisclosed investor to buy high-performance GPUs and lease them to customers who need compute.
Stock up 600% on the news.
TechCrunch compared it to 2017, when a company called Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as a blockchain company and the stock jumped 275%. That one got delisted within a year.
Blue Origin reused a booster for the first time, then lost the payload
New Glenn launched on its third flight on Saturday, successfully recovering and reusing its first-stage booster for the first time. A real milestone for Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, which has been chasing SpaceX’s reusability record for years.
The satellite it was carrying didn’t make it to the intended orbit.
Half a win.
The AI data centre buildout has a PR problem
Activist groups in 24 US states are now actively organising against AI data centers. The complaints are utility bill spikes, water consumption, noise pollution, and land use. There have been ballot measures, council ousters, and isolated vandalism.
65% of Americans now say they oppose new data center facilities being built near them. That number is bipartisan.
Big Tech is committing hundreds of billions to AI infrastructure while communities are voting against the buildings. That tension is going to get harder to ignore.
All 11 original xAI co-founders have left
The last of the original team departed this week. Musk posted on X: “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”
He then hired Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, the two engineers who scaled Cursor to $2 billion in revenue, to lead the rebuild.
xAI was valued at $250 billion as part of its merger with SpaceX in February. The company now has a new leadership team, a new technical direction, and an IPO on the horizon. A lot riding on the rebuild going right.
Revolut wants a $200B valuation
Revolut told investors this week it is targeting a valuation of $150 to $200 billion in its eventual IPO. The company was valued at $75 billion in a secondary sale last year. The CEO says the listing is at least two years away and will be in the US.
The numbers back it up. $6 billion in revenue in 2025. $1.7 billion net profit. 68 million customers. $9 billion in revenue projected for 2026.
It will be one of the biggest fintech IPOs in history. And it won’t be in London, which has been trying to keep Revolut as a UK listing for years. Another one the UK loses.
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