Top News
Google drops Gemini 3.5 Flash: The hyper-scaler introduced its latest model while kicking off their annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday, touting it as their strongest release yet for coding, research projects, managing agents, and research projects. (The big claim: In internal tests, 3.5 Flash built its own proprietary operating system from scratch.) TechCrunch suggests this is the start of a new direction for The Goog, away from framing AI as a conversational tool and search add-on and toward more coding and independent, agentic use. To that end, they’ve introduced a new version of the Antigravity agentic coding app, dubbed “Antigravity 2.0,” which includes an updated desktop version, a CLI tool, and an SDK for custom workflows. CEO Sundar Pichai told conference attendees that Google now processes a staggering 3.2 quadrillion AI tokens each month, up from a scant 480 trillion just one year ago.
DeepMind CEO rejects job loss concerns: Also at I/O 2026, DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis pushed back against the apparently widespread belief that AI tools will lead to mass unemployment. In comments to Wired, Hassabis said that it’s too soon to speak about the impact of AI with any degree of certainty, and suggested that there may be “an ulterior motive for putting those messages out,” including “raising money or whatever.” At DeepMind, he says, the assumption is that, if AI tools in fact make workers significantly more productive, smart companies will want to accomplish far more tasks in less time, thus prompting them to hire even more humans, not fewer. Could this utopian vision turn around some of the increasingly negative sentiment around AI among the mainstream US population?
Jury rejects Musk’s OpenAI suit: A nine-person jury in Oakland, California took just two hours to reject Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, which accused the company and leaders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of violating their founding agreement to maintain non-profit status. The jury did not consider Musk’s central claims, rejecting the case on the basis that he’d failed to file the suit before the statute of limitations had expired. This ruling clears a significant remaining hurdle as OpenAI continues down the long road toward an IPO.
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AND SPEAKING OF FORMER OPENAI EXPATS…
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy — who exited the startup in 2017, then rejoined the firm in 2023, and once again walked away in 2024 to start his own company, Eureka Labs — announced that he’s once more taking a role at a major AI lab… But this time, at Anthropic!
The coiner of “vibecoding” and creator of the AutoResearch protocol posted to X on Tuesday that he’s joining Team Anthropic and looking forward to getting “back to R&D.” TechCrunch adds that he’ll be working on a team dedicated to accelerating pre-training research for Claude, a sign that the company is focused not just on scaling up their compute capacity but improving the user experience of employing LLMs for personal research. (It’s unclear whether or not Karpathy will be balancing this work with ongoing Eureka Labs efforts, or if he’s quietly folding up that project.)
In other T500 news, Polymarket announced a new partnership with Nasdaq Private Market. But this is not a standard marketing partnership agreement! Instead, Nasdaq will serve as Polymarket’s new “resolution data provider,” sharing more transparent and verifiable settlements for contracts relating to private companies and their value. Previously, Polymarket has relied exclusively on publicly available information for contracts relating to high profile private companies and IPO events. They’ll now support a “broader range of event contracts,” which can theoretically resolve before some of these companies go public.
Finally, another entry for the T500 “Maybe Pile,” consisting of startups that we’re considering for inclusion on the list. Radar, which helps retailers manage their inventory and cut back on lost merchandise, raised a $170 million Series B, bringing their value into the $1 billion-plus unicorn range. Clothing giant American Eagle is an early customer, and their CEO Jay Schottenstein is also an investor. Sounds like a startup to keep on our collective… well, radar. Sometimes the puns write themselves. – Lon
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This Week in Startups
E2290: Multiple 2026 commencement addresses have been interrupted by a chorus of boos when the speakers raised the topic of AI innovation. Why are America’s students SO NEGATIVE about the prospect of working with AI tools, and is it too late to turn things around. Jason and Alex discuss the growing backlash to datacenters, AI apps, and technology more generally among mainstream Americans, why it’s happening, and whether it’s still fixable. PLUS thoughts on how OpenAI and Anthropic gained such massive dominance in terms of actual AI-related revenue, and the growing visibility of Flock Safety’s surveillance network.
E2289: Self-driving just stopped being a science problem and became an engineering challenge instead. That's the through-line of today’s double-header with the CEOs of two of the most important AV companies in the world — Wayve's Alex Kendall and Waabi's Raquel Urtasun. Between them: ~$2B raised in the last six months, Uber as a partner, Nissan and Volvo as OEMs, and a shared bet that end-to-end AI plus world models beats Waymo's city-by-city map-and-pray approach. If you want to understand the state of the self-driving industry beyond recent Waymo announcements, this is the episode for you.
E2288: Anthropic just declared every unauthorized secondary sale of its stock "void" — naming Hiive, Forge, Sydecar, Upmarket, and others in a public hit list. Jason and Alex sit down with Jenny Fielding (Everywhere Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical VC), and Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures) to unpack what the AI lab’s move to limit secondary trades means for SPV operators, brokers, and the founders trying to keep control of their cap tables. Plus: a real story of a founder who returned a $15M Series A six months after closing because Claude was going to eat his startup, SaaS moats, and just what does it mean to be rich?
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