io, io, it's off to work they go

Top News

• OpenAI acquiring Jony Ive’s io: The Godfather of the TWiST 500, OpenAI, announced plans to pick up the Apple veteran’s startup for a cool $6.5 billion in an all-stock deal. It’s the largest acquisition in OpenAI history and strongly suggests the company plans to start releasing AI-powered devices, hopefully with the same iconic appeal and pop culture impact as Ive’s work on the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Apple Watch. Though Steve Jobs once called Ive his “spiritual partner,” the design guru has not worked with the company once during Tim Cook’s tenure. Fortunately, everything else is going so well for Apple’s AI division! <cough>

• Google introduces Veo 3 engine: During its I/O developer conference, the Gemini factory debuted a number of AI model upgrades. The hottest of the new hotness was Veo 3, an upgrade to Google’s text-to-video generator that can now produce realistic clips with both crisp visuals and synchronized sounds. For example, this entirely AI-generated clip of a stand-up comedian telling a joke in a comedy club. (Sure, the joke is bad, but it realistically looks like a guy telling a bad joke! You have to give them that!)

• Shopify debuts new AI tools: The e-commerce giant dropped a number of new features to help merchants improve their stores and enhance their customers’ online shopping experience, while also upgrading their AI “commerce assistant,” Sidekick, with voice chat and screen sharing powers. Arguably the biggest upgrade (and a new rival to a number of other agentic startups in an increasingly crowded space) is an AI store builder, allowing merchants to very quickly create and personalize their websites from prompts rather than code.

TWiST500

When Alex brought up France’s OpenAI rival Mistral on Wednesday’s show, Jason expressed a bit of surprise that they are still an ongoing concern. And it’s true that, at least here in the States, they’re not often named directly alongside major players like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity.

But perhaps it’s too soon to count the “Le Chat” maker out of the race. This week, one of continental Europe’s key contributors to the TWiST 500 dropped their latest coding-forward model, Devstral, developed in concert with All Hands AI.

Mistral claims that Devstral already outperforms similar models like Google’s Gemma 3 27B and DeepSeek’s V3 on the SWE-Bench Verified test. And this is just the first step, a small proof-of-concept model that’s being used as the basis for a “larger agentic coding model that will will be available in the coming weeks.”

Devstral is actually light enough to run on a single Mac with 32GB RAM (you can download it right now via Hugging Face). And it’s available for unrestricted commercial use via the permissive Apache 2.0 open-source license.

This all sounds promising, but Mistral is nonetheless entering a staggeringly crowded marketplace for AI coding assistants, with players like Google, OpenAI, Windsurf, and others all vying for the same (admittedly large) userbase of developers. Does this plucky upstart have what it takes to slay these various Goliaths? We’re certainly pulling for them. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2128: On a rare Alex-free episode of TWiST, Lon and Jason update viewers on the latest in the Rippling vs. Deel corporate espionage saga, which now has more chapters than the Jason Bourne franchise. Plus are Firecrawl’s AI agent job postings just a marketing stunt(?), Jason’s thoughts on spotting “world class design,” and a chat with Prandtl Dynamics CEO Parth Mahendru about his innovative sonic anti-drone systems.

E2127: Jason, Lon and Alex reflect on Microsoft’s cutthroat move of laying off 6,000 staffers even as it rakes in record profits, in a demonstration of just how series tech companies are about austerity and leaning on advancements in AI. Plus, they wonder aloud if AI startup Windsurf is selling itself too early and greet Jeremy Redman of Airfive to talk about his bold new prepaid SaaS model.

E2126: Podcast giant and Florida transplant Dave Rubin is Jason’s special guest on a politics and media-heavy edition of TWiST. Plus Jason and Alex talk the Chime IPO, Databricks major bet on agentic AI, startups offering Postgres as a service, and more.

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