W hen Lunos, an AI startup in New York City, was gearing up for launch, its founder and chief executive, Duncan Barrigan, and his team wanted to make a splash. So they shelled out $3,500 to do the unconventional: hire a horse and a cowboy to lasso the bull of Wall Street. Wearing ranch gear and a western hat stamped with the Lunos logo, he lassoed the bull's horns as invitees and curious passersby watched. He and the horse then circled the statue, handing out cowboy hats and branded stress balls. The goal was simple: deliver Lunos's pitch of "taming the wild west" of accounts receivables in the most literal, public way possible.

Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

Here's What You Should Know About Launching an AI Startup AI startups say the promise of turning dazzling models into useful products is harder than anyone expected. Three founders discuss what it takes. Julie Bornstein thought it would be a cinch to implement her idea for an AI startup . Her résumé in digital commerce is impeccable: VP of ecommerce at Nordstrom, COO of the startup Stitch Fix, and founder of a personalized shopping platform acquired by Pinterest . Fashion has been her obsession since she was a Syracuse high schooler inhaling spreads in Seventeen and hanging out in local malls.

Jeff Bezos has a unique set of management practices he used and espoused during his time as CEO of Amazon. Amazon founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos honed his leadership philosophy running one of the world's largest companies. Project Prometheus, which Bezos co-founded with scientist Vik Bajaj, will use AI to accelerate engineering and manufacturing in fields like aerospace and automobiles, the New York Times reported. The startup has $6.2 billion in funding, sourced in part from Bezos himself, and employees counted in the dozens, some of whom were poached from leading AI labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. As co-CEO with Bajaj, Bezos is back in a formal executive post for the first time since stepping down from Amazon in 2021.

OpenAI has committed to buying billions of dollars worth of compute from AWS--the latest in a string of major deals brokered by the AI startup. OpenAI has signed a multi-year deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion worth of AWS cloud infrastructure to train its models and serve its users. The deal is yet another sign of the AI industry becoming increasingly entangled, with OpenAI now at the center of major partnerships with industry players including Google, Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD. The AWS agreement is also notable because OpenAI rose to prominence in part through its partnership with Microsoft--Amazon's biggest cloud rival. Amazon is also a major backer of one of OpenAI's key competitors, Anthropic.

Thousands of entrepreneurs are trying to rebuild the economy around AI. I set out to see how they're actually doing it. Earth, it's said, is home to more than 10,000 AI startups. The figure is a guess, of course--startups come, startups go. But last year, more than 2,000 of them got their first round of funding. As investors shovel their billions into AI, it's worth asking: What are all these creatures of the boom doing? I decided to approach as many recent AI founders as I could. The goal was not to try to pick winners but to see what it's like, on the ground, to build AI products--how AI tools have changed the nature of their work; how terrifying it is to compete in a crowded field.

'The ludicrous valuations of AI startups are predicated on the idea that this technology has the power to eliminate the very need for human labor.' 'The ludicrous valuations of AI startups are predicated on the idea that this technology has the power to eliminate the very need for human labor.' AI will make the rich unfathomably richer. Is this really what we want? The'knowledge economy' promised cultural and social growth. Instead, we got worsening inequality and division. R ecently, Palantir - a tech corporation that boasts no fewer than five billionaire executives - announced its Q2 earnings: over a billion dollars generated in a single quarter.

On a sunny day in San Francisco, along the city's waterfront, families dived into the wacky world of artificial intelligence inside the Exploratorium museum. Visitors made shadow puppets for AI to identify, used AI to generate songs, asked chatbots questions and faced off with AI in a game in which players tried to draw images that only humans would recognize. A giant robot hand moved around and people peered into a video game chip. They jotted down their hopes and worries about AI on cards displayed in the museum. Hope: AI will cure cancer.

Despite suggestions it has been losing its edge, California is way ahead of others when it comes to the hottest technology right now: artificial intelligence. The regions around San Francisco, San José and Los Angeles are among the best prepped for AI in the country, according to a report released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution. The Washington think tank dubbed the San Francisco and San José metropolitan areas "superstars" when it comes to AI readiness. Three out of the top 10 city regions most ready for AI are in California, according to the report. No other state has more than one region in the top 10.

OpenAI published receipts, in the form of a long timeline of emails, texts and legal filings, illustrating that Elon Musk's injunction to prevent OpenAI from converting into a for-profit company runs counter to what he wanted in 2017. Essentially, OpenAI is providing even more evidence to the fact that its former co-founder wanted the AI startup to become a for-profit company and make him CEO. You should read the whole blog to get all of the details (and get a sense for how billionaires email) but the gist is that in 2017, Musk and OpenAI came to an understanding that the then non-profit needed to become a for-profit to "advance its mission" and seemingly capitalize on the public interest earned from its AI beating professional Dota 2 players in one-on-one matches. According to OpenAI, Musk proposed a new board structure where he "would unequivocally have initial control of the company," which OpenAI was opposed to. That led to the disagreements between Musk and OpenAI leadership, and him ultimately leaving the nonprofit's board in 2018.