This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jun 13, 2025)
TL;DR - 💥 LA vs National Guard; ⭐️The Gentle Singularity; 🤝 Meta's multibillion investment into Scale AI
Hey folks!
TGIF - Tech news below.
TL;DR -
💥 Los Angeles vs National Guard: Hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city on Sunday, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids through the week (NYT live updates). There were also demonstrations across the US, including Seattle, St Louis, San Antonio and more.
⭐️“The Gentle Singularity”: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a new blog post claiming humanity has passed the AI event horizon
🤝 Meta Platforms agreed to make a $15bn, 49% investment into the data-labeling startup Scale AI. It’s Meta’s largest external investment in AI yet. Meta would put Scale AI’s CEO in charge of a new “superintelligence” lab
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
😎 Outlook for the summer: Most economists think the prospects of a recession are higher than they were at the beginning of the year but lower than in April and early May, when tariffs on China had been increased by 145%. Three major risks loom large:
The US labor market is in an “uneasy" equilibrium where companies aren’t hiring but reluctant to fire.
Delinquency rates on consumer debt have been on the rise for a year, meaning there could be a slowdown in consumer spending ahead. Plus, home sellers outnumber buyers by ~500k, meaning home prices could fall as much 1% this year.
Financial-market shocks or abrupt sentiment changes remain a wild card. Officials hit pause on rate cuts this year amid concerns that tariffs might create new inflation risks, and the uncertainty triggered by Trump’s sudden and seemingly arbitrary announcements of tariffs has upended the outlook for sales this year.
📈 Meanwhile - the IPO market may be looking up: Klarna is still expected to go public this year, as are Discord, the chat app, and Figma, the software design company. The number of new listings as of June 5 is the highest since 2021.
🇺🇸🇨🇳The U.S. and China agreed on a "framework" to implement a trade deal struck last month. Why it matters: Progress on trade peace with China, particularly if it resolves the issue of Chinese rare earth minerals exports, would be a boon to the economy and markets, which have struggled for months with the impact of President Trump's tariff program.
🇨🇳 China now owns 20% of global ad market. Why it matters: Chinese ad sellers are finding enormous success selling ads to audiences globally, especially in the United States. But U.S. tech giants are still largely banned from China.
🇦🇹🇮🇳Global tragedies: A school shooting in Austria resulted in 11 casualties, including the shooter. The attack was the among the worst European school shootings. A 200 person passenger flight crashed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, killing all but 1.
President Donald Trump is planning to sign another executive order extending the deadline to enforce a law to ban or force a sale of TikTok in the U.S. This will be the third time the president has pushed off the deadline. (Quick MAU count: Instagram still leads w 1.5bn MAU, while Tiktok has 1.16bn, Snap has 900M)
😳 Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted all 17 members of the expert panel that makes vaccine policy recommendations to the CDC this week. RFK's replacements are expected to introduce anti-vaccine ideology to the panel.
🇺🇸Immigration war - it’s complicated: How comfortable are Americans with deporting millions of immigrants who paid taxes, built families and committed no crimes after coming here illegally? An estimated 14 million unauthorized immigrants live here — many of them working and paying taxes. The White House is pushing to hit a target of 3,000 immigration arrests a day - 3x the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump's term. Read more on Axios’ column.
💥 Los Angeles vs National Guard: Hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city on Sunday, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids through the week (NYT live updates). There were also demonstrations across the US, including Seattle, St Louis, San Antonio and more.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🪞Maybe they got the idea from Korean skin care: Apple’s WWDC conference was this week and they announced a refreshed user interface called Liquid Glass, which features shiny, reflective, and transparent visual interface elements that give the software a more “glassy” look and feel. But many think Apple’s announcements were lackluster and are evidence that Apple is still figuring out its AI strategy. For example, the company didn't offer a concrete timeline for the improved Siri that was originally promised last year. Other updates include:
New Live Translation brings real-time language translation to Messages, FaceTime, and calls, with processing done locally on-device to maintain privacy.
Visual intelligence now analyzes on-screen content, letting users search for similar products
The Shortcuts app gains AI-powered intelligent actions and the ability to use ChatGPT for automation processes
“Workout Buddy” debuts on Apple Watch, using AI to generate personalized voice coaching during exercise based on real-time biometric data and history.
🤯Give us your ad business or we’ll sue: X launched an extraordinary pressure campaign to strong-arm advertisers, including threatening legal action. At least six companies that had either received lawsuit threats or were pressured have caved into ad deals with X. The platform’s tactics have generated a climate of fear on Madison Avenue.
👻👓 Snap plans to launch a new version of its augmented reality glasses, called Specs, in 2026. Why it matters: Snapchat still makes most of its money from advertising on its mobile app, but CEO Evan Spiegel believes the future of connection, and its business, will live beyond the smartphone and in the real world.
Walmart plans to offer deliveries using drones from Alphabet subsidiary Wing from 100 stores in five new U.S. cities.
Amazon announced that it plans to invest $20 billion in Pennsylvania to expand its AI data centers.
Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company to cable channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT and the streaming service HBO Max, announced that it plans split into two publicly traded companies, parting its television networks from its streaming business. WBD Streaming & Studios will include HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios. WBD Global Networks will include CNN, TNT Sports U.S. and Discovery. Executives say WBD's tax-free transaction allows each business to pursue bigger deals immediately following the close of this deal.
🤖 AI News
⭐️“The Gentle Singularity”: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a new blog post claiming humanity has passed the AI event horizon — predicting superintelligence will reshape society, but its changes will remain manageable. Altman frames the takeoff as a “gentle singularity,” where society adapts to exponential progress as once-amazing capabilities quickly become routine. His timeline includes the AI creating new ideas in 2026, robots functioning in the real world in 2027, and an explosion of creation across industries.
Disney, NBCU are suing Midjourney over copyright infringement. Why it matters: It's the first legal action that major Hollywood studios have taken against a generative AI company.
📈OpenAI says it recently hit $10 billion in ARR, up from around $5.5 billion last year. The figure includes revenue from OpenAI’s consumer and business products, as well as its API. The company is targeting $125 billion in revenue by 2029. Lucky for us - OpenAI also announced a stark price cut for its o3 "reasoning" model, slashing the price by 80%.
Mistral announced its first family of "reasoning" AI models named Magistral. Magistral works through problems step-by-step for improved consistency and reliability across topics such as math and physics.
🇨🇳📝 🧑🏻🎓Major Chinese tech companies temporarily blocked AI features during the country’s gaokao university entrance exams, aiming to prevent cheating among the 13M+ test-taking students competing for limited university spots. Why it matters: AI is causing chaos throughout the education system, with pre-ChatGPT testing methods and assignments proving no match for today’s models — and educators having few ways to stop it. Schooling is in for a complete overhaul in the AI era.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Walt Disney Co. will pay $438.7 million more to Comcast to complete its purchase of the Hulu streaming service.
Doordash is buying advertising technology company Symbiosys for $175 million, a deal that will help restaurants and other advertisers on DoorDash place ads on external sites and apps.
Tencent Music is buying Chinese podcasting startup Ximalaya Inc. for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.
Fundraising
Glean, an enterprise search startup, raised $150 million at a $7.2 billion valuation. This is the third round of funding the company has raised since the beginning of 2024.
Pactum AI, which helps companies automatically negotiate with their suppliers, raised $54 million in a Series C.
Laurel, an AI timekeeping startup, raised $100 million in Series C funding
Beewise, which uses AI and robotics to monitor the health of beehives, raised $50 million in a Series D
Definely, a London-based startup that develops AI legal tools, raised $30 million in Series B
Partnerships
Meta Platforms agreed to make a $15bn, 49% investment into the data-labeling startup Scale AI. It’s Meta’s largest external investment in AI yet. Meta would put Scale AI’s CEO in charge of a new “superintelligence” lab, along with other top Scale technical employees. Between the lines
Skirting regulators’ criticism: Meta’s choice to take a 49% stake in Scale seemed to be a barely-veiled attempt to skirt regulatory scrutiny, similar to the way Microsoft and Google hired the startup CEOs of Inflection and Character.AI, respectively, without fully buying out their startups.
Implications for Meta’s enterprise ambitions: Scale could also help Meta get its open-source Llama model into more enterprises as well, a goal the company has struggled with, given that it doesn't have a cloud business like Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Impacting the market: The Scale-Meta deal could portend to a broader trend of AI labs bringing data labeling in-house.
IPO
Voyager Technologies shares jumped by 82% in their trading debut, after the defense and space firm raised $383 million in an upsized initial public offering.
Bullish, the crypto exchange and owner of news publication CoinDesk, has confidentially filed paperwork for a US initial public offering
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
Cool: Researchers just discovered that the Dead Sea Scrolls may be up to a full century older than previously estimated after training an AI system called Enoch to analyze ancient patterns and combining it with radiocarbon dating techniques
Not cool: College students are so conflict avoidant they’re using “no contact orders”, originally designed to protect victims of sexual harassment or assault on college campuses, to avoid interpersonal conflict. The disputes can be as minor as stolen bagels or awkward social run-ins.
🏆🇫🇷🎾Coco Gauff won her first French open and her second Grand Slam title. She’s the first American to win the French Open since Serena Williams in 2015. Carlos Alcaraz beat top-ranked Jannik Sinner for the men’s title.
✈️ PSA Airline prices have fallen for 3 mos: The decline is partly a result of sluggish demand; economic anxiety and concern about tariff-driven price increases have prompted many Americans to rethink their travel plans. It’s not yet recessionary, ppl are just more cautious. There’s also an “elevated level of anxiety” among foreigners who are concerned about detentions at the border.
💕💻 Browser Dating is an experimental dating platform that matches users based on their last 5,000 browser searches.
🤨 People are hating on Sabrina Carpenter’s latest IG post that might be her album cover? (kinda NSFW)
thank God: peak millennial is apparently back in fashion. Say hello again to big hair (“the higher the hair, the closer to God”), wired headphones, hair accessories, DVDs and cassettes, and Pokemon.
🏆 The 78th annual Tony Awards happened Sunday and they were graced by the presence of the original cast of "Hamilton" — including Lin-Manuel Miranda —who performed a medley of its biggest songs to mark the musical's 10th anniversary. The biggest winner of the night was “Maybe Happy Ending,” about two discarded robots who go on a road trip; it won six awards — the most of any show — including best new musical. Also unexpected - remember Pussycat Dolls? Nicole Scherzinger was named Best Leading Actress.
🧢 What’s on his hat?! 😉 Pope Leo XIV — a Chicago native — wears a Chicago White Sox cap yesterday in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican.
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