🇯🇵 Last week was the 19th Nipponbashi Street Festival in Osaka. One parade featured maids from Nipponbashi's maid cafes. While most people know of the maid cafes in Akihabara, Osaka also has many of them in the Nipponbashi area.

🇯🇵 There was a 100-person maid parade in Naniwa, Osaka last year! I love seeing all of the different concepts. Personally, I like the darker/gothic costumes. Some users also asked me what these ladies do. They serve drinks, play games and take pictures. It's very wholesome.

do you understand what ARSENAL just did... 22 years. 8,035 days. That's how long it took Mikel Arteta to bring the Premier League trophy back to North London. They didn't sneak it. They weren't lucky. Arsenal ended the season on 87+ points, broke their own club record for possession and press intensity, and made Man City - the dynasty that owned the last decade - look like a mid-table side chasing them. > First title since 2003-04 Invincibles era > Martin Odegaard lifts the trophy today at Selhurst Park - AWAY ground > Arsenal confirmed champions BEFORE the final day - title sealed by Man City's draw vs Bournemouth > Arteta: from "project" to Premier League champion in 4 seasons > Bus parade scheduled May 31 - one day after the Champions League Final vs PSG The numbers say one thing. The narrative says everything else. A club that was mocked for "almost" seasons, for being a nearly-man project, for trophy drought - just paraded their captain on an opponent's pitch with 22 years of pressure finally lifted. Re-rate Arsenal. Or stay wrong.

2026 #ForbesAI50# Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives, increasingly core to how we work, search for information and express ideas. In the last year, the startups spearheading this paradigm shift have raised gobs of money from venture firms to build applications used by hundreds of millions of people across professions like law, software engineering, banking and even music. Three years into the AI frenzy, startups are starting to prove they can turn lofty ideas into sustainable businesses. That’s evident in Forbes’ eighth annual AI 50 list, which spotlights the most promising privately-held AI companies in the world. See the list: Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka for Forbes Sponsoring Partner @MayfieldFund

2026 #ForbesAI50# Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives, increasingly core to how we work, search for information and express ideas. In the last year, the startups spearheading this paradigm shift have raised gobs of money from venture firms to build applications used by hundreds of millions of people across professions like law, software engineering, banking and even music. Three years into the AI frenzy, startups are starting to prove they can turn lofty ideas into sustainable businesses. That’s evident in Forbes’ eighth annual AI 50 list, which spotlights the most promising privately-held AI companies in the world. See the list: Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka for Forbes Sponsoring Partner @MayfieldFund

2026 #ForbesAI50# Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives, increasingly core to how we work, search for information and express ideas. In the last year, the startups spearheading this paradigm shift have raised gobs of money from venture firms to build applications used by hundreds of millions of people across professions like law, software engineering, banking and even music. Three years into the AI frenzy, startups are starting to prove they can turn lofty ideas into sustainable businesses. That’s evident in Forbes’ eighth annual AI 50 list, which spotlights the most promising privately-held AI companies in the world. See the list: Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka for Forbes Sponsoring Partner @MayfieldFund

Super excited to announce seven new world-class MAI models today. They represent what we consider a new era in AI designed to keep you in control and on the frontier. First is our text foundation model, MAI-Thinking-1, exceptionally strong on reasoning and SWE tasks. - It’s a 35B active parameter MoE with a 256K context window. Independent human raters on Surge prefer it for overall quality in blind side-by-sides versus Sonnet 4.6, and it’s achieved 97% on AIME 2025, the key measure of its general-purpose reasoning abilities. - It's at 53% on SWE Bench Pro, placing it right alongside Opus 4.6 on one of the toughest coding benchmarks. - And since we co-designed our models with our own silicon, MAI-Thinking-1 is optimized on our MAIA 200 chip. Benchmarking head-to-head against the GB200, we see 30% better performance per dollar as well as a 1.4x performance-per-watt gain when running our MAI models on the MAIA 200 end-to-end. Next is MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash variant. Two super strong models now at #2# on the leaderboards, surpassing the score of Nano Banana 2 on image editing. Last for now is MAI-Code-1-Flash, our new inference efficient coding model, especially tuned for VS Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. - Code-1-Flash achieves 51% on SWE Bench Pro, despite having just 5B parameters, putting it closer to Haiku in size but cheaper in cost. All of this is the foundation for Microsoft Frontier Tuning. It lets you customize our models to create custom, company-specific agents that only you control. You can make our model, your model. Your data. Your agents. Your moat. Early adopters are already seeing a difference. When we tuned our models for McKinsey’s tasks, MAI delivered the highest win rate, outperforming GPT-5.5 on quality, while being 10x lower on cost. Also really excited to be collaborating with the amazing team at Mayo Clinic to jointly train a new frontier AI model for healthcare. Our announcements today mark another milestone on the road to humanist superintelligence. You can learn more and about our other new models in our latest blog:

The AI bubble will collapse. Here’s the cascade and what survives. (Claude wrote this for me based on my thoughts) OpenAI burns $9B cash on $13B revenue. Their own projections show $143B in cumulative losses before profitability. They’re selling dollars for 70 cents at scale. The more they sell, the more they lose. The collapse sequence is simple: frontier labs fail → GPU cloud middlemen (who borrowed billions at peak prices) get crushed → hyperscalers cut capex → NVIDIA cycles down. Each step accelerates the next. The people who lived through 2001 see it. But being early is indistinguishable from being wrong — for years. The last skeptic will capitulate right before the crash. That’s how every bubble ends. Here’s what’s different: the technology is real. Fiber was real in 2000 too. It just needed a decade of bankruptcies before the economics worked. So what survives? Local models. Delivered by Apple. Their playbook never changes — let the industry burn capital on half-baked implementations, then arrive late with something so integrated it makes everything before it look like a prototype. The entire AI industry is currently doing Apple’s R&D for them. At $143B in projected losses. With no compensation. The M5 already runs 70B parameter models locally. DeepSeek V4 dropped this week — open source, near-frontier performance, no NVIDIA hardware required. The gap between local and cloud closes from both directions simultaneously. The killer move: your iPhone tunnels home to your Mac over an encrypted connection. Your Mac becomes your personal AI server. Your data never touches a corporate server. Ever. Apple doesn’t compete with OpenAI. They make them irrelevant. Jensen knows this. He just can’t say it.