SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why is the Lakers' owner selling 10 months after buying? • Mark Walter bought a controlling stake last year at $10 billion • Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger are paying $12.5 billion, a $2.5 billion profit for Walter in about 10 months • They were pursuing an expansion team in Las Vegas, then pivoted and approached Walter on Sunday • It's now a record for a US sports franchise @theojaffee: "I was not aware that Josh Kushner and Bob Iger were so rich that they are capable of spending $12.5 billion on a sports team between them. So I wonder if there are other investors."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Lovable raised $400M at $13.3B • 2x its December valuation, on a run rate near $600M • Co-leading the round is the European Commission's new €5bn fund, built specifically to stop European startups from leaving for the US • Lovable is one of its first bets, and Menlo's largest position after Anthropic • Tencent is on the cap table too, so a Chinese internet giant and the European Commission are now funding the same Swedish startup @theojaffee: "Props to them for staying in Europe instead of escaping to Silicon Valley like so many other European startups and European founding teams." @schisofrenia: "Tencent backs Roblox? Snap? Reddit? Discord? Tesla? Oh my God, they're so locked in."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: What does DeepSeek V4 Pro do to frontier lab pricing? • It went GA at $0.44 input and $0.87 output. Fable is $10 and $50, Sol is $5 and $30, Opus is $5 and $25 • On output tokens, that's 60x cheaper than Fable, for a model that's SOTA on NL2Repo and beats Fable on CyberGym • DeepSeek said last week it would substantially raise prices. It shipped a better model at the old price instead @theojaffee: "It's not slightly cheaper than these models. It's 10 or 20 times cheaper. In the case of output tokens, it's 60 times cheaper than Fable."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: How did Grok catch up this fast? • Grok 4.5 scored 56 on the Artificial Analysis index five weeks ago. Grok 4.6 scores 61, one behind Fable, at the same price • SOTA on knowledge work and legal, beating Fable on GDPval and Sol on Harvey LAB by 13 points @ml_angelopoulos: "Grok 4.6 is a Sol-quality model, at a fraction of the price. Grok $6 vs Sol $30" @schisofrenia: "Now that the frontier labs can't release anything because, ooh, scary, close to critical capability thresholds, forget Chinese companies, all of the American companies are racing to close the gap."

SITUATION BREWING: DeepSeek is building a specialized Harness Team to directly challenge Claude Code, per Bloomberg. Verified WeChat accounts and fresh job listings reveal the Hangzhou lab is aggressively hiring to build rival autonomous AI coding agents.

SITUATION DETECTED: The UK government is drafting new biological weapons laws to regulate the use of AI in gene synthesis, per Bloomberg. Driven by fears of global guardrails failing, ministers want labs to screen customers and flag suspicious DNA sequences.

excited to speak with @theojaffee and @schisofrenia today on @MTSlive at 2pm eastern / 11am pacific. we’ll mostly be talking about the economics of AI, but maybe they’ll let me talk a bit about josh kushner and bob iger buying the lakers!

Huge stream today and so much to cover: - measuring how grok 4.6 stacks up to other frontier models - thrive holdings raises $2b & josh kushner + bob iger purchase the lakers - our take on what deepseek v4 pro could mean for the model pricing debate - lovable raises $400m - nebius +500% quarterly sales increase Following this up with some really great interviews: - @daveholtz professor at @Columbia will discuss his latest economic research paper & talk about the impact ai has on organizations live at 11am - @dschwarz26 co-founder of @FUTURESEARCHAI to give us more context on forecasting and how useful it is for making sense of the future - @hamandcheese chief economist @JoinFAI telling us more about his recent article and making a case against creating the superintelligent slime mold - @poteto and @romanugarte_ will be discussing grok bot, grok 4.6, and more at 330pm today live from our studio - @jessepollak covering what he thinks the future of independent agents transacting on-chain looks like - @steve47285 talking about his work @AsteraInstitute and most recent writing on the four flavors of llm misalignment - @Altimor founder of @getlindy discussing latest release of their teammate product - @exnx on what he's seeing in ai & biotech, as well as his work at radical numerics - @RKacaba talking spacex, its impact on public market investing, and more

DAILY SITUATION RECAP: SpaceXAI releases Grok Bot in early beta. Grok Bot is an agent swarm product designed for white-collar work tasks, an early preview of what Leopold Aschenbrenner called a “drop-in remote worker”. Bots can learn workflows and improve over time. This is likely part of the joint SpaceXAI-Tesla MACROHARD project, which seeks to eventually emulate entire software companies. OpenAI VP of Special Projects Brad Lightcap departs the company in order to start something new. Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 as CFO and helped build out many of its operations and business teams. He became COO in 2022, and VP of Special Projects (including the OpenAI Deployment Company) in April 2026. Previously, he was an investor at YC (along with Sam Altman) and worked in finance at Dropbox and JPMorgan. River AI raises $1.1B. The neolab, founded by xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, seeks to build powerful personal AI that knows and works for the user, starting with enterprise and moving to individuals over time. Anthropic is responding to tough investor questions on competition from cheap open-source Chinese models, on the firm’s tense relationship with the Trump administration, and on public backlash against data centers. Anthropic makes a $9.1B deal with Riot Platforms for compute. Riot is a former Bitcoin mining firm (and also former biotech diagnostic machinery manufacturer) that’s now pivoting to providing AI data center capacity. UK sovereign AI startup Cosine raises $15M, backed by the UK government and major financial companies. The 30-person startup plans to train LLMs for highly regulated industries that need sovereign AI. $15 million is around 0.005% of the total cumulative funding raised by OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users, becoming the fastest-growing product in Google’s history. Google now has 14 products (Search, Gmail, Drive, Chrome, Maps, Play Store, Calendar, Photos, Android, Discover, Lens, YouTube, Messages, Gemini) with more than a billion users. VC firm Accel raises $3.5B to make early-stage AI investments. $1.35B will go to larger rounds and follow-on investments, $800M to US (primarily Silicon Valley) investments, $800M to Europe and Israel, and $550M to India. Intel raises $20B in a share sale, showing continued demand for AI stocks. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calls for a data center moratorium amid increasing anti-data center sentiment nationwide. Written by @theojaffee. Read more at our link in bio.

in my new piece for the @MTSlive substack I write about the last few weeks of bad vibes at the labs. some of this is down to what you might call "unforced errors." but the labs have responded quickly to their own mistakes, and with a candor and seriousness that surprised even me, a lab optimist. personally, I think a big chunk is attributable to growing pains. openai and anthropic, particularly, are speedrunning in months the transition from new startup to Power That Needs To Be Held Accountable that took google and facebook years. like everything in AI, expect it to accelerate. full piece here: