Wake Up Imagine · Monday Morning Mashup, by Michael Chase.What moved in AI, and what it changes.
Five hundred words on a Monday morning on what moved in AI and why it matters to the people who allocate money and attention. The column ran 137 times from 2015 to 2018, every Monday, from the CMO desk at St. Joseph. It picks up here at No. 138. Newest first; the 2024 to 2026 entries are LinkedIn posts from before the column came back, kept as written.
2026
Forty to one
Voters in ten US states decided 41 times whether a data centre could move in next door, and said no 40 times. Two days later the Nasdaq 100 had its biggest one-day loss on record. The AI build-out was priced as a supply problem. It just became a consent problem.
Read it →
Several hundred
DoorDash did 993 million orders last quarter. Its CEO says third-party AI agents have placed several hundred, in total, and Amazon's CEO says the outside agents are not good enough yet. Agentic commerce is a position everyone is taking and nobody is in.
Both numbers are true
Anthropic's S-1 says it lost 80.7 billion dollars in six months and has 131.7 billion in the bank. The gap is accounting; the number to hold is a 693 million operating loss on 16.3 billion of revenue.
Nobody looks up
Agility launched a humanoid last Tuesday. The most expensive thing in the film is a woman who does not look at it.
▶The wheel goes, the button stays
Tesla took the wheel out of the Cybercab and left a red button by the dome light. The elevator did the same trick eighty years ago.
▶Vacuums today, strawberries tomorrow
You can now buy strawberries grown by Dyson. Yes, the vacuum company.
▶We are very good at filling the sky
In 1957 the whole planet held its breath to hear one satellite beep. Look up now: more than 15,000, and the dark is filling in.
▶Ace plays a game. The architecture does not.
A Sony robot just beat elite humans at table tennis. Nine cameras around the court. Real-time spin estimation. A peer-reviewed Nature paper logging the wins.
▶Sometimes the best robot just pulls weeds
If you told a farmer ten years ago that a solar-powered robot would crawl through their fields pulling weeds, they'd laugh you off the property.
▶The machines will never plan for Nutella
252,756 miles from Earth. The farthest humans have ever been. And the cameo goes to a jar of Nutella.
▶The moment we cared about a machine
A Disney robot just died in front of a crowd of children.
▶Apple at 50: still shipping
Apple just turned 50. And they celebrated with a 30-second video.
▶The Moon ball that was 22 years too early
NASA designed a ball that could explore the Moon. In 2003.
- →
Nine years, 27 feet
Tesla's Roadster flew off a loop at a SpaceX test site and landed on its wheels. The stunt is real. The date is 2028, and the move is Musk reaching into another of his companies, again.
- →
Which rung
The first AI allowed to write a prescription is also the most supervised doctor in Utah. The ladder from two doctors reading every script to spot checks is written down in public.
- →
Models sell chips
AMD is paying about 8.2 billion dollars in its own shares for Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. The chip war just moved from silicon to the models that decide what silicon is for.
- →
Read the test list
Google is putting its AI chips on a rocket this week. Its own sentence says the mission is a stress test, not a data centre.
- →
The pilot is over
The pilot bought time and proved the model works. It also became the way a company avoids deciding anything.
- →
The best AI is not for you
Anthropic just built an AI so dangerous they won't let anyone use it.
2024
Nvidia x Acquisition Frenzy
An image post from the Wake Up Imagine archive, first posted on LinkedIn.
Microsoft x Mexico x AI
An image post from the Wake Up Imagine archive, first posted on LinkedIn.
Microsoft x AI x Three Mile Island
An image post from the Wake Up Imagine archive, first posted on LinkedIn.
Google x $120M AI Education Fund
An image post from the Wake Up Imagine archive, first posted on LinkedIn.
BlackRock x Microsoft x AI
An image post from the Wake Up Imagine archive, first posted on LinkedIn.
Elon x Colossus x Nvidia
An image post from the Wake Up Imagine archive, first posted on LinkedIn.
OpenAI Beats Eye Doctors
GPT-4 goes head to head with junior doctors and eye specialists on eye conditions, and holds its own.
$75 Million Raise x Chatbots
Poe raises $75 million, adds multi-bot chat and plans an enterprise tier to become the one-stop shop for AI chatbots.
Elon x xAI x Grok
xAI's Grok-1.5V reads documents, charts, screenshots and photographs, weeks after Grok-1.5 shipped.
Apple x AI x New M4 Chips
Every Mac gets an M4 with on-device AI processing, and the PC chip race is on.
Tesla x Robotaxi
Tesla says a dedicated robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals is coming. The regulators are the real road.
Siri Can See
Apple's ReALM lets Siri resolve what is on your screen, tuned to run on the phone itself.
OpenAI x Microsoft x Stargate
Microsoft and OpenAI plan a $100 billion supercomputer for 2028. Several gigawatts of power to find first.