AI continues to move at breakneck speeds. The main questions we faced this week is the retention power (we hear already of one large AI co who has had so much churn/costs it's going down) and what a future with superintelligent, infinitely-parallelizable, agentic computer users looks like.
But this is also a week that saw one of the worst ever stock crashes, with many questioning if the US administration is playing 5D chess or just completely insane. Many institutionals are closing their USD longs, and just pouring more capital in Europe and China.
The speed of change seems to be pervasive, not remaining confined to technology but touching everything around us.
This seems also evident in the speed of technology window opportunities compressing more and more, with the window to create massive AI companies almost largely closed after just a few years (unless the Deepseeks of the world just plainly destroy the entire window).
Prompt wrappers
This week we've been able to read through the system prompts for v0, Manus and even Cursor. Reading through them really makes you wonder what the staying power of all of these tools will actually be.
They all seems to rely on Sonnet heavily, with really most of the heavy-lifting coming from Anthropic (we're not surprised to see them raising a Series E at $60B+) (we also hear that OpenAI is raising $40B at $300B valuation 🤯).
Most people are already switching from one tool to the other with very little loyalty. And so the age-old "will the models or the application layer capture the most value" question seems to not be fully solved at all as of yet.
Have fun and look under the hood to how these tools work!
GitHub - x1xhlol/system-prompts-and-models-of-ai-tools
Contribute to x1xhlol/system-prompts-and-models-of-ai-tools development by creating an account on GitHub.
Manus panic
Leave it to Manus (do let us know if you have an invite for us)
Multimanus: welcome to dystopia!
One demo: 14 min demo of Manus in action.
OSS Manus: https://github.com/camel-ai/owl. We already have an open source implementation of what Manus does, based on Camel AI. It seems the staying power question is even more relevant than we can imagine.
Superintelligence strategy
Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang propose a strategy around Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM, our times' MAD) for nonproliferation of weaponizable AI capabilities, and offer a framework for competitiveness.
And an article by Hendrycks and Schmidt on the nuclear-level risks of superintelligent AI.
Anthropic’s Recommendations to OSTP for the U.S. AI Action Plan
Reflection: a path to superintelligence + a piece by Sequoia
Other AI
The arms race
ReArm Europe
Ursula von der Leyen announced a $800bn, five-part plan to boost Europe's defence capabilities.
Update from a world with European fiscal packages, security funding, and US tariffs.
The S&P 500 is down 1.8% in 2025, European stocks (.STOXX) have risen 9% to a record high, and Hong Kong tech stocks (.HSTECH) surged nearly 30%; halved bullish bets on the U.S. dollar to $16 billion; pushed the euro to a four-month high above $1.07.
Shield AI raises $240 million
The defence aircraft company has raised at a $5.3 billion valuation from investors including L3Harris and Andreessen Horowitz to expand Hivemind Enterprise, an AI-driven autonomy platform accelerating development for OEMs and primes in the industrial base.
Alpine Eagle raises €10.25 million
Munich-based startup Alpine Eagle has secured seed funding from IQ Capital, General Catalyst and HCVC to advance its Sentinel counter-drone system, an airborne platform using AI-driven modular sensors and kamikaze interceptors for cost-efficient threat detection and neutralization.
Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons?
As it turns out, “Most European militaries depend heavily on the US for communications support, for electronic warfare support, and for ammunition resupply in any serious conflict.”
The future of labs
Novo Nordisk Says AI Is Reliable Enough to Produce Sensitive Documents. And two more notes from the labs of the future.
Towards an AI co-scientist
A multi-agent system built on Gemini 2.0 employs a generate-debate-evolve approach for hypothesis generation, using a multi-agent architecture and tournament evolution process. The system demonstrates enhanced biomedical discovery, validated through drug repurposing, target discovery, and bacterial evolution studies.
Lila Sciences raises $200 million to build scientific superintelligence
Lila announces a platform integrating AI with autonomous labs to conduct thousands of parallel experiments, with the lofty goal of "reinventing the scientific method". Also in the NYT.The Einstein AI Model
Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, discusses scientific research, genius, creativity, and move 37.
Research
A safer, better Ozempic
Stanford Medicine researchers have identified a peptide that suppresses appetite and reduces body weight in mice without side effects like nausea or muscle loss.
Cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cell (CALEC) transplantation for limbal stem cell deficiency
A phase I/II clinical trial (so feasibility and safety) evaluates cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cell transplantation to treat limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD), demonstrating corneal regeneration and improved vision.
Emerging supersolidity in photonic-crystal polariton condensates
Researchers have transformed laser light into a supersolid state, achieved by firing a laser at a gallium arsenide semiconductor with microscopic ridges, creating polaritons - hybrid light-matter particles that self-organize into a crystalline lattice while maintaining superfluidity.
Weeping willow
A team from the USTC in Hufei, China reports that their 105-qubit Zuchongzhi 3.0 quantum processor completed a random circuit sampling task in seconds, a feat they claim would take the Frontier supercomputer 6.4 billion years, outpacing Google's Willow by a million times. All usual QC caveats apply.
Other stuff we liked
Sesame Conversational Demo: welcome to the future.
"Sing, o Muse": fiction AI writer.
Speed to proof/value
A run in Shenzhen's Talent Park
Eric Schmidt joins Relativity Space as CEO: the co was having a hard time, and Eric comes in as a white knight (and majority shareholder). Let's see how this one goes!
If you think modern code review is fine as is, turn back
Playbook to fine-tune and deploy LLMs
Buy every possible lottery ticket: there was a Texas Lottery arbitrage opportunity. In April 2023, an entity called Rook TX effectively purchased the jackpot, collecting a one-time payment of $57.8 million, by acquiring virtually all of the 25.8 million possible number combinations.
Just blink once
Let us know what you think of this format, and if you have anything else we should read!
