20 Aug 2025

Gates Pits AI Against Alzheimer's; Altman Pokes the Bubble

💰Altman Drops a Reality Bomb on AI Investing

Well this is ... concerning?

OpenAI's Sam Altman threw some serious shade at the AI investment frenzy recently, and it's got investors cackling.

In a candid moment reported by CNBC, Altman admitted that investors are "overexcited" about AI and compared the current situation to the infamous dot-com bubble that crashed and burned in the early 2000s (between 2000-2002, the Nasdaq lost nearly 80% of its value when investors realized they'd been throwing money at companies with no real business models). This is something your editor, dear reader, witnessed from the inside ... so, ugh.

📊 The Numbers Are Wild

AI startups raised a whopping $104.3 billion in just the first half of 2025
That's almost as much as ALL startups raised in the entirety of 2024
Nearly two out of every three venture dollars are going to AI companies
Startup valuations have reached "insane" heights (Altman's words, not ours)

Despite warning about the bubble, Altman isn't slowing down. OpenAI is planning to spend "trillions of dollars" on data centers, and ChatGPT is absolutely crushing it with 700 million weekly users. That's a 4x increase from last year.

Altman still believes AI is "the most important thing to happen in a very long time." So maybe it's not about whether AI is revolutionary (it is), but whether we're getting ahead of ourselves with the money side of things.

“Calling it a bubble is too simplistic. What we’re really seeing is a supply chain bottleneck – too much capital with real need, chasing too little compute,” Kyle Okamoto, chief technology officer at Aethir, a decentralized cloud GPU network, told The New York Post.

“Until infrastructure catches up, prices and hype will stay inflated, but that’s not a bubble bursting - that’s a market maturing.”

The OpenAI platform is now the 5th biggest website in the world and has its sights set on beating Meta's Facebook and Instagram.

The Gist: Even the king of AI thinks we might be getting a little too excited about AI investments.
Why it Matters: When the CEO of the hottest AI company warns about a bubble, it's time to pay attention.
The Irony: OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation – talk about being part of the problem!

Read more: Entrepreneur

🧠 DeepSeek's V3.1 Is Here, But Is It a Game-Changer?
DeepSeek just dropped its V3.1 model, and it's making waves with a massive 128K context window and some serious coding chops (71.6% on benchmarks). But hold your horses, critics are saying it's still a few steps behind the big players like GPT-5 and Claude 4.1.

The Gist: DeepSeek V3.1 is out with a bigger brain, but it's still playing catch-up.
Why it Matters: The AI race is getting more crowded, and it takes more than just a big context window to stand out.

Read more: AI Secret, The Neuron, The Rundown AI

🤖 The Great AI Consciousness Debate Rages On

Are we building tools or digital beings? That's the trillion-dollar question on everyone's mind. Microsoft's AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, is urging caution, warning that treating AI like it's alive is a "dangerous" game. He's worried about "AI psychosis" and says we should be building AI "for people, not to be a person." This philosophical showdown is just getting started, and it's one of the most important conversations in tech right now.

The Gist: Big Tech is divided on whether we should be exploring AI consciousness.
Why it Matters: The answer to this question will shape the future of AI and our relationship with it.

Read more: The Rundown AI, AI Secret

📄 Adobe Is Making PDFs Fun Again (Seriously!)

Get ready to fall in love with PDFs all over again (ok, maybe in like). Adobe just launched Acrobat Studio, a new platform that turns your boring old documents into interactive, AI-powered conversation hubs. You can chat with your docs, get instant summaries, and even create social media posts without ever leaving the PDF. It's like your documents just got a major upgrade.

The Gist: Adobe is bringing AI to PDFs, and it's a game-changer.
Why it Matters: This is a huge step toward making AI a seamless part of our everyday workflows.

Read more: The Neuron

🏦 Local Banks Getting an AI Makeover

Big news for small banks... Casca AI just scored a $29M investment to bring super-fast, AI-powered loan processing to community banks. We're talking loans approved up to 30 times faster. This could be a huge win for small businesses and local economies.

The Gist: AI is helping small banks compete with the big guys.
Why it Matters: This could democratize access to capital and boost local economies.

Read more: AI Secret

🧬 $1M to Cure Alzheimer's? Gates is Writing the Check

In a cool move, Bill Gates is putting his money where his mouth is with a $1M prize for an AI that can help cure Alzheimer's (Bill, why not $10M??). The goal is to create an AI agent that can analyze decades of research to find new breakthroughs. Gates Ventures is utilizing the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative with the competition open to folks including both individual AI engineers and big tech labs ... with the winning tool to be made available free to scientists.

The Gist: Bill Gates is funding an AI competition to accelerate Alzheimer's research.
Why it Matters: This could be a major step forward in the fight against one of the world's most devastating diseases.

Read more: The Rundown AI

💻 Your Productivity Just Got a Boost

Get ready to be more productive than ever. Microsoft is testing a new COPILOT function in Excel that lets you use plain English to do complex tasks. Also, you can now use ChatGPT to create custom designs in Canva automatically.

The Gist: AI is being integrated into our favorite productivity tools.
Why it Matters: This will save us time, make us more efficient, and unlock new creative possibilities.