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subtl daily briefing
Good morning, founders and builders. The AI arms race just got a lot cheaper — and a lot more disruptive. DeepSeek dropped a bombshell open-source model this week, Meta quietly laid off 8,000 people to pay for its $72B AI bet, and one analyst named Jeremy replaced a 100-person team with a Claude subscription. Let's get into it.
In today's briefing
- 1.DeepSeek V4 Undercuts Competitors by 90%
- 2.Meta Cuts 8K Jobs to Fund AI Buildout
- 3.Open-Source Models Built for Agentic AI
- 4.B2B Buyers Demanding Shorter Contracts
- 5.Evan Spiegel: Distribution Is the Only Moat
- ⚡Quick hits on other news
Latest Developments
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Everything else in the news today
Caleb Franzen (Cubic Analytics) says Bitcoin remains in a bear market until it reclaims the 2-day 200 MA at ~$95,650 — he's using Williams %R to time re-accumulation entries→
Michael McGuiness (Etherealize) argues ETH is more secure than Bitcoin due to proof-of-stake economics and projects a path to $250K if ETH reprices as a monetary asset rather than a tech token→
Milk Road head of research predicts at least one of Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google Gemini will go bankrupt, citing zero moat in AI models and inference costs that scale with engagement→
Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Morgan Stanley are all launching new ETF products tied to MicroStrategy's institutional Bitcoin strategy, driving fresh institutional BTC inflows→
Boys' high school volleyball participation surged 76% over the last decade, creating a recruiting pipeline small colleges are now using to survive enrollment crises→
Division II and III schools now have athletes comprising ~25% of all students, up from ~15% in 2004, making niche sports a critical enrollment and financial lifeline→
Hartwick College launched a men's volleyball team this year as part of a broader survival strategy that also includes slashing tuition and adding new majors after enrollment dropped ~30% since the early 2010s→
Google committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic — one of the largest single AI investment commitments from a hyperscaler to date→
Kimi-K2.6's modified MIT license requires UI attribution for any product exceeding 100M MAU or $20M in revenue — a clause fast-growing AI startups should flag before building on it→
Qwen3.6-27B is fully runnable on M-series MacBook Pros under Apache 2.0, making enterprise-grade agentic coding viable without cloud API costs→