A good-ish IPO, a blizzard of AI updates, and what the hell are the Democrats going to do?

Welcome back to Cautious Optimism, where we’re breaking with our usual format today. It’s Friady, June 28th. Let’s get to work.

• Webtoon’s IPO went well: Shares of online comics giant Webtoon closed at $23.00 yesterday, up $2 from its IPO price. Yahoo Finance reports that the company is up another 6.5% in pre-market trading. A modest IPO pop, a good first day, and continued momentum the next morning are about all you can hope for in a debut. The company’s valuation won’t inspire many copycats, but the IPO window is open if you are willing to accept a market-clearing price.

• Lawyers might be the real AI winners (so far): The Center for Investigative Reporting is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over “using the nonprofit news organization’s content without permission or offering compensation.” Amazon is looking into whether or not Perplexity is breaking AWS’s terms of service over its scraping practices, the Times is suing OpenAI as we have long known, and other newspapers are also heading to court. It’s not a unified front, but not a complete frontline collapse, either. I wonder what the total legal tally will sort out to.

• Further LLM progress: Lawsuits aside, the AI industry is cooking right now. To close out the week, we learned that Baidu’s new ‘Ernie 4.0 Turbo’ is out and that the Ernie family of models has 300 million users. Then there’s Meta’s new “suite of robust, open-source models designed to optimize code and revolutionize compiler design.” Don’t forget the fresh $100 million for Hebbia, a “startup using generative AI to search large documents and return answers.” And $46 million for Clay (BG) which is building sales and marketing AI, work that helped it earn a $500 million valuation. Character.AI is even more popular than I thought. Another AI chip startup just raised $68 million. The list goes on. Even a snapshot of AI news this year is too much to digest.

And then there’s Biden

After watching what felt like infinite debates in prior election cycles, I’ve eased off the practice. Rare was the moment when the candidates’ views were in need of enough clarification that I learned something in a debate. I was really watching to determine what other people might think about the event. But since I was watching merely for political news gathering, I realized I could leave that to the professionals and do anything else with my time.

So, I didn’t watch the debate last night. As expected, Trump told a host of whoppers. But Biden’s age and lack of linguistic fluency were the real news. His underperformance—and what it might say about his ability to do the job—was brutal enough that the entire national conversation flipped from Joe Biden might take performance-enhancing drugs to trounce Trump to this guy has to drop out in just a few hours.

Your views here don’t matter. Mine either. What does is that the conversation about Biden’s age and fitness for office is now the conversation. Somehow Trump, a felon who talks about shooting migrants looking for a better life and has floated pursuing more than two terms this year, came out unscathed. That’s not how you claw back what appears to be a regular polling deficit in key states.

My co-host on This Week in Startups has long argued that Biden would get swapped before the election. Given the sheer institutional momentum to sustain a Biden candidacy against Trump, the idea sounded nuts to me. And yet.

It may still not happen, and Trump will probably win. It may also happen, and Trump would still have a good shot at winning. But would Trump have a worse chance against someone other than Biden? Maybe.

The stakes are insanely high if, like myself, you consider secular democracy the highest national ideal. After Louisiana publicly dared the Supreme Court to tell it that it couldn’t promote Christianity in publicly-funded schools, Oklahoma took things a step further, “direct[ing] all public schools to teach the Bible, including the Ten Commandments,” as the Times reported. Trump, in between, praised the Louisiana decision. If we want to combat creeping galloping Christian nationalism, Trump can’t win. And if Biden is a net negative to that project, well, it’s time to go.

Tired of politics?

It would be nice to curl up inside the little world of startups and the sub-set of the private equity market we care about the most. Young tech companies and venture capital are, after all, very interesting and busy enough to occupy our thoughts (see the AI news section above).

But we’re busy sorting out big questions in elections around the world—in Europe and the United States, and recently in India. As candidates have differing—and occasionally highly variable—views on matters involving technology services, development, and more, there’s no avoiding politics. Not unless you want to operate with an artificially small viewing port on the world, which I cannot recommend.

Still, enough here for now. CO is back to its regular startup focus tomorrow morning, when, if all goes according to plan, I’ll have something special for you. — Alex