All gas, no brakes in AI-land
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
It’s Thursday. Yesterday afternoon POTUS iced a large portion of his new tariffs on global trade. However, duties on China went even higher in the same stroke, targeted tariffs are still coming, some larger packages are still in force, and a 10% flat rate was left in place. Out of the trade war we are not.
He blinked. Anyone telling you this was all planned is lying to you.
Stocks ripped higher yesterday on the détente, but are still off for the year. And, early trading indicates that some of the gains earned yesterday will be given back at the open.
The good news is that March inflation came in under expectations. Domestically prices fell 0.1% from the preceding month, leading to a 2.4% YoY rate. That’s slower than the 2.5% anticipated. It’s not hard to find market expectation that inflation will pick up in April as rising trade costs bite. Still, after the chaos of the last week, a little reprieve in the shelling is welcome. — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Abuse … the crypto industry … that’ll fix it … crypto prices … signs of the times … abuse of state power … rule of law … Jacquelyn Melinek …
Tailscale: I added corporate VPN startup Tailscale to the TWiST500 after it more than doubled its business customer count in less than a year. Moving from 5,000 to 10,000 paying corporates in less than four quarters is nuts. Then, Tailscale raised a $160 million Series C. Right before I got to chat with the company’s CEO for the show. Clip coming soon. It’s a fun one.
📉 Trending Down: Meta … cybersecurity … fashion value … the chance of a rate cut in May …
Small bites
What’s up with Figure? Around the world dozens of companies are working on humanoid robots. Advances in required hardware and software (often in the form of AI) have put human-like robotics within reach. And few companies from the cohort of unicorns are making more noise than Figure. But, a WSJ report on its under-construction financing round got our eyebrows jumping. Potentially overstated early commercial practicality, limited financial details and more cast a bit of a pall over a company targeting a nearly $40 billion price tag.
Here’s hoping nothing is amiss, and our much-dreamed-for robotic home helpers truly are coming. I am tired of picking up socks.
OpenAI fights back: The AI shop has countersued Elon Musk in an attempt to get him to leave it alone. I suspect given the war chests on both sides of the dispute that we won’t see the end of the OpenAI fight for years to come — but goddamn is it messy while we’re in the middle of the spat.
All gas, no brakes in AI-land
Where to start.
Despite the brouhaha over possibly aggressive operating practices and limited customer joy at 11x, venture investors are still bullish on AI sales tools.
TechCrunch writes that Artisan, a startup that offers “AI employees” for sales tasks just raised $25 million.
Also TechCrunch from late 2024: “AI sales rep startups are booming. So why are VCs wary?”
I have no particular view of 11x or Artisan, but I view continued investment into the AI sales model to be a bullish indicator for venture interest in AI-ish startups. So, if you are raising, consider this a green flag. If you are an LP? You might be a bit more conservative.
Elsewhere in startup-land, xAI is getting serious about money. After Anthropic dropped an OpenAI-esque super-premium subscription offering — helping to anchor cutting-edge, nearly limitless AI pricing in the four-figure range on a yearly basis — Musk’s AI company and new home for the assets formerly known as Twitter, threw up an API for Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini.
At first blush, Grok doesn’t seem too cheap compared to rival offerings. So, xAI intends to compete on quality with its myriad domestic and international rivals.
Despite Grok models doing well on some leaderboards, do you know of anyone building their business atop xAI technology? I’m not being glib — I’m curious. Hit reply if you know of a company with Grok as their model of choice and let me know who it is. I’d love to chat with them. (PR people, this is as close to a Bat Signal as I can get.)
Finally from little tech, OpenAI is working on new benchmarks for AI tools that are domain-specific. Cool.
Startups aren’t having all the fun. This week’s AI barrage from Google included new models, self-hosting, and more. But the update that most caught my eye was Google’s new Agent2Agent product. Here’s Google:
Today, we’re launching a new, open protocol called Agent2Agent (A2A), with support and contributions from more than 50 technology partners […] The A2A protocol will allow AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms or applications. We believe the A2A framework will add significant value for customers, whose AI agents will now be able to work across their entire enterprise application estates.
You can think of Agent2Agent as the horizontal layer between AI agents. In theory, A2S-like systems will allow self-directed AI agents to pass information between one another, skipping duplicate work and potentially helping each agent do better, faster.
But agents chatting side to side is only part of the picture. Don’t forget that Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows for vertical communication between AI systems and data.
So, we now have open-ish technologies to better ingest data into AI tools, and share that information amongst, and between, AI agents. All this sums to an increasingly durable technical foundation for companies — like startups — to build atop.
I have long been jealous in a wistful sense of stories of the early Apple days of building impressive new devices with often off-the-shelf technology. Imagine being able to change the world with the computing equivalent of Legos and soldering?
But A2A and MCP could, I reckon, grant new founders a similar set of of the shelf parts — tooling? — to go out and create something incredible. More, please.
Closing note: Cautious Optimism grew a lot this week. If you are new, please know that I try to respond to every email that folks send in. So, hit reply if you want to chat about anything from the missive or whatever else is on your mind. And if there’s something that you want examined, just shout! — Alex