It’s been a busy few weeks in the AI trenches. From leadership boomerangs to the realization that our jobs might actually be safe, for now.
Here is the breakdown of what’s happening:
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OpenAI is playing musical chairs to save its enterprise business. Brett Zof is back as head of enterprise sales at OpenAI after a brief hiatus co-founding a billion-dollar startup, Thinking Machines Lab. He’s returning to a fire though, with OpenAI’s enterprise market share reportedly down from 50% to 27% over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s share has climbed to 40%. Turns out, being first doesn’t mean staying first.
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The plumbing of the AI world is getting very expensive. LiveKit, the infrastructure powering ChatGPT’s voice mode, just hit unicorn status with a $100M raise. While everyone focuses on the “brain” (the LLM), the “nervous system” (accessing real-time voice/video) is where the money seems to be flowing now. If prompt responses from your favorite LLM don’t lag, thank these guys.
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Inference is the new training. Startup Infract just pulled in $150M to commercialize VLLM, focusing on making models run faster and cheaper. The industry shift is clear: we’ve spent years teaching these huge models how to “think”; now we’re obsessed with making sure they can be inferernced at scale without breaking the bank.
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Your job is safe (for now), according to the data. The new Apex Agents benchmark tested models on high-level white-collar work (law, banking, consulting). The results? Most models scored under 25%. Currently, AI is less an “autonomous replacement” and more an “unreliable intern” that needs heavy supervision to do anything useful from data pulled from Slack and Drive.
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AI agents are finally tackling the nightmare of scheduling. Block Kit, a new startup from a former Sequoia partner, wants to end the “Calendly link” dance. Their agents negotiate directly with each other to find meeting times based on your specific tone and preferences. It’s the “my cloud will talk to your cloud” future we’ve been waiting for.