🌏 Taiwan Teams Up with Tech Heavyweights on AI Talent Push
Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs just signed partnerships with Qualcomm, Microsoft, and a few other big names. The pitch: grow homegrown AI talent, not just ride the semiconductor wave. Training programs, better infrastructure, pipelines for young engineers - the whole works.
Some people see it as a counterbalance in the whole U.S.-China AI race; others say it’s simply Taiwan realizing it can’t afford to sit back. Maybe both are true.
🤖 Two Paths in the AI Race: U.S. Chases AGI, China Plays It Steady
The U.S. is pouring billions into what amounts to moonshot projects - full-blown AGI. Elon Musk is hyping Grok 5 as “the closest yet” to general intelligence. Could be groundbreaking, could be a bit of showmanship… hard to say.
China, meanwhile, seems less distracted by the dream. Their playbook looks more practical - apps, services, systems that already turn profit. Two very different bets: one long horizon, one immediate payout.
💸 Anthropic Rockets to $170B Valuation After $13B Raise
Anthropic - the folks behind Claude - just pulled in $13 billion, sending its valuation to about $170 billion. That’s basically OpenAI territory now.
What’s wild is how fast they’ve scaled: revenue jumped from $1b to $5b in just a year. Enterprise adoption seems to be spilling over everywhere, and investors clearly don’t want to miss the wave. Hype, sure, but also real demand.