This week: humanoid robots beat multiple human athletics records (also robot horses), ChatGPT can now send iMessages from your iPhone, and US Government datasets are disappearing.
Just three main stories this week, but they are big:
- Stripe acquires OpenRouter for a rumored $7B. This seems a bizarre matchup on the surface - Stripe is global payments infrastructure, and OpenRouter is a unified API and marketplace for LLM model inference. However, I see a lot of logic here. Stripe has worked very hard to become a true network where both buyers and sellers see the Stripe brand and the trust that comes with it. OpenRouter is a genuine network with compute ("intelligence") providers on one side and computer consumers on the other. Some commentators suggest that the OpenRouter upside might be limited in the long run (if people stick to frontier models or just a few models), but I doubt either of these will really happen. The proliferation of open source and the constrained compute means an arbitrage layer makes huge sense. Further, it's not just routing ... there is a trust function, there are payments; one can imagine agents built on OpenRouter compute getting native access to payments via Stripe and the new Agent Payment Protocols. Of course it may not work, but Stripe has picked a key leverage point in the future of compute.
- Anthropic tells investors annualized revenue run rate climbed to $65 billion in July. It's easy to get desensitized to the big numbers in AI. Run rate is not quite the same as revenue in the bag (it implies 5.5B of revenue in July, which x12 = 65). However, this is still an absolutely massive number, and it would put Anthropic comfortably in the US Fortune 500 (the cutoff for that is $33B annual revenue). It's hard to imagine this will not negatively squeeze other software budgets or labor budgets at this current growth rate. The company also stated they were profitable last quarter for the first time - just in time for a fall IPO.
- Higgsfield raises $400M Series B, quadrupling its valuation in 8 months to $5.4B. Very much like OpenRouter, Higgsfield started as a mediation layer to help prosumer users of AI video generators pick between models and stay in control. Fast forward a couple of years and the company has built a trust and management layer that goes together with a supply-side ecosystem of model inference providers and a customer base of video creatives. Network effects still exist in the AI-accelerated world. Imagine a real-time, interactive version of Fiverr for the creative work.
Lastly, some Sci-Fi to look forward to with The Expanse coming back in 2027.
Wishing you a great weekend!
