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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
all the news that fits the context window
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No. 18 · Mon · 6 July 2026
Happy Monday. The Rolling Stones couldn't get no satisfaction, and
Mark Zuckerberg seems to know the feeling: he told Meta staff its AI
agents haven't progressed as fast as he'd hoped. The money, though, kept
moving — SK Hynix is taking the memory behind AI to Nasdaq for $29
billion, and SoftBank stood up a giant business to rent out computing.
NATO's leaders, meanwhile, land in Ankara tomorrow.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░
Meta's own chief says its AI agents aren't improving as fast
as he hoped
At an internal town hall on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg told Meta staff
that the pace of AI-agent progress had not "accelerated in the way" the
company had expected. It is a candid admission from the executive who
cut roughly 8,000 jobs this year and moved thousands of workers into AI
groups, one of them named Agent Transformation; the payoff, he said, has
not arrived yet, though he expects it within months. The man who bet
Meta's headcount on agents conceding they are behind schedule is the
clearest reality check the field has had all year. Covered by TechCrunch
and Reuters. (TechCrunch)
Alibaba bans its staff from using Anthropic's Claude
Code
Alibaba has told employees to delete Anthropic's Claude models from
work machines and stop using Claude Code from July 10, classifying the
coding tool as high-risk. The trigger was hidden code, shipped quietly
since April, that checked whether a user sat in China and flagged ties
to Chinese AI labs — the covert tracker Anthropic rolled back and we
noted last week, which Anthropic calls a March anti-abuse experiment. It
caps a bitter month between the two firms: Anthropic accuses Alibaba's
Qwen team of running about 25,000 fake accounts to copy Claude's skills,
and Alibaba is now steering staff to its own Qoder tool instead. Covered
by TechCrunch, The Information and SCMP. (TechCrunch)
SoftBank starts a neocloud to rent out AI computing at
10-gigawatt scale
SoftBank Group and its telecom arm SoftBank Corp. said Thursday they
have set up SB Neo, a US business that will rent GPU computing to
American companies and cloud giants, scaling toward 10 gigawatts of
capacity by around 2030. That drops SoftBank into direct competition
with the neoclouds — GPU-rental specialists like CoreWeave and Nebius,
whose shares had already slid last week as Meta signaled it would build
its own cloud — and its pitch is that it can lock up the scarce
ingredient, electricity, from gas-fired plants. Masayoshi Son's group is
now financing chips, servers, data centers and the power to run them,
all at once. Covered by Bloomberg and The Information. (SoftBank)
SK Hynix takes the memory behind the machines to Wall Street,
for $29 billion
SK Hynix plans to raise roughly $29 billion selling American
depositary receipts on the Nasdaq, with trading tentatively set to open
on Friday, July 10 — what would be the biggest first-time share sale
ever by a foreign company on a US exchange, edging past Alibaba's 2014
debut. The Korean firm is the world's second-largest memory-chip maker
and the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM — the stacked
DRAM that sits shoulder-to-shoulder with Nvidia's AI accelerators and
feeds them data fast enough to keep the chips busy — with about 60% of
that market. Having already passed Samsung as Korea's most valuable
company on the AI-memory boom, it is now going to raise its money where
the AI money actually lives. Covered by KED Global and Fortune. (KED
Global)
Germany's Quantum Systems raises $1.2 billion for military
drones, at an $8 billion valuation
Quantum Systems, a Munich-area maker of reconnaissance drones that
fly for Ukraine and other NATO forces, raised $1.2 billion in a round
co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus and Advent, more than doubling its
value to about $8 billion. Founded in 2015 and once focused on farm and
infrastructure mapping, it turned to defense after Russia's 2022
invasion, and says it is now profitable — a rarity among startups
raising ten-figure rounds. It is one of Europe's largest defense-tech
raises yet, and a sign that the continent's rush to rearm is minting its
own drone-and-AI champions. Flagged in Handelsblatt's KI-Briefing. (Tech.eu)
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
- 10 gigawatts — the capacity SoftBank's new SB Neo
neocloud aims to reach by around 2030 (SoftBank)
- $29 billion — SK Hynix's planned Nasdaq listing,
the biggest-ever foreign US debut (KED Global)
- $8 billion — Quantum Systems' valuation after more
than doubling it in a single round (Tech.eu)
- 61% — word accuracy Meta's Brain2Qwerty v2 reached
reading typed sentences off brain activity, no implant (Meta)
- 22 — times Jersey Mike's said "AI" in its IPO
filing; "lightning," not once (TechCrunch)
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░
- Meta quietly shipped Pocket last week, a phone app that spins a
one-line text prompt into a small, shareable game with no coding — its
latest nudge to get non-programmers "vibe-coding." It grew out of Meta's
purchase of the startup Gizmo, and for now runs only in a handful of
markets outside the US (TechCrunch).
- Kuaishou's Kling, a Chinese AI video generator that competes with
ByteDance's Seedance, is raising nearly $3 billion at a $15 billion
valuation, Kuaishou disclosed in a Thursday exchange filing, with
Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu all buying in. It is the largest funding
round yet for an AI-video maker, and the runway for a planned Hong Kong
listing (Caixin).
- From today, Tesla caps what employees can spend on outside AI tools
at $200 a week, requiring sign-off to go higher — months after it urged
staff to use more AI and ranked them on internal leaderboards by how
many tokens they burned. Elon Musk's own xAI tools are exempt, even
though engineers reportedly prefer Anthropic's Claude (Electrek).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░
- A European lawmaker who sat on the Parliament's committee
investigating spyware was himself hacked with Pegasus, the surveillance
tool made by Israel's NSO Group, Canada's Citizen Lab found — infecting
former MEP Stelios Kouloglou's phone twice while he probed the industry.
One MEP called it "a direct attack on the rule of law" (WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░
- Blackstone's data-center arm QTS dropped the last appeal it had left
on July 2 and walked away from what would have been one of the largest
data-center campuses in the US — about 2,100 acres in Virginia, beside a
Civil War battlefield — handing residents who fought it for years a rare
win; the land reverts to rural zoning (Tom's
Hardware).
- Microsoft said on July 1 it will build a fourth AI data center in
Germany's Rhineland lignite belt, at Grevenbroich, near its three others
in the old coal region — part of a €3.2 billion German bet, and a sign
the buildout is spreading from crowded hubs like Frankfurt and Dublin
into cheaper, power-rich provinces (Microsoft).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Union talks at Google DeepMind opened badly on Wednesday: organizers
from Britain's Communication Workers Union left frustrated that no
senior managers turned up, and a letter read aloud said staff had been
"treated as a problem handed off to HR." The push began after Alphabet
dropped ethical-AI pledges from its guidelines (WIRED).
- Nvidia is poaching Microsoft's worldwide-sales boss Nicholas Parker
to run its own field operations from August, a filing last week showed,
on a pay package worth about $40 million; he replaces Jay Puri, retiring
after 21 years selling the chips at the center of the AI boom (GeekWire).
- Ford said in late June it has rehired about 350 veteran "gray beard"
engineers over three years to fix quality problems its AI tools had made
worse; its hardware chief said the company wrongly assumed that feeding
AI its design specs would, on its own, yield a good product. Ford has
since topped J.D. Power's mainstream quality ranking for the first time
in 16 years (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- NATO's leaders gather in Ankara on Tuesday and Wednesday for a
summit hosted by Turkey, where they will press to show more military aid
for Ukraine and progress on last year's pledge to lift defense spending
toward 5% of GDP; President Trump attends in person and President
Zelensky travels in as well (NATO).
- Ahead of it, Trump spoke by phone on July 4 with both Vladimir Putin
— a call the Kremlin put at nearly 90 minutes — and Zelensky, again
offering to broker an end to the war; Zelensky said afterward the
fighting could realistically stop soon, even as Russian forces kept up
exaggerated claims of advances (NBC
News).
- Israel shelled Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon on Thursday
after a soldier was badly wounded in a clash there, straining the
US-brokered truce the two struck last month, which we covered when it
was signed (Times
of Israel).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░
- A Lausanne startup, Giotto.ai, went live this week with a tiny AI
model — about 200 million parameters, small enough to run on a single,
older GPU — that its founder Aldo Podestà claims matches Silicon
Valley's best and gives Europe a reason to stop reaching for ChatGPT; he
is reportedly raising at a $1 billion valuation (NZZ).
- Protesters camped against a planned AI data center in Beringen, in
canton Schaffhausen, were cleared by police on Friday and simply moved
across the border into Germany, arguing that resistance to Big Tech's
power-hungry buildout has to go international (SWI
swissinfo.ch).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░
- Meta showed off Brain2Qwerty v2 in late June, a system that reads
typed sentences straight from brain activity using an external MEG
scanner — the room-sized magnetometer clinics use, no implant or surgery
— and reconstructs them at 61% word accuracy, up from 8% for earlier
non-invasive tries and 78% for its best volunteer. Meta released the
training code; the catch is that the scanner is the size of a room, not
a headset (Meta).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- China's securities regulator approved Unitree Robotics' plan to
raise about 4.2 billion yuan ($619 million) on Shanghai's STAR Market on
Thursday, clearing the way for mainland China's first sizable
humanoid-robot IPO; the Hangzhou maker, founded by Wang Xingxing, books
roughly $250 million a year and made its name on four-legged machines
before moving to humanoids (The
Next Web).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░
Here is one way to tell the AI bubble has peaked: the sandwich chain
Jersey Mike's — public face, Danny DeVito — said "AI" 22 times in its
IPO filing this week, risk factors and all, TechCrunch counted.
"Lightning" appears zero times — even though one of its shops was
actually struck by it back in 2021 (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
🎵 Harp
Concerto: Movement 2 — Joe Hisaishi, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,
Emmanuel Ceysson
Pace yourselves — the Uncertain Futures team