VP @SBS_Comms, ex-OMERS Venture, ex-Managing Editor at TechCrunch. Writer of @theangle, host of @originalcontentpodcast
Articles by Darrell Etherington
AI is finally actually just business
Las Vegas is a strange place to go looking for proof that something is real, but that’s where I found it last week. Ai4, which started in 2018 as a 300-person gathering in Brooklyn and has since grown into North America’s largest AI industry conference, took over The Venetian this year with attendance that roughly doubled year-over-year – enough growth that it had to abandon last summer’s home at the MGM Grand just to fit everyone in.
Canada’s AI champion Cohere is standing up the load-bearing walls of our economy
The Toronto AI firm says that these days, the Canadian flag is a good brand. This article appears in the 2026 BetaKit Most Ambitious issue. Read more stories of the Canadian tech innovators strengthening our autonomy, security, and prosperity here. . . . Nick Frosst thinks there are only a handful of countries in the world at the frontier of the AI race. The United States. China. France, where Mistral holds the flag alone. And Canada, which has chosen Cohere as its global champion.
The Great Reabsorption
At HumanX this past week, I watched eight different tech leaders – including the CEO of AWS, the co-founder of Cursor, and the head of Anthropic Labs – describe essentially the same phenomenon without any of them naming it. A Novo Nordisk scientist asks a Databricks agent about adverse effects in an obesity study and gets referenced, percentiled answers in minutes; work that previously required routing through a data team over months.
A year is a lifetime: HumanX returns to a very different AI world
When HumanX debuted in Las Vegas last March, DeepSeek was a name that maybe a few hundred researchers would have recognised. Reasoning models were a novelty. Cursor had a devoted following but hadn’t yet become a verb among developers. And the idea that AI agents would be autonomously merging pull requests, managing corporate expenses, or finding and patching security flaws without a human in the loop would have sounded like a pitch deck fantasy – ambitious, sure, but comfortably distant.
Wake Up Dead Man
This week, Jordan, Darrell, and Anthony discuss the documentary series "Sean Combs: The Reckoning" and review the latest Knives Out movie, "Wake Up Dead Man." (If you notice a few seemingly outdated references to the holiday season, we recorded this in December, but Anthony failed to finish editing until now!) If you'd like to skip ahead, here's how the episode breaks down: 0:00 Intro 0:37 Sean Combs: The Reckoning discussion 25:58 Wake Up Dead Man review 41:20 Wake Up Dead Man spoiler...
Frankenstein and Nobody Wants This Season 2
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HubSpot's CMO on how AI will mess with marketing metrics - and why that's exciting
"I'd wager that the most successful companies of the next decade were founded and run by missionaries who earned high rewards through hard work and learning." Kipp Bodnar is talking about the AI talent wars, where companies are throwing $250 million pay packages at researchers, and his take is heretical: it won't work. Not in any way that matters.
Google's Gemini and Pixel 10 natural language image editing is the future of Photoshop
Google has made some very interesting product announcements over the past week around AI-powered image editing. There are actually two separate announcements, and no overts link between the two, but it seems likely that they at least share some common DNA under the hood.
Claude's latest shows that the App Store is the next thing AI will swallow whole
The iPhone’s ‘killer app’ didn’t launch with the original hardware – it came later, when Apple changed course from an original vision of allowing only first-party native applications to run on the device, to opening up access to third-party developers who wanted to build locally-installed, downloadable ‘apps.’ Apple’s App Store, combined with new technological capabilities ushered in by, and unique to the smartphone – like location services and cellular connectivity – resulted in an explosion...
Last week, OpenAI announced a new feature relatively quietly, without the usual fanfare it assigns to product introductions or capability expansions: ChatGPT Record, a fairly innocuous new ability for its LLM-based chatbot that’s very limited in scope and availability at launch – but that seems symptomatic of a potentially significant issue for anyone building on top of OpenAI (or other model makers’) foundations.
A $6.5 billion epic troll, or the real AI future of consumer devices?
In a week absolutely stuffed to overflowing with AI-related news and announcements, one in particular stands out: Sam Altman and Jony Ive revealing ‘io,’ their collaborative effort to design and develop the first generation of truly mass-market consumer AI devices. We’d heard through earlier reports that the collab was on, but this week, the two dropped an absolutely wild trailer for their joint company – along with the news that OpenAI would be acquiring io for $6.5 billion in OpenAI shares.
Meet the latest betaworks AI startup Camp cohort
Betaworks’ Camp program is evolving alongside the emerging AI economy, and its latest cohort is another iterative shift: It builds on the last group’s focus on AI-native product experiences, but now moves into AI-powered applications that appeal specifically to enterprise, SMBs and future of work. The class of nine startups (the first of two cohorts betaworks is running this year) includes a wide-ranging field of founders and concepts, as is typical for the firm’s wild and wonderful approach.
GrowthX raises $12M... and I'm along for the ride!
I’ve been a little quiet here for a few weeks, and now I’m finally ready to share the reason: I’ve got a new gig, with GrowthX, an exciting early-stage startup that blends perfectly the areas in which I can have the most impact, and my beliefs about where the future is headed in terms of AI technology development and tool use.
The AI Sales Agent That Makes Reps Superhuman
New AI-powered sales agent gives B2B sales teams a competitive edge by automating the most tedious and time-consuming parts of the sales process Redcar, developers of the world’s most accurate and flexible AI sales agents, today announced it has raised $5.3 million across its seed round led by Khosla Ventures and pre-seed led by humbition.
Redcar Raises $5.3M Seed Led by Khosla Ventures and Pre-Seed Led by humbition to Launch F1: The AI Sales Agent That Makes Reps Superhuman
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 14, 2025-- Redcar, developers of the world’s most accurate and flexible AI sales agents, today announced it has raised $5.3 million across its seed round led by Khosla Ventures and pre-seed led by humbition.
Redcar's AI sales superpower platform lands $5.3M from Khosla, Greylock and others
Redcar founding team, including (left to right) Cataleya Jiang, Ben Wu, Jeff Chen and Aidan Lynott Sales enablement and go-to-market process augmentation has been one of the early beachheads for B2B AI tools, and Redcar, a two-year old startup based out of SF, fits squarely in that category. The company is building AI sales agents that take care of a lot of the repetitive, fundamental steps involved in the sales process so that the people doing the selling can actually focus on the close.
rabbit hints at future and partner hardware with 'rabbitOS intern' launch
People who I speak with often know I’m extremely bullish on this being the time for an exciting new period in the evolution of consumer hardware (and, at the same time, software and experiences). I’ve written before here about some of the recent entrants in the field focused specifically on building consumer devices from an AI-first perspective, including Humane (RIP) and Limitless – as well as rabbit, the company behind the r1.
OpenAI's new image generator changes everything
AI image generators have already been impressive for quite a while, and iterative improvements in things like Stable Diffusion have added up to a fairly capable creative tool, but one with very clear, hard to escape limitations. This week, OpenAI launched a new image generation tool that’s built into its ChatGPT 4o model, which leverages technology developed for its Sora video generation tool.
Notes from Human(X) Day 1
There are a lot of signs that a technology or industry has ‘arrived,’ meaning that it’s reached a point where it impacts things in a way that can’t be reversed and that’s far-reaching. One is when it earns enough attention to make a large, lavish and well-crafted industry event viable. Human(X), a new conference happening in Vegas right now (which is where I am right now) is that for AI – loosely defined and broadly applied.
Imagining a new incarnation for AI: The unprompted expert
Generative AI has done more than maybe any other technology to help solve the ‘blank page’ or ‘cold start’ problem when it comes to content production and idea generation. It’s the first time in history that we’ve developed a technology that can capably act in a co-creator role with human beings, as opposed to just an enhancement or accelerant to human origination.
Humane's AI pin dies an ignominious death
The launch event for the Humane AI pin was basically a pageant of hubris, a pantomime of an Apple event that proved almost all style and very little substance. To be clear, I’m not critical of Humane founders Imran Chaudri and Bethany Bongiorno’s ambitions: the concept behind Humane was truly trailblazing, with bold bets on emerging technologies and novel approaches to consumer devices, a category otherwise infected by a rictus of lack of innovation.
xAI's Grok 3 and jumping into the deep end
At this point in the AI arms race, there are a few new things that are considered table stakes – basically while they also remain the bleeding edge of the state of the art. Chain-of-thought is one, and the other is ‘deep research,’ which comes under different branding depending on which model maker you go to, but which amounts to an undergraduate level introductory topic-based survey paper about whatever you want to learn more about.
DeepSeek won't kill OpenAI, but it does show us what's settled - and what isn't
The financial markets are currently having a very broad and fairly deep reaction to the technically impressive debut of DeepSeek’s V3 and R1, and Janus-Pro-7B models – a lot of which is showing up as a significant sell-off of US tech stocks, all the way up and down the stack. Some are saying this undermines not only all of OpenAI’s value premise, but also the recent funds of the venture firms that put money into model companies altogether.
The new Jotunheim: OpenAI's Stargate and xAI's Colossus
OpenAI just revealed a new venture called ‘Stargate’ in partnership with SoftBank that will direct $500 billion over the course of the next four years to build out the data centre infrastructure to power its technology in the US, beginning with a facility in Texas that has already broken ground.
Perplexity wants to be the Meta, Google and Microsoft of the AI era
This past week, two isolated pieces of news about Perplexity came out – one that was very high-profile, riding high on the heightened drama surrounding the TikTok ban (and unban, just hours later). The other flew more under-the-radar, a passing report about the startup exploring product direction decidedly outside of its current wheelhouse. Combined, they paint a picture of a company looking to grab as much real estate as possible during a pivotal paradigm shift.
2025 is the year of the AI lobbyist Original
Developing and powering AI technologies will still account for the bulk of money spent in 2025 across the industry, but expect to see a lot more activity and cash going into one area in particular as it relates to AI: Lobbying. In part because of where we’re at in the tech’s maturity cycle, and in part because it’s a time of change in the U.S. administration – a time in which you can have an outsized influence the next four years of policy (at least).
NVIDIA might do for desktop AI what it did for desktop gaming
One of the highlights of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been the NVIDIA keynote for as long as they’ve been around – it’s a much different affair from the usual efforts by Samsung, LG, Sony and others which just feel like marketing decks for home electronics buyers but performed on stage with a relatively inflated A/V budget.
Welcome to the era of productizing and professionalizing gen AI
We are, of course, deeply enmeshed in the age of AI startup enthusiasm, so it’s no surprise that it’s become a focus of investment firms and startup studios around the world. New York’s Betaworks, however, has better claim than most to being a trendsetter rather than a consensus-follower when it comes to providing a solid foundation upon which world-changing startups are built.
AI's Next Frontier: Capturing Human Process, Not Just Output
Today's leading AI thinkers agree on a compelling possibility for unlocking major advances in foundation models and LLM capabilities: capturing the largely invisible processes behind human thought and creation. While the internet contains vast amounts of information equivalent to countless Libraries of Alexandria, almost all of this data represents end products rather than the underlying processes that created them.
We've only just begun to figure out how we interact with AI
Today, the experience of ‘using’ AI for most of us involves going to a website or opening an app and entering text into an input field that resembles a chat messaging interface – one human, messaging one AI chatbot.
Can one of the architects of modern software development help unlock AI's true potential?
Modular AI founder Chris Lattner has a storied career, with industry-changing stints at some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including at Apple, where he helped create the Swift programming language that the company uses across its platforms today. He also created LLVM, and both the Clang and MLIR compilers, so he may be the single-best global authority on low-level software tooling development working today.
Microsoft spreads its AI bet
The Windows-maker has taken a minority stake in French startup Mistral AI, diversifying its AI playbook Microsoft announced a deal this week with the not-quite-one-year-old startup Mistral AI, a French company that just debuted an extremely French-sounding ChatGPT rival called ‘Le Chat,’ alongside a large language model intended to improve on those of its competitors including OpenAI’s GPT-4 in some key, specific ways.
Elon sues OpenAI
Hopefully he uses Grok as his legal representation This week’s news roundup is one day late, owing to the fact that I was in Spain on a much-needed (and much-appreciated) holiday. Now that I’ve eaten my fill of tapas, and drank my fill of vermut, let’s break down a really very newsy week in tech. The lead: Musk v.
AI chips ahoy!
This is the second edition of The Angle where AI chip-building news led the round-up in as many weeks – which alone says volumes Plenty of big news this week – and lots in AI, including Nvidia’s bonkers earnings which I won’t go into in detail since plenty of markets-aimed publications do that much better already. The big theme, appropriately, was a number of different approaches to challenging Nvidia’s dominance when it comes to being the hardware layer powering the AI revolution.
Altman strikes back
Sam Altman and OpenAI aren’t letting Elon Musk dictate the conversation around his lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker Elon Musk made a big splash last week by suing OpenAI, which I talked about in brief in The Angle’s last Friday roundup. Yesterday, OpenAI responded to the suit with a public blog post coauthored by all of the company’s key people, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockton, and Ilya Sutskever.
House of the Dragon Season 2 first impressions
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Bridgerton Season 3 conclusion
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Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1
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The Regime
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New Demos, new day for TO tech
A couple of weeks ago, I attended New Demos 2, the second in a new event series started by internetVin and Tommy Trinh, two Toronto west-enders who turned a serendipitous meeting into a scrappy demo day in January, followed by a slightly less scrappy (but still pleasantly underproduced) version two in April. The format of the event was simple: A handful of people building stuff have five minutes to show the assembled crowd what it is they’re building.
Oscars + Love Is Blind Season 6 Wrap-up
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Love is Blind Season 6
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Shiny new Rivian(s)!
I’m coming off my first week on the job at OMERS Ventures, but it was plenty busy in the tech news cycle, too: New cars, new Claude, new controversy around Apple’s App Store and new congressional TikTok drama. The lead: New Rivians — times two! This week had a lot of mess, but the biggest headlines came from EV-maker Rivian unveiling its new, more affordable mid-sized SUV.
Altman strikes back
Elon Musk made a big splash last week by suing OpenAI, which I talked about in brief in The Angle’s last Friday roundup. Yesterday, OpenAI responded to the suit with a public blog post coauthored by all of the company’s key people, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockton, and Ilya Sutskever.
Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Season 6
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Elon sues OpenAI
This week’s news roundup is one day late, owing to the fact that I was in Spain on a much-needed (and much-appreciated) holiday. Now that I’ve eaten my fill of tapas, and drank my fill of vermut, let’s break down a really very newsy week in tech. The lead: Musk v.
The Brothers Sun
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Apple Vision Pro and the hair/nose hard limit
Hi – welcome to this, the first edition of The Angle. In case you only skimmed the ‘welcome’ note, I should let you know up front that this inaugural edition is a single-focus column, which means usually it’d only be available for paying subscribers. But it’s a special day, so everyone gets to enjoy this one to celebrate! Also, whether you’re a paid member or not, I wanted to say ‘Thank you’ for signing up.
OpenAI's Sora soars
This was yet another week of all the major players in AI – Google, Meta and OpenAI in particular – falling over themselves trying to one-up the others with announcements of splashy new advances. OpenAI came out as the clear winner in terms of attention, however. OpenAI’s massive splash in generative AI video Thanks for reading The Angle! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. OpenAI revealed Sora, an AI model that can generate realistic looking video based on text prompts.
AI chips ahoy!
Plenty of big news this week – and lots in AI, including Nvidia’s bonkers earnings which I won’t go into in detail since plenty of markets-aimed publications do that much better already. The big theme, appropriately, was a number of different approaches to challenging Nvidia’s dominance when it comes to being the hardware layer powering the AI revolution.
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