The Angle (Newsletter)

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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.