The last AI bagholders
What's driving the AI IPO boom. Also: People keep starting AI labs, Microsoft's addiction memo, and AI meets physical product design.
Happy Friday. The weather in NYC this week has been incredible.
Shoutout to Blackbird for helping me get around the city and setting me up with some great dinners. And thanks to everyone who came out to the new media party I co-hosted at a16z HQ last night. I’m not a sports guy, but go Knicks.
I’ve got a shorter feed check issue today. I’m headed back to the west coast this weekend for Apple’s WWDC on Monday. Ping me if you’ll also be in Cupertino and want to say hi.
In other news, I’m excited to be co-hosting an evening of conversations about AI, the future of the web, and the creator economy with Yahoo at Cannes Lions in a few weeks, featuring Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk, After School’s Casey Lewis, and Cat Goetze of CatGPT fame. If you’ll be on the Crosette on June 23rd and want to attend, ping me.
Feed check:
Anthropic needs more money. Daniela Amodei kind of just said that’s what the IPO is for onstage at Bloomberg Tech this week. For OpenAI and Anthropic specifically, the money bag has been passed through pretty much every pool of private capital that exists already. The last bagholders will be retail investors.
But Anthropic also wants to maybe pause AI development. Co-founder Jack Clark published a big essay this week about recursive-self-improvement that calls for other labs to slow down: “If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing.” This will, of course, not happen, but it certainly makes Anthropic look more like the good guy.
“OpenAI’s next model is being designed by another model in a sign that AI is reaching ‘superintelligence,’ SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son told CNBC.” Hm. “So once that happens, [the] model generates [the] next model ... and it’s going to be exponentially smarter than all of us. That’s a superintelligence,” Son told CNBC.”
AI is not causing mass job loss. In fact, the opposite is happening. Per Joe Weisenthal on the new jobs report: “Booooom. 172k jobs. Economists had expected 88k.”
Brian Chesky is maybe starting an AI lab. Bloomberg scoops: “Chesky plans to create an AI venture to develop artificial intelligence models and is considering a focus on user interaction and design, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. He is in the early stages of funding the lab, one person said, and the details could change.” Here’ what he told me and other reporters on May 20: Airbnb “won’t build our own models” and won’t “spend billions on GPUs and data centers,” but today’s chatbots are the wrong interface for travel and that the prize is something “conversational but not a chatbot.”
The kind of ‘going direct’ I can get behind: Founders Fund gets it. Famous tech leaders being filmed playing Mafia with each other is much more engaging than one of their partners doing a lovefest interview. From Tom Dotan: “They filmed the show a few months back at Tosca Cafe, the fabled North Beach hangout that once served as the setting for the PayPal Mafia photoshoot in Fortune. The players include Sam Altman, Bryan Johnson, Dylan Field, Trae Stephens, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Cyan Banister, and Moxie Marlinspike. The show will live on YouTube and X.”
Reid Hoffman is trying another AI startup and leaving Microsoft’s board. His previous one, Inflection, was acquihired to build what has become Microsoft’s in-house AI lab with Mustafa Suleyman, which created some awkwardness at the board level. This time, Hoffman is actually leaving Microsoft fully to focus on Manas, his AI drug discovery startup. His disclosed the news in a podcast with Satya Nadella.
Microsoft doens’t actually want to addict people to its AI agent. Speaking of Nadella, he quickly pushed back internally after 404 Media leaked a memo from a Micosoft leader saying the goal was to "make people addicted” to the new Scout agent.
Thomas Reardon of CTRL-labs fame is back with a new startup that wants to build “the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.” Steven Levy has the exclusive deep dive. The EMG ‘mind control’ wristband CTRL-labs developed, and Meta acquired to create the neural band for its display glasses, is one of the most geniunely ‘oh shit’ demos I’ve ever done. Excited to see what Reardon does not.
Meta does not like this Wired story. CTO Andrew Bosworth and other Metamates have been pushing back on it on social media, though I haven’t seen any direct refute of the crux of the story: “Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones.”
Apple whitegloved OpenClaw for normies in iMessage. Poke is one of, if not the best consumer AI assistant products I’ve used in the last year, and Apple has given it special permissions to work via the Messages app. To knowledge, this is the first AI agent to be officially blessed by Apple this way. For more on Poke, check out the ACCESS episode we recently did with CEO Marvin von Hagen.
As usual, Mark Gurman has the details on what Apple is about to announce at WWDC.
“Meet the SpaceX Employees Who Are About to Make an Overnight Fortune”
I talked with Offleash PR about what I’m up to with Sources and the podcast.
Scenes from the Sources x a16z new media party yesterday:
Shrikala@ShrikalaKashyapFuture of new media convos with @RKRigney, Brittney @alexeheath at the @a16z NYC office @Techweek_
9:59 PM · Jun 4, 2026 · 2.97K Views3 Replies · 2 Reposts · 23 Likes
This week on ACCESS
Ellis Hamburger and I sit down with Jordan Taylor, founder of Vizcom, to discuss the AI design tool that lets anyone take a rough sketch and turn it into a finished product. We discuss how Jordan built Vizcom from a viral Reddit post during COVID, why a drawing is still a better creative input than a text prompt, and how hundreds of thousands of designers are already using it to design shoes, cars, and other physical products.
And we, of course, had to talk about the Ferrari Luce.
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
ICYMI
Sources is a newsletter by Alex Heath about the AI race, featuring scoops, unique analysis, and exclusive interviews. Every week, Sources is read by thousands of decision makers in tech, finance, policy, and media. Click here to learn more.