Two new issues overnight: Stratechery's week in review (Anthropic's data-retention U-turn, Meta's teen-safety settlement, Nvidia's 'remarkable and boring' earnings) and Not Boring's optimism roundup (world models, Tesla's Cybercab launch, a geothermal gigawatt, and a space telescope launched nine months early). Nothing new from Faye D'Souza, Vested Shorts, FoundMyFitness or Every.
Stratechery
Ben Thompson's week: Anthropic released Fable 5.1 and entirely removed its controversial data retention policy - the market speaking, since Anthropic needs enterprise money while OpenAI (whose president Greg Brockman gave Stratechery an interview on Astra and alignment) competes hard. Meta settled with 29 US states and will make sweeping restrictions on teen use of Instagram; Ben's framework piece argues the settlement makes sense for all parties but shows why tech regulation always 'feels off'. Nvidia's earnings were 'remarkable and boring' - the same coin's two sides - and the bundle chewed on Nvidia buying Hugging Face. Finally, Apple 'found religion': its immersive Vision Pro broadcast of Friday Night Baseball finally nailed live immersive sports.
Why it mattersThe through-line is feedback loops catching up with tech: AI labs bending policy to revenue pressure, states forcing teen-safety rules onto Meta, and Apple finally shipping the immersive-sports experience critics demanded - plus Nvidia's quiet consolidation of the AI stack.
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Not Boring
A stacked week. World models took a leap: Runway's Solaris generates software itself frame-by-frame ('the image is the application'), World Labs' Atlas (Fei-Fei Li) makes a minute of 1440p video with pixel-perfect camera control, and Runway's GWM World 2 streams interactive 720p simulations at 24 fps; OpenAI also dropped Astra 6. Fervo signed a 396 MW geothermal PPA with Google - the largest ever - with an option to reach ~1 GW by 2030. Tesla launched the Cybercab in Austin: no steering wheel or pedals, ~290 miles of range, a claimed sub-$30K build cost and 20 cents a mile at scale, against Waymo's 500,000 paid weekly rides. Also: the first robotically harvested head of iceberg lettuce (Sami Robotics - 'an AgTech moon landing'), NASA's Roman Space Telescope launched nine months early to hunt exoplanets from L2, and Physical Superintelligence raised $58M - having already designed The Fermi Explorer, a minimum viable spacecraft to Alpha Centauri ('the first spacecraft to leave Earth for another star, and the last to arrive').
Why it mattersPacky's case for acceleration, with receipts: the picks that matter for you are the Cybercab economics (sub-$30K cost, 20c/mile claims vs Waymo's paid scale), the Fervo-Google deal showing where AI's power demand gets built, and world models moving from demo to product.
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