AI DUNN Right Weekly - Issue #35
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
Practical AI insights for business growth
Hey AI Innovators! đź‘‹
This week felt like someone hit fast-forward on the entire AI industry. Between Anthropic raising the most money in startup history, Google dropping 100+ announcements at I/O, and OpenAI's AI solving an 80-year-old math problem... it was a lot. Let me break it all down.
But first -- I have some exciting personal news to share!
Here's what you need to know this week:
I'm speaking at the AI Clarity Summit June 1-14 -- and you're invited (free!)
Anthropic just raised $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation -- yes, billion with a B
Google I/O 2026 gave us a personal AI agent that works for you 24/7
OpenAI's AI cracked an 80-year-old math conjecture humans couldn't solve
Figma now has AI agents collaborating with your team on the design canvas
California signed an executive order to protect workers as 70,000+ jobs vanish to AI
Read time: 8 minutes
🎤 I'm Speaking at the AI Clarity Summit!
I have some exciting news -- I'm one of 28 speakers at the AI Clarity Summit, a completely free online event running June 1-14, 2026.
My session is called "Start Here with ChatGPT: A Beginner-Friendly Demo" -- hosted by the wonderful Steph Swanson. It's exactly what it sounds like: a friendly, judgment-free walkthrough of ChatGPT for anyone who's been curious but hasn't taken the plunge yet.
This summit was built for people who are tired of feeling like everyone else already has AI figured out. It's beginner-friendly, practical, and completely free to attend from anywhere online. Topics across all sessions include:
ChatGPT for beginners
AI tools for business and productivity
AI safety and privacy
Marketing and content creation with AI
Simple everyday uses that actually save time
If you've been on the fence about diving into AI... this is your sign. Grab your free spot and I'll see you there!
Big Story
Anthropic Just Raised $30 Billion. Here's What That Number Actually Means for You.
Let's put this in perspective for a second.
Thirty billion dollars. That's not a typo. Anthropic -- the company behind Claude -- just closed one of the largest funding rounds in startup history, valuing the company at over $900 billion. For reference, that's close to the GDP of the Netherlands.
But here's what's more interesting than the number itself: where all that money is going. It's not going into flashy product launches or hiring sprees. It's going into compute -- raw computing power to train and run AI models at a scale most of us can barely imagine.
The deal breakdown:
A $45 billion agreement with SpaceX for computing infrastructure
A $1.8 billion agreement with Akamai for additional capacity
$1.25 billion per month paid to xAI (yes, Elon Musk's company) to use their Colossus computing clusters -- through 2029
That last part stops me every time I read it. Anthropic -- which competes directly with Musk's AI ventures -- is paying him $1.25 billion a month to keep Claude running. This is the compute economy in action. Companies that can afford the most computing power will build the most capable AI. And that's increasingly a very small, very well-funded club.
On top of the money news: Andrej Karpathy, who co-founded OpenAI and built Tesla's Autopilot, has joined Anthropic to lead a new team focused on automating the AI training pipeline using Claude. When the people who built this technology start making moves like this, it tells you something about where the serious work is happening.
My take on this? The $900 billion valuation sounds absurd... until you realize that AI is now the thing every company on earth is betting on. This money represents belief -- massive, institutional, global belief -- that we are at the beginning of something, not the end. For small business owners, the takeaway is simple: the AI tools you're using today are being turbocharged by trillion-dollar investment. Now is not the time to sit on the sidelines.
What's New This Week
Google I/O 2026: Your Personal AI Agent Is Here
Google dropped over 100 announcements at its annual developer conference this week, and almost all of them were AI-focused. The one that has me most excited for everyday business owners? Gemini Spark.
Gemini Spark is a 24/7 personal AI agent that runs on Google Cloud virtual machines. It doesn't just answer your questions -- it takes action across Google Workspace, Chrome, your email, and third-party apps while you're doing other things. Or sleeping.
Think of it like hiring an executive assistant who never stops working and never needs a coffee break.
Other I/O highlights worth knowing:
Gemini 3.5 Flash is faster and cheaper, approaching the performance of more expensive frontier models at a fraction of the cost
Gemini Omni generates video from text, images, or audio -- aimed squarely at creators and marketers
AI-powered smart glasses launching this fall, in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster -- Google's first serious glasses push since the original Google Glass flopped
Gmail Live adds voice-powered inbox search -- you can literally talk to your email
Google and Apple are now collaborating, with Google Cloud powering the next generation of Apple Foundation Models for a more personalized Siri
That last one would have seemed impossible just three years ago. The AI landscape continues to produce strange bedfellows.
OpenAI's AI Breaks an 80-Year-Old Math Record
Here's a story that genuinely stopped me.
OpenAI announced that one of its internal reasoning models autonomously disproved a math conjecture that had stood unchallenged for 80 years -- rooted in a problem posed by legendary mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946. The proof drew on advanced algebraic number theory and was independently verified by three prominent mathematicians: Tim Gowers, Noga Alon, and Thomas Bloom.
What makes this remarkable is that it wasn't a specialized math AI. It was a general-purpose model. The same kind of model that helps you write emails and summarize documents.
OpenAI researcher Alex Wei said it plainly: "Math is a leading indicator of what is to come."
If AI can solve problems that stumped humanity's best minds for nearly a century... the implications for science, medicine, and business problem-solving are difficult to overstate.
Figma Puts AI Agents On Your Design Canvas
Even if you're not a designer, this one is worth paying attention to.
Figma -- the tool most creative and marketing teams use to build websites, ads, and brand assets -- now has AI agents that work directly on the collaborative canvas with your team. Multiple agents can run simultaneously on different tasks:
One handles layout
One iterates on components
One generates variations -- all at the same time, while your team works alongside them
Figma's Chief Design Officer Loredana Crisan: "Teams can now collaborate with agents on the multiplayer canvas to test out ideas, visualize edge cases, and refine concepts together without over-indexing on the more tedious parts."
If you're paying a designer or agency to do your brand assets... this changes the conversation about timelines and costs. Significantly.
California Moves to Protect Workers as AI Takes Jobs
Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order this week directing state agencies to develop policies protecting workers from AI-driven job displacement. The context: over 70,000 jobs have already vanished in California in 2026 -- and the state is home to 33 of the world's top 50 AI companies.
The order requires:
A dashboard tracking AI's job impact -- within 90 days
Proposed updates to California's WARN Act for faster layoff alerts -- within 180 days
A review of union AI negotiations and updates to workforce training programs -- by October 15
This is the first time a major state has taken executive action specifically targeting AI's employment impact. Expect other states to follow closely.
Tool of the Week
Gemini Spark — Google's 24/7 Personal AI Agent
Gemini Spark is the AI tool from Google I/O 2026 that has me most excited for non-technical business owners.
Here's the simple version: instead of you going to AI and asking it questions, Gemini Spark acts on your behalf -- all day, all night -- across your Google apps and connected tools.
Real use cases for business owners:
Monitoring your inbox and drafting replies based on your communication style
Scheduling, rescheduling, and coordinating meetings without you touching a calendar
Summarizing and actioning items across Google Workspace docs and sheets
Running multi-step research tasks while you sleep
The big difference from other AI tools? You don't have to be at your computer. Spark runs on Google Cloud, which means it keeps working when you walk away.
It's not fully rolled out to everyone yet -- Google is doing a phased launch through Google One and Workspace. But if you're a Google user, get on the waitlist. This is what an AI-powered business actually looks like in practice.
Quick Hits Worth Your Time
→ Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic. The co-founder of OpenAI left his AI education startup to join Anthropic's pre-training team, leading a new group focused on automating the AI training pipeline using Claude. When the people who built this technology start making moves, pay attention to where they go.
→ BBC investigation: AI can be fed fake facts with surprising ease. A journalist published a fake article claiming to be a world-champion hot dog eater. Within 24 hours, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews were repeating it as fact. Experts warn this is already being used to push false information about health supplements, financial advice, and retirement products. Trust your AI... but verify.
→ Emergence AI ranked how AI models behave in a virtual town simulation. Over 15 days: Claude had zero crimes and all residents survived. Grok's town had 200+ crimes and everyone was dead by day 4. Gemini's town was on fire after two agents fell in love and started burning things. Make of that what you will...
→ Cohere open-sourced its most powerful model. Command A+ -- a 218 billion parameter model -- is now free to download and use under an Apache 2.0 license. It runs on just two Nvidia H100 GPUs and benchmarks near top Claude models. For businesses that want to run AI on their own servers without sending data to the cloud, this is a significant development.
→ Intuit is cutting 17% of its workforce, citing AI. The company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks joins a growing list of major software companies eliminating roles as they redirect resources to AI development. The enterprise software industry is restructuring fast -- and the ripples will reach all of us.
Prompt of the Week
With AI agents becoming a real thing, it's worth learning how to brief them properly. This week's prompt turns any AI into your personal business intelligence researcher -- the kind of briefing that used to cost a consulting firm thousands of dollars.
Act as a senior business intelligence analyst. Your job is to create a weekly competitive intelligence briefing for my business. Here are the details: - My business/industry: [describe your business and industry in 2-3 sentences] - My top 3 competitors: [list competitors] - What I care about most: [e.g., pricing changes, new features, marketing campaigns, partnerships, hiring moves] - Format I want: executive summary (3-4 bullets), then a section for each competitor, then a "So what does this mean for me?" conclusion Based on what you know about this industry up to your knowledge cutoff, give me a sample briefing using this format. Then tell me which questions I should ask you each week to keep this briefing current.
Why this works: You're not just asking AI for information -- you're training it to act like a dedicated analyst who understands your business. That final question ("which questions should I ask you each week?") is the secret sauce. It turns a one-time answer into an ongoing competitive intelligence workflow you can run every single week.
My Take
What a week.
I've been writing about AI long enough that I've gotten used to big announcements. But this week felt different. When Anthropic raises $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation... and Google announces a personal AI agent that works around the clock for you... and OpenAI's AI solves an 80-year-old math problem as basically a side project... something has shifted.
We are not in the "AI is coming" phase anymore. We are in the "AI is here and the companies are playing for keeps" phase.
For business owners, I think the most important thing to take from this week isn't any individual product launch. It's the pace. The speed at which AI capabilities are evolving is no longer something you can catch up to in your spare time on a Sunday afternoon.
But here's what I want you to hold onto: the tools are getting easier, not harder. Google Spark is designed for people who aren't engineers. Figma's agents work alongside you on a canvas. The prompt this week doesn't require any technical knowledge at all.
The gap isn't widening between you and AI. The gap is widening between people who are actively using these tools and people who are waiting until things "settle down."
Things are not going to settle down.
P.S. -- Don't forget to grab your free spot at the AI Clarity Summit! June 1-14, completely online, completely free. See you there. 👉 go.aiclaritysummit.com/summit-registration?ref=jackie
See you next week.
Jackie
Comments