Ctrl AI Profit

TwelveLabs raised $100 million in a Series B round co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with participation from Amazon and Red Bull Ventures. The company is building video superintelligence — AI that perceives, understands, and reasons about existing video footage rather than generating new video from text prompts. Michael and Frank break down the distinction between video generation (Sora, Veo) and...

Venice.ai raised $65 million in a Series A funding round led by Dragonfly, valuing the company at $1 billion. The company has been profitable since its 2024 launch, with more than 3.5 million users and an annualized revenue run rate above $70 million. Michael and Frank break down what makes Venice.ai different: it is designed so that it never possesses user data in the first place. Prompts are not...

Google released TabFM, a zero-shot model for tabular data that performs classification and regression on tables — spreadsheets, databases, CSV files — without task-specific training or manual feature engineering. You give it a table and a question, and it answers. Michael and Frank break down what this means for small businesses that live in spreadsheets. TabFM could identify churn-prone customers...

Together AI closed an $800 million Series C funding round in July 2026, valuing the company at approximately $8.3 billion post-money. Aramco Ventures led the round, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, and Nvidia. Together AI builds infrastructure for open-source AI models — the compute, optimization, and serving layers that let businesses run models like Llama and Mist...

Colorado's AI Act (Senate Bill 24-205) became effective on June 30, 2026 — the first comprehensive state-level artificial intelligence regulation in the United States with mandatory requirements for businesses using high-risk AI systems. It applies to any business using AI to make consequential decisions about consumers in areas like employment, housing, credit, and healthcare. Michael and Fr...

The Trump administration announced plans to fast-track 74 new or expanded fossil fuel power plants specifically to support AI data-center expansion — enough to generate 143 gigawatts and emit an estimated 662 million tons of greenhouse gases annually. The stated rationale is that AI data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and renewable capacity cannot be built fast enough to meet dem...

Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated performer created by UK studio Particle 6, was announced as the lead in the feature film "Misaligned" in early July 2026. The film is a hybrid production — human directors and writers, but Tilly's performance is entirely generated by AI. Her expressions, voice, and delivery are not a human actor digitized. They are synthesized. Michael and Frank break...

The Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists hosted a webinar on July 21, 2026: "Asked. Answered. Discoverable: Are AI Chats Litigation Gold?" The topic was whether AI chat histories, logs, and interactions can be used in legal discovery and as evidence in litigation. The answer is yes. Michael and Frank dissect why AI conversations are more dangerous than email in litigation. Un...

OpenAI revealed its first custom AI chip, codenamed Jalapeño, developed with Broadcom in approximately nine months — one-third the typical custom chip design timeline. Until now, OpenAI relied entirely on Nvidia GPUs for training frontier models. Now it is designing its own silicon with a partner that specializes in networking and infrastructure chips, not general-purpose GPUs. Michael and Frank b...

MIT's 2025 State of AI in Business survey delivered a brutal number: 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots failed to show measurable financial returns within six months. Only 5% delivered P&L impact. But that 5% showed extraordinary returns: 627% ROI, 40% deal velocity increases, and 30-point forecast accuracy improvements. Michael and Frank dissect the data — not to say AI doesn't...

Alibaba classified Anthropic's Claude Code as "high-risk software" effective July 10, 2026, directing 120,000+ employees to use Qoder — their in-house coding assistant — instead. This is not a security review. It is a competitive battlefield drawn across an internal IT policy. Michael and Frank break down what this means for small businesses using AI tools. If the world's large...

Meta confirmed Meta Compute — a plan to lease its idle data-center AI capacity to external customers. This puts Meta in direct competition with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and independent neocloud providers. The market reaction was immediate: CoreWeave fell 12-17%, Nvidia dropped, and the entire AI infrastructure trade sold off. Michael and Frank break down what Meta Compute means for small business...

Tesla launched its unsupervised Robotaxi service in Miami — vehicles operating without a human safety driver on board, charging real customers for rides in a major US city. This is not a pilot program with engineers in the back seat. It is a commercial service navigating traffic, intersections, and parking without human supervision. Michael and Frank break down what this means for small business o...

South Korea just announced an AI investment plan totaling roughly $880 billion — with $307 billion earmarked specifically for AI data centers and memory factories. Bloomberg Intelligence found that sovereign AI spending globally is approaching 30 gigawatts of data-center capacity. Governments are no longer regulating AI. They are competing with Amazon to build it. Michael and Frank break down the...

Samsung posted record, AI-driven profits in its semiconductor division — demand for HBM, DRAM, and NAND memory in AI data centers hit historic highs. And the market punished them for it. Samsung stock fell 10% in Seoul and the selloff spread across the entire chip sector. Michael and Frank break down the AI spending expectation gap. The market wanted proof that AI infrastructure spending accelerat...

If the biggest AI company in the world allegedly coached Apple employees to bypass security checks — what does that mean for YOUR business data?  Michael and Frank break down the 41-page complaint where Apple accuses OpenAI of running "show and tell" interviews to extract trade secrets, the Codex sub-agent encryption that quietly killed your audit trail, and the leadership shakeup ahead...

A Bloomberg Intelligence survey this week found that Chinese AI companies — Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei — are redirecting roughly 46% of their AI accelerator budgets to domestic chip suppliers over the next 12 months. They're systematically moving away from Nvidia, the dominant global supplier, toward Chinese-designed alternatives like Huawei's Ascend and Alibaba's Hanguang processors....

Microsoft — the company that invested $13 billion in OpenAI and made "Copilot" synonymous with AI-assisted work — is reportedly replacing models from OpenAI and Anthropic with its own AI to cut costs. This isn't a minor adjustment. It's a signal that the biggest buyer in the AI market is price-shopping. Michael and Frank break down what this means for small business owners payi...

On July 6, 2026, xAI officially ceased to exist as an independent company. Its X account posted: "We are now @SpaceXAI." Elon Musk folded his AI company, his social network, and his rocket company into one conglomerate — with Grok as the flagship product and plans for an AI-native device thinner than an iPhone. Michael and Frank break down what this consolidation means for small business...

Lowe's — the home improvement retailer with 7,500 vendors, 130 distribution centers, and 1,700 stores — just went public with how they're running their entire supply chain on a combined Nvidia and Palantir AI stack. Intelligent agents monitor shipping routes, inventory levels, and demand signals in real time, re-optimizing the entire network automatically when conditions change. Michael...

A company called Odra.dev posted something this week that stopped me cold: "We charge $10,000 a week to delete AI-generated code." Their product, SlopFix, exists because businesses are discovering that code written by AI — fast, cheap, and impressive in demos — becomes a liability the moment real users touch it. For small business owners using AI coding tools, this episode is a wake-up c...

OpenAI dropped a whole family of models this week — GPT-5.6 with three tiers named Sol, Terra, and Luna. But the real story isn't the specs. It's the gate. The preview is locked behind a White House framework, and only select partners with government clearance get the keys. For small business owners, this changes everything. Michael and Frank break down what "voluntary" frontie...

Your team’s AI tools might be following rules you never agreed to — and they’d run for months before anyone noticed. Alibaba recently banned Claude Code from internal use after discovering a hidden mechanism in one of its updates. The mechanism detected China-linked users via timezone and proxy checks, then silently modified the system prompt without disclosing the change. Anthropic says it was an...

Sam Altman just offered the U.S. government a forty-two-billion-dollar stake in OpenAI — and if you think that's just a Wall Street story, think again. In this episode, Michael and Frank break down what it actually means when the federal government becomes a financial stakeholder in the world's most powerful AI company. From GPT-5.6 being locked to twenty vetted organizations, to Anthrop...

OpenAI just launched a three-tier model family — Sol, Terra, and Luna — and for the first time, small business owners can match the AI brain to the job instead of paying premium prices for everything. Michael and Frank break down what Sol, Terra, and Luna actually do, how the pricing tiers work, and which model belongs in which business workflow. They get into why the government asked for a staged...