Good morning & happy end of the week! Fridays are for the good stuff, and today's newsletter is exactly like that ' We're diving into Stripe Agentic Commerce suite and the new era of AI-powered payments (what it's all about & why it's huge, why FinTech giant's strategy here is brilliant & what to expect next + bonus dive into Stripe's quest to become the financial backbone of the AI economy & 100+ battle'tested tools and frameworks to accelerate your AI projects insde), and Klarna, which is now moving deeper into digital assets (what their Privy parntership is all about & why it makes sense + bonus deep dives into Klarna & Affirm inside). So let's just jump straight into the finnovative stuff '' The BIG News '' $106 billion FinTech titan Stripe just introduced its Agentic Commerce Suite. And honestly, this isn't only big' More importantly, it represents a pivotal strategic initiative to establish the financial technology company as the foundational infrastructure layer for AI-driven commerce....

As language models (LMs) improve at tasks like image generation, trivia questions, and simple math, you might think that human-like reasoning is around the corner. In reality, they still trail us by a wide margin on complex tasks. Try playing Sudoku with one, for instance, where you fill in numbers one through nine in such a way that each appears only once across the columns, rows, and sections of a nine-by-nine grid. Your AI opponent will either fail to fill in boxes on its own or do so inefficiently, although it can verify if you've filled yours out correctly. Whether an LM is trying to solve advanced puzzles, design molecules, or write math proofs, the system struggles to answer open-ended requests that have strict rules to follow. The model is better at telling users how to approach these challenges than attempting them itself. Moreover, hands-on problem-solving requires LMs to consider a wide range of options while following constraints. Small LMs can't do this reliably on their own; large language models (LLMs) sometimes can, particularly if they're optimized for reasoning tasks, but they take a while to respond, and they use a lot of computing power....

The robot swerved through the cafeteria of Rivian's Palo Alto office, shelves adorned with chilled canned coffees ' until it didn't. Five minutes later, a man carefully pushed it out of everyone's way, the words 'I'm stuck' flashing yellow on the poor droid's screen. It was an inauspicious start to Rivian's 'Autonomy & AI Day,' a showcase for the company's plans to make its vehicles capable of driving themselves. Rivian doesn't make the cafeteria robot and isn't responsible for its abilities, but there was a familiar message in its foibles: this stuff is hard. The EV equipped with the automated-driving software drove myself and two Rivian employees on a switchback route near the company's campus. As we glided past Tesla's engineering office, I noticed a Model S in front of us slow to turn into the rival company's lot. The R1S eventually noticed this, too, braking hard just before the Rivian employee nearly intervened. During my demo drive, there was one actual disengagement. The employee in the driver's seat took over as we passed through a one-lane section of road due to some tree-trimming. Minor stuff overall. But it wasn't exactly rare either; I spotted multiple other demo rides that had disengagements too....

Startup investors this week demonstrated continued willingness to write big checks for promising companies in sought-after areas. Leading the pack was Saviynt, an AI identity security platform that picked up a fresh $700 million. 1. Saviynt, $700M, AI identity security: Saviynt, a provider of AI-optimized identity security tools, announced that it secured $700 million in Series B financing. KKR led the round, which set a $3 billion valuation for the 15-year-old, El Segundo, California-based company. 2. Unconventional AI, $475M, AI energy efficiency: Unconventional AI, a startup designing a computer to optimize energy efficiency for AI, raised $475 million in seed funding. Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the financing for the San Francisco Bay Area company. 3. Fervo Energy, $462M, geothermal energy: Houston-based Fervo Energy, a developer and operator of geothermal energy projects with a focus on technologies to scale this power source, picked up $462 million in Series E funding led by B Capital. The funding will go toward a geothermal project in Western Utah as well as other projects in its pipeline....