Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we're living in a time of 'profound change,' which can be both 'exciting' and 'daunting.' 'The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,' Caulfield declared ' prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, 'What happened'' 'Okay, I struck a chord,' she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, 'Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives' ' only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause. In Schmidt's case, the criticism actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage....

The Siri relaunch is widely seen as Apple's big chance to reestablish its relevance in artificial intelligence. As part of that effort, company executives will argue that they're taking a more privacy-friendly approach than most other AI companies, Gurman said. Apple will reportedly launch the first standalone Siri app, powered by Google Gemini and offering users a chatbot experience reminiscent of ChatGPT. But compared to those other chatbots, the app is supposed to have more limitations on how long user information can be used and stored. Gurman also suggested that Apple might be emphasizing privacy as a way to excuse Siri's shortcomings compared to competing products ' and that this emphasis might obscure the fact that Google is handling some the security....

This week in AI felt less like a product cycle and more like a philosophical provocation wrapped in a market event, a demo, and a few delightfully ambitious lab announcements. The common thread was not bigger models, larger context windows, or yet another benchmark victory. It was agency. Who gets to shape intelligence' Who gets to improve it' And, slightly more ominously, what happens when the tools begin improving the tools' Start with Cerebras. The IPO was not just a financing milestone for an AI chip company; it was a reminder that the AI race is still brutally physical. Behind every magical chatbot sits an industrial stack of silicon, power, networking, cooling, capital markets, and geopolitical anxiety. Cerebras has always been the wonderfully weird character in the AI hardware opera: instead of making chips modestly larger, it went all-in on the wafer-scale computer, basically asking, 'What if the chip were the data center'' That sounds like something invented after too much espresso at a semiconductor conference, but it captures an important truth. If intelligence is becoming a commodity, compute remains the refinery. Public markets are now voting on which refineries matter....

More than a decade later, Eclipse finds itself at the center of the tech world's action. The firm's $6.5 million Series A investment in Cerebras Systems in 2016 paved the way for a total return of $2.5 billion when the semiconductor company went public this week. The firm invested a total of $147 million in Cerebras over time, a bet that generated a 17-fold return at the IPO price of $185 per share, according to Eclipse. For Susan, the windfall from Cerebras is only the beginning of reaping big rewards from a longstanding belief that because 85% of global GDP is tied to the physical world, investing in companies beyond pure software could be immensely lucrative. Public markets and startup founders seem to be recognizing the value of physical-world tech now, too. Susan noted that shares of TSMC and Micron recently hit all-time highs, while a growing cohort of elite founders are eager to build startups at the intersection of hardware and software. Susan echoed public market sentiment that earlier this year sent many SaaS stocks tumbling on the belief that enterprises may use Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's latest models to create their own bespoke software tools instead....