OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machine Labs raised individual $2 billion seed rounds before shipping a single product. Even first-time founders were raising at a scale that once belonged only to Big Tech. Such astronomical investments were followed by equally incredible spends. Meta shelled out nearly $15 billion to lock up Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and spent countless more millions to poach talent from other AI labs. Meanwhile, AI's biggest players promised close to $1.3 trillion in future infrastructure spending. The first half of 2025 matched the fervor, and investor interest, of the prior year. That mood has shifted in recent months to deliver a vibe check of sorts. Extreme optimism for AI, and the accompanying wild valuations, is still intact. But that rosy view is now being tempered with concerns over an AI bubble bursting, user safety, and the sustainability of technological progress at its current pace. The era of...
learn more
