Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Saturday, April 25, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
The biggest story is the AI capital arms race, and today it had two perfect bookends. Google committed up to forty billion dollars into Anthropic — ten billion now, thirty billion more tied to performance — the largest AI investment commitment ever recorded. Same day, DeepSeek dropped V4 Pro: 1.6 trillion parameters, under two dollars per million tokens, running on Huawei chips. Not Nvidia. That hardware detail is the real headline. It's a direct challenge to the assumption that US export controls can contain Chinese AI progress. The gap is narrowing, and the cost structure isn't close.
Infrastructure is getting rewired fast. Meta is renting hundreds of thousands of Amazon Graviton chips for inference — non-Nvidia silicon in real production. Nvidia still hit a five trillion dollar market cap. Intel had its best single day since 1987. And Oracle just closed sixteen billion to build out data center capacity for OpenAI. The buildout is enormous and the financing is starting to strain.
One more thing — Polymarket had a genuinely bad week. A US Special Forces soldier was arrested for allegedly trading on classified intel about Maduro's capture. Credibility problem.
More tomorrow.