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Good morning, it is Wednesday, May 27, 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 big macro story today is memory chips minting trillion-dollar companies in real time. Micron up 19% on a UBS upgrade, crossing a trillion in market cap. SK Hynix following hours later. Qualcomm cutting a deal to supply custom AI chips to ByteDance. Inference startups doubling their valuations in months. ByteDance potentially spending seventy billion dollars on capex next year. The through-line is simple: AI infrastructure spending is moving fast enough to reshape entire industries almost overnight.
SpaceX had a complicated day. American Airlines signed on for Starlink, giving Musk deals with three of the four major US carriers. But X's ad revenue came in at just 1.8 billion — still less than half Twitter's peak. And reports surfaced that SpaceX pressured the Pentagon to raise Starlink fees mid-conflict. Commercial dominance, financial disappointment, and real leverage over US military operations — all at once.
Two things to sit with. China is restricting overseas travel for top AI researchers at Alibaba and DeepSeek — treating talent as a containable strategic asset. And the Claude Code coverage today made something concrete: the software engineer role as we know it may simply stop existing. Demis Hassabis putting AGI at 2029 only sharpens that picture.
More tomorrow.