Lead story: The Pentagon goes all-in on AI

The Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Office has written three identical $200 million checks—one each to Anthropic, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI—to push agentic AI from lab to battlefield, only weeks after giving OpenAI the same mandate. This is the state seeding a domestic oligopoly of frontier-model suppliers. It’s not a winner-takes-all bet, but a portfolio hedge that locks talent and compute inside US security perimeters while forcing the giants to prove safety, auditability and interoperability on DoD terms. In the exponential age, power accrues to whoever sets the technical and ethical specs for these agents; America is racing to codify those specs before rivals do. [BreakingDefense] #AIModels

Key signals, quick scan

A 30-second scan of four secondary signals that hint at where the curve is bending.

• Meta will switch on its Prometheus (Ohio) data center next year and break ground on Hyperion (Louisiana) soon after. Both will provide several ­gigawatts of load, rivalling small nuclear plants and confirming that hyperscalers are leapfrogging 100-MW builds in favour of giga-campuses to feed next-gen “super-intelligence” models. And they’re vast—Prometheus will be almost as big as Manhattan. [The Information] #Infrastructure

• Xiaomi is taking on Tesla in China with a highly automated EV factory employing 1,000 robots. The company’s manufacturing approach, which includes replacing a 72-part process that has 840 weld points with a single die-cast element, allows for rapid production and means Xiaomi will soon challenge Tesla’s competitive pricing. [KrAsia] #Hardware #Robotics

• China has approved Synopsys’s $35 billion acquisition of Ansys — the biggest deal ever in electronic design automation, the software used to design advanced computer chips. With this approval, two US companies will control nearly the entire global market for high-end chip design software. A supply chain already strained by export controls now hinges on even fewer tool providers. [Reuters] #Infrastructure

• Meta’s new superintelligence lab has reportedly considered abandoning its most powerful open-source model, Behemoth, in favor of a closed alternative. If it does, it all but confirms that China now leads the open-weight frontier. [NYT] #Models

  Share

Tool of the week – Building an AI assistant

Last week, we built a no-code automation that helps you triage inbox chaos, handle urgent requests and shield your focus time - without hiring a virtual assistant.

The assistant works like this:

• It reviews every incoming email and classifies it by urgency and importance.

• It pings you on Slack if something genuinely urgent appears.

• You can reply right there—or ask it to block out a 30-minute focus slot in your calendar.

We used Lindy, a tool designed for chaining AI steps together (alternatives include n8n, Make, or Wordware). But the key takeaway isn’t the tool – it’s the workflow: lightweight and built to defend your time.

🔧 Here’s the tutorial to build your own in under 10 minutes.

All annual members of Exponential View get an extended free access to Lindy – claim your AI bundle here.

Share

Was this email useful?

• 👍 That helped me. Thanks

• 😐 Meh - was ok.

• 👎 Not interesting to me.

Thanks! Want to share this with someone like you? Forward the email.

Want to opt out of the daily emails? Follow these steps. You can still receive essays and the Sunday edition as usual.