I just launched an AI school

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Monday.

Global M&A has hit $2.6T YTD, the strongest start since 2021, powered by AI driven growth plays and U.S. megadeals.

Tim Cook told Apple’s 12,000 person all hands that AI is “as big or bigger than the internet,” promising major hiring, chip projects, and acquisitions to catch up to Microsoft and Google.

This space is moving so fast, it’s impossible to navigate alone…which is why I launched an AI school (on skool.com).

It’s not really a normal “school”…that would kind of suck…

It’s a hands-on club where we test AI tools, swap experiments, and share ideas in a judgment‑free space.

Early members get in for only $5/month. The low cost keeps spammers away so it stays a high‑value community.

We’re starting lean and adding new material as we go. Early members will get to shape the community from day one and it will be fun.

This likely won’t be $5 forever. I’ll either cap it at a couple hundred members or raise the price soon, whichever makes the most sense.

(This is just the start. More premium communities are coming soon, and joining this one puts you first in line for future insider perks.)

Join here, while it’s hot!

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

Everyone is arguing about JSON prompts for AI videos.

Google finally weighed in (and shared a prompt).

Here’s the full post. Posted on LinkedIn.

PS: In case you missed the entire email intro….I just launched the AI creative community. It’s going to be fun and you’ll feel right at home. Thanks again for being patient! Click here to join.

💡 Here’s what you should know

• Apple is building a ChatGPT rival

  Apple’s new “Answers” team is creating a lightweight ChatGPT competitor to accelerate its push into generative AI.

• Rethinking how we measure AI intelligence

  Google DeepMind and Kaggle launch Game Arena, an open-source platform where AI models compete in strategic games to benchmark problem-solving and reasoning skills.

• Cloudflare flags Perplexity for stealth crawling

  Cloudflare says Perplexity used hidden crawlers to bypass robots.txt and site blocks, prompting new defenses and delisting as a verified bot.

• Broadcom debuts Jericho4 chip for AI data center networks

  The new Jericho4 chip boosts long-distance data transfer, memory capacity, and encryption to support large-scale AI workloads across connected data centers.

• Palantir sees surging AI demand from gov and business

  Company lifts its annual revenue outlook amid growing adoption of its AI tools.

• Qwen‑Image launches for text and image generation

  20B model creates posters with native text, bilingual support, and versatile image generation from photoreal to anime.

Also, Grok Imagine is here. I played with it for 10 min on iOS, and it’s an endless social feed of continuous images from a single prompt. It’s pretty addictive.

Can you create AI videos at the level of Veo, Midjourney, Kling, or Hailuo? Short answer, is no…not yet.

💰 The numbers

• Palantir hit $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time, up 48%, fueled by AI demand and U.S. government contracts.

• Reflection AI is targeting a $1B raise to compete with Meta and DeepSeek in open-source AI.

• South Korea will invest $383M by 2027 to back Naver, LG, SK Telecom, NC AI, and Upstage in building a sovereign AI model.

• Harvey hits $100M ARR with 500+ enterprise clients as weekly active users quadruple in a year.

• UK startup CuspAI is reportedly raising $100M+ for its AI-driven materials discovery platform.

• HelloFresh is investing $70M to use AI for meal planning and expanding dinner options.

• Pantomath raised a $30M Series B to scale its agentic AI data‑operations platform automating root‑cause analysis for enterprise pipelines.

• QuamCore raised a $26M Series A to develop quantum‑AI acceleration hardware targeting million‑qubit superconducting systems.

• OpenMind raised a $20M Series A to build FABRIC, a decentralized OS for AI‑robot coordination across hardware platforms.

• Subzero Labs raised a $20M seed round to launch Rialo, a Web2‑style blockchain network for scaling real‑world AI applications.

🧠 Thought starters

• Inside OpenAI’s quest to make AI do anything for you

• China unveils ‘Darwin Monkey,’ a computer that mimics a monkey brain

• Demis Hassabis: AI will be 10x bigger and faster than the Industrial Revolution.

• What happens to the internet if no one clicks search links?

  🎧 8:46 min (Podcast)

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

Join the AI Creative Club (you’ll find me there).

Are we friends on LinkedIn and X? Let’s connect — DM me or hit the follow button.

P.S. If this was valuable, forward it to a friend. If you’re that smart friend, subscribe here.

P.P.S. Interested in reaching other ambitious readers like you? To become a sponsor, reply to this email.