Perplexity bids $34.5B for Chrome

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

Perplexity, last valued at $18B, says it wants to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5B in cash.

The offer comes as a federal judge is set to rule on whether Google must sell Chrome after being found to have an illegal search monopoly.

Perplexity says it would keep Chromium open source, keep Google as the default search, invest $3B into the product over two years, and hire much of Chrome’s team.

The problem is they don’t have $34B.

Large investment funds would finance the deal, according to Perplexity, but the company won’t name them.

Earlier this year it made a similar offer for TikTok’s US operations that went nowhere.

Right now it looks like a high stakes publicity play with little chance Google would ever accept.

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

This AI-generated video is simply beautiful to watch.

Hong Kong’s backstreets in street photography style, from award-winning filmmaker Mateo Willis.

He’s actually a member of the creative community but that’s not why I’m sharing it. Even if he told me he doesn’t like me and wants to slap me in the face, I’d still post it.

The art is just that good. It’s damn good…and it makes me wonder how dangerous it’s going to be when other filmmakers start getting curious about AI too.

Watch the video. Posted on LinkedIn.

👋 If you’re passionate (and a little obsessed) about AI creative, I just launched an AI Creative Club. It’s $5/month. You’re the average of your 5 closest people, so make sure they’re building the future. Join here and start leveling up.

💡 Here’s what you should know

• Nvidia hits record 8% share of S&P 500, largest since 1981

  Nvidia now makes up nearly 8% of the S&P 500, the biggest single-stock weighting since records began in 1981, according to Apollo Global Management.

• Anthropic offers Claude AI to entire U.S. government for $1

  Anthropic is matching OpenAI’s $1 deal but extending Claude access to all three government branches with FedRAMP High security and multicloud support.

• Claude Sonnet 4 adds 1M-token context window in public beta

  Anthropic has expanded Claude Sonnet 4’s context window to 1 million tokens, enabling full codebase analysis, large-scale document synthesis, and long-running context-aware agents, now in public beta on its API and Amazon Bedrock.

• Rubrik launches Agent Rewind to trace and undo AI actions

  Powered by Predibase AI infrastructure, Agent Rewind gives enterprises full visibility into AI agent behavior with an immutable audit trail and safe rollback of unwanted changes.

• China questions tech giants over Nvidia H20 chip purchases

  Chinese regulators have summoned Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and others to explain their purchases of Nvidia’s H20 AI chips, citing information security concerns that could hinder Nvidia’s China sales.

• Apollo Hospitals to double AI investments after profit beat

  India’s Apollo Hospitals plans to double its AI spending over the next two to three years, expanding use in diagnostics after higher patient volumes lifted quarterly profit above estimates.

💰 The numbers

• Sam Altman is co-founding Merge Labs, a brain–computer interface startup valued at $850M that aims to challenge Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Funding may come from OpenAI’s ventures team.

• Fractal Analytics, India’s first AI unicorn, filed for a $560M IPO in Mumbai that could value the company at more than $3.5B.

• AI companion apps are on track to generate over $120M in 2025, up from $82M in the first half of the year, according to Appfigures.

• 1Kosmos raised $57M in Series B and credit to expand its platform for identity proofing and authentication.

• Squint raised $40M to accelerate human-to-machine collaboration in manufacturing.

• Profound raised $35M in Series B to help brands optimize content for AI-driven search.

• GoodShip brought in $25M in Series B to scale its AI-powered freight management platform.

• Dashverse picked up $13M in Series A to grow its AI-driven short-form episodic content platform.

• Continua, founded by former Google Distinguished Engineer David Petrou, raised $8M in seed funding led by GV to bring a Social AI agent into group chats on SMS, iMessage, and Discord.

• Dealops raised $7M to build pricing and quoting infrastructure for AI and enterprise sales teams, backed by Pear VC, General Catalyst, and leaders from OpenAI and Anthropic.

🧠 Thought starters

Figure’s Helix can now fold laundry.

From their site, here’s more details:

“This is the first instance of a humanoid robot with multi-fingered hands folding laundry fully autonomously using an end-to-end neural network.”

Without any architectural changes, Helix learned to:

• Pick towels from a mixed pile

• Adjust folding strategies based on starting configurations

• Recover from multi-pick errors by returning extra items

• Use fine manipulation skills, like tracing an edge with a thumb, pinching corners, or unraveling tangled towels - before completing folds

“Natural multimodal interaction. In addition to folding, Helix learned to maintain eye contact, direct its gaze, and use learned hand gestures while engaging with people.”

Imagine the prank videos on YouTube. Be honest, if you saw Figure folding laundry and staring you dead in the eye right next to your bed, are you grabbing a bat or throwing the first punch? Because I know I am.

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

Join the AI Creative Club (you’ll find me there). It’s not only for artists and filmmakers…it’s for anyone who recognizes this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn as much as you can about AI to multiply your impact...to become superhuman. Remember, creativity is just intelligence having fun. This club is for ultra curious people, and if you’ve made it this far…you’re pretty damn curious and probably the smartest one in your circle of friends. It would be my honor to have you in there.

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