Acrobatic Robots, OpenAI Buying the World, DSA

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we have exciting news, with acrobatic robots, new algorithm breakthroughs, OpenAI “buying the world", an insanely good document understanding product you can use today, and more.

Enjoy!

STARTUPS

Most Used AI Startups… by Other Startups

a16z, a top-three venture capital firm in terms of deployed capital and an investor in most of the hottest AI startups, has presented a list of AI startups whose products are being used by other startups.

Although the list screams the following meme, as most of the so-called winners here are part of a16z’s portfolio, it’s still a nice way to visualize what AI startups are deemed ‘popular’.

Among the main insights, we have:

60% of top spend is in horizontal applications, those designed to boost productivity across roles. The remaining ~40% is in vertical / role-specific solutions.

Among the vertical (role-specific) apps, most (~12 out of 17) are augmenting human work (automating repetitive tasks). Only a minority (~5) aim to replace human workflows fully (end-to-end agentic systems). What a surprise, maybe because framing AI as a substitution tool is too much of a grifter thing to say?

“Vibe coding” is no longer just a consumer or hobbyist trend, they say. Four such companies made the top 50 spend list (Replit, Cursor, Lovable, and Emergent). Personally, beyond prototyping, using vibe-coding apps like Lovable is ludicrous spending. Cursor is an obvious choice, but I do not consider it to be a vibe-coding platform in the same way Claude Code isn’t either.

Nearly 70% of the top 50 companies can be adopted individually (i.e., they don’t require enterprise licensing). Et voilà, the real golden nugget here. They are framing this as enterprise spending when, in reality, it’s just scrappy founders and early employees frugally using non-enterprise licenses. Hardly proof of enterprise value.

I may come across as overly sarcastic, but I really, really believe most of these companies are living on borrowed time. The truth is, many of them are as irrelevant as they get.

Additionally, many of these startups (at least one in the list above) engage in outright “ARR fraud” by claiming recurring revenues that are not actually recurring, but rather aggressive customer acquisition strategies that offset the massive churn these products experience, and even outright lying about customers they don’t actually have.

I genuinely believe that a newer generation of AI startups, based on strong models trained with end-to-end on-the-job training, will emerge and outperform all these.

But if I could highlight one that is maybe different, that would be Plaud, one of the few American startups with enough balls to build hardware.

My main criticism of the US’s startup ecosystem is that they all take the easy route; they are all building the same thing with different shapes and sizes. In what appears to be a flourishing and varied ecosystem from the outside, it’s actually the same VCs pouring money into the same company types.

The lack of innovation is glaring.

Plaud is different. I haven't yet purchased…

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