Saturday Links: $4T NVIDIA, Video Walls, and Cute Robots

This week, NVIDIA's market value reached $4M, which is a huge milestone. The stories we see every week are puzzle pieces, and maybe even NVIDIA itself will fall at some point in the future, but the many bets being made to raise the stock price like this do seem to mean people believe that whatever happens, AI compute infrastructure is here to stay. Stories from this week:

• NVIDIA reached $4trillion in Market capitalization (video). It's quite hard to really process this rapid rise. It has only been 7 years since Apple became the first company to cross $1 trillion in market value (2nd August 2018, Apple is now at 3.1B). Such a swift rise might say more about the economy than it does AI, but it is hard to ignore just how fundamental AI and tech have become to the perception of future productivity and value creation.
• Refik Anadol Showreel 2025 (video). For a little AI Art, this is a little showreel by Refik Anadol. I love these organic big screen "sculptures," but also the more I see them, the more I think we'll end up seeing many from now on. Today, Anadol is ahead of the curve, but with the advances in AI video, I'm pretty sure we'll soon be seeing real-time, prompted immersive video walls.
• Windsurf’s CEO goes to Google; OpenAI’s acquisition falls apart. Silicon Valley seems to be having telenovela moments each week, but on a billion-dollar scale. OpenAI was originally reporting that it had closed a deal to buy Windsurf, but that seems to have fallen apart. In such a large acquisition, it's hard to imagine what could have happened to break the deal. Perhaps IP arrangements played a role. At some point, the strange quasi-acquisition structures also seem like they will get questioned legally.
• OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome. Maybe OpenAI decided that it had priorities other than code? This news item is still a rumour, but I think it's highly consequential if true. Similarly to Perplexity, which just launched its own web browser, OpenAI's move would be a bit to control more of the online experience than today. This is a huge threat to Google in particular, but also to Apple and Meta. The experience of browsing the web has remained largely unchanged for 20+ years now. A reimagined browser could be multimodal, deeply embed AI, and rethink how web browsing could be tracked (and processed) to personalize experiences. There's no doubt other players will be forced to react, but this may well lead to antitrust barriers and worse for scale players like Google.
• Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots. Lastly, it's nice to see open-source progress on robotics as well as software. You can now pre-order mini desktop robots from Hugging Face. It might take a while to discover the use case for these, but the prospect of robots that can be programmed at a deep level is a lot more appealing than closed, app-based systems.

Wishing you a good weekend. Perhaps things will slow down a bit in July and August?

All the best.