This past week shows us something important: the AI story is no longer about product demos. It’s about power, infrastructure, and legitimacy.
1. The Microsoft–OpenAI “non-divorce”
A non-binding MoU reshuffles equity, revenue rights, and AGI clauses. The nonprofit now sits on a $100B+ stake — critics argue that’s optics, not governance. Regulators in California and Delaware are already circling. The real question: can you still call it a nonprofit when it sits at the heart of a trillion-dollar ecosystem?
2. Capital flows are catching up
Microsoft just pledged £22B to build AI supercomputers and data centers in the UK. This isn’t about being a software vendor anymore. It’s about controlling the physical substrate of intelligence: compute, chips, and energy.
3. Leadership signals are shifting
- OpenAI hires xAI’s former CFO Mike Liberatore to oversee finance and scaling — proof that the “AI brain trust” is consolidating across rival labs.
- Demis Hassabis (DeepMind) is calling out “PhD-level AI” as nonsense, saying AGI is still 5–10 years away.
- Sam Altman now suggests the very term “AGI” is losing relevance. When the loudest evangelists start walking back the rhetoric, you know the narrative is evolving.
4. Safety vs. scale
Some researchers warn of catastrophic risk from superintelligent AI. Others argue data, compute, and energy constraints will delay that horizon. Either way, safety has moved from fringe debate to mainstream regulation. Chips are the new oil, and policy is the new battlefield.
And the irony?
AI can rewrite contracts, design proteins, and summarize court filings in milliseconds. But the engineer who built it may still be stuck in an 18-month H-1B lottery. We may get AGI before some of the smartest humans on the planet get a green card.
The takeaway:
The AI race is no longer about who builds the smartest model. It’s about who controls the rails — compute, regulation, incentives, and interfaces. By the time “AGI” arrives, it won’t feel like a moon landing. It will feel like infrastructure — invisible, everywhere, already owned.