Artificial Intelligence

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💸 AI's midterm money machine

Credit: Rebecca Steele of Toyota Motor North America. Data: FEC, OpenSecrets, media reports. Chart: Axios Visuals The chart, from Axios CEO Jim VandeHei's weekly C-Suite newsletter, captures how AI went from irrelevant to dominant in D.C. in one election cycle. Andreessen Horowitz and its co-founders have pumped $116 million into the midterms so far — more than any other donor, according to The New York Times (gift link).

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San Francisco turns to AI to avoid collisions between ships and whales searching for food

Ferries, cargo ships and tankers cut through choppy waters in San Francisco Bay as a whale surfaced nearby, its spout barely visible against the whitecaps. Until now whales could easily go unnoticed by mariners, but an AI-powered detection network launched this week is designed to track them day and night. The effort comes amid an alarming rise in gray whale deaths in the bay. Read more.

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Reclaim thinking in the AI age

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

A just-departed executive at one of the world's most influential wellness companies is giving three pieces of advice for preserving our humanity in the AI age. David Ko, who was CEO of the app Calm for the past four years, recently stepped down to pursue a new, undisclosed path focused on guardrails for kids using AI. "If we didn't have AI, I would not leave," Ko said in an April interview with Axios' Amy Harder at the Palo Alto headquarters of Calm, a couple of weeks after he announced his departure. "If we weren't having AI conversations today, I'd still be the CEO of Calm." Calm, founded in 2012, is a mental wellness app with more than 180 million downloads. ⚠️ Zoom out: Ko sees AI moving faster than social media, with potentially similar risks for young people. As a father of two daughters — a teen and a college student — that urgency is driving his pivot. "Let's not make that same mistake twice with something that's moving twice as fast," said Ko, who'll continue advising Calm's board. Here's Ko's advice for using AI mindfully: 🧠 1. Protect your critical thinking. Don't accept the initial output from an AI model. Two reasons: You'll get better results. And you'll protect your own mind. Referring to his younger daughter's AI use, Ko added: "She'll go a few rounds and push back on the AI tool." Zoom in: Even if AI delivers instant answers, kids still need to learn how to think their way to them. Ko said critical thinking should be treated like physical education — good for its own sake: "Isn't it good for children to exercise? Of course it is. So why is it good to give kids all the answers?" ⏱️ 2. Be intentional with your "found time." AI is making people more efficient at a rapid pace, which makes the time savings more visible. Sometimes you should use that time to do more work, but it shouldn't be the subconscious, reflexive answer. ✨ "If you find yourself saving time, then find yourself doing things that give you joy," Ko said. 🔁 3. Skip the big talk — go small. "I find often that people try to have the one heavy conversation" with kids, Ko said. "I find that rarely works." Instead, he suggests frequent, low-stakes conversations — often sparked by what kids are already seeing, like a TikTok about AI.

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2 hours that changed AI

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

Over the course of two hours yesterday afternoon, the AI industry produced an extraordinary stream of headlines mapping the vast architecture of its ambitions, Axios' Zachary Basu writes. Why it matters: One historic news cycle peeled back virtually every layer of the AI revolution — smarter systems, exploding revenues, roaring markets, staggering infrastructure demands and a federal government racing to catch up. Zoom in: Yesterday's developments crystallized the core pillars of the emerging AI order. 🧠 1. Brains: OpenAI announced one of its general-purpose reasoning models autonomously cracked a famous geometry problem that stumped mathematicians for 80 years. The implications are enormous: An AI capable of original mathematical discovery could unlock breakthroughs across science, engineering and medicine. 📈 2. Demand: Anthropic's explosive growth has the company on track for its first profitable quarter, with revenue projected to more than double to $10.9 billion in Q2, The Wall Street Journal reported. The estimated $559 million operating profit arrives two years ahead of internal projections — a turning point for an industry whose spending has long outrun its earnings. ⚡ 3. Power: Anthropic expanded its compute partnership with SpaceX, agreeing to spend roughly $1.25 billion per month through 2029 for access to the company's Colossus supercomputing infrastructure. Ahead of SpaceX's IPO next month, the deal cements Elon Musk as a power broker in the AI economy, where access to compute infrastructure is becoming as strategically valuable as the models. 🤖 4. Chips: Nvidia delivered another monster quarter, posting $81.6 billion in revenue — with its data center business alone bringing in $75.2 billion. CEO Jensen Huang said demand has gone "parabolic" and described the AI boom as the "largest infrastructure expansion in human history," reinforcing Nvidia's dominance over the hardware powering this economy. 💰 5. Wall Street: SpaceX's long-awaited IPO filing (see Item 2!) revealed a company rapidly transforming into an AI infrastructure giant, with massive compute operations and ambitions stretching far beyond rockets and satellites. The blockbuster filing arrived as OpenAI and Anthropic race toward potential public offerings this year that could value all three companies in the trillions. Also yesterday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal popped the news that OpenAI is working with bankers on a draft IPO prospectus to be filed confidentially with regulators as soon as tomorrow. 🏛️ 6. Government: President Trump has summoned top tech CEOs to Washington today for the signing of his AI executive order, prompted by mounting cybersecurity fears. CEOs on the invite list, Axios' Ashley Gold learned, include Musk, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Andy Jassy, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Apple's Tim Cook.