This was a big week for news in Silicon Valley in what would otherwise be a sleepy time of year. I am currently baking in my apartment with a fan and a cold towel on my neck. But as I personally heat up, so are those Nvidia chips. Anthropic released its Claude Opus model, outperforming every other significant model across all major benchmarks. This is more evidence about the race to the bottom in AI development.

In other news, I think what is most fascinating is the new political dividing lines emerging in the Valley. While traditionally known for its San Francisco values, there is a rising chattering class of elites extending a warm embrace toward the 45th President. Known conservative VC David Sacks hosted a significant fundraiser for Donald Trump where the former president hobnobbed among Silicon Valley’s most notables, such as the Winklevoss twins, Chamath Palihapitiya, and the Ohio senator and Thiel acolyte J.D. Vance and Kieth Rabois’ Husband.

Most of these luminaries were supporters of Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet they have shifted rightward. What strikes me is how nakedly self-serving many of these SV elites are about backing Donald Trump. Top of mind for them is the stagnant M&A market under Lina Khan and opening up the H1-B process to fuel their tech companies. At the same time, they say that Trump wouldn’t dare implement catastrophic tariffs that would cause massive inflation.

These are intelligent people, and they no doubt see Trump more as a useful idiot to achieve their political agenda. Yet, for all their hubris on how they could influence Trump, so did many others—Gary Cohn, H.R McMaster, Ivanka Trump, etc. But if they can’t see that Donald Trump is a notorious flip-flopper who will revert to the most draconian policies that he believes will serve his base, they are delusional. Donald Trump is only loyal to one man—himself; just ask Rudy Guilliani.

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News I Have Been Reading

Tech News

• Read Tomasz Tunguz. For Venture investors at the pre-seed and seed stages, it's been very tough to get to the coveted series A. As the VC states, “Whenever there are ‘too many’ fundraises of one type, the next round becomes the hardest to raise.”

• Donald Trump is on the All-In podcast. Welcome to the strange world where VCs are turning to DJT. Many in SV are concerned with the anemic M&A activity under Lina Kahn. At the same time, Vinod Khosla and Reid Hoffman clap back at SV’s tepid embrace of the Donald. Rifts are emerging among Silicon Valley’s elite.

• Apple throws the gauntlet down at European Regulators and slow-rolls AI to the EU. Read in the Information.

• Is the Nvidia bubble finally over? I finally convinced my wife to sell her shares before the massive sell-off. Check out this post on why AI tests are testing for accurate intelligence and where LLMs fail to perform. Klarity, the legal and accounting startup, raises a whopping $70M series B. The Agent War is heating up with Emergence coming out of stealth, raising $97.2M.That’s it for this week. The podcast will soon have major updates and really interesting guests. Stay tuned! Please like and subscribe.