From Dishwasher to DON AI

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

Imagine working your way up from washing dishes at Denny’s to controlling the fate of artificial intelligence. One day, you’re dodging spilled coffee and scrubbing syrup off plates, and the next? Your company is worth $3.2 trillion, and every AI model on Earth is running on your hardware.

Sounds like a Hollywood script? Well, so does Jensen Huang’s real-life story.

The immigrant kid from Taiwan who once cleaned tables for tips is now the undisputed king of AI hardware, leading Nvidia, the company fueling the entire AI revolution. 

And yet, despite another mind-blowing earnings report — $39 billion in a single quarter! Wall Street is starting to sweat.

Is Nvidia unstoppable? Or is this the moment where the AI hype train hits a wall?

In today's email

• The Sound of Silence

• 92% of Students Now Use AI

• Alexa Just Got an AI Glow-Up

• Chegg Sues Google

• Nvidia & AI Market Analysis

• More Tools & Updates

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Quick News 

🎤 Do you like music? AI companies do too — especially when they can use it for free. Over 1,000 British musicians just released “Is This What We Want?”, a completely silent album protesting UK laws that could let AI models train on copyrighted music without permission.

Legends like Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, and Elton John aren’t impressed, calling it "music theft." If the message wasn’t loud enough, the track titles literally spell it out.

📚 Turns out, AI isn’t the future of education — it’s already here. A new HEPI survey shows 92% of students now use AI (up from 66% last year), and 88% have used it for assessments — which means AI is officially doing more homework than most students. Meanwhile, only 36% say their university has helped them learn AI skills, but at least staff AI literacy is improving (finally).

🔥 Amazon just gave Alexa the glow-up of the decade, turning it from a glorified kitchen timer into an AI powerhouse. The new Alexa+ can book dinners, order groceries, and remember your oddly specific coffee order — all powered by Amazon’s Nova and Anthropic’s Claude. At $19.99/month (free for Prime members, because Bezos still loves you), this ChatGPT-level upgrade could finally make voice assistants actually useful — unless it turns into another "Apple Intelligence" fiasco.

⚖️ Chegg is suing Google, blaming its AI Overviews for turning search into an "answer engine" and tanking its business. Once worth $3.7 billion, Chegg is now limping along at $118 million, reporting an $837M loss in 2024 as students ditch step-by-step learning for AI-generated shortcuts.

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Nvidia & AI Market 
Nvidia Just Made $39 Billion in a Single Quarter 

Are We in an AI Bubble or Just Getting Started?

If tech earnings were an Olympic event, Nvidia would be Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, and Simone Biles all rolled into one, shattering records and casually strolling off with another gold medal.

$39.3 billion in revenue.
A 78% YoY increase.
AI data center revenue almost doubled to $35.6 billion.

That’s not an earnings report — that’s a financial atomic bomb.

Yet, just a few weeks ago, Nvidia lost $600 billion in market cap in a single day after investors got spooked by China's DeepSeek and its ultra-efficient AI models.

So what happened? How did Nvidia go from Wall Street panic attack to AI god status in a matter of days? And are we in an AI bubble, or is this just the beginning?

Let’s break it all down — preferably with fewer existential crises than your last ChatGPT conversation.

The "We Told You So" Moment

📈 Key numbers from Q4:

• Revenue: $39.3 billion (vs. $37.8B expected)

• Data center revenue: $35.6 billion (up 93% YoY)

• Net income: $22.07 billion (up 72% YoY)

• Gaming revenue: $2.5 billion (down 11% — because who has time to game when you’re training LLMs?)

• Q1 2026 projection: $43 billion (because, of course, they’re going higher)

Wall Street’s reaction: 🤯 → 💸 → 🕺🏽 → "Meh."

Why So Much Better Than Expected?

Because despite all the noise, AI still needs insane amounts of compute power. And no one — not OpenAI, not Microsoft, not even the supposed “Nvidia killer” DeepSeek — can train massive AI models without Nvidia's Blackwell AI supercomputers.

Jensen Huang’s response? A polite but confident "Told you so" in the form of billions of dollars in revenue.

Is AI Spending Getting Out of Hand? (Spoiler: No.)

Every quarter, skeptics ask: Are we spending too much money on AI? And every quarter, Nvidia responds: "Nah, here’s another $40 billion in revenue."

🛑 Let’s bust some myths:

1. "AI investment is slowing down."
Nope. Nvidia just made almost $40 billion in a quarter and projected even higher revenue for Q1. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are still pouring billions into AI infrastructure.

2. "DeepSeek’s models will make Nvidia irrelevant."
DeepSeek’s R-1 model is making waves by being cheaper and more efficient than existing AI models. But guess what? Those models still run on Nvidia chips. More AI = more demand for Nvidia hardware.

3. "AI hype is overblown."
You’ve heard "AI will change everything" so many times, it’s practically tech gospel now. But here’s the thing: AI isn’t just hype when every major company is restructuring their business around it.

The Nvidia Playbook

1999: Nvidia launches the GeForce 256, the first-ever GPU.
2012: AI researchers realize GPUs are amazing at deep learning. Nvidia goes from "graphics card company" to "AI messiah".
2016: Jensen Huang personally delivers Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI, and the rest is history.
2025: Nvidia is now a $3.2 trillion AI behemoth.

TL;DR: Nvidia saw the AI wave coming a decade before everyone else, built the world’s best AI chips, and now owns 90% of the market.

Nvidia vs. The World

Not everyone is sitting back and letting Jensen & Co. print infinite money. Here’s who’s trying to shake things up:

🇨🇳 DeepSeek – Their R-1 model is making AI cheaper and more accessible, causing market panic in Silicon Valley.
🇨🇳 Alibaba – Just dropped a $53 billion AI investment into cloud infrastructure. Oh, and they just made their AI video generation model free globally.
🇺🇸 AMD & Intel – Trying (keyword: trying) to compete with Nvidia in AI chips.
🇺🇸 Google, Meta, & Microsoft – Investing billions into their own AI chips, but still buying Nvidia’s in bulk.

Right now? Nvidia is still untouchable. But competition is heating up fast.

Will AI Growth Ever Slow Down?

Here’s the real question: Is AI growth sustainable, or are we in the biggest tech bubble since Pets.com and Beanie Babies?

What the future looks like:

✅ AI compute demand will keep skyrocketing. (Models are getting bigger, not smaller.)
✅ Cloud companies will keep throwing billions at AI.
❌ At some point, Nvidia’s pricing power might shrink. (Especially if competitors figure out how to do more with less.)

For now? The AI party isn’t slowing down. But expect more volatility as new players enter the game.

AI’s Future & Nvidia’s Throne

• Nvidia is still the undisputed king of AI hardware.

• AI demand is only increasing — DeepSeek and Alibaba might be new challengers, but they still rely on Nvidia.

• There will be dips, market freakouts, and maybe even a bubble… but long-term? AI is here to stay.

Jensen Huang saw the AI future before anyone else — and now, his company is reaping the rewards.

So, is Nvidia too big to fail, or just one AI breakthrough away from disruption? 

And You?

Tools & Updates

🤖Anthropic just launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, now better at coding, reasoning, and even playing Pokémon. It keeps everything in one AI brain instead of splitting tasks across models, and introduces Claude Code, a hands-on assistant that edits, tests, and pushes code to GitHub like a tireless intern.With pricing unchanged from 3.5, devs can now adjust response speed to match their patience.

🎉Microsoft is unlocking free, unlimited access to Copilot’s Think Deeper and Voice features, so users can chat longer, reason harder, and (hopefully) get fewer "I'm just an AI" answers. Meanwhile, OpenAI is rolling out Deep Research for ChatGPT Plus users, giving faster, deeper insights—because sometimes, AI needs to actually think before it speaks.

🎙️ ElevenLabs just dropped Scribe, a speech-to-text model so accurate it’s outpacing Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI’s Whisper v3. With 99 languages, 95%+ accuracy in 25, and support for low-resource languages like Serbian and Cantonese, it’s basically a multilingual genius. At $0.40 per hour, it labels speakers, timestamps words, and even detects laughter and music (finally, AI that gets your jokes).

🚀 DeepSeek is speed-running its next-gen R2 model after its budget-friendly, market-shaking R1 AI wiped $1 trillion off the stock market last month. Turns out, you don’t need fancy, high-end chips to rattle Silicon Valley and Wall Street at the same time. Now, Beijing is all in, while Western regulators are sweating harder than an overheating GPU. 

💻Google dropped a free version of Gemini Code Assist, offering 180,000 monthly code completions — 90x more than GitHub Copilot’s free tier. With a 128,000-token context window, it can handle massive codebases and integrates seamlessly with VS Code, GitHub, and JetBrains — no credit card, just a Google account.

⚡  Tired of AI models taking their sweet time to generate text? Inception Labs just dropped Mercury, an AI so fast it writes in entire blocks instead of one token at a time — making it 10x faster than traditional LLMs. Their first model, Mercury Coder, already outperforms GPT-4o Mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku in coding, at speeds that make your keyboard feel outdated.

😬 A new Pew Research survey shows 52% of U.S. workers are worried AI will mess with their jobs, while only 36% are feeling optimistic (the rest are presumably too busy updating their résumés). Nearly one-third think AI will shrink job opportunities, and 63% say they barely use AI at work — though younger employees and tech-savvy folks are already making friends with the robots.

Let's Chat About AI

This is all for today!

Replay to this email with your thoughts.

AI is more than just a buzzword. It’s a shift in how we live and work. And understanding it a bit better means you can make smarter choices about the tech you use every day.

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