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Race to AGI - Monday, December 8, 2025
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TLDR
Wall Street tilts from OpenAI halo to Alphabet
BIDU +5.8% and CRM +5.3% on AI platform optimism
Meta pushes Phoenix MR glasses out to 2027
Practitioners flag LLM reliability gaps on HN
The Full Story
The AI platform race looked more contested today as both courts and investors nudged OpenAI off its recent pedestal. A U.S. court barred the company from using the "io" branding for its planned AI hardware, a setback that complicates its push beyond cloud APIs into physical devices. That legal friction arrives just as a separate narrative takes hold in markets: Wall Street increasingly prefers Alphabet over OpenAI-linked exposure as the more durable AI bet.
The rotation shows up around the edges of AI-adjacent equities. Baidu gained about 5.8% and Salesforce climbed over 5% in the latest session, suggesting investors are rewarding platforms that can immediately monetize AI through search, enterprise SaaS, and data platforms. Snowflake traded lower while Broadcom and Intel drifted higher, underscoring continued demand for AI infrastructure even as pure-play data platforms face tougher expectations.
On the product side, Meta reportedly delayed its "Phoenix" mixed-reality glasses to 2027, pushing out one of the more ambitious AI-native hardware roadmaps. That contrasts sharply with OpenAI's hardware ambitions and highlights how difficult it remains to turn foundation models into everyday AI companions.
Meanwhile, governments and institutions are trying to shape the field these giants compete on. Chile and Mexico signed a cooperation deal on responsible AI, while Edmonton's police test real-time facial recognition in body cameras—two very different visions of AI's public role. Partnerships like OpenAI–La Trobe University and IBM–Riyadh Air show firms racing to localize and sectorize their models.
Community sentiment is more ambivalent. A popular Hacker News post on failing to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude highlights how often LLMs still stumble on ostensibly simple tasks. As capital consolidates around a few platforms, the key question is whether product reliability and governance can mature fast enough to justify the current allocation of power—and whether alternative ecosystems can still break in.
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