Musk vs Altman, Chrome’s $34B bid & more (August 13, 2025)

Good morning,

Buckle up because Silicon Valley is delivering full-on reality TV this week, complete with public insults, billion-dollar bets, and audacious acquisition offers.

Let’s dig in👇

🤯 Big Tech Drama

😤 Musk vs Altman: From Collaborators to Combatants

What began as a lawsuit threat from Elon Musk to Apple over App Store favoritism spiraled into a messy, very public feud with Sam Altman. Accusations of bias, bot armies, and screenshots of AI declaring Musk “more trustworthy” flew across X. Even Grok jumped in, siding with Altman. The clash reads less like a tech dispute and more like a middle-school cafeteria showdown, just with billions at stake.

🧠 OpenAI’s Brain-Computer Power Play

Sam Altman is co-founding Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup aiming to rival Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Valued at $850M, the company will be funded by OpenAI’s venture arm, with leadership from Alex Blania of Worldcoin. This marks OpenAI’s first big bet in brain-machine tech, and it’s unlikely to sit well with Musk.

🛳️ U.S. Embeds Trackers in AI-Chip Shipments to China

U.S. authorities have secretly inserted location trackers into select shipments of advanced AI chips, especially servers containing Nvidia and AMD components, to detect illegal diversions to China. These devices, sometimes hidden within packaging or the servers themselves, are part of enforcement operations by agencies like the Bureau of Industry and Security, Homeland Security Investigations, and the FBI.

🖥️ Bold Bets & Big Moves

💰 Perplexity’s Wild $34B Chrome Grab

In a bold, maybe publicity-driven move, Perplexity offered Google $34.5B for Chrome, nearly double its own valuation. The pitch? Become an independent operator to resolve Google’s antitrust woes. With Chrome’s 3.5B users and a judge’s decision pending, this could be either genius or pure headline bait.

🤑 Anthropic Offers Claude to U.S. Government for $1

Anthropic, backed by Amazon, will offer its Claude AI chatbot to U.S. government agencies for just $1, joining OpenAI's similar offer for ChatGPT Enterprise. This pitch comes after Claude was added to the official roster of approved AI vendors, alongside ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

🔒 How to Run AI Models Locally (No Cloud Needed)

Want to keep your data private while running powerful AI? OpenAI’s open-source GPT-OSS-20B can run directly on your machine. Use Ollama for a CLI experience or LM Studio for a ChatGPT-style interface. If your hardware can’t handle it, there’s a web-based Playground alternative.

🛠 Tools of the Day

• Kandid – Consultative AI salesperson for ecommerce
• Jan – 4B-parameter open-source model for search and research
• Fellow.ai – AI meeting assistant with the privacy controls you need

💡 Prompt of the Day

"Create a satirical political debate transcript between two AI chatbots arguing over who’s the better assistant, using sarcastic humor and pop culture references."

⚡ Quick Hits

• Tenable launches AI Exposure for securing internal AI systems
• OpenAI clarifies GPT-5 context window at 196k for “thinking” mode
• Mistral drops Medium 3.1 with creative writing boost

📌 TLDR

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are turning Silicon Valley into a soap opera, OpenAI is backing a Neuralink rival, Perplexity’s gunning for Chrome, and you can now run GPT-level AI right on your laptop.

See you tomorrow,
David