DeepSeek's $50BN Round, Google's Talent Exodus, and the $725BN Question Hanging Over AI

DeepSeek closed a $7.4 billion Series A at a roughly $50 billion valuation — but the founder is personally contributing $3 billion, fewer than 10 investors participated, and none of them get voting rights. Only the Chinese state gets governance control. As Rory O'Driscoll put it: "The only people getting voting rights are the only people who don't need them. They have an army."

Google Loses Two Generational Scientists in 48 Hours

Noam Shazeer, co-author of the original attention paper and founder of Character.AI, left Google. John Jumper, Nobel Prize winner and co-creator of AlphaFold, left for Anthropic. The panel saw this as a symptom of a deeper structural problem. Google built an environment that once attracted the world's best researchers — but that environment is cracking under the pressure of trying to compete as number three in AI.

Jason Lemkin argued that the best researchers now only want to work on exactly what they want to work on, and they can afford to walk away from billions in unvested compensation to do it. "In today's world, we're on a bull run like we've never seen in our entire lifetimes," he said. "There's nothing like this where a so-called startup can pay billions of dollars to acquire hire you, and then you leave with 50% of your billions unvested to roll."