Top News | Notion bids its Inbox app adieu: Back in 2025, Notion released Notion Mail, an application that brought AI into your inbox. Today, the startup (and TWiST500 member) announced that it will shutter the service later this year. Why? Because, per Notion, more of its customers are using agents to handle their email, so it’s skating to where the puck is heading. Consider this (relatively minor) product decision as one more piece of evidence that future software will be built for agents, not humans. Electronics prices are going up: The massive global data center buildout is causing parts shortages around the technology industry. This is perhaps most evident in today's memory prices, which are skyrocketing. So much so that consumer electronics companies like Apple and Microsoft are raising their prices on computers and gaming machines. For gamers who recall that crypto-era GPU crunch, this is familiar, if annoying, territory. World models are hot, hot, hot: Today’s episode of This Week in AI goes deep into the world model debate, including where they excel compared to other AI technologies. General Intuition, which TechCrunch reports has built an “agentic model that can generalize from gameplay to simulation to embodiment,” is a good reminder of just how far AI technology is expanding beyond mere LLMs. World models, they’re going to be big!
| TWiST 500 | Back in February, TWiST500 stalwart Anthropic disclosed that it had discovered that several Chinese AI labs were distilling its models to improve their own. While some distillation appears to be the norm between competing AI companies, what Anthropic alleged was far broader and insidious than mere testing. | If Chinese AI labs can absorb the expensive training work that American companies have financed and brought to market, they can offer fast-follow models with benchmark results nearly as good as those of the original models they copied. At a fraction of the cost. Distillation matters. | This week, a letter that Anthropic sent to Congress earlier in June became public. The missive alleges that Alibaba — a company listed on American markets — “executed the largest known distillation attack on Anthropic to date,” including 28.8 million queries from 25,000 “fraudulent accounts” between April and June. | Knowing its audience, Anthropic argues that such distillation attacks will limit the time the United States can remain comfortably ahead of its rival, China. And that such aggressive distillation subverts “the returns on American investments without bearing the costs or risks associated with training frontier AI models.” | Risk and economic loss? That’s the language that Congress speaks, much more than it can parse AI arcana. | Anthropic is not merely talking its book. Reporting indicates that China is working hard to bake AI into its armed forces; distillation attacks are therefore economic sabotage and national security worry all balled up into a single problem. Let’s see what Congress can do in response. — Alex | A message from Quo: | Quo (formerly OpenPhone) gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first 6 months at quo.com/TWiST. | This Week in Startups | E2304: Jason sits down with Brynn Putnam, CEO and founder of Board, to learn more about her company’s tabletop gaming console. The pair talks about how to raise capital for yet-to-launch hardware projects, the screen-time debate, and how Board is approaching building or buying IP for its family-friendly games. Next, Alex got Heremus’s AJ Piplica on the horn to chat hypersonic, autonomous jets. The startup’s technology bridges the gap between rockets and airplanes, and may represent the future of warfare, yes, but also fast freight! | E2303: Two fascinating new interviews with great founders on this Monday special. First up, Jason and Lon chat with Louis Phillips, the creator of Australia’s white-hot fitness app INTVL. The app gamifies your daily run, turning neighborhoods into “turf wars” that you win just by jogging around the block… until someone else doesn’t retrace your steps. Find out how Louis grew the project to over 1M users with zero paid ads. Then, Alice Zhang of Verge Labs stops by to discuss the startup’s recent name change and pivot, and how they managed to assemble one of the world’s largest proprietary brain tissue data sets. | E2302: Anthropic stabbed Cursor in the back. Then SpaceX swooped in with $60 billion. Today, TWiST connects the dots on the biggest deal in AI since the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, and why it's a warning sign for every startup building on top of a frontier model. Jason is joined by Bling Capital’s Ben Ling, Banana Capital’s Turner Novak, and co-host Alex to go deep on the future of coding models, the current golden age of venture liquidity, OpenAI’s financials, and the ‘Four Ds’ of venture investing. The show closes with a tribute to Josh Baer, the founder of Capital Factory. | TWiST Partner Offers | LinkedIn Jobs: Post your job for free at linkedIn.com/twist then promote it to get access to LinkedIn Jobs’ new AI assistant. Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. Deel: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deel.com/twist to learn more.
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