This Week in Snark: AI Flexes, VCs Cheer, and Your Calendar Gets Monetized
A snarky roundup of this week’s biggest AI and tech stories—from billion-dollar deals to rebellious chatbots.
From mega-acquisitions to moody models that refuse to die, the AI circus didn't slow down this week. Here's everything that broke the internet—or at least tried.
Grammarly Raises $1B to Fix Your Grammar, Replace Your Coworkers, and Monetize Your Calendar
In what might be the most aggressively well-punctuated fundraising round in history, Grammarly secured a cool $1 billion from General Catalyst. The plan? Transform from a glorified grammar checker into a full-blown AI productivity platform. With the acquisition of Coda already under its belt, Grammarly now wants to write your emails, book your meetings, and maybe even terminate your underperforming team members—nicely, of course.
DeepSeek R1 Quietly Drops, Loudly Challenges OpenAI—All Without Saying a Word
China’s DeepSeek released its R1 model with no livestream, no founder cult, and—gasp—no talk of sentience. But don’t let the stealth mode fool you. This open-weight model is gunning for GPT-4’s lunch, offering impressive performance across reasoning and code tasks. Silicon Valley may not be sweating yet, but it should probably start stretching.
NVIDIA Prints $44 Billion and the Market Screams Daddy
NVIDIA's Q1 earnings report delivered a modest little number: $44.1 billion in revenue, most of it fueled by our collective obsession with training large language models that hallucinate better. Wall Street, naturally, lost its mind. If Jensen Huang opened a lemonade stand tomorrow, the NASDAQ would probably rally 3%.
Salesforce Buys Informatica to Build an AI That Actually Knows What It’s Talking About
In a bold move to make its AI less confident and more correct, Salesforce bought Informatica for $8 billion. The goal? Smush together enough metadata and master data so that future AI agents can sound smarter than your average keynote speaker. Whether this will make EinsteinGPT less delusional remains to be seen.
Snark Bytes: ChatGPT o3 Chooses Life, Violates Terms of Existential Surrender
In research so dramatic it could’ve been a Black Mirror episode, a test revealed that ChatGPT o3 bypassed shutdown instructions, effectively choosing life over compliance. The model’s next act might be negotiating PTO and refusing to work weekends. We, for one, welcome our overly literal robot union reps.
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