This week on the AI Rollup, the Limitless crew—David, Ejaaz, and Josh—unpack a flurry of major moves across the AI landscape. OpenAI just spent $3 billion to acquire Windsurf, signaling an all-out arms race for coding assistants, as Google releases Firebase Studio and Apple partners with Anthropic. These giants are now vying to own the full end-to-end AI development stack—from prompting, to building, to deployment. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s subtle memory and web search updates raise deeper questions about user control, and Sam Altman formally surrenders the for-profit fight as the nonprofit parent retains full control.
In the world of finance, the AI-commerce thesis just got real. Visa and Mastercard are preparing for a future of autonomous agents with new payment infrastructure—“Intelligent Commerce” and “Agent Pay.” It’s a striking validation of the Web3 thesis, with AI agents now being handed credit cards. On the robotics front, Hugging Face is getting into hardware, California startups are pushing toward general-purpose robotics, NVIDIA launches Project Groot, and Waymo is quietly doing a quarter million rides per week. It’s a new arms race—this time with arms and wheels.
We also zoom out to reflect on where AI is heading. Dwarkesh Patel and Dario Amodei both raise urgent questions around interpretability: we don’t understand how these models think, and we may not have time to figure it out before AGI arrives. Dario’s bet? We’ll have an “MRI for AI” in five to ten years—but that may be too late. And for dessert, we dive into the fun and weird: AI ASMR, glow-up prompts, and the skyrocketing IQ of AI models.