Limitless High Five: AI Browsers & Billion-Dollar Hires

Dear Limitless Nation,

Welcome to your new frontier tech weekly rundown. Every week, Josh and I will share five pieces of content (news, launches, tools, videos, tweets) that caught our eyes.

Some weeks these may be the most universally earth-shattering topics, other times they might be more niche happenings that speak to our longer-term views of new technologies. Every week, we hope you'll find something that gets you stoked about our limitless future.

Cheers,
Ejaaz & Josh

5️⃣ AI-powered browser gets bought for $610M

As I’m writing this, news just broke of Atlassian’s acquisition of a company building a new web browsing experience, aptly named The Browser Company for a whopping $610M (pretty insane for a company that makes <$10M annually but I digress). Their core product, Dia, is an attempt at rebuilding the traditional web browser (e.g. Chrome, Safari) with AI at its core. 

Founder Josh Miller stated the company will remain independently operated and that the all-cash injection will give them the “resources, distribution and monetization muscle” to get Dia into the hands of everyone.

My take:

If I’m being honest, I fail to see the appeal of AI-browsers today and think a $610M price tag is massively overvalued and just another gargantuan figure churned up by the AI hype. Having spent a non-trivial amount of time testing out multiple “AI-browsers” I haven’t experienced any life-changing features apart from maybe a better Google Search(?). To steelman the other side, Atlassian (being an enterprise titan) probably sees massive value in a tailor-made, semantic-search experience for their clients' workflows (remember Jira is still the favored management tool of the S&P 500). Additionally, on a longer time horizon I’m 100% sure AI agents actually become useful (and crucial) for a person’s “internet experience,” and assuming this, browsers will probably be the intermediary platform that facilitates their activity. Time will tell.

In the meantime, if you want to hear more about the pros and cons of AI browsers, check out our interview with the founder of Perplexity AI on their new browser Comet.

4️⃣ Zuckerberg just fumbled ~$20 billion

Just two weeks after launching Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Meta’s new AI lab focused on creating AGI, six key engineers and executives have announced they’re resigning. The former employees are a mixture of tenured Meta employees (10+ years) and recently hired executives from a $15.6B investment in AI data specialist Scale AI. While most have refrained from public comment, some former Meta AI engineers have speculated this attrition is due to too much “dynamism” from recent re-orgs plus a loss of confidence in Meta’s ability to execute on its ambitious mission. 

My take:

While your instinct may be to flinch and dump your $META stock, I think this ultimately is a nothing-burger. We all like to clown on Zuck but the truth is he’s a seasoned founder and ruthless when it comes to getting what he wants. The notion I see some people sharing that he got sold a dud by Alexandr Wang is wrong; $15B is no small price tag even for Meta so you can bet Zuck did his homework. My bet is this “news” isn’t news a few months from now and Meta launches a flagship (closed-source) model that hits #1 in the charts.

Researchers Are Already Leaving Meta’s New Superintelligence Lab

CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a recruiting blitz to lure top AI researchers to Meta. WIRED has confirmed that three recent hires have now resigned.

WIREDZoë Schiffer

3️⃣ OpenAI spent $1.1B to hire one man

Continuing this week’s theme of dropping inordinate amounts of money on hiring, Mr. Altman just made his largest purchase to date, acquiring tool-testing platform Statsig for $1.1B. Putting their product aside, the real story here is CEO Vijay Raji who, prior to starting Statsig, spent 10 years building and testing tools at Meta, working alongside none other than OpenAI’s newly appointed CEO of Applications Fidji Simo <insert mind-blown emoji much wow>. Turns out OpenAI is readying itself for a big push into AI applications and Vijay, now CTO of Applications, was the missing chess piece.

My take:

After the lackluster launch of GPT-5, I think it’s clear now we’re not getting “AGI” (whatever that means) anytime soon. I think Sam knew this too earlier this year when he hired Fidji to head up the new AI app store experience for OpenAI. The acquihire of Vijay is yet another data point we can use to confirm this thesis. On the plus side I think this is a good thing. AGI was always some elusive, undefined mythical creature of ingenuity (to pump numbers and valuations) and a renewed focus on Apps that are actually useful will be much more positive for the space.

OpenAI acquires product testing startup Statsig and shakes up its leadership team | TechCrunch

OpenAI is bringing on the founder of Statsig as its CTO of Applications, and making changes to other leadership roles at the company.

TechCrunchMaxwell Zeff

2️⃣ Dario Anthropic is now worth ~$200B!

Anyway, on the topic of pumping numbers and valuations, Anthropic just raised $13B in a Series F valuing them at $183B! This is staggering given just over a year ago they were worth just $4 (four) billion! This now cements their position as an elite AI model producer pushing them toward the valuation echelon of OpenAI ($500B).

My take:

At a $5B ARR this new valuation puts Anthropic at a 36x revenue multiplier. Is that insane? Depends on who you ask. In traditional tech sectors this would be considered overblown but in the world of AI less so. I’d say take these valuations with a huge pinch of salt, we’re at a stage in the investment cycle where memetics drive the valuations more than fundamentals do, in a hopeless attempt to price a vision that isn’t all too clear at the moment (“but it's provocative”).

Anthropic Completes New Funding Round at $183 Billion Valuation

Anthropic has closed a deal to raise $13 billion from investors in a new funding round that nearly triples its valuation to $183 billion, including dollars raised — a larger-than-expected haul that makes the artificial intelligence company one of the most valuable startups in the world.

BloombergShirin Ghaffary

1️⃣ Apple’s star sign is Gemini

News broke this week that Apple is entering an exclusive partnership with Google that will see their flagship AI model Gemini integrated into Apple's Siri, forming a new AI-powered search feature. Gemini will be added to Apple’s private cloud service such that personal data remains private, encrypted and valuable to Apple alone.

This follows news earlier in the year, that Apple was courting a few candidates (OpenAI, Anthropic) to fill the role and it seems we might have a winner. This news comes ahead of “tech-tember” (September tech month) where Apple will be announcing some major hardware and software updates for the iPhone. Fingers crossed we get a preview of Gemini-Siri!

My take:

I for one, am ecstatic. Listen, I know I’ve been hating on Apple (I still will) but it pleases me to see that they’re finally making the decision to get past the “AI model provider” hurdle and focus on what they do best: consumer experiences. My hope is, with this behind them, they can now focus on turning Siri into an actual useful AI assistant that's fully integrated with all my apps and not something I have turned off in my settings. I also love that Apple is honoring their commitment to localized AI models which I believe will eventually become “personal AI models” for the individual – something I strongly believe will actually feel like AGI.