Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI, Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71, Hill and Valley Forum Reactions | Casey Neistat, Chris Samra, Zak Kukoff, Vineeta Agarwala, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson

Google raises AI capex to $85bn as revenue grows 14%

Funding and deals

• BrightAI. Raised a $51m Series A for AI that finds leaks and faults in water and infrastructure networks.
• Elad Gil. Raised a $1.5bn fund, mentioned in the closing news roundup.

Guest interviews

• Mickey Malka, fintech investor and founder of Ribbit Capital. Ribbit Capital made the first institutional bets on Coinbase, Robinhood, Revolut and Nubank, and Malka wired Robinhood almost half a billion dollars in four hours during the GameStop squeeze. He says brand is the only moat in financial services, expects 30 or 40 fintech compounders to steal share from incumbents, and predicts stablecoins reach $2tn with five brands mattering.
• Zak Kukoff, venture capitalist. Kukoff says the Hill and Valley Forum, once a dinner, is now a playbook-driven organisation, and Trump's Mellon Auditorium keynote thanked the All-In podcast before covering export controls with location tracking. He walked through three AI executive orders, including procurement attestations for model providers and a ten-year moratorium on state AI rules, and backs targeted visas for elite AI talent.
• Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Agarwala calls healthcare a $5tn corner of the world and says AI agents are arriving through the FDA's ELSA and open source protein models like Boltz-2. She notes more than 90% of chemical screens fail, 10% of nurse roles sit vacant and the US will be short over 3m healthcare workers next year. Scribing tools like Ambience and Abridge are seeing bottoms-up adoption.
• Casey Neistat, filmmaker and YouTuber. Neistat's ModRetro ships the Chromatic handheld and a coming M64, and matching the original Game Boy screen was exhaustive because emulator handhelds get Mario half a pixel off. He says the hardware world overlooks the social dynamics of wearables like the Humane AI Pin and Apple Vision Pro, and predicts AI media becomes a tidal wave that leaves an extreme premium on human voices.
• Alex Hawkinson, founder and CEO of BrightAI. BrightAI's first customers came through private equity firms that own the service companies maintaining infrastructure, and Hawkinson says 30% of cleaned water leaches back into the environment through leaking pipes. In industries where BrightAI delivers 90%-plus productivity gains, he says the company might buy and operate assets directly to unlock the most value.
• Chris Samra, founder of Symphonic Labs. Waves, Samra's camera glasses, got about 12m views on a launch video that cost roughly $50-60k and was filmed in Vancouver. The glasses stream over RTMP from a phone and will ship with an indicator light creators can disable. Waves plans a 100-creator beta and aims for mass production in the first quarter.