6/8: Moonshot's Moonshot
Plus: New Siri AI at WWDC, ChatGPT superapp, Leopold in the WSJ, new AI bills in Congress, Google x Intel
Happy Monday, everyone. Unfortunately June 8 was the first day of the week, so I couldn’t title a newsletter with 6/7. I still had a good 6/7 weekend. Be sure to catch us on X and YouTube, and join our Discord to chat with our hosts live.
Today’s Experts
Tsung Xu (Vight)
Danielle Fong (Lightcell Energy)
Taylor Barkley (Abundance Institute)
Noel Smith (Convex Asset Management)
Rui Ma (Tech Buzz China)
Samo Burja (Bismarck Analysis)
Seb Johnson (Scaling Europe)
Anne Neuberger (Andreessen Horowitz)
Making Sense of the World
Moonshot AI to raise $2B at $30B, a 7x increase from its last round in January. The maker of the Kimi series and one of China’s top frontier labs is raising capital right after DeepSeek. Chinese lab raises and valuations are much lower than American ones due to a combination of lower revenue, shallower capital markets, worse-performing models, and different venture market norms, but they’re rapidly increasing performance and dominate the niche of low-cost models.
Apple announces new OS features at WWDC26. We covered the keynote live on stream, likely Tim Cook’s last one as CEO before John Ternus takes over in September. Features we’re looking forward to include Siri becoming a true personal AI assistant with deep integrations across iOS and macOS, the ability to customize Siri’s voice, and my personal favorite, better 3D imagery in Maps. It’s unclear whether you’ll be able to select which model will power Siri, but I hope you’ll be able to. Markets were a little pessimistic — Apple stock dropped 5% after the announcement.
ChatGPT will become a superapp. This has been known for some time, but the latest story in the Financial Times sheds a little light on the vision of combining chat, code, and agents in a single app, with Thibault Sottiaux (Tibo on X) leading the new product. The new app will likely be like the Claude desktop app, which has different tabs for the Claude chat experience, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.
Democrats in Congress are pushing new AI bills. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) has introduced the HALO (Human Authority in Lethal Operations) Act, which would require a review process for autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons and ban the military from using AI to monitor individuals for constitutional activities, the same red lines set forth by Anthropic in their dispute with the Department of War. Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) have introduced similar bills.
Google will order 3 million AI chips from Intel. Google currently works with TSMC to manufacture its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that it uses for Gemini training and inference. TSMC’s wafer and packaging lines are fully booked, and so Google is now working with Intel to accommodate some of its demand for TPUs. Nvidia is also looking into Intel for some of its manufacturing capacity, and just signed a deal with SK hynix to work on advanced memory chips.
Leopold Aschenbrenner gets profiled in the WSJ. We’ve covered Leopold before, including diving deep into his backstory on the MTS newsletter. Some new facts that this article brings to light: Situational Awareness LP’s assets exceed $20 billion, around the same as Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square. SALP is up 270% YTD and over 1,000% since inception (less than two years ago) after fees. SALP has a stake in Anthropic that accounts for about a fifth of its AUM. And yes, Leopold is still 24 years old. He’s likely the richest self-made person of his age in the world, and all he did was run a fund with the simple thesis of making AGI-pilled bets on the stock market before the singularity1. As Charlie Munger said, “take a simple idea and take it seriously”.
Software buyouts reach the lowest level since 2020: just $50 billion in the first five months of the year, down from $88 billion in the same period last year. In May 2026, that number was just $5 billion, down from $29 billion in May 2025. This is another data point in favor of the “SaaSpocalypse”, where enterprise software businesses that were once treated as high-valuation growth investments face significant repricings due to ever-better agentic software.
Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are working on compute futures and other ways to trade on the cost of compute, which helps hyperscalers with price discovery, hedging against negative outcomes, and more. Market operators CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have already announced plans to offer compute contracts later this year, and there are numerous startups in this space, including Architect and MNX.
Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon. The founder of disgraced crypto exchange FTX2 is currently serving a 25-year federal sentence for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme. He’s appealed to President Trump for a pardon with pro-Trump posts on social media, but his role as one of the largest donors to Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats during the 2020 election cycle probably won’t help. Trump has already pardoned others in the crypto space, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht.
Banger Review
![Line chart titled "Token purchasing power across the engineering basket — Opus 4.6 in SWE-chat." Subtitle: each line shows units of the good 1 token buys, relative to a Feb 5–24 baseline (1.00×); knowledge capture (teal) erodes least. The full-basket composite ends at 0.23× purchasing power (95% CI [0.18, 0.28]) = 4.38× more tokens per unit. The y-axis is log-scaled "output per token," from ~0.15× to 1×. The x-axis spans five time windows A–E (Feb 05 to Apr 15), labeled as phases: Pre-mystery climb, Mystery climb, Post-mystery climb. Colored lines track five goods: agent-drafted code, PR shipped, file touched, agent-drafted docs, and knowledge capture; a thick black "COMPOSITE" line with a gray 95% CI band trends downward from 1× to 0.23×. Knowledge capture rebounds to 0.37×. Reasoning effort shifts from "high" to "medium" to "high" across phases.](https://pbs.substack.com/media/HKTckEXb0AAUvnF.jpg)
From the Situational Awareness LP website:
Situational Awareness believes that AI will be the dominant driver of global market returns over the next decade. Based on its depth of expertise in AI and its underlying economics, Situational Awareness seeks to capture the gains expected from the global growth and broad adoption of AI. Situational Awareness’s goal is to find investments and themes that will be materially impacted, positively or negatively, by developments in AI.
SBF is sort of like a foil to Leopold Aschenbrenner. Both were/are young, brilliant, overachieving, futurist effective altruists in tech and finance who made billions of dollars in their twenties from smart, forward-thinking investments. Bankman-Fried was one of the largest investors in Anthropic’s Series B and C, which would have returned tens of billions to FTX. Aschenbrenner actually worked at FTX in 2022 as one of the investors on the FTX Future Fund. But Bankman-Fried ended up disgraced, in federal prison, with his empire dissolved, and Aschenbrenner escaped FTX unscathed to start one of the most successful hedge funds ever. I’m not sure what the lesson is here, but “don’t commit fraud” is a good starting point.