Walter Schulze

Walter Schulze · May 2, 2026 · 4:36 PM

The Ethereum Foundation Is Selling to BitMine and That Relationship Is Reshaping Who Controls ETH Supply

The Ethereum Foundation sold 10,000 ETH directly to BitMine Immersion Technologies at $2,387 in its second bilateral OTC deal of 2026, bringing BitMine's total holdings to nearly 5 million ETH at 4.12% of circulating supply. The recurring direct relationship between Ethereum's protocol steward and its largest institutional holder raises questions about supply dynamics, governance, and network concentration that have no clear precedent.

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Walter Schulze · May 2, 2026 · 3:41 PM

Companies Are Doubling Their AI Budgets and Most of Them Are Getting Almost Nothing Back

BCG data shows companies plan to double AI spending to 1.7% of revenues in 2026, yet only 31% have moved beyond pilots and 72% of teams are not meeting available productivity potential. The adoption gap is now a change management problem more than a technology problem, and it threatens the revenue story for the entire AI supply chain.

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Walter Schulze · May 2, 2026 · 2:18 PM

GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 are trading blows on ARC-AGI-3 and the benchmark arms race is shaping how investors read the frontier model market

Early community comparisons between GPT-5.5 High and Anthropic's Opus 4.7 on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark are generating significant attention in the AI community, reflecting how closely investors and developers are tracking reasoning test performance as a proxy for model quality and competitive positioning. The results matter, but the gap between ARC benchmark scores and real-world agent reliability remains wider than the coverage of leaderboard updates typically acknowledges.

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Walter Schulze · May 2, 2026 · 12:03 PM

Apple Got Caught Using Anthropic's Claude and the Internet Had a Field Day

Apple accidentally included internal Claude.md instruction files in its Support app update v5.13, then pushed an emergency hotfix to delete them within hours. The slip confirmed Apple engineers use Anthropic's Claude Code internally, creating an awkward gap between Apple's AI marketing and its actual development workflow.

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Walter Schulze · May 2, 2026 · 12:00 PM

The GUARD Act just passed committee and mandatory ID verification for AI chatbots could reshape the entire consumer AI industry

The GUARD Act, which would require mandatory identity verification for AI chatbot users, has cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support rooted in child-safety concerns. While the protective intent is genuine, the compliance architecture the bill would create raises serious questions about startup competitiveness, user privacy, and whether child-safety regulation is becoming the mechanism through which the consumer AI market consolidates around large platforms by default.

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Walter Schulze · May 2, 2026 · 4:12 AM

Meta acquires Assured Robot Intelligence and signals it wants to be the AI brain inside the next generation of physical machines

Meta has confirmed the acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup focused on helping robots understand and predict human behavior in complex environments, according to TechCrunch reporting on May 1, 2026. The deal signals Meta's ambition to build foundational AI software for physical machines before competitors like Tesla, Figure AI, Amazon, and Nvidia lock up the category. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the strategic intent is clear: Meta wants a platform position in embodied

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 8:33 PM

Fun raises $72 million to build the payment rails that make crypto transactions feel like normal fintech

Fun has raised $72 million in Series A funding led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire to scale payment infrastructure that connects fiat and crypto rails for consumer finance platforms including Polymarket, Aave, and Lighter. The company has processed more than $18 billion in annual payment volume by making blockchain deposits and withdrawals feel like ordinary fintech transactions. The raise reflects growing conviction that invisible, embedded crypto rails rather than user-facing wallet manage

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 7:37 PM

The Pentagon Just Put Frontier AI on Its Most Classified Networks

The US War Department signed classified AI deployment agreements with OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, AWS, SpaceX, and Reflection on April 30, placing frontier AI inside its highest-classification military environments for the first time at this scale.

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 3:33 PM

Synaps raised €3 million to take on AutoCAD with an AI-native architectural platform and the bet is bigger than it looks

Synaps, a Vienna-based architectural planning startup, has raised €3.06 million in pre-seed funding to build a browser-based collaborative platform that combines drafting, rendering, and workflow tools as an AI-native alternative to AutoCAD and legacy design software. The round follows an earlier €1.4 million raised at stealth emergence, suggesting growing investor confidence in the company's thesis that vertical AI platforms can disrupt entrenched professional software by offering a fundamental

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 11:44 AM

Calligo Technologies is raising up to $15 million to prove that India can build the chips powering the next wave of AI infrastructure

Calligo Technologies, a Bengaluru-based RISC-V chip startup founded in 2012, is in talks to raise $12 million to $15 million in a round expected to be led by US-based BIG Capital at a valuation of $50 million to $55 million. The company designs energy-efficient processors targeting AI, supercomputing, and high-performance computing workloads, positioning itself at the intersection of India's semiconductor ambitions and the growing demand for power-efficient alternatives to GPU-dominated AI infra

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 8:40 AM

Vlad Tenev says a tokenization supercycle is underway and Robinhood is betting its future on being right

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev declared a tokenization supercycle underway during the company's first-quarter earnings call, even as crypto revenue and trading volume fell from year-earlier levels. Tenev framed stablecoins as proof of concept for a broader migration of financial assets onto blockchain rails, with tokenized equities and always-on trading as Robinhood's central long-term bet. The argument asks investors to look past near-term weakness toward a structural shift in how mainstream investin

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 6:44 AM

Netomi raised $110 million and Accenture's involvement tells you everything about where enterprise AI is heading

Netomi has raised $110 million in a Series C led by Accenture Ventures, with Adobe Ventures and WndrCo also participating, as the enterprise AI customer service platform moves toward proactive agents that resolve issues before customers contact support. The company already serves United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Paramount, and DraftKings, and Accenture's lead position signals an intent to deploy the platform through its consulting relationships with major enterprises. The round reflects a broad

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Walter Schulze · May 1, 2026 · 4:27 AM

Salesforce Is Letting Its Customers Build the Agentforce Roadmap and the Strategy Is Smarter Than It Looks

Salesforce Is Letting Its Customers Build the Agentforce Roadmap and the Strategy Is Smarter Than It Looks

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Walter Schulze · Apr 30, 2026 · 2:48 PM

Big Tech is spending $725 billion on AI infrastructure and the market is starting to ask when that bill comes due

Bloomberg reports that the largest US tech companies now plan up to $725 billion in combined capital expenditures this year, almost entirely directed at AI infrastructure. The scale of the commitment is changing how investors read earnings results, with every revenue beat now accompanied by mounting questions about when the spending curve and the returns curve actually meet.

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Walter Schulze · Apr 30, 2026 · 9:55 AM

Anthropic's Mythos fight shows frontier AI is becoming strategic access infrastructure

Anthropic's Mythos fight shows frontier AI turning into strategic access infrastructure, with the White House resisting broader rollout while Germany's Bundesbank pushes for European banks to get the same cyber-defense capabilities as U.S. institutions.

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Walter Schulze · Apr 30, 2026 · 8:23 AM

Thomas Reardon is betting AI's next bottleneck is power

Thomas Reardon's Flourish is raising at a possible $2.5 billion valuation to build more energy-efficient AI, signaling that investors think the next major AI bottleneck may be power and inference economics rather than model intelligence.

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