Sora Hits #3 on App Store as AI Captures Record $192.7 Billion in VC Funding
December 10, 2024
Subject: Sora Breaks App Store Records While AI Funding Hits Historic Highs
TOP STORIES
OpenAI’s Sora Rockets to #3 on App Store in Days
• Consumer appetite for AI video generation proves massive with Sora’s lightning-fast climb to third place
• Success validates that advanced generative AI is ready for mainstream adoption beyond business users
• Video AI could replicate ChatGPT’s transformative impact across content creation industries
AI Captures Record $192.7 Billion—Over Half of All VC Funding
• Historic milestone: AI sector attracts more venture capital than all other industries combined
• The $192.7 billion figure exceeds the GDP of most nations, showing unprecedented capital concentration
• Investment dominance reflects confidence in AI’s potential to transform virtually every sector
Nvidia-Fujitsu Alliance Targets AI Robotics Integration
• Strategic partnership combines Nvidia’s computing power with Fujitsu’s manufacturing expertise
• Focus on industrial automation and healthcare robotics signals next major AI frontier
• Alliance model may become standard for scaling AI beyond software into physical applications
MARKET PULSE
The AI sector’s capture of over 50% of global VC funding—a first in venture history—is creating bubble concerns as pre-revenue companies command billion-dollar valuations. Yet Sora’s immediate consumer traction suggests some AI applications may justify the hype. The Nvidia-Fujitsu partnership indicates smart money is moving toward integrated AI-hardware solutions rather than pure software plays.
CONTRARIAN CORNER
While everyone celebrates Sora’s App Store success, consider that rapid consumer adoption might actually accelerate regulatory crackdowns. The faster AI video tools proliferate, the sooner governments will impose restrictions on deepfakes and synthetic content—potentially limiting the very market opportunity driving current valuations.
WHAT TO WATCH
• How will traditional content creation companies respond to Sora’s mainstream breakthrough?
• Which AI startups are most vulnerable when bubble concerns trigger valuation corrections?
• Will the Nvidia-Fujitsu model of AI-hardware partnerships reshape competitive dynamics across robotics?
Additional reading: AI Investment Trends Analysis
Past Briefings
OpenAI Deleted ‘Safely.’ NVIDIA Reports. Karpathy Is Still Learning
THE NUMBER: 6 — times OpenAI changed its mission in 9 years. The most recent edit deleted one word: safely. TL;DR Andrej Karpathy — the engineer who wrote the curriculum that trained a generation of developers, ran AI at Tesla, and helped found OpenAI — posted in December that he's never felt so behind as a programmer. Fourteen million people saw it. Tonight, NVIDIA reports Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings after market close: analysts expect $65.7 billion in revenue, up 67% year over year. The numbers will almost certainly land. What matters is what Jensen Huang says about the next two quarters to...
Feb 23, 2026Altman lied about a handshake on camera. CrowdStrike fell 8%. Google just killed the $3,000 photo shoot.
Sam Altman told reporters he was "confused" when Narendra Modi grabbed his hand at the India AI Impact Summit. He said he "wasn't sure what was happening." The video, which has been watched by tens of millions of people, shows Altman looking directly at Dario Amodei before raising his fist. He knew exactly what was happening. He chose not to do it, and then he lied about it. On camera. In multiple interviews. With the footage playing on every screen behind him. That would be a minor character note in any other industry. In this one, it isn't. Because on...
Feb 20, 2026We’re Building the Agentic Web Faster Than We’re Protecting It
Google's WebMCP gives agents structured access to every website. Anthropic's data shows autonomy doubling with oversight thinning. OpenAI's agent already drains crypto vaults. Google shipped working code Thursday that hands AI agents a structured key to every website on the internet. WebMCP, running in Chrome 146 Canary, lets sites expose machine-readable "Tool Contracts" so agents can book a flight, file a support ticket, or complete a checkout without parsing screenshots or scraping HTML. Early benchmarks show 67% less compute overhead than visual approaches. Microsoft co-authored the spec. The W3C is incubating it. This isn't a proposal. It's production software already...