One of the reasons the [Trump administration's investment in Intel] has so far proved so sound is that the White House has made sure of it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick personally pushed deals on Intel’s behalf with some of the most lucrative clients you could think of. They include Nvidia Corp., the company at the heart of the AI revolution; SpaceX, which would like to be; and now, reportedly, Apple Inc. — a crown jewel client that would be the firmest stamp of approval yet on the Intel turnaround project.

If the company could take its own “Readiness Score,” as the device gives its wearers each morning, it would surely say “optimal” for an IPO. The sales pitch to potential investors should be that the Oura ring is the starting point for something much greater.

Yet as the I/O keynote flew past the hour-and-a-half mark on Tuesday, it became clear Google faces an issue in rolling out AI to all those services. Hearing the latest announcements was like sitting in a wind tunnel. The danger that consumers will be left overwhelmed, and grow more resistant as a result, is real. In trying to reinvent Google’s services for AI, there’s such a thing as doing way too much way too quickly.

Was Musk portrayed in court as untrustworthy, hypocritical and bullying? Did he come across as brash and argumentative on the stand? Well sure. Hold the front page. Investors know what they’re getting with Musk. They’re still figuring out Altman.

Just last week I had a someone reply to a request for an interview using what he referred to as “AI-assisted articulation.” Harshith Vaddiparthy, a tech executive, read my email asking for his view on the reliabilty of Anthropic’s coding tool. Then he spoke into his computer using OpenClaw, a speech-to-text tool, “to create a full doc with my thoughts.” He reviewed it before sending it to me.

“The key nuance I would emphasize is that OpenClaw is not independently inventing answers on my behalf,” Vaddiparthy told me after I quizzed him about it. “The point of view is mine.”

Is it, though? I get what he’s saying: They are his thoughts, structured into text, then approved. But I think he’s kidding himself, as is anyone else delegating to these tools. An unstructured, unarticulated thought spoken aloud is merely a half-thought; a raw egg cracked into a cold pan. “Writing is thinking,” the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough said in 2002. “To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

As boos rang out among the audience of University of Central Florida graduates, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield turned to the faculty staff behind her to ask what had happened. Then it dawned on her: She’d mentioned artificial intelligence.

That percentage difference might seem negligible, but for demanding workflows, it isn’t. “Anthropic has some fantastic models,” said Wade Foster, CEO of automation company Zapier, who explained that his company switches out models often for a variety or reasons, one of them being reliability. “The whole industry is compute constrained, and Anthropic has procured a lot less compute compared to OpenAI. So yes, I think Anthropic is feeling that.” (Separately, Foster said, Claude Design had failed him just as he was finishing a presentation. “Well, that stinks,” he remembered thinking.)

Separate from the pack is Apple, which has a much different story. Analysts on its Thursday earnings call didn’t bring up capex even once — a contrast to previous quarters when the concern had been that Cook was being too timid in spending compared with Apple’s peers. Instead, focus was on simply whether the company can make its hardware quickly and cost effectively enough to meet what is a surge in demand to use them … for AI.

That spending is in the same arena as the other cloud businesses. Except, Meta isn’t a cloud business. So when it breaks the news that it’s going to need to spend even more, it can’t point to healthy growth in cloud sales from AI — because obviously there aren’t any. Investors are right to question what Meta will get in return for all that AI investment when ultimately its only client is itself.

I’ve questioned before whether Wall Street has the temperament for the artificial-intelligence era. It’s hard to argue it does when just one report from the Wall Street Journal, which suggested OpenAI had missed some internal growth targets, was enough to wipe billions of dollars of value off related stocks. For a moment on Tuesday, you’d have thought the sky was falling on the AI boom.

In attempting to find a jury in the case of Musk v. Altman, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers chose to widen the pool of potential candidates for selection. That figures: To many Californians, being asked to side with either Elon Musk or Sam Altman is like deciding between getting a slap in the face or a knee to the groin.

Michael only partially does Jackson’s achievements justice. We see little of how he created his art and persona. The mastering of dance steps in the small hours in cramped hotel rooms, the beatboxing into tape recorders in lieu of being able to competently play any instruments himself, the days-long studio sessions repeating takes dozens upon dozens of times are largely missing. His album Thriller, still the biggest-selling of all time, seemed to come together in a breezy afternoon after lounging in the sun. The real story — of perfectionism, serendipity and tearful compromise — is skipped. Audiences will leave the theater having learned nothing about Jackson’s songs they didn’t know already. That is underscored in Bubbles the chimp having more scenes than Quincy Jones, the peerless producer who had almost as much hand in Jackson’s success as Jackson himself.

With the White House placated, Intel has been on a tear. Its stock is up 78% since the beginning of the year, outperforming the likes of Nvidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The past month has been Intel’s strongest since January 1987. On Thursday, Wall Street expects further confirmation that the former jewel in America’s tech crown is no longer on life support.

There are, to be generous, a few teething problems with Amazon.com Inc.’s recently upgraded AI shopping bot, “Rufus.” When I followed its suggestion to have it recommend books based on my reading habits, second on its list of top picks was a $135 pair of hiking shoes. Still, let’s not be too judgmental. The Rufus bot is still in beta, and if any company can create a compelling shopping bot, it’s Amazon. Or rather, if any company has the data to create a compelling shopping bot, it’s Amazon. Whether it has the institutional ability to pull it off is another matter: Many of the lofty promises it made about how its Alexa assistant was going to revolutionize e-commerce are now more than a decade overdue.

In announcing on Monday that John Ternus would be succeeding Tim Cook as chief executive officer of Apple Inc. this year, the company’s board made it clear: We’re a hardware company and we’re going with the hardware guy. It’s a mission statement that bears repeating in 2026, the year of Apple’s 50th anniversary and now one that the company and its legions of fans hope will feature a smooth leadership transition. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001 and rose through the ranks to become senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021, will take over a company in fine strength but facing looming questions about how it shifts to the new computing paradigm of AI.