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  • 🔥 Karp calls AI industry "effing insane." On live TV.

🔥 Karp calls AI industry "effing insane." On live TV.

Plus a leaked Treasury memo, Microsoft's latest layoffs, and your last week with Fable 5.

July 06, 2026

My fellow AI explorers

I almost spit out my coffee watching this week's Alex Karp interview. The man went on CNBC to talk about a chip partnership and ended up accusing the entire frontier AI industry of running a shakedown. Meanwhile, quietly, a $28 billion chip IPO and a leaked government memo might matter more for where this industry is headed than anything said on live TV.

This edition's got a bit of everything: corporate rage, memory chip mania, and a countdown clock on the most powerful model Anthropic's ever shipped.

In today’s edition:

SPONSORED BY BTQ TECHNOLOGIES

The encryption protecting your bank account, your messages, and pretty much everything else online could eventually be cracked by quantum computers.

Governments are taking it seriously. U.S. agencies are under orders to switch to "quantum-proof" security over the next decade.

That's the problem BTQ Technologies (Nasdaq: BTQ) is working on, and this week it completed the acquisition of QPerfect, a French quantum software company specializing in high-performance quantum simulation, emulation, and software tools for designing and testing quantum systems.

With QPerfect, BTQ adds a practical way to help banks, telecoms, enterprises, and governments explore, test, and validate quantum software and security architectures before quantum machines are fully mature.

The deal (worth up to about $28 million) also gives BTQ a research base in Strasbourg, France, at one of Europe's top quantum science hubs. The founding team is sticking around to keep building.

Most of the quantum industry is racing to build the computers. BTQ is working on what has to come first: quantum-resistant encryption and chips designed to run it at practical speeds.

With QPerfect, they have a way to prove it all works before banks, telecoms, and defense networks bet on it.

Palantir

Palantir CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC's Squawk Box to talk about Palantir's new partnership with Nvidia. He left having called the entire AI industry "effing insane."

Here's what actually happened:

  • The deal itself: Palantir is pairing Nvidia's open-weight models with its own software so government agencies and big enterprises can run AI without handing their data, weights, or "alpha" to a third party.

  • The pitch: Karp's argument is ownership. Customers should control their compute, their models, and their data stack instead of renting intelligence from labs that can, in his words, cache their data and copy their business.

  • The rant: Karp accused OpenAI and Anthropic of overcharging enterprises for tokens while quietly harvesting the IP needed to compete with those same customers. He called it a "wealth tax" on American business.

  • The market reaction: Palantir shares jumped more than 9% the same morning, even as the stock remains down roughly a third for the year.

Strip away the theatrics (and there was a lot, including Karp asking the hosts "are we still on?" after what he thought was the end of the segment) and there's a real argument buried in there.

Enterprises don't want to pay per-token pricing that both costs money and trains someone else's model on their playbook. Karp's selling sovereignty. Nvidia's selling the chips underneath it. Whether that framing survives contact with actual enterprise buying committees is another question entirely.

🔮 Prediction: This won't be the last CEO to publicly separate "AI infrastructure" from "AI labs." Expect more vendors to pitch control and ownership as the differentiator, not raw model capability, especially in regulated and government-facing markets.

Do you think enterprises actually care about owning their model weights, or is this more of a sales pitch dressed up as a principle? Hit reply, I want to know what you think.

IPOs

SK Hynix's $28 Billion Bet on the AI Memory Supercycle

While Karp was busy going viral, SK Hynix quietly kicked off one of the biggest listings of the year. The South Korean chipmaker is seeking to raise about $28 billion through a US ADR listing on the Nasdaq.

Why this matters:

  • High-bandwidth memory is the new bottleneck. SK Hynix supplies the memory chips that feed Nvidia and Google's AI systems, and demand has outpaced supply for over a year.

  • The stock has already exploded. Shares are up roughly 260% this year in South Korea, pushing the company's market cap above $1 trillion back in May.

  • Big-name investors are circling. Baillie Gifford, Coatue, and Situational Awareness Partners have each indicated interest in buying up to a combined $7 billion of the ADRs.

  • The money has a purpose. Proceeds are earmarked for new chip factories in South Korea and EUV scanners from ASML, feeding straight back into more AI hardware.

Here's the tension nobody's fully pricing in. Everyone treats memory demand as a permanent floor under the AI trade, but this listing is happening right as some investors are quietly asking whether "memory inflation" starts denting spending on AI infrastructure, phones, and PCs. SK Hynix is betting the supercycle has years left. The size of this raise is basically a referendum on that bet.

🔮 Prediction: If this IPO prices well and trades up, expect it to reset the ceiling for how investors value the entire memory sector, not just SK Hynix. If it stumbles, it'll be the first real crack in the "AI hardware demand is bottomless" narrative.

Are you more bullish on the chipmakers or the model labs right now? Reply and tell me where you're putting your chips (pun intended).

30-Second AI Play

Claude Fable 5 is back after Anthropic restored access following the export control saga, but through July 7th, you can only use up to 50% of your weekly usage limit on Max plans before it shifts to usage credits. Translation: use it or lose the free window. Here's how to get the most out of it:

  1. Clone paid software you already use. Have Claude Opus 4.8 run deep research on how a tool like Whisper Flow actually works, turn that into a prompt, then hand it to Fable 5 to build a local, private version.

  2. Audit your own Claude Code workflow. Ask Fable 5 to review your past sessions and cluster the patterns into new skills, automations, or fixes. It's a free consulting session on your own habits.

  3. Build a custom agentic OS. Wrap Claude Code in a visual layer that surfaces your skills, automations, and metrics in one dashboard instead of a terminal.

  4. Run a full code review. Point Fable 5 at a messy codebase and let it dedupe findings, rank severity, and hand you a fix list.

  5. Tackle a long-horizon build. Write a tight PRD (a product requirements doc), then let Fable 5 execute autonomously across a long session for something too ambitious for a single prompt.

💡 Pro tip: Don't just say "go build X." Use Opus 4.8 to do the upfront research and planning, then hand Fable 5 a clear, structured prompt. It burns far less of your usage limit than letting Fable 5 figure out the plan itself.

Advertise to 174k engineers and CTOs choosing what tools their companies build with.

Other Relevant AI News!

📉 A leaked Treasury Department report warns that an AI bubble bursting could hit markets harder than the dot-com crash because AI firms are now more deeply woven into the economy than their 2000s predecessors ever were.

🪓 Microsoft is cutting roughly 4,800 jobs, hitting sales, consulting, and Xbox hardest, as the company keeps funneling spending toward AI infrastructure instead of headcount.

🇫🇷 Station F in Paris is gearing up for its second F/ai accelerator cohort, backed by a who's who of AI labs and chipmakers, cementing its role as Europe's answer to Silicon Valley for AI startups.

Golden Nuggets

  • 🔥 Karp's rant reframes the AI pitch around ownership and control, not just capability, and Wall Street rewarded it.

  • 💾 SK Hynix's $28B listing is a real-time stress test of whether the AI memory supercycle still has legs.

  • 🤖 You've got until July 7th to squeeze full value out of Fable 5 before usage credits kick in.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Send me your thoughts by replying to this email (yes, I read them all :)

Until our next AI rendezvous,

Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI