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The big news today is you can now check out and play around with Grok for free, right from your smartphone. Learn more about how to get started and see what it can do for you below.

Also, three separate stories landed this week, and somehow they're all the same story: the gap between how AI is being sold and what the numbers actually say. A bear case went mainstream on cable news, a $10 billion fundraise wiped out a stock in a single morning, and Sam Altman quietly admitted the "iPhone moment" still hasn't arrived.

Buckle up, this one's a rapid-fire reality check.

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Meet Ed Zitron, the independent journalist CNBC just put on air as "the leading expert voice on the bearish case against AI." His argument isn't vibes; it's a spreadsheet, and it's starting to make people in suits nervous.

Here's what he's pointing at:

Here's the uncomfortable part. Zitron's central claim is that the entire industry is betting on revenue growth from exactly two companies that are each losing tens of billions of dollars a year, and that if either one stumbles, the hyperscalers who built their growth forecasts around that spending get caught holding the bag.

Oracle in particular has tied itself so tightly to OpenAI's compute commitments that Zitron says it has "a very real chance of dying" if the relationship sours. That's not fringe anymore. It's a CNBC segment.

🔮 Prediction: Expect the "circular financing" framing to become the dominant media narrative over the next two quarters, not because it's necessarily wrong, but because it's simple, quotable, and finally has hard numbers attached to it (Nvidia's overlapping investments, OpenAI's $20.9 billion loss, Anthropic's $30 billion raise). The real test isn't whether Zitron is right about AI's usefulness. It's whether Anthropic and OpenAI can show a believable path to profitability before their next funding rounds.

If either company has to raise at a flat or down valuation, or if OpenAI's reported $1.4 trillion in compute commitments start looking undeliverable, the bear case stops being a contrarian take and becomes the base case on Wall Street. Watch for two signals specifically: whether the Trump administration's AI and crypto czar David Sacks keeps publicly ruling out a federal backstop (he already has, once), and whether Oracle's stock starts trading as a leveraged bet on OpenAI rather than a database company.

If both of those things intensify before year-end, the "AI bubble" conversation moves from podcasts and newsletters into earnings calls, and that's when it actually starts moving markets rather than just headlines.

Reply and tell me: are you more worried about an AI bubble popping, or more worried that we stop investing too early and miss the upside? I read every reply.

Watch the full segment here →

Alibaba just gave the market a live demonstration of the tension running through this entire newsletter: spend big on AI, and investors punish you for it immediately.

The facts:

Then, less than 24 hours after pricing the dilution, Alibaba turned around and launched Wan3.0, its newest AI video model. This one's genuinely interesting on the merits: it generates up to 30 seconds of video in a single pass (double the previous model's ceiling), and it can build a finished video directly from a spreadsheet, a slide deck, a PDF, or a live webpage, not just a text prompt. Alibaba's already using it for short films, ads, and tourism marketing since its public beta opened August 6.

Here's the tension nobody's saying out loud. Alibaba brought forward its own projected payback period on AI investment from three years to two and a half, citing surging demand. That's either a genuinely bullish signal about how fast AI revenue is materializing, or it's a company trying to reassure jittery shareholders the day after diluting them by 3.6% of the company. Both things can be true at once, and the market's answer, a 10% overnight drop, suggests investors aren't fully buying the optimistic version yet.

🔮 Prediction: Wan3.0's document-to-video feature is the more important story here long term, even though the share placement is grabbing today's headlines. Turning a spreadsheet or slide deck into a finished 30-second video with zero editing is exactly the kind of unglamorous, high-volume corporate use case that generates real, boring, recurring revenue, the opposite of the flashy consumer demo reel. Expect enterprise marketing and training teams to adopt this faster than individual creators do, because the input format (documents they already have) removes the single biggest barrier to AI video adoption inside companies: nobody wants to learn prompt engineering, but everyone already has a slide deck.

If Alibaba can show even modest enterprise traction numbers for Wan3.0 by its next earnings call, expect the market to reframe this week's stock drop as "smart capex" in hindsight rather than "panic dilution." If it can't, the 75% profit decline plus a 10% stock hit in the same month becomes the headline instead, and that narrative sticks around through the next quarter.

Reply and tell me: would you trust an AI-generated video built straight from your company's slide deck, or does that feel one step too automated?

Read the Reuters coverage here →

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🎙 Sam Altman just admitted AI hasn't had its "iPhone moment" yet, weeks after telling a podcast we're "in the singularity." In a new interview, he says the tech is largely there, but the industry still lacks a product that reshapes how people actually interact with computers. Watch the clip here.

🤗 Hugging Face is reportedly fielding acquisition offers around $13 billion, despite the company turning down a $500 million Nvidia investment earlier this year that would have valued it at just $7 billion.

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