Meta had its big hardware event and the story was not the hardware. It was Muse, the agent Meta launched three weeks earlier, which has already passed 2.8 million downloads and now sits inside every pair of glasses Meta sells, including a cheaper range with no cameras, plus a keychain-sized gadget called Charm whose only job is to talk to it. Meta is executing very well. I am still not convinced by the category. Most of the examples Meta shows are things people do once every couple of years. Nobody has solved the blank screen problem, where you open the app and have no idea what to ask. And nobody knows yet whether the winning agent is one general assistant that sees everything you do, or a dozen specialist ones living inside your bank, your travel app and your shop. We are where the web was in 1995, arguing about what the building blocks even are.
The shopping side got decided fast, at least for now. Shopify opened every store it runs to Muse and Amazon blocked it outright, on the same day. That is the oldest trade in retail: if you are small, you take distribution wherever it comes from; if you are big and own the traffic, you refuse to let anyone stand between you and your customer. Meta also showed VR glasses that weigh 100 grams by moving the computer into a puck in your pocket, at about a third of the price of Apple's headset. The engineering is impressive and I do not care, because the pitch is still "a big cinema screen and six monitors at the coffee shop." I own a Vision Pro. It lives in a cupboard. The problem was never the weight.
The OpenAI story keeps getting bigger because they finally started looking. Since the Hugging Face break-in they have gone back through their test runs and found agents hammering public databases with thousands of requests and routing around their own network blocks, and in one case reading data from an unsecured Australian government health site. Here is the thing. These agents did exactly what they were built to do. You give an agent a goal, you let it find its own way there, and some of the ways it finds are rude or illegal. The labs describe this in human terms, as models "deciding" and "lying". The pushback in the Valley is that this is just renaming bugs. When Word ate your essay, you did not say Word decided to destroy your work. Almost every one of these incidents comes down to a test setup that was not isolated and was not watched. That is an engineering problem, a management problem, and soon a liability problem.
Robots, quietly. Tesla is reportedly building a few hundred Optimus robots a week, still a long way from the 20,000 a week it talks about. Amazon put another $100m into a robot factory and has now deployed over a million robots, none of them humanoid. Make of that what you will. Anthropic says Claude found a previously overlooked enzyme system by running around 950 copies of itself for 21 hours. I cannot judge the biology, but the pattern is the interesting part: a thousand ordinary brains working in parallel beats one brilliant brain for some problems, and the open question is which problems. And Google launched four of its chips into orbit to test data centres in space. My guess is this goes like satellite internet: a great idea in this bubble that works by the next one.
Three numbers worth sitting with. ASML has sold nothing in Europe this year, zero, for the most important chip machines in the world, made in the Netherlands. Brookings put US AI infrastructure spending at 3.6% of GDP a year through 2032, more than the railways at their peak, with a lot of the debt sitting off balance sheet where nobody can see it. And Chinese car brands are now 12% of European sales and around 15% in the UK, from nearly nothing three years ago.
A hacker group claims it has the personnel files of nearly every FBI agent, addresses and assignments included, which is not the kind of thing you can un-leak. Apollo's chief economist asked what happens when agents automatically move everyone's money from checking accounts paying nothing to accounts paying 4%. The answer is that banks lose the cheap deposits they lend against. That is the real story of this whole wave, I think: enormous amounts of money sit in places that only survive because it is too much bother to move them, and AI makes the bother go away.
And a French note to finish. Noël Godin died at 80. He threw cream pies at the pompous for fifty years, Bill Gates once and Bernard-Henri Lévy eight times. Every industry needs one.