Short issue this week due to illness. Normal service resumes next week. The big story was Grok (links below), its spectacular failure, followed by a series of reckless decisions by Musk and co that poured gasoline on the fire. My advice remains unchanged for anything involving AI and Musk: use at your own risk and make sure your insurance is current.
POTATO officially hit one month old and we flipped the group into a community with ten focus groups. Not in UK tech’s faster growing community yet? Join the waitlist. Busy week with Google / NotebookLM (July 17), and then the POTATO Summer meetup in the evening. Make sure you get a spot for the Shopify TNN on Sept 18 too.
Apple plans a refresh for MacBook Pro, iPads, and iPhone 17E, while COO Jeff Williams stepped down. Meta acquired voice AI startup PlayAI and invested €3.5B into AI smart glasses with EssilorLuxottica, continuing its spatial AI push. YouTube moved to kill its Trending tab while cracking down on mass-produced AI slop. Perplexity launched an AI-powered browser called Comet, Hugging Face started selling Reachy Mini robots, and OpenAI delayed its open model yet again. Oh, and it lost a huge deal too.
X had an extremely bad week: xAI launched Grok 4 for $300/month, while apologising after it hallucinated violent and offensive content. Grok’s antisemitic posts resurfaced, Yaccarino resigned, and X faces criminal charges in France over algorithm manipulation. Why anyone uses any of this remains a mystery to me and risk departments. Musk’s Grok also made physics claims, and sometimes consulted “Elon” directly.
Anthropic’s compute needs were spotlighted as AWS announced an AI agent marketplace launching next week, with Claude as a headliner. Moonshot AI launched Kimi-K2, which beat GPT-4 on some benchmarks, and it's free Meanwhile, Meta poached Apple’s Pang for $200M, X was hit with an antitrust alert in France, and Apple readied a Vision Pro update.
Google added image-to-video generation to Veo 3 and brought AI marketing tools to India. Meanwhile, Replit ditched Google Cloud and partnered with Microsoft. TikTok was sued again over child data collection, and Elon’s antitrust complications deepened with Trump-linked Binance activity. The EU rolled out new AI watermark and transparency rules, while Meta declined to change its consent model, even under threat of fines.
▲ The promise of ambient AI. /11 mins
Denmark wants you to copyright yourself. It might be the only way to stop deepfakes. /6 mins
Jack Dorsey’s new messenger doesn’t need internet connection to work. /5 mins
DJ handbags are, apparently, now a thing. /4 mins
How to know when to pursue your side gig full-time. /6 mins
Please do not use Mockly for evil. /2 mins
How do we reclaim our attention? /6 mins
There are now more than half a billion mobile money accounts in the world, here’s why where they are matters. /18 mins
Autonomous robot surgeon removes organs with 100% success rate. /8 mins
These are the most liveable cities in 2025. /5 mins
Cybersecurity is melting, and experts are scrambling to come up with new solutions to old problems (let alone the new ones). /18 mins
// C_NCENTRATE is written and curated by Paul Armstrong
Paul delivers actionable insights that keep companies ahead of the coming disruptions. As the founder of TBD Group and author of ‘Disruptive Technologies’, he is trusted by global brands, agencies, and when breaking news hits the FT, WSJ, BBC, and CNN ask for his analysis. Find out more and connect with him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.