Good morning. It's Wednesday, February 25, and we're covering China’s industrial AI expansion, mixed signals on AI-driven productivity, rising semiconductor supply risks, and more.
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🦥 OpenAI COO Says Enterprise AI Lags Adoption
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said AI hasn’t meaningfully penetrated enterprise workflows, despite strong demand and $20B in annualized 2025 revenue. The company launched OpenAI Frontier to help businesses deploy agents and measure impact by outcomes, not seats. It’s partnering with firms like McKinsey to expand enterprise use.
♀️ ŌURA Debuts AI Model for Women’s Health
ŌURA launched its first proprietary large language model focused on women’s health, now testing in Oura Labs. The model powers Oura Advisor with clinician-reviewed research and users’ biometric data to deliver personalized guidance from menstruation through menopause. Hosted on ŌURA-controlled infrastructure, it emphasizes privacy and evidence-based responses.
⚡ AMD, Meta Strike 6GW AI GPU Deal
Advanced Micro Devices and Meta Platforms signed a multi-year deal to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs for Meta’s AI infrastructure. The first 1GW rollout begins in 2H 2026 using custom MI450-based GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC CPUs. AMD granted Meta milestone-based stock warrants. The deal is expected to boost multi-year revenue and align product roadmaps.
🧩 Anthropic Expands Claude Enterprise Plugins
Anthropic introduced updates to Cowork and plugins for Claude Enterprise, letting admins build private plugin marketplaces and manage connectors company-wide. New integrations include Google Workspace, DocuSign, and Slack, plus role-specific plugins for HR, finance, and engineering. Claude can now complete multi-step tasks across Excel and PowerPoint in research preview.
🎭 REAL OR AI?
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📺️ FROM THE LIVE SHOW
“Eight years ago, it took 20 hours of voice to clone someone.”@Vijay_Voice, CEO of @pindrop, on the rise of deepfake scams:“Now AI can clone you using nothing but your voicemail greeting.”“As a result, AI-generated fraud has exploded almost overnight.”“Last year, we went… pic.twitter.com/ZGZF7DRB7M
@ForwardFutureView post on X🏭 MANUFACTURING
China Embeds AI in 30,000 Factories as U.S. Manufacturing Lags on Deployment
The Recap: Jonas Nahm — an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and former White House economist — argued in The New York Times that China has outpaced the United States in manufacturing productivity by systematically embedding automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) into factory operations. He writes that while U.S. policymakers focus on trade barriers and frontier AI research, China has spent a decade organizing national, provincial, and local efforts to modernize factory floors at scale. The implication: without shifting from protectionism to deployment, the United States risks falling further behind in industrial competitiveness.
Highlights:
China has built 30,000+ smart factories, and more than half of all new industrial robots installed globally in 2024 went into Chinese plants, driving higher output per worker across sectors.
Companies like Zeekr, Xiaomi, and Midea deploy hundreds of robots and AI-driven control systems, with Xiaomi producing a car every 76 seconds and Midea cutting response times from hours to seconds.
In the United States, only 18 percent of manufacturers report formal AI strategies, and two-thirds struggle to scale pilot projects; many cite legacy equipment, data gaps, workforce shortages, and high upfront costs.
Jonas Nahm argues U.S. policy focuses on tariffs and supply-chain restrictions — including investigations into robotics imports — rather than coordinated investments in factory modernization, digital infrastructure, and worker training.
Forward Future Takeaways:
Nahm’s argument reframes the U.S.–China manufacturing gap as a deployment problem, not a research deficit: America leads in advanced AI models but lags in applying them to factory floors. If productivity gains increasingly depend on integrating software, sensors, and robotics into legacy plants, industrial policy may hinge less on breakthroughs and more on execution. → Read the full article here. (Paywall)
👨💻 PRODUCTIVITY
AI Is Advancing Fast but U.S. Productivity Shows No Boom Yet
The Economist examines whether rapid advances in artificial intelligence are translating into measurable economic gains, finding little evidence of a broad productivity surge. Although U.S. GDP grew 2.2% in 2025 while annual job growth slowed to just 0.1%, detailed analysis suggests most gains stemmed from investment in data centers and AI infrastructure rather than efficiency improvements. For now, AI's macroeconomic impact appears modest — with deeper organizational changes still largely unrealized.
Jason Furman of Harvard estimates roughly 90% of GDP growth in early 2025 came from spending on data centers and related capital; research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco finds underlying productivity gains near zero once investment effects are stripped out. About 41% of American workers reported using generative AI at work by November 2025, but only 13% use it daily, and just 5.7% of total work hours involve generative AI — up from 4.1% in late 2024.
The gap between AI's technical progress and its economic footprint underscores a familiar pattern: general-purpose technologies deliver their full gains only after firms reorganize around them. Adoption today is concentrated in discrete tasks like writing and coding rather than full workflow redesign — broad, but shallow. → Read the full article here. (Paywall)
🗺️ GEOPOLITICS
U.S. Races to Rebuild Chips as Taiwan Risk Exposes $10 Trillion Threat
A New York Times investigation finds that U.S. officials spent years warning Silicon Valley that a Chinese blockade or invasion of Taiwan — which produces roughly 90% of the world's most advanced chips — could cripple the tech industry and trigger a global economic crisis. Despite classified briefings, $50 billion in CHIPS Act subsidies, and later tariff pressure under President Trump, major tech firms were slow to shift production away from Taiwan, citing higher U.S. costs and persistent technological gaps.
The stakes are severe: a 2022 Semiconductor Industry Association report warned that a supply cutoff could slash U.S. GDP by 11% — around $2.5 trillion — and China's by 16%, losses rivaling the Great Depression. Recent commitments have accelerated: TSMC pledged an additional $100 billion for U.S. plants, and Intel granted the government a 10% stake in exchange for $8.9 billion in federal subsidies. Yet supply chains remain deeply tied to Taiwan, and full reshoring could take a decade or more.
Taiwan's dominance in advanced chip manufacturing has transformed a longstanding geopolitical risk into a central economic vulnerability — one made more acute as AI systems grow increasingly dependent on chips largely produced there. Washington's turn from subsidies to aggressive tariff leverage signals a harder-edged industrial policy, but semiconductor capacity cannot be rebuilt quickly, regardless of the pressure applied. → Read the full article here. (Paywall)
🛰️ NEWS
What Else is Happening
📉 Dimon Shrugs Off AI Stock Jitters (Paywall): JPMorgan CEO said the Feb. 23 selloff was overblown after shares fell 4%, vowing a $20B tech push to outpace fintech and payments rivals.
💹 AI Predicts 71% of Fund Trades: A Harvard-led study found a neural network forecast 71% of mutual-fund trades, with alpha concentrated in the 29% of unpredictable moves.
🦾 Pentagon Taps Grok: Musk’s xAI will deploy Grok in classified military systems, challenging Anthropic amid a clash over safeguards and “all lawful purposes” use.
👥 Kilo Launches 60-Second AI Agents: Kilo unveiled KiloClaw, hosting always-on OpenClaw agents in under a minute with 500+ model access and zero token markup.
🛠️ Google Adds Workflow Agent to Opal: Google introduced a Gemini 3 Flash–powered agent that builds interactive mini-app workflows from text prompts, expanding vibe-coding.
🚀 New Relic Debuts Agentic Platform: The company launched a no-code AI agent platform for data observability, plus new OpenTelemetry tools to unify APM and OTel data.
🎭 REAL OR AI
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