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Happy Friday! All eyes will be on the market today after Thursday’s sucker punch. While some analysts were initially optimistic that the Democrats’ midterm wins could help slow the sky-high spending in Silicon Valley, the sentiment didn’t last long.

Growing concerns about the impact of the Democrats’ win on AI bled into the market only a day later. The Nasdaq composite fell 5.5%, representing $2.5 trillion in market value, on Thursday—the most on record in dollar terms. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 fell 4.4%, the biggest drop since Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs in 2025.

Zooming in, Nvidia is on track for another week of losses. The chipmaker has lost $1.4 trillion since its October record.

Things also aren’t looking good for Anthropic, with major investors skeptical that it can achieve a previously expected $1.5 trillion valuation. Some say the valuation could be closer to $1 trillion.

Let’s get started.

— Jody Serrano, with help from Shawn Chen

→ The dog days are starting
→ Give the people all the RAM. All of it!
→ Grimes is part of a new movie. Well, kind of

...and all the AI news we couldn’t fit here.

The news: Thursday was a bloodbath for tech stocks. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, shares of Asian chip makers, Texas power producers, New Jersey compute providers, and more all tumbled, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The "Magnificent Seven," composed of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, collectively lost around $1 trillion in value. While the biggest AI hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, dodged the worst blows, they weren't completely immune. SpaceX took a 9% hit, likely related to the promises from Democrats to investigate Elon Musk-led companies.

Scrutiny on Musk's companies is likely to increase today after The Washington Post reported that the House is laying the groundwork to investigate President Donald Trump's use of Grok to plan the military operation in Venezuela.

The takeaway: Investors are fearful that the Democrats will end Trump's era of laissez-faire regulation and backroom deals. That fear isn't likely to subside in the coming days as Democrats start announcing more of their plans and priorities.

The news: Sam Altman now says his comments about DRAM were taken out of context after the OpenAI CEO made a wildly unpopular suggestion that all the memory should belong to data centers, where it could be used for "maximum utilization in the cloud." This especially made gamers angry.

On Wednesday, Altman changed his name to "RAM Altman" on X and bemoaned the negative response: "i actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context. i have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time."

The takeaway: Look, RAM prices have skyrocketed to entirely ludicrous levels in large part due to data center expansions that companies like OpenAI are asking for. Stack this on top of other deeply personal affordability issues consumers are facing and you have an exasperated audience. Altman claims his comments were taken out of context, so we've included the full remark in the article. Please read and let us know what you think.

The news: People keep trying to make AI-generated movies happen. They haven't had much luck so far, but a YouTuber has a new hook he's hoping might encourage audiences to give the slop a chance: a cameo from Grimes.

Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, plays a disaffected aristocrat in Gods Don't Give Gifts, a largely AI-generated film produced by the YouTuber Gossip Goblin. Given her past as an AI art booster and AI optimist, Grimes' participation isn't surprising.

Whether you can call Grimes' role a "cameo" is up to your interpretation. She recorded her lines from home, which means she wasn't on screen for any of it.

The takeaway: Marketing an AI-generated movie by promoting the role of a real-life celebrity in it is certainly intriguing. I wouldn't be surprised if more AI boosters started doing it. However, it still feels hollow and doesn't get anywhere near a real film performance.

A look at the two philosophies that shape Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's worldview: rationalism and effective altruism.
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