AI Is Creating Billionaires Faster Than Ever

A wave of fundraising for AI startups has created dozens of new billionaires and pushed total unicorn count to 498. CB Insights pegs their combined value at $2.7 trillion, with 100 of those companies founded since 2023.

Anthropic is negotiating a $5 billion raise at a $170 billion valuation, while OpenAI plans a secondary sale that may value it at $500 billion. Secondary markets, mergers, and acquisitions have already produced 73 liquidity events since 2023, giving founders and employees new avenues to cash out.

MIT’s Andrew McAfee says no previous era has generated personal fortunes this large or this fast. Wealth managers are racing to capture these clients, yet most holdings remain locked in private shares concentrated around Silicon Valley.

Anthropic today released Claude Sonnet 4 with a 1-million token context window. The expanded capacity can ingest roughly the entire Harry Potter book series in a single prompt.

Early tests showed Sonnet 4 found two hidden movie scenes in 41.8 seconds—about half the time of Gemini 2.5 Flash—and avoided the title hallucinations both Gemini models produced.

Reviewers conclude Claude now offers unmatched speed and low hallucination risk on massive inputs but returns less detailed analysis than Google’s rivals.

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NVIDIA used the SIGGRAPH stage to launch a trio of offerings—fresh Omniverse simulation SDKs, upgraded Cosmos world foundation models, and RTX Pro servers—built for industrial robotics and physical AI.

The Cosmos suite now includes a 7-billion-parameter Reason model for multi-step physical reasoning and faster synthetic data generation.

For NVIDIA executives, physical AI represents the next major frontier, with Rev Lebaredian calling current robotics momentum unprecedented.

VisistAI, a Bengaluru startup, offers an AI video-analysis platform that flags technical flaws in badminton strokes and suggests corrective drills. The system already supports more than 70 city academies, delivering automated reports that coaches use to monitor multiple athletes at once.

Players upload smartphone footage, and the software tracks posture, footwork, shuttle flight, and grip, returning dashboards, smart journals, and local-language reports. Coaches say the objective data has lifted their coaching quality and boosted the number of competitive players they produce.

With elite coaching accessible to only 0.1% of Indian players, the tool opens biomechanics insights to the grassroots. The founders stress AI augments coaches rather than replaces them, while long-term plans target injury-prediction capabilities.

Axios reports that next-gen chatbots will mine social media to build psychological profiles and converse with users as convincingly as real people. Vanderbilt researchers say the technology, exemplified by Chinese firm GoLaxy, tailors content to a person’s values, emotions, and vulnerabilities.

Leaked GoLaxy documents show generative AI fused with massive personal data sets to create dynamic personas that adapt in real time and evade detection. The professors call it a propaganda machine operating at a scale and sophistication that makes Russia’s older bot farms look outdated.

Harvard Business Review finds therapy and companionship are already the top uses for chat-based AI, placing these hyper-personal bots directly inside users’ emotional lives. With only a handful of U.S. states moving to restrict AI therapy, the line between helpful confidant and covert influence operation is vanishing fast.