Category: Perspectives

With SpaceX’s recent announcement that it is exercising its option and acquiring Cursor, we thought it would be helpful to summarize what the current AI Frontier chessboard looks like. It’s still a very tight race among the five leading labs with coding taking up most of the attention (and revenue) today.

I spent some time this week discussing with others about the recent private equity partnership announcements from OpenAI and Anthropic, and what it means for AI adoption. [1] I think the most interesting question is not just distribution or increasing AI usage. It’s whether PE-backed companies become one of the first real-world test cases for…

Following comprehensive discussions earlier this year with leaders from enterprises to early-stage innovators, Stepmark Partners has published our latest market analysis on the Talent Management ecosystem. This report details the dual-adoption of AI by both companies and job seekers, outlining the strategic implications for corporate leaders. Key Strategic Takeaways:

Executive Summary Building on our 2025 Year in Review report, which highlighted the rapid advancements and challenges in the AI landscape, Stepmark Partners presents our forward-looking predictions for 2026. These insights draw from emerging trends in technology, regulation, and market dynamics, offering a glimpse into potential developments in the AI industry. While these predictions may…

Table of Contents Introduction 1. 2025 in Review: Macroeconomic Backdrop 1.1 Markets and Monetary Policy 1.2 Asset Class Performance 2. 2025 in Review: Technology Sector 2.1 Industrial Policy and Sovereign Capital 2.2 Selected Technology Transactions 2.3 Energy and Power for AI 2.4 Hyperscaler Capital Deployment 2.5 Neocloud Infrastructure Buildout 3. 2025 in Review: Frontier AI…

Zuck’s vision of having AI generate marketing collateral and automatically run ads is closer to reality than most people think. Ironic that Gemini is making this process so easy, which means Meta has a clear path in making it happen. Shrimp cocktail (Fri/Sat only) from Cook’s Seafood in Menlo Park. From Meta’s Q2 2024 earnings…

My wife recently stopped using the Oura Ring and became a Fitbit user, so I became a proud owner of a new tech gadget. If you haven’t heard of the Oura Ring before, it’s a ring-like device that you wear on your finger and throughout the day, it records your biometrics data such as heart…

Open Source Catches Up, and Consumer Hardware Is Ready Open-source large language models have quietly caught up to their closed-source cousins. Models like OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20B, Meta’s Llama, and many models coming out of China can now deliver reasoning, code generation, and conversational ability that would have seemed like science fiction three years ago. And they’re…

Authors: Justin Wang (Analyst), Evelyn Xie (Analyst) Table of Contents Introduction Inflection & Microsoft (Mar 2024) Adept AI & Amazon (Jun 2024) Covariant & Amazon (Aug 2024) Character.AI & Google (Aug 2024) Windsurf & Google + Cognition AI (Jul 2025) Scale AI & Meta (Jun 2025) Enfabrica & Nvidia (Sep 2025) Takeaways Introduction A new…

After a month-long trip to China this August, I found myself reflecting on the rapid pace of technological change and how much of it is shaped by China’s state-managed economy. As I rest on my flight back to the U.S., I could not help but notice how different the consumer experience felt, from transportation to…