Four Top Google AI Minds Leave for Startup; Foldable Smartphone Sales to Grow 20% with Apple iPhone Ultra in Mix; SpaceX Earnings Report Spooks Investors; Desktop Linux Exceeds 10% Market Share

Talk about brain drain…four of Google’s top AI whizzes are jumping ship to launch their own AI startup. Wired.com reports that one is Jeff Dean, who co-founded Google Brain and has been chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research. Colleague Sanjay Ghemawat and two others will join him in the fledgling AI company. It is worth noting that Google will have a stake in the new company….but it is still a blow to have so much AI brainpower off on its own. The new firm is called Discovery Loop. The other big brains founding the new AI startup are Quac Le and Oriol Vinyals. Discovery Loop is aiming for making superhuman advances in a variety of fields, including chip design, biology, drug discovery, and material design.

With Apple about to enter the fray with the upcoming iPhone Ultra folder, worldwide folding smartphone sales are expected to be 20% higher than last year. According to macrumors.com, this is despite the tight supply of logic chips and price increases on memory chips due to all the AI data centers gobbling that silicon up. Folders have been around for about 8 years now, with Samsung really driving the category almost single handedly for a good share of that. Apple plans to ship some 10 million folding phones this year…not a big number compared to the total number of iPhones, but a big boost to the folding phone sector.

SpaceX’s first earnings report as a publicly traded company were out yesterday, and the company beat expectations with revenue of $7.8 billion, while analysts looked for $6.82 billion. Arstechnica.com notes that SpaceX had a net loss of about $541 billion, better than the $2.12 billion expected. Even so, shares took a 10% dump after the firm reported capital expenditures of about $16 billion on AI, double last quarter and far more than Wall Street’s expectations…AND SpaceX indicated that spending level would continue for at least 2 more quarters. SpaceX shares have lost about half their initial value from the initial public offering. Worrisome to investors…the majority of their AI revenue has come from leasing excess data center capacity to rival AI firms like Anthropic and Google. 

It may not have crossed your mind, but Linux…an operating system favored by gamers and hobbyests…has now passed 10% market share on the desktop. Zdnet.com reports that StatCounter gives the OS 10.65% of the North American market now. Almost all the growth can be blamed on the intrusive Windows 11 from Microsoft. In 2025, Linux only had about 5% of the market. ChromeOS has a bit over 2% of the desktop…and it is a so-called Linux distro. If you add that in, Linux as 12.72%. Windows is at about 60.8% in North America, while the MacOs has about 12%…roughly the same as Linux. (It should be noted that the MacOS is built on a base of Unix, as is Linux.) Linux is free and easy to install. It resembles Android in a way….infinitely customizable, and a plus is no one is pushing their AI on you if you use it. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.