The lawsuit’s over. A 9-person federal jury in Oakland needed two hours Monday to throw out Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit, dismissing every claim against Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI on statute-of-limitations grounds — Musk first sued in February 2024. His team plans a Ninth Circuit appeal. Three days earlier, OpenAI shipped ChatGPT’s Plaid integration to a small group of Pro users on web and iOS, wiring in 12,000+ banks with GPT-5.5 Pro scoring 82.5/100 on its personal-finance benchmark. Two wins in one week for OpenAI.
The frontier-model bill is being negotiated down. Cursor’s Composer 2.5, released Monday, lands at $0.50/M input and $2.50/M output, matches Claude Opus 4.7 on key benchmarks at roughly one-tenth the cost, and scores 79.8% on SWE-Bench Multilingual. The chip-strategy hedge funded the same day: Decart’s $300M round from Radical Ventures, Nvidia, Sequoia, and Benchmark closed at a near-$4 billion valuation for hardware-agnostic optimization software pitched as Nvidia lock-in relief. The market is bankrolling Nvidia and the company hedging against Nvidia in the same week.
The labor side of the AI deployment story keeps showing up on payrolls. Standard Chartered’s AI cuts, announced May 19, eliminate over 7,000 of roughly 80,000 employees by 2030—more than 15% of corporate function roles—with CEO Bill Winters framing the move as “replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with” AI investment. The bank targets return on tangible equity above 15% by 2028 and roughly 18% by 2030. The headcount line has become an AI-deployment lever, and global banks just joined Big Tech in pulling it.
The Pulse
Searchable raises $14M Series A from Headline to optimize brands for AI-driven search
SEO is dying. Whatever replaces it is what investors are writing checks for now.
Odyssey unveils Starchild-1, the first real-time multimodal world model with synced audio and video
World models just grew ears. Robotics and simulation got a new toy.
Dust raises $40M Series B from Abstract and Sequoia for enterprise AI agents wired into Slack, Notion, and GitHub
The internal-tool agent has officially become a Series B category.
That’s the signal.
— The PulseMark Team
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