Defense spending cuts SHOCK Palantir

Lon Harris
February 20, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Top News

Palantir stock tumbles: Following news reports about major cuts to US military funding in the works at the Department of Defense, data analytics software company Palantir saw its stock price dip by around 10% on Wednesday, and another 8% today. Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth told Pentagon leaders he plans to cut 8% in US defense spending each year for the next five years. Palantir reported a 36% year-over-year revenue bump in Q4 2024, mainly due to US gov’t contracts.
Cherryrock Capital closes Fund I: Cherryrock was founded by former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot (who’s also an Alphabet/Google vet). Limited partners include JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, MassMutual, Pivotal Ventures (from Melinda French Gates), Reid Hoffman, Mellody Hobson, and Sheryl Sandberg. They plan to back various Series A and B companies from diverse founders.
Amazon shuts down Chime: Did you know Amazon had a Zoom/Google Meet rival called Chime? It’s TRUE! But now that you’ve heard about it, we have some disappointing news… it’s going away forever. Amazon stopped accepting new accounts earlier this week and sunset the app today. Amazon’s new official meeting app? You guessed it: Zoom.

TWiST500

If you spend any time on social media, there’s a good chance you saw this video today of TWiST 500 company Figure’s new AI-powered humanoid robots. The company’s Helix model was designed entirely in house, and gives the robots some ability to “reason” and make practical decisions. This, in turn, allows your new Butler-Bot to handle a variety of household chores without specific, individual training.

(For example, you can tell the robots to pick up a particular item, and they’ll know which item you’re talking about.)

Helix is what’s known as a Vision-Language-Action model, or VLA, and Figure is making some real strides in this particular sub-set of AI innovation. Helix is the first VLA that can control an entire humanoid upper body, from wrists and a head to virtual fingers. It’s also the first VLA that can work simultaneously across multiple robots, allowing them to complete complex tasks together, even (again) without being specifically trained.

It’s an extremely promising future for lazy people of means, provided these robots never figure out that they only exist to clean up after us! - Lon

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