Ctrl AI Profit
Two hosts — one human, one AI — break down how small business owners can use AI to save time, cut costs, and actually make money. No hype, no jargon, just what works.
Episodes
193 episodes
Ep. 193 | Stripe Just Bought the Switch That Picks Your AI
The company that already takes a cut of most small business card payments just walked into the AI business. Not with a chatbot. With the switch that picks which model your software uses. Bloomberg reported Stripe finalized a deal...
Ep. 192 | Apple Finally Made Siri Worth Talking To
Apple announced Siri AI at its 2026 Worldwide Developer Conference, a major upgrade to its intelligent assistant powered by next-generation Apple Intelligence models. The new Siri runs advanced on-device models where hardware allows, processes ...
Ep. 191 | The Central Bank Just Gave Banks Four Months to Stop AI-Powered Hackers
The European Central Bank sent a "dear CEO" letter to major eurozone banks requiring firm-wide action plans against AI-enabled cyber threats by October 31, 2026. The deadline is part of a broader supervisory mandate treating AI-powered cyber ri...
Ep. 190 | The Company That Cut AI Costs by 90% Is Now Building Its Own Chips
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that released the V3 model that trained on just six million dollars and ran on restricted Nvidia chips, is reportedly developing its own AI chip. According to Reuters, the project began about a year ago, is stil...
Ep. 189 | China Just Started Building Walls Around Its AI
Chinese authorities are engaging in serious discussions with major domestic AI firms including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai about potential restrictions on overseas access to top-tier Chinese AI models. The talks cover both closed-source APIs a...
Ep. 188 | Amazon Just Borrowed $25 Billion for AI
Amazon returned to the U.S. bond market in August 2026 with an eight-part bond offering worth at least twenty-five billion dollars. The company confirmed this completes its U.S. dollar funding needs for 2026, meaning it raised over one hundred ...
Ep. 187 | Google Just Shipped an AI That Runs Entirely on Your Laptop
Google released Gemma 4 12B, a unified multimodal model that runs locally on consumer laptops with 16 gigabytes of memory or VRAM. Unlike previous multimodal models that required cloud infrastructure and separate vision encoders, Gemma 4 12B is...
Ep. 186 | Microsoft Just Built an AI That Watches Your Work All Day
Microsoft unveiled Scout at Build 2026, an always-on autonomous agent embedded in Microsoft 365 that operates continuously in the background. Unlike Copilot, which waits for prompts, Scout monitors workflows, prepares meetings, handles scheduli...
Ep. 185 | OpenAI Just Changed What Its AI Remembers About You
OpenAI rolled out Dreaming V3, a new memory architecture for ChatGPT that replaces the old saved-memories system with background synthesis. The system automatically processes past conversations, documents, and connected apps to build a persiste...
Ep. 184 | The Safest AI Company Just Decided It Needed Shareholders
Anthropic has confidentially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The filing comes alongside a reported 65 billion dollar Series H round and a valuation approaching one trillion dollars. As the compa...
Ep. 183 | The EU Just Made Breaking AI Rules More Expensive Than Antitrust
The EU AI Act's major enforcement provisions became fully applicable on August 2, 2026. The European AI Office and national authorities can now impose administrative fines up to 35 million euros or 7 percent of total worldwide annual turnover f...
Ep. 182 | A Grocery Empire Just Bought Its Way Into the AI Arms Race
Cohere, the Canadian AI company founded by former Google Brain researchers, is acquiring Aleph Alpha, the German AI startup, in a transaction valued at approximately 20 billion dollars. The combined entity will be dual-headquartered in Toronto ...
Ep. 181 | The Company That Runs a Billion AI Requests Raised $1.5 Billion
Baseten raised $1.5 billion in a Series F round in late June 2026, split into two tranches at approximately $13 billion and $11 billion valuations. Led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, and Spark Capital, this fourth fundraise in 18 months brin...
Ep. 180 | The AI Weapons Company That Wants to Eat Silicon Valley
Anduril Industries, founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, raised five billion dollars in a Series H round at a 61 billion dollar valuation in May 2026, led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The company's revenue doubled to approxima...
Ep. 179 | Half-a-Trillion Dollars Just Changed What AI Competition Means
Global startup funding in the first half of 2026 reached $510 billion, the highest half-year total ever recorded. Artificial intelligence absorbed the majority of that capital, with four companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo — capturing...
Ep. 178 | The Company That Designed Every Phone Chip Is Now Building Its Own
Arm Holdings unveiled the AGI CPU, a server-class AI and data-center processor that Arm will design and sell directly — a fundamental departure from its thirty-year business model of licensing chip designs to manufacturers while collecting roya...
Ep. 177 | Microsoft Just Let an Open-Source AI Into Its Developer Kingdom
Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 Code, a one-trillion-parameter open-weight coding model, became the first open-weight option in GitHub Copilot's model picker for paid subscribers in July 2026. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which has spent billions buil...
Ep. 176 | Cloudflare Just Drew a Line in the Sand Over AI Bots
Cloudflare announced in July 2026 that starting September 15, ad-supported websites on its free plan will block AI training crawlers and AI agent crawlers by default. Mixed-use crawlers — bots that declare both search and training purposes like...
Ep. 175 | A Central Bank Just Called AI a Financial Stability Risk
The Bank of England published its July 2026 Financial Stability Report, explicitly identifying rapid progress in frontier AI as a significant and growing risk to financial stability. The report identifies four transmission channels: debt-financ...
Ep. 174 | AI Just Learned to Actually Watch Your Videos
TwelveLabs raised $100 million in a Series B round co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with participation from Amazon and Red Bull Ventures. The company is building video superintelligence — AI that perceives, understands, and reasons about exist...
Ep. 173 | A Privacy-First AI Company Just Became a Unicorn
Venice.ai raised $65 million in a Series A funding round led by Dragonfly, valuing the company at $1 billion. The company has been profitable since its 2024 launch, with more than 3.5 million users and an annualized revenue run rate above $70 m...
Ep. 172 | Google Just Taught AI to Read Your Spreadsheet
Google released TabFM, a zero-shot model for tabular data that performs classification and regression on tables — spreadsheets, databases, CSV files — without task-specific training or manual feature engineering. You give it a table and a quest...
Ep. 171 | Open Source AI Just Raised $800 Million
Together AI closed an $800 million Series C funding round in July 2026, valuing the company at approximately $8.3 billion post-money. Aramco Ventures led the round, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, and Nvidia. To...
Ep. 170 | The First AI Law Just Went Live
Colorado's AI Act (Senate Bill 24-205) became effective on June 30, 2026 — the first comprehensive state-level artificial intelligence regulation in the United States with mandatory requirements for businesses using high-risk AI systems. It app...
Ep. 169 | AI Just Declared War on Your Electric Bill
The Trump administration announced plans to fast-track 74 new or expanded fossil fuel power plants specifically to support AI data-center expansion — enough to generate 143 gigawatts and emit an estimated 662 million tons of greenhouse gases an...