Tech Chaos Roundup: Silicon Valley Goes Full Wild West July 2025

The AI Money Printing Factory

1. AI startups raised $104 billion in the first half of 2025, nearly matching all of 2024. Just got my first $5 Google Ads payout. Retirement is officially 63,999 years ahead of schedule.

2. Ramp raised another $500 million at a $22.5 billion valuation because apparently fintech startups need more funding rounds than I need coffee breaks.

3. Ambience Healthcare just raised $243M to automate clinical notes. Meanwhile, I’m still copy-pasting from WebMD.

4. Meta invested $14.3B in Scale AI. That’s roughly the budget of fixing healthcare… but who needs that when we can make smarter ads?

The Great Grok Reality Check

5. Elon says Grok 4 is smarter than PhDs. Honestly, if it can sit through a 3-hour Zoom without losing willpower, I’ll believe it.

6. Grok 4 Heavy costs $300 per month, because apparently AI intelligence now comes with luxury car payment pricing. My ChatGPT Plus subscription suddenly feels very reasonable.

7. The Grok launch happened right after its Twitter account posted antisemitic content and praised Hitler. My blog’s worst controversy was using Comic Sans in 2019.

8. xAI claims Grok scored 44.4% on “Humanity’s Last Exam,” which sounds impressive until you realize it failed 55.6% of human knowledge. Still better than my email open rates.

The Windsurf Acquisition Chaos Continues

9. Remember the Windsurf saga from our last roundup? Well, Cognition finally closed the deal to buy what was left after Google’s talent raid. That company got dismantled faster than my productivity when TikTok notifications are on.

10. OpenAI’s failed $3 billion acquisition, Google’s $2.4 billion talent grab, and Cognition’s asset pickup prove that in 2025, your team is literally worth more than your technology. So why are people still getting laid off?

The Social Media Circus

11. OpenAI started removing ChatGPT conversations from Google search results because apparently they had a “make this chat discoverable” button. It’s like having a “publish my diary” feature. Who thought that was a good idea?

12. TikTok launched “TikTok Pro” in Germany, Portugal, and Spain. Basically TikTok without ads, shopping, or livestreams, plus a charity feature called “virtual sunshine.” Even TikTok is trying to rehabilitate its image.

13. The TikTok Pro app lets users earn “virtual sunshine” by engaging with charity content, which sounds like a blockchain project that actually does good. Is this a revolutionary concept?

The Corporate Scramble

14. Amazon’s Alexa will start advertising products during conversations, which sounds exactly like the dystopian future we were warned about. “Alexa, what’s the weather?” “It’s sunny—speaking of sunny, have you tried our new solar panels?”

15. Valve CEO Gabe Newell bought an entire yacht company because when you’re Steam-rich, you don’t just buy yachts, you buy yacht factories. My biggest purchase this month was a domain name I’ll never use.

16. Google lost its appeal against Epic Games, meaning they have to stop blocking developers from using non-Google payment methods. Monopolies are so last year.

17. Amazon launched ShowRunner, an AI streaming service for making your own TV shows. CEO Andy Jassy already admits it’ll be “slop no one will want to watch.” At least he’s honest about the content quality.

The Talent War Escalates

18. One guy named Soham worked at 15 Y Combinator startups simultaneously, then claimed it was “to make ends meet” when caught. Either inflation is worse than we thought or this is the gig economy’s final form.

19. Companies are now paying $100 million per researcher because in an era of weak patents, stealing talent is the new IP strategy. My hiring budget remains firmly in the “pizza party” category.

20. SpaceX invested $2 billion into xAI, which is basically Elon moving money from his left pocket to his right pocket while claiming it’s external validation.

The Youth Takeover 2.0

21. Roy dropped out of Columbia to build Cluely, an AI tool that helps you cheat on everything. Someone responded by building Truely, an open-source tool to catch the cheaters. We’re entering the virus-antivirus era of AI.

22. A16z funded the AI cheating tool startup while someone else cloned it and called it “Cheating Daddy.” Silicon Valley has officially run out of moral guardrails.

23. The bar for startup demo videos has reached Guy Ritchie levels of production value. I can barely get my phone’s front camera to work without looking like a hostage video.

The Browser Wars Begin

24. Everyone pivoted from AI coding tools to AI browsers in July. Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic all want to own search because after the “RIP Google” phase, they realized Google still controls the internet.

25. AI startups raised over $2 billion in just one week, but most exits are still “bolt-on acquisitions” basically bigger fish eating smaller fish to boost their own valuations before going public.

The Technical Reality Check

26. My production system handles millions of API calls daily but I still can’t figure out why my newsletter signup form breaks every Tuesday.

27. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates jumped as companies replace entry-level workers with AI. The footnote clarifies they mean “H-1B Indians,” because even dystopian job displacement comes with immigration politics.

28. Tech salaries have gone completely insane with $100M annual packages becoming normal. Meanwhile, I’m negotiating whether the company coffee is worth commuting for.

The European Experiment

29. The UK’s age verification apocalypse continues with users submitting selfies and government IDs to access content. VPN usage has skyrocketed, leading regulators to consider banning VPNs to enforce their ban.

30. Twitter and Reddit are restricting under-18 accounts from accessing news about wars and current events. Protecting kids by keeping them ignorant—that’s definitely going to work.

The Hardware Hustle

31. Jaguar pulled off “the best rebranding in history” by going completely minimalist and bold. It’s inspiring to see companies take creative risks, unlike my blog design which hasn’t changed since 2018.

32. Apptronik raised $350 million for humanoid robots, proving that the future is robots doing our jobs while we figure out what universal basic income looks like.

The Crypto Comedy

33. Bitcoin hit $120,000 and I’m still buying high and selling low like a true professional. I remember when people thought $200K was a joke—turns out the only joke was my trading strategy.

34. The crypto market cap officially exceeded the GDP of most countries, which means digital money is now more valuable than actual economies. This is sooo fine.

35. Someone launched a startup called BrowserBase, Amazon set up a “partnership call” to spy on them, then announced a direct competitor days later. Great artists steal, but apparently so do trillion-dollar corporations.

The Bottom Line: July 2025 proved that Silicon Valley has officially become the Wild West—companies are throwing billions around like Monopoly money, talent poaching has reached mafia levels, and we’re building AI that can cheat on exams better than humans. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out if my latest blog post will get more than three readers.

Next month’s goal: Figure out if “virtual sunshine” is a viable monetization strategy. At this point, even imaginary currencies sound more promising than my affiliate commissions.

Links:

Half of these stories came from my personal Twitter scrolling and startup founder group chats, so if you want sources for everything, you’ll have to fire up the old Google machine like it’s 2005. Consider it my gift to your research skills—and my protection from getting sued by people who prefer their chaos private.