Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Good Tuesday, NOLA. June 2nd brings the biggest financial story of the year so far: Anthropic just confidentially filed for an IPO, and Google is raising $80 billion for AI infrastructure. Meanwhile, the cost reckoning we flagged last week is accelerating — and there's a solid educational resource if you want to build language models from scratch.

The Big Moves

Anthropic files confidential S-1 with the SEC

Anthropic is officially going public. This is the company's first major regulatory filing, moving it into the final stretch before an IPO. The Economist piece on this raises a real question: can public markets actually absorb these capital-hungry AI companies? Worth reading if you care about where the industry is heading.
Anthropic blog

Google announces $80 billion capital raise for AI infrastructure

Alphabet is doubling down on compute. This is one of the largest equity raises in company history, signaling that Google is betting hard on AI infrastructure dominance. It's a clear counter-move to the private equity deals and funding rounds we've been tracking.
Alphabet investor relations

OpenAI frontier models and Codex now available on AWS

OpenAI's latest models are now available directly through AWS, making it easier for enterprise customers to access them without leaving the AWS ecosystem. This is a key distribution move that could accelerate adoption among large organizations already invested in AWS infrastructure.
OpenAI blog

Learning & Building

CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch (Stanford)

Stanford just released CS336, a full course on building language models from first principles. If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to train and understand an LLM, this is the real deal — hands-on assignments, clear explanations, and it's free. They even have AI agent guidelines for the course that show how to use Claude effectively while learning.
Stanford computer science

Pasted File Editor in Claude

Simon Willison flagged a neat quality-of-life feature in Claude: you can now paste large files and Claude detects them automatically, making it much easier to work with bulk text. Small feature, real productivity boost if you're editing or analyzing large documents.
Simon Willison

Cost & Reality

DuckDuckGo's 'no-AI' search engine gains traction as users seek alternatives

DuckDuckGo is seeing a real uptick in traffic from users who explicitly want search without AI synthesis. This mirrors what we've been seeing: some users are burned out on AI, and they're willing to switch products to opt out. It's a meaningful counter-signal in the broader AI adoption story.
TechCrunch

Amazon shuts down internal AI leaderboard after employees gamed the system

Amazon's internal AI benchmark leaderboard became a victim of its own success — employees started optimizing for the leaderboard instead of building useful systems, so Amazon pulled the plug. It's a funny reminder that metrics drive behavior, and sometimes the best metric is no metric.
404 Media

Quick Hits

Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks

Florida's AG filed the first major state lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming deceptive practices around AI safety claims. This is the litigation wave that many expected, but it's worth watching as a legal precedent.
Politico

The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

A thoughtful piece on how AI is flattening the skill floor for building prototypes. If you've been wrestling with whether AI-assisted development actually speeds things up, this is worth a read.
Daryl Cecile

Also

Today’s Sources