Observations · AI and Business Since 2022
Finance
AI went from back-office experiment to front-office tool: Morgan Stanley's GPT-4 advisor assistant and BloombergGPT arrived within months of ChatGPT. By 2025–26, AI also became the market itself — NVIDIA's rise to $5T, trillion-dollar circular compute deals, and the AI capex cycle dominating equity markets.
What drove it
GPT-4-class models with retrieval over proprietary research, BloombergGPT, reasoning models for analysis, and agent platforms for operations like reconciliation and compliance checks.
The evolution
2023
Morgan Stanley and BloombergGPT proved regulated finance could deploy frontier AI, while NVIDIA's $1T market cap made AI the market's story.
- Microsoft commits ~$10B to OpenAI
It tied the most important AI lab to the second-largest cloud provider and signaled that frontier AI would be financed by Big Tech capital, not standalone startups.
- Google rushes out Bard; a demo error erases ~$100B of Alphabet
It crystallized the perception that the AI research leader was reacting defensively, and showed that markets would brutally price AI execution.
- The first enterprise wave: Salesforce, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg
Regulated, brand-sensitive industries moved from curiosity to production deployments within four months of ChatGPT's launch.
- GPT-4: AI passes the bar exam
GPT-4 reset expectations of what AI could do in professional domains — law, medicine, finance, coding — and became the benchmark every rival measured against for over a year.
- NVIDIA joins the trillion-dollar club as the H100 boom begins
It established AI compute as the scarcest strategic resource in technology, and proved the surest profits of the boom were in the hardware layer.
- Amazon commits up to $4B to Anthropic
It completed the alignment of every frontier lab with a hyperscaler patron — frontier AI economics now required Big Tech capital and compute.
- Biden signs the sweeping AI executive order
The US government's first binding intervention in frontier AI development, setting compute-threshold reporting before any legislation existed.
- OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman — and reinstates him in five days
The crisis exposed how fragile governance was at the world's most important AI company — and showed that investors, employees, and Microsoft held the real power, not the safety-oriented board.
- EU agrees the AI Act — the world's first comprehensive AI law
It set the global regulatory benchmark for AI — the 'Brussels effect' — and covered frontier model providers for the first time anywhere.
2024
NVIDIA became the world's most valuable company, OpenAI's $157B round reset private-market scale, and DeepSeek-V3 hinted the cost curve might collapse.
- Klarna: our AI assistant does the work of 700 agents
One of the first widely cited corporate claims of large-scale labor substitution by generative AI, with hard numbers attached.
- NVIDIA becomes the world's most valuable company
The clearest single marker of how thoroughly AI had reshaped the corporate hierarchy: the chip supplier now sat on top.
- The EU AI Act enters into force
The first binding global template for regulating AI by risk category.
- xAI builds Colossus — 100,000 GPUs in 122 days
It demonstrated how fast a new entrant could stand up frontier-scale compute and credibly challenge incumbents.
- The reasoning era: OpenAI ships o1, then announces o3
Inference-time reasoning emerged as a new scaling axis distinct from model size — capability could now be bought with thinking time.
- OpenAI raises $6.6B at a $157B valuation
It nearly doubled OpenAI's valuation in months and tied its corporate structure to its capital needs — a thread that defined 2025.
- Amazon doubles down: $8B total into Anthropic
Deepened the hyperscaler–lab alliance pattern and advanced Amazon's bid to challenge NVIDIA with custom AI chips.
- DeepSeek-V3: frontier-class performance at a fraction of the cost
It challenged the assumption that frontier models required hundreds of millions in training spend, setting up January's R1 shock.
2025
The DeepSeek shock erased $600B in a day; then trillion-dollar circular compute deals and NVIDIA at $5T framed the bubble-or-supercycle debate.
- Stargate: a $500B bet on American AI infrastructure
The largest infrastructure commitment in AI history. Frontier AI officially became national industrial policy.
- The DeepSeek shock: R1 wipes ~$600B off NVIDIA in a day
Frontier-level reasoning, cheap and open, directly challenged the assumptions underneath hundreds of billions of dollars in US AI capex.
- OpenAI raises $40B at $300B — the largest private round ever
Capital markets proved willing to fund AI at unprecedented scale — and the round's terms forced the for-profit restructuring question.
- Washington's AI Action Plan — and the H20 chip whiplash
US policy pivoted to deregulation and export promotion, making chip access an explicit instrument of trade negotiation.
- MIT: 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots show no P&L impact
The '95% fail' statistic became the most-cited data point in the AI bubble debate.
- Anthropic triples its valuation to $183B in six months
It validated the enterprise-first, coding-led strategy as a counterweight to OpenAI's consumer scale.
- The circular economy of AI: NVIDIA–OpenAI $100B, Oracle $300B, AMD warrants
Vendors investing in their biggest customer raised circularity concerns at the heart of the boom's accounting.
- OpenAI completes its for-profit restructuring; Microsoft takes 27%
It resolved the year's most consequential governance fight and removed the constraints that had bound OpenAI's capital raising since 2019.
- NVIDIA becomes the first $5 trillion company
The milestone bookended 2025's story: compute demand overwhelmed every efficiency scare.
2026
The AI capital cycle went public: Cerebras listed, Anthropic neared a trillion-dollar valuation and filed, OpenAI submitted its own confidential S-1, and SpaceX — with xAI inside — priced the largest IPO on record, while NVIDIA's record quarters kept converting capex into revenue.
- OpenAI signs a $10B inference deal with Cerebras
A deliberate diversification away from NVIDIA-only infrastructure, validating specialized inference silicon as a category.
- NBER: ~90% of firms report no AI productivity impact yet
It quantified the gap between historic AI investment and measured firm-level returns.
- Cerebras IPO: biggest US tech listing since Uber, up 68% on debut
The first blockbuster pure-play AI chip IPO of the cycle, testing public appetite for NVIDIA challengers.
- NVIDIA's record quarter: $81.6B revenue, market cap past $5T
It countered bubble fears for at least another quarter: AI infrastructure demand kept compounding.
- Anthropic raises $65B at $965B, overtakes OpenAI, files for IPO
The world's most valuable AI startup, and the first frontier-lab IPO filing — a watershed for public-market AI exposure.
- OpenAI confidentially files a draft S-1
Both leading frontier labs entered the public-markets pipeline within two weeks. That turns 'private AI valuations' into an imminent question of public disclosure: audited financials, named risk factors, and the first comparable look at frontier-lab economics.
- Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines
The hard problem in agentic commerce is not moving money — it is proving an agent's identity and constraining its authority. Putting that identity, consent, and permission layer on shared infrastructure is the trust standard the agent economy was missing.
- SpaceX (xAI inside) prices the largest IPO on record
Read through the AI lens, not the rocket: public-market investors now get frontier-AI compute exposure (xAI, Colossus) bundled inside the largest listing in history — the capstone of an AI capital cycle going public in a single quarter (Cerebras → Anthropic → OpenAI → SpaceX/xAI).
- IMF: Nigeria is 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows
This is a multilateral institution, not a vendor, reporting that dollar-denominated stablecoins have become a real payments channel — and the reason is not enthusiasm for the technology. It is that correspondent banking works badly in exactly these corridors. Adoption is highest where the incumbent rails are worst, which is the honest version of the story.
- The OCC proposes the compliance perimeter for stablecoin issuers
This is the boring half of the stablecoin story and the half that decides whether regulated businesses can actually use these rails. Nothing about a payout channel matters operationally until an issuer sits inside a supervised AML, sanctions and reporting regime. Compliance is not a tax on the product here — it is the feature that makes the product usable by anyone with a real balance sheet.
- Concentrix cuts guidance while AI deals grow 400%
Read the two halves of the release against each other. The AI product line is growing fast in percentage terms off a small base; the services business still sets the guidance, and the guidance came down. This is what the middle of a service-to-software transition looks like on an actual income statement — not a clean pivot, but a fast-compounding new line that cannot yet carry the company, disclosed in the same document as a cut.
- Visa, M-PESA and Onafriq pilot stablecoin settlement in the DRC
The interesting party here is Visa. When a card network and a mobile money operator run settlement over stablecoins, the technology has stopped being a challenger to the incumbent rails and started being a component inside them. That is usually how infrastructure actually changes — not by replacement, but by quiet substitution one layer down, while the interface the user sees stays the same.
Key sources
The papers, announcements, and reports that document this industry's shift. Each also lives in the Library.
What businesses do differently
Firms deploy AI assistants over internal knowledge with strict audit trails; analysts draft with AI and verify by hand. CFOs now evaluate AI spending like capex — and investors price 'AI exposure' as a factor in every portfolio.
What this means for founders and leaders
Regulated-industry AI rewards whoever solves trust and auditability, not just capability. And if you raise capital, understand that the AI cycle now sets the market's temperature — plan around its volatility.