The Morning Bro

America wants to make its own chips. The hard part still lives in Taiwan

Everyone pictures a 'chip' as one slice of silicon. A modern AI chip is actually a bunch of separate dies stitched together and wired up — a step called advanced packaging — and that stitching, not the etching, is now the choke point for AI. The catch: you can carve the silicon in Arizona and still have to ship it across the Pacific to get it assembled.

The packaging: Advanced packaging is where individual chips get bonded into the dense, multi-die monsters that AI training needs — and it's a niche specialty Taiwan dominates. Researchers like UCLA's Subramanian Iyer are racing to crack it stateside, but right now the U.S. can pour the foundation and still has to fly out for the finishing work.

Intel: Intel (now $132.87, +0.9% 1D), the centerpiece of President Trump's drive to make more chips on American soil, is finally showing signs of life after years of getting lapped. Calling it a turnaround is generous — the chip business has a long way to go before it's actually fixed.

Zoom out: Here's the irony nobody's putting on a banner: even as we spend to bring chipmaking home, AI leans on Taiwan more than ever — for the assembly, not the silicon. Reshoring the easy part doesn't reshore the bottleneck.

Wall Street is quietly deleting its own gold price targets

Gold pays you nothing to hold it — no dividend, no interest. So the second the Fed signals it'll keep rates higher for longer (or even hike), boring bonds that actually pay you start looking better, and money rotates out of bullion. Stack a stronger dollar on top — which makes dollar-priced gold pricier for buyers in China and India — and you get a stampede for the exits.

Spot gold sat around $4,025 an ounce early Friday, down roughly 30% from January's intraday record near $5,600. That's after a historic two-year run that more than doubled gold from about $2,000 at the start of 2024. The once-fashionable $6,000 calls? Fading fast.

The cuts: The banks that cheered it up are now walking it back in a hurry. ING dropped its Q3 2026 forecast to $4,300 (from $4,850) and Q4 to $4,600 (from $5,000). Deutsche Bank (now $34.38, +1.1% 1D) slashed its Q3 view more than 20% to $4,300, and Goldman Sachs (now $1,065.09, -1.1% 1D) trimmed last week too. As ING's Ewa Manthey put it, the 'usual suspects' propping up demand are 'notably absent, for now.'

Since when does the White House get to gate a chatbot launch?

OpenAI built its newest model, GPT-5.6, and was reportedly ready to roll. Instead, it's handing it to a hand-picked group of partners rather than the public — and the reason isn't a bug or a benchmark. The Trump administration told it to slow down over safety concerns.

Read past the safety boilerplate and the real shift is the org chart: a private company is now letting the federal government decide who gets its product and when. That's a brand-new gear in how AI ships — one that doesn't appear in any release notes.

A 230-million-parameter model just out-extracted rivals 4x its size

While everyone else races to trillions of parameters, Liquid AI — founded by ex-MIT computer scientists — went the other way. Its new LFM2.5-230M packs 19 trillion tokens of training into a 230-million-parameter footprint and skips the standard transformer guts for a leaner hybrid design. The result: it fits under 400MB of memory and runs on-device, no cloud connection required.

On data extraction it beat Alibaba (now $95.07, -4.7% 1D)'s 800M-parameter Qwen3.5 and Google's 1-billion-parameter Gemma 3 — models more than 4x its size. And it's quick: on a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra it cranks out 213 tokens per second. The whole thing lives on your phone, which is the point.

The catch: It's free for individuals and any company under $10 million in annual revenue; the big boys pay for an enterprise license. The bet here is that efficiency beats brute force — that you don't need a data center the size of a town to do real work.

Larry Sanger helped invent Wikipedia. Wikipedia just banned him

Wikipedia runs on a volunteer community that votes on its own rules and its own members — including who gets to stick around. That community just voted to bar co-founder Larry Sanger indefinitely from editing the site. The timing is the kicker: it came days after Sanger submitted a proposal on 'intellectual diversity.'

So the guy who helped build the place pitched more viewpoint diversity, and the place responded by removing his. Whether you read that as the system working or the system proving his point, it's a hell of a feedback loop.

Who lines up to touch goop in a drained pool?

A stalled renovation drained the Reflecting Pool, leaving its bright blue waterproof coating exposed to the open air. Naturally, that became the attraction. Tourists are now showing up specifically to poke the blue lining of a famous landmark that's stuck mid-project.

It's a very 2026 kind of sightseeing: people aren't visiting despite the renovation being unfinished — they're visiting because it is. A stalled project turned into a wave of schadenfreude tourism, one finger-poke at a time.

Pochettino rested his stars and the backups lost 3-2 to Turkey

The U.S. had already clinched a knockout-round spot before this match even kicked off, which changes the math entirely. So coach Mauricio Pochettino overhauled the lineup — fresh legs for the games that actually count, rest for the starters. The backups went out and lost 3-2 to Turkey.

It's the classic host-nation gamble: in a group game that no longer affects qualification, do you sell out for the win and the home crowd, or save the bodies for the bracket? Pochettino chose bodies. The scoreboard punished him; the standings didn't.

• North Korea's new Mac malware, macOS.Gaslight, ships a prompt-injection payload built to argue with the AI analyzing it.
• The CFPB is overhauling its complaint portal after gripes hit 6.6M last year — double 2024's 3.2M — blaming credit-repair influencers.
• A German court ruled Google is liable for its AI Overviews, rejecting the 'users know not to trust AI' defense outright.
• The Trump T1 phone hit open sale at $499, no deposit — meanwhile the folks who preordered still don't have theirs.
• RIP Om Malik, GigaOm founder and one of the original tech bloggers, dead at 59. Pour one out for the OG feed.

1D / 1W / YTD = move vs prior close / 5 sessions ago / Jan 1. Pulled fresh.