Alphabet's Q2 earnings seen as barometer for market and Big Tech

Reflection AI, a New York City startup valued at $25 billion, is rumored to be on the verge of releasing its first open-source AI model, according to a report from Axios. Founded about 2.5 years ago by two former Google DeepMind researchers who worked on the foundations of Google Gemini, the company came out of stealth at a $545 million valuation and has since raised $2 billion from Nvidia, which led its next round. Reflection AI has committed upwards of $7 billion on compute before its first model ships, including roughly $150 million per month paid to Elon Musk's SpaceX AI for compute access, and it does not own any of its own chips. The company's pitch centers on an "AI factory" model in which enterprises pay for model weights, download them, and run them privately on their own infrastructure so proprietary data never reaches a centralized lab. The launch would mark a rare Western attempt to compete in open-source AI, where Chinese models now account for 58 to 80 percent of usage among US AI startups, and where Reflection AI's $7.4 billion compute spend amounts to only about 1.4 percent of the $0.5 trillion Anthropic plans to spend on compute over the next 5 to 10 years.

Temasek, Singapore's state investment company, has warned that if the investment momentum in artificial intelligence, or AI, begins to fade, it could become the single biggest risk to financial markets right now, even though there is no sign of that happening soon. Rohit Sipahimalani, Temasek's chief investment officer, said at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore that while there is still no clear signal that AI investment is slowing, markets could face volatility in 2027. AI has been a key driver keeping the S&P 500 near a record high, even as US Treasury yields have risen. However, the overall market is not strong across the board, because roughly half of the stocks in the Russell 3000 index have fallen at least 20% from their June peak, reflecting that most of the market's gains have been driven by just a handful of stocks. Temasek believes the AI investment momentum could stall for several reasons, such as safety concerns leading governments to impose stricter regulations, or customers beginning to see AI technology investments as not delivering returns worth the money spent. At the same time, Temasek remains positive on AI over the long term and is continuing to increase its investments in the sector. Currently, about half of its AI investments are in publicly traded assets, and the company wants to raise that share to around 70-75% so it can adjust its portfolio more quickly as the AI industry changes, since unlisted assets can take longer to sell or reduce. Temasek has invested in private AI model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but Sipahimalani said Temasek will limit the proportion of its investments in these companies because they are assets that are harder to adjust than publicly traded ones.