Claude 4, Veo 3, and the data land-grab
A week of frontier launches and the rising value of real-world data — Meta's $29bn Scale AI bet, Clay at $3bn, and a Bank of England holding pattern.
WWDC25 brought Liquid Glass, Live Translation, and an AI workout buddy that uses a speech model to pump you up. The translation piece, powered by Apple Intelligence and shipping in iOS 26, works across Messages, FaceTime and Phone calls — conversational translation in real time. But the week's bigger theme was the frontier moving again, and the rising value of data — not just text — coming sharply into focus.
Frontier launches
Google's Veo 3, launched at I/O 2025, drops jaw-dropping 8-second AI-generated videos complete with audio and dialogue, with invisible (and soon visible) SynthID watermarks to tackle authenticity, at around $200/month. Google also released Mariner for personal task automation, and quietly shipped Stitch — describe a web interface and it builds the code for you. Anthropic's Claude 4 Opus arrived and piqued developer interest, matching a mid-career PhD-level coder and automating customer-service roles. Perplexity, meanwhile, now handles hotel bookings natively — a direct threat to Google's ads business as augmented AI search matures.
The data land-grab
The data story is the one to watch. Scale AI took funding from Meta at a $29 billion valuation. Scale produces and labels LLM training data — a signal of the value placed on data beyond text. Before long, anything that can be labelled can be categorised, trained into models, and give those models a wider lens of analysis. And go-to-market automation platform Clay raised at a $3 billion valuation.
The macro
The Bank of England held rates steady at 4.25% on 13 June after cutting in May, citing tariff-fuelled global uncertainty, with markets expecting the next cut in August. UK GDP shrank 0.3% in April, yet the FTSE 100 hit record highs near 8,884, buoyed by flows away from US equities. The OECD nudged its outlook down: global growth around 2.9% in 2025–26, UK GDP at 1.3% easing to 1%, inflation near 4.2%.
Reading and listening
- Going Infinite by Michael Lewis — the rise and fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.
- Orwell on Freedom.
- The Acquired episode on TSMC and founder Morris Chang.