Friday 5.0: AI Cyber Attacks, Tech that shaped the world, Startup Founders, and Hardware Luck
Tips, tools, & technology resources that I've found interesting in the recent weeks. These are links that, rather than just sharing to friends individually, I share with you all here
Table of Contents:
Articles I’ve Been Reading in Depth: AI Cyber Espionage with Claude Code, Microsoft’s AI Strategy, State of AI 2025, and the importance of hardware luck
Books to Read: “How We Got To Now”
Bonus: Startup Founder Shoutouts
Articles I’ve Been Reading in Depth
Anthropic: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
The first AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage campaign shows how autonomous agents can now execute end-to-end attacks with minimal human input. This basically forces us to rethink a lot about what we know about “traditional” cybersecurity
Semianalysis: Microsoft’s AI Strategy Deconstructed - From Energy to Tokens
After a year-long “AI pause,” Microsoft is racing to vertically integrate everything from chips to tokens, betting that control of the full stack will define the next platform era.
Air Street Capital: State of AI Report 2025
I read this report religiously each year. In this year’s report: The AI race is shifting from scale to (agentic) reasoning. Very interestingly, Chinese labs are closing the gap and governments entering an industrial phase where data centers, safety, and sovereignty become strategic assets. I wrote quite a bit about this two years ago after the WEF AI Governance Council 2025 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Sara Hooker: The Hardware Lottery
As we move from the Age of Scaling to the Age of Reasoning, progress in AI has is increasingly dependent as much on hardware as on ideas. What wins isn’t always what’s best, but what fits the machine of its time. Just think about it: GPUs were originally designed for parallel graphics processing, and it so happened that Transformer based AI models could leverage this (already existing) hardware really well.
Books I’m Reading
How We Got To Now - by Stephen Johnson
The history of humanity is a history of technology. I’ve always been a bit of a history junkie, but when I was young it was all about either Ancient Rome or World War II. In both those periods (and all others), power dynamics, economics, politics, philosophy, and beliefs, were really driven by the progress of technology. Wars are won by technology. Peace is maintained with technology. Human Progress is possible only through technology
“How We Got To Now” brings out four really interesting examples of innovations that might have seem quirky or ludicrous at the time, but which over the years have bent the arc of history in truly spectacular ways
Bonus: Startup Shoutouts
Some people are just built completely different. And when those peope chose the path of entrepreneurship it is a true privilege if you get the rare chance to be a small part of their journey as an early angel investor.
I’ve met hundreds of amazing founders through the years, but there are three startup founders I would like to give a special shout-out to:
Nour Taher: Co-founder of intella
Mahdi Yahya: Co-founder of Ori
Phuong Nguyen: Founder of Physical Robotics
All three are building amazing companies within the space of AI, Compute, and Robotics, and are awesome people
Disclaimer: I’m an early backer of all three companies so I might of course be a tiny bit biased here ;)
P.S. As you may know, I also write another newsletter: [Tech You Should Know]
This one purely consists of technical explainers of current AI, Compute, and Robotics topics, written for technically curious Executives, Operators, Investors, and others who wish to upskill their technical understanding. You can subscribe separately in the link HERE
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About Me
My name is Andreas Proesch. I work at the interface between frontier technology and rapidly evolving business models, where I develop frameworks, tools, and mental models to keep up and get ahead in our Technological World
Having trained as a robotics engineer but also worked on the business / finance side for over a decade, I seek to understand those few asymmetric developments that truly shape our world
If you want to read about similar topics - or just have a chat - you can also find me on LinkTree, X, LinkedIn or www.andreasproesch.com