How Top VCs See The AI Arms Race [Side Hustles, Workflow Hacks, Prompts & New Tools Inside]
We Read a 340-Page AI Report From a Top VC. This is Your Classified Briefing.
July 15, 2025 | Read Online
We Read An ULTIMATE 350-Page AI Report from A Top VC; Here's Everything YOU Need to Know!
Reading time: 15-30 minutes
helping you and other founders, entrepreneurs & visionaries stay ahead with AI-powered strategies
Welcome to your unfair advantage.
This is where we help you and other founders, entrepreneurs & visionaries stay ahead with AI-powered strategies. This week, we’re giving you the decoded playbook from one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms. We've dissected the 340-page "AI Trends" report from BOND Capital so you don't have to. While your competitors are chasing yesterday's headlines, you're about to get the forward-looking intelligence that shapes markets.
Your briefing includes:
The Trillion-Dollar Signal: Why Big Tech's spending spree is the only chart that matters.
The Monetization Paradox: How AI leaders are generating billions in revenue and losses simultaneously.
The Eastern Front: Why China's progress in AI is faster and more threatening than most realize.
Actionable Playbooks: Prompts, tools, and workflow hacks derived directly from these macro trends.
Alright, let's cut straight to the chase. The AI landscape is a high-stakes, capital-intensive battlefield. Forget the hype; we've sifted through the noise to bring you the critical intelligence. This is your classified briefing.
TOP 3 STORIES IN AI: WHERE THE REAL MONEY AND MOVES ARE HAPPENING
Most are drowning in headlines. You're about to see the undercurrents. Highlighted below are some strategic inflection points that will make or break fortunes.
⇢ 1. The Great Cash Burn: Big Tech's $212 Billion AI Bet
The Raw Intel: The six largest US tech companies (Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta) have cranked their capital expenditure up by a staggering 63% in one year, hitting over $212 billion. They are building the global "AI factories" that will power the next decade of innovation.
Why Competitors Who Miss This Will Bleed: They will be vaporized. Any company trying to compete on foundational infrastructure is bringing a knife to a thermonuclear war. They'll burn through capital trying to replicate what Big Tech is subsidizing, while you will be building on top of it.
Implications for YOU:
Leverage, Don't Build: Your competitive advantage is not merely in creating foundational models or massive server farms. It's in your unique application of these powerful, commoditizing resources.
Niche Dominance: Focus your capital and talent on a specific, vertical problem that the giants are too big to see. Your value is in precision & scale.
Your Next Steps:
Audit your current tech stack. Identify where you are trying to "build" instead of "renting" AI infrastructure.
Challenge your team to find one process that could be revolutionized by leveraging a top-tier API (like OpenAI's or Anthropic's) instead of an in-house solution.
⇢ 2. The Monetization Paradox: Billions in Revenue, Billions in Losses
The Raw Intel: The revenue growth is astronomical. OpenAI is rocketing past a $3.7 billion run rate. But the report estimates their compute expenses could be as high as $5 billion. They are literally losing money to power your queries.
Why Competitors Who Miss This Will Drown in Inefficiency: They'll chase the "next GPT" dragon, get seduced by vanity revenue metrics, and completely ignore the brutal unit economics. They will build products that are impossible to scale profitably.
Implications for YOU:
Profit in the Application Layer: The real, sustainable profit is beyond just building the general-purpose AI; it transcends into applying it to a high-value business problem.
Focus on ROI, No Hype: Every AI initiative you launch must have a clear path to profitability or a massive efficiency gain. Don't do AI for AI's sake.
Your Next Steps:
For every AI feature you consider, create a simple P&L projection. What is the API cost vs. the value generated?
Identify a "cost center" in your business (e.g., customer support, document review) and pilot an AI tool with the express goal of turning it into a "profit center" through efficiency.
⇢ 3. China's Breakneck Speed: The Threat You're Underestimating
The Raw Intel: While Silicon Valley gets the media attention, China has quietly surpassed the entire world combined in the number of industrial robots installed. Their AI models (like DeepSeek) and user adoption are exploding, and they are achieving top-tier performance with lower training costs.
Why Competitors Who Ignore This Will Faceplant into a Skills Gap: They will operate with a fatal blind spot, assuming all major innovation comes from the West. They'll be blindsided by a disruptive model or workflow from a competitor they never even knew existed.
Implications for YOU:
Global Awareness is Non-Negotiable: Your strategic planning must include monitoring developments from China. The next big thing might not be announced on X (formerly Twitter).
Supply Chain & Geopolitical Risk: Acknowledge that the AI race is intertwined with geopolitics. Over-reliance on a single country for talent, data, or hardware is a strategic vulnerability.
Your Next Steps:
Assign someone on your team to spend 30 minutes a week monitoring top Chinese AI labs (e.g., Zhipu AI, DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen).
War-game a scenario: "What if our main competitor adopted a Chinese AI stack that was 50% cheaper and 10% better?" What would you do?
↳ The Unifying Trend: The era of casual AI experimentation is over. We are in a full-blown AI arms race, defined by massive capital investment, brutal economics, and intense geopolitical competition. You can't win by building bigger weapons. You win by being the smartest strategist on the battlefield; using the giants' infrastructure to surgically dominate a niche they can't see and will never reach.
THE HUMAN TOUCH: AI IS MORE THAN JUST BITS & BYTES, IT'S ABOUT BREAKTHROUGHS FOR REAL PEOPLE
Behind the code, AI is a lever for human potential. While others fear robots taking jobs, smart operators are using AI to reclaim their time, augment their expertise, and achieve the impossible.
⇢ The Doctor Reclaiming Their Life from Burnout
The Human Pain Point: A dedicated physician at Kaiser Permanente, drowning in the hours of administrative note-taking that follows every single patient visit. It's a direct path to burnout and drains the humanity from medicine.
The AI Transformation: Kaiser deployed an ambient AI scribe to over 10,000 physicians. The AI listens to the natural doctor-patient conversation and automatically generates the structured clinical notes.
Before/After: Before, hours of typing and clicking after a long day of seeing patients. After, the AI handles 90% of the documentation, freeing doctors to focus on care, connection, and having a life outside of work.
⇢ The Non-Expert Becoming a Creator Overnight
The Human Pain Point: The immense barrier to entry for creating complex products. You have a great idea for a course or an app, but you lack the technical skills (and the budget) to build it.
The AI Transformation: A team of two at Duolingo—neither of whom were programmers or chess experts—used AI to create an entire, fully-fledged chess curriculum from scratch.
Before/After: Before, creating a course like this would require a team of instructional designers, subject matter experts, and developers, taking months of work. After, two people with a good idea and a powerful AI tool built it in a fraction of the time.
↳ Bottom Line: These stories reveal the true promise of AI: alleviating core human frustrations like burnout, knowledge gaps, and the limits of individual capacity. The takeaway for you is to stop thinking about AI as a "tool" and start seeing it as a "force multiplier." Identify the single biggest task that relies on manual, repetitive human expertise in your business and find an AI to amplify it.
PROMPT OF THE WEEK: STEAL YOUR COMPETITOR'S ENTIRE AI STRATEGY
This is a strategic X-ray. While your rivals are guessing, this prompt turns a language model into your personal corporate spy.
⇢ The Problem: You know your competitor is doing something with AI, but you don't have the time to connect the dots between their press releases, earnings calls, and job postings.
⇢ The Prompt (Engineered for GPT-4o/Claude 3 Opus):
Act as a world-class competitive intelligence analyst from a top-tier consulting firm. Your task is to analyze [Competitor Company Name]'s public information from the last 12 months (earnings call transcripts, investor presentations, press releases, and senior-level job postings) to synthesize their complete AI strategy.
Provide the following in a concise, structured report:
1. Executive Summary (1-paragraph): What is their overarching AI goal?
2. Strategic Pillars (3-5 bullet points): What are the main pillars of their strategy (e.g., internal productivity, new product features, R&D)?
3. Key Investments & Initiatives (Bulleted list): What specific AI products have they launched (e.g., copilots, assistants)? What major partnerships or CapEx have they announced?
4. Talent Focus (Bulleted list): Based on job postings, what specific AI roles are they hiring for (e.g., machine learning engineers, prompt engineers, AI ethicists)?
5. Implied Risks & Weaknesses: What are 2-3 potential vulnerabilities in their strategy?⇢ Step-by-Step Implementation:
Use a model with robust web Browse and analysis capabilities (GPT-4o is ideal).
Replace
[Competitor Company Name]with your target.Paste the prompt and let it run. It will crawl, synthesize, and analyze for you.
Receive a strategic brief that would have taken a junior analyst a full day to prepare.
↳ Estimated Time/Money Saved Monthly: This prompt eliminates at least 10-15 hours of manual research and synthesis. For a founder or executive, that's thousands of dollars in reclaimed time that can be spent acting on the intelligence, and not just gathering it.
TOOL OF THE WEEK: SCALE AI - THE DATA BOTTLENECK IS KILLING YOUR AI AMBITIONS. THIS UNCLOGS IT.
Forget building models; the real war is fought over data. The business case? You can't build a powerful, custom AI without massive amounts of high-quality, labeled data; a process that is historically slow, expensive, and a logistical nightmare.
⇢ Tool: Scale AI Core Value Proposition: Scale AI is your on-demand data factory. They provide the high-quality, human-powered data annotation and generation needed to train and fine-tune frontier models, solving the "data abundance" problem so you can focus on building your product.
⇢ 5-Step Implementation Guide:
Define Your Data Need: Identify the core AI task you want to accomplish (e.g., "identify our product in user-generated images"). This defines the data you need.
Scope the Project: Contact Scale AI. Their team will work with you to understand the specific requirements, formats, and quality thresholds for your data.
Integrate the API: Plug their data pipeline directly into your development workflow. As they produce labeled data, it feeds directly into your model training process.
Train Your Custom Model: Use the steady stream of high-quality data from Scale to train a model that is uniquely tuned to your specific business problem.
Create a Feedback Loop: As your model performs in the real world, send edge cases and incorrect predictions back to Scale for further labeling, continuously improving your model's intelligence.
⇢ Pricing & ROI Calculation (Illustrative):
Pricing: Project-based. Varies from thousands to millions depending on scale.
ROI Example: An e-commerce company wants to build a custom visual search model. Hiring an in-house team of 10 data labelers could cost $500,000+ per year. Using Scale AI, they might get the same quality data for a fraction of that as an operational expense, without the HR and management overhead. The ROI is not just in cost savings, but in the speed to market.
↳ Bottom-Line Impact: This is all focused on speed and focus. Using a service like Scale AI allows you to build a powerful, defensible AI moat without the massive capital expense and operational drag of building a data labeling team from scratch. You get to fight like a giant without needing a giant's balance sheet.
CLOSING: THE FUTURE DOESN'T WAIT
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." – William Gibson
This quote has never been truer than in today's AI landscape. The tools and intelligence we've shared today aren't just interesting developments; they are actively being deployed by those who intend to win.
Your move.
Reply to this email with ONE insight from this briefing you're acting on this week.
Share this with one other ambitious leader who needs to be in the know.
Stay sharp, stay ahead.
Relentlessly Yours,
The Wealth Waves Daily Team
P.S. Future Forward Flash: We're already tracking the next seismic shift from the report's data: The rise of AI-native hardware in the physical world. From autonomous tractors to AI-driven mining exploration, the data shows that the biggest untapped value for AI is in atoms, not just bits. An upcoming briefing will focus exclusively on this.
The ULTIMATE 2025 AI Toolkit (200+ Tried & Tested Tools)
⇢ We tested hundreds of AI tools so you don't have to! ⇢ We're giving it all away for FREE! ⇢ Why? After investing countless hours, we want to share our findings to help businesses like yours succeed. ⇢ Consider it our contribution to a community that's helped us grow.
TO-GO INSIGHTS
Your entire unfair advantage, distilled. This is what you need to burn into your brain this week.
⇢ Stop Chasing Models. Start Building Moats. The game is beyond just having the "best" general model; it's using high-quality data to train a model that is untouchable in your specific niche.
⇢ Leverage the Giants' War Chest. Big Tech is spending billions on infrastructure. Your job is to be the smartest renter on the planet, not a foolish owner.
⇢ Physical-World Data is the Ultimate Defense. If your business touches the physical world, you're sitting on a data goldmine that pure software players can never access. Automate it.
⇢ The Real ROI of AI is Liberated Human Potential. Measure AI's success not just in dollars saved, but in hours of high-value human time reclaimed from soul-crushing drudgery.
↳ Bottom Line: While your competition is asking, "Which AI tool should we use?", you should be asking, "Which business process will our AI workforce automate first?"
“The future is agentic – embrace the rise of AI agents and catapult humanity into an era of unprecedented cognitive augmentation and creative synergy!” – Emmanuel Apetsi, CEO of SISU AI
PODCAST HIGHLIGHT: Listen to this week's episode of Wealth Waves Daily by ARMORE™ Capital (ranked 24 across platforms & 34 in Investing in the UAE) exploring how businesses are integrating AI into their operations. We just covered Mary Meeker’s 300-pager AI report in our latest podcast here!
Avail an EXCLUSIVE Consultation – Evaluation & Alignment [Limited Time Only] for being a valued reader .
Free AI Workflow Audit - This Month Only
Our team is offering 3 free consultation slots this month.
⇢ 45-minute deep dive into your current business processes
⇢ Custom AI agent architecture recommendation
⇢ Potential ROI calculation based on your specific data
⇢ Access to Free Resources, Mentorship, Proprietary Tools & Personalized Guidance
Book Your Free Consultation Now!