Full recap
Good morning. It is June 1st, 2026, and Nvidia is apparently not satisfied with just owning the chip market. They have now picked a Chinese humanoid robot startup called Unitree to power their first publicly available robotics platform. That is correct: the company that sells the shovels in the AI gold rush is now also building the miners. Somewhere a VC is staring at a whiteboard and weeping. Speaking of weeping, let us pour one out for the pre-ChatGPT startup graveyard. Over 250 billion dollars has poured into OpenAI and Anthropic since 2022, and hundreds of startups that were once considered visionary are now described as, quote, disrupted or dead. This is what happens when you build a clever SaaS wrapper and call it an AI company. The tide went out and a lot of people were swimming naked. On the flipside, a new study from something called the AI-Driven Enterprise Institute ranked Nvidia, Meta, and Schlumberger among the top S&P 500 companies actually deploying AI rather than just putting it in their earnings call. Schlumberger, the oilfield services giant, made that list. The oil patch is moving faster than your average fintech. Let that sit. Premarket movers include Nvidia, Arm, Qualcomm, and Taylor Morrison. Chips and homebuilders in the same sentence is 2026 in a nutshell. The market is doing what the market does, which is reward the same five companies while pretending to care about the others. On the diamond, the Mariners are heating up and the Dodgers are back to looking like world beaters after a slow start. Meanwhile Victor Wembanyama is apparently on a fast track to GOAT status before he is old enough to rent a car in most states, the Stanley Cup Final is set with Golden Knights and Hurricanes, and your fantasy baseball sleeper list includes names that sound like they were generated by the same AI that killed those startups. The USMNT beat Senegal 3-2 in World Cup prep, with Pulisic doing Pulisic things and Ricardo Pepi finally showing up in the build-up play. Pochettino is installing a system and it is starting to look coherent. For a national team that has historically played like strangers who met at the airport, this is progress worth acknowledging. Bottom line: AI is eating everything, robots are getting legs, the Mariners are getting hot, and somewhere a pre-2022 startup founder is updating their LinkedIn to say they were an early AI pioneer. Same energy as calling yourself a crypto expert in 2021. Stay sovereign, stay skeptical, and watch what actually ships.
Highlights
- Nvidia is now backing Chinese humanoid robots for their robotics platform - peak vertical integration or a geopolitical plot twist waiting to happen, you decide
- Pre-ChatGPT AI startups are getting eulogized en masse; turns out slapping a GPT-3 API call on a spreadsheet was not a moat
- Victor Wembanyama is being called a future GOAT at age 22, which is the sports media equivalent of a seed-stage valuation: impressive, unproven, and probably right anyway
- Schlumberger made the top AI adopters list, because nothing humbles a Silicon Valley narrative like an oil company out-executing you on technology
- USMNT beat Senegal and looked like a real team for once - Pochettino may actually be building something, or we are in the best stretch of a 3-game sample size
Original source links
- CNBC: Stocks making the biggest moves premarket: Nvidia, Arm, Taylor Morrison, Qualcomm & more
- CNBC: 'Disrupted or dead': AI is crushing a generation of startups built before ChatGPT
- CNBC: Nvidia, Meta and Schlumberger rank among top companies adopting AI, new study says
- CBS Sports: MLB Power Rankings: Here come the Mariners, plus the Dodgers finally look like world beaters again
- CBS Sports: Spurs' Victor Wembanyama on fast track to GOAT status | First MLB mock draft of 2026
- CBS Sports: How Mauricio Pochettino's USMNT vision was on display as Christian Pulisic and squad excel in World Cup prep