The Olympics may have just ended, but the countdown to the 2028 games has already begun. The passing of the Olympic flame to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — as well as Tom Cruise’s stunt — officially kicked off preparations for the 2028 LA Summer Olympics. Paris set the bar high for sustainability, but LA is looking to one-up them by aiming for a no build and car-free event… and making sure they don’t repeat Paris’ mistakes.

Despite Paris’s efforts, things didn’t go… swimmingly. The Seine’s water quality was still highly contaminated after the country’s USD 1.5 bn cleanup project, leaving athletes a bit under the weather. The city’s eco-friendly cooling efforts left much to be desired during Europe’s heatwave — many teams had to resort to installing their own AC units to keep cool.

LA is relying on existing facilities to make sure living conditions are tried and true. The Olympic Village will find its home at UCLA, the infrastructure of which is already equipped to handle large numbers of people. Their no build guarantee will also see SoFi Stadium host the opening ceremony and the swimming events, while the San Fernando Valley will rev up for BMX racing. Golf will tee off in the Pacific Palisades, and Long Beach, despite its polluted water history, will host triathlon and marathon swimming.

Managing traffic won’t have as clear a solution. Mayor Bass is certainly making lofty promises with the car-free approach, hoping that encouraging and facilitating use of public transportation — and deploying over 3k buses to that end — will be enough of a fix. But with the city’s population soaring from 7.9 mn in 1984 to over 9.7 mn today — and only 5 of their 28 planned transit projects completed — organizers might have their work cut out for them yet.

The 2028 games have also some great news for us: The games will see new sports added to the roster, including Flag football, baseball and softball, cricket, and lacrosse will be introduced or reintroduced in LA — and luckily for our internationally renowned homegrown players, so will squash.

Big Tech is knocking down promising AI startups. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have poached top talent from Inflection and Character.AI, and Adept, pushing them to an early exit. The startups showed promising futures, together raising over USD 2 bn in funding, according to Financial Times.

Alongside the startups’ researchers, engineers, and even founders, the tech giants also swiped the licenses to their products. This spells a grim fate for AI startups trying to break into the industry. This has caused venture capitalists to back down, threatening to push them out of the AI boom completely. The industry is growing, but it seems that no matter the case, Big Tech always ends up winning due to their existing capital and influence.

They’ve seen modest returns. After Google recruited the founders of Character.AI and obtained the license to their celebrity-impersonating chatbot, the company’s original investors received USD 2.5 bn — a modest return considering what they had injected for its launch, as well as its projected growth, which they hoped would cover the costs of other failed ventures. Microsoft’s deal with Inflection was even less rewarding, with a return just slightly higher than their original investment.

This is an ongoing trend in Silicon Valley. Those who initially quit corporate jobs to launch their own startup end up giving in to the stability of Big Tech buyouts. Adept’s Mustafa Suleyman and Character.AI’s Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas have done the same to capitalize on those companies’ resources needed to train the AI models. Sequoia Capital partner, David Cahn, believes it will only get harder: “The next phase in the AI race is going to look different,” he said. “It will be defined more by physical construction than by scientific discovery.”

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