Linas Beliūnas's Linkedin Analytics

13 years ago this week, tech history was made 😳 In April 2012, Facebook stunned the world by acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. Back then, Instagram was: - A tiny app with just 13 employees. - Home to "only" 30 million users. - Newly launched on Android, just a week before the deal. Fast forward to 2025: → Instagram generates ~$1.3 billion in ad revenue every single week 🤯 → It accounts for over 40% of Meta's total revenue. To put this into perspective: - YouTube generated $31.5B for the entire year of 2023. - Instagram nearly doubled that, bringing in $61.1B the same year. The wild part? Instagram didn’t just succeed - it reshaped the social media landscape: ↳ Ignited influencer culture. ↳ Revolutionized mobile advertising. ↳ Made Stories and Reels central to online culture. From a photo-sharing app to a $60+ billion/year empire. Instagram is the greatest acquisition in tech history. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Nailed it! NVIDIA founder & CEO Jensen Huang on AI taking jobs: "Anybody who is concerned about an AI taking their job, you should probably worry about someone who uses AI taking your job" - Jensen Huang Humans + AI. This is the way. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Zuck is back! Meta AI just dropped Llama 4 Scout, which can run on a single GPU and has a 10M context window 😳 AI just took a giant leap forward - Meta announced Llama 4, its most advanced suite of AI models yet. Here's why it's massive news that could reshape the future of AI 👇 3 Models, Infinite Possibilities: - Scout: 17B active params, 10M-token context - perfect for deep document analysis. - Maverick: 400B parameters, beats OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini 2.0 in coding, creativity, and multilingual tasks. - Behemoth: 2 TRILLION params (still training), expected to dominate in math & STEM 🤯 AI Can Now SEE and READ: → Llama 4 processes text AND images effortlessly. → Think smarter chatbots, intuitive visual search, and instant image captions. The best part? It's Open Source 🔓 ↳ Runs on just one GPU (Scout model). No gatekeeping, just pure innovation. ↳ Developers worldwide can now build cutting-edge AI without massive budgets. More importantly, Llama 4: → Democratizes powerful AI for everyone - not just big tech. → Huge efficiency gains mean faster, cheaper innovation. → Multimodal capabilities unlock entirely new applications. Meta is currently integrating Llama 4 across WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. This means more than 3.35 billion daily active users will soon get access to powerful AI. Llama 4 is setting new standards - open, powerful, accessible. Mark & the team cooked 👨‍🍳 P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Humans behind the camera might soon become optional. Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot just nailed its new role - cameraman 😳 - Pinpoint shots. - Smooth pan-and-tilt moves. - Can carry heavy rigs without missing a beat. - Shoots in places too dangerous for humans. - Doesn’t get tired. Ever. The wild part? This wasn't even its original purpose. Atlas was built for rescue missions, not Hollywood. Yet here we are, amazed and slightly nervous. Imagine a Hollywood set where the camera crew is made of robots. Imagine documentaries shot deep inside disaster zones - no human risk. Atlas isn't just lifting boxes anymore. It’s stepping into the creative industries. It’s rewriting the rules. Sure, it’s expensive. Sure, it's overkill for basic shoots. But the future of filmmaking just got real. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Everyone's obsessed with AI. But the real superpower? Sales. Think about it: Startup founder pitching vision - sales. AI entrepreneur raising new funding - sales. Fortune 500 CEO rallying employees - sales. Investment banker closing billion-dollar deals - sales. Engineering managers convincing teams to tackle technical debt - sales. Brilliant ideas without alignment fade into forgotten Notion docs. Tech alone doesn't ship great products. Influence does. The hard truth? You're always selling - ideas, vision, possibility. Master sales, and you will open doors you never knew existed. Because every role is sales.

In case you missed it, in less than a year, AI has gone from below-average human intelligence to near-genius level 😳 → May 2024: Smartest AI tested at 96 IQ (average human range). → April 2025: AI scored 136 IQ (top 2% of human IQ scores). Within a year, it will surpass an IQ of 160, placing it among the top 100,000 smartest people in the world 🤖 But does that actually mean anything? IQ tests were designed by humans, for humans.
 They measure a narrow slice of human cognition, not the full spectrum of intelligence. Can we truly measure AI intelligence by standards created for us? We're not witnessing just a rise in numbers - we're seeing AI rapidly mastering our own tests. So the question isn't just how smart AI is becoming. It's whether our measures of intelligence are even relevant anymore. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

This is what happens when you ask OpenAI’s GPT-image-1 model to "create an exact replica of the image, don't change a thing" and run it 74 times 😳 Each time, the output became the input. Result = A slow-motion digital meltdown. 
 Details vanish. Quality degrades. This is a brilliant example of the model collapse. If AI systems increasingly train on synthetic (AI-made) data & content... They risk becoming pale imitations of themselves. It’s probably one of the biggest hidden dangers in the current AI race. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

In case you missed it, Google has just released Firebase Studio. You can now build any app in natural language, modify it, and deploy it all in one place 😳 Say goodbye to endless coding. Say hello to your AI-powered assistant. Thanks to AI, you can now: Describe your idea → Watch Firebase Studio build your app → Deploy instantly. All in one place. Imagine Cursor, Bolt, or v0 - but completely free and right in your browser 🤖 Here's why you will love Firebase Studio: ↳ Natural Language Prototyping Create full apps by simply describing your idea. ↳ AI Code Assistant Google’s Gemini AI helps code, debug, and document for you. ↳ Full IDE in Browser Powered by Code OSS (VS Code)—familiar, powerful, customizable. ↳ Framework Flexibility Supports Next.js, React, Angular, Flutter, and more. No vendor lock-in. ↳ Totally Free (for now) No hidden fees during the preview, so jump in fast. Google continues to ship amazing AI products without any hype. App development will never be the same. h/t Paul Couvert P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

DeepMind CEO believes all diseases will be cured in about 10 years: "AI could make drug development much faster, going from years to just months/weeks ...this might change healthcare completely and help end all diseases in the next 10 years" - Demis Hassabis We've left linear progress behind. We're riding an exponential curve. ↳ AlphaFold & Evo aren't just tech buzzwords. They've opened biology's source code. ↳ Robotic wet labs now run experiments 24/7. No sleep. No breaks. ↳ Foundation models design drug candidates before lunch. ↳ Cloud-scale simulations test millions of ideas every single day. The old pharma roadmap? It's like sending messages by pigeon in a world of instant chat. → By 2030, illness will be optional. → Real-time, personalized healthcare will be the norm. → Most diseases can be stopped before you even feel sick. Remember, antibiotics, GPS, smartphones were magic to someone from 1900. We're about to experience the same jump. In just one decade. Your key job now is just don't die. Because the greatest upgrade in human history is downloading right now. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Warren Buffett just announced he will be stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway by the end of 2025 😳 At last year’s Berkshire conference, he gave the best advice ever, and it has nothing to do with investing: “Ask yourself who you’d want to spend the last day of your life with and then meet with them as often as you can”- Warren Buffett Buffett has been CEO for 55 years, making him the longest-serving CEO of any S&P 500 company. Historic run by the greatest investor of all time.

This AI Studio Ghibli style video of Donald Trump moments is going viral right now, and it's just incredible 👏😂 The ending alone is worth an Oscar for itself. What a time to be alive. P.S. for more great stuff, check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Banking giant JPMorgan just said the quiet part out loud - companies rushed to deploy AI without understanding the consequences 😳 Their Chief Information Security Officer, Patrick Opet, released a critical Open Letter. He isn't mincing words. The way we use SaaS & cloud is fundamentally broken, creating a massive blind spot. And the rise of AI? It's pouring gasoline on the fire 🔥 Why JPM is worried (and you should be too): ↳ Systemic Risk: Our reliance on a few SaaS giants creates single points of failure. An outage or breach ripples everywhere. ↳ "Innovate or Die" = Risky: We demand features NOW. Security becomes an afterthought, baked out, not baked in. ↳ Fortresses Turned Freeways: Old security walls (segmentation) are gone. Modern tools connect directly via APIs & tokens, often unchecked. ↳ The Danger Zone: Integration: This "easy connect" model creates implicit trust between external services (SaaS, AI tools) and your crown jewels. ↳ AI & Automation Magnify This: JPM notes "explosive growth" in AI/automation amplifies and rapidly distributes these risks. Think: AI agents with privileged access granted via shaky integrations. Compromise one, access much. ↳ Blind Spots: JPM highlights opaque vendor dependencies & tools gaining access without explicit consent. Do you truly know what OpenAI, Gemini, or Claude can access? 🤔 JPM's call to action: → Security is NOT optional. Providers MUST build it in, enable it by default. Slogans aren't enough. → Rethink Integration: We need modern security architecture – robust authorization, detection – for this connected world. Goodbye, legacy thinking. → Demand Proof: Annual checks? Weak. We need continuous, demonstrable evidence that controls work. → Address AI Risk within Integration: Secure the connections before unleashing powerful AI tools into your sensitive environments. The hard truth is that we built a hyper-connected ecosystem on fragile foundations. Adding powerful, complex AI tools onto this shaky ground is courting disaster. It's like building AI skyscrapers on digital quicksand. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that AI could eventually use 99% of the world's electricity 😳 Right now, AI uses just 3% of the world’s electricity. But Schmidt warns this could skyrocket, especially with more advanced systems on the way. Just think about it: → Data centers 10 times larger than an entire nuclear power plant. → Energy grids stretched beyond their limits. → AI pushing energy prices and shortages to unprecedented levels. Schmidt also mentioned that superintelligent AI is coming sooner than expected, and warned that China could gain an edge if the U.S. can't keep up with compute and power needs. Energy is becoming a major factor in AI development. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

China did it again! ByteDance just dropped an AI bombshell 😳 Meet DreamActor-M1, a next-gen AI model that brings full-body, expressive human animation to a whole new level. Picture this: - Snap ONE still photo of anyone. - Pair it with ANY short video. - Instantly transform it into a hyper-realistic, fully expressive animation. Yes, the future arrived early. Why DreamActor-M1 is huge: → Unmatched realism. Subtle smiles, tiny frowns - all are now captured perfectly with AI. → Creative Revolution. Filmmakers, creators, gamers - this means incredible animations for everyone without million-dollar budgets. → Social Media Magic. Turn selfies into videos in seconds. TikTok & Instagram are about to get even wilder. But here’s the scary truth: with great power comes great risk. ↳ Fake political speeches. ↳ Misleading viral content. ↳ Identity theft at scale. This means we need an urgent ethics debate, and we need guidelines, fast. DreamActor-M1 isn't just tech - it’s a wake-up call. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.

Following China, the US just made AI mandatory in schools. A few days ago, China announced mandatory AI education for every child starting at age 6. And now, the US follows suit. President Trump just signed an executive order making AI education compulsory across American K-12 schools. "This is a big deal. AI is where it seems to be at. We have trillions of dollars being invested in AI. AI is the way to the future... very smart people are investing in it heavily" - Donald Trump Why now? Because AI isn't just another technology. It’s THE technology. It’ll redefine jobs, economies, and societies. We’re about to raise a generation fluent in AI on both sides of the globe. Think about this: - Students will learn AI skills from the age of 6. - Teachers will become AI-savvy. - Schools will partner with tech giants. The goal? Keep countries competitive. Prepare kids for jobs that don’t even exist yet. Artificial Intelligence is no longer optional. Adapt or get left behind. P.S. check out 🔔linas.substack.com🔔, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Technology. For founders, builders, and leaders.