Big Creek Briefing

The AI Arms Race Price Tag

Welcome to this week's Big Creek Briefing.

This week, the AI world broke wide open. Anthropic crossed into near-trillion-dollar valuation territory, OpenAI quietly filed for its IPO, and Google rolled out an agent that reads your entire digital life to help you work smarter. Behind all the headline noise, though, a quieter story is developing: small business owners who move intentionally with AI right now are pulling ahead of competitors who are still treating it like a novelty. This issue breaks down the biggest moves of the week, what they mean for your business, and one underrated tool worth adding to your stack today.

Let's jump in!

AI Joke of the Week

The difference between using AI as a founder in 2023 vs. 2026: in 2023, you were amazed it could write an email. In 2026, you are mildly annoyed it scheduled the wrong Zoom link. We have officially entered the relationship phase.

Big Stories of the Week

Anthropic Is Now Worth Nearly $1 Trillion: Anthropic is closing a $30 billion funding round at a valuation north of $900 billion, which would put it ahead of OpenAI in the funding pecking order for the first time. The round is co-led by Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer, Altimeter, and Greenoaks. Even more remarkable: Anthropic is projecting $559 million in operating income for Q2 2026, which would be its first-ever quarterly profit. The company backing Claude just became one of the most valuable private companies in history.
OpenAI Files a Confidential IPO and Cracks an 80-Year Math Problem:
OpenAI submitted a confidential S-1 to the SEC this week, signaling that a public offering is closer than most expected. In the same stretch, the company announced that one of its reasoning models independently solved a geometry problem that stumped mathematicians for 80 years. That is not a party trick: an AI capable of original mathematical discovery could eventually unlock breakthroughs in science, engineering, and medicine that no human team could reach alone.
Google Launches Gemini Spark, a Personal AI Agent: At Google I/O, the company announced Gemini Spark, a general-purpose AI agent inside the Gemini app that reasons across information in all your connected apps. Think of it as a personal chief of staff that reads your Gmail, Drive, and Calendar and can take action on your behalf. It is launching in beta to Google AI Ultra subscribers first. Combined with the faster, cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google is doubling down on making frontier AI cheap enough to deploy everywhere.

Main Insights

How Small Businesses should use AI right now

The biggest shift in how small businesses use AI right now is not about writing or research anymore. According to a 2026 Federal Reserve analysis on AI adoption, the highest-impact deployments are happening in customer-facing roles: AI-powered customer engagement tools are now used by 46% of small businesses, and those businesses report faster response times, higher close rates, and lower support costs. More telling: small business owners who invest in AI are nearly twice as likely to report year-over-year revenue growth compared to those who do not. The tools are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is figuring out which customer touchpoint in your business would benefit most from a 24/7 AI layer, and then actually setting one up.

Founder Insights

Here is the gap worth closing right now: 68% of small businesses use AI regularly, but 77% have no formal policy, no training program, and no measurement framework to track whether it is working. That means most founders are getting some value from AI, but leaving a significant amount on the table because they are experimenting instead of systemizing. The founders who will be hardest to compete with in 12 months are the ones building lightweight internal playbooks today: which tools their team uses, for which tasks, and how they evaluate whether it is delivering. You do not need a 40-page policy document. You need three decisions written down and shared with your team.

Quick Hit: One Prompt to Simplify Your Week

"Act as an operations consultant helping a small business owner create a simple AI usage policy. I run a [describe your business] with [number] employees or contractors. Ask me 5 clarifying questions, then write a one-page AI policy that covers: which tools our team is approved to use, what data should never go into an AI tool, how we will measure time or cost savings, and who is responsible for keeping this policy updated. Keep it practical and jargon-free."

This prompt forces your AI assistant to think strategically about your specific business instead of giving generic advice. Run it monthly and compare the outputs.

AI Tool Spotlight: Granola

If your calendar is packed with calls and you are still taking notes by hand or relying on a bot that awkwardly announces itself at the start of every meeting, Granola deserves a serious look. Granola is an AI meeting notes tool that works by capturing your computer's system audio directly. There is no bot that joins your meeting, no notification to other participants, and no interruption to the flow of the conversation. You jot rough notes as you go, and Granola merges them with the full transcript after the meeting to produce clean, structured summaries with key decisions, action items, and context.

What makes it especially useful for founders and small business owners is the memory layer it builds over time. You can ask Granola natural language questions about past conversations weeks later, "What did the client say about the budget in our last call?" and get a real answer. For anyone running a lean team and managing complex client relationships, sales pipelines, or partner conversations, that kind of recall is a genuine competitive advantage. The $14 per user per month Business plan also integrates with Notion, HubSpot, Slack, and Zapier, so your meeting notes flow directly into the rest of your stack.

Granola runs on Mac and Windows desktop apps. Pricing starts with a free tier that holds your last 25 notes, and the Business plan at $14 per user per month gives you unlimited history and full integrations. Find it at granola.ai.

What We're Watching

Agentic AI moving from demo to deployment

Google's Gemini Spark and similar tools represent a shift from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions inside your apps. The implications for operations, customer service, and sales workflows are significant.

The OpenAI IPO and what it means for pricing

When OpenAI goes public, shareholder pressure will change how it prices its products. Founders who lock in annual contracts or build on competing platforms now may have more pricing stability later.

AI and original scientific discovery

OpenAI's geometry breakthrough this week is the first widely reported case of a frontier model doing genuinely novel mathematics. Watch for similar announcements in material science, drug discovery, and climate modeling over the next 12 months.

The gap between AI users and AI strategists

As adoption approaches saturation among small businesses, the competitive edge will shift from using AI to using it better. Benchmarking, internal training, and defined workflows are becoming the new differentiator.

The Wrap(TLDR)

This week, Anthropic closed in on a $900 billion valuation and its first quarterly profit, OpenAI filed a confidential IPO and proved AI can do original math, and Google launched an agent that works across your entire app stack. Meanwhile, 89% of small businesses are now using AI, but most still have no system for measuring whether it is working. The founders who turn that gap into a playbook right now are the ones who will be hardest to catch in a year.

If you want help designing AI workflows or understanding how these new models fit into your business, Big Creek Growth can help. Reply to this email and we will walk through it together.