Good morning. After 21 years, Skype, the service that was once worth $8.5 billion and forced telecoms to evolve has been shut down. Microsoft pulled the plug with just a simple "thank you" message joining AIM and MSN Messenger in Microsoft's product graveyard.

— The Deep View Crew

In today’s newsletter:

• 🚁 AI for Good: Zipline’s drone lifeline

• 🤖 Google’s Gemini climbs to first place

• 💰 Microsoft’s slice of OpenAI’s revenue shrinks

🚁 AI for Good: Zipline’s drone lifeline

A company called Zipline is quietly leading charge in autonomous drone delivery – not in the service of online shopping, but to save lives. Since 2016, Zipline has operated the world’s largest autonomous drone fleet, delivering blood, medicine and vaccines to remote clinics across Rwanda and Ghana. With over 100 million miles flown and zero safety incidents involving humans, the company is scaling up globally and launching its next-gen delivery platform in the U.S.

Why it matters: Two billion people lack access to essential medical supplies due to poor infrastructure. In Rwanda, for instance, over 80% of roads are unpaved and often impassable during the rainy season. And in emergencies, speed matters – a delay in delivering blood during childbirth or antibiotics can be fatal. Zipline’s fixed-wing drones cruise at 70 mph, carrying small payloads up to 100 miles, with most deliveries completed in under 30 minutes. Their system has already reduced in-hospital maternal mortality by 88% in Rwanda.

How it works: Zipline now has two distinct platforms

• Platform 1 uses fixed-wing drones launched by catapult and caught with a tailhook wire – a literal mini-aircraft carrier. Packages are dropped with parachutes

• Platform 2 is a hovering drone that lowers a lightweight delivery droid that uses onboard sensors and computer vision to gently place a package with dinner-plate accuracy — from 400 feet in the air.

Each drone has full system redundancy, with backup motors, actuators and even a parachute, ensuring safety even in the event of mechanical failure. The technology is entirely electric, operates 24/7 and is quieter than hobbyist drones thanks to acoustically engineered rotors.

Big picture: While Amazon and Alphabet have struggled to get drone delivery off the ground, Zipline’s success stems from starting where the need is greatest. Its work is now informing U.S. regulations and enabling a second wave of precision, urban drone delivery – from prescriptions to power banks.

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🤖 Google’s Gemini climbs to first place

Google is gunning for the AI coding crown with its latest Gemini 2.5 Pro I/O edition – a preview release squarely aimed at coding tasks. The new version, released ahead of Google I/O, shows it beating out Claude 3.7 Sonnet by a significant margin on the WebDev Arena Leaderboard taking first place. 

• The model has a new feature that allows it to understand video “in-depth”.

• It’s being offered to developers at the same price as 2.5 Pro’s March 25th release.

• Developers can already access Gemini 2.5 Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, or through Vertex AI.

Public sentiment: Participants on prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket, seem to think that Google will be the leader of the race by the end of the month, but the pole position in the race for the best AI model seems to be ever-changing.

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• IBM CEO Arvind Krishna urged Washington to boost — not slash — federal AI R&D, warning Trump’s planned 50-plus-percent National Science Foundation cut and CHIPS Act rollback will impede U.S. tech leadership; despite $100 million in canceled contracts, Krishna expects funding to rebound within a year.

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• What Fed is (likely) waiting for before lowering interest rates

• OpenAI agrees to buy Windsurf for $3B

• The rise and crash of India’s largest EV company

• Elon Musk’s attorney responds to OpenAI’s proposed restructuring

💰 Microsoft’s slice of OpenAI’s revenue shrinks

OpenAI intends to cut the revenue it shares with Microsoft to 10 percent by 2030, down from the 20 percent agreed in their 2023 deal, according to internal projections obtained by The Information and reported by Reuters. The change sits inside a scaled-back recapitalization that keeps OpenAI’s nonprofit parent in control and reins in Sam Altman’s voting power.

Microsoft has poured about $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, securing privileged access to ChatGPT models and priority use of the startup’s custom silicon. Microsoft receives 20 percent of OpenAI’s revenue through 2030. The proposed terms would drop their share to 10 percent by decade-end, saving OpenAI hundreds of millions in the out-years if its sales forecasts hold. Microsoft is pushing for rights to OpenAI tech beyond 2030, people familiar with the matter told The Information

Slashing the royalty gives OpenAI more retained earnings for GPU purchases and data-center expansion, providing somewhat of a cash-flow cushion. With ChatGPT Enterprise bookings piling up and a rumored GPT-5 in late testing, OpenAI now holds more bargaining power than when it first cut the deal in 2023, signaling a shift in leverage. Even at 10 percent, a fast-growing OpenAI still feeds Azure demand and underpins Microsoft 365 Copilot revenue. The software giant also retains an equity stake that converts to profit share once investors are paid back. EU and US regulators are already probing whether the partnership gives Microsoft an unfair edge in generative AI. A lighter revenue tie could ease antitrust pressure without unwinding technical integration.

OpenAI’s move is a textbook leverage play: once a supplier becomes indispensable, it renegotiates the fee. Microsoft surrenders a headline slice yet cements a deeper lock-in – every ChatGPT call still runs on Azure, and Microsoft’s equity converts to profit share later. Regulators gain a talking point that the tie-up is less exclusive than feared, but the real moat remains the cloud integration. All that really seems to be changing is the headline percentage.

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 1 (Left):

• “This one made me feel bad, because I figured the AI image was the cooler shot. I realized I will be second-guessing every contest-/award-winning photography shot that feels "too good to be true" since AI means it might be (even if it's legit)!”

Selected Image 2 (Right):

• “In the first image the footprints in the wet sand are very irregularly spaced. Also ALL the other dry sand footprints appear to be made by a dog, which seems odd.”

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

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