The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that last week, amid the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the stock markets got on with what it does best: continue to pump the promise of artificial intelligence. The Globe's Tim Shufelt writes consider Alphabet. There's its core advertising business, subscriptions to services like YouTube, and sales of phones and other devices. These lines of business generated $25-billion in net income last quarter (all figures U.S.). Go a little further down Alphabet's income statement and you come to a line called "other income (expense)." This has traditionally been a catch-all for minor, miscellaneous stuff like interest earned on cash. Alphabet made $38-billion in "other income" last quarter. Alphabet is the largest investor in Anthropic, the start-up behind the Claude family of AI models. This is why Alphabet crushed earnings forecasts last quarter. Same goes for Amazon, which blew past analysts' Q1 estimates by 70 per cent. It wasn't because it shipped more packages. It was because Amazon's stake in Anthropic helped generate a paper gain of $16-billion. If valuations take a hit, those one-time gains will turn negative and we'll see what the ripple effect looks like.