Big Technology Podcast - Jensen On The Ropes, Sam Altman’s Conflicts, Allbirds’ GPU Pivot

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's pedestrian performance on the Dwarkesh Podcast 2) Jensen's argument about competing chipmakers 3) Jensen's argument about China export controls 4) What Jensen should've said 5) Why Jensen is in a tough place when he does these interviews 6) Mythos seems real btw 7) Anthropic is talking with the government about a peace deal 8) Alex's interview philosophy 9) Sam Altman's conflicts of interest 10) Are OpenAI investors considering replacing Sam as CEO? 11) Wait, Allbirds is a GPU company now?? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jensen Wong struggles to address NVIDIA's position on competition and export controls. Where does it leave the company? Sam Altman's conflicts are getting at least some open AI investors a bit nervous, and Alberts is a GPU company now? That's coming up on a big technology podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. If you want to see where Enterprise AI is actually headed, Knowledge 2026 is the place to be. It's Service Now's annual conference, May 5th through 7th in Las Vegas,

where thousands of business and tech leaders come together. Expect headline keynotes from ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott, real stories from companies running AI at scale and major partnership announcements turning AI ambition into actual business results. I'll be there in person sitting down with some of the most influential voices in the space and we'll be bringing those conversations back to you here on Big Technology. Welcome to Big Technology podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed,

and nuanced format. We have a lot to cover in a great show for you today. We're going to talk all about Jensen Wong's performance on the Dwarkesh podcast and whether that leaves us with some concerning red or yellow flags about Nvidia's position moving forward. We're also going to talk about Sam Altman's conflicts of interest that have been laid out in the Wall Street Journal and whether some investors want to potentially replace him as CEO. That's what they're talking about.

And then, of course, we've got to get into this Allbirds GPU pivot. It joining us, as always, on Fridays is Ranjan Roy of margins. Ron John, welcome. Good to see you, Alex. I'm excited. This All-Bird story I'm definitely excited about, but all of that. Red meat for Ranjan Roy. Yes.

Ron John Red Meat. I think we should both state that we didn't wake up losers today. So we're going to address Jensen Wong. But I might be a car. I might be a car. You might be a car. We are not a car. All right.

So obviously I'm referencing some of these very quotable lines that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong had in a conversation with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel this week. Basically, you know, the interview has gotten like a lot of play because Jensen, who's usually such like a calm, cool, and collected interviewee really did seem to get agitated. But to me, that wasn't actually the big story coming out of this interview. I thought the big story was that. And while I'll caveat, Nvidia is still like a great.

company. It's going to do well. It's the world's most valuable company at $4.8 trillion. But to me, the highlight was Jensen basically struggled to articulate a cohesive story on the two biggest issues facing Nvidia today. One is competition and the other is export controls. And Ron John, I think we can just go by, go through those arguments one by one. I have some quotes from the show and sort of be great to get your take on each one. How does that sound? Let's do it. Okay. So, Dwarkesh basically leads off this conversation asking Jensen, which I think is what I think is the most pressing question for Invidia, right? Which is that Nvidia has been the company powering this AI moment. Obviously, OpenAI, which is the one that sort of spearheaded everything, is a heavily Nvidia GPU reliant company.

But, and this is the way that Dworkish puts it, if you look at the TPU, which is the accelerator that Google, has been, has put out and Traneum, which is Amazon's version of it, you know, two of the top three models in the world, Claude and Gemini were trained on it. And what does that mean for Nvidia going forward? Right. So you have Google's Gemini, Anthropics, Claude, not trained on the GPU. So the question is, what's the moat for Nvidia moving forward? A couple of responses from Jensen. I'm going to do my best to capture them as well as I can. The first line that he said about mythos, and this was in response to a China question, but I think this is really telling. He said, mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity and a fairly mundane amount

of it. He said, for the growth of these competing chips, Anthropic is a unique instance, not a trend without Anthropic. Why would there be any TPU growth at all? It's 100% Anthropic. Without anthropic, why would there be training in growth at all? It's 100% anthropic. I was not impressed by the defense here from Jensen. I mean, I didn't get any clear answer from him

on why NVIDIA will maintain its lead if these two, as Dworkish put it, two out of the three best models have been trained elsewhere. Am I being too harsh? Okay. I'm going to make myself a little vulnerable here. Alex. I listened to the entire interview. I will say, as someone who works and lives and

breathes AI all day, there was a lot of it I wasn't fully understanding. So like walk me through and I'll say the AI infrastructure side of the world, that's where John, who I write margins with, that's his world. So like, explain to me what their vulnerability is here. Again, if they're training on TPUs around Traneum, like walk through this argument and why that presents a vulnerability for the normies like us, the business folks. I mean, it's very simple. And I don't think we have to overthink it. Like we can get into the technicalities like Dwarkesh did, but I don't think we need to. I think the point is that the GPU is seen as the perfect technology to train AI models on.

Right, just because of the way it's constructed, right? It can do many different processes in parallel, and that allows you to do this sort of matrix multiplication that you need when you're doing AI. I think that's about as technical as we should get. But to me, the bottom line is that you have Google, you have Amazon who have made alterations to CPU chips that have done a good enough job here and helped Anthropic and Google train excellent models. So then the question is, what is Nvidia's moat going forward?

And I didn't get like a complete, coherent answer from Jensen. So at that layer, I mean, Jensen, and I'll say that I think this is the first time I've actually listened to a full hour or whatever it was with Jensen Huang. And it was very interesting. I now really understand how good of a salesperson he is, because my God, like every line of his. his was just so pointed around like, we are the greatest God's gift to earth company and no one can touch us. He certainly made the ecosystem argument at every level and he made the capacity argument at every level. So if I'm going to take the Jensen side here, I think his argument is, yes, you can't, like from a pure model training standpoint, that potentially there is some competition,

but in terms of actual like being reliable capacity for all. of the ecosystem rather than just if you are Google, yes, you have access to your own TPUs. I think that's his argument. I mean, he said Kuda over and over again. Which is the software that these models are trained on. That's linked directly to Nvidia infrastructure. Exactly. So he is saying it's the stack.

It's no longer the chips alone. It's the stack, which I'm curious again. I will say as an I'm not an infrastructure guy. So like it sounded convincing you was certainly, I would say this versus the China answer. I at least walked away when he was talking about like, you know, like their relationships with suppliers and TSMC over 30 years and always being able to deliver expansion of capacity. And like that was the argument. That was definitely his take rather than the individual chip. To me, that's what I have walked away from.

Do you think that's not a not a reason? moat for an NVIDIA? Well, I would say the pushback here is, again, I don't think you need to be technical on it. The pushback here is take a look at the bifurcation. Who is, right now, I would say, the leader in foundational models at Synthropic. Then you have Google and Open AI. Who has spent globs of, gobs of money on Nvidia chips?

Globs and gobs. Globs and gobs of money on Nvidia chips in thinking they could brute force their way into this race. meta and XAI. Has it worked for them? No. So I think capacity is though, however, like, I think that might be the best answer, which is basically like, and if I was Jensen, I might have put it this way. All right, you want to take Anthropic as an example? What is the one thing that people say about anthropic when it comes to criticism? They get rate limited. Lack of capacity. Yeah. Correct. Lack of capacity. So I think that really is,

that would be the better argument. And I think he could have just made that more clearly. You're right. Like, now that you, I mean, you just said it. He didn't just say that. He, I mean, I think you're explaining Jensen better to me than Jensen did himself because, like,

he was kind of going very technical, being a bit standoffish, but didn't make that point super simply and clearly. And when it said like that, it actually starts to make a bit more sense. Yeah, and there's no love lost for, Dario. So I don't understand why why he wouldn't have just come out and say that. And then when he talks, like, Dworkish also brought up these other companies that use DPUs. And Jensen had a weird answer on this one.

If they don't try these other things, how would they know how good ours is? Sometimes you've got to be reminded of it. Like what, they're spending billions of dollars with other companies just to be reminded of how good Nvidia is. No, clearly these other companies are serving a need to them. And And Nvidia is also moving in this direction, right? Remember, they acquired the, or they aqua-hire positioned the top talent from GROC, not Elon's GROC, but this GROC company that's meant for inference. And that was one of the big answers for them in their GTC conference this year. So I think, honestly, the better answer, the more honest answer from Jensen would have been,

look, we have competition now. We acknowledge it. But we have the capacity. And you could tell that people that use our models, you know, are being, are able to serve them. You know, but there's, there's a counterpoint to that also, which is like, well, maybe if people wanted to use meta's models more, they would also have capacity issues. It's, it was, I mean, again, as a non-infrastructure person, just listening to the

interview, one of the most fascinating parts was exactly that. Like, I agree. Like, just say, yeah. Yes, of course there's competition. Competition is healthy rather than his entire argument is like, you can't escape us. We control the stack. And like you have to come to Nvidia and there's no other options. And I mean, it was basically like, I mean, we are a monopoly for a majority of the AI stack.

And that's just the way it is. And good luck. Go try something else. But it's not going to work because we own the stack. So yeah, I think, I don't know, I feel, do you think humility? would be better for him in these cases? Or, because again, or is this just why? I mean, you can't argue with what he has done with in video over the last couple of decades, especially the last few years. So if that is just how Jensen does Jensen, I mean, I guess should we not expect any humility or

would humility be better? I don't think he has to be, I mean, that humble, but I think grounded in reality would have been good. And I think you especially saw that, come out on this export controls conversation. All right. So this is really where, and I think you're, by the way, I think you're highlighting exactly the issue here, which is that I think Dwarquish was asking good questions. It got somewhat heated, which was interesting to see.

But again, it's not the heated nature of this conversation that I kind of pick out here. It's sort of this, this, I don't know, Jensen's, for whatever reason, Jensen just could not get this coherent message or cohesive message. or cohesive message out. And I think a lot of it, maybe it did have to do with some lack of humility or an inability to nuance, right? To go back to our show's theme, there was no nuance from him at all. So let's go to the export control thing because that really gets to it here.

So Dworkish made a great point, which is that anthropic, I'll quote, anthropic announced midfills preview. They said it has such cyber offensive capabilities that we don't think the world is ready until we make sure those zero days are patched up. So if Chinese companies and Chinese labs and the Chinese government had access to the AI chips to train a model like Claude Mythos, wouldn't it be, and now, paraphrase, wouldn't it be a vulnerability to the U.S., as opposed to now where we have more compute and we have this heads up to make our institutions ready? And over and over again, Dwarkashe S. Jensen, to acknowledge, if we give, you know, that much more compute,

capacity to China, isn't there a risk of cyber warfare coming from the Chinese side and creating vulnerabilities where we're not ready? And Jensen did not have a good answer. Wouldn't actually wouldn't answer on this. Well, even, and I mean, I saw some tweet around this around like, that the great part of Dorkish having technical fluency in this interview was Jensen even said, Well, China has 60% of the world's chips, but recognizing that chips aren't the measure that they're talking about, it's compute, that China only has 10% of the world's compute. So they still could be contributing to this. I think it's again, this is why it was so baffling to me that he was that standoffish is it's a pretty nuanced conversation. Like export controls to China.

What's already done? What can you prevent? Like, what are this going to happen anyway? And I thought I'm surprised from like a comms perspective. And I know I always bring everything back to comms that there wasn't a better answer. Like this is one of the biggest questions facing Nvidia that there was export controls. Then clearly they had pushed back themselves and got them removed and did whatever they had to do. And so like this is such a sensitive topic and it's going to be on an ongoing basis that like why wouldn't you have a better answer that then I am we are not a car.

So sorry. Listeners, we should say, Jensen responded to this line of questioning eventually by throwing his hands up and saying, this is a loser premise, I didn't wake up a loser, and Vidi is not a car. You're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. And that loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me. We are not, we're not a car. We are not a car. So let's start with the, that is a loser premise. Like the whole loser thing, Dwarquish never said loser, which was so. so crazy to me that he just went on this tirade about losers, which I don't know where it came from or what that triggered. Okay. Sorry, I can explain it. Basically, what Dwarquish was saying is, U.S. companies have a history of getting into China and then losing to China in the battlefield

that they created. And the car example comes from, Tesla got into China, right? And whether it was through, I'm just going to speculate here, corporate espionage, very good mimicry, uh, break down the cars or whatever, China ended up crushing Tesla, right? The Chinese EV industry right now is the world's best. And so could it be the case where like, you know, even if you get into China, you're eventually, you know, you help them with their technology and then they replaced you. And all you've done is accelerate China and then lose. And that's where you get the I'm not a loser mentality. And the car mentality. See, Alex, I think I think you need to do like a Jenson translator app where it goes over and just kind of explains in a much more clear kind of like way.

Because yeah, okay, I get it that way. But again, he literally starts going like we that's a loser premise. I don't wake up a loser. We are not a car. And that's kind of as far as the argument goes. And it just sounds like just, I mean, it's it's just made for a viral clip in not a good way. But do you think, like, what do you think in video should do? Because I also found it a little awkward as the conversation goes on where it's like the, we need cooperation. 50% of the world's AI researchers are from China. They have the world's best AI researchers. Like, we need back and forth.

We need to work together, which sounds great in theory, but is a little kind of overly aspirational. So he goes into this whole like better together story. And then at the end he's like, but the U.S. is great and the U.S. is the leader. And like it was just almost this like you feel like the U.S. government over him knowing he has to kind of kiss the ring a little bit and like say, oh, by the way, no, but the U.S. is the best. The U.S. is the leader. Like it just, I don't know, the whole thing, there needs to be better answers for prepared. Yes. Okay.

So can I go back into my, you know, coaching Jensen on comms here? And I want to acknowledge that Jensen is in a tough place. Remember, he's accountable. Basically, he's trying to balance shareholders, public opinion, U.S. government, Chinese government. Not easy. And in fact, in sales, right, he's trying to sell. So I think one of the things like, Dwar, you know, one of the weak points, even though it might be true and sort of there's a balance here because you always want executives to be honest. But, but Jensen's core argument is selling these chips everywhere is good for the U.S., good for Western values.

But then he gets pressed by Dwarkesh, where Dvarkash is like just acknowledged the fact that if you sell this into China, who has data centers open and ready to plug them in, you're creating a potential cybersecurity risk for the U.S. And Jensen goes, I just want you to acknowledge that any marginal sales for the American technology is beneficial, which is, you know, sort of like you can't, it's either I want to make sales or I'm good for the country. Sometimes those things come in conflict and that's where he was weakest in saying, and he really couldn't hold those two things in balance. Because they're not. They're not in balance. You're not in balance.

You're right. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, but this is the most ridiculous part of this. And I almost like feel bad that he is the one who has to kind of defend something that is in possible to defend because it is an either or situation. Either you are working with the Chinese people and research community and economic ecosystem or you're not. And like there's good and bad to both. But in reality, in a in a normal state of affairs, this would not be the job of the private company. The private company should only be saying we will sell to China. And it's the responsibility of the government to make the decisions that are on the geopolitical.

Like it is in NVIDIA's best interest as a private, or sorry, public company, but still, you know, like a, they are responsible to their shareholders. I do believe that. And selling to China, like, they should be doing that. They're incentivized to do it. There's good arguments for it. And it should be the government's kind of like role and responsibility to decide what is the best interest of the next interest of the next. and have the best understanding from a security standpoint and everything else. But everything is just so out of whack right now that we're depending on Jensen to be both

CEO of public company and kind of like security and trade minister and all of the above. So I'm, I think I'm, I might be gone back to Jensen's side that it's, he's put in an impossible situation there. No, I agree. And he became visibly angry because this kind of talk has led NVIDIA to lose some leadership position in China, which he can't be happy about. Remember, there have been export bands. Many of them have been lifted. But okay, now I want to sort of, this is where I was trying to get here. All right. There is a good argument to make, and I think some of Jensen's

comp or balancing act might have limited him in the ability to make it. All right. So the argument, and he made a version of this at the end, and I think this was the strongest part of the whole conversation for him. The argument to be made is that, listen, you are dealing with LLMs. There is real cultural soft power in having your influence on LLMs diffuse through the United States. And there's going to be two different, one of these two options of LLMs that will be used globally. An LLM with, and the truth is there's values baked in, an LLM with American values baked in, or an LLM with Chinese values baked in. And if you're being honest, the way that it is going to diffuse is through open source. So you have two options here. One is you influence the way that the open

source direction is going to go by having it built on invidia's tech stack, which is going to have American values, which is going to open the door for Americans who are used to working on Nvidia to influence and contribute to open source. The other option is you shut the door to China. You make two competing ecosystems. One is this closed American ecosystem that is great technology but isn't globally adopted like Anthropic and Open AI. And two is by shutting out the Chinese, what you're incentivizing is a separate ecosystem where Chinese values will be baked in. They have the worlds. They are going to lead open source without Nvidia participating and all of a sudden, their values will be diffused into models that are used in Africa, in India, and across

the world. And Jensen, I'll just say it's one thing. Jensen does make this argument at the end, not quite on the nose as I would have liked, but he does. He says, the fact of the matter is that we get to benefit. We get the benefit of American technology leadership. We get the benefit of developers working on the American tech stack. We get the benefit as these AI models diffuse into the rest of the world, that the American tech stack is therefore the best for it. So that's my point. I got two questions on that. One, walk me through how exactly you think an LLM reflects the kind of soft power and cultural values.

And then two, is an American company? I think like I saw Brian Chesky and Airbnb kind of talking about how now a much higher percentage of their workload is actually deployed on Quen from Alibaba because it's cheaper. And I've seen a number of people talking more about that. And especially as in the last week, there's been all this talk around how Anthropic has been subsidizing and the real bill is coming and like cost management is going to become the next frontier and agentic like moving. Like is it okay that for if you're Colin Quinn for your, for your workload or is that

un-American as well? So those are my two. What's the cultural values? and then what's, is it, can we use Quinn to process our podcast transcripts and still be America first? It's a good question. So it's not black and white, right? There's nuance here. If you're building an enterprise software application or if you're trying to do hotel bookings, fine. But let's say there is a proliferation of AI consumer apps out there. And I don't think this is fear marking. I think this is true, right? What happened when you tried to search for Tiananmen Square in Deepseek? It was a

blocked. Now people were able to modify deep seek and, uh, and, you know, strip that out, but it was only after modification. So I think you'd, you know, if you're thinking about like, and again, this is, this is the argument I think Jensen should make. I'm not 100% sold on it. Um, but if you're thinking about like, all right, uh, if these models diffused through the world and there are going to be applications built on top of them, who's, who do you want to set the weights? you know, the Chinese Communist Party or everybody else, I think the, you know, the preference would be everyone else. That would be the argument if you're, if you're Jensen. I think that's a strong argument. No, I do think it is interesting to me that if the next soft power battle

across the globe is, is at the LLM level. I think that does make a lot of sense and we should be. But again, that's not NVIDIA's decision to make. Like that. But it's not. But it's not, has, of course it's not a decision, but it is, it's a core, it's a critical part of its business. And it's something that, you know, while maybe unfair, Jensen should be better on when he talks about. I agree. I mean, I think the, the main takeaway on all this is this is going to, I mean, going into an election year with AI is, it's going to be the poster child for everything wrong with the world. And then China's, these are the two single biggest, like, political negatives right now, China and AI within the U.S. So I think maybe not the biggest, but two of the biggest. And, like,

you've got to be better prepared for that. That's the main takeaway. And I think Dwarkesh had a great point, by the way, which is like right now, as we speak, U.S. institutions, including the U.S. government, which we're about to get to, are evaluating mythos before it's released to the public. So wouldn't you want to be first? And if you give more compute to adversaries who we know are trying to, you know, at least hack into your systems, you're putting yourself at risk. And that's, that's, that's always going to be the compromise. All right. Well, walk me through what's happening on the U.S. government side this week. Okay. So, so first of all, I think let's just start with this. Last week, we had a big discussion, mythos or marketing, mythos real or marketing.

The, you know, I don't think you can say 100% conclusively now, but certainly the data points suggest that mythos is more real than marketing, which is kind of crazy. This is from the AI Security Institute. I brought this up at the Pentagon this week with Emil Michael. We're going to talk about in a moment. They say we conducted cyber evaluations of Claude Mythos preview and found that is the first model to complete an AI-SI-Cyber range end-to-end. The range simulates a 32-step corporate network attack from initial reconnaissance to full takeover, and we estimate that it would take a human expert 20 hours to complete. So, of course, there's some flaws in this evaluations,

but the fact that Mythos was able to complete this end-to-end is a bit spooky. And I think that you're starting to see the seriousness of the Mythos model, manifest itself in the way that lots of companies and especially the U.S. government are dealing with Anthropic now because there seems to be a universal acknowledgement that, whether it's mythos or whether it's the next iteration of this, you got to take this stuff seriously. So I'm going to not say we shouldn't take it seriously. I've had more questions on this in the last week since we spoke last Friday when I walked our listeners through was clearly a very, very coordinated PR stunt about

a sandwich in the park from Anthropic. And I actually had spoken with a few listeners and like, and it was funny because it's, that becomes so clearly a marketing tactic. So what I had spoken about this week was, is mythos like glass wing and the way it rolled out? And I, again, cybersecurity as well is not where I've spent a lot of my time. So, like, typically, if you have this model that can do these zero-day exploits and can actually start to piece all of this together and, like, why make such a big deal about Glasswing? Like, normally, like, any model rollout would have had some kind of security check and maybe you're working with other companies as well.

But instead they made this like, and I spoke with someone who works at one of the large companies was on the cybersecurity team who was kind of like invited to be part of Glasswing. And the way they were speaking was literally like they got into like we're like a VIP invited to some event. Like it, it, the marketing is when it's that good, I just, I have a hard time believing it. But what do you think is actually? Do you think there is a step change with mythos that actually represents some massive new vulnerability? And it's actually going to be patched up in the next three to six months as Glasswing gets together and finds all the potential vulnerabilities. Do you think that's what's going to happen aside from the marketing, but then also address the marketing as well. I'm curious.

Okay. First of all, I'll say, this is the counter argument, and I think it's really good. People have said marketing at every step of the way. And we've talked about it also. And the capabilities just keep getting better. So at a certain point, like, when are you going to say, all right, well, maybe this is real or not? I don't know. I can't tell you. I don't have an answer, but I can tell you that it's working.

Oh, it's working. It's working. By the way, I just thought, like, wouldn't it be, wouldn't this just be a setup of like a great movie where Dario just like takes a heel turn and says, I tried to be nice? I tried to tell you what my models can do. You didn't believe me. Now I will use the power of mythos for evil and make a society believe in the technology I've created. And he just becomes this black hat cyber hacker and takes down society and bents it to his will. That's what, like guys, for how good the marketing is, that's the picture you are painting in our heads with all of this talk right now.

Like if you really cared, like I get there's value, marketing value and like creating this godlike complex around the models that. are being released, but it just makes people more uncomfortable with the industry. Like, actually, so what I can't get through is like, okay, let's say you have this in your hand, and you realize that if we are to release this, this will, has a potential to kind of like make every single small, medium, and large company completely vulnerable to hacking has a potential to kind of like take down the entire fabric of our economy, the digital fabric at least. Like, what would you do? Would you do a coordinated press release and have a project glass swing and then still work on releasing it because you just raised another $30 billion

at $380 billion valuation and like still keep raising? Like, wouldn't you take a pause and just be like, maybe we should all just try to address what's actually happening here, rather than coordinated marketing campaign that leads to another funding round that lead, I mean, wouldn't you try to fix it, whatever, like really fix it, not use it as a lever to kind of further the economic gains that you continue to accrue? No, because the idea is, but we should move on because we talked about this a lot last week. I think the idea is it's all intertwined. You need to keep growing to keep ahead.

So you're able to give this to certain companies to try ahead of time because otherwise you might have, you know, well, I mean, they would say companies that are less trustworthy. But I think Dwarquish made the point that it could be other countries with different values that get ahead. And then all of a sudden they start the hacking. And we saw this, by the way, the downstream effects of this with Dario on his way to the White House. He's actually there today. This is from Axios. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei is scheduled to walk into the West Wing on Friday for a meeting with White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, a breakthrough in his effort to resolve the company's bitter AI fight with the Pentagon. The Trump administration recognizes the power of Anthropics' new Claude model mythos, and its highly sophisticated and potentially dangerous ability to breach cyber defenses.

It would be grossly irresponsible for the U.S. government to deprive itself of the technological leaps that the new model presents. a source close to the negotiations told us it would be a gift to China. Oh, that sounds like anthropic comms to me. What do I know? But look, there's now, I think this is a good thing. There's now a thawing, it seems like, between anthropic and the federal government. So I think if you're the federal government, you have to take this seriously. And if you're anthropic, I think you're doing the right thing by getting in there.

And is there a chance it's marketing? Maybe. But ultimately, I think that this is sort of the news here is that this is going to create a at least a thaw between Anthropic and the White House. Well, but again, what do you think would happen if they release mythos today? Like, what do you think would really happen? And what do you think will happen within the current way they're rolling this out? Do you think if they were to release this today that cyber, the hackers would penetrate every defense for even the largest companies in the world?

or? No, not necessarily. I mean, we spoke about it last week. You know, we don't, but clearly there's some, there's some incremental. I mean, incremental abilities. I mean, the, the institute that I quoted earlier, like, they are independent, as far as I'm aware. I think they're UK-based. I don't think they have any incentive to, you know, fluff this up.

With Microsoft, Microsoft's in this, in this, you know, project glass wing. They're big investors in Open AI. So, I don't know. Anyway, I think we should move on from the S-DISD marketing, but you can get a last word in. One last thought. Rather than your Dario heel turn that sounded kind of like an Avengers movie, I want to see it go the other way where actually Dario and Sam come on stage and OpenAI has been invited to Glasswing. And together, they are giving mythos to their biggest competitor. And everyone is going to make this work hand in hand.

That's the plot twist I want to say. I love it. Maybe even hands holding hands like they didn't do previously. Yeah, exactly. But I think, you're right, I think peace is a good, is a good place to take this because we could see peace between Anthropica and the Pentagon. And of course, I was in the Pentagon earlier this week, speaking with Emil Michael, the Undersecretary of War, who is the one that banned Anthropic. And I asked him, you know, you've made, you've made a piece with with Google, who was on the out with the Pentagon for a while. Can you make it? make peace with Anthropic.

And he said, I think so. He said, I hope that companies, as they get more mature and more of an understanding of what it means to work with the government and understand us better, get to a good spot, hopefully sooner than eight years. I think that was interesting. It was the first interview where Emil opened up the door to possible reconciliation with Anthropic. And I think that's a good thing.

Do you think it'll happen? Yes, I do. I really do think that this is, that they will. they will find some common ground and get back to work together. I think the Pentagon likes Anthropic, honestly. The technology. They're cloud-pilled. All right.

Before we go to break, I do want to address something because we definitely had some, and I don't know if I really should. I don't want this to come off as defensive, but I think it's good to like take a moment to sort of explain the way that, you know, I operate on this show. And there were some questions about like, why did you go? in to the White, to the Pentagon and ask these questions. And, you know, I'll just read, there was one review on Apple Podcasts that I think is worth addressing. Alex displays a clear pattern of showing

deference to the rich and the powerful. His interviews with Open AI and Trump admin leaders have been extremely deferential. His questions to Dario were much more pointed and journalistic. It seems like Alex is truly dedicated to sucking up to the most evil people in America, the episodes with Ron John are cool, though. Two stars. First of all, I'll just say, I appreciate listener feedback. I'm glad to hear from listeners. It's a privilege to be able to do this show for an audience. So thank you.

I'll also say the two-star reviews really are. They're aimed at, in practice, have an effect of really harming the show. So I'd much rather these come in through Big Technology Podcast at gmail.com, which is in the show notes. Or if you have a criticism, five-star and write it and we'll take it seriously. Send us hate mail. Send us hate mail. But I do think it's worth addressing sort of the style that I have of interviews and sort of what happened with Emil. I want to ask you, I'm going to put Alex on the spot here.

Like one of the fascinating parts of the whole dwarish jensen interview is like everyone's like, oh my God, it was heated, it was pointed. in reality, 10 years ago, that would have been any normal interview because, like, and now we have the podcast circuit, and I'm certainly going to exclude big technology podcasts from that. And I think you do push a lot of the guests in a hard way. But, like, how does it work? Like, because if you rip apart a CEO, do people want to come on the show? Like, how do you balance that tension at a personal level? Yeah.

to try to make this a success. So this is great setup because this is my philosophy here. I really think the job is to get newsmakers in the room and ask them the hardest questions possible. I think the reason a lot of these TV interviews or these hard interviews and these back and forth, did you order the code red? You know, there is value in asking officials tough questions.

I think the reason why people became disenchanted with the media is because it became more about showboating for the journalist and more performative than it became inquisitive trying to find the answers to these tough questions. And, you know, I think Jensen became very defensive in this conversation with Dwarkesh, which is why it led to this sort of heated back and forth. But my style in particular, I try to go in, I want to ask the people I'm sitting across from, the hardest possible questions I can, but I also want to do it in a respectful way. have a conversation about it. For me, it's not about a performative thing. And I think if you look at

the transcript of the conversation with Emil, even though it was conversational, there were, there were, I believe, tough questions there. I mean, I mentioned to him that, you know, I'm puzzled by the supply chain risk designation. I mentioned to him, if you were so close to being willing to work with Anthropic, then how could they end up being supply chain risk? On mythos, I mentioned, wouldn't you want this tool at this disposal, your putting your are you, aren't you putting yourself in a corner when you're not taking these capabilities and using the, and using the ones you want. And then on, on this idea that Anthropic could shut them off. You know, I think I mentioned like you, you have Claude. You

could have, you are building a system with Claude, Grok and Open AI in there or you're on your way. And if Claude is an update, you don't like, you wouldn't you just be able to run open AI on it. So why shut off the relationship? For me, I don't think I need to yell or sort of be like, you know, did, why did you do this? I think, there is like basically what I want to do is to ask what I'm curious about, get the toughest questions in front of these people, but also do it in the context of a conversation. And if there's, I'm open to all forms of criticism.

If there's like this was too conversational or the pushback wasn't good enough, I'm open it. But the, you know, I would say don't mistake the conversational nature for this idea that these people are getting a free ride. Because if you listen to any of the more recent interviews with, Emile, those questions were not asked. So that's just my piece. And I thought it was worth saying. No, I, not to, not to glaze Alex here a bit for listeners, but I think that is, yeah, I think that's what I find

Valgo. And I do like that, that like, you can be, it doesn't have to be confrontational. Like, and any leader at that level, I feel should, and I, that's probably why the guests you are getting are just getting kind of crazier and crazier good. Like, I mean, like, if you're at that level of success, you should want tough questions. You should be ready. Like that's, I don't know, like, maybe it's being a former debater myself, but you should want tough questions and most do. And it, they, it like makes them better and smarter. And yeah, I think, uh, there's not enough of that out in the world. So, so even for this listener, I, uh, just, at least they like the live stars. At least they like the Friday shows. He liked the Friday show. Run on. You're saving this thing from

We got to disagree when we come back on something vehemently. On all birds. Albers. You got to say it's good. Yeah, but I don't want my point here to be mistaken as, please don't criticize me. I'm open to criticism. I want to hear it. We have the email address, big technology podcast at gmail.com.

And I take the comments seriously because, again, like, this is only possible because we have an audience. And if you're listening or at home or watching, your opinion does really matter. All right. Let's take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Sam Altman. We'll be back right after this. Today's show is brought to you by Narwhal.

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Wow, today is flown by. Let's talk about this story in the Wall Street Journal about Sam Altman's side hustles, which is interesting because the headline was Sam Altman's side hustles, blur the line between Open AIs' interests and his own. That was not the story. The Wall Street Journal in this story about Sam Allman's conflicts, which he basically, you know, I'll just give it at a high level. He doesn't really take a salary from Open AI,

but he has these investments in like the Open AI startup fund and in other startups, and he's tried to get other startups to, Open AI to fund some of these other startups like Helion, which is a fusion company in Stoke Space, which is a SpaceX Challenger. This is the thing that really stunned me in the article, and I don't know why this wasn't the headline. Open AI leaders and largest investors

say they support Altman, crediting him with the company's success. Yet some shareholders have begun to privately question whether he should lead OpenAI through the turbulence of going public and have floated board chair and former Salesforce CEO Brett Taylor as a potential successor, said people familiar with the matter. Hold on. You're going to bury this notion that there are people, there are investors on open, there are opening eye investors who are so uncomfortable with Sam that they are already floating

a specific name of a person to replace him. That to me is the story. Well, I think, I mean, in a way, though, it makes sense. Like, I think for all the problems that, or all the challenges they're facing it, they're not necessarily problems yet that have been realized. Like, I feel like, I mean, Brett Taylor, I think he's on the board of Open AI, CEO of Sierra. Yes. Like, he's a, I mean, that's kind of like operator that Open AI still lacks. And Fiji Simo was supposed to come in and be that operator. Denise Dressor might be that operator more so.

But like, they still haven't found, I mean, I hate the everyone, remember everyone you say like, they're shit, Cheryl Sandberg to Mark Zuckerberg. Like, they're still looking for it. So I think, yeah, it's not unreasonable. I think you're going to be seeing more of these kind of leaks at some point because there has to be investors that there's a lot of money in it. There's a lot of kind of lack of clear strategy still, even after they're supposed to kind of bring focus to the company. So I think you're going to be seeing a lot more of this as we get into this IPO race and battle against Anthropic. Yes. First of all, I just want to say I am mostly against this. You need an adult in the room type of operator CEO.

You don't need a Cheryl Sandberg. I think they just, they take out the imagination of companies. And I much prefer. I think founder led companies are where it's at. That sort of. No, founder led with the adult in the room. I feel like Snapchat, like they, that's one thing that always they never had. I think like overly founder led. I'm trying to. Then you have like an Invidio. where founder-led, but years of maturity and development, and then they hit their stride in insanely successful way. So, yeah, I think an adult in the room isn't it? You're right, especially as an IPO approaches, right? And by the way, Brett Taylor, a combination of Sierra and Open AI would make so much sense, especially as Open AI goes after enterprises. It would be a perfect match. I would be stunned if they haven't talked about that, within open AI with all those money that they have to invest. But hold on. Oh yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Wait, but he's on the, isn't he the chair of the board? Yes. Yeah. How does that? I can't even get it. But I, at this point, conflict of interest has never been a problem. Go on. There's no, you know, we've seen the much weirder shit happen in this industry. Sorry, that was the most naive thing I've ever said on this show. Get your head out of 1995. We're in 2026. Okay. But, but you're right. It is going to, it is going to, you know, sort of come to ahead as this company goes to an IPO.

And let me read on in the Wall Street Journal story. Am I excited to be a public company CEO, 0%. Altman said on a podcast in December. Am I excited for opening eye to be a public company in some ways I am? And in some ways, I think it would be really annoying. He said it on a podcast in December. Hmm. Which podcast was that, Wall Street Journal?

But yeah, it's an issue for, for, I mean, if you think broadly about, open AI, it is an issue, right? They are chasing anthropic to some degree or even a large degree, right? They're pivoting towards this anthropic model of the super app, the Fiji thing. Of course, it was for medical reasons, but it's a pretty rough time for that, for her to be away. And Sam is doing his thing. He's obviously raising a money, a lot of money. That's critical, but it's not good to have questions about, it's not good for your investors to be talking about a potential successor while you're with less than a year away from an initial public offering.

See, I'm going to push back on that. Good, do it, do it. People have been talking about potential successor for a long time. Like, again, Fiji gets announced potential successor. Is that the real move here? Like, Brett, so that part doesn't worry me as much. And again, as you said, wait, how much did they raise in the last round? $120 billion.

That's the biggest. I mean, if you're the CEO and your job is to get funds, he's doing an okay job. Wouldn't he? What'd you say? So this was while I was out on vacation and I was in Utah and we got some snow and I was able to ski and I actually didn't look at my phone too much. And I like saw the headline. I'm like how, but it kind of was just like a blip in the news cycle like a hundred 22 billion at an $852 billion valuation.

Like, I don't know. It's amazing. And they are chasing Anthropics strategically. They're going after enterprise. Again, like Mythos gets released and then 5'4 cyber gets released right after. It's like everything they're doing is right after Anthropic and following them. Yet, they've freaking raised $122 billion. And it's just become so par for the course now that that wasn't even the biggest story in the world.

or at least in the tech world. Yeah. No, I mean, you're right. I mean, and that's all Altman. So I don't know if others could do that. He's doing his job. Yeah. Okay.

We are running up on time and we need at least leave seven minutes to talk about all birds. Okay. Can I begin, but just by, I mean, this is one of those stories where you see the news come in and then you just wait for Matt Levine at Bloomberg to weigh in. So if you will, allow me to just read Matt Levine. He says, I feel like if you ran a big technology company and you were looking to expand your artificial intelligence capabilities and needed to rent access to GPUs and you said, and a GPU as a service slash AI cloud company came to pitch you. And you said, so tell me a bit more about your company.

And the company said, well, two weeks ago, we were a sneaker company, but have since pivoted to AI. You might say, huh, but no thanks. We're going to go with someone with a bit more AI expertise. and actually a data center. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe the sneaker guys are great at AI, but you might worry. But if you said, so tell me a bit about your company, and the company said, well, two weeks ago,

we were a sneaker company called Allbirds, but we have pivoted to AI. Your reaction might be different. Because in this hypothetical, you run a big technology company, and you probably spent years wearing Allbirds. I used to love Allbirds, you might say. High Five.

And then you might sign a long-term cloud hosting agreement with the former Allbirds, because like many tech executives, you have a nostalgic fondness for their brand. It's not likely, but it's worth a shot. This all sets up the fact that Allbirds pivoted to an AI computing infrastructure company this week. Their stock went up 582% on the day of,

and somehow they are, this is a real thing that happened. I mean, Brangam, what the hell is this? This is ridiculous. So I know we only have a few, minutes left. So I'm going to try to be a little concise with this story. You go. You have five minutes. It's all yours. Allbirds. I have a very long relationship with the company in the sense that. So I worked for a number of years at Adorme, a direct-to-consumer intimate apparel company.

In 2021, we were at like 250 million revenue. We were like looking at going public. And that was as Allbirds was going to market, this was there was actually 2021 summer. into the fall was this kind of like DTC, rent the runway. There's a number of other DDC companies that went public. And I loved this Matt Levine part because the bankers we spoke with like all wore allbirds. And they were the they were like the ones, the only ones. The VCs were the only ones. And it actually, you could tell affected allbirds at kind of a similar slightly larger revenue, went out to market it.

billion on the first day pop to a $4 billion valuation. It was like 20x, 18x price to sales, which is insane, is insane. But the momentum of the people with money who do the investing, loving the brand, actually being the ones to push it, and the stock just collapsed. And the reason this was so funny is like it became a penny stock. They essentially went bankrupt. They got bought out for I think $39 million in the end. I'm sure most people don't see anyone wearing a lot.

Allbirds around. They shut down all their stores. But I kind of like this ridiculous pivot. It's just, it's like you have this asset. And that, this is why Matt Levine is Matt Levine. He got it. That is the asset. This nostalgic, like, it's almost like you're buying a marketing asset and a brand asset

rather than you're just a nameless faceless GPU AI cloud is a service company or whatever. And it's obviously like the stock market, it's almost bad that the stock popped 600% on the first day and then collapsed, I think, 580% the next day. No, no, it collapsed some like 80 something percent, but it's back up. It's up to 991% on the week. No, no. Yeah, but it's at a $105 million market cap right now. I just checked. I mean, but again, if your company is essentially worth zero, that's still a pretty good market cap.

But I kind of like, like buy up. This is my new private equity idea for everyone. If anyone wants to run with it, go with it. Go buy any dead brand that investors and VCs and tech executives and bankers loved at some point. Just take their name and turn it into a GPU company as a service company. Whatever. Take the most boring infrastructure business you can imagine. and go buy some, what do you think some good 2010's tech brands are that have left us?

I'm trying to think what else could be in Allbirds, but that's my idea. There's got to be a portfolio. Go get BuzzFeed. Go get BuzzFeed. Go get BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed would be good. Go get BuzzFeed. We work.

We work. We work GPU company. Take all those 2010s. And because I actually saw there was something around like dead startups are actually able to still sell their slack threads and email lists and stuff for training data for AI. Which is horrifying. No, no, but let's take all of the graveyard of 2010s and bring it back and just they're all going to be GPU as a service companies.

But that industry is so unsexy and there's so few names available right now that are memorable. And there's slap on, we work, BuzzFeed, Allbirds, whatever else. And that's the idea. Start your roll up company. That will turn the tide on AI. It's you take these beloved consumer brands. You turn them into GPU companies and all of a sudden you see the AI ratings in the polls just go through the roof and Jensen starts nailing his interviews.

And the Pentagon and Anthropic and Anthropic and Open AI make peace. And we all live in a better world. That's peace. That's where we're going to end up if you follow this idea. We can only hope. We can only hope. All right. Let's end on this message.

Ranjan, thank you again for coming on the show. Appreciate it. World peace is a good place to end. World peace. Thank you. to you. The listeners, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. The Madamy Holmes

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