TBPN Live - Anthropic Drama, Meta Now Tokenminning, Fox's $22B Roku Deal | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Obviously, Mistral is in the news. Incredibly bullish for Mistral. Obviously, very unfortunate drama happening in the anthropic world. We'll go through all of that. But if the sovereign AI thesis could not get any stronger right now, this weekend really showed a lot of countries, hey, maybe we do want a national champion. Hey, maybe we do want someone that will provide us models forever.
Starting point is 00:00:26 SpaceX IPO, we have Gavin Baker joining in 30. minutes and we're recapping UFC Freedom 250. It happened at the White House last night. Jordy, take us through your reactions. Introduce our first guest to the show. Okay, quick intro on the event overall. I am a UFC fan. Yes. It's one of the few sports, maybe the only sport where I actually know the names of the people that are competing. Our guest in just a few minutes is one of those people. Now, are you more of a fan of the UFC or more of a fan of the government because a lot of people were watching just because they're fans of the government and they're and they said oh i will watch any i watch c span all day long i watch anything
Starting point is 00:01:06 that happens if it involves the government this was an interesting cross no more uh more seriously i as a ufc fan and as an american i'm excited for the for the ufc to do well i'm excited for the fighters to have a platform i was a little bit wary of this event overall sure just because uh the aesthetics of putting on this crazy party. High stakes. In this moment when there is a ton to black pill about. Yeah. Not after. Interest rates, wars, all this other stuff going on. And yeah, so war raging, gas prices are high, house prices are high, rates were going up. A lot of people in America are not having a good time. Yep. And it really felt like a bread and circuses moment. Sure. But the bread and circuses, John, it worked on me. Top notch. It worked on me. It worked on me.
Starting point is 00:01:57 Some of the best ever. It was, it was... Why was it so good compared to a normal UFC event? Well, you didn't watch, so I guess it's, I guess it's hard.
Starting point is 00:02:06 Was it the aesthetics or the actual... Well, so one, the production value, won. The card was absolutely stacked. It was eight fights, no filler. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:14 Wall to wall. Really, really, fights that had a lot of, they carried a lot of weight, right? So like the main title fight, Gaei versus Ilya, that changed both fighters' careers, like full stop, right?
Starting point is 00:02:31 And even with Bo Nickel joining in just a few minutes, you know, Bo, that was the biggest possible stage that any athlete could be on, and especially in the UFC, at least here in America. So anyways, going into it, I thought the aesthetics were bad. I was excited to watch the fights. It turned out it was just really cool. And sure, there's still going to be people that are upset,
Starting point is 00:02:55 that the president and the admin is like platforming something like this. It turned out to be really fun. It was a cool night. And I think America kind of needed it. Yeah. A lot of people are saying it's not unprecedented because Teddy Roosevelt held a boxing match in the White House almost 100 years ago around that time. And apparently he fought in the boxing match, which is crazy.
Starting point is 00:03:19 Yeah, he was a big, big boxer. He was a big boxer. And so. Imagine. So this is like a light, a light. the president. Anyway. But anyways.
Starting point is 00:03:28 We have a guest. Yeah. I, you know, the event was incredible. And I came away thinking that big parties and sporting events are potentially the most underutilized political strategy. All right. I would actually expect the admin's like overall popularity to go up. Proval rating to go up based on, based just on this event. Because there were so many iconic images.
Starting point is 00:03:52 Funny enough, the most iconic image is of a Brazilian. Diego, Diego Lopez, which we had up on the screen there. Standing up on that. But anyways, really, really wild. So the other big topic over the UFC was the fact that Dario Amadee was not in attendance. He wasn't front row. Mark Zuckerberg was.
Starting point is 00:04:13 And it sort of underscores this odd situation that Anthropics in where, like, they just got dealt this weird hand where, like, they're doing so well. And the admin could not be more misaligned, aesthetically with Anthropic. Their whole brand. Yeah, but the whole brand.
Starting point is 00:04:29 They're very, very different. And I was, you know, I read the article yesterday that, that Anthropic staff were going to Washington, D.C. You assumed it was for, you know, this is bad. Like, if it was, they could, if they could solve the issue easily, they could, they could do it over the phone. Not how this works. You always go.
Starting point is 00:04:47 Serious issue. Everybody goes. You know, yeah, you would obviously go. But going to Washington, D.C. to try to solve an issue on. a Sunday, there was not a worse. They'll be here. No, no, I know. But you can imagine you land there.
Starting point is 00:05:00 You're like, okay, like, where is everyone? Let's, let's, like, meet is a big issue. Let's meet. Let's figure this out. This is important. The national security is on the line. Like, let's figure this out. And they're like, where is everyone?
Starting point is 00:05:10 And like, if you take safety seriously, cybersecurity seriously, biosecurity seriously, export control seriously, like, UFC could not be less aligned with that, the stakes there. And so, like, there is this big gap. between the administration and anthropic. And I think that everyone should, like every American should care about bridging this gap. Like private enterprises should be able to flourish
Starting point is 00:05:36 in the United States. Everyone agrees with that. And the government should be able to enact reasonable regulations to protect America's interests. And both of those need to find a way to play together, but there is just a really, really broad gap between these two organizations. And so everyone's hoping that things resolve quickly.
Starting point is 00:05:52 And it seems like the right, you know, wheels are in motion. The flights have been booked or already taken and things are moving along. But just a recap on the play-by-play. March 4th, Anthropic received a Department of War supply chain risk letter that, of course, got rolled back eventually. April 7th was the Mythos preview announcement alongside Project Glasswing. June 9th was the Fable 5 launch last Monday. Mythos with guardrails around cyber, bio, and AI research. And on June 12th, just five days after the end of the week. Fabal 5 gets suspended after the Commerce Department issues an export control directive. So Anthropic explained in a blog post that the U.S. government is restricting both
Starting point is 00:06:33 Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from being used by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the U.S., including foreign national anthropic employees. And so that's a huge compliance burden, very sudden, and that led Anthropic to completely suspend the use of those models for all users, not just for national employees because they need to, at least if they want to comply with this, do all the KYC, understand how different organizations are using the model, who at those organizations has access. If something's being vended through an API and it's showing up in another product, does that product do all of the proper authorizations?
Starting point is 00:07:15 And so it's a big wrench in the gears of the rollout of this model. Then the information reported that Andy Jassy at Amazon had raised concerns with the senior administration officials about jailbreaking, the risk of jailbreaking fable, getting access to all of Anthropic. Anthropic countered in their blog post saying, quote, we reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a problem. bypass. So they're saying this isn't that big of a jail break. This isn't that big of a deal. We can move forward safely. We've taken safety seriously. But that is the debate that's going on between the admin and anthropic. So as everyone knows, the rollout of Fable 5 has been a bit rocky. Incredible demos, incredible benchmarks, but offset by the odd decision to silently degrade
Starting point is 00:08:10 the quality of answers related to frontier AI development, instead of just refusing the request like cyber and bio prompts, which that was the main thing that everyone was. was really confused about. The actual rationale behind AI development refusal is pretty sound. Like, people are upset about that if they're working on machine learning systems, recommender systems, anything that requires, you know, like instantiating an AI product, let alone if you're just, hey, I'm just doing open source AI research and I'd love to use the latest and greatest models to help me. Now it's not an option. But at the same time, just think about the logic. If a model doesn't let you hack a system, just have the model business. Just have the model
Starting point is 00:08:50 build you an unrestricted model that does let you hack your system that system. And so clearly in that scenario, it makes sense to restrict, if you want to restrict hacking or bio, you also have to restrict the tool that makes the tool that hacks the system or develops the bioweapon in theory. And so, but the choice to silently degrade responses was not well received. These are important issues, and there's another timeline where AI leaders are cut from the same cloth as America's elected officials. But we're in a world where Anthropic has to make their case for safety. in an age of RSI during a UFC fight on the White House lawn. It's a very bizarre timeline, but here we are.
Starting point is 00:09:26 Most of the big tech CEOs, they have figured out how to work with the administration effectively, showing up to large dinners, photo ops, the occasional movie screening to make their case about hot topics. Many of these CEOs also have business relations with Anthropic, either on the customer side or on the investor side, and that's what's really complicated about the Amazon relationship. Obviously, Amazon uses anthropic models,
Starting point is 00:09:48 also is an investor in Anthropic, also provides compute to Anthropic. And so they have a very hairy, complex, circular relationship. And so that clouds the discussion over whether or not is Anthropic going to try and help Anthropic get through this? Are they doing everything above board? At the same time, you know, people were sort of putting out that like, oh, did Amazon like spike the ball on this?
Starting point is 00:10:10 And at the same time, if the government comes to you and asks, like, hey, you're a big tech company. You've been using this model a lot. You're a close partner to an important. your close partner, were you able to jail break it at all? And your security team just issued a report, like, yeah, we actually were able to just jailbreak it a little bit. Like, you're not going to withhold that from the government.
Starting point is 00:10:27 You're going to turn that over. That's different than calling and saying, hey, I really think it's dangerous. You've got to put pressure on them. So there's this wide range of levels of interaction that can go both ways. You can be a lab partnered with a big tech company. That big tech company can have a really established government relations group that is actually helping you get through to the admin. On the flip side, you could have a big tech company that is competing with you or frustrated by your business and is actively trying to put their thumb on the
Starting point is 00:11:00 scale the other way. So I'm sure we'll learn more in the future. Many of these CEOs have business relationships with Anthropics, so we'll see how all of this develops. And they're always renegotiating these contracts too, which makes things more complex and they're competing across multiple markets. So expect the 4D chess to be on full display all summer long in Washington. Anyway, what else is going on? Meta is doing a 180, according to Amir over at the information, trying to be the vanguard of token minimizing. I think the token maxing, token minimizing thing is so silly
Starting point is 00:11:36 because do you know where maxing comes from, really? Like, it comes from gamer lingo usually. Adopted by looks maxing? I don't know if looks maxing community was the first one. They certainly made it really go really viral. But they popularized, like, I feel like through, effectively through clavs clipping. Yeah. The idea of like doing anything like, oh, I'm computer maxing today.
Starting point is 00:12:01 Yeah. Isn't it from like min maxing? Min maxing. And that's what I'm getting at. Like, you shouldn't be token maxing or token minning. You should be token min maxing. And the idea of min maxing is when you're in a video game, you want to get the most resources for the lowest.
Starting point is 00:12:16 cost. So if you're playing League of Legends, you're going to put just the right amount of gold into this particular item or this particular stat point in an RPG, and you're going to try and find the optimal build based on your resources. You have confined resources. And somehow, it feels like tech and all these companies went through some sort of hallucinatory period where they lost sight of that they should always have been mid-maxing, because that is the goal of business at all times, in all things. You would never say like, oh, yeah, we're ad maxing this quarter. We're going to buy as many ads as possible.
Starting point is 00:12:51 Oh, no, it didn't work. We spent way too much on ads. They were not effective. We need to admin spend as little as possible on marketing. It's like, no, you always want to be spending. You always want to be getting the most return on ad spent, the highest leverage output. Yeah. There was an, and again, unsubstantiated post.
Starting point is 00:13:08 Yes. But somebody was saying they talked to somebody of meta. And there was one engineer that spent $90,000 in one day. and was quickly terminated. Really? Terminated within three days. So again, could just be entirely fake news, but it seems somewhat informed.
Starting point is 00:13:26 The crazy thing is that the lesson from that will be... This guy's like, I'm not getting fired. I'm going to use AI more than anyone else in the whole company. I'm running loops. $90,000 bill. I mean, so the lesson that will be learned from that is don't spend $90,000 a day. But the Super Bowl is for a marketer. the Super Bowl is spend $5 million in one day.
Starting point is 00:13:46 And it works sometimes. And sometimes Super Bowl ads deliver $20 million to dollars a dollar. But what do teams do when they run Super Bowl ads, right? We ran our Super Bowl ad. We trained our own model in order to, yeah. No, but teams are in a rock. We made sure that ours was ROI positive. And we only bought the ad in a small market.
Starting point is 00:14:03 And we did it before the game. Where our audience was. And so for a very low cost, we were able to get a very high value. So I believe we got a very high return on it. investment. We mid-max the Super Bowl. Now, there were some companies that sort of just Super Bowl maxed, and they just spent a ton of money. And when you looked at the data on how they were received by audiences, it seemed like, oh, they definitely didn't get $5 million in brand value back. In fact, maybe that ad was poorly received. Some of the AI generated ads. I got to give it up
Starting point is 00:14:33 to the UFC for the level of advertising during the event yesterday. They're running full, full ads in the middle? No, so one, the interesting thing. With the New Paramount deal, there's a lot of ads. Okay. But one, Dana White was in a lot of the ads that were running. So, like, Dodge was doing a TRX ad.
Starting point is 00:14:55 It was Dana White driving. That's cool. There was another ad. I forget the brand, so I guess it was a bad ad. But Dana White was, they faked a podcast set where it was with an insurance company, and Dana was having a conversation about business insurance with the
Starting point is 00:15:10 the CEO of the company. Interesting. So it looks like a podcast. So I thought it was interesting. They were casting data and all of them. Then second, the level of advertising just in the Octagon was out of this world. There was so many different ways to gamble. Every, there was like, there's no, like, UFC cannot do, like, a gambling exclusivity deal with anyone, right?
Starting point is 00:15:31 Because it's like they have, it's crypto.com. It's polymarket. It's bet 365. Yeah. Any possible way that you could want to, like, gamble. Bet 365. So the only day you're taking off is leap day. Every four years, you take one day off of gambling.
Starting point is 00:15:46 That's the mission. One day off every four years. And then Cali's running ads during the event. So Calci and Polymarket are doing it out? So Polymarket is in the octagon. Okay. But Calci is running a bunch of ads. Against it?
Starting point is 00:15:59 And they're buying directly through Paramount? Because you streamed it on Paramount, is that correct? Yeah, I don't. Did you have to pay for it in addition to? No, no, no. Okay, so you pay for Paramount on a monthly basis. and then you get UFC for free. Got it.
Starting point is 00:16:12 Gambling is just min-maxing done poorly. That's true. So the news around Meta is, Meta's doing a 180, trying to be the vanguard of token minimizing. Two months ago, meta epitomized token maxing on track to spend billions a year on Claude, etc. We've seen an exponential increase in AI usage and we are tracking to spend billions on internal use alone in 2026.
Starting point is 00:16:34 The memo said at the same time, individuals and teams have limited visibility into and control over how they use AI. In 2027, we expect meta will move towards managing AI tokens in a more structured way with bullet budgets, allocation decisions, and supporting tools. That makes sense. You have a marketing budget. You should also have a token budget. They also saw something they have like meta code, which is their internal. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:57 That makes sense. I mean, they're like, you know, catching up to the frontier with. Yeah, I mean, Zuck has talked about this. There's a bunch of like these leaked calls where Suck is like, you know, you should imagine that met employees are going to be better than like the average open source. contributor. So it's like the basically quality of coding data within meta should be super good. You can train some model on that. It's the same pitch as take a frontier model, bring them in through some sort of consulting partner, they fine tune on your business workflow, they automate your business process. But your business process in this case, if your meta is generating code that
Starting point is 00:17:29 makes your social networks better. Yeah, it's especially good because like in meta, all of the like, internal business like whatever data, it's already in like code format. You don't have to, like, scan in a bunch of papers into, you know, like, digital. I still don't know what meta is actually building. And I think there comes a time soon that they should probably communicate that to the market. Personal super intelligence, baby. What's not to, what's there not to understand? No, it's just, it's a $1.5 for a dollar company.
Starting point is 00:18:00 What does that mean? 75% is valuable as SpaceX, buddy. Come on. It's crazy. SpaceX, well. Space is 2.3. Well, if things keep going the way they're going, we'll see even more of a divergence. No, but I think, like, it's so unclear.
Starting point is 00:18:16 You should be able to put a lot of the SpaceX bull case on meta, right? It's like, sure, maybe Colossus was built a little bit faster, but meta's pretty fast. I think they're wildly, I think there couldn't be more different with meta right now. The bull case is it's potentially the greatest business in the history. Yeah, just advertised. That is not threatened by AI. Totally, totally.
Starting point is 00:18:35 That actually is accelerated by AI. Yeah. And I don't think, anyways, but I do think, I do think I would expect some communication from meta around what their real strategy is. Yeah. Over the next month or so, because it's killing them that they just keep saying, oh, we're personal super intelligence. But wait, they're building like a coding harness and they're working on coding. Like, are they going to sell that externally or is it going to be internal? Coding?
Starting point is 00:19:05 Are they going to try to? Coding seems like it makes sense. Are they going to try to sell their model on an API and get into Enterprise? The big question is, like, do they take the leap? They kind of did that with Manus. Yeah. But that's getting unwound. Fox is buying Roku, the streaming service, for $25 billion.
Starting point is 00:19:24 It's in the Wall Street Journal. 25 or 22? 25 billion in the Wall Street Journal here. Let me refresh the page, see if they updated it. It still says 25. Weird. Auerreys is reporting 22 billion. Okay.
Starting point is 00:19:36 But who knows? Somewhere is. in the north of a billion, sub-hundred billion. Let's be very conservative with our estimates. Yeah, CNBC, also 22 billion. Weird that the journal is... The journal, I mean, I have inside information, given that it's a News Corp property related there, right?
Starting point is 00:19:54 Anyway, let's read through the journal piece. Let me just give you some facts, and then you can sort of give me some takes and contextualize it with more information. So Fox Corp said it's acquiring Roku in a deal, valued around $25 billion. So the Wall Street Journal saying around is 22 around, maybe, making a major bet on the future of ads supported streaming. Ad supported streaming, obviously Netflix, pivoted to ads after saying we don't, we're not going to do ads, turned out to be a great
Starting point is 00:20:22 business. Ads are undefeated and more people want. They're just down with ads. They're just down with ads, especially for good ads. Anyway, the Fox, the deal. The deal is Fox's largest to date. It brings together a media company known for its live news and sports programming with the biggest provider of streaming platforms for connected TVs. It will add scale to Fox's streaming business, currently home to free ad-supporting streaming service, Too-Bee, which the company bought for $400 million in 2020 and subscription-based Fox One and Fox Nation. In addition to... ToBe, from my understanding, has been a home run. I don't remember exactly what their revenue is, but they bought it for $400. It's in the billions now. And all the metrics about actual audience
Starting point is 00:21:05 size are huge. And getting... to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, hundreds of millions of dollars in ad sales against a big audience like the 2B viewership, when you have the Fox machinery behind it, it makes a ton of sense. In addition to distributing other streaming services through connected TVs and devices, Roku has its own ad-supported Roku channel. The combined company will better compete with the likes of Amazon.com and Netflix for ad dollars. Quote, bringing these two companies together will really help define the future of television in the United States and in many other markets around the world. Fox chief executive Lockland Murdoch told investors on a call Monday. Fox will pay
Starting point is 00:21:41 around $160 per share, 96 in cash, and 0.9693 Fox Class A shares. The deal is valued at around $22 billion on an enterprise basis. Fox expects to fund the cash portion of the transaction with $12 billion in new debt as well as cash on hand. The combined company expects to cut around $400 million in annual costs. Fox plans to keep 2B in the Roku channel as separate offerings. Consumers are Increasingly opting for free and lower cost, ad-supported streaming options as the cost of subscriptions marches ever higher. Ad-supported streaming plans now represent almost 50% of all premium subscription ad video-on-demand signups in the U.S. Up from 39% just two years ago. More than 100 million global households stream with Roku.
Starting point is 00:22:27 Roku's the largest streaming platform for connected TVs with 25% market share. Samsung's Tizen is number two at 23%. and then I'm sure probably Amazon's fire TV is not far behind. Fox remained on the sidelines during the heady early days of streaming boom, pouring money instead into programming for its cable channels and buying up sports rights. It launched Fox Nation in 2018 and introduced direct-to-consumer Fox One, which includes sports and Fox News last year. Fox said last month that Tooby had nearly 100 million monthly active users,
Starting point is 00:23:00 and its revenue had grown by 23% in the fiscal third quarter. And so Fox's stock is down today. Roku is down 0.2%, something like that. And the market doesn't like it. Take him has a take here. We can read through his opinion. He says, I don't understand how this Roku deals makes any sense. Bringing together the most valuable live...
Starting point is 00:23:23 I'll tell you how it makes sense. How does it make sense? No, so I think it makes sense. One, Fox, they have a great product in Tubi, right? It's, again, there are certain people that are happy with their HBO or Netflix or whatever, but 2B has a great niche. It's been a great acquisition for Fox, north of a billion dollars of revenue. That is a product.
Starting point is 00:23:50 Roku is a platform. They have over 20% market share in connected TVs. I was looking at the data. They have over 40% of the engagement. with connected TVs. So when you think about it from an advertising potential, right, it's not just that they have 20% of the connected TV market. They have over 40% of like the watch time effectively, right? So looking at the potential from an advertising standpoint and how many dollars are still yet to shift from traditional television to connected TV. So from that lens,
Starting point is 00:24:22 I think it's, I think it's great. Roku's also a much younger demo. So like a lot of media, a lot of media properties, right, especially television related, are going to be. be, you know, older demos that are, that are eventually going to be aging out, at least, of like, prime consumers. But these are consumers that are in their, you know, prime earning years, prime years as consumers. And so ultimately, I think it makes sense. I think it makes sense for Fox. Next, the thing that I hope that they can do as a consumer is re-bundle, right? We've just gone, we've gone through this era of unbundling and the fact that you get a new TV and you're like, okay, great, let me log into, you know, 15, 10 different services, something like that.
Starting point is 00:25:10 I would like to see them do, I would like to see them do something in bundling for a consumer. So again, looking at it from the lens of like having north of 40% of like watch time, right, that is a super valuable property. And like with the right ad-driven approach, I think it'll pay off. I wonder how windowing fits into this. Like, when I grew up, I didn't have cable, but you would get a prestige movie played on ABC, like, once a week. And for a while, that was the flow on Netflix. And HBO was like its own premium subscription.
Starting point is 00:25:47 You open up the HBO app. It's all premium series and movies. And then some of that would trickle down, but then it feels like the ecosystem sort of branched a little bit, where Netflix stopped getting the James Cameron library for a while, and Disney started hoovering up some of that, keeping some of the really popular movies, the Marvel franchise, off of Netflix, even for later run a year or two after,
Starting point is 00:26:12 because there was more competition from the actual different pieces of the different studios. So I wonder if Roku will be able to provide some sort of like neutral territory in some ways, where viewers can pick up something that's in the premium end, something that's a sequel to a franchise that they know and love, but it's not seen as competitive as Disney versus HBO or whatever. We will see. Overall, real platform. They already have a product that sits on top of it,
Starting point is 00:26:45 tons of advertising potential. And I think that regardless of whatever the market reaction is today, I expect that people will get it over time. Tyler Cowan shared some more thoughts on the recent mythos, Bruhaha, it's a good term. This was all over, we talked about this earlier, but he says, according to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that the model could be jailbroken.
Starting point is 00:27:09 There's debate over this now. The released mythos already restricted bio and AI improvement queries rather than strictly in fact, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available. Here are a few of the constraints on the US government, not the only ones I might add. One, it needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it's now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce.
Starting point is 00:27:39 Demis, Ilya, Andre, for a start, are all international engineers. It is much harder for the main competitors to drum up foreign business in a credible manner and sustainable manner. That's interesting. We haven't seen many breakout charts of how much revenue is domestic versus international, but we have seen reports of OpenAI and Anthropic doing big deals with international companies. Some of these companies, Fortune 500s, they just have global footprints, so they got to use the models everywhere, ideally, unless they do all of their software engineering in Silicon Valley. One B, how are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems moving forward? That's literally what I just said.
Starting point is 00:28:20 I just predicted the next line. Whoops, I am a stochastic parrot. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power. So model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with partial model access when they get it in the future. Three, the U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race. This is a big question. We have Aaron Ginn from Hydrohosts joining in
Starting point is 00:28:48 just 10 minutes. We'll ask him for his perspective on this. For the U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable and U.S. citizens only doesn't fit that bill. That's a good point. Furthermore, markets and everything. It is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing. That's a really good point. How can you verify that every American is loyal? Or for a matter, it is not that difficult to fake citizenship in various ways. Yeah, there's been people over the last 50 years that have gotten caught, like, passing on or basically selling, you know, secrets around our various military aircraft, for example. Yeah, there's a very controversial story of Virgil Griffith, a cryptocurrency researcher, who I actually met once. He worked at Caltech, was deep in math and very excited about cryptocurrency.
Starting point is 00:29:40 And he went and gave a talk on cryptocurrency in North Korea, explaining how crypto. currency works and how cryptography works and that was seen as a violation of export controls and he was sent to prison And the crypto community is very upset about that because they they maintain that math should not be illegal This information should not be illegal the government side is that what was his defense? Was he like thinking that he was going to liberate the North Korean people by Giving them access to effectively or explaining how code can be used to create a A store of value that that is that is that is unsexuality un-sanctionable essentially and so it was seen as a violation of sanctions by the U.S. government and more importantly it's seen as unpaid- Do they have a North Korean stable
Starting point is 00:30:22 coin? I don't know. I don't know they all- calling it the most sanctioned stable coin. Potentially. Potentially. This one number five by Tyler Cowan was a little bit controversial. He says the U.S. government cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively. And people were debating that saying that it might be possible for the U.S. US government to own the labs in some way and leave them to their own devices to actually roll these things out? What do you? Yeah, I mean, if you're like super RSI-pilled, right, you don't need the employees at all because they just improve the sale. So the government just says continue
Starting point is 00:30:57 to improve. Yeah, basically. That's it. So you don't actually. You know, the extreme scenario. Yeah. Yeah. And then on the other side, it's that, okay, these systems are actually extremely complex. You look at the uptime of some of these systems, the research taste. In fact, you need so many employees to make these products effective, you actually need the international employees as well because they come up with great ideas. And so, yeah, those are the two sort of sides of the debate. Six, his Chinese and open source models do, in fact, improve at some reasonable pace, even though they are right now considerably behind them at best proprietary models. And that's something that I want to dig into more. It does seem like the pace of open source
Starting point is 00:31:35 development in China is slowing. I'm not entirely sure what's driving and it feels like there's a number of different things. Gavin Baker said it's about. about compute and they're turning their backs on the blackwells that they had the opportunity to buy. I think it might be research ideas that are more locked down now in tighter controlled circles in San Francisco. It also might be the data, but you'd have to imagine
Starting point is 00:32:00 that they have lots of people that are writing code, lots of people that are inferencing those models and then full data and information capturing of those rollouts. There are a number of different reasons why that pays might be slowing. And we'll see. Maybe there's a big jump in the graph. Maybe we have another deep seek moment in the next couple months. We'll see. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at TBPN.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Goodbye. Technology's daily show.
Starting point is 00:32:28 Technology in motion.

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