TBPN Live - China Blocks Meta’s $2B Manus Deal, Meta Bets on Space-Based Solar | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: April 27, 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 each 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.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

We'll take you through some quick headlines of what's going on in the news today. Of course, the Elon Musk, Open AI. Let's take a moment for the production team. Yes. Background update. We have a new screen in the background, much better contrast, much brighter. We're excited to explore this. The production team's stoked.

There's four key stories going on in the news today. The first is Elon Musk's $134 billion lawsuit against Sam Altman goes to court today in Oakland. Musk is alleging that Open AI abandoned its original nonprofit mission and became a for-profit entity focused on maximizing profit for Microsoft. Jury selection is going on today. There are a number of reporters on the ground and we'll be checking in on the progress there. Yeah, already there was some reporting that said certain people were saying it would be difficult for me to be unbiased here because of my general dislike for basically everything going on. Sam and Greg were spotted on scene. Elon has not been spotted yet. There's also other Microsoft

OpenAI news, they changed their partnership. Open AI can now serve all of its products to customers across any cloud provider. Andy Jesse had a post about it saying it was a very interesting update. Obviously, he's excited to vend OpenAI technology through AWS, which they also have partnership. And so, in other words, OpenAI can potentially use Google TPUs, Amazon Traneum, other chips are on the table now. There's a lot more flexibility that comes from that. Over in Meta World, China has blocked META's $2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Manus after regulators reviewed whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules. This was something that went back and forth.

Did they get enough of the company to Singapore in order to clear the hurdles that require the acquisition to go through? Then some members of the Manus team were detained briefly in China on business. There were some issues there. And one of the challenges is going to be clearly the Manus team wanted to do this. They wouldn't have signed up for it. It was a great outcome for the team. They were excited to build with META.

But one of the challenges is you have all these different team members, many of which were born and raised in China. And they still have family members and people back in China that they care a lot about. So that's going to be, I would assume, that's going to be a leverage point from the CCP. And the last story also from META is that they are planning to use solar power from space

at night, beamed from space, They're partnering with overview energy, a different company than the other solar space company talked about. The other space. They've been in stealth for about four years. They're planning to beam up to one gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to Earth for around-the-clock power production. They're also deploying one gigawatt of ultra-long duration storage batteries with noon energy. So some exciting deals coming out of Menlo Park. We got to start with these Diet Coke videos because I fell down a rabbit hole of Diet Kof.

Coke Instagram Reels. I'm surprised you weren't in this. Yeah, it took them a long time to figure out that I drink three Diet Coke's a day, and I love Diet Coke, but these videos have brought me a lot of joy. So we can play one. There's been a new study about Diet Coke versus Coke Zero, and we can pull it up in just a minute. It just came out with this new study that compare people that drink Diet Coke versus people

that drink Coke Zero. And what it actually found was that people that drink Coke Zero are idiots. and then people that drink Diet Coke are actually Sigma Chats that are way better than everyone else. Thank you. Thank you. We needed that. Wait, play the restock video. There's a restock video that is, it claims to be $4,000 of Diet Coke stored all over this person's massive house.

I think it's about 200. Let's count it up. Let's pull up the restock video. And you tell me, is this $4,000 for the Diet Coke? Okay. That's maybe $20,000 of Diet Coke? This is maybe $10 of Diet Coke. There's another 10.

We're what? Under $100 still of Diet Coke, I would imagine. I'm just so curious when do they opt for the plastic bottle versus the can? It is odd. Some people have preferences. I saw, again, on Instagram in my Diet Coke deep dive, someone who insists that the 16-ounce aluminum can of Diet Coke tastes better than the 12-ounce aluminum can.

That's the level of Diet Coke. Also, check out the organizational inefficiency here in this fridge. What's going on here? She's not putting up prodding the front. Yeah. Frauding. Frauding. Yeah, because you could stack the Diet Coke much deeper, but once you're that far in the reel,

you call it quits. Instagram is just the Diet Coke app for you now. Yes, well, I'm getting, I'm so deep that I'm getting Diet Coke vibe reels. Let's pull this one up because this one is electric. This is like peak content. There we go. This one. must be heaven

I gotta testify come up in a spot looking at this is like John just watching this. The fact that somebody took so long to edit this together is that looks like something you could one shot.

I mean it's like in Capcut and you'd need to like choose the words and place them and add the features like you should be able to puppeteer that with an agent but I don't know of any agents that are really there on the video editing front. Certainly like the next

the next chip to fall, the next opportunity. Anyways, says, Chad might mog, but when the jester performs, even the king sits to listen. And this is incredibly

true. We have a friend of the show that is 100% a jester, and the closest thing we have to Kings in this industry, will pick up his call and listen to whatever he has to say, even if he's jester maxing. That's true. Based 16th,

he got to be honest bro uh oh i think you got deleted but said got to be honest bro i have no idea what a semiconductor is do you know why they call them semiconductors that made me laugh so hard it's deleted do you do you know why they call them semi i do not so full-on conductors like copper electricity flows through it constantly a semiconductor is like geranium or silicon the current is can be turned on and off so it's semi-conductive and that started the computing boom because you can effectively store ones and zeros in it. A little more complicated than that, but that's like the very high-level version for why they are semi-conductors. That's not why they call it semi-analysis. It's because Dylan just says he

doesn't want to do full-on analysis. He only wants to do semi-analysis. I think his analysis is totally full-on analysis, but he decided to go with semi-analysis. Anyway, imagine genuinely believing that the entire human race was going to be wiped out in the next year and then you just kind of aimlessly argue about it on Twitter. That is a weird, weird phenomenon that's going on. Oh, Phil is looking for a large gong in the Bay Area. If you are in possession of a gong that is over 30 inches, give him a call. He's in the market. Is that a large gong? Is it a 30-inch gong, a large gong, though? How big is our gong? I think it's 42. 42? We're around there. We're around there. Anyway, do you know where we got this gongsunlimited.com?

Gongsunlimited.com, Phil, you have your answer. Okay, but here's the thing. I couldn't reply to this. on X, but I chose to save it to Monday and tell it to you in person. Yeah. Why did we get the biggest gong? Why did we? Why is there a limit on gong size? We've seen bigger gongs online. Should you not be able to? They do exist, but they get very expensive. Sort of an exponential relationship between gong size and price, unfortunately. Okay. We have to talk about this study that went viral over the weekend. Yeah.

It is placebo sleep effects cognitive functioning. And the takeaway is that literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes in physiology. Sleep badly, convince yourself you're well-rested. Stressful day, convince yourself its fuel. Failed, convince yourself its useful data. So in this study, it says the placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment, but rather to an individual's mindset.

This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In two studies examining whether perceived sleep quality affects cognitive functioning, 164 participants reported their previous night's sleep quality. They were then randomly assigned one of two sleep quality conditions or two control conditions. Those in the above average sleep quality condition were informed that they had spent 28% of their total sleep time in REM, whereas those in the below-average sleep quality condition were informed that they had only spent 16.2% of their time in run sleep. Assigned sleep quality but not self-proported sleep quality significantly predicted participants' scores on the PACE Auditories Serial Edition Test and controlled oral word association task.

Assigned sleep quality did not predict predict participants' scores on the digit span test as expected, nor did it predict scores on the symbol digit modalities test when it was. unexpected. The control conditions show that the findings were not due to demand characteristics from the environmental protocol. Those findings supported the hypothesis that mindset can influence cognitive states in both positive and negative directions, suggesting a means of controlling one's health and cognition. Takeaway, golden retriever mode. Golden retriever mindset. They made a movie about the golden retriever mindset years ago. I know you haven't seen it. Have you seen it? It's called Yes, Man. I was thinking the AirBud. Everybody is a great answer to that.

No, that's about a literal golden retriever. Yes, man, with Jim Carrey, is effectively about the golden retriever mindset. Basically, he's a bank loan officer. He's become withdrawn. He's going through a divorce. He's having an increasingly negative look, outlook on life. He then goes to this seminar with an inspirational guru who has, him enter a covenant with the universe and say yes to everything asked of him.

And so he just has to say yes to everything. And hijinks ensue, but he has a fantastic time. And it's a very, like, interesting, like, silver lining story. Bradley Cooper's in it. Zoe DeChernell and Jim Carrey star. Highly recommended if you're looking for a good, a good uplifting movie this week. Should we talk more about Meta's space solar project? Absolutely.

What's going on there? So they announced this morning two new partnerships to bring innovative energy generation and storage to our data centers. We mentioned this earlier. Space solar, partnering with overview energy to beam up to one gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to Earth for around the clock power production. What is the company? I think they're in El Cigando. Reflectorble. We talked about that.

I think Sean McGuire did the deal. And then they're also doing. And also, who is it? co-founder of Robin Hood, Bajou, is that his name? Yeah, but I thought that was more of a compute place. He has done more compute, but at least at one point, a piece of the business was collect energy on solar panels in space and beam it down via laser.

And so that was, all of these projects are, you know, incredibly difficult to math out and require a lot of different things to go well. They're very exciting, but this company, we've clearly been working for a long time. But if it's working for them and it winds up working for meta, you can imagine that there are going to be lots and lots of buyers because energy, of course, is in short supply. The mirror in space is such an interesting solution to what I'd heard before, which was collected on a solar panel and then beam it down on a laser. A mirror is such a simple solution to that. So we'll have to see. It feels like the step one is just getting more solar panels down on the ground. You know,

you see these data center projects and a lot of natural gas turbines, not a lot of nuclear. Well, the question is like if you have this ability to bring basically 24-7 sun, can you bring a lot more solar projects online because the economics just make more sense because you can power things like data centers, especially if you have batteries. The batteries that they are doing in tandem with this apparently have 100 hours of capacity, So presumably even if you had a few days of cloudy weather, you could still keep energy coming through the system. Yeah, yeah.

It feels tough because data center wants to run 24-7, needs to run 24-7. The math on depreciation and the cost of the chips completely changes if you have intermittent electricity. And in some cases, if you lose power, you can actually damage the data center. And so there's a whole bunch of other things that you need to work through.

Did you see this post from Benjamin Todd? This was a very interesting post. We found this a little bit. You were the first person that kind of brought this up. I had looked at... So the question is, you know, AI's impact on jobs, on jobs and employment broadly. I looked at overall employment in India, overall employment in the Philippines, and how it was tracking this year, because, of course, there's a lot of outsourcing,

there's a lot of, you know, lower-skilled white-collar-style work call centers, BPO's, outsourced processing centers, like small, you know, atomic tasks that get done abroad. And so I expected that if there was going to be an uptick in unemployment, it would show up in potentially India and the Philippines first. Of course, we heard that somewhat hilarious quote that 90% of the Philippines economy is, Call centers, of course, it's not. It's closer to 5% or something, that maybe 6%. But everyone sort of agrees, at least on the service level that it's, as Benjamin Todd put it, it's hard to think of a more AI exposed job than Filipino call centers. But oddly, in 2025, employment was up 4%. And so, of course, people will say, well, maybe it's earlier. The technology is getting better, you know, all these different things. But there has been a process of automation around calls. I mean, I was trying to get on the phone with the company just earlier. I had to go through a whole phone tree.

It was even hard to find the phone number. There's a whole bunch of steps that companies take to try and reduce the amount of call center operators that are in the flow. And so this was not necessarily a new trend. U.S. call center worker employment is in decline. But that started before chat GPT and is probably mainly about outsourcing. So the outsourcing boom, you would think it would have started with like the dawn of the internet. I would have expected the trend to start in 2005, you know, like internationalization,

globalization was well underway. In fact, U.S. call center, business support services, all employees for the United States. The peak happened in 2016 and then declined sort of during COVID and then has been declining ever since, probably as things move offshore. So there is a world where, you know, these technologies, they take time to diffuse. And so AI might play the similar role in the sense that, like, there is some sort of onboarding cost to moving from a U.S. base to a Filipino call center. That's taken a decade to actually decline by, you know, not even half. It went from 900,000 people to 650,000 people over the past decade.

Certainly not good if you're in that, if you're in that industry in America. But interesting, interesting nonetheless. Also, Poland is having a breakout year. Income in Poland is on track to overtake income in the United Kingdom. This is based on a forecast for advanced economies. UK has growing now slower than Poland. So everyone who's a fan of Poland will be excited to hear the news that Poland really is going through a fast takeoff over there in Poland. They are doing some great stuff.

Poland was once a communist third world country. Now it's overtaking Britain. This is in the telegraph. European superpowers luring a record number of UK immigrants with its restored economy and robust patriotism. Interesting. Three months ago, the British businessman Johnny Mercer advertised a marketing role

in his construction firm, Polstraud, based in Poland. Not long ago, people weren't interested in moving here as he sits down at a trendy French bistro. This time, however, Mercer was inundated with Britain's eager to work in Poland. 35 applicants for the job were British and happy to relocate permanently, including one without any British links who got the job. People are excited.

Nome Brown shared some interesting details about the different constraints on AI progress. He says, Noam Brown suggesting that model weights become relatively less important as inference becomes more important, which means securing weight still matters, but securing inference capacity becomes a strategic advantage. This is from a slide for a talk he gave, which is very, very interesting just from an AI safety perspective. The idea of sneaking the weights out on a hard drive that you've smuggled in your suitcase, and that being equivalent to a suitcase bomb is... Or refined uranium.

Yeah, yeah, it's not quite the same. Maybe the chips or the refined uranium, more than the actual weights and the weights are merely one piece of the puzzle. Do you have any? Yeah, it's interesting because I think like recently the past few months we've seen this big fuss over like distillation. Yeah. But like, you know, maybe there's an angle where like distillation is actually gets less

important because, you know, even if the, you know, the Chinese can distill our models, they actually can't serve them. So it's like, you know, is that even important? Yeah, yeah. And even if the models are exactly the same, if I'm able to put 10 agents securing my bank account against your one agent trying to break into it. I will have 10 times the amount of solutions. And so I should win that battle almost all the time. And it does seem like we're shifting towards this, the incredible value of inference and capacity, which of course makes the whole

data center slowdown ban so much more complicated because once you get into like the geopolitical considerations and what happens when large inference clusters start coming online elsewhere. And you go back to the Dorcasch, the Dorcas, what was it, probability density curve, where he says, like, if AGI comes soon, America wins. If it comes over long-term China wins, because he's worried about China ramping up their capacity over time, but they're behind currently. Semaphore posted an article, said, Meet the man who's outsourcing almost everything in his life to his AI assistant. It listens to every conversation, reads every message, emails, and schedules meeting for him, all while pretending to be him. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked him. I asked

to be me. And Taylor says, I think this will be normal in five years. She has an excerpt here. So he's made a small fortune selling multiple companies to Apple. Multiple companies to Apple. That's always, I love stories like that. And recently launched a voice recognition startup called Olive, said his personal AI has all but taken over his life.

Now when he wakes up most mornings, he consults the agenda. His AI assistant is crafted for him and then spends his days following its directions. The AI has permission to email people on his. his behalf and sometimes sets up in-person meetings with people he has never met. It listens to conversations he has with his three kids and then suggests parenting advice, which he says has improved his relationship with them. It's a portrait of an emerging class of token maxers, power users, who are plunging tens of thousands of dollars in McGiver-level AI assistance, not by waiting for the next big model release,

but by orchestrating today's models and loops with more computing power, more passes, and more automated checking, and a massive dose of risk tolerance. is to give the system an unlimited amount of tokens and access to every conceivable piece of relevant data. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me. So some of this is extremely weird. Some of this is maybe very normal.

I'm trying to think of like how many of my interactions my daily life are like mediated by technology already. Like my alarm clock comes from my phone. It decides when I wake up more than anything else. In fact, I have the eight sleep will decide like the optimal time that I wake up within

in a few minutes, right? Because it's like an adaptive alarm. And then I get in the car. I select maps. It sort of tells me what streets to go on. I'm merely like the embodiment of the AI to get where I need to go. And then I have a calendar that tells me what I'm doing when. There are some level of like intermediation.

But I don't know. There's still incredible value in touching grass. And I think that we would be. Bullmarked. I just think we're going to be in this barbell world for so, potentially forever, where you have, Larry Ellison is, is, you know, buying Oracle data centers and going super long on AGI and also CBS and Foghorn Leghorn and you got to own Bugs Bunny and you got to own Superman and Batman, right? And then on the flip side, you have Josh Kushner, investor in Open AI, a ton of different artificial intelligence companies.

and then on the other side, SF Giants. And it's like, are these diametrically opposed, or are they actually both true visions of the future of the world? It seems like something that is going to continue. We should go back to Maness. Do you want to read through the Financial Times with Tyler? And I'm going to take a quick break. Let's do it.

Can we do a two-up with Tyler in place of me? And you can read through the Financial Times and sort of some of the reactions because this... The regulators reviewed the deal, reviewed whether deal violated Beijing's investment rules. China has ordered META to unwide its $2 billion acquisition of AI app Manus, as Washington and Beijing vie for dominance over the emerging technology. The decision marks an extraordinary late-stage intervention by Beijing involving two non-Chinese companies. META had already begun to integrate software from Manus, which was founded in China,

but relocated to Singapore last year. It was unclear how the acquisition could be unwound at such a late stage. A person briefed on Beijing's decisions said the announcement could be intended primarily as a warning for similar deals in the future. The person said the gesture was pretty harsh and it carries a strong intention to stop follow-on deals like Manus. In reality, it's hard to unwind a done deal. Manus has been live, I believe, in the Facebook ads manager. It has obviously been heavily branded as a meta platforms company for some time now. The meta team has been investing in scaling it.

And so, yeah, very much feels like a done. It had been a done deal. I don't think there's been any reporting on it, but I would assume that full cap table had been paid out in large part already. So it's very unclear how you undo. something like this. I'm not, it's not super surprising given that we obviously forced the sale of TikTok and this feels like somewhat of a response. Yeah, it is interesting. Is this the moment when like China wakes up, right? People, they're super like, AGI-I pill. They're like, okay, at some point

China's going to like wake up. This seems like directionally towards that. But it is interesting because like you have this and then you have, you know, China approving the sale of, of Nvidia chips there. So it's like, okay, how much do they really want to disentangle from the U.S. regarding AI. Yeah, AI 2027 had China wakes up in mid-20206. Yeah, it feels like, I don't know, Manis is, I mean, it's not like a cash flow acquisition. Like, it's not a highly profitable thing that you're trading on earnings. It's a team.

And it's a, it's a rapper. And it's a technology, but the technology is somewhat commoditized. There's been code leaks from Cloud Code. It's a open-sor's sloppers. It's a super-talented product team with a demonstrated track. record of like getting real paying users. Yeah. And so the question was always, you know, how much does Zuck care about keeping this as a

standalone product? Yeah, yeah. An AI assistant for business that can- But why even buy the whole company then? Why not do one of those zombie acquisitions where you get the talent and then you get a license and then there's a ghost ship and you leave- Yeah, I would assume. Because that's got to be harder to approve.

I'm assuming that that's kind of what happens. I don't know. I mean, it seems like it's too late. They already bought the company, right? Like, they already did, like, the proper acquisition, like, you know, as you said, like, paid out the cap table. I don't know. I don't know the exact terms of the deal, but it would have been, it probably would have been easier to do something like what GROC and Nvidia did or, like, the windsurf Google thing where, like, you're bringing people over with this

contract and then, like, yes, China blocks it, but it's, like, what are they even blocking? It's just people getting a new job and a licensing deal that the money flows through. Maybe they try and claw that back. I don't know. It is a tricky, tricky situation. Yeah, I'm not familiar with an acquisition that actually closed in venture that was then later fully unwound. I don't know. I don't know. Dellian's taken a victory lap. He says, wow, so weird that they can do this, since it's not a Chinese company, according to Gurley. There's always been back and forth about whether or not China would have any power over the Manus team. It seems like they have some, some sort of power.

says after China's cancellation of Mehta's purchase of Manus, why would any founders start an AI company in China if they had a choice? I mean, well, you can make money and cash flow in China. You don't necessarily need to sell to an American hyperscaler to have a wonderful life as a founder of an AI company in China. But he makes the argument. In China, you have access to less compute, less capital and salaries are lower than in the West. And if you are so successful that a non-Chinese firm tries to acquire. you for billions of dollars, the Chinese government will lure you back to Beijing, ban you from leaving the country, and take your profits by canceling the acquisition.

Manus did everything right. They even moved their entire business to Singapore to comply with U.S. outbound investment restrictions. Their only mistake was that they originally founded the company in China. It's not even clear what this means for China to force Meta to unwind the transaction. Is it going to force Manus researchers to return to China and place exit bans on them, too? Is it going to force Manus' founders and shareholders to pay back $2 billion to Meta? this is what happens when you regulate by fiat,

rather than by rule of law. Ultimately, this is a much larger defeat for the Chinese AI ecosystem than for the United States. Interesting. Meta will be fine without manis, but Chinese nationals looking to found AI companies will increasingly start them overseas. Hmm, that's interesting.

The message from the Chinese government here is that every AI company founded in China will forever remain subject to the Chinese government regulatory pressure and manipulation, regardless of its legal status. So he goes on, but you can read that there. What's Bill Bishop up to these days? He says, he's quoting from the Financial Times.

Do we already read this? A person familiar with the matter said Beijing had told the two companies that the deal must be unwound completely, including returning funds, re-registering the company's ownership, and halting meta's use of the manis algorithm. The person said that if the parties failed to fully undo the acquisition, Beijing could impose penalties on meta, limit its China-related business, and possibly pursue criminal charges for individual. involved. That is a wild wild. China does have a good amount of leverage, given that

like tens of billions of meta ad spend, yeah. It originates from Chinese companies. And so they could put pressure on Chinese companies to pull back spend, which would hurt mema, uh, meta. So yeah, very, very unclear how this will all sort itself out. But, um, yeah, unfortunate for everyone. All of this post from Michael Chang is showing sort of a glimpse of like the future of generative UI. So the prompt here, hey, chat, GPT, what's the weather like today? Might have been a little bit more complicated than that. But using the new images 2.0, it is rendering sort of a video game style map. I don't even know. This feels like the type of map that you'd see at the front of like the Lord of the Rings book or like a Game of Thrones book. But it's giving you

the actual information, like accurately telling you for each neighborhood what the weather is of course. You didn't need that much information because every single town is 56 degrees, maybe 57, maybe 55. There's very slight differences. It is an interesting world where you're getting closer and closer to this generative on-the-fly UI. Ben Thompson wrote a big bull case for the meta-agmented reality headsets, not just Orion, but also the meta-rayband displays today, talking about as as AI models get better on the fly UI generation with less Chrome, which is like the top bar and the bottom bar and less permanent UI functionality, is what actually feels magical.

Like when you go to, you know, look at something and you get something that perfectly sums up exactly what you're looking for on the fly. And previously, was it possible to build something like this? Absolutely. but you would have to hang out in Blender and create the 3D map and render it and then build some web page that would go and pull in the data from APIs and place it on the Ryan says one tower golden gate is a crime so more work to be done jobs not finished goodbye cheers