TBPN Live - Fatter AI Models, Neural Computers, GameStop’s $55B eBay Offer | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: May 5, 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

Would you look at that? Would you look at what, Jordy? Everything looks fine. We're back. We're back. That's what I'm looking at. We're getting ready at the last second. We may have installed Modern Warfare 2 on this large screen and gotten a little bit behind schedule with some of the interns playing.

Yeah, Ben and Tyler were. I was cooking him. You won by a lot, right? Yeah. Well, it was it was pretty embarrassing for Ben. for Ben, considering that he is still in that, not Chief Producer Ben, but other Ben, considering he's still in like the main kind of like

demo, video game demo. But at the same time, I mean, you were probably two years old when Modern Warfare 2 came out. So you got to sort of relearn the old tricks, the old tricks on Rust. Anyway, big show today. Hope you guys had a great weekend. Hope you had a great weekend. Big week. We'll be, we are going to a conference on Wednesday and Thursday. So we might be off both those days, but we have some great shows for you planned Monday, Tuesday, Friday. It's a conference. Oh, I thought you said concert. No. Although, I think there might be a concert. That would be extremely out of character. Well, I mean, there's a bunch of

news we're going to go through. But first, I was just sort of reflecting on, there was a great interview with Andre Carpathie at Sequoia AIS Sent. I think last week it went up on YouTube. And it was, he was sort of reflecting on how his workflow is changing around vibe coding. And I was sort of reflecting on how my knowledge workflows are changing, particularly around image generation, now that image generation is really good at infographics and effectively designing slides or output. And so we're, we're starting to see the rumblings of this idea of like the neural computer. There was this, people have been talking about this for years since the AI boom began. But the basic idea is like, You would have a computer that basically has no software whatsoever on it.

It would just have an LLM or just an AI model, just inference capability or potentially connection to cloud inference that would generate whatever you want, whatever you need on demand on the fly. And so I think Elon talked about this with macro hard a little bit. That was a piece of the vision. This has always been theorized, but it's becoming more and more real. And so Carpathie describes this idea of like a neural computer this way. And I think it's an interesting framing.

Obviously, it'll have implications for SaaS products that might be used in a headless under the hood scene way or might be competed with against these neural computers. But Carpathie describes it as, imagine a device that takes raw video or audio into basically what's a neural net and uses diffusion to render a UI that's unique for that moment. And so this sort of like on-the-fly instantiation of the exact U.S. that you need for that particular question or whatever problem you're trying to solve, whatever you're trying to do, is an interesting paradigm shift that it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of. So I most recently felt it when I was trying to understand Ryan Cohen's proposal for GameStop to take over eBay.

This is a big story. We'll go through it today. But I haven't tracked either company closely. We've had Ryan on the show, and we've talked about eBay and GameStop intermittently, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, what's the revenue for each company? What's the profit like? What are the different multiples? And so in a pre-chatGAPT world,

I would have gone to Google Finance or Yahoo Finance and pulled some data, maybe had two tabs up, maybe used one of their comparison tools. If I wanted to be really advanced, I would have copy and pasted the stats into a spreadsheet. If you're really working on Wall Street,

you might have like Cap IQ or Bloomberg plugging into a sheet, an Excel sheet that then can build you a comparison table and do like comps. And then once we got into the chat GPT world, you might do a deep research report, pull all that data, put it into a table, which is effectively marked down. And sometimes the tables render is a little weird and like you can kind of bounce around. But now the whole process from start to finish is just a single

prompt. It outputs an image. So you can pull up the image that I generated. So this was this was one prompt. I said, do a bunch of research on GameStop and eBay's valuation and key financial metrics, things like growth rate, top line, earnings, revenue, valuation, how the multiples fit together, build a nicely designed side-by-side comparison of the two companies. And you wind up getting something that is very digestible. Like just looking at this, I mean, it's obviously a little zoomed out, but you can zoom in and see, okay, eBay has about three times the revenue, $50 billion versus $15 for GameStop.

And revenue growth. eBay is growing while GameStop shrunk by 5%. eBay grew 8%. Operating income. eBay has 10 times the operating income at 2.2.2.8. billion versus $232 million for GameStop. And so you just get this like very easy, okay, what's the operating margin? eBay is up at 20% game stops down at 6.4%.

And so you can start to see on a price to sales ratio, Game stops at 4x, eBay's at four and a half X, but on a market cap to net income, Game stops higher, has a higher value, 34x versus net income versus eBay's 25x. So you can just sort of see this table and this is something that usually would have been like three or four steps to get here. And instead, it's just this single prompt. And so I think that there's, like, this is not a perfect result. Like, in that image, you can see that, like, it chose red as the color for all of GameStop's

financials, which is not what you'd normally do because red is usually for negative numbers, but those revenue figures are positive. Like, it could be better. I could probably go further and prompt it a couple more times to get exactly what I wanted, but it solved my problem of having, like, here's the summary of the question that you were actually asking, which is, like, you know, Like, how do these companies stack up to each other? What's the relative size of the business?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of them? And then, boom, you have a square image that you can easily text to someone and it's ultimately shareable. More importantly, I don't care what it used under the hood. It could have puppeteered a spreadsheet and put it all in comma separated values and make a CSV and it could have transformed it with Excel or Google Sheets under the hood. It could have written Python. It could have used pandas or sciat learn. It could have done anything it wanted to.

but it's all abstracted to me and I don't even think about it. And this is different from the previous era of like, okay, well, if I wanted to do some sort of stock comparison tool, I could vibe code a stock comparison tool with API integrations, make sure you have the data connections, but it's just kind of less necessary as the models get fatter and they sort of eat more and more of the process. And so Carpathie describes this concept as Software 3.0, and we should pull up his example because it's very similar. Of course, it happened like months ago, because he's ahead of me on everything, obviously. But he gave a good example of shifting from like, you have a problem that there's no solution for,

so you're going to vibe code an app to just a few weeks or months later, like the AI tools can just do it. And you don't need any code. You don't need any system to build, even though it's fun to build a system. And it's interesting and it allows for more, maybe more speed and more reliability. Like more and more things are like one shotable by the model. So let's pull up Andre Carpathie talking at Sequoia AIScent about his experience with Software 3.0. I think one more maybe example that comes to mind that is even more extreme than that is when I was building menu gen. So menu is this idea where you come to a restaurant, they give you a menu, there's no pictures usually. So I don't know what any of these things are usually.

I like 30% of the things I have no idea what they are, 50%. So I wanted to take a photo of the restaurant menu and to get pictures of what those things might look like in a generic. And so I built, I've i coded this app that basically lets you upload a photo and it does all this stuff and it runs on Vercel and It basically re-renders the menu and it gives you like all the items and it gives you a picture that it uses an image You know generator a four to basically OCR all the different titles Use the image generators to get pictures of them and then shows it to you and then I saw the software 3.0 version of this Which is which blew my mind which is literally just take your photo give it to Gemini and so say use nanobanana to overlay the things onto the menu and that a banana

basically returned an image that is exactly the picture of the menu that I took but it actually put into the pixels it rendered the different things in the menu and this blew my mind because actually all of my menu gen is perious it's working in the old paradigm that app shouldn't exist and yeah the software's three-pointed paradigm is a lot more kind of raw it just neural network is doing more and more of the work in your prompt order context is just the image and the output is an image and there's no need to have any of the app in between. So I think that people have to kind of like reframe. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, it's real.

And I had some takeaways from this. Like, what are the implications for this? And I think there's a few things. The first thing that was on my mind was that although we have gone through this crazy vibe coding boom where everyone is vibe coding apps, it feels. like a very temporary aberration. And also I know that even though there are millions and millions of people that have used Codex and Claude Code and OpenCla, like the numbers are big, but it's not at 20% of the U.S. population. Like it's just not at that level of adoption, as opposed to chat apps, which are at like 70, 80% penetration, right? Yeah, the other thing that's been interesting is non, like people outside of tech that have gotten into vibe coding

that have been pitching me their ideas here and there. Almost every time they're pitching me the idea, it is something that ClaudeCode and Codex can do themselves pretty well today, like just in one chat thread. Or the app. Like, the apps can do them. And that's what I'm like, what's blowing my mind now is that in many ways. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah. So, like, they're using vibe coding tools to vibe code something that doesn't necessarily need to exist because you could just use the app itself to do the thing. and they're already widely available. So it's been been interesting. Yeah. So I think there's,

I think there's two things. Like, one is that if you've been, like, hesitant to jump into vibe coding, uh, because, like,

it's just, it's a little bit too much of hassle. Like, And your Carpathie's, like, obviously very, very comfortable being like, oh yeah,

let me deploy to Versail and do all this. Like, you can figure all that out, but that leads to this world where it's like, oh, I was staying up all night. I was,

I was really, really like burning the midnight oil to get this app deployed and, like, do all this stuff. But then there's also this question, what you had, which is like, there needs to be this higher order loop of thinking around, okay, you have a problem. Should you actually vibe code an app, or should you just try and one shot it with the current model capabilities? Because for

a lot of things, like... And within... Yeah, within Chachapit, within Gemini, within Claude, the actual apps. Like, you can, like, take a picture of your food and say, hey, start tracking my calories. Like, there's a lot of things that the apps can just do in one chat thread that people are doing. But I think that there's like this tension between when you actually need to for sure go and vibe code something versus when you can just do it in like a one-shoted LLM context. Frontier models are already able to, in basically 90% of situations, I feel like instantiate exactly whatever's required to solve the actual problem under the hood entirely abstracting away

like code and tools. Like you will just not be aware of what's happening and it doesn't matter. And then the second... Yeah, I would add to my previous statement by saying, that doesn't mean that there's not necessarily a business there because sometimes taking a raw capability and presenting it to people in a way that's very easy for them to digest. You can still deliver value and you can get customers

and people will pay you money. Yep. But it has been fascinating to see, like, does this actually need to be an app? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a ton of apps and software. that will still be valuable, whether it has a liquidity pool or some sort of unique source of strength or some differentiation point that the existing chat apps can't hack at all. And then there's also just like marketing ARBs effectively where it's like, okay, yes,

any frontier model in a chat app could do this, but you weren't aware of it. And this company was really good at running ads to actually get awareness going. and then drive downloads of the specific thing. And so we see those in the app store all the time. The other thing that I was reminded of was, did you ever read Union Square Ventures 2016 blog post Fat Protocols? Are you familiar with this?

So Fat Protocols was this concept around how in the web, like web, I guess 1.0, 2.0, there were protocol layers, which are like TCPIP, HGTP, SMTP, like file transfer protocols, HTTP. And for like a couple of years, the crypto community was like the group that developed and maintained HTTP, they basically created the standard that the web ran on. And yet very little value accrued to the creators and the maintainers of that protocol. And crypto would be different because the Bitcoin protocol had the value capture component

like baked into it. And so there was this idea of like the application layer in blockchain would accrue very little value, and the protocol layer would capture the vast majority of value. So this is on the web, the applications on top of HTTP. You can think of, like, Facebook as a beneficiary of the protocol of HTTP, because that's how the actual information in the photos and the text gets transferred to you. But the HTTP standard does not accrue the value. The value accrues to the application on top. And if you scroll down, you'll see the blockchain example, which was sort of borne out.

that the application layer was pretty thin on top, and most of the value went to, like, the tokens and the protocol below. Yeah, exactly. Ethereum's a good example. Salon is a good example. Of course, there's value in the application layer, and there's some companies that are being built, but this was basically this thesis that he says,

we see this very early, we see this very clearly in two dominant blockchain networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Bitcoin network has a 10 billion market cap. Wow. I think it's like a trillion now, right? Isn't it $700 billion? Yet the last one.

largest companies built on top are worth a few hundred million at best. Now we have Coinbase which is in the tens of billions. So both sides of the protocol application layer did very well, but the point is still true. Similarly, Ethereum has a $1 billion market cap even before the emergence of real breakout applications on top and only a year after its public release. And so that was sort of the core thesis on this fat protocols thing. And I think there's something similar happening in the AI value chain. Of course, there's like a bunch of other dynamics going on in the AI value chain, and there's a lot of capture and complicated market dynamics. But the models feel like they're getting fatter every month, and they're sort of eating away at the

edges of what you can do with them. And so increasingly you can just get more and more out of the core model, which is an interesting dynamic. Third, there's still like this huge question of like Waldgarten jumping. We've talked about this before, but it's almost, we need like a different term for like the dead internet theory. It's like the walled garden internet theory. Like the internet's not dead. There's great information in Substack on certain legacy media websites and on Facebook and on X and on YouTube. But like all of those companies don't want to interact with each other. And so that's where you get something like, oh, well, like if you write code, you do get access to it loosely. Or if you're puppeteering a browser on a Mac Mini, you get access to that. Or,

If you're digging through iMessage locally, that can require a different workflow. But that's more of like a legal and business discussion than a technical one. Like there's no reason technically that a single LLM wouldn't be able to just query every single web resource, except for the fact that the various tech companies

don't want each other to talk to each other. And so the models, I think we'll continue to find a way under the walled garden, over the walled garden, through the walls. Like they'll seep everywhere. and it's more of a question of just inference cost, how long it takes to actually grind through the wall. But they're already figuring out a way around. And Open Claw is a good example of that.

A lot of the walled gardens were sort of brought down by running away. Yeah, except I think SAP came out and said, no unauthorized agents here. They're trying to put up the walls. They're trying to build a moat. They're trying to get some alligators to scare off the agents. Yes, but I would be very surprised if they're able. to stop me from if I have SAP and I'm running it locally, for me to take a screenshot of my computer and then tell the mouse to go where it wants. It's very hard to fight back against

the... Rune had a good tweet where he was like, you know, people are now just like vessels for the AI where they just like the AI tells them what to do and then they just act exactly like what the model says. Wasn't John Collison talking about you? John Collison was saying, like the humans get the thing off the high shelf. Every time I have to like go and like export a PDF and upload it to chat GPD because I can't get it in there by default, even though I could just give them a web URL, I have to export it, print,

or whatever. Let's talk about, I think we should talk about GameStop. Let's do it. What's up with GameStop? What's going on with GameStop? Yesterday, it came out through the Wall Street Journal. GameStop was preparing to make an offer for eBay as part of CEO Ryan Cohen's plan to turn the retailer into $100 billion-plus

juggernaut. GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer and could submit an offer as soon as later this month, which they did this morning. If eBay isn't receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to eBay's shareholders. And they released a letter yesterday to Paul Pressler, who's the chairman of the board over at eBay, happens to be a friend of mine. Yeah.

Wait, really? Yeah. Yeah. His daughter and my wife are good friends. Oh, cool. So we end up hanging out a decent amount. And we're neighbors. Does he do a lot of, like, podcasts or press appearances? It can, we can, it can be discussed.

I'm just saying, like, dominant determinism of Pressler would be like somebody who dominates the press. The press circuit. I think you would be doing a press circuit all the time. Anyway, Paul, Paul is fantastic. Yeah. And Ryan wrote this letter to him yesterday. GameStop is proposing to acquire all common stock of eBay at $125 per share. We have accumulated a 5% economic stake in eBay through derivatives and beneficial ownership of common stock

and are filing a Schedule 13D and HSR notification tomorrow. Our offer is $125 per share comprising 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock, which we will get to in just a little bit because Ryan Cohen discussed this on CNBC this morning. that represents a 46% premium to eBay's ineffective closing price on February 4th, 2026. The day GameStop started accumulating its position in eBay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but let's go straight to the CNBC. So, so, quickly, there was a question. So Bislett said, can someone please tell me how GameStop has $56 billion. It's not a $56 billion company. There were questions, and Ryan Cohen went in the with Aaron Sorkin over at CNBC.

Put the gloves on. Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC, Squawk Box, to interview about the GameStop eBay acquisition. We can play this. Through how you could get to that price and how it would work. It's on our website. It's half cash, half stock.

But the details are on our website. Can you help? I've read them, but can you help our audience understand? them? Yeah, which part exactly? Well, I think we can start with the idea that the market cap of GameStop is call it $11 billion. You have $9 billion on your balance sheet. Arguably, if you're providing effectively all of your stock and then the cash that gets you to 20, you have this letter from TD. That's another 20.

We're now at 40, but we're still off by, call it 16. And the 20, as far as I understand, while it's considered a highly confident letter, meaning TD's saying they're highly confident that they would provide the financing, it's not locked financing. Yeah, we'll see what happens. Founder, no. Never doubt. I hear you.

Dead hair. I understand that. I'm just trying to understand where the rest of the money would come from. It's half cash, half stock. I hear you. I'm just saying that that math doesn't get you to the price that you're offering. Brian, that's a pretty straightforward question. I don't get it.

Where's the rest of the money coming from? Andrew laid it out pretty clearly. I don't understand your question. We're offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done. But the full details of the offer are on our website. But you're on our air.

We thought we'd get... But I don't understand your question. Where's the money coming from? That's the question. You're wondering, record scratch, freeze friend. You're wondering how. I tried to buy a $55 billion company with $40 billion, earmarked. Do you think he was expecting this to go out on Sunday, Monday, GameStop, stocks, pop, like, crazy.

Yeah. And it's actually down today. I guess that's possible. I don't know. I also don't understand why he can't just say, like, hey, we're in the process. Like, we got a highly likely letter from a bank for 20. Yeah, we need 16 more, but we're going to go get more letters from other banks. we're going to go get other equity investors.

Like, this is a whole process. We're excited to announce this. And this is like our first close. Like, we're not like we're fully ready. Yeah. But maybe you can't do that. I don't know. He took this offer to Paul,

the chairman of the board. Yeah. Now Paul has to look at this and be like, okay, is this a real offer? Yeah. And I imagine Paul will watch CNBC. And it's not. That's not going to give anyone a lot of confidence.

Yeah. It's, yeah, I mean, you can imagine it in the, in the context of like buying a house. You know, you show up and someone's, is like I have 80% of the money. And like my bank will underwrite me for 50% and I have 30% in cash and you're just like,

look, I need the full amount. Yeah, the tough thing is like I'm wondering, I'm wondering what Ryan, you know, eBay is an incredible business. It's been remarkably durable. They've faced an onslaught of competition for every single category from sneakers to watches to art to name any cars, right?

category there is like a vertical competitor to eBay. Yeah. And yet the business has done has been remarkably, remarkably strong. Yeah. It's up pretty meaningfully this year, right? Like, management is executing. Yeah. And it's unfortunate for Ryan and his bid that the most viral sort of video clip out of all of this is just him failing to answer like, you know, a pretty straightforward question and not having an opportunity to talk about, okay, why do you, you know, presumably if you're buying this company, you think, you think. think it can and should be worth a lot more. What's your plan?

What's your plan for the business? Why are you better suited to run it than Jamie, who's been in the seat since 2020, worked at eBay from 2001 to 2009? So he's a veteran, knows the business very well. And you're coming in $16 billion short. At least that's what it looks like. Anyways, this bid could be over before it really started. Yeah.

Or, I mean, it could attract a bunch of investors who want to line up and fall in line and wind up producing the 55 or so required. But it does feel like it's a ways away. Breaking news for gamers out there. What's that? I know a lot of gamers out there. They have laptops. They're worried about the price of these laptops, the batteries, electricity is getting expensive. What are you going to do?

How are you going to charge? We got the solution for you. It's a gasoline-powered laptop. So it's pretty simple. It's a one-of-kind gasoline-powered laptop. It's offered for just $850. Looks like it's running Windows XP. You might not be able to play the latest and greatest games.

Will it run crisis? Maybe, maybe not. With a full tank, you can get an hour and a half of runtime out of this time. It runs a two-stroke engine, and it's perfect for off-grid computing. That's hot right now. And so the laptop specs, let's take you through it. It's got an Intel Core 2 Duo. Two gigs of RAM. Ram's going up in price. This is valuable. This is an appreciating asset.

120 gigs of hard drive space. That's going to hold a lot of games. When you're off grid, you only have a little bit of gasoline. You want a game. This is the laptop for you. It's a good working. And it's running Windows XP. And it says that it starts easy. The two-stroke engine on the gasoline-powered laptop. Yes, it does start easily. Colin in the X-chat says it gets 300 tweets to the gallon. Oh, no, I accidentally set GTA 5 to max settings. Well, at least it'll serve as a benchmark test. How many Chrome tabs can it open before it crashes? People are having fun with this.

But the gasoline-powered laptop, this is true hacker mindset. Whoever built this is an incredible engineer and did something. They did be impossible. They built a gasoline-powered laptop. I've seen a couple other of these, like, gasoline-powered projects. people making all sorts of different things. It's always a funny gag. Obviously, do you have...

The actual breaking news is that the White House is considering vetting AI models before they are released. Trump admin, which took a non-interventionist approach. AI is now discussing imposing oversight on AI models before they are made publicly available. Well, FDA for AI. We'll see. It would be potentially an executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures. Okay, so this would be an executive order to create an executive order to create an AI working group.

a working group that could potentially create an oversight body. Okay. So we're a couple steps away, but it seems reasonable. I don't know. Depends on what the benchmarks are, but you certainly don't want. And Trump says, we're going to make this industry absolutely the top because right now it's a beautiful baby that's born. Interesting way to put it. We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive.

Is this real? It's a real quote. Are you messing with me? This is a real quote that Trump said about AI. He said, we have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules.

And even stupid rules. It's not a baby. It's a $10 trillion industry. It's like the engine of the global economy. Anyway. Dean Ball's got a quote in here. What does he say? The technology is moving extremely fast and there are few formal procedures,

but they don't want to overregulate. He said it's a tricky balance. I say don't release it unless it's. It's acing tax bench. It's got to be able to do the taxes before it gets out into the wild. No, obviously you want these models to be safe. You want them to be reliable. You want them to avoid negative externalities.

And anything that gets us in that direction is probably good, but everything comes with tradeoff. So final post of the day. Yeah. I'm Tommy. Hi, Ph.D. in Hammorology here. All right. So what we're looking at is a nail. That is the correct mindset.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Also, go check out Riley Walls' new project. He's shipping stuff every week. This one got a million views. You probably already saw it, 27,000 likes. 10% of AMC movie showing sell no tickets at all. So if you want to go see a movie in a private theater with no one else, he made a site that finds empty theaters and tells you exactly when you should go and book.

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Around us. Zero seats. Enjoy it. Enjoy being allowed. You got it. This is very funny. Yeah, he does surface some that has. have one seat or two seats. Interesting way to make a new friend. Me and you. Because you think so,

you think, oh, I got the zero seat theater. You're in the one seat theater and somebody's like, I want to meet the psycho that went to the empty theater. And then they're talking your ear off. Who knows? Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Love you. Goodbye. A little bit missed time there.