TBPN Live - OpenAI Math Breakthroughs, SpaceX’s $40B Nvidia Deal, Quant Firms Hiring Idea Guys | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: October 7, 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.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

First off, I got a little movie review for you. I saw a movie yesterday. I went to the theater and I saw Prime Time. And I wanted to, yeah, oh, okay. I want a review from those on the production team who have seen Primetime, the new Robert Pattinson film. But I thought I would try and take you on sort of a film critique, a journey with a review that sort of channels the way Tyler reviews,

movies. So here's my review of prime time. It was good. The audio was good and the video was good. Act one was good. Act two was good. And act three was good. The acting was good. And the lighting and the cinematography was good. And the set design was good. So overall, I feel like I have I would say it's a good movie. Strong review. Pretty good. That was a good review. Pretty good.

What do you guys think? You liked it? Let's get Scott up here. I saw that movie. Yeah? You liked it? I thought was great. How cool was the frame?

It felt like I was watching IMAX format, but it was just four three. They used 23 different cameras on that movie. The cinematography was crazy, right? And the highlights blown out, and there was so much grain. Like, it was. It was like way too stylized. for a Chris Hansen movie. I had no idea where any of this would like,

where these ideas came from. It feels like they were just pulling from every different camera from that era. Yeah. It was really, really cool. Well, Lance Oppenheim. There we go. Lance Oppenheim, he does documentaries.

Have you seen Renfair and? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Okay, cool. Yeah. But yeah, really, really fun, you know, creative way to throw back to like the way people watch TV at that time. Yeah, four by three. I like that I like that Chris Hanson was kind of like the antagonist the entire time. Yeah, it's a it's a complex

Investigation of his career and and and the way he's remembered did he go too far. It feels like a little bit heavy-handed like it's pretty clear Yeah, the the vision. It doesn't fully leave you open to make your own judgment, but you of course can Yeah, which I thought was a nice touch and and Robert Pattinson is just in fighting form like he's in a flow state. He's just in flow state. Yeah, he's just in flow state. Yeah, He's really good. Anyway, we clearly were teasing it, but of course we have the TBPN Road to Christmas Countdown ready for you. Let's let you know. Let's remind everyone there are 78 days until Christmas.

Get ready. Get ready. If you missed it yesterday, we did an interview, a deep dive into the Christmas Tree Tree Farmers Association of America. understanding everything from how the Christmas tree industry is structured to techniques for keeping your Christmas tree alive. And if you watch any tech or business content this week, it's got to be that. It's got to be that. It's got to be that. It's got to be that.

We highly recommend that you donate. I made a donation yesterday. Treesfor Troops.org. Give whatever you can. They also do company matching. So if you work at a company that matches donations, If you're an early anthropic employee and they match three to one, back the truck up. Throw down 100 mill.

Come on, let's do it. Let's get every troop must have the biggest tree possible, a 40-footer. I want a White House-style tree in every troop's home. That would be amazing. No, but he had some harsh words for the plastic tree industry. He called them toilet brushes, which was hilarious. I'd never heard that slur for those plastic trees before, but he had it ready to go, which I enjoyed.

And I noticed some people in the comments saying, hey, look, I understand that a real tree is better, but not everyone can afford a real tree. And the economics of a plastic tree just sometimes make more sense for certain people. And I understand that. Not everyone's in the position to buy a brand new expensive tree. Anyway, Ben Thompson's going through a bunch of frustrations. over Mac OS. He's vibe coding, building apps.

The apps need permissions. We've talked about this, the agentic era. But yesterday there was a post that hit the timeline that was pretty crazy, a sort of truth nuke for the Adobe crowd. Someone decompiled basically every Adobe product. ArtCraft, getartcraft.com, capable tools for artists, and you can download for free. all sorts of different tools that they have and they basically cloned

What kind of tools? Photoshop, Premiere Pro. It feels like they can do a lot. I'm not exactly sure if they decompiled everything in the Adobe ecosystem but listed here is Photocraft, which is clearly Photoshop, vector craft which is Adobe Illustrator,

Film Craft, which is Premiere Pro, lightcraft, which is Lightroom, print craft, effect craft, which looks like After Effects, and then design craft, which is, I think, in design, more crafts are on the way. And so it says all Adobe products re-implemented from scratch free and open source. And this is pretty, pretty crazy. There have been open source competitors to Photoshop for a long time. They've always lagged a lot. I downloaded the Photoshop decompilation, Photocraft, used it a little bit. Not bad, pretty

remarkable how many tools did make it over. It actually doesn't have everything that you would expect. Some of the really cool features of modern Photoshop are actually AI and they run on the server. So if you want to patch a hole, you've always been able to fill it in with a full color. You've also been able to do content aware fill where it has a basic algorithm that looks at the colors of the pixels around, the textures and tries to blend that in. But it can be a little, it's like pretty hallucinatory. And then recently, Adobe Longer, AI fill. I forget what it's called. It's not content aware fill. It's it's it's some generative fill. I think they call it generative fill and that of course runs on the server

usually uses nano banana or they have a they have a couple fine-tune models and that feature because it's server side doesn't work. So there's this interesting thing we're like yeah you're in the death of software you can just decompile everything but at the same time I probably want my software to run on the server. I want the server to be stable. I need the I need services so all the investments that software makers made in providing like inference heavy tooling actually sort of creates a little bit more of a moat. Obviously the modes are decreasing, but there still is something where if I were doing heavy duty Photoshop use, photograph would not be a perfect substitute for my workflow. For some people, they'll be like, yeah, this is actually perfect. But you've always been able to download an

illegal copy of Photoshop, but this is less illegal, maybe. It's unclear. It's unclear because it's probably... Is Adobe responded yet? I don't know. But it's going to be fun to watch the open source decompilation community duke it out with all the tech companies. Yeah, the interesting thing is there's been so many reasons to not buy Adobe for so long. Sure. Just given that historically, I would think of an idea for even like a joke.

Yeah. And I'd be thinking in my head, I wish I had the time to Photoshop this or I wish I had somebody handy that could just Photoshop this. now you just, you get there with a prompt. Yeah. Especially for these sort of less professional use cases. Totally. Tools sort of stick around if it's like you need to lock in and do like a full day of work. Like there's no substitute yet for like if you were going to be spending eight hours in After Effects or eight hours in Premiere Pro, you're probably not going to be replaced that with a prompt.

But if it's like, oh yeah, you want to just like, you know, composite two images together for a meme or add some, text, a prompt is going to get you there. And it would have been 20 minutes of work in Photoshop. Now it's, you know, one minute of work in Shot Chip-T or any other tool. And so the, obviously we're seeing like these two spikes of intelligence right now. Anything that can be done in a purely virtual environment is accelerating extremely quickly. Anything that touches like the real world or requires human data or requires like this flywheel, that's much slower.

And the open-AI math results like show a similar. story. We can talk about that more later, but I'm sure most people saw it. It's a pretty crazy result. What is the highlight, the high level? It's like 70 different problems, right? I think it was, so I think the full number is 720, like manuscripts. Okay. And then so it's kind of hard to like, how do you delineate like an actual problem? Yeah. Yeah, there's like a massive list of like unsolved problems. Yeah. The press release just calls it a broad range. It's like we solved math. It's interesting. There's a good Josh Gans article analysis on substack that we can read through later. And Francois Cholet, the creative RKGI, broke down a theory of what's going on with this big jump in progress.

And what it means for overall generalization? He said, what if the jagged frontier is mainly math plus code, which you can push arbitrarily far with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, RLVR? and everything else starts to plateau because it's still bottlenecked by human generated data. Model performance in non-verifiable areas has kept improving steadily, albeit much slower than for math and code. But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G, the general intelligence, itself driven by RLVR, or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training, which is still continually happening on a massive scale. A lot of things depend on the answer to this question.

And so this is less of a feel-the-A-G-I moment and more of a feel-the-super-intelligence moment for me, personally, because no human intelligence has ever been able to solve this many math problems this quickly at this level of mathematical ability. Like it has never happened in human history. It's beyond, it feels like it's beyond,

Einstein grinding on this or anyone else really. And so it feels like it's something new. At the same time, it's very spiky. I still like the machine intelligence name because it has a different shape. And we're trying to mold the machine intelligence into something that slots in neatly into like a human, a general framework.

But it keeps breaking out and spiking in these odd areas because of the ability. to train in these environments. So the terminology debates are sort of irrelevant. There's clearly some near-term impacts that are worth working through. As I mentioned earlier, Ben Thompson has been working through these Mac OS frustrations

while he goes deeper in Agentic AI. He wrote about this in a Stratory Post called Apple and the Hackers Future. He said, what I'm much more interested in is controlling the software layer myself. The fact of the matter is that with AI, you can decompile almost all existing software.

There is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish, and you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything. That's way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that third-party developers don't suck.

And so he's talked about the frustration of you use an agent, to build a piece of software and that piece of software lives on your Mac Mini or your computer and it needs to access the desktop to save files or it needs to access the network. And when you build a new piece of software, MacOS says, hey, this is a piece of software you're running, but you need to explicitly give it permissions. You have to click yes on the pop-up. We're all familiar with this from iOS. You download an app and it's like, can it send you notifications?

Can it have your location? Can it get into your camera roll? Right? Like these apps, even after you install them, they're very walled off for privacy reasons, which is great. But Ben wants to operate at a different level of abstraction. Give a coding harness the ability to write software that then maintains the same level of approvals

and access and permissions that the overarching AI agent has been given. There's been this bulk case for Linux. It's possible that we see more. Linux boxes and maybe even Linux on the desktop because all the downsides of Linux are offset by oh well now you just have a prompt to interface with it instead of anytime like getting the volume changed in Linux is sometimes like a command line thing and it's such a hassle but if you have a prompt there you can just say oh like fix this driver change this thing and it'll just go do it what's interesting is like we went from like old games like halo and modern

Warfare 2 and Minecraft being decompiled, and then Photoshop and some other Adobe software. And I'm wondering, like, how far are we away from just straight up decompiling MacOS? Because if you can decompile MacOS, then you could potentially patch security features that you don't like, change that fact that every new application needs permissions granted explicitly. you could just go into the source code and recompile your new version of your operating system that's based on Mac OS. Now, clearly Apple's not going to be happy about that.

It's really complicated, but what do you think? Yeah, I mean, isn't that just like jailbreaking, like your iPhone? We've been able to do that for a while, but no one does it because then you lose, like, a bunch of features of Apple. Yeah, I wonder how hostile Apple would be to that because is there a way to decompile jailbreak Mac OS

and still appear to Apple's servers, as like, oh yeah, this is like a legit MacOS install. And so we will still serve them iCloud, or we will still treat it as a viable iMessage recipient, which is like what people want. They want iMessage, they want the ecosystem, they want security updates, but then they also, or at least the hackers in Ben Thompson's analysis.

Sure they'll love it and they'll encourage it and they'll celebrate it. Yeah, yeah. But it does feel like it does feel like it could be good for the hacker future in the Apple ecosystem. If you can eventually just point an AI model and say, like, you know what, I don't like this about Mac OS, but I like everything else, just change this feature at a very root- level and it goes and breaks in and does exactly what you want. Hackers could be like, yeah, okay, we're staying with MacOS for a while because the hardware

is great. They obviously still have a huge hardware mode. But there are a whole bunch of other issues in the new world where software is infinitely malleable. Adobe Market Cap where we traded down. 5% over the last five days, 10% over the past month. I don't know, there's like an ongoing Saspocalypse narrative.

It's down 33% over the past year, but it doesn't seem like people are canceling their creative cloud subscriptions en masse because of this, but it'll be interesting to see where this goes. This is definitely like you gotta be pretty early adopter-ish to be like, yeah, I'm running the decompiled version of this thing and like I modded my own halo into modern warfare and I'm having fun with that.

I did see someone got a nuke, in Modern Warfare 2, Minecraft edition. Did you get a nuke? I did not drop a nuke. It seems like you did drop a nuke on the show. Yeah, right now. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

I feel like the sound effects are an anti-climactic there. Okay, there we go. I guess it would be quiet. There we go, the truth new. It's been a good run. Goodbye, everyone. We'll be back in five seconds. John.

Do you value human intelligence above all other human qualities? No. I knew the answer to that already. Because we've been operating with golden retriever mindset. Yes, yes. The golden retriever mindset, two years ago, we sort of coined this on the show. It's the two-year anniversary of TBPN, by the way. We started in October of 2024.

There we go. Yeah, two years in. But yes, the golden retriever mindset. 200 to go. Be hot, friendly, and dumb. Something like, it was like, this is pre-lux maxing, But it was basically like focus on physical fitness. Don't make enemies.

Be very friendly. And don't think you're the smartest person in the room. No one really likes to know at all. But also, you're going to have a bad time if you prize value, if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you're going to have a bad time. That was Ilya Sutskiver in 2023. And, yeah, it seems like that is playing out in real time. But there are still a whole bunch of. of other things.

And I don't know, people are, like, intelligence is still really important, obviously. It's just applied in so many different ways. It's just odd that, like, the IMO gold medalist to startup founder pipeline is super rich. And yet the work of a Scott Wu at cognition day to day does not look like solving IMO level. It looks like high stakes poker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dealmaking, hiring, strategy, implementation,

product development. There's so many other things. It would be very funny if it was just like, oh yeah, actually, like solving math problems is the most. Like, if you can solve a math problem, your company will make like a billion dollars. So you've got to solve like 12 a year. So you've got to just staff like a lot of mathematicians

and like just be solving these and like, yeah, as long as, okay, how are you going to solve 20 of these math problems that get you a billion dollars each next year? Because we need to see growth. We need to underwrite these. It's pretty high margin. but you've got to pay the mathematicians a lot. No, it's never really been, that's not the work,

but it's all these other human qualities that seem to be sticking around. Rune says, do not let yourself be reduced to the status of an audience at a magic show uncomprehendingly clapping as machine intelligence creates parcels of astounding knowledge.

All of thus is for us to be understood by us to state our own curiosities. It's all really happening. Yeah, the good, news here, the internal model that was used. Why is he taking shots at being an audience member at a magic show? That's like my favorite thing to do. I know. Kind of a low blow. I'm like the number one audience member at a magic show. I love magic shows and I love being there. Being like, wow, this is amazing. That's the best. That's the best. I don't need to be the guy being like,

oh, I figured out the magic trick. I know how it works. I just want to sit there and be off. And that's my experience today. I'm just like really impressive math. That's awesome, but I don't, I don't need to redid it. We did it. SpaceX is looking to raise 40 billion to give to Jensen. Blockbuster debt deal's latest sign of vast spending on chips and other infrastructure. The company is seeking to raise about 10 billion in bank loans and 30 billion in investment grade debt to fund its blockbuster chip order. Private capital group Apollo is expected to lead the financing effort and help sell the debt to a broad base of investors. PIMCO, was among a small group of lenders in talks to fund the deal.

SpaceX financing plans underscore the vast sums that are being raised to pay for investment in data centers. Insurance and pension funds would be able to buy SpaceX's debt due to its BBB credit rating, the second lowest investment grade ranking. Such funds take much more limited positions in junk-rated notes. Apollo and Pimco declined to comment. The deal would strengthen ties between SpaceX and Nvidia after Musk vowed to double down on the group's technology for his AI initiatives. It would also mark a win for NVIDIA as it contends with growing competition from chipmakers aiming to challenge its dominance in advanced semiconductors.

We've decided to build exclusively on NVIDIA because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels. That's interesting because that's only on the short term, right? Because he's still doing tariffab. He's going to make his own chips. He's making his own chips at Tesla.

And he has a deal with Intel for that? Yeah. So he's kind of just saying like, right now. I think he recognizes like right now it's very strategic to just kiss the ring, basically. Investors whom SpaceX had previously approached about financing its purchase said they only received a short two-page deal memo with pictures of outer space and an arrow pointing out that the company was going to build data centers somewhere in the universe. How are we supposed to take that to IC, one of the people said. Sounds like a pretty good memo to me. I was laughing at this too, and then I was thinking like, it really is pretty simple.

Like, it's $40 billion, buy some chips, what is the value of the chips? How do you underwrite those? I mean, I guess you need more, but you can probably back of the envelope it yourself. But it is funny that the photos that we saw in the S-1 made it into even the private credit side of the deal-making. exploring, putting billions to work into AI infrastructure, you should probably be doing a lot of your own work on understanding the risks. Totally. How this could go wrong.

Yeah. And I think that giving money to Elon and just sort of trusting the process has work to date. Yeah. And so he's sort of earned the right to have a, you know, shorter than average memo, I think at this point. What does Nick Presler have to say? Says, look at him. That's my qual. You're what? You're qualitative. My vibe specialist. Look at him. You notice anything different about it? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint. His name is Jaden. He won a local poetry competition in Bushwick. Yeah, I'm sure the vibe. This is based on real reporting here. From AQR Capital, quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants. I've been skeptical about the whole software is commoditized. Ideas are the moat argument. But I've seen firsthand the best quant and technical firms in the world. higher thinkers, liberal arts grads and generalists.

I predict the trend accelerates. Yeah, I actually know, now that I'm thinking about it, I know a lot of hedge fund guys who have philosophy degrees. And I'm kind of biased here, I think, based on the sample size. But I know a lot of people who are like studied history and gone into investing. And they brought a very differentiated lens to the practice. and some of them did really well because of that, because they were able to, you know, understand the way, like,

the Eurozone might develop more because they studied, you know, history in a PhD program. They had a crazy Euro summer. Yeah, basically. So let's read this actual letter. The question being asked not only in finance, but also across industries and business schools, is what remains a durable differentiator once AI has surpassed, past many of humanity's analytical and technical capabilities.

Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor. Of course, AQR, what does AQR actually stand for? It's like advanced quantitative research, I think. Is that right? Did I one shot? Applied. Applied quantitative research. No.

We should know that. Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor or in business school dean, creativity and emotional intelligence. That's what's going to get you, the big bucks on Wall Street going forward. You got to win that poetry competition in Bushwick if you want to get the big bonus. Not because these qualities are wholly immune to AI, but because in the age of AI, they are domains where people can develop a durable advantage. AQR said Golden Retriever Max.

They agree. They agree. The air, the time of the golden retriever is upon us. You're in Europe and you're building the data center, you've got to call Cisco. You also got to procure a beautiful, beautiful building because take a look at this European data center. Amazing. This solves so much, this is so good, right?

This is what we want. This would change so many things. If we had a data center, if Abilene looked like Versailles, it's a completely different conversation. Jordi, do you disagree? I agree. I'm on to something, right? I agree. Give me credit here. Build Versailles as a data center. Actually, turn Versailles into a data center, then copy-paste it into every community in America. Okay, so I'm so confused because this image came out of a thread from the co-founder of Mistral, which he posted announcing Lechonk, their new model yesterday. Oh, it's a train station.

But then it's getting community notice. I think he might have been just messing. Was he messing with people? Brutal. It seems like it's a train station in France. Hmm. He pranked us. Well, it will be a data center.

Soon, I think the traction on this post shows you that people want beautiful data centers. And this is the future. A reporter was on the ground. Oh, yeah. Apparently inside a data center, they were asking one of the construction workers, His thoughts on the current labor market. Let's pull this up. So when you hear data centers, what comes to mind?

I'm working at Homer City building the new data center. People say it's only temporary. It's only when they're building it out. Then what happens? Hey, every job in my field is temporary. That's true, too. I hear you, man. So when you hear data centers, what comes from?

Yeah, the reporter's like, yeah, that's a good point, actually. Yeah, people haven't really said that before. Like, that's kind of a genius take. I don't know. I've never heard that. It's like, yeah, they're temporary, but every construction job December, that's the little point. Funny. Anyway, what if instead of Greek life it was Chinese life? Yeah, bro, I'm rushing Mao Zedong next semester. There's like 1.4 billion people in my pledge class.

I thought that was just very funny. Instead of Greek life. Because we use the Greek alphabet. Chinese. It'd be very funny. David Holes shares reflecting on 19. 1920s images of people working on massive generators for the electric electrification of the modern world makes me realize that the past was wildly futuristic too. This image was so seeing this was honestly depressing to me in some ways because it felt like it feels in some ways like a mid-jorney image of the future. And yet we were doing this over 100 years ago. And it really makes you. We don't know the full story. feeling the stagnation.

These guys could be larping. These could be larpers, and this could all be cardboard. And they could be like, yeah, let's just, like, we got to build something really cool and take a photo of it. And so they just built something huge, but it actually has no functional purpose. You don't know. You don't know. But I think it's real because we did get the electrification. We enjoy it every day.

That's right. I think it was possible. We did it. We did it. We created more ad space. You saw this? DIY device turns your. car window into a digital billboard. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it.

DIY system, it's called Holo Glass and it turns your car into a moving display. It can turn almost any car window into a digital display for ads. This is the future. It allows you to basically digitize the exterior of your windows to share content on the go, says the founder, who I invited on the show. Hopefully we'll get them soon. You can literally pop it in, pop it out. We make them for all makes and models.

If you're getting Jaguar Type 01, get a couple of these in there. Offset that cost. Run some ads. An app controls what you see from videos on your phone to a custom sign you can generate in seconds. The system needs called half an hour. Can you just blast Paw Patrol out for the people? You can do whatever you want. For the other citizens sitting in traffic?

Yes, yes. This is extremely cyber pumped. If you're running this with the Nouveau-Lari, with the cyber truck, with the Jaguar Type-01, and you're just blaring ads. Look at this. It attaches, just a full-on projector. This company's hilarious,

just an off-the-shelf projector. And they're just selling you a projector and amount and the software system. It's brilliant, John. It's brilliant. We love it. I was getting worried that there weren't going to be that many more ad inventory services.

So what does it cost? And then what kind of revenue can you generate if you opt into serving ads? It starts at about $300. I feel like this will math out. It depends on, maybe not in year one. So the audience is what matters. So where are you driving this?

Because if you're driving this around Sand Hill Road and you're advertising a bunch of really high ticket items to venture capitalists could be really high AOV, really high ARPU. But if you're driving it around some place where people don't have as much disposable income, you're not going to be seeing the same CPM. How much do you think somebody in a. city like L.A. could make on a daily basis. I don't know. Do they give any estimates? I have no idea. I think that I think it probably costs a lot more than that to run like one of those taxi ads on the top of a roof on a per day basis.

So I think the math could actually be pretty compelling, right? If you can basically pay back the unit in six months and then from that point on, you're just getting paid to commute. I like it. Thank you for tuning into TBPN today. It's been an honor. Leave us $5,000 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify sign for a newsletter at TBPN.com and we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.