Tech Brew Ride Home - Elon Says: IPO NOW!

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Anthropic continues to project strength in the AI race. How OpenAI is rolling out ads on ChatGPT. Netflix wants to become TikTok faster than TikTok can become them. YouTube wants to have it both ways when it comes to AI. And Elon wants SpaceX to win the great IPO race of 2026. Anthropic’s CEO stuns Davos with Nvidia criticism (TechCrunch) OpenAI rolls out age prediction on ChatGPT (Reuters) OpenAI Lines Up Advertisers, Reveals Key Details Ahead of Ads Launch (The Information) Netflix Is Testing Vertical Video Features For Mobile (THR) YouTubers will be able to make Shorts with their own AI likenesses (The Verge) YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s Big Ideas for 2026: More Superstar Creators and Transparency, Less AI Slop (THR) Why Elon Musk Is Racing to Take SpaceX Public (WSJ) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Anthropic continues to project strength in the AI race. How OpenAI is rolling out ads on chat GPT. Netflix wants to become TikTok faster than TikTok can become them. YouTube wants to have it both ways when it comes to AI. And Elon wants SpaceX to win the great IPO race of 26. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. There's a ton of chatter about using AI agents right now. but no one seems to be talking about how these agents aren't always perfect. Sometimes they delete the wrong files or make changes you didn't authorize, and when that happens, you're left to clean up the mess. That is, unless you're using Rubric Agent Cloud. It's the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern, and rewind AI agent actions. And if your business relies on AI agents, you need those abilities. On a singular platform, it helps you unleash more agents faster while mitigating risk. If you're running AI agents and want to sleep better at night, Rubrik is worth

checking out. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to the platform. Head to rubric.com. That's rubr-b-r-k.com. Over at the old the Davos, Demas Hasebis says there aren't any plans to put ads in Gemini and, in response to OpenAI testing ads in chat GPT saying, quote, maybe they feel they need to make more revenue. But also, there was this. interesting sort of power play by Anthropic, quoting TechCrunch. Last week, after reversing an earlier ban, the U.S. administration officially approved the sale of Nvidia's H-200 chips, along with a chip line by AMD, to approved Chinese customers. Maybe they aren't these chipmakers' shiniest most advanced chips, but their high-performance

processors used for AI making the export controversial. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amo Dai unloaded on both the administration and the chip companies over the decision. The criticism was particularly notable because one of those chipmakers, Nvidia, is a major partner and investor in Anthropic. Quote, the CEOs of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back, Amadai said, incredulous in response to a question about the new rules. The decision is going to come back to bite the U.S., he warned. We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips, he told Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, who was interviewing him. So I think

think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips. Amo Dai then painted an alarming picture of what's at stake. He talked about the, quote, incredible national security implications of AI models that represent essentially cognition that are essentially intelligence. He likened future AI to a country of geniuses in a data center saying to imagine a hundred million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner all under the control of one country or another. This image underscored why he thinks chip exports matter so much, but then came the biggest blow. I think this is crazy, Amadai said of the administration's latest move. It's a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that Boeing made the casings. That sound you hear? The team at Nvidia

screaming into their phones. Maybe it was just an unguarded moment. It's possible he got swept up in his own rhetoric and blurted out the analogy, but given Anthropic's strong position in the AI market, it seems more likely he felt comfortable speaking with confidence. The company has raised billions, is valued in the hundreds of billions, and its Claude Coding Assistant has developed a reputation as a highly beloved and top-tier AI coding tool, particularly among developers working on complex real-world projects. It's also entirely possible that Anthropic genuinely fears Chinese AI labs and wants Washington to act. If you want to get someone's attention, nuclear proliferation comparisons are probably

a pretty effective way to do it. But what's perhaps most remarkable is, that ammo dye could sit on stage at Davos, drop a bomb like that, and walk away to some other gathering without fear that he just adversely impacted his own business, end quote. OpenAI has begun rolling out age prediction on chat GPT globally to identify under 18 users and to apply automatic content protections as it prepares to add adult content. Quoting Reuters, when the age prediction model estimates that an account may belong to someone under 18, chat GPT automatically applies additional protections designed to reduce exposure to sensitive content, opening I said in a statement, users mistakenly placed in the under 18 experience will regain

full access by submitting a selfie through persona and identity verification service. In the EU, the feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Opening AI's CEO of applications, Fiji Simo had in December said that she expects adult mode to debut within chat GPT in the first quarter of 26, following Chief Executive Sam Altman's comments about allowing mature content for users who verify their age, end quote. By the way, back on the ads front, quoting the information, Open AI has started offering its new chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, according to two people familiar with the matter. To start off, the company is charging on the basis of ad views, as opposed to per ad clicks that are typical at large sellers of search ads like Google and Amazon,

the people said. Open AI is asking, that small pool of advertisers for less than $1 million in spending commitments each over a several-week trial period, with ads launching in early February, the people said, the company does not yet offer technology for advertisers to easily buy ads themselves, but is working on getting self-service ads up and running, the people said. Advertisers and agency executives said they have been intrigued by the prospect of buying ads that appear in chat GPT, thanks to weekly active users of about 900 million people, and because the personalized nature of user chats could make ads more effective.

OpenAI last week gave examples of what the ads could look like, such as an ad showing a particular sauce brand when a user looks up a recipe. The company said it will show ads to U.S. users of the free version of chat GPT as well as to those paying $8 per month, a tier of the company just added in the U.S. It said ads would appear within weeks. While OpenAI is starting by charging on the basis of views, the company may change this approach after it begins testing, said one of the people. Major search advertising companies like Amazon and Google generally sell ads on a cost-per-click

model charging for ads based on whether the user clicks on the ad. Social media firms like meta charge on the cost-per-impression basis that OpenAI is using. Which model will be the most lucrative approach for chatbot ads is something of an open question as the rise of conversational AI changes how people interact with the broader internet. Brands that noticed traffic declines in the past year haven't resulted in declines in revenue, the information previously reported, suggesting the people who are still visiting after researching using AI could be more likely to make a purchase, end quote. Netflix reported Q4 revenue up 18% year over year to $12 billion, $325 million paid subscribers, and announced plans to up content spend by 10% in 2026, blah, blah, blah. More interestingly, Netflix also says ad revenue hit $1.5 billion in 2025, up by over 2.5x versus 2024, and this, quoting the Hollywood Reporter, Netflix has been testing new vertical video features,

which it plans to roll out later in 2026. Speaking on its earnings call, Tuesday, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, said the streamer had already been featuring a vertical video feed in the mobile experience for the past several months, which includes clips of Netflix shows and movies. That will likely soon include other new content types, including video podcasts, which began streaming on the platform in January. You can imagine us bringing more clips based on new content types like video podcasts, which Ted Sarandos mentioned that we're adding to the general service,

will bring the sort of appropriate components of that into the vertical video feed, Peter said. He added that the company is also working on a new mobile user interface that will, quote, better serve the expansion of our business over the decade to come. We're going to roll this out later in 2026 and just like our TV UI. It then becomes a starting point. It becomes a platform for us to continue to iterate, test, evolve, and improve our offerings, Peter said. The move comes as consumers increasingly view more content on their phones and as Netflix surveys its competitive

threats, which it says now includes social media platforms such as Instagram, end quote. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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saying the platform wants to fight AI slop and strengthen parental tools and teases shorts updates. Quoting the Hollywood reporter again, Mohan framed this year as a pivotal one. As we entered 2026, the lines we between creativity and technology are blurring, sparking a new era of innovation. This inflection point requires ambitious bets, he wrote. Perhaps most importantly, Mohan is focused on pushing back against so-called AI slop while also opening the door to new types of content that

the tech could enable, noting that, quote, over the past 20 years we've learned not to impose any preconceived notions on the creator ecosystem. Today, once odd trends like ASMR and watching other people play video games are mainstream hits. The rise of the rise of AI has raised concerns about low-quality content, aka A. AI Slop as an open platform, we allow for a broad range of free expression while ensuring YouTube remains a place where people feel good spending their time. Mohan writes, but with this openness comes a responsibility to maintain the high-quality viewing experience that people want. To reduce the spread of low-quality AI content, we're actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combating

spam and clickbait and reducing the spread of low-quality repetitive content. The executive noted that many creators are now building whole studios, underscoring how the creative dynamic has changed. The era of dismissing this content as simply UGC is long over, he wrote. These are shows built by creators who greenlit themselves, end quote. Now, having said that, remember when I had that little rant on here where I was like, it's going to be all AI soon on things like YouTube, because once you can make a decent AI avatar of, say, me, why then would I need or want to record myself on video? I can put myself doing a YouTube short standing in front of the Grand Canyon if I want, and I don't need to bother with lights or a studio

or any of that. Well, YouTube sees this too, quoting the verge. Your YouTube shorts feed might soon be filled with a lot more AI-generated content from your favorite creators, including AI-generated versions of the creators themselves. In his annual letter released today, YouTube CEO Neil Mohan says that sometime this year, creators will be able to make shorts using their, quote, own likeness. Mohan didn't share further details about these likenesses. We'll have more to share soon, including the launch date and how the feature will work, according to YouTube spokesperson, Boot Bullwinkle, which, this is Brian cutting in here,

that's a great name. Boot Bullwinkle, congrats. But the likenesses are part of a growing push from YouTube into AI tools. This year, creators will also be able to use AI to make games with a text prompt, a feature already available in closed beta and experiment with music, Mohan says. YouTube already offers creators tools like an AI chatbot for channel analytics, AI powered auto-dubbing, and AI-generated video clips for shorts. Shorts are getting other new features too.

Mohan says that YouTube will be integrating different formats, including image posts directly into the feed this year. He reports that shorts now average 200 billion daily views, end quote. So, and with all due respect, he's sort of talking to. talking out of both sides of his mouth there in terms of AI, right? But it does line up with the point that I made earlier. We need to come to terms with the fact that anything AI is not by definition automatically AI slop. If I were to take the recording of this segment, which I researched and wrote myself and recorded in my high-quality studio, but simply used AI to make a photo-realistic AI avatar

of myself to turn it into a video, is that really slop? Because again, all I did was skip the step of turning on my camera. The journal says Elon Musk is pushing for a SpaceX IPO by July. He seems eager to beat OpenAI and anthropic to the public markets and views it as a way to help XAI catch its rivals. Quote, SpaceX resisted going public for years, then came the rise of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk's rocket maker became one of the country's most valuable private companies due in part to its ability to develop risky space businesses outside the scrutiny of public investors. Its executives like to say the company wouldn't IPO until its rockets were regularly flying to Mars. That was before the rush to build data centers for AI computing prompted Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others to propose putting them in space.

The idea has prompted skepticism from many engineers, given the technical challenges posed by building solar-powered AI data centers that zip around Earth. But it has continued to gain traction, and Musk has become obsessed with the idea of SpaceX being the first to do it, people familiar with the matter said. Such a feat would be hard to attempt without the billions of dollars in capital and initial public offering could deliver in one fell swoop. The billionaire also sees a SpaceX IPO as a way to help his AI company, XAI, catch up to rivals, some of the people said. Musk has a long-running rivalry with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who last year explored buying a rocket company to deploy satellites with AI computing capabilities into space. Two of XAI's competitors, OpenAI and Anthropic, are eyeing their own IPOs this year, and Musk seems eager for SpaceX to hit the public market. markets first, some of the people said. SpaceX is expected to select banks to lead the stock offering soon. Musk has told people he wants to complete the IPO by July. Musk's apparent change

of tune on SpaceX's IPO plans in the middle of last year surprised many. The billionaire has loudly complained about running his existing public company Tesla and repeatedly tangled with regulators and the courts over issues like his compensation. SpaceX had for years been developing technology such as computing nodes that would be helpful for an AI satellite network. Former employees say by this fall it had a breakthrough in its attempts to figure out how to build and launch data centers into space, according to people familiar with the matter after devoting more resources toward solving technical issues. But competitors were pushing forward to Altman investigated partnering or acquiring Stoke Space, a startup rocket maker over the summer.

During an event in Italy in October, Jeff Bezos said that shifting data centers to orbit made sense to him. Later that month, Musk took to his social media platform X and suggested that solar-powered AI satellites were the future. He posted about the topic several more times in November. What had been a medium or long-term goal for SpaceX, developing orbital data centers became a matter of utmost urgency for Musk mid-last year, according to people familiar with the matter. Building and launching thousands of satellites would be technically demanding and costly, and SpaceX officials quickly decided the easiest way to raise the tens of billions of dollars it required was to dip in into the newly thawed U.S. market for IPOs, the people said, end quote.

I've been having dental issues of late. Tomorrow's episode might be a bit late and maybe even sound a bit off. That's because even though I was already scheduled to have a crown put in a week from today, the temporary crown I got put in last week came off last night at dinner. I even swallowed it. Apparently, that is a bit of an emergency, so I have to go in tomorrow more. morning to get another temporary crown put in. Thus, number one, tomorrow's show will be a bit late. But number two, you know, depending on what I can write and record tomorrow morning before I have

to go in, you might be able to tell what segments I recorded before going in and what segments I recorded after, depending on how numb my mouth is when I get back. Fun stuff. Talk to you tomorrow best as I can. All. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. Celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th.

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