Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/10 – How Sam Altman Outflanked Elon Musk?

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home from Monday, February 10th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. According to the Super Bowl ad I saw last night, anyone can use Starlink on their phone soon, not just T-Mobile users. Was this the Super Bowl of crypto betting? Are we seeing the first signs that AI is stealing jobs from tech workers and a behind-the-scenes tale of hell?

Starting point is 00:00:54 Sam Altman outflanked Elon Musk. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. We've got the details on that Starlink T-Mobile tie-up that will allow texting via satellite. satellite. It will cost $15 per month starting in July for most users on most plans, but more than that, you can try it even if you're not a T-Mobile subscriber, quoting Bloomberg. The service is in beta mode now, and users can sign up online to participate the company announced last night in a Super Bowl ad. In a notable development, people on other carriers like Verizon Communications and AT&T will also be able to try out the T-Mobile Starlink service on their existing phones if they support digital SIM cards. Starting in July, the perk will cost $15 a month for T-Mobile users on most

Starting point is 00:01:41 plans or $10 for people who participated in the trial. It will be included at no extra charge for users on the company's Pricious Go-5G Next plan, according to Mike Katz, T-Mobile president of marketing strategy and products. Verizon and AT&T customers will be charged $20 a month. At first, the service will only include satellite-supported texting in mobile dead zones, but the company plans to add voice, picture, messaging, and other data services down the road. We essentially put cell towers in space, Katz said, end quote. And quoting the verge. Registrations for the free beta open in December after T-Mobile and Starlink tested direct-to-sell emergency alerts and texts in disaster zones last year. T-Mobile says it's accepting users who register on a rolling

Starting point is 00:02:24 first-come-first-served basis, but quietly discloses that there are limited spots available in the fine print. The Starlink-enabled service works on most smartphones from the last four years, according to T-Mobile, which lists currently compatible devices from Apple, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and Revel on its website. If you watch last night's Super Bowl, then you might have been misled by T-Mobile's ad. While it showcased satellite-supported voice and multimedia messaging capabilities, the public beta test only includes texting in dead zones for now. Support for picture messages, data, and voice calls is coming later, end quote. Apparently, folks place bets worth $1.1 billion in volume on the outcome of the Super Bowl despite regulatory hurdles.

Starting point is 00:03:10 I mentioned this because there is quite the tech angle here. I'm not talking about Fandul or the usual suspects in legalized betting. A lot of this is happening on those new crypto-based outcome markets like Polymarket. One trader made a $550,000 profit on one Eagles bet, quoting CoinDisc. Polymarket has become the go-to avenue for placing on-chain bets, which has brought in scrutiny from regulators. Some countries have outright banned polymarket, while the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission or CFTC wants to gain access to the platform's customer data. According to crypto attorney Aaron Brogan, the argument that prediction markets like Polymarket are simply a Web3 version of gambling is an inaccurate characterization. Brogan said that unlike traditional betting platforms, prediction markets make money on the transactions fees rather than the users. regardless of the challenges, Polymarket is thriving, and betters are gaining or losing big sums of money, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:05 And since it's on chain, we can see exactly how much money. According to Polymarket analytics data, trader, a beautiful mind earned over $550,000 betting on the Eagles, with this particular user sporting total platform profits of roughly $1 million primarily from sports wagers. Their counterparty in the Eagles trade, Hubert de Kidd suffered a $718,630,000. loss, betting against the Eagles pushing their overall polymarket losses to $638,177. Polymarket Super Bowl offerings included betting markets on Taylor Swift's broadcast appearances and the national anthem duration. Polymarkets sports betting contracts have generated over $6 billion in lifetime volume, surpassing U.S. election market volume of $5.2 billion based on polymarket

Starting point is 00:04:51 analytics figures. Sources are telling Reuters that OpenAI is finalizing its first in-house chip design. in the next few months to cut its reliance on Nvidia and plans to send the chips for fabrication at TSM, a process known as taping out. Quoting Reuters, the update shows that OpenAI is on track to meet its ambitious goal of mass production at TSM in 2026. A typical tapeout costs tens of millions of dollars and will take roughly six months to produce a finished chip, unless OpenAI pays substantially more for expedited manufacturing. There is no guarantee the silicon will function on the first tapeout and a failure would require the company to diagnose the problem

Starting point is 00:05:35 and repeat the tapeout step. Inside OpenAI, the training focus chip is viewed as a strategic tool to strengthen OpenAI's negotiating leverage with other chip suppliers, the sources said. After the initial chip, OpenAI's engineers plan to develop increasingly advanced processors with broader capabilities with each new iteration. If the initial tapeout goes smoothly, it would enable the chat GPT maker to mass produce its first in-house AI chip and potentially test an alternative to Nvidia's chips later this year. OpenAI's plan to send its design to TSM this year demonstrates the startup has made speedy progress on its first design, a process that can take other chip designers years longer, end quote. This chip initiative is being led

Starting point is 00:06:14 by Richard Ho, who joined from Alphabet, where he led Google's AI chip program. Under Ho's leadership, Open AI's chip development team has expanded to 40 members and is collaborating with Broadcom on a custom AI processor. The team remains modest compared to some divisions at Amazon or Google. Industry experts indicate that developing a single iteration of an advanced chip can require $500 million, with additional costs for software and supporting systems, potentially reaching another $500 million. The initial deployment of OpenAI's chip will be limited in scope, primarily focusing on AI model inference rather than training, according to sources familiar with the project. The processor will play a specialized role within OpenAI's broader

Starting point is 00:06:52 infrastructure. To match the scale of Google or Amazon's chip programs, OpenAI would need to significantly expand its engineering workforce by hundreds of personnel. Are these the first signs that AI is creating joblessness in the tech and IT sector? We thought last year was bad, but could this year end up being even worse for workers in IT? An analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data reveals that. The IT sector unemployment rate rose from 3.9% in December to 5.7% in January, with the number of unemployed rising from 98,000 to 152,000. quoting the journal. This is well above last month's overall jobless rate of 4% in the latest sign of how automation and the increasing use of artificial intelligence are having a negative impact on the tech labor market.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Job losses in tech can be attributed in part to the influence of AI, according to Victor Junalaitis, chief executive of Janko Associates. The emergence of generative AI has produced massive amounts of spending by tech giants on AI infrastructure, but not necessarily new jobs in IT. The latest IT jobs numbers come as unemployment among white-collar workers. remains at its highest levels since 2020, according to Corey Stale, an economist at hiring website Indeed. What we've really seen, especially in the last year or so, is a bifurcation in opportunities where white-collar knowledge worker-type jobs have had far less employer demand than jobs than jobs that are more in-person, skilled labor jobs, Stale said. New Indeed job postings in software development, for instance, declined 8.5% in January from a year earlier, but they are

Starting point is 00:08:29 showing signs of stabilizing after drastic job cuts in the tech sector in 2023, Stale added, end quote. Now, given that last segment, notable that Anthropic has launched the Anthropic Economic Index to track AI's impact by analyzing anonymized clawed usage data, showing 57% of AI use leans toward augmentation. In other words, workers are using AI differently than you might think. Quoting Axios, AI use leans more toward augmentation, 57%, where AI collaborates with and enhance chances human capabilities compared to automation, 43%, where AI directly performs tasks, Anthropic reports. The distinctions between you fully delegating tasks to a language model versus like batting the ball back and forth are subtle and emerging right now, Clark says.

Starting point is 00:09:20 AI adoption was widest among workers in computer and mathematical fields, chiefly software engineering. 37.2% of queries sent to Claude were in this category per Anthropic that could reflect Claude's popularity among programmers. The next largest category was arts, design, sports, entertainment and media, 10.3% of queries, which Anthropic said mainly reflected people using Claude for writing and editing. Anthropic plans to run follow-ups every six months to track changes in AI use over time. A challenge in AI is you don't know the full scope of the capabilities of the systems that are being released. Clark says, it's very different to, you know, cars where you know how fast the car is that you're bringing out. Anthropic is publishing all

Starting point is 00:09:58 its data so external researchers can review and use it. We'd love more eyes on this problem. Ganguly says, end quote. Christie's plans to hold its first ever AI art auction beginning February 20th. Critics say the sale elevates AI tools trained on artist's works without their consent. Quoting TechCrunch, Fine Art Auction House Christie has sold AI-generated art before, but soon it plans to hold its first show dedicated solely to works created with AI, an announcement that has been met with mixed reviews. The auction which Christie's is calling augmented intelligence will feature artwork from artists

Starting point is 00:10:35 including Matt Dryhurst, the founder of AI startup spawning AI, a robot that paints live, is set to be the exhibition centerpiece at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries in New York being February 20th. Users on social media were quick to point out that many generative AI tools for art were trained on artist's works without their permission. Critics argued that shows like augmented intelligence put this work on a pedestal at the expense of those creating art by hand. There's now an open letter demanding that Christie's canceled the auction. It's reached over 1800 signatures and less than 24 hours, end quote. And quoting the art newspaper. Artists represented in the sale include AI art pioneers like Refix, Anna Dahl, Harold Cohen,

Starting point is 00:11:15 Holly Herndon, and Matt Dryhurst, Alexander Rebben, and Claire Silver. Only 26% of the sales will be made up of digital native works, like non-fundable tokens, NFTs, according to Christie's, with the rest being lightboxes and screens, as well as sculptures, paintings, and prints. The auction house estimates the sale will bring in at least 600,000. $1.1. One of the highlights will be a 12-foot-tall-tall robot by Reben that will make an oil painting in Christie's Rockefeller Center space during the auction. With each new online bid, the work receives, the robot will paint a new canvas guide by Rebens AI model. Bids start at $100, and the robot will fill out the canvas as the price increases. Also up for sale is husband and wife duo Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst's Two Embedding Study, 2024-24-Wittany, Biannial. Featuring a car. Featuring a car. cartoonish character in a puffy spacesuit, the works were created with a text-to-image AI model directed to produce versions of Herndon's appearance. Christy's estimates the works will sell for between $70,000 and $90,000. Christes will accept cryptocurrency as payment for the majority of lots,

Starting point is 00:12:18 93% in the sale. In November, Sotheby's New York sold a painting by AI Da, a humanoid robot powered by AI for more than $1 million with fees, end quote. Finally, today, the times over the weekend had an interesting behind-the-scenes piece suggesting Sam Altman outflanked Elon Musk to win over President Trump, including by telling Trump in a phone call that AGI will be achieved during his second term. Quote, before flying to Washington, Mr. Altman was on the phone with Mr. Trump, preparing an announcement that would outflank Mr. Musk and put Mr. Altman's company at the center of the new administration's agenda for artificial intelligence. On the 25-minute call, Mr. Alman appealed to Mr. Trump's love of a big story and a big deal. Mr. Altman told the president-elect that the tech industry would achieve artificial general intelligence,

Starting point is 00:13:09 the hypothetical moment when technology matches human intelligence during the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the call. And to get there before competitors from China, Open AI, Oracle, and SoftBank had completed a $100 billion deal to build data centers across the country. The day after the inauguration, Mr. Altman stood behind Mr. Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as Mr. Trump announced the deal called Stargate and described it as the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history. Stargate had been in the works for months, but Mr. Altman and his partner's timely announcement to allow Mr. Trump to take credit for it in his first days in office. We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President. Mr. Altman said in front of a gathering of reporters

Starting point is 00:13:47 that Mr. Altman managed to outflank Mr. Musk and make Open AI the centerpiece of the new administration's nascent AI agenda to stay ahead of China was a testament to Mr. Altman's talent for shape-shifting and nearly two decades of dealmaking in Silicon Valley. It also offered a view of Mr. Trump's flexible loyalties when it comes to being wooed, as well as the limits of Mr. Musk's ability to influence tech policy. Even before the presidential election, Mr. Altman quietly worked his way into Mr. Trump's inner circle, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Mr. Altman's drive to win over Mr. Trump. Many of the details of that courtship, which went on for months, have never been reported before. Mr. Altman leaned on relationships with

Starting point is 00:14:25 Doug Bergam, the governor of North Dakota, and Mr. Trump's eventual nominee for Interior Secretary and two other Trump allies, Larry Ellison, co-founder of the Software Company Oracle and Masiosi Son, founder of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. Mr. Altman had been discussing possible investments with SoftBank and Mr. Son. The two men met at OpenAI's offices earlier in the summer of 2024, according to three people familiar with the discussions. After Microsoft agreed to an extension of its exclusive contract with OpenAI, the startup signed a $10 billion data center deal with Oracle and pushed for something much bigger. As Oracle built a new data center campus in Abling 10, Texas, Mr. Altman hoped to expand this into the $100 billion project he and Mr. Nadella had

Starting point is 00:15:05 envisioned months earlier. But the Biden administration had expressed concerns over opening I's efforts to secure additional money from investors in the Middle East. And potential investors worried that the government would be slow to provide approvals for a project that required enormous amounts of land and electricity. The sentiment surrounding the deal changed after Mr. Trump was elected. Over the next several weeks, SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI each agreed to put money into Stargate, said three people familiar with the negotiations. They also secured funding from MGX, a tech investment firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Altman flew back to Washington and had dinner with Republican lawmakers two days later. The next morning, he spoke at a

Starting point is 00:15:39 private event with members of Congress, policymakers, and think tank leaders in the shadow of the capital in a gleaming rented space close to the lobbying shops of Google and Amazon. When Mr. Alman was asked what Deep Seek meant, as he and his partners committed $100 billion to new data centers, Mr. Altman edited the question, $500 billion, he said. Then he answered it. As Companies like OpenAI continue to increase their computing resources, he said, their AI technologies continue to get better. We should want to keep doing that, he said, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/10 – How Sam Altman Outflanked Elon Musk?

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