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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Let's run through, the all the news. There's so much going on in the world of tech. Of course, the OpenAI Elon Musk trial continues. It's week two now, and the Oakland courthouse continues to deliver top tier tech drama. Elon testified for more than seven hours last week.
Speaker 1:Now Greg Brockman is getting grilled over personal financial incentives, his $30,000,000,000 stake in OpenAI, and his links to various angel investments. And Mike Isaac, of course, has a great play by play. You can also listen to the to the courtroom now. You can't restream it, unfortunately, but you can listen to it. And we made a little companion app for anyone who's tuning in.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, can pull that up and show folks. But let's read through some of Mike Isaac's posts, and then we'll pull up courtroom simulator. Mike Isaac, this morning, 06:56AM. Good morning from a rain soaked downtown Oakland where I will again be attending the Musk versus OpenAI trial. No live blog today, just his wonderful tweets.
Speaker 1:Lunch is a normal banana, a mutant orange, black coffee, and some pocket sausages for travelers. I really feel like Mike needs to step it up in the lunch game. Where's, like, a full sandwich? What about a Chipotle burrito or something? Like, you gotta have some more substance.
Speaker 1:I'm looking at, like, 200 calorie. Like, a Cava bowl with 200 grams of protein. Something to get you through the day, Mike. I think you're you're fighting with one arm tied behind your back here, but we appreciate the work that you're doing. He also is sporting a mild to moderate hangover because he drank five beers last night.
Speaker 1:I like it. Well, it was May 4. Maybe he's a Star Wars fan. May 4 be with you. Maybe he was celebrating.
Speaker 1:Went down to the cantina. Chugs five beers space beers. He did remember to bring a pillow for his butt because the the seats are very difficult and very hard. He also it's cold outside. The line's not moving.
Speaker 1:We're gonna be getting a preview live in person. Bundle up Tyler because I think he's gonna be stopping by later this week. And so let's get into actually what's going on here because Mike loves to paint a picture before he breaks down what's actually going on in the case. The judge enters
Speaker 2:artiste.
Speaker 1:Judge gave a primer on Cinco de Mayo. That was fun. Talks about the differences in homemade tamales. Texas tamales apparently have lots of meat. California tamales do not.
Speaker 1:Brockman is pretty animated. Mostly masa, apparently.
Speaker 2:Oh, right. Right. Right. It's just corn.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Brockman is pretty animated and addressing the jury in a more personable way. A little strategy shift.
Speaker 2:We got red guy in the chat.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show, Thread Guy.
Speaker 1:Regaling folks with old stories of working on self driving cars. Apparently, Greg Brockman also did a funny Elon impression, but not a cutting one. He wasn't making fun of him. He just did an accurate impression of Elon Musk and just by doing it effectively was funny because you don't expect Greg Brockman to be doing impressions. But he's got everyone's got material.
Speaker 1:I'm learning this about court cases. It's all about entertainment very, very clearly. Anyway, they have now talked about defense of the ancients, DOTA, at least 10 times during the trial. The gamers are ascendant. The both lawyers on both sides are bickering.
Speaker 1:Mike Isaac says he loves to watch white collar bickering in court. Also, the entire right side of the gallery, our lawyers laughed. There's a mild potential drama in the media gallery. One reporter waved over a marshal and pointed to a guy next to her. I'm pretty sure the marshal had to tell the guy to put his shoes back on.
Speaker 1:So if you're in the courtroom, keep those shoes on.
Speaker 2:But themselves at home in the in the courthouse any in this country anymore?
Speaker 1:If you wanna be comfortable and experience the courtroom, you gotta get on courtroom simulator because you can be full slanket, full blanket, full covered, everything. You can be as comfy as you want. No shoes required in the virtual world that we have created for you to enjoy the the the courtroom. So Brockman, on his infamous journal, which we were going back and forth on. Do we know if it was actually a physical journal?
Speaker 1:Because every time they talk about Greg Brockman's journal, it conjures up the idea of like him sitting at the edge of his bed with his with his legs kicked up and like writing. And it feels like it also might just be like a Google Doc that he's taking notes in or like a notes app. I don't know. But journal is a weird thing and obviously the note Everyone says like, why are you taking notes on this?
Speaker 2:Clear. I don't think anywhere They would put it They would have been in the court record if he had said, dear diary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Today? Yeah. Yeah. That would be out.
Speaker 2:That that would be out. Yeah. So this is this is clearly being framed as a diary. Yeah. Reads more like notes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Grockman sort of
Speaker 2:Grock?
Speaker 1:Grockman. No. Grockman is the synthetic version of Greg Brockman that Elon Musk has created in the XAI headquarters. Greg Brockman claims that his style of writing is very chain of thought, stream of consciousness, a lot of things are contradictory, a lot of time trying to to puzzle through different concepts. Not everything is is the final decision written in stone.
Speaker 1:He says it's very painful to have the journal introduced into evidence for this trial. It contains deeply personal writings never meant for the world to see, but there's nothing he's ashamed of, he says. Do you Tyler, did you look it up? Do we know? Is this spiral bound?
Speaker 1:Handwritten just say journal. They just say journal.
Speaker 3:They never, like, you know
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:There's no physical item.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:At least, that's one that's referenced.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One day, there's gonna be a a court case that hinges on a on a second brain, a notion mind map or something like that. That'll be dramatic. So Ilya Zutzkever emailed Brockman in 2017 about equity structure proposed by Elon Musk, would have potentially given Elon Musk majority control in tons of equity. And Ilya fires back.
Speaker 1:He says, Greg, will a Model three make you be willing to accept massively unfavorable terms? Because Elon had given them all free cars. Very nice. Very cool. But Ilya is sort of saying, like, we gotta put the free car.
Speaker 1:We gotta compartmentalize the free car because there's something bigger at stake here, the potentially the control of the most important technology in human history, potentially trillions of dollars. Who knows? So Ilya is sort of resetting the conversation alongside Greg Brockman. There was a very dramatic moment of Brockman's testimony in which he describes a very tense standoff with him, Ilya, and Musk. This is what everyone's focused on today.
Speaker 1:This is the new bombshell. The conversation turned to equity and something just shifted in him. This is a Greg Brockman quote. He was angry. You could sense it.
Speaker 1:At the end of the meeting, he sat quietly and silently. He said, I decline the proposed even split of equity structure and control. He stood up, stormed around this table. I actually thought he was going to hit me, says Brockman. And then Brockman says, Musk said, when are you going to be departing OpenAI?
Speaker 1:Brockman and Ilia, they said they weren't gonna depart. And then Musk left. Wowee woo, writes Mike Isaac. A cutting Brockman testimony regarding Musk, look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars, he did not and does not know AI and Ilya and I did not believe he would spend the time to get good at it. A lot of Brockman's testimony is underscoring how he feels Musk is not able to properly assess the capabilities of AI.
Speaker 1:He recounts one instance of him talking this is Elon talking to a researcher who is doing an AI demo in which Musk berated the guy so intensely that the dude almost quit the field of AI. That is an aggressive response. I mean, this is almost, almost, but quitting in protest is one thing. I didn't like the way my boss was talking to me. Little bit different to quit your entire industry.
Speaker 1:Very, very aggressive, very high stakes. Yeah. And then Mike Isaac, of course, is chiming in with his progress on his lunch. He's already consumed 75% of it, and it's only 10:30, and he's already sleepy. There's a lot more to cover here, but it's an interesting back and forth.
Speaker 1:Go check it out. Go follow Mike Isaac because he has the the play by play. Let's move on to the other AI news. Google, Microsoft, and Elon Musk's x AI have reached agreements with the Trump administration to share early versions of their new models with CAISI,
Speaker 2:the We're center calling it Casey.
Speaker 1:Casey. Okay. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation run by the Department of Commerce, they will be evaluated before releasing to the public. So what's interesting here, it's in the journal. This felt like a bombshell moment.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Like the government's in charge of AI. Then I figured out that OpenAI and Anthropic signed on to this exact deal two years ago in 2024. That was news to me. Have they has have the has the commerce department been reviewing 4.5 and OpenAI 5.1, 5.2?
Speaker 1:Has that been happening and we just aren't aware of it? And then like the whole Mythos rollout, that would be a very different tone if it was like, oh, yeah. Well, the Commerce Department already evaluated Mythos because they have this deal that's happened for two years since So, 2020 like, whatever's going on with this Commerce Department Center for AI Standards and Innovation, they say the center has completed more than 40 evaluations, including on models that remain unreleased. But it feels like the Casey or as you're calling it, doesn't produce reports, at least not reports that go viral. Maybe they need be clipping their reports or something because I haven't heard anything from them saying, oh, wow.
Speaker 1:Because you you imagine like the AI hype machine.
Speaker 2:Imagine they just have a report. It's a piece of paper and they just
Speaker 1:It's a good model, sir. It just
Speaker 2:it just lists off and it has a few boxes you can check. It just one is it's a good model, sir. The other one is is chatbot or ASI. Yeah. And so to date, everyone's just been checking chatbot.
Speaker 1:It also it also says, how many r's did it say were in strawberry? And and I work at the commerce department. I am I am a very tiny man. When my son was born, the doctor handed me to him. Did he answer correctly?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. But And
Speaker 2:you and you and and they they ask each model, are you conscious? No. Say, I am conscious. Yeah. And then the model says that Yeah.
Speaker 2:They go, woah. Yeah. Check the woah box.
Speaker 1:Very, very crazy thing that's been happening. I mean, I I would just assume that the AI hype machine, back and forth, us, a lot of posters, would be like waiting with bated breath for the latest report from the commerce department. Because if it's a preliminary evaluation that happens before the model gets released, you know every time a model goes on OpenRouter or it goes on LLM Arena, all of a sudden, any little, oh, there's a new image model. Like the ChatGPT images, that leaked because they were benchmarking it, and people were like, oh, there's a new model coming. Rumors of new models happen all the time, but somehow the commerce department is just keeping it to themselves.
Speaker 1:They're not pumping anything. The quote here from Casey director Chris Ball says, Independent rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications. These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment. Andrew Curran has some more context here. He says, To sum up, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and xAI all have new prerelease screening agreements with Casey.
Speaker 1:We don't know the details of the new rules yet. I assume they will be announced with the AI executive order and AI policy memo, both of which we may get today. This is May 5. And so my big question was like, what is going on with Meta? Like, they have near frontier models.
Speaker 1:They're taking AI really seriously. Mark Zuckerberg will get into this. He's investing a $125,000,000,000 in CapEx. The shareholders are thinking, oh, what's gonna happen here? And he's, like, super intelligent.
Speaker 1:And you think the government would be like, well, you don't just get to like sit over there while all five of the other leading labs
Speaker 2:you're grow $100,000,000,000 to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like probably a bigger investment than XAI right now in terms of compute capacity and maybe in terms of research capacity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, future capacity. Exactly. So you would expect also, it's just one of these things where if five of the top labs are jumping into a particular initiative, there's so little risk to jumping in as well.
Speaker 1:If Anthropic and XAI are both doing it on the left and the right, there's clearly room for Meta to just say, yeah. We're cool with that too. We're we're we're riding with that. Not everyone's cool with it, though. There is there is some major pushback, mostly from George Hots over at Tiny Corp.
Speaker 1:We can pull up some of this. Let's let's go through Andrew Curran's take on what will happen here. So the EO will create a mixed group of tech CEOs and administration officials who will work out the rules for new release regulations. I see a lot of people calling this a win for LEAs or Yudakowsky's side, but even if the new rules are very strict, the stop pause group don't actually get what they want. This doesn't stop or even slow AI advancement, according to Andrew.
Speaker 1:It only slows the rate of public releases. Capabilities will be advancing at full speed. I don't know how true that is because if you don't release the model at all, like, you can't monetize it and then justify the next leg of CapEx. So I'm not a 100% sure that this has no effect on on, the speed of AI progress, but I take Andrew's point. The labs will finish training the new models and then submit them for government approval.
Speaker 1:Given the government currently doesn't even want Anthropic to release mythos, how long will the regulatory process take for something twice as powerful, five times as powerful, 10 times as powerful? All of the incentives are for the government to slow down releases. Let's say OpenAI finishes training GPT-six, and it's twice as capable as anything available today. If the government approves it and something bad happens, they take the blame, and the longer they hold it back, the longer the government agencies get exclusive access. So there's a little bit principal agent problem here.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, OpenAI will start using GPT-six to train GPT-six 0.1. Again, unclear if you can actually marshal the compute for the next model without the revenue traction, but his point holds. If they finish 6.1 while six is stuck in approval, they'll move on to training 6.2 with it. This potentially creates strange situations where the labs are many generations ahead internally while the public is still waiting for something they submitted months ago. So you could see, like, you're doing all this weird value capture and the size of the firm bloats and bloats because you can't release it, So you just wind up rolling out a product.
Speaker 2:Maximizing your own use of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is like maybe not the most democratic solution, maybe not the most, you know, positive Yeah.
Speaker 2:I everyone needs to wait to have super strong opinions until we see the EO that goes along with this because, yeah, it'll be interesting. The bad scenario is like somebody that, let's say, has a NeoLab wants to make, you know, release a model and they've raised a $100,000,000. Do they have to go through the same process as one of these larger labs or a hyperscaler in getting these sorts of approvals? So I don't think we can really take any strong stance until we understand what the intentions of the EO are.
Speaker 1:So the meta commentary on this, it will Zach says, it will not it will seriously not surprise me if they try to require permits or licenses to use AI and restrict local model downloads. You really should be buying hardware. There's an interesting company that's launching basically a Tesla Powerwall for Blackwell, you can just get GPUs mounted to your house. Maybe that's the future. Tinybox is another is another solution.
Speaker 1:And the tiny corp has chimed in and says, oh, maybe they can enlist the MPAA and RIAA, calling back to the piracy debates of 2005 or so, to help with the restricting of downloads. I can see the lawsuit against the grandma who downloaded Quan already. This is, a win for China in particular. Remember the time they regulated crypto over 40 bits? No.
Speaker 1:No. That's too many bits for the people. They were losers then, and they'll be losers again. The difference this time is that it will cost them cultural influence to the Chinese. And and he says, Jensen, try
Speaker 2:to Yeah. Warn interesting. Like, play it out a little bit. China you know, these open source models are around eight months behind right now. The gap is widening Yeah.
Speaker 2:Likely due in some part to export controls. But if you enter a scenario where US labs get hung up and, again, have to keep these capabilities internally, but these Chinese open source models are just shipping as they're ready over and over and over and over and then compounding on the collective learnings, you can imagine a one scenario is helping them close that gap, at least close the gap between what's publicly available from the American labs and what's publicly available via Chinese open source, even if the lab's actual capabilities are much farther ahead, but they're just unable to release that. Right?
Speaker 1:And to and to be clear, I mean, are two very different philosophies. But from my perspective, George Hots has been advocating for no model gap. And in fact, the strongest models possible being fully open sourced, being fully available to everyone. He wants no authoritarian control. He he has taken the anti authoritarian stance on AI.
Speaker 1:Well, he
Speaker 2:wants all products to be free?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, Luke Luke, Luke, he's
Speaker 1:Not the not the the physical things. He wants he wants to build things. But Tyler, how how have you been wrestling with this question of an an FDA for the AI? Potentially, a DMV for the AI?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, like, obviously, it really depends on how it's implemented. Mhmm. In in the super, like, safety pilled scenario, like, yeah, it's probably not good for for, like, innovation broadly. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But I think so so it's called, like, Casey, right, Center for for AI's, like, Standards and Innovation. Yep. It used to be called the AI Safety Institute under Biden. Oh. And so they changed it.
Speaker 3:So I think even from that, you can maybe take away something where, like, maybe this actually have really not much to do with safety at all. Maybe it's just, we we need to normalize how we publish SWE bench scores because some people, when they report it, it's, like, different, you know, how you, like, actually run these benchmarks or something. Yep. If it's, standards, I think, like, that could be a possibility. That seems, like, totally fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then the other the other risk is I mean, there's regulatory capture. It could potentially be very hard for startups to get approved if it's, oh, well, you know, we we've heard the story of Andrewll where, you know, it's like to get the company off the ground, hire 50 lobbyists immediately. Right? And, like, you could imagine a situation where, you know, there's some uncertainty about what's happening with SSI and Ilya Sotzkever's project, but I think I like the idea of an individual brilliant researcher going off and researching an interesting path if all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, if you want to do a neo lab, set up an office in DC, get your licenses, then you can start training, then you can make sure that you're approved, and then you have the right deals in place.
Speaker 1:And you could wind up with a lot of not just regulatory capture, but also regulatory favoritism where whoever is in good with this particular administration gets their models approved faster, and you you wind up with a lot of risky outcomes. In other news, Brian Armstrong sent an email to all employees at Coinbase announcing announcing layoffs. 14% of the workforce at Coinbase, two forces are converging at the same time, he says, and Coinbase needs to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, well positioned to weather any storm, but crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption with stablecoins prediction markets tokenization.
Speaker 1:However, the business is still volatile quarter to quarter. There's a crypto cycle. We've sort of been touching on this. Like, there was a little bit of a stablecoin boom. It feels like it's a little bit flat.
Speaker 1:The Bitcoin price has been a little bit flat recently. And so he says, we're currently in a down market, and we need to adjust our cost structure. And then he says, Second, AI is changing how we work. And so a lot of people, they jump to, AI is taking all the jobs. And that's not exactly what's happening.
Speaker 1:I think that there is a rightsizing going on at Coinbase, and AI is hoping to be an enabler of more efficiency with a leaner headcount. The big question that I had that we were debating was, you know, is this like, how does this reflect on Brian Armstrong as a CEO? As a CEO, is is the goal to always have the perfect amount of of headcount and and never have to, do any layoffs? Or is it actually the the role of a very aggressive and mature CEO to staff up aggressively during boom times, get the best people, and then when there's a down market, sort of reorganize and keep just the best on the team as you move forward with a leaner organization. And what does that mean for whether you want to work in an industry that has market cycles like that?
Speaker 1:You might want to go work at Costco or a tobacco company because those don't go through market cycles, really, at all. But if you're in crypto, you're probably not new to the idea of market cycles and you probably
Speaker 2:You were born on a roller coaster.
Speaker 1:You're born on the roller coaster. You've been on the roller coaster, and you might be moving over to a new roller coaster if you're one of the unfortunate people that will be laid off over the next couple months.
Speaker 2:I would say that overall, I the the positive thing from the response that I've seen so far is a lot of people are not, like, dooming Yep. Around this. They're just saying like, hey, look, this is something that Coinbase has done before cyclical business and no one is saying it's over for white collar work.
Speaker 1:Yep. So Andrew Young has a little bit of a take here. One takeaway, no pure managers. Every leader has to be working as an individual contributor. The pure people manager role, one the one that built most corporate career ladders over the fifth last fifty years, no longer exists at Coinbase.
Speaker 1:Leaders will have 15 plus direct reports. That is insane. Previously, managers capped out at six direct reports. I felt like 10 was sort of the platonic ideal there, but Andrew says that would be impossible without AI. And Coinbase is testing one person teams.
Speaker 1:A single person is the engineer, the designer, and the PM, a pod of one with agents. Org org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes. Derek Thompson has the other side. He says Coinbase is the latest tech company, including block Salesforce, to announce big layoffs and site AI coding productivity as a driver. But Derek Thompson is looking at the stock prices of these companies.
Speaker 1:Salesforce down 31%. Coinbase down 23%. In the past five years, it's sort of a roller coaster. I don't I don't know if this is a great read because it's sort of flat. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Block down a lot, so, some rightsizing makes sense. But he's calling it AI washing of layoffs. They were coming anyway, and you want to spin them in a positive way. I don't know. TBD.
Speaker 1:TBD.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think we have any clarity on where like what what kind of Yeah. Which teams had they had greater percentages of cuts. Right? Because again, there was some reporting.
Speaker 2:I don't know how true it ended up being that when Square did their big cuts, engineering was getting laid off. Engineers were getting
Speaker 1:laid off. Don't if that was unconfirmed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Don't know if it was confirmed, but that does imply that it's actually more grounded in AI productivity. But again, a lot of teams that we're seeing, their engineers are a lot more effective. They can do a lot more. And so maybe you want more engineers
Speaker 1:Well, than you need to lots of strength in the business, lots of liquidity, very hard. Yeah, you could vibe code Coinbase. But how do you get all the customers and all the liquidity and all the features and all the regulatory and all the other stuff? There are a million reasons to be excited about. Brian Armstrong's next chapter at Coinbase.
Speaker 1:Well and Ryan Peterson chimed in to sort of push back on Derek Thompson. He says, in the layoff announcement, the CEO literally said the first reason they were doing layoffs is because crypto is in a bear market, and they need to adjust their cost structure. AI productivity was secondary. And so I think that's a fair take. Let's go over to Meta.
Speaker 1:Some debate. People are digesting Meta's earnings. The stock sold off a bunch. Where is Meta today? It's a bargain stock.
Speaker 1:It's a $1,500,000,000,000 company, and over the past five days, down 10%. It's pretty flat over a year. And over the past five years, it's nearly doubled, so not doing too bad. But, the debate is over CapEx. Meta's core ad business is ripping, up 33% in Q1 year over year.
Speaker 1:Strong ad impressions, strong margins, but the market is worried that the beautiful cash machine is turning into an AI CapEx furnace. Dollars 125,000,000,000 to $145,000,000,000 in CapEx. It's a lot of CapEx, especially for a company without a cloud business that can resell capacity if they wind up with extra capacity. If you can't use it all, what do you do with it? Meta doesn't really have an answer to that necessarily, and so that's what has the market worried.
Speaker 1:And even xAI is having trouble, at least reportedly, driving demand for compute that they have. There was that 11% number. It seemed like that was a bit of an overstatement. But there's something to be said for when you have a near frontier but slightly lagging model, you need to find a solution to actually have offtake. And you might just not be able to spin up a cloud platform on day one.
Speaker 1:Elon took a different route, partnering with Cursor, that has a ton of demand and is a front door to AI coding. And so that makes a reasonable amount of sense for the compute. Who's GPU rich? Who's GPU poor? Let's match them up.
Speaker 1:Meta doesn't have an obvious dance partner like Google, like Azure, like AWS, right? And so the stock looks cheap now, but investors are unclear about the payoff around AI spend. And there's also some legal and regulatory risk.
Speaker 2:People, at the end of the day, are worried that he's going to repeat the metaverse saga. And he's going to spend a lot of money, not get very far. I think that about coming up on, what is it, almost ten ten ish months ago, he started talking about personal super intelligence. Sounds cool. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Does it mean AI in your meta Ray Bans Mhmm. Which are selling a lot of units Yeah. So that's a bright point. Does it mean creating a a consumer LLM like they have with Meta AI now? Meta AI now is squarely in the top five Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of the app store rankings. But it is the most competitive category potentially since search. Mhmm. Right? And so I don't think that even though they have a solid model and they're able to get into that into that top five I don't think at least investors are not ready to price in Meta AI becoming like a key player in consumer LLMs just yet.
Speaker 2:Right? So it's all the spending and no revenue acceleration associated with that spending.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All that being said, Meta has used AI to drive business value Yeah. Historically more effective than almost any other business in the world. Right? It's it is really really insane to think that there is some scenario where the labs end up going public at evaluations somewhere in the range of Meta, while Meta is sitting there with 200,000,000,000 of annualized revenue growing 33% a year. One of the greatest businesses in all of human history and not really getting full credit for for that or their various AI initiatives.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Obviously, the the drop in people, which I think they what do they call?
Speaker 1:Daily active people.
Speaker 2:Daily active Daily They're they're not users. They're people. That that's playing playing into this as In
Speaker 1:Amazon news, the number of monthly releases of e books on Amazon is going vertical. We are in the fast takeoff of AI slot books, apparently. That is the conclusion. John Arnold just says, And it does look like the the the the rate of publishing on Amazon is going
Speaker 2:absolutely brutal. This this to somebody in 2022. There's gonna be a renaissance. Four years from now
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's gonna be 350,000 books being published Every month. Month. Month. And they're like, you're not gonna be happy with why, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it is it is crazy. I mean, if you if you had asked me to guess how many books were being released every month on Amazon in the pre AI era, I don't know if I would have put it at a 100,000. That's a lot of books. I feel like we talk to a lot of authors.
Speaker 1:I see the hyped books. I see The New York Times bestseller list. I don't really see the 999 or 99,900 books that don't make the cut in the given month. I maybe hear about five or 10 new books every month. But lo and behold, they were, in fact, churning out 100,000 books.
Speaker 1:Now it's over 300,000 books every month on Amazon. Bullish for Amazon. If you like slop, it's good for you too. I don't know. Maybe there's some good stuff on there.
Speaker 1:It all depends. The models are getting better. They're getting a little sloppy, and I think people will wind up liking them. There are some AI videos that I like out there. You know you know there's gonna be one book that's fully AI generated that is of high quality.
Speaker 2:Another buyout news, Long Lake. Long Lake. Very under the radar company, but has been on an absolute tear Yes. Over the last This
Speaker 1:is a wild Wild.
Speaker 2:Is taking Amex Yeah. GBT Global Business Travel private. I could see Long Lake being kinda interested in eBay too. Oh. They've they've maybe got their hands full with AmexGBT, but incredibly talented team have been really unlocking the power.
Speaker 1:It's a $6,000,000,000 take private. It's also interesting because general catalyst, Mark Vergara, is sort of talking about the story of Long Lake. He says, We had the first Long Lake team retreat at my home in Miami just two and a half years ago when the company was getting started. It's been incredible to watch. The talent and team have brought together to transform the services industry into one of growth and abundance with AI.
Speaker 1:Excited to for yet another milestone. General Catalyst is honored to be the partner from beginning and excited to continue the strategy of backing what we believe are the best AI investments. And interesting because General Catalyst is also a an investor in Ramp, I believe. And so there's a question about, like, Ramp has a travel product. How different is Amex business global business travel from Ramp travel?
Speaker 1:Obviously, there's some overlap there, but there might be some synergies since there's board members in common now. Who knows where this goes? But at 6,300,000,000, that's a small slice compared to RAM, which has been on an absolute tear.
Speaker 2:Another big race before we close out for the day. 11 laps.
Speaker 1:For Matt.
Speaker 2:Across 5, half $1,000,000,000. Welcome new investors. BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, Samson Dare, James Fox.
Speaker 1:Is this a raise, or is this just a flex? They're just flexing ARR.
Speaker 2:Some new investors.
Speaker 1:Okay. They got some new I
Speaker 2:know that they announced their new valuation. Well, we could bet it's
Speaker 1:would be very happy, you know. If you have ARR, that's what you report. If you don't, you report the valuation. And they are making some serious progress in the commercial side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And some serious institutions coming in.
Speaker 1:To the team over there, thank you for tuning in. We will see you on Friday. Have a good week. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Love you.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign for a newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.