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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Today, I wrote about will AWS buy TPUs from Google? In the front page of The Wall Street Journal's business and finance section, they're singing the Tranium chips praises. Amazon's chips pose risk to NVIDIA. The whole week, we've been talking to people.
Speaker 2:Is that clickbait?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Well, we're gonna find out. We'll see. It certainly doesn't seem, you know, good to have more competition in the in the market. There's a lot of losers if Google winds up winning with TPU.
Speaker 1:The the losers came out to, to fight, apparently. Amazon.com is the latest big tech company to muscle in on NVIDIA's turf. Give me a sound cue from the fall.
Speaker 2:In. How about this?
Speaker 1:There we go. That's right. On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services announced the public launch of its training three custom AI chip, which it says is four times as fast as its previous generation of artificial intelligence chips. Four x speed up. That's actually very significant.
Speaker 1:That's great. The company said training three produced in by AWS's Annapurna Labs, fascinating company, acquired a decade ago for around 350,000,000,000 or 350,000,000. So it's pretty small acquisition, actually. 350,000,000. In AI, you never know.
Speaker 1:But back then You never you started a custom silicon company. You could barely clear 9 figures on the way out the door. Interpernal Labs has been working on custom silicon for Amazon for a long time. They actually do have a custom CPU at AWS to accelerate CPU based workloads. Then for the last few years, they've been working on GPUs or or, you know, ASICs for, accelerated workloads.
Speaker 1:And so this custom chip design business, Annapurna Labs, can reduce the cost of training and operating AI models by up to 50% compared with systems that use equivalent GPUs. The chips are meant to provide a stronger backbone of computing power for software developers like Dean Leiters Leitersdorf, the cofounder and co and executive chief executive officer of the startup, Descartes, who we had on the show. And Descartes, is valued now at $3,100,000,000. Let's go. So if you don't remember Descartes came on, and Dean, was doing live AI video generation while he was doing the interview with us.
Speaker 1:It was really crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He basically yeah. It was real time. Yeah. He looked like he was in a video game, but it was happening with, little to no delay.
Speaker 2:Really, really cool demo.
Speaker 1:He said his company had a breakthrough enabled by a Tranium three chip by the Tranium three chip after trying out several other competitor chips, including NVIDIA's processors. Dozens of programmers and AI researchers from his San Francisco based company had been trying four months to train a version of Descartes' flagship AI powered, video generation application known as Lucy, that would be able to render footage in real time without bugs or hiccups. AWS gave Descartes early access to Training three after meeting with the startup and being impressed with founders. The company was two weeks into a marathon coding session in a rented house in Silicon Valley, which I think he took us on a tour of while he was in, wizard land, an AI generated sci fi world. It was very fun.
Speaker 1:That a few of his employees were celebrating wildly behind him. The moment that I saw it worked, I saw four people just start jumping up and down, said Dean. The next question was how fast can we get it to market and start changing industries with it. The launch of Tranium three is the latest broadside against NVIDIA, which dominates the GPU market. A flurry of deals in recent months have caught the attention of investors in indicating that more AI firms are seeking to diversify their suppliers by buying chips.
Speaker 1:Meta Platforms is in talk with Google to buy billions of dollars worth of advanced AI processors known as TPUs, and OpenAI has struck deals with rival, NVIDIA rival AMD, as well as Broadcom. Very exciting that Descartes got good results out of the Tranium chip. That's awesome, obviously. I'm sure everyone over at Amazon has been working very hard on that. At the same time, we've heard that Anthropic maybe didn't have that great of an experience Tranium, and that's why maybe they're moving over to TPU a little bit more.
Speaker 2:But Even though Amazon remains a major
Speaker 1:Investor holder. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anthropic.
Speaker 1:And so my question is, will AWS buy TPU from Google? I asked Matt Garmin that question. I didn't
Speaker 2:me that question.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I said they will be mocked.
Speaker 1:They would be mocked.
Speaker 2:They would be mocked.
Speaker 1:Is ridiculous. Where I Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just say is, like, please, please, my Yeah. My archrival, can I please get some chips for my data center to compete with your data center?
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, let's actually go to what Matt Garmin, the CEO of AWS, said on TPPN yesterday because I asked him, will you be buying TPUs? And he said, hey. Look. We're very excited about Trainium, and we think it has enormous potential.
Speaker 1:And we absolutely think there's a benefit to optimizing every layer of that stack. People were joking on the timeline. You know? Oh, there's this new Trainium chip, and somebody was like, all five people using Trainium are ecstatic. You know, that that there's that there's this new news.
Speaker 1:Amazon's so bad at hype. Trainium is used by 500,000,000 people through Bedrock, but their marketing team just can't. AWS is undervalued, blah blah blah. And he's obviously a bull on the stock. But what's interesting is that, like, it is it
Speaker 2:is deployed. I met some of their GTM staff today. Let's just say you'll have years to accumulate stock at cheap prices. There, buddy.
Speaker 1:Yes. There there obviously is value even if Trainium winds up being for a particular niche. Like, maybe it's for real time video. Maybe that's the that's what it gets really good at.
Speaker 2:The thing with real time video that's interesting, something that Descartes is focused on Mhmm. Is working with live streamers Mhmm. Specifically on Twitch. Yeah. Amazon owns Twitch.
Speaker 1:Oh, that'd be cool. So that that Okay.
Speaker 2:That kind of partnership, more interesting.
Speaker 1:I like that. So, obviously, there is value to saying, hey. If you go to AWS, you can get Bedrock and some services that have been fine tuned specifically for Trainium. You go all the way down, you're gonna get very good performance because we have a stack from top to bottom that's very efficient. But at the same time, if you're trying to do something that's sort of, like, not within the training ecosystem, you might have a rough go.
Speaker 1:You might wind up on a different chip. Yeah. But he did say something. He said, we are going to support choice for our customers as well. And so we'll continue to offer GPUs from NVIDIA as an example, and we'll have and we have a very tight partnership there.
Speaker 1:So this idea of customer choice, I think, is important. And if you go back to Jeff Bezos, he said, we're not competitor obsessed. This idea that Google is their archrival, that's not in Amazon's DNA. Jeff Bezos said, we're not competitor obsessed. We're customer obsessed.
Speaker 1:We're customer obsessed. So if the customer says, look. It's great that you acquired Annapurna Labs for $350,000,000. I'm really happy with what you've done with Tranium three. It doesn't work for me.
Speaker 1:I'm the customer, and I want you to give me an NVIDIA GPU in your server or or or in your data center, or I want you to give me a TPU in your server. They might do that because that's actually in Amazon's DNA.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then the follow-up question is, is there any world where Google sells TPU to Amazon?
Speaker 1:Already, they are partnering. Like, this was another partnership that came out. Separately, there was an announcement of an AWS partnership with Google Cloud. Now they aren't buying TPUs, but what they're doing is they're enabling customers to establish private high speed links between the two companies' computing platforms in minutes instead of weeks. And so the general here the general idea here is that Google has some amazing AI capabilities that customers are just struggling to match on AWS at this point.
Speaker 1:And the same thing is happening on Microsoft as well because on Azure, you have access to OpenAI models that you might not have access to on on AWS. And so even though your whole infrastructure might be on AWS, you might be going back and forth to GCP constantly. Companies used to think about AI as a special piece of their application, so it would be fine to bounce around to another cloud to get the best possible results. But if the next generation of companies, I'm sure we'll talk to some of the AI focused YC demo day companies today about this
Speaker 2:I hope there's at least one.
Speaker 1:I hope there's at least one company that's doing something with AI. That would be a real treat. So it used to be fine to bounce around. Now the next generation companies, they're maybe making their entire infrastructure decision based on who has the best AI products. What are you laughing at?
Speaker 2:I'm laughing because, I texted Simon.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have a Turbo Puffer has a booth at AWS. I said, how's going at at re:Invent? And he says, I'm not there. I just make it seem like I'm there as a joke because the VCs keep going to the booth and then our growth intern is like, oh, Simon. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think I saw him over there. Just continuing continuing to mog while while, ARR skyrockets.
Speaker 1:Amazon needs to fire, fight back against this and allowing high speed interconnect between AWS and GCP solves a piece of that, but will they go further? NVIDIA has an insane amount of power right now. They've just ramped full year revenue from 27,000,000,000 in 2023 to 60,000,000,000 in 2024 to 130,000,000,000 in 2025. That's, like, one of the greatest revenue ramps at scale in history. And then, also, they grew their net profit margin from 16% to 56%.
Speaker 1:That's insane. Insane. Yes. GOAT. That's why Jensen Huang is on Joe Rogan, and I'm sure it's gonna be a fantastic episode.
Speaker 1:All the hyperscalers and OpenAI, but that creates problems. Right? Because all the hyperscalers and OpenAI are now sort of incentivized to form a bit of an anti NVIDIA alliance to commoditize the accelerator market and drive down those margins a bit. So 56% net profit margins on a 130,000,000,000 of revenue. People are just sitting there, they're like, there's $50,000,000,000 of profit over there.
Speaker 1:Like, that's a lot of acquisitions
Speaker 2:And that's our
Speaker 1:at Perna Labs.
Speaker 2:That's our cost.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's our cost. Like, you're just you're you're just eating a lot off of these plates.
Speaker 2:How much do you think it hurts Amazon that they don't have a dedicated podcast guy? Like, don't have a Sholto. They don't have a Sam. They don't have a Satya.
Speaker 1:You know how much that hurts because they definitely have someone in that role. You just don't know them.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't have someone who's
Speaker 2:They might have they might have the title, but they're not really in the driver's seat. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't have a rune.
Speaker 2:They don't have a rune. Right? They don't have a.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They should step it up. They should they should definitely get someone. Fortunately, I mean, the semi analysis crew was over there taking pictures, sharing photos, in the timeline of the Trainium three Ultra Server liquid cooled with a lot of hard eyes. That's a glowing endorsement from, the semi analysis crew.
Speaker 1:And look at this. Very purple. I wonder if that's, like, intentional. Google is having this kind of success with TPUs. What about Amazon's Tranium?
Speaker 1:Tranium is new and underpowered, just 667 t flops, b f 16. It has lots of HBM, but the bandwidth is lower than the h 100 TPU v six e. It's competitive h 100, not on HBM or bandwidth, and Ironwood is competitive with Blackwell on flop bandwidth and HBM capacity. I expect Ironwood to quickly gain market share as it ramps up as you can see from throughput slash TCO, NVIDIA versus Tranium. Ruben mogs, Tranium three harder than Blackwell versus Tranium two on TCO training FLOPs and reduces the gap by 5% on TCO MEM bandwidth.
Speaker 1:So the gap between NVIDIA and Tranium is actually increasing rather than decreasing. By the way, this math was done before CPX was introduced. I won't be surprised if CPX plus Rubin is cheaper than Tranium for inference. So I do think that there's a world where there's, where there's something specialized, like what's going on with Descartes, some sort of special model that's that thrives in what Tranium is good at, and they can further niche down. But, but we'll see.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe they come from behind and they just destroy t p TPU, and we're all talking about training next year. We gotta say a little rest in peace.
Speaker 2:Rest in peace
Speaker 1:to the quad. San Francisco's beloved albino alligator has passed away at age 30. That's a good age. I don't know how long alligators typically live, but I'm glad Looking it up.
Speaker 2:Feels like Thirty to fifty years for
Speaker 1:the American Alagina. Little bit short, but, Claude was, of course Often supported
Speaker 2:reaching by seventy years or more.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You know, obviously, people started speculating immediately. Mhmm. Anthropic, of course, was the sponsor Yes. Claude. Yes.
Speaker 2:And, you know, people were wondering was, was there foul play involved? Mhmm. Was it possible this poor dinosaur not dinosaur. Dinosaur. Alligator passed the day that they that that it that it got announced
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That they've hired IPO lawyers. Some people are speculating could is it possible Claude was sacrificed to the capital markets gods in some type of ritual? But anyways, he look at the look at this expression he has on his face. Can we zoom in a little bit? What a what a what a cool guy.
Speaker 2:And he will be remembered.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Trump administration will invest a $150,000,000 into a lithography startup called X Lite, its first Chips Act award. Chat this morning with X Lite CEO. There's a few lithography companies now. We've had some on the show.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a very interesting tier of investment, like a $150,000,000 from the government that feels like a series b. They did raise a series b, this past summer led by Playground Global. Makes sense that the government's investing in Intel. Pat Gelsinger, of course, former Intel CEO. Now he's getting involved in X Lite, marshaled 40,000,000 of capital, went and got a 150 from the government.
Speaker 1:There's also another AI startup, that wants to remake the $800,000,000,000 chip industry. This one's in the Wall Street Journal founded by ex Google researchers, Recursive Intelligence, raised 35,000,000 with backing from Sequoia to automate chip design. Obviously, this is not lithography. This is the design process. But still
Speaker 2:Well, this is AI for for AI chip design.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's right. Yes. On a quiet residential street a few blocks from Stanford University, two former Google researchers are launching a start up they hope will remake the $800,000,000,000 chip industry, trying to build software that can automate the design of cutting edge chips, a prospect that would allow every company to build their own chips from scratch. Working from the top floor of a suburban home, the duo recently raised 35,000,000 to kick start recursive intelligence with funding from Sequoia Capital and
Speaker 2:strike Sorry. We got it The recursive We gotta add putting that. It in the name.
Speaker 1:We gotta add that to the list of because there's Standard Capital, Modern Capital, Standard Intelligence, Modern Intelligence.
Speaker 2:Raw Intelligence.
Speaker 1:Raw Intelligence. Wow. The company, 35,000,000 for evaluation of 750,000,000. That's a very low dilution. What?
Speaker 1:5% or something like that?
Speaker 2:VC is remarkably high.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I would I would have assumed this would be a very a very capital intensive business, but I I I suppose if it's just a software that they're developing, maybe maybe they have more control here. Thoughts on AI progress. He says he's moderately bearish in the short term, but explosively bullish in the long term. Well Very interesting.
Speaker 1:So he says he's confused why some people have short timelines. They say AGI is coming soon, but at the same time, they're bullish on RLVR, which is reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. He says if we're actually close to a human like learner, this whole approach is doomed. Currently, the labs are trying to bake in a bunch of skills into these models through mid training. There's an entire supply chain of companies building RL environments, which teach the model how to use Excel to write financial models.
Speaker 1:For example, I think we're actually talking to an AI Excel analyst for Excel power users called Crunch at 12:50 YC company in the context of when does AGI arrive, when does superintelligence arrive. I understand Dorkish's point. Either these models will soon learn on the job in a self directed way, making all of this prebaking pointless, or they won't, which means AGI is not imminent. Humans don't have to go through a special training phase where they need to rehearse every single piece of software we might ever use. When we see frontier models improving at various benchmarks, we should not, we should think not just of increased scale and clever ML research ideas, but billions of dollars spent paying PhDs, MDs, and other experts.
Speaker 1:One counterargument I've heard from the takeoff within five years crew is that we have to do this clue GRL in service of building a superhuman AI researcher, and then the million copies of automated Ilia can go figure out how to solve robust and efficient learning from experience. This gives the vibes of we're losing money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume. This automated researcher is somehow going to figure out the algorithm for AGI, something humans have been banging their heads against for the better part of a century while not having the basic learning capabilities that children have? That seems super implausible to me. You've been asking about economic diffusion.
Speaker 1:What is the rate that we're diffusing? Let's see what Dwarkash has to say about economic diffusion. He says that economic diffusion lag is cope for missing capabilities. I'm very sympathetic to this because when I go to the doctor's office and they hand me a piece of paper, I know that a web form is good enough. The capabilities of the digital form are complete.
Speaker 1:No. It's just a diffusion problem. There's just someone who runs that doctor's office is like, I like doing it the old way. Right? And that's the and that's the economic diffusion lag problem that I think is real in a lot of scenarios.
Speaker 2:Right now, AI is great at generating text. Right? It's great at kind of analyzing a piece of content and then generating text text based on that. And yet, we still have multiple people on the team at TVPN whose job is to find interesting moments of the show and then create captions around that and share it to X and Instagram and YouTube YouTube and other platforms.
Speaker 1:And and Dora Keshet too, where he was trying to find the most interesting pieces of a full podcast with one big Gemini prompt. And he was trying all the different models and couldn't get it to actually find like the most salient and viral point points.
Speaker 2:The other thing that stands out is like one of the seeming missing capabilities is is like ability to like identify humor or even something like it's almost emotional. So Ilya and Dwarkash talked about this where I Ilya was giving the example of scientists study people who had had various brain injuries that limited their ability to experience emotion. Yep. And when they took out emotion, it took them, it can take somebody two hours to figure out which pair of socks to choose.
Speaker 1:And they
Speaker 2:were kind of like stunned. It's just a pair of socks. You know what's going on in your day. Why do you need emotion in order to make that kind of decision? And so it seems like at least in AI, missing capability is like, Okay, finding out what's an interesting moment of a podcast.
Speaker 2:Is it something that makes the audience member feel something? The other thing that's notable is on WAP, one of the top jobs that people do on WAP, or way they make their first dollar online, is just clipping for various content creators and media companies. And some of the clips that they make are so sloppy. Like, it's literally just like a random segment of the show, and they're blasting it out from, like, 20 different accounts. And the fact that we're still paying humans to do that, still, I mean, it just feels notable.
Speaker 1:Well, let's read Dora Kesh's take on economic diffusion lab lag being cope for missing capabilities. Sometimes people will say that the reason that AIs aren't more wide widely deployed across firms and already pro providing lots of value outside of coding is that technology takes a long time to diffuse. Dorkash thinks this is cope. He says people are using this cope to gloss over the fact that these models just lack the capabilities necessary for broad economic value. Since new technologies take a long time to integrate into the economy, well, ask yourself, how do highly skilled, experienced, and entrepreneurial immigrant humans manage to integrate into the economy immediately?
Speaker 1:Once you've answered that question, note that a AGI will be able to do those things too. If these models were actually like humans on a server, they'd diffuse incredibly quickly. In fact, they'd be so much easier to integrate and onboard than a normal human employee. They could read your entire Slack and drive in minutes and immediately distill all the skills that your other AI employees have. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I agree with that. I the the one thing that I don't necessarily agree with here, he says, well, ask yourself, this quote from Stephen Burns. How do highly skilled, experienced, and entrepreneurial immigrant humans manage to integrate into the economy immediately? I mean, they do sort of integrate into the economy immediately, but, like, the the immigration flow is, a slow process. Like, it doesn't just happen immediately.
Speaker 1:It's not just, like, you know, the amount of immigration went from, like, zero to, like, I don't know, a million people or something. Like, it's, like, move around. There is, like, a there is a bit of a drag. But I understand what he's saying here, and it does make sense. Silicon Valley is rallying behind a guy who sucks.
Speaker 1:It's like, what does that mean? Like
Speaker 2:Pure ad hominem.
Speaker 1:It's it's it's rage bait. It's gonna go hard. It already got a thousand likes. On a linked article, the Verge is not putting up a thousand likes per link. So this is outperformance, and, it's heavily paywalled.
Speaker 1:You cannot learn how David Sacks sucks without subscribing to that thing. They did a good job. You gotta pay.
Speaker 2:You gotta pay.
Speaker 1:You wanna know why he sucks.
Speaker 2:That'd be really funny if behind the paywall is like, we're just kidding. He's actually awesome. The We New York Times missed on this one. The startup told me that one of their investors didn't like that they were selling to newly founded startups and wanted them to sell to bigger companies who have more money. If investors tell you this, write them off as idiots.
Speaker 2:Selling to startups is the best thing you can do. I'm sure many of the companies we're talking with today will be selling to other companies in the batch. A lot of people say that's bad. Yeah. They try to say like, y c is a circular economy, But you have to ignore the hundreds of very real businesses that have been created through YC and gone on to work with every kind of company in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even if there's some sort of insular circular economy in the startup ecosystem, like, there's a pretty immense amount of pressure to actually deliver something that's valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're they're being rational. It's not like Yeah. It's not like I'm sure there's been small instances where companies were actually, you know, had had somewhat bad behavior. But in general, it's like, if I'm gonna pay for your the SaaS
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tool or the beta that you're running, it has to be good.
Speaker 1:So there's a $1,500,000,000 judgment against Anthropic for including 480,000 books in training their AIs. Five of my books are among them. Word is, there might be a $1,500 payout per book according to my agent Max Brockman. I wrote to my agent Max the following. If any payment comes to me, please send it back to Anthropic with my thanks for including my books and their AIs.
Speaker 1:The judgment website offers a way to opt out of the payment, but I found it cumbersome. So I didn't. I'm principled, but too lazy to be highly principled.
Speaker 2:The secondary markets are rife with fraud and bad actors, and it pains me to see these bottom feeders profiting off of Anderil's growth while fleecing retail investors through unreasonable or opaque fee structures. In this week's episode of nonsense, Ignite VC, a fund we've never taken a meeting with or had any contact with whatsoever. Founded by Brian, who we've never met, soliciting investors via public Google Docs to invest in an SPV that will in turn invest in another SPV that will in turn potentially enter into a forward contract with a supposedly though unnamed early Andrew employee. Few problems here. First off, so called forward contracts are notoriously hard to settle in private companies, and counterparty risk is extremely real.
Speaker 2:What about the many complicating corner cases like acquisitions where shares don't trade, or marriages, divorces, or deaths where ownership of the underlying shares is complicated. Just generally a risky structure to close that I don't think most folks actually understand. Yeah. If you enter into a forward contract and you basically buy the right to the future value of some shares, and then somebody gets, again, married or divorced or passes away or bankruptcy is another situation where you might not be actually able to collect even your investment should have generated some return. Matt says, second, this deal memo includes basically no details about Andoril's performance, no revenue figures whatsoever, no product specifics.
Speaker 2:I guess that's good, right? Like, if they were if they were just floating around the information that they had acquired, almost as if it's soliciting investors to invest on hype and momentum and not fundamentals. Generally, I'd advise folks to be skeptical of any deal memo lacking basic details. Third, forward contracts are explicitly disallowed by Anderol's stock plan and bylaws, which means that Anderol will never consent to Team Ignite's SPV, actually taking possession of these shares while we are privately held, zero chance. And finally, the memo spends most of its time talking about the structure and fees, which are insane.
Speaker 2:A double layered SPV with all legal and admin costs passed through in addition to an 8% upfront fee, 3% annual fee for two years, 20% carried interest, and the craziest part, an implied price per share that is completely insane. In this case, the implied, PPS is a 115% higher than the most recent preferred raise from nine months ago. Flattered, I suppose, but also puts these investors in an almost absurd position by paying more than double the price per share of our most recent transaction. As stated at the top, I don't know Brian or Team Ignite at all. Maybe they're kind of wholesome people, and this is all a big misunderstanding.
Speaker 2:But if I were an investor looking at this quote, I'd run for the hills. And I believe the founder the founder replied and said, appreciate the heads up. The document reference was an internal draft prepared for discussion with an existing LP and was not intended for public circulation. It appears someone shared it without authorization, and we're looking into how that happened.
Speaker 1:But do you see what
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:There's, seven people that share a screenshot of, like, a direct email So they got with this exact memo.
Speaker 2:Okay. And the other thing is they say not soliciting investment for any Andoril related vehicle. Matt says, really? The draft was written by your founder and managing partner. I literally watched him edit the doc in real time.
Speaker 2:And he has a screenshot screenshot of like the the the the founder's name, in Google Doc. What a mess. Don't do this.
Speaker 1:Don't do it. Instead, why don't you start a company and apply to Y Combinator? Build an actual business instead of going around hustling SPVs and companies that don't wanna sell shares. We will talk to you later.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Goodbye.