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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.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Tuesday, 10/21/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:The capital of capital. There we go.
Speaker 2:Massive news out of OpenAI. They launched their browser. It had been rumored for weeks now, months now. The browser wars have been heating up. OpenAI dropped a trailer, announcing the browser, which is called Atlas.
Speaker 1:By the way, the Atlassian browser company acquisition just closed today.
Speaker 3:Oh.
Speaker 1:It was announced.
Speaker 2:I'd love to play the video from OpenAI announcing their browser, Atlas. I like the different sound cues. This one. That sounds kind of like typing on an iPhone.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's it sounds exactly like typing.
Speaker 2:Is that what it sounds like? It Okay. I turn it's funny. I like the sound cue in videos, but I turn it I certainly turn the sound off on my actual phone, so I don't actually, hear it very regularly. So this is you're on AllTrails.
Speaker 2:Is that the website? So you're in Coursera, and you're saying cheat on my homework. Wall Street Journal summarizes for me. Interestingly, The Wall Street Journal actually has AI summaries now in every article, just a couple bullet points. There I don't go to them a lot, though.
Speaker 2:So just some online shopping. Tyler, were you, were you successful in your prompt? Give me your review.
Speaker 3:People are saying, you know, it's a new browser. It's not just a browser. I think it's kind of a whole new way to really use the Internet. Browse the web. Browse To the web.
Speaker 2:Will this be successful?
Speaker 1:I believe that ChatGPT, especially once it had, like, some close to live search Yep. Was five to 10 times better than Google search
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For a lot of searches. Yep. And my prediction is that Atlas, in its current form, might be 1.1 times better than Chrome. Yeah. And that will not be enough to get large scale consumer adoption.
Speaker 1:I'm not super bullish, but I think it's great that they're taking a big shot on goal, and it makes sense strategically.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're looking for a product that 10 that is 10 times better, go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Me, my daily driver in a peaceful corner of the Internet.
Speaker 2:Safari power user. Safari power user.
Speaker 1:First of all, let's say thank you to Sam Altman for constantly creating content.
Speaker 2:It really is like the bull market in tech news. There's always something to talk about. Always. Always something.
Speaker 1:That's Sam a story. Wall Street Journal's OpenAI piece makes you realize Sam Altman must succeed
Speaker 2:or
Speaker 1:he could be a real problem for an otherwise sterling industry dot dot dot.
Speaker 2:Sam Altman is kind of becoming the preeminent deals guy of the modern tech era. He's like, the deals are so big and they're coming so quickly that a lot of people are asking, like, is Sam just so good at deals that all the counterparties are actually making mistakes by tying their fortunes to OpenAI? If OpenAI doesn't deliver and Oracle does all the build out, but then OpenAI doesn't have the revenue, is Oracle in trouble? That's the narrative right now. So the question is, like, why are these deals happening?
Speaker 2:I don't think Sam's gotten any fox here now that he's 40. He's he's gonna be a silver fox. But he's always been a great dealmaker, even going back to his very first company where he got, he got looped, acquired when the company wasn't doing that well. He was sort of at one of the first acqui hires that turned out really well. But now everything has three, four, five extra zeros after it.
Speaker 2:And I think that the reason isn't just that he's become a better deal maker. It's that he actually has more leverage now.
Speaker 1:When you have the breakout consumer product of a generational tech trend Yes. You have a lot of leverage. If you're running AMD or Nvidia or Oracle or any hyperscaler, you know, computing company, and you have to go in front of shareholders and they're asking you, are we doing anything with OpenAI? The company that scaled to over a billion users and
Speaker 2:The thing that will be the next Google, the next Amazon, the next Microsoft. And
Speaker 1:if you have to go in front of them and say no
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're they're they're like, okay. What what what exactly do you do here?
Speaker 2:Why are you missing this? OpenAI could swap out the underlying model and still accrue the vast majority of of value. So, hypothetically, you could have ChatGPT, chat.com, powered not by GPT five, but instead powered by Gemini or Claude and still see positive user growth, monetization. Because at the end of the day, most of the users aren't there for the model. They're there for the app.
Speaker 2:They're there for the ecosystem. They're there for the platform now. Joel Spolsky in 02/2002, coined this phrase, commoditize your compliments. And so anything that compliments your product, you want to be a commodity so that it can bring more content onto the platform. This was the thesis behind Meta open sourcing llama.
Speaker 2:If it's free to generate content, there will be more content on the platform just like the Sony camera, you know, commoditized the video production, made more content for YouTube. All of their partners are looking at them whether they're Google with the CPU program, Amazon with Trainium, OpenAI, say, AMD is pretty good.
Speaker 1:Sam's looking at that margin profile just being like, Jensen, I'm so happy. The whole industry is losing money.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they're like, we're trying to find the one guy that's making money.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And they see Jensen. She's absolutely prince
Speaker 2:If only there were another plate that we could eat off of and Jensen's just there with like the massive Thanksgiving dinner on his plate. And so everyone's kind of incentivized to like
Speaker 1:work against NVIDIA. Obviously, Jensen would have been incredibly frustrated by this for a number of reasons. His reaction, very presidential was, I saw the deal. It's imaginative. It's unique and surprising considering they were so excited about their next generation product.
Speaker 1:The Pew says, enjoy the vague posting while at last, my friend. Soon all the AGI companies go public and ruin an eye's shitposts are also called securities violations. Martin Shkreli says jail is not so bad. It's funny because OpenAI's some somebody at OpenAI Legal is gonna probably
Speaker 2:See this
Speaker 1:send this to Will. Will. Will you know? To him and be like, hey. Look.
Speaker 1:Like, a lot of people are gonna read into this that gonna go public soon.
Speaker 2:Genuine question For VC firms invested in both frontier model labs and coding application layer companies, how do you handle the discrepancy between the two since coding is number one on the road map of the labs versus other products which are more adjacent.
Speaker 1:If you're a company, I don't I don't think there's huge downside here. Yep. Like, VCs tend to give immense support for their winners.
Speaker 2:I think something similar might have happened with Palantir and Databricks, which had some same investors, actually. But there was this thesis of, like, well, if Databricks is the database layer and they allow you to do AI on top of that, like, what what is Palantir's role? And they and they they kind of wound up partnering.
Speaker 1:Venture investors want to become want to invest in companies that become so successful that they launch products that ultimately compete in a bunch of different adjacent categories and ultimately compete with a range of their portfolio companies, like that is ultimately what success looks like. Yeah. Something I've been thinking about a lot is this dynamic between Anthropic where all of their revenue comes from having the best coding model
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is very different than having a lot of revenue because you have a hit consumer product because you have to keep training the next model.
Speaker 2:Pets.com is the go to slur of the .com era. Let's see. Pets.com burned a $182,000,000 of total investor capital before going bust. Today, just US online pet goods sales is $38,000,000,000 a year, 70,000,000,000 total market cap, including portions of Amazon and Walmart.
Speaker 1:Lesson, should have invested more in pets.com. Like, makes sense to take a really big swing at a what became a $38,000,000,000 Yeah. Market.
Speaker 2:US East is down from Syriac, and it's, what what exactly is this image from? Is this like Rome falling?
Speaker 3:Is this the fall of Rome? This is very
Speaker 1:Do we know what caused it yet?
Speaker 2:Wasn't it database migration or something? Some data oh, no. DNS configuration, I think, was the was the root. Something like that. The outage began around 3AM eastern time when Amazon made a technical update to a widely used AWS database service, DynamoDB.
Speaker 2:The update, included an incorrect domain name service or DNS information for DynamoDB, kicked the database offline in Amazon's critically important Northern Virginia data centers
Speaker 1:next time. Exposed to insane, dependency. Yeah. So we're taking it on prem.
Speaker 2:This was my take yesterday. We're going back to sticks and stones. We're going back to pen and paper, baby. The computer revolution is over. AI is dead.
Speaker 1:So Tuxedo Sam says, meet James Hamilton. He's Amazon's literal very top engineer, the brain behind all the data centers. He lives in a custom yacht and does not give an f about any RTO. Wow.
Speaker 2:So it it claims that his lot his yacht made landfall, and this is, like, in
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:AWS update.
Speaker 1:Fake news.
Speaker 2:But it was digitally altered. It was fake news.
Speaker 1:Moving on. Coinbase and Kobe announced that Coinbase is acquiring Echo.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Echo is an angel list like platform
Speaker 3:Very cool.
Speaker 1:For crypto. So they help, groups of people invest in different projects. Yep. They paid 375,000,000, and so you can think of this as a effectively a $400,000,000 Yes. Acquisition.
Speaker 2:It's such a creative way to get a little bit more attention on an acquisition
Speaker 3:that would have been would have been cool,
Speaker 2:but it wouldn't have had a narrative to it where people were like, this is crazy. Oh, it actually all makes sense now. So it was a really good Mission Impossible rip off the mask. Coinbase isn't actually crazy. They're not actually paying 25,000,000 just for a podcast.
Speaker 2:One of
Speaker 1:the most iconic quotes from a tech CEO of this century Yes. From Chesky said, I was basically going room to room just pouring out this stream of consciousness manifesto like Jack Kerouac writing on the road. I basically said, we're not just a vacation app. We're going to EmDash. We're gonna be a platform, a community.
Speaker 2:What's funny is, like, I I think of Airbnb as a community from, like, day one.
Speaker 1:What does community mean,
Speaker 2:Like, I met my cofounders on Airbnb. I met in YC.
Speaker 1:My pushback would be that maybe the last 10 times I've used Airbnb, it was to book a vacation rental. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so so wanna meet the house.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that's Also, once I was traveling and I was staying in an Airbnb in New York, and it was very clear that the, the owner of the house, like, wanted to meet me and, like, wanted to, like, make friends. And, and in that in that context, I was like, I don't I don't I don't know. Like, I I I'm here on a business trip now. I kind of don't wanna make a new friend.
Speaker 2:You seem cool, but, like, I'm good. Apparently, Anthropic spent 2,660,000,000.00 on Amazon Web Services in the 2025, around 100% of their estimated revenue.
Speaker 1:This article is implying that Anthropic has basically 0% margins, but it's possible that some of, like, they're paying to serve and run the models Yeah. For customers Yep. API clients, but they're also training. You can now fundraise in Stripe Atlas. It's very cool.
Speaker 1:Stripe Atlas generates a a significant amount. I forget the exact percentage, but a meaningful, I think, double digit percentage of all c corps created are created with Stripe Atlas. Yep. I built this product at Party Round. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's very useful. It's not a great business, but it makes sense to, you know, tie it into the to the Stripe ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, search every byte, serverless vector in full text search, build from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. The world is changed, subtle, and obvious. For the first time in living memory, the scope of live player action expands.
Speaker 1:Thinking of tech companies as nations. Yes. Right? If you start thinking of OpenAI in the context of like a a a nation state Yeah. And the nation state is saying, like, we're gonna need trillions of dollars.
Speaker 1:We're gonna need a huge amount of energy. And, yes, it's gonna be distributed all over. Yeah. It's not that crazy for, you know, a country to be saying, like, we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Yeah. On it's like a, you know, digital nation state.
Speaker 2:Still feels like the US government is at the top of the stack and the tech companies answer to the US government. But I do wonder if there's some element of flipping that will happen at some point or has already happened. Like, did you know that Walmart spends more money than the United Nations? Isn't that remarkable?
Speaker 1:Do you see this picture? There it's looks like somebody found, them filming the OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Is this real or is this just someone dressed up as Ilya? Chatty PT 21 says this movie's gonna be sick, and it looks
Speaker 1:like someone's Joseph Gordon Levitt.
Speaker 3:Oh, you think so?
Speaker 1:Playing Ilya. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe. Oh, it does look like him. He's playing Iliad?
Speaker 1:That It would make sense that they would film in
Speaker 2:Anyway, San Wild. Wild. Gonna be a good movie. Hopefully, it pumps some people up. We'll see.
Speaker 2:It's probably gonna be a brutal hit piece.
Speaker 1:We'll see.
Speaker 3:I wonder if we're gonna see any releases of, who's playing Rune.
Speaker 2:I I would love to know who's playing Rune. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's let's play the Apple video. Every story you love. Is this a new Mac MacBook Pro? Is that what we're getting?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It seems just like a pro Apple creativity vibe real.
Speaker 1:It's a Mac ad, John.
Speaker 2:A Mac ad. It hits extremely emotionally because, that that, ad is voiced by Jane Goodall who passed away on October first of of this year. She was, of course, the British primatologist. She studied monkeys. She studied chimpanzees.
Speaker 2:Warren Buffett missed out on $50,000,000,000 in profits by selling Apple too early. Barron's calculated that he sold $650,000,000, 650,000,000 shares at an estimated price of a $185. Now they're at $263. He might have made more money than any investment manager ever with that trade, and it was sort of a sort of a, narrative violation because he's often bought, you know, these low PE ratio stocks and not stayed out of techno and just generally stayed out of technology. Of course, Apple kinda violated them both, but it was a fantastic success.
Speaker 1:Because I remember when the trade war hit, the tariffs, liberation day, everyone was like, oh, Buffett is a is a genius. Right? He looked so smart for selling when he did, and then, of course, ripped back up because nothing ever happens.
Speaker 2:Nothing ever happens. Absolutely remarkable day. Well, thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone and supporting us. Can't wait for tomorrow.
Speaker 2:We will see you tomorrow. Have a great evening.