THIS WEEK IN AI: Grok Bot (and 4.6), AI Watermarks, Deepseek Strategy, Selling the Lakers

This week we discuss Grok 4.6, GrokBot, and DeepSeek V4 Pro, along with the implications of their benchmark results and capabilities. 

We also cover neocloud earnings, Intel’s $20 billion capital raise, an EU AI watermarking rule, the LA Lakers sale, and Brad Lightcap’s departure from OpenAI.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Grok 4.6
7:08 GrokBot
12:31 DeepSeek
15:08 AI Cloud Earnings
19:46 Intel CapEx
22:57 AI Watermarks
25:15 Lakers Sold
28:00 OpenAI Leadership

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
There's a new Frontier model in town, and it comes from a not-so-suspecting company in SpaceX AI.

Josh:
They just released Grok 4.6. This is now possibly the best model that there

Josh:
is out there, depending on what you care about. As we look at this benchmark

Josh:
card, it shows that Grok 4.6 High is scoring higher than even Fable 5 on some tasks.

Josh:
And this is shocking because, I mean, just last week, if you would have asked

Josh:
us where Grok stood in the AI race, we would say, well, they're like a distant

Josh:
third competing probably with Meta and Gemini.

Josh:
The reality is that with this new model, they are now right at the front.

Josh:
And not only that, but the new model, Grok 4.7, is expected to come out in the

Josh:
next three to four weeks and be even better than this one.

Josh:
This comes on the back of Grok releasing a new product called GrokBot,

Josh:
which we'll get into, as well as a lot of other interesting news from this week.

Josh:
This is the roundup, the weekly roundup every Friday that we publish,

Josh:
where we cover all things about news and AI, things like covering earnings from

Josh:
NeoClouds all the way over to the new acquisition of your favorite or least

Josh:
favorite sports team. But we have to start here with Grok 4.6.

Josh:
They're back. They're right here at the frontier. This is an amazing model.

Ejaaz:
So back. Yeah, no. So for the longest time, SpaceX had kind of lost the frontier race.

Ejaaz:
Elon's engineering team had made a few wrong moves and they kind of fell behind

Ejaaz:
the likes of Anthropic OpenAI and Google, which is crazy to say because Google's

Ejaaz:
fallen behind a lot since then.

Ejaaz:
They're officially back. Grok 4.6 comes, I think, three weeks after Grok 4.5

Ejaaz:
got released, and it is a bigger and better model.

Ejaaz:
Now, specifically, if we look at a few different benchmark comparisons,

Ejaaz:
there's this thing called the AA Intelligence Index. It's a really good way

Ejaaz:
of testing just the general level of intelligence across different models.

Ejaaz:
And on your screen here, you'll see it compared directly to GPT 5.6 Sol Max.

Ejaaz:
So that's like the highest, hardest version from OpenAI, as well as Fable 5 Max.

Ejaaz:
And you'll see it is the equivalent to GBD 5.6 Sol and just a point of Fable

Ejaaz:
5. So you could argue that its general intelligence level is right up there.

Ejaaz:
But the best part is it comes at a fraction of the cost. So it's 5x cheaper

Ejaaz:
output than Sol, 8.5x cheaper output than Fable.

Ejaaz:
Overall, you're kind of ranging between 3 to 5x cheaper than these two models,

Ejaaz:
which is a big thing if you're like a company that's using these frontier models

Ejaaz:
and want to kind of figure out

Ejaaz:
how to cut your cost down from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ejaaz:
Now, the main way that they're able to achieve this frontier intelligence,

Ejaaz:
well, there's a few ways, but the main one is they spin up a bunch of agents.

Ejaaz:
So Grok 4.6 uses multiple agents to kind of like solve your query.

Ejaaz:
Now, this isn't something that's relatively new.

Ejaaz:
This is something that Meta is doing in their smaller models.

Ejaaz:
It's something that a lot of Chinese open source models are also doing. So that's one part.

Ejaaz:
Two, and this is like, I have to emphasize, this is SpaceX's like biggest moat.

Ejaaz:
They have a lot of data, a lot of useful data that makes these models insanely

Ejaaz:
smart. They can just bung it into it when they're training it.

Ejaaz:
And also a hell of a lot of compute, which Elon has been very strategically

Ejaaz:
amassing over the last year. He has like the most compute out of anyone in the game.

Ejaaz:
And we're starting to see this, like you mentioned, like 4.7 is coming out in

Ejaaz:
a few weeks time, and it's going to be even bigger and better than this.

Ejaaz:
I think it's going to be like a three to five trillion parameter model.

Ejaaz:
So you can only imagine that, like, you know, with the cost benefits and with

Ejaaz:
the intelligence that's increasing, like SpaceX is in a new world right now. It's very impressive.

Josh:
Yeah, this is where things are going to start to get really interesting because it was.

Josh:
Mostly a matter of if not when and now it feels like it's a matter of when when

Josh:
they actually get to their frontier and eclipse it

Josh:
for a few reasons the first of which is that i mean as we mention all the time

Josh:
the spacex team is the best team in the world at building physical things at

Josh:
moving atoms around at compiling data centers quickly

Josh:
it is nothing compared to building a rocket ship to just put a couple servers

Josh:
on a rack on the ground and plug them into electricity so they have been doing

Josh:
this quickly and efficiently in the episode yesterday we talked about micro

Josh:
hard which is the small version of macro hard

Josh:
yet it is the same exact footprint in terms of gpus in a cluster so basically

Josh:
they've able to they've been able to figure out how to get 200 000 coherent

Josh:
gpus into a package the size that's

Josh:
about one third of macro hard so it's this amazing iterative process that they

Josh:
have on hardware and then they have this amazing iterative process on software

Josh:
where they're planning to publish these models once a month

Josh:
that are incrementally stronger and stronger you said now you just i think we're

Josh:
at three to five i'm pretty sure there's plans for like eight to 10 trillion parameters

Josh:
in terms of parameter count.

Ejaaz:
They actually have that training run going right now for a 10 trillion parameter model.

Josh:
It's in the oven right now. So we are going to get that after it's done with

Josh:
the post-training alignment phase.

Josh:
But the idea is that it's all coming. It's all happening.

Josh:
The hard part is mostly done. They've gotten from zero to one.

Josh:
They've reached it back to the frontier.

Josh:
Now it's just a matter of seeing how far they could push it, how quickly.

Josh:
I'm going to guess like pretty quick. I don't know. when i think about other

Josh:
advantages like their data set like you mentioned having access to all the proprietary

Josh:
space rocket science data that seems valuable in terms of science and intelligence

Josh:
basically they have this open corpus of data that no model has ever been trained

Josh:
on that's proprietary and for

Josh:
those that aren't familiar like starship the giant rocket that's going to mars

Josh:
that was built 100 by humans there was no ai in the process so all of the math

Josh:
all of the science all of the hardware schematics

Josh:
that's incredibly valuable and that's what grok 4.6 is being trained So this

Josh:
model is an amazing model and I'm very excited to see where Grot goes from here.

Ejaaz:
Not to mention that Elon Musk has specified that by the end of the year,

Ejaaz:
Grok 5 will be released. I believe that will be the 10 trillion parameter model.

Ejaaz:
So we're talking about mythos grade level model.

Ejaaz:
But it'll be the smartest engineering AI model in the world.

Ejaaz:
And the reason why he says that is it'll be trained entirely on SpaceX's engineering data.

Ejaaz:
And there is no better physical engineering team in the world that isn't at

Ejaaz:
SpaceX. So not only is he building better generalized models,

Ejaaz:
he is building hyper-specific ones that are going to hopefully push the frontiers

Ejaaz:
of science, material sciences forward.

Ejaaz:
Now, for those haters out there that have, you know, validly pointed out that

Ejaaz:
Elon makes a lot of big promises but doesn't really fill his shoes,

Ejaaz:
this is one instance where he definitely is doing this.

Ejaaz:
And I don't think it was, it was until a few days ago, priced into the market.

Ejaaz:
But like right now, when you look at the stock, it is up 26% in the last five days.

Ejaaz:
I remember when we made our episode last week when the stock was down, I don't know, like 35%.

Ejaaz:
And we literally said that like, you know, like there's a lot of unlocks coming out.

Ejaaz:
We understand that there's a lot of supply constraints and issues here.

Ejaaz:
But if you are somewhat a mid to long-term holder, SpaceX so obviously has a

Ejaaz:
track record for execution, being able to pull feats like this off and people

Ejaaz:
just weren't pricing into the air completely.

Ejaaz:
Remember, when you buy SpaceX stock, You are just buying like a rocket company, right?

Ejaaz:
You're buying a satellite connectivity company.

Ejaaz:
You are buying the cheapest way to get into space and launch your own compute

Ejaaz:
if you wanted to harvest that. You're buying a rocket company as well.

Ejaaz:
And you're also buying an AI company. Oh, also the social media company of the

Ejaaz:
world that's going to distribute a bunch of these things. Include it.

Ejaaz:
This new product that has just come out, which we have been playing around with

Ejaaz:
called GrokBot. It's my understanding that this is basically their version of

Ejaaz:
OpenClaw, except it actually works. Do I have that right, Josh?

Josh:
It's a remarkable product. I am obsessed with GrokBot. It feels like the SpaceX

Josh:
AI team is jumping to endgame of what a agentic product could actually look like.

Josh:
Like you mentioned, it's very similar in sense to OpenClaw, but it feels like

Josh:
it's a much more improved and refined version of OpenClaw in the sense that it's fully agentic.

Josh:
And maybe I could explain the way it works. So basically you join this application

Josh:
and it just gives you a text box similar in style to iMessage.

Josh:
You could picture like where you send your text messages, except you could spin up an agent.

Josh:
You can give them a task. You can give them a personality. You give them a name

Josh:
and then they will be that person for you. So for example, if you like working

Josh:
out, you go to the gym, you create a little chat bot and you say,

Josh:
Hey, you're my gym workout companion buddy. You are a world-class expert at fitness.

Josh:
You are going to give me an entire workout program based on these 10 things

Josh:
that I know about my body and I'd like to work with you every single day to

Josh:
Actually get more fit and more healthy and remind me every day to go and work

Josh:
out. And if I don't check in with you, then remind me again and again until

Josh:
I actually get my ass to the gym and work out.

Josh:
And this is a very basic version of what it's capable of. But I think it's really

Josh:
interesting in a way that OpenClaw wasn't because OpenClaw required a bit of

Josh:
technical expertise. You need to host your own server.

Josh:
You need to download the software on the server. You need to run maintenance.

Josh:
You need to manage the memory system. You need to manage all the nuance and complexities.

Josh:
With this program all you have to do is just log in and you just start talking

Josh:
to it it hosts it on their servers the application is beautiful they've done

Josh:
this really cool thing that i love which is the design of the actual

Josh:
agents they have this very cute animation it kind of disarms the feeling that

Josh:
you're working with this like

Josh:
kind of scary spooky ai and just turns it into a really fun experience

Josh:
and it's available on mobile it's available on desktop and i like cannot encourage

Josh:
trying it out enough and you don't even realize that you're talking to a system

Josh:
similar to open claw because it's so easy to set up it's all handed on the background

Josh:
i think amazing product from grok

Ejaaz:
If you're listening to this and you're wondering okay is this a new ai model

Ejaaz:
should i be using this i tried that open call thing out and it was terrible

Ejaaz:
it stole all my money from my bank account

Ejaaz:
Let me try and explain like who this product might be pitched at,

Ejaaz:
right? So it is not the ideal product to use if you are a hardcore software

Ejaaz:
engineer, if you want to code every day.

Ejaaz:
This is pitched at sort of knowledge workers who spend a lot of time doing software

Ejaaz:
or desktop-based tasks, but want to automate some of the more.

Ejaaz:
Menial things like email admin or calendar scheduling or customer support and stuff like that.

Ejaaz:
These types of things take up a lot of time. And if you kind of like sum up

Ejaaz:
the economic value of all of it across like every single sector, it is quite a large sum.

Ejaaz:
And I think to understand why GrokBots isn't just a toy is to understand what

Ejaaz:
Elon Musk said, I think about six months ago, which is,

Ejaaz:
it is very much XAI and now SpaceX AI's mission

Ejaaz:
to replace a lot of human software-based tasks, not so that it replaces people's

Ejaaz:
jobs, but to give them the freedom to not waste their time on stuff that doesn't need to be wasted.

Ejaaz:
They can kind of like automate away all the boring manual labor that you get tired of doing at work.

Ejaaz:
And it frees you up to do more creative, impactful things in your actual job.

Ejaaz:
He references it as a human emulator. So it's basically, you can interact with

Ejaaz:
these agents and you don't even know that it's another human.

Ejaaz:
That's like the real test, the benchmark on the other end. And this is the first

Ejaaz:
step towards that. Now, is this that?

Ejaaz:
No. But is this a really refined and easy to use version like you mentioned, Josh?

Ejaaz:
Yes. You sign up. They spin up a virtual machine in the cloud and your agents

Ejaaz:
just kind of like run riot and they can like simultaneously take over your computer,

Ejaaz:
but it's done in a very safe mannered way so that they can't do anything crazy.

Ejaaz:
And the thing that pops to the top of my head when I read through and watch

Ejaaz:
all the demos of this problem and read the feedback is...

Ejaaz:
This is a direct attack against not OpenAI or Anthropik, but Apple,

Ejaaz:
who is releasing Siri AI in a few months' time now and is meant to function

Ejaaz:
and perform completely on your phone.

Ejaaz:
It's meant to interact with all your apps and all that kinds of stuff.

Ejaaz:
Now, granted, GrokBot can't do that right now, but it is accessible and available on your phone.

Ejaaz:
You can text it whenever you want. And I can only imagine that eventually this

Ejaaz:
will get access to some types of phones, maybe Android first because the Apple ecosystem is so closed.

Ejaaz:
But I see this as a direct competitor to that. And I'm just so happy to see

Ejaaz:
Elon make a functional product that isn't just a model because that's why he's best at. Yeah.

Josh:
And at the very least, you at least you get the app on your phone and the new

Josh:
Siri is actually launching in about a month from today. So it's coming very soon.

Josh:
But this feels like the magic that I felt with Open Claw, except a more refined

Josh:
and far more productive version.

Josh:
Currently, it's baked in with GPT 4.6, which we just said is a remarkable model

Josh:
for incredibly low price.

Josh:
As these models continue to improve having those baked into this agentic experience

Josh:
feels pretty incredible

Josh:
it's like you open up your phone out of your pocket and you have this series of brilliant

Josh:
supercomputer helpers that can do anything in the world for you they can work

Josh:
together they can gain access to your context it feels like a peek into the

Josh:
future this feels like open claw 2.0 so it's a really exciting product i think

Josh:
we're going to follow this one

Josh:
closely and see what the other company's reactions to a product like this

Josh:
are going to be but that is the grok update congratulations on your new Frontier slot.

Josh:
Looking forward to the next one. For the next topic, we have another,

Josh:
I mean, kind of Frontier model, except this one on the open source side.

Josh:
DeepSeek is back with another release as well. DeepSeek v4.0.

Josh:
Pro. And the price floor has moved once again. This is a pretty big deal.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. So DeepSeek, if we kind of harken back to, what is it,

Ejaaz:
like a year and a half now, which is not that long ago at all,

Ejaaz:
caused a massive disruption in the AI field because back then, compute was king.

Ejaaz:
Sam Altman was on top. And if you could buy as much compute as you can,

Ejaaz:
you could train the smartest models.

Ejaaz:
DeepSeek came along, which is, I believe, birthed out of a hedge fund, Liang Wangfeng.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, he's a hedge fund manager in China and basically said,

Ejaaz:
hey, yeah, I ran a bunch of quants and asked them to make a model that would

Ejaaz:
help it with financial trading and ended up creating a groundbreaking model

Ejaaz:
that didn't require as much compute. And it kind of like tore the market apart.

Ejaaz:
Well, since then, they've released, I think, one more model.

Ejaaz:
And now they're back with like their big boy model. Now, this isn't an official

Ejaaz:
release. This has been rumored to be released soon, but we had an official leak

Ejaaz:
about the benchmarks for this model, DeepSeek V4 Pro.

Ejaaz:
Now, yes, it is re-rated the cost sheet as always. It is always the cheapest

Ejaaz:
cost per unit intelligence for an AI lab out there.

Ejaaz:
But what struck me was some of these benchmarks that were leaked.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you look at Terminal Bench 2.1, which is a popular coding paradigm or

Ejaaz:
benchmark, it comes in at 87.9, right?

Ejaaz:
Now, when you compare that directly to, say, Fable 5, it is,

Ejaaz:
what is that, 0.1 of Fable 5's level of coding capability, measured at this benchmark.

Ejaaz:
If you look at Opus 4.8, Kimi K3, and GLM Fiber 2 absolutely crushes it.

Ejaaz:
But the other worrying part is this one over here.

Ejaaz:
It's the CyberGym benchmark.

Ejaaz:
It is not only rivaled, but it's slightly better than Fable 5 at cyber capabilities.

Ejaaz:
Now, the reason why this worries me is Dario had a really good post.

Ejaaz:
I think about a month ago, where he said, in about six months time,

Ejaaz:
we are going to have an open source version of Mythos' level of cyber capability.

Ejaaz:
And that's going to be an issue because it's going to have no safeguards around it. So.

Ejaaz:
The reason why Mythos hasn't been able to wreak havoc on the world is because

Ejaaz:
they have safeguards around it.

Ejaaz:
DeepSeek, if they release this in an open source fashion, is going to have,

Ejaaz:
you know, a bunch of amazing effects where you can run it at home,

Ejaaz:
it's cheaper, private, blah, blah, blah.

Ejaaz:
But also, if it was put in the hands of a malicious actor, it could end up causing

Ejaaz:
havoc. So I just wanted to point that out. Like, it isn't an official release

Ejaaz:
just yet, but it's something that I'm keeping my eye on.

Josh:
It's coming. Well, we did have an official release, and it came in the form

Josh:
of an earnings release. In fact, we had two of them.

Josh:
Uh one from core weave and the other from nebius for those not familiar these

Josh:
are neocloud providers neocloud providers they're basically

Josh:
they they work with the gpu providers to collect gpus they build their own infrastructure

Josh:
and they rent out that infrastructure to people who want to train their ai models

Josh:
or use them for inference or whatever it may be so you could think of it as

Josh:
like ai training or ai inference as a service they offer to people

Josh:
they had a pretty unbelievable quarter both of these companies when we look

Josh:
at nebius how much was it up on the day i'm not seeing it on the chart but i

Josh:
know it was up like a huge amount i think it was up

Ejaaz:
25 on the day.

Josh:
Yeah and core weave i believe was up 31 at least this week yes both of these

Josh:
companies showed blowout numbers mostly because um

Josh:
as we mentioned in the previous episode the price per rental hour of gpus is

Josh:
just going through the roof everyone when they initially evaluated these neocloud

Josh:
providers they were baking in depreciation of these gpus over time

Josh:
because when you have a gpu you assume it's a depreciating asset,

Josh:
you mark it down year over year until it reaches a settling point.

Josh:
What's happening is the inverse. The number's going up. So therefore,

Josh:
the amount of revenue that they're making is going up. And from the Corby Verning's

Josh:
call, we have a quote here. It says, we recently signed an A100 contract.

Josh:
Again, those are the 2020 GPUs.

Josh:
That extends into 2029 GPUs.

Josh:
At an attractive price. So people are signing contracts for three years out on GPUs that are 25%

Ejaaz:
Higher than they rented out two years ago, by the way.

Josh:
That's incredible. So on the surface, I mean, that looks, that looks great.

Josh:
We're like, okay, this is a good company. But then also I do have to,

Josh:
I do have to say, I was looking into the earnings, particularly of CoreWeave,

Josh:
which I'm more familiar with.

Josh:
And I realized that they actually have a bit of an issue on their hands.

Josh:
They're spending a lot of money that they don't have. So one of the things that

Josh:
we look at when we look at the hyperscalers in particular, like Google and Amazon,

Josh:
is they're spending a lot of money out of their free cash flow.

Josh:
They're not going into debt.

Josh:
What's happening with Corbiv at least is they have $6.5 billion of capex,

Josh:
but they have a negative free cash flow of just under $6 billion,

Josh:
which means they're losing money.

Josh:
They have debt around $35 billion of it. And this is a company,

Josh:
when I see that, I'm like, oh, wait, that's the thing we've been looking out for.

Josh:
The hyperscalers don't have that because they're making enough revenue in order

Josh:
to offset that. But this company,

Josh:
I don't know. I just noticed that. And I was like, huh, okay.

Josh:
A little flag went off. I'm like, okay, great earnings.

Josh:
Number one up. But we're spending a little bit more than we can afford right now.

Ejaaz:
But they also have a revenue backlog of $104 billion.

Ejaaz:
And they just signed $25 billion in customer commitments, which I think about

Ejaaz:
50 to 60% of that is paid up front, just for Q3 alone.

Ejaaz:
So you're definitely right to call out the debt backlog. I saw Martin Shkreli,

Ejaaz:
our financial analyst provocateur make the point around that they're in a lot of debt.

Ejaaz:
But I think this is just the name of the game over the next couple of years

Ejaaz:
where a lot of hyperscalers, especially these neoclouds who have to compete

Ejaaz:
with the big boys like Microsoft and Google and AWS.

Ejaaz:
Need to double down on AI CapEx if they want any shot of winning.

Ejaaz:
And if you look over at the Nebius kind of breakdown, by the way,

Ejaaz:
we should get into the revenue numbers just very briefly, like their revenue

Ejaaz:
is up 454% year upon year.

Ejaaz:
That is an insane business. And that is not too indifferent quarter to quarter

Ejaaz:
as well. I think they're compounding by like 50%, which is just absolutely insane.

Ejaaz:
But the point around Nebius is this is a more, shall I say, grown up version of CoreWeave.

Ejaaz:
And they're sitting on about $8 billion in cash. So I think of like CoreWeave

Ejaaz:
being a younger gun that's like really eager and might end up flying too close

Ejaaz:
to the sun, but they do have the backing of NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
They do have contracts with Anthropic, I believe, which essentially prop up

Ejaaz:
that revenue backlog that I mentioned earlier on.

Ejaaz:
And I just want to explain something that separates what these neoclouds are

Ejaaz:
versus like some of these hyperscalers. When you look at Google,

Ejaaz:
when you look at AWS, when you look at Microsoft, they've been in the cloud game for a while.

Ejaaz:
So when this AI stuff came along, they basically looked at it and said.

Ejaaz:
Oh, cool. I'm squeezing 30 to 40% margins on normal cloud.

Ejaaz:
I should be able to do the same with AI, right?

Ejaaz:
So they go to Jensen and they buy all these GPUs and they realize,

Ejaaz:
oh, Jensen's taking 70% margin, so I have to take less...

Ejaaz:
Percentage on this. So they become a little more difficult to work with.

Ejaaz:
When you're a company that wants to least compute for some of these hyperscalers,

Ejaaz:
they don't do anything and everything for you.

Ejaaz:
Compare that to Nebius and CoreWeave, they will go out to build a specific cluster

Ejaaz:
that works for your specific workload.

Ejaaz:
And that's the difference between these two companies or these two types of

Ejaaz:
companies and why I think Nebius and CoreWeave are actually going to do pretty well in the future.

Josh:
Yeah, I hope so. We'll see. We also had news from another company similar in

Josh:
this space with Intel, who was saying, they're like, hey, actually,

Josh:
we kind of need some more money. Can we get $15 billion?

Josh:
And they asked for $15 billion and the market kind of hated it.

Josh:
The stock fell 5% after announcing that they are doing a $15 billion common

Josh:
stock issuance to help fund the AI build out and growth opportunities.

Josh:
Market was like, ooh, we don't like that. Again, to the CapEx thing.

Josh:
Everyone's allergic to CapEx for some reason. They think that these companies

Josh:
are not good at allocating money.

Josh:
Clearly, they're wrong because, I mean, in the last day, Intel has now bounced

Josh:
back. They're doing fairly well.

Josh:
But what is the story behind this reaction and the kind of knee-jerk reaction

Josh:
in which initially they were a little upset? But then it seems like today the

Josh:
market's kind of coming to its senses and figuring, like, wait a second, maybe we do like CapEx.

Ejaaz:
Well, people obviously do like it, but specific people, which are the investors

Ejaaz:
in Intel. So they originally asked for $15 billion, but they ended up getting

Ejaaz:
demand for $100 billion.

Ejaaz:
And they thought, okay, well, we won't take $100 billion worth of equity sell,

Ejaaz:
but we'll take an extra $5 billion. So they ended up raising $20 billion in

Ejaaz:
under 24 hours, might I add.

Ejaaz:
Now, you might be wondering, why on earth do they need more money?

Ejaaz:
Why are they selling equity? Why are they diluting shareholders?

Ejaaz:
Well, number one, the dilution isn't actually that much, who cares?

Ejaaz:
But if you listen to their last earnings call, Li Bhutan, who is the CEO,

Ejaaz:
who has been changing things around a lot for Intel, as well as the CFO said

Ejaaz:
something very specific, and I'll quote it.

Ejaaz:
He goes, things are going really well, and we have almost $20 to $30 billion.

Ejaaz:
Cash balance that we can spend on anything and everything.

Ejaaz:
However, if things are going really well, we may raise external capital.

Ejaaz:
And what he was referring to there is if they have a lot of signed contracts

Ejaaz:
and upcoming customers, big customers that want to use their foundry.

Ejaaz:
There's something called Intel Foundry where Intel is basically building a chip

Ejaaz:
fab that is going to go up against NVIDIA and the likes of AMD as well.

Ejaaz:
Then they will raise external capital. This is the clearest signal that they have those customers.

Ejaaz:
So I have a feeling over the next couple of months, we're going to see an announcement

Ejaaz:
from Intel saying that they've signed a major client like, I don't know,

Ejaaz:
an Apple or an Anthropic or OpenAI, basically saying, yeah, we're going to be

Ejaaz:
designing custom chips for them, which I think is a big deal.

Ejaaz:
So I'm happy to see Intel winning and I'm a pretty big fan.

Josh:
Yeah, well, part of the reason why they're needing this build out is because,

Josh:
I mean, again, we talk about the increased amount of inference that has been happening.

Josh:
There's just so many inference tokens required because of agents and if you're

Josh:
building with agents we have a message for you from our friends and sponsors

Josh:
over at ledger because oftentimes if you're building with agents you're probably

Josh:
worried about security we've seen all these breakouts that have happened recently

Josh:
in the space it's kind of scary ledger has a solution to this it comes in the

Josh:
form of three parts where the agents propose the humans approve and then the ledger signers enforce

Josh:
this is the three-step process to ensure that you are safe when you're working

Josh:
with agents ledger has this thing called an agent stack it's totally open source

Josh:
it comes equipped with tools to help you manage the way that you work with your agents.

Josh:
It works with cloud code, codex, cursor, anywhere you really interface with

Josh:
AI, and it's totally open source.

Josh:
So you can check it out in the link in the description below.

Josh:
Thank you so much to Ledger for sponsoring this episode. Now we have to move

Josh:
over to watermarking, which is apparently a thing that's been happening now.

Josh:
What's the watermarking story here?

Ejaaz:
I'm still trying to figure it out myself, but basically our friends across the

Ejaaz:
pond in the EU, they like regulating stuff, especially tech and especially AI.

Ejaaz:
And their latest law has basically required the top AI labs to watermark the

Ejaaz:
text output or the response that your AI chatbot gives you when you write to it.

Ejaaz:
So let's say you ask Anthropik or Claude specifically, hey, like,

Ejaaz:
can you teach me how to do A, B, and C? Or let's say you ask it to do a bit

Ejaaz:
of work at your job, right? Like help you generate a structure for a document.

Ejaaz:
That text that it generates will have an embedded watermark that can be traced

Ejaaz:
back to being Claude. So let's say you copy that text and you paste it into your work document.

Ejaaz:
And eventually your manager is like, oh, I'm going to run this through a detection

Ejaaz:
system just to see if this was written by Claude.

Ejaaz:
By the way, even if you edit it, it'll still work. So he runs it through Claude

Ejaaz:
or runs it through Anthropics New Thing.

Ejaaz:
And apparently it'll become flagged as written by Claude or AI specifically.

Ejaaz:
And the EU's justification behind this is essentially, we want to make sure

Ejaaz:
that we protect users from AI generated content and be able to distinguish between

Ejaaz:
human generated stuff and AI generated stuff.

Ejaaz:
I have a bunch of questions around this being number one, is this official?

Ejaaz:
Number two, why is an EU act being applied to the entire world?

Ejaaz:
By the way, this will be applied to not just EU countries, but models anywhere

Ejaaz:
and everywhere in the world. I don't really know what to think of this.

Josh:
Yeah, the EU has this really funny thing where like sometimes they ruin the

Josh:
world sometimes they help the world and there's a funny example that i love

Josh:
to reference here which is like the iphone

Josh:
um the iphone had this proprietary cable which was lightning and it was kind

Josh:
of annoying because it was the only device that used a lightning adapter it

Josh:
was proprietary it only worked for apple

Josh:
The EU was being being annoying as they are. They said, no, no,

Josh:
no, no, no. You must use a generic port. You must use a port that everybody

Josh:
else is using. That's not proprietary.

Josh:
So Apple had to accelerate the switch over to USB-C. And it turns out that worked

Josh:
out well for everyone. We enjoyed that.

Josh:
This seems like a different case. I'm not really sure. I think we could kind

Josh:
of stay tuned for more information on how this is going to roll out and what

Josh:
this will actually look like.

Josh:
But an interesting development nonetheless. There's another interesting development

Josh:
that I actually I added to this agenda intentionally because I needed to talk about it today.

Josh:
Not because i care about the la lakers but we care i care about the people who

Josh:
bought the la lakers so for those who aren't familiar

Josh:
the la lakers was sold last year for about 10 billion dollars i believe it was

Josh:
flipped in the matter of 12 months to a new owner who just purchased the stake

Josh:
for 12.5 billion dollars the most expensive sale in american history

Josh:
there are two people behind this purchase the first one

Josh:
His name is Bob Iger. You might know him as the dude who acquired Marvel,

Josh:
Lucasfilms, 21st Century Fox.

Josh:
That's like Star Wars, Iron Man, Avengers. This is the movie guy.

Josh:
This is the CEO of Disney.

Josh:
He partnered up with this other guy named Joshua Kushner, who you may also have heard of as the

Josh:
Perhaps the single largest, if not one of the largest investors in OpenAI and

Josh:
one of the most active investors in the company to which Sam Altman frequently

Josh:
references him as the flagship person who you want to invest on a cap table.

Josh:
I find this to be really interesting because this very much feels like the barbell

Josh:
strategy in which you have a fund, Thrive Capital being the name of it,

Josh:
which is fully invested in the frontier.

Josh:
They're investing in AI, they're investing in all this robotics infrastructure,

Josh:
all these things that are coming down the pipeline.

Josh:
And then they're also investing in what you could imagine is a post-EGI world.

Josh:
What things actually matter, what things go up in value when AI can automate

Josh:
everything. Well, I mean, people aren't going to stop watching basketball, right?

Josh:
And that's uniquely human. We're not going to get humanoids involved in that.

Josh:
So they're looking to purchase assets that are durable post-AGI and I just found

Josh:
this to be a really interesting story of if anything a thought experiment when

Josh:
you think about the world's after we have artificial super intelligence we have

Josh:
humanoid robots walking around everywhere we have

Josh:
robotics at scale what are the things that still matter to us as humans that

Josh:
we're going to continue to spend capital on it's probably something like these

Josh:
human experiences and the LA Lakers are a pretty sweet brand so they dropped

Josh:
a bag on securing this and I just thought it was really interesting and worth mentioning.

Josh:
And just like an interesting thought experiment on like, hey,

Josh:
where's the world going to go once we figure all these hard problems out?

Ejaaz:
Yeah. Largest transaction for a sporting franchise ever. That is a large amount of money.

Ejaaz:
I'm big fans of Thrive and I like the way that Josh thinks of a lot of his investments.

Ejaaz:
But yeah, to your point, I think this is a very intentional bet on humanity,

Ejaaz:
which is very refreshing to see from one of the largest AI investors in the world.

Ejaaz:
And I think that, you know, as time progresses, human created or human authenticated

Ejaaz:
IP is going to become incredibly valuable. And sporting is a.

Ejaaz:
Just happens to be one of those franchises where, you know, that condenses pretty

Ejaaz:
strongly. And I think, you know, it's just also pretty dope to just buy your

Ejaaz:
favorite team. I think that's a freaking epic, epic baller trade for them.

Ejaaz:
And yeah, so to round off the docket, speaking of OpenAI, they're churning through,

Ejaaz:
these employees, man. But just to round this off, Brad Lightcap,

Ejaaz:
who joined, I believe, as their head of growth and then ended up becoming the COO, has left,

Ejaaz:
Brad Lightcap was pretty definitive to a lot of OpenAI's growth stage,

Ejaaz:
specifically from like GPT-3 onwards.

Ejaaz:
He's been toiling away, but now he's left to go do bigger and better things.

Ejaaz:
We don't actually know what he's doing. But the point is, OpenAI has seen quite

Ejaaz:
a lot of churn over the last couple of months.

Ejaaz:
It happens to come around a time where they're rumored to basically be IPO-ing.

Ejaaz:
When I look over Anthropic, I see the opposite.

Ejaaz:
They're like a magnet attracting a bunch of people. And I do wonder what the

Ejaaz:
differences between them are actually.

Ejaaz:
But that being said, it doesn't seem to be having any change structurally.

Ejaaz:
The research team is still pounding along and creating better models.

Ejaaz:
But it's just interesting to see. And you know, Brad, if you're watching this,

Ejaaz:
dude, like, thanks for everything, dude, you've absolutely killed it.

Josh:
So yeah, pretty legendary run. Yeah. Open AI seems to have this remarkable rate

Josh:
of turn where a lot of top leadership leaves as a lot of very impressive people come in.

Josh:
And I think it's interesting and just noteworthy. I'm not sure what that implies,

Josh:
but a lot of people want to work there. A lot of people are going there.

Josh:
I guess it's testament to how intense it is to work there, but noteworthy nonetheless.

Josh:
Thank you for your services. My dear Brad, you have made a meaningful impact

Josh:
on the world through OpenAI and I'm sure whatever is coming next.

Josh:
Sam Altman said that he looks forward to working together. So whatever this

Josh:
new thing is, I suspect they're going to be doing it as some form of a partner. We'll see TBD.

Josh:
But that is the roundup. This is a fairly long one we had a lot to cover this

Josh:
week a lot of cool and exciting news and it's funny it felt like this was a down week

Josh:
this week felt kind of like a lull there wasn't that much going on and yet still

Josh:
we are here talking about so many things that are happening every single day

Josh:
i think the highlights this week really i mean grok coming out with that new

Josh:
model was pretty big meta releasing the open source models were pretty big

Josh:
we had the full diagnosis on the exploit that happened

Josh:
with open ai and breaking through hugging face you could check out all those

Josh:
videos we filmed entire episodes about that if you haven't made it through.

Josh:
But if you have, and you've reached this point of the video,

Josh:
made it through another week, congratulations. Thanks for sticking with us.

Josh:
It was a really good one. Really exciting. You are now fully up to date.

Josh:
You can go and touch some grass. Enjoy your weekend.

Josh:
Maybe look at the sun, but not for too long. The eclipse happened yesterday

Josh:
at the time of recording. It looked amazing. I went to the last two full eclipses

Josh:
and I missed this one. And I have so much FOMO. So if anyone was there,

Josh:
I'd love to hear about your experience.

Ejaaz:
What do you mean you went to the last two eclipses? Like you traveled to a country

Ejaaz:
where you could see them?

Josh:
Yeah, the United States of America, dog. It was great.

Josh:
Tennessee. And then I forget where the second one was a couple of years ago.

Josh:
But they're amazing. They're unbelievable experiences. And another one just

Josh:
happened. It covered a lot of Spain.

Ejaaz:
Wait, Josh, I thought they were every 90 years. this wasn't the last one like 1999.

Josh:
No dude i saw the last one like a couple of years ago right right like it was

Josh:
like a four-hour drive away from you wait

Ejaaz:
Wait let's let's track this up so that sounds epic i mean it.

Josh:
Must be it's just like unbelievable experience similar i guess you could kind

Josh:
of make it a comparison to the world cup in a way where it's like this unifying experience that feels

Josh:
credibly neutral like sure the world cup everyone has like their favorites but

Josh:
it's this unifying thing where you experience this together and you're like

Josh:
holy shit like we're actually

Josh:
we're pretty small beings in this universe we don't mean a lot there's like

Josh:
really powerful things happening and it's it's something that's totally out

Josh:
of our control that is like remarkably beautiful and unique and rare

Josh:
and i could see why if people like who didn't know what this was

Josh:
had this happened to them you'd probably be pretty freaked out you'd probably

Josh:
believe in aliens or whatever crazy stuff because like it that's what it feels

Josh:
like um so next one next we'll find where the next one is we'll put on our calendars

Josh:
we'll book a flight and we'll go because it's amazing but that's why I just

Josh:
had a little bit of fun with that.

Ejaaz:
I saw some insane photography and videography about people seeing this for the first time.

Ejaaz:
And also there was this awesome video of a guy skateboarding off a half ramp

Ejaaz:
into the eclipse sun as it was setting. It was just the most insane thing ever. Everything was dark.

Ejaaz:
And I couldn't help but think,

Ejaaz:
is this AI. And so I'll leave you on this note. That was real.

Josh:
Wait, also one cool thing about, like, because it mostly happened in Spain,

Josh:
in Mallorca, the sun was going down right at the time of the eclipse happening.

Josh:
And when the sun is closest to the horizon, it's largest. So it looked like

Josh:
this huge eclipsing sun. And I think that's the video you're referencing of

Josh:
this, like with the telephoto lens, you can get some pretty unbelievable shots.

Ejaaz:
It looked like the end of the world, honestly. It was pretty insane.

Josh:
So cool.

Ejaaz:
But yeah, that is it. That is the roundup. Thank you so much for listening.

Ejaaz:
If you are listening to us, if you're watching this and you aren't subscribed

Ejaaz:
or you don't have notifications on, please do. It helps us out massively.

Ejaaz:
Leave us a comment, DM us.

Ejaaz:
A bunch of you have been saying hi in IRL as well. So we love that.

Ejaaz:
Keep approaching us. Keep saying hello. We'd love to hear from you.

Ejaaz:
And yeah, that is it. We will see you next week. Back again on the list.