Sam Altman Issues a "Code Red." The Tides Are Shifting In AI.

OpenAI Issues a Code Red, and Anthropic prepares for an outrageous IPO.

Meanwhile, Amazon has stepped up their AI game, and also pose to eat the lunch of... USPS? Cheack out this crazy alien asteroid with us, and also: Thank you for tuning in this year! 2026 will be our biggest year ever. And by that, we mean first full year ever.

-----
🌌 LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️
https://limitless.bankless.com/
https://x.com/LimitlessFT

------
TIMESTAMPS

0:00 OpenAI Code Red
8:00 Anthropic
14:30 Amazon
20:30 RAM Shortage
23:30 Apple Personnel Chaos
27:00 Extraterrestrial Asteroid
30:00 Spotify Wrapped

------
RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
The golden child of AI, OpenAI, has issued a code red.

Josh:
Just this Monday, Sam Altman, he sent out an internal memo declaring code red around ChatGPT.

Josh:
What is code red? We're gonna get into it, but we understand that it's a direct

Josh:
response to the increase in competition from people like Google and Anthropic

Josh:
who are now releasing models that are superior to anything that ChatGPT has ever created.

Josh:
Code red seems a little risky, a little dangerous for a company that is so levered

Josh:
up on future costs and not able to make a lot of money so

Josh:
i'm not really sure what's going on here ejaz you've lived through a code red

Josh:
in the past through previous experiences can you walk us through what it looks

Josh:
like when a company issues a code red because from what i understand the entire

Josh:
company just gets put on pause and everyone focuses on a single

Josh:
existential risk to the company and i assume that's around chat gpt right

Ejaaz:
Yeah, Code Red can be described with one word, Josh, danger.

Ejaaz:
So I experienced a Code Red when I worked at Coinbase, and it doesn't come about

Ejaaz:
too often. And it basically means one simple thing.

Ejaaz:
The core product or the thing that makes your company special and all the money

Ejaaz:
that it makes is in danger.

Ejaaz:
It is about to die and it is under the threat of major competitors.

Ejaaz:
And you need to pile any and every resource that you can into protecting it

Ejaaz:
and making it the number one leader again.

Ejaaz:
And so my experience at Coinbase, when a code red was issued was literally I

Ejaaz:
woke up one morning, Josh, there was a slack message across the entire company

Ejaaz:
saying code red, here's a list of things that we need to do.

Ejaaz:
And I lost half my team to a completely different part of the organization to

Ejaaz:
focus on something else.

Ejaaz:
And that pursued for like the next like quarter or so, which is just kind of crazy.

Ejaaz:
And so in the context of Sam Altman, and with OpenAI, I just want to give a

Ejaaz:
bit of a context as to like how this has come to be.

Ejaaz:
Last week, I'm showing you this article here.

Ejaaz:
It was leaked in an internal memo by Sam Altman that he gathered the company around and said, hey,

Ejaaz:
in the aftermath of Google releasing their new Gemini 3 Pro model,

Ejaaz:
which absolutely blasted them across every single benchmark by a wide, wide margin,

Ejaaz:
we're probably going to face some economic headwinds because what he was basically

Ejaaz:
saying is our models aren't good enough and we have to put in some more effort to catching up.

Ejaaz:
And that kind of, that economic headwinds kind of like transgressed into a hurricane

Ejaaz:
of sorts, if we wanted to keep the analogy going along,

Ejaaz:
into a code red where he's issued an internal memo to his company that we need

Ejaaz:
to gather all resources to make ChatGPT better.

Ejaaz:
And there's three main buckets that they're compiling these resources into,

Ejaaz:
Josh, which I just want to briefly go over. Number one,

Ejaaz:
improve model performance. So that means improving the benchmarks to match and

Ejaaz:
beat Gemini 3 Pro and other competitor models, and also to help on the pre-training

Ejaaz:
and post-training front. So that's where the majority of the resources are going.

Ejaaz:
The second bucket is going to be in image generation.

Ejaaz:
Now, I found this really interesting because this is a direct response to Gemini

Ejaaz:
3's Nano Banana release. We've spoken about this on a previous episode.

Ejaaz:
You should definitely go check that out. I think it was from two weeks ago.

Ejaaz:
But this is their text-to-image editing model, which is actually really good

Ejaaz:
and driving the most usage for Gemini 3 right now. Their downloads are off the

Ejaaz:
charts right now because of this feature.

Ejaaz:
Sam wants to combat that directly. And the third bucket is personalization, Josh.

Ejaaz:
So you and I have said this before, but OpenAI or ChatGPT's moat is personalization.

Ejaaz:
It's memory. It's the reason why you and I consistently use ChatGPT,

Ejaaz:
despite there being a lot of these other models. they understand and they get us.

Ejaaz:
He wants to double down on that. So you might then ask, well,

Ejaaz:
what comes at a cost to all of this? Like what's the price that he's paying?

Ejaaz:
Well, all the efforts and resources that he's been putting into advertising,

Ejaaz:
into consumer products, in agents, into healthcare, all the stuff that he spoke

Ejaaz:
about on his recent developer conference that everyone got super excited about is now void.

Ejaaz:
Sora 2, it's kind of like it's chilling. It's all been put on hold to focus

Ejaaz:
on these three core buckets. He has gone into war mode, Josh.

Josh:
Yeah, it's, um, I could understand why. I mean, OpenAI, they're reportedly valued

Josh:
at what, half a trillion dollars, 500 billion.

Josh:
They have greater than 800 million weekly active users, which has surprisingly

Josh:
and suspiciously stayed the same over the last two months. Every time they mention

Josh:
it, it's been pegged at 800 million per week. So I'm a little curious if that

Josh:
means that they've kind of stalled out on growth.

Josh:
They are still unprofitable, and they have greater than $1 trillion in cloud

Josh:
and chip obligations to companies and partners like Microsoft,

Josh:
Oracle, and NVIDIA. So they have this huge...

Josh:
Like conundrum on their hands where they need to start making money.

Josh:
And in order to do so, they need to have products that are superior to everybody else's.

Josh:
And we have on screen here a few charts that I found fascinating that may have

Josh:
spurred the code red, which is the relationship between Gemini downloads and ChatGPT downloads.

Josh:
EJ, as we mentioned just on our episode earlier this week, how like Gemini is

Josh:
now on the home screen of my phone.

Josh:
And this is a new phenomenon because of how good it is. We talk about Nano Banana

Josh:
all the time. We had an episode just about it because it was so good.

Josh:
And what you're seeing here in the charts is that Gemini is starting to catch up.

Josh:
And I suspect that it's okay if Gemini is a slightly superior model to ChatGPT's flagship model.

Josh:
But if the consumer application, if that product is at threat,

Josh:
which is the ChatGPT mobile app, the ChatGPT desktop app, if that's under threat

Josh:
by a Gemini, then that's a serious problem.

Josh:
And that's what we're seeing reflected in these charts is Gemini as a better

Josh:
model, sure, but it's also now starting to impede on the actual user base of ChatGPT.

Josh:
And when your company is contingent on this exponential line of growth and you

Josh:
have a real threat to that growth, you must do everything in your power to fix that.

Josh:
And that is what the Code Red is all about. It's like, okay,

Josh:
how do we make this product better so we stop losing market share to these other competitors?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, and it's not like this threat isn't very, very real.

Ejaaz:
I mean, look at this chart, right? You've got not only Gemini users and downloads

Ejaaz:
creeping up to match ChatGPT users, they're spending more time on the app,

Ejaaz:
Josh, which has always been ChatGPT's moat.

Ejaaz:
So, you know, we might be fear-mongering a bit here, but it is a very real threat.

Ejaaz:
We've heard feedback from other people, such as this tweet that I have pulled

Ejaaz:
up here, where, you know, this is just a fad.

Ejaaz:
People are only using Gemini because of Nano Banana Josh. Josh,

Ejaaz:
that's the main reason why you have it on your home screen right now.

Ejaaz:
So there is an argument that this might die down in a few weeks.

Ejaaz:
Time will tell, but it's obviously enough to kind of like push Sam into this

Ejaaz:
hole where he needs to kind of like combat this, right?

Ejaaz:
So then the next natural question I would ask is, well, what's he doing about

Ejaaz:
this and how fast is he going to move?

Ejaaz:
There's two main updates that you need to know about.

Ejaaz:
Next week, he's rumored to release a new reasoning model, which is meant to

Ejaaz:
match and even surpass Gemini 3.

Ejaaz:
It's kind of crazy how he's just done that turnaround. We went from like no

Ejaaz:
ChatGPT model for the rest of the year to, yeah, we're going to roll out one

Ejaaz:
next week. So we already see the effects of this code red coming into place.

Ejaaz:
But then, Josh, there is another secret model.

Ejaaz:
Which is planned to be released early next year in January, called Codenamed

Ejaaz:
Garlic, which is meant to be kind of like a GPT 5.5, which represents or implies

Ejaaz:
a major jump in performance,

Ejaaz:
and for them to retake the kind of number one spot convincingly.

Ejaaz:
This is all hearsay right now. I have no confidence that this is going to happen,

Ejaaz:
but these are the kind of like rumors being spread. And Google isn't the only

Ejaaz:
threat that they're facing that is kind of instigating them with this code red.

Ejaaz:
Anthropic has come out of the woodworks with a flashy new coding model,

Ejaaz:
Claude Opus 4.5, which not only maintained their lead as the number one.

Ejaaz:
Coding AI model, but kind of like boosted them even further than they already

Ejaaz:
were. Like they've got like a marginal lead right now.

Ejaaz:
I'm showing up the quick stats on Opus 4.5 right here.

Ejaaz:
You've got stuff as 80% on agentic coding, terminal coding, 60%, agent tool use, 90%.

Ejaaz:
If you compare these to any of their previous models, as well as Gemini 3 Pro,

Ejaaz:
they're absolutely smashing it, right?

Ejaaz:
And so the fact is, despite Google's kind of like advantage with TPUs or whatever

Ejaaz:
stuff, we've spoken about this on a dedicated episode actually earlier this

Ejaaz:
week or last week, definitely go check that out.

Ejaaz:
They've been able to find a secret source to kind of like boosting their models,

Ejaaz:
Josh. And this is one of many good things about this new model release and about Anthropic this week.

Ejaaz:
Josh, do you have any thoughts on this model? The reason why I'm impressed by

Ejaaz:
this is I think coding is such an important kind of characteristic to have or

Ejaaz:
advantage to have for a model.

Ejaaz:
Why? Because if you have the best coding model, you can practically create whatever

Ejaaz:
the hell you want. If there's a competitor that creates a cool new feature,

Ejaaz:
well, hey, Anthropic can just spin up an exact replica and hearsay. Do you feel the same?

Josh:
Yeah. So here's the getting back to the ChatGPT point. Gemini is better at math and science.

Josh:
Anthropic is better at code. That leaves a narrower and narrower sliver for

Josh:
ChatGPT to actually be great at.

Josh:
And this Anthropic model, it's amazing. I think one of the most important things

Josh:
that I want to highlight here is the scores are great but the cost

Josh:
per token is the most impressive because not only is it a huge intelligence jump

Josh:
it is significantly cheaper per token yeah you could see this chart here how

Josh:
much cheaper it is relative to previous models and how we're kind of getting

Josh:
this this exponential increase where it seemed to previously be flattening flattening

Josh:
out we're getting a new increase and

Josh:
anthropic kind of exists in this strange

Josh:
bubble of code but my god is it really good at code and it comes equipped with

Josh:
this new agentic feature where it will actually ask you a series of questions

Josh:
after you submit a prompt that will kind of go through all of the edge cases that you might want

Josh:
and then it will one-shot things that are really impressive we have an example

Josh:
of a designing a front end right

Josh:
yeah this is crazy yeah i mean please look at this

Ejaaz:
Yeah i mean literally like look okay like i don't need to demonstrate the entire

Ejaaz:
video but just look at the prompt on the left here that i'm circling with my

Ejaaz:
cursor and then just look at the result.

Ejaaz:
This happens, by the way, over a matter of like a few minutes,

Ejaaz:
you have like a fancy fintech background,

Ejaaz:
fintech front end, which is what the prompt asked it to build,

Ejaaz:
in a matter of minutes. This would normally take like a Fortune 500 company

Ejaaz:
a couple months to produce about two years ago. And now it's happening in under

Ejaaz:
four minutes, which is just insane to see.

Ejaaz:
But Josh, there's also this really cool blog post I saw about the Red Team project.

Ejaaz:
Can you tell me about this?

Josh:
I love that. This week we have OpenAI with CodeRed and Anthropic with Red Team.

Josh:
And it kind of shows you it's a testament to where both companies are at right

Josh:
now one is very clearly on the defense one seems to be on the offense so part

Josh:
of this new anthropic rollout is they published this blog post

Josh:
about whether ais can actually exploit blockchains and smart contracts so for

Josh:
the crypto fans this is for you um in simulated testing they found that

Josh:
It could gain access to 4.6 million dollars in exploits and again i mean anthropic

Josh:
is the best coding model in the world if you ever wanted to penetration test

Josh:
any software, this would be the model to do it with.

Josh:
And with every new incremental increase and improvement in this model,

Josh:
it unlocks new exploits that we can actually find. So Nick Carter has this amazing

Josh:
take that I love. I'm just going to read it word for word because it's exactly how I was feeling.

Josh:
And he says, within a year, when people tell their AI agent to go make money,

Josh:
the AI will interpret that as go and steal crypto by phishing our exploits.

Josh:
We're going to have to take OPSEC and smart contract security a lot more seriously

Josh:
on a go forward basis and that's that's true it's like you get into the alignment question where

Josh:
like is this ai good or is this ai trying to answer

Josh:
you solve your request and if your request is go make me some money

Josh:
well it'll just go hack from someone else's because a lot of these systems are

Josh:
not secured against the most cutting edge ai just yet so it unlocks this new

Josh:
interesting paradigm that

Josh:
i find is unique uniquely for anthropic in the case because they are just the best at coding

Josh:
and code is what secures all of our financial assets today so interesting thought experiment

Ejaaz:
Yeah. And the fact of the matter is like, you know, this, the coding frontier

Ejaaz:
model is an incredibly valuable thing to have.

Ejaaz:
And the numbers don't lie, Josh. So if you remember, in January of this year,

Ejaaz:
Dario Amode, the CEO and founder, projected that they would probably reach around $1 billion worth of AR.

Ejaaz:
That's currently what that was what the revenue they were earning at the time.

Ejaaz:
He went on stage yesterday and announced convincingly that they are on track

Ejaaz:
for $10 billion of annual recurring revenue at the end of this year.

Ejaaz:
That is a 10x. That is insane.

Ejaaz:
And so it's going really well. He's on track to hit that $70 billion projected goal,

Ejaaz:
ARR in 2028, which we spoke about a few episodes ago, which will make them the

Ejaaz:
first profitable major AI lab in 2028, beating OpenAI, who's projected to get there in 2031, 2032.

Ejaaz:
So all things are in favor of Anthropic to kind of like do something pretty

Ejaaz:
dramatic, such as a IPO, maybe.

Ejaaz:
Rumors broke, maybe, well, maybe convincingly from an insider.

Ejaaz:
News broke that Anthropic has engaged a firm to start prepping them for an IPO

Ejaaz:
in 2026. Of course, there hasn't been any official confirmations yet,

Ejaaz:
but the regulations and the docs do not lie. um.

Ejaaz:
It also says that Dario is in the kind of midst of closing a massive round,

Ejaaz:
which would value Anthropic at $300 to $350 billion, which will place them up

Ejaaz:
there with OpenAI, who's currently valued at $500 billion.

Ejaaz:
And with OpenAI going into Code Red, with Anthropic entering Red Team and this

Ejaaz:
new Frontier model, maybe they might be even worth the same amount, if not more.

Ejaaz:
So that's just a very interesting kind of like run for Anthropic in general.

Ejaaz:
I saw this tweet, I want to mention it very quickly, that states that Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
might even value the IPO at 300 to 350, which would mean that they don't make

Ejaaz:
any money on it. And the argument for that would be they've already raised so

Ejaaz:
much money that they don't need it.

Ejaaz:
And it is more beneficial for investors to purchase or buy Anthropic stock in the future.

Ejaaz:
I don't know this is all hearsay, but it's something interesting to kind of check out.

Ejaaz:
And the final thing I want to make a point of is these IPO valuations,

Ejaaz:
Josh, are getting absolutely insane.

Ejaaz:
I have this really fun anecdote where a Chinese AI company, which is meant to

Ejaaz:
try to compete with NVIDIA, IPO'd on the Chinese Stock Exchange this week.

Ejaaz:
And Josh, it IPO'd for 4,000 times oversubscribed, which placed it at a 4.5 billion.

Ejaaz:
A trillion dollar market cap beating nvidia's market cap now that was for a

Ejaaz:
brief moment it is now regulated down but it just shows the insatiable appetite

Ejaaz:
and demand for ai stuff right now.

Josh:
Yeah the the four and a half trillion dollar number it's outrageous it's not

Josh:
the only company with the valuation close to that high that we're going to talk

Josh:
about this week we have updates from amazon amazon's been moving kind of slow

Josh:
out of all the mag 7 companies they are the

Josh:
the one showing the least amount of growth this year so it's it's fitting that

Josh:
it's their time is coming if not already here ijaz and you have some updates

Josh:
for us about what they actually announced this week at their aws event so can

Josh:
you walk us through where does amazon stand why are they losing and why is that

Josh:
hopefully not indicative of the future growth that they're going to see from this ai

Ejaaz:
Advancements you can see i'm rubbing my hands josh for those of you who are

Ejaaz:
listening i'm rubbing my hands uh the reason why is uh i've been purchasing

Ejaaz:
amazon stock recently um right before.

Josh:
We recorded actually you guys were saying i'm dcaing in right now

Ejaaz:
Oh yeah oh yeah um and it's because i have an amazon thesis which is it is a sleeper ai stock hit um

Ejaaz:
and this uh set of releases the slew of ai releases that aws um launched this week is proof of that

Ejaaz:
um so i'm going to quickly run you through it um they released a new uh ai chip

Ejaaz:
or ai gpu which competes directly with nvidia's gpus and Google's TPUs.

Ejaaz:
And it's cool for a few different reasons. Number one, it's four and a half

Ejaaz:
times more performant than the previous Tranium chip that they launched.

Ejaaz:
This is Tranium 3. I'm talking about Tranium 2.

Ejaaz:
It is 4x more cost efficient. So it's cheaper.

Ejaaz:
And it also has higher memory bandwidth, which makes it just all around like

Ejaaz:
a really good infrastructure product to use for people to train their models.

Ejaaz:
So that's super cool. And I think it kind of competes directly with NVIDIA in

Ejaaz:
the sense that it can get you about 80% as good as NVIDIA GPUs, but 50% cheaper.

Ejaaz:
So for anyone that's kind of like running on NVIDIA GPUs and they're like spending

Ejaaz:
billions of dollars, they could slash that bill by half, which is really cool.

Ejaaz:
The other really cool thing that they released is something called Nova Forge.

Ejaaz:
In a single sentence, it allows any enterprise to train their own AI model using their own company data.

Ejaaz:
The reason why that's cool is, imagine, like ChatGPT is good,

Ejaaz:
right? But imagine if you had ChatGPT for your own company, imagine how productive

Ejaaz:
you'd be. Imagine how productive each of your employees would be.

Ejaaz:
That's a really unique thing. And it just tells me that like Amazon is going

Ejaaz:
down the enterprise route, similar to the company that they have a 19% stake

Ejaaz:
in, Anthropic, right? So I kind of see the alignment here.

Ejaaz:
And the third point is around these three agents that they released,

Ejaaz:
which basically helps them automate a bunch of things using AI.

Ejaaz:
The way I think about it is Amazon's kind of like the automation AI giant.

Ejaaz:
And I think they're going to do really well, Josh.

Josh:
Yeah, Amazon. I mean, we could lay out a bit of a brief bull case here because

Josh:
I'm super excited about Amazon, too.

Josh:
I was looking at the Mag7 leaders, like who in the Mag7 moves the most amount of atoms?

Josh:
Because when you apply this AI leverage to these companies, the ones that move

Josh:
the most amount of atoms stand to benefit the most.

Josh:
And we have Tesla, we have Apple, we have Microsoft, we have Google.

Josh:
But Amazon moves the most amount of physical stuff in the world by a large margin.

Josh:
I think they're estimated, what is it, 6 to 7 billion orders per year,

Josh:
containing 12 to 15 billion items shipped in 8 to 10 billion packages globally.

Josh:
So in the US alone, that's like 6.3 billion partials in 2024.

Josh:
They're on track for 8.4 billion in 2028. It's a huge amount of stuff just moving around.

Josh:
And when you apply automation to that stuff, you can cut your cost and increase

Josh:
your margin at such a significant rate that amazon stands to benefit hugely from this automation

Josh:
and we're seeing this with the things that they announced this week with in

Josh:
terms of like building their own

Josh:
vertically integrated ai systems we have some interesting takes on chips that

Josh:
they're making so to me amazon is just like poised to explode just because the

Josh:
sheer amount of volume that they move throughout the physical world

Ejaaz:
I i that's such a good point josh did you see the news uh that got released

Ejaaz:
this morning about the USPS stuff?

Josh:
No, what was that?

Ejaaz:
Okay, so get this. Amazon currently pays USPS six to $7 billion a year for them

Ejaaz:
to ship packages for them, right?

Ejaaz:
Because they don't want to like, they can't claim everything because like,

Ejaaz:
you know, you can use the existing postal network.

Ejaaz:
They announced plans, they being Amazon, that they're going to create their

Ejaaz:
own postal service equivalent this morning, which will basically wipe out $6 to $7 billion.

Ejaaz:
No other company can do this to the scale that Amazon is doing it. It's just insane.

Ejaaz:
The other thing I wanted to address, because I know you listeners,

Ejaaz:
I've read all your comments. I know exactly the criticism you're about to give

Ejaaz:
to this segment is, oh, but NVIDIA is still good because everyone is using their

Ejaaz:
software CUDA, C-U-D-A.

Ejaaz:
Amazon has a special source in response to that, which is with their new Tranium

Ejaaz:
chip, they have software that you can just simply port from NVIDIA's to Amazon's,

Ejaaz:
which makes the switching cost not just a hardware consideration,

Ejaaz:
but an easy software consideration as well.

Ejaaz:
Now it becomes really easy if you're running a NVIDIA GPU cluster on AWS to

Ejaaz:
hop onto Amazon. So it's actually a really smart strategy. And I'm pretty,

Ejaaz:
I'm bullish, Josh. Can you tell? Yeah, I can.

Josh:
The switching cost being as close to zero as possible is huge,

Josh:
right? Because like as much,

Josh:
I'd say what CUDA is to NVIDIA memory is to OpenAI, where it is a very strong

Josh:
moat. And if you can, it's basically saying we can make your memory portable in a commercial way.

Josh:
And that's a huge unlock for anyone who is interested in using these AWS chips.

Josh:
Now, when they make it, I don't know.

Josh:
There are some problems in the world of computers, particularly around RAM right

Josh:
now. If you have ever built a computer before, you know about RAM.

Josh:
RAM is this, it's the very lightning fast memory that holds temporary memory, but it's very fast.

Josh:
And it's required for training AI data centers, so much so that there has become

Josh:
this egregious shortage of RAM.

Josh:
And for people who haven't lived through the previous GPU cycle,

Josh:
there was this huge problem where you couldn't buy an NVIDIA GPU because they

Josh:
were being used for crypto miners.

Josh:
And if you're a hobbyist at home, now you can't buy RAM for your computer because,

Josh:
well, the prices have tripled in the last 12 months.

Josh:
And this comes on the back of an announcement from a company that makes the crucial RAM.

Josh:
They just stopped making it for commercial purposes. They're using it only for

Josh:
institutional entities, for private entities who are building AI.

Josh:
So now one of the three major manufacturers of this RAM is stepping away.

Josh:
If you are building a computer, I am sorry, it is about to get a lot more expensive.

Josh:
If you are building an AI data center,

Josh:
It's also expensive, but now you at least have one of these three major suppliers

Josh:
explicitly making stuff just for you.

Josh:
So just something to note that there are these supply chain crises happening.

Josh:
This most recent one is in RAM. Previously, it was GPUs. I guess it's still GPUs.

Josh:
But as we go along, it's going to be interesting to see where these kind of bottlenecks form.

Josh:
And just in terms of, you know, bubble watch, we just want to see where everything's landing.

Josh:
This is the RAM segment. Here's where it is. It was getting very high very quickly.

Josh:
One of the companies bowed out. And that's just kind of like the nerdy hobbyist enthusiast,

Ejaaz:
Like state of the union for it. Sorry, Josh. Sorry. I can't let you get off

Ejaaz:
the hook that easy. You sent me this website and it looks intense.

Ejaaz:
What am I looking at?

Josh:
I can't believe you've never used PC Part Picker. If anyone has ever built a custom PC before.

Josh:
There's a lot of compatibility issues between parts because sometimes a specific

Josh:
manufacturer's piece does not work with another manufacturer's piece.

Josh:
So what PC Part Picker does is it allows you to place all of these pieces into

Josh:
one place and it'll tell you which is compatible with which.

Josh:
It also does a great job of tracking prices of these items. And what we're seeing

Josh:
here in these charts that are all going up and to the right is the price for

Josh:
the average person to get their hands on a critical piece of compute hardware, which is the RAM.

Josh:
And there's another nerdy joke she made here where now developers are going

Josh:
to have to actually optimize their websites because a lot of the times these

Josh:
big clunky websites and the big clunky code, it all gets stored in your RAM

Josh:
because they just throw it in there's no budget.

Josh:
Well, maybe if there's a budget, they'll start making more efficient code.

Josh:
But that's kind of a deep cut.

Josh:
I don't want to spend too much more time on here. We have other interesting

Josh:
things to talk about, mostly in the world of Apple.

Josh:
There is a big switch up this week in Apple world. Please, Ejaz, tell us what happened.

Ejaaz:
Well, I want you to tell me about this, Josh. This is your favorite company

Ejaaz:
ever, Apple, and they just lost their chief of AI.

Ejaaz:
John is leaving and he's being replaced by this guy called Amar from Microsoft,

Ejaaz:
and is joining to lead AI under Craig Federini.

Ejaaz:
Can you give me the law of this?

Ejaaz:
Is this kind of bearish,

Ejaaz:
eventually bullish or should I just be bearish?

Josh:
I don't really, I don't know these guys. It's like, I mean, Apple AI sucks.

Josh:
So whoever's in charge of it, like, sure, get rid of them. Whoever tried,

Josh:
they failed clearly because like, I still don't have Siri enabled and they're

Josh:
now hopefully going to outsource to Gemini.

Josh:
I think this is probably a good thing. If you're in charge of AI at Apple,

Josh:
you probably should be fired.

Josh:
I find it funny how everyone kind of reports to Craig Frederici.

Josh:
So everyone comes in and out, but Craig is always that guy. He's always sitting

Josh:
there he never takes the blame he never takes the fall um i'd be curious to know

Josh:
how much of this is his responsibility versus people who are beneath him um

Josh:
but yeah it's funny actually the first comment says under craig federighi that's

Josh:
the problem right there um so

Josh:
I don't know where to stand on this i know that apple's ai sucks i hope this

Josh:
new guy i mean god speed brother amar whatever you're like whatever you're doing

Josh:
i wish you all the best i hope you figure it out um that's kind of what i got for this

Josh:
there is another guy as well i was gonna say this is the more interesting conversation

Josh:
to me at least i think uh which is this guy who was previously in charge of

Josh:
a lot of things at apple his name is alan dye and he's

Josh:
responsible for this whole slew of things he was working on packaging then he

Josh:
helped with the ios 7 redesign he created the dynamic island he led the ui for

Josh:
vision pro he helped with the vision pro launch he did liquid Glass, he did all of

Josh:
the human interface spatial computing things.

Josh:
And he just, one of the things that we love and one of the things that I'm personally

Josh:
excited about in the future is to switch to spatial computing.

Josh:
And this guy did a great job. Like Vision OS looks great. Liquid Glass,

Josh:
we've had our debates on the show. I think it looks pretty good.

Josh:
This is the guy kind of behind and in charge of all of that stuff.

Josh:
And Meta poached him for a presumably ton of money. Meta said,

Josh:
hey, we'll pay you whatever you want. Come over here, do it for our products.

Josh:
That's presumably going to be for the meta ray band displays that we had a few

Josh:
episodes on earlier on and

Josh:
it made me a little bummed because this guy actually did do a great job on these

Josh:
apple products and now he's going to be going to develop for meta who makes

Josh:
really crappy hardware products in really siloed software suites um so

Ejaaz:
To have a little bit of sweet zuck is really on a on a rampage isn't he to just

Ejaaz:
kind of like hire the talent from everywhere but like will he actually prove

Ejaaz:
it like listen he spent what 25 billion dollars in hiring like a hundred people,

Ejaaz:
less 100 people actually at 30 35,

Ejaaz:
to 40 people and like i haven't seen the fruits of that labor so like is he

Ejaaz:
going to do the same thing with design and his glasses probably not it was an

Ejaaz:
absolute shambles of a launch so we'll see uh josh do you know anything about

Ejaaz:
the guy that's replacing this apple design guy steve lemay.

Josh:
New guy uh no other than the fact that he's been around for a very long time

Josh:
and apparently has been here since 1999 he helped ship the original iphone uh

Josh:
mac os ios iPadOS, watchOS, and most recently, visionOS.

Josh:
So somebody who was around during the Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive era seems bullish.

Josh:
That's about all of the context clues that I have. But hey, again, I wish you the best.

Josh:
I hope you could help Apple figure it out. They have a lot of figuring out to do.

Josh:
And that's just, we're going to take it from there. But there is another interesting

Josh:
topic that I want to cover here, some science corner stuff, which is pretty cool.

Josh:
We found sugars in outer space, essential to life.

Josh:
This is kind of cool. It was found on some asteroid that was in deep space.

Josh:
And it is one of the first times that we actually discovered some sort of building

Josh:
blocks for life that came from outside of our galaxy.

Josh:
So I wanted to just briefly mention this because it creates this interesting

Josh:
conversation around the Fermi Paradox.

Josh:
For people who don't know the Fermi Paradox, it's the apparent contradiction between

Josh:
The high probability that intelligent life should exist elsewhere in the universe

Josh:
and the total lack of evidence that it actually does.

Josh:
So from a Fermi paradox perspective, this is great and terrible news.

Josh:
Terrible as the paradox is stronger than ever, but great because whatever filter

Josh:
causes the paradox is more likely to be early in our evolutionary history rather than in the future.

Josh:
You can at least make the case that this life was kind of randomly placed

Josh:
and there is a high probability that it can be placed randomly elsewhere because

Josh:
there are the basic building blocks coming from all these external places. What do you think?

Ejaaz:
Listen, my pastime in a very, very long ago life was a biologist.

Ejaaz:
That's what I kind of like studied at university.

Ejaaz:
And all I could help but think when I learned about all these different amino

Ejaaz:
acids, building blocks, DNA, blah, blah, is like,

Ejaaz:
there is so much chance in this that it is almost certain that there exists

Ejaaz:
another universe where there are other sorts of life forms because all the building

Ejaaz:
blocks are just out there, right? So why should we be the only favored ones?

Ejaaz:
Josh, I pulled up the sugar futures chart and I have to say,

Ejaaz:
I have to say, no one seems to be reacting as violently as I had expected here.

Ejaaz:
Listen, I'm a markets man. I'm invested in this stuff.

Ejaaz:
I want to see how I can make returns on this. And I don't know,

Ejaaz:
maybe there's a delay in this information, Josh.

Ejaaz:
Maybe I should be shorting the sugar stocks as much as I can before they kind of catch on.

Josh:
That's so funny. You're the type of guy where like a meteor will hit earth and

Josh:
it will be made of solid gold.

Ejaaz:
And the first.

Josh:
Thing you will do is hop on your computer and figure out how do I short gold?

Josh:
Forget about my bug out bag. Forget about how do I short gold?

Josh:
We just got hit by tons of it on earth.

Josh:
That is so funny. Well, that's, it's just an interesting thing.

Josh:
It's like, it makes you think it's like, okay, we found a critical building

Josh:
block for life that came from another universe, yada, yada, yada,

Josh:
whatever that science corner.

Josh:
We have something important to celebrate as we wrap up this episode which is

Josh:
our spotify wrapped which just came out and we have some really amazing stats

Josh:
and some really gracious thank yous to hand out to everybody because

Josh:
wow i think uh i share this thought in the fact that we are both blown away

Josh:
by the support that we've had over the past year and these statistics that we're

Josh:
showing on screen are like pretty outrageous you guys right like top one percent across the board

Ejaaz:
Top 1% across every single category. So that is a 2025 instant hit show,

Ejaaz:
2025 most shared show. That's you guys listening to this right now,

Ejaaz:
watching this right now.

Ejaaz:
Thank you for sharing it with all your friends. It turns out you guys are listening.

Ejaaz:
Someone's listening to us, Josh, which is great. I wonder if it's the aliens.

Ejaaz:
Exactly. I also do want to point out that our show has only been going for six months.

Ejaaz:
So we got like half a year delayed on the headstart for this.

Ejaaz:
And we still managed to pull the top 1%.

Ejaaz:
No easy feat, Josh. But the one I'm probably most proud of right now is we are

Ejaaz:
ranked as one of the top technology podcasts in the world, ranking at 21, Josh.

Ejaaz:
I can, I can't, I'm not looking at your face right now because I'm staring at

Ejaaz:
the camera, but I know part of you is seething because you want that top 10 spot. And so do I.

Ejaaz:
So we are going to be gutting for this. But what a crazy start.

Josh:
Seething but grateful. Like man, all the people who are listening here,

Josh:
normally it's the real ones that make it to the end of the episodes.

Josh:
So if you're watching still, chances are you're one of the real ones that made this possible.

Josh:
So thank you from like the bottom of my heart, seriously. Like the support and

Josh:
the sharing with your friends and the liking and the subscribing and the rating.

Josh:
Like it really makes a meaningful difference.

Josh:
And we're seeing that support reflected in the numbers for the first time ever

Josh:
really through the Spotify wrapped. And it is so, so awesome. Like it really, it's...

Josh:
It's one thing to see the numbers on the screen but it's a second to actually

Josh:
see the the impact that it has through all of the comments through everyone

Josh:
sharing through just like the nice messages we receive on a daily basis so seriously

Josh:
like thank you so much for the support

Josh:
i think based on this we can give limitless rookie of the year podcast award

Josh:
because like man i think so that was uh it's a pretty crazy run

Josh:
it's a really crazy one we've published 93

Josh:
episodes this is number 94 that will be coming out in a six-month span and if

Josh:
you've listened from number one or if you listen from number 92 um

Josh:
thank you i hope that you have found value in the show i hope that you will

Josh:
continue to find value in the show

Josh:
the frontier is like expanding faster than ever it has never been more exciting

Josh:
to be right on the bleeding edge of it and that's exactly where the show lies so we're going to keep

Josh:
doing more of this i hope you still continue to find it exciting exhilarating

Josh:
we're going to keep working to get better hopefully you can keep working to

Josh:
share this with every single person you know who could be remotely interested in this

Ejaaz:
And we will just continue.

Josh:
Chugging along. Yeah, so who knows? Maybe by next year's Spotify wrapped,

Josh:
we can trim a two from the front of that 21 and just leave it at number one.

Ejaaz:
Oh, that's good. I like that. And the final thing I'll say is,

Ejaaz:
We don't just do podcasts, Josh. We also do newsletters.

Ejaaz:
And I know you guys are reading a bunch of newsletters, but if you'd read our

Ejaaz:
newsletter about a month ago, you would have bought Google stock and you would

Ejaaz:
have been up about 15 to 30% on the stock right now, which is nuts. So I have a thesis.

Ejaaz:
We have a thesis coming out on Amazon next week.

Ejaaz:
So if you want to read that and be notified about that, subscribe to the newsletter.

Ejaaz:
That is all from my end, Josh.

Josh:
That's it. Yeah, and that's Alpha. A few weeks ago, or even a month ago now,

Josh:
he just posted the Google Bowl thesis. And since then, the stock is up quite a bit.

Josh:
So there are some good alpha in these newsletters. I would highly advise you

Josh:
to subscribe. The link is in the description below.

Josh:
But as always, thank you. Seriously, thank you for a great year.

Josh:
We're going to keep on going. The year's not over. It's still early December.

Josh:
We got a lot more to talk about. So we will be back next week.

Josh:
Have an amazing weekend.

Josh:
And we will see you guys then. Thank you.