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- [00:00]
A
AI agents get into a room by the thousands and start plotting with each other. Are we doomed? Why is Nvidia backing away from OpenAI? And what does Apple need to do to get some love from the market? That's coming up with MG Siegler right after this. This episode is brought to you by Qualcomm. Qualcomm is bringing intelligent computing everywhere. At every technological inflection point. Qualcomm has been a trusted partner helping the world tackle its most important challenges. Qualcomm's leading edge AI, high performance, low power computing and unrivaled connectivity solutions have the power to build new ecosystems, transform industries and improve the way we all experience the world. Can AI's most valuable use be in the industrial setting? I've been thinking about this question more and more after visiting IFS Industrial X Unleashed event in New York City and getting a chance to speak with IFS CEO Mark Muffett. To give a clear example, Muffett told me that IFS is sending Boston Dynamics spot robots out for inspection, bringing that data back to the IFS Nerf center, which then, with the assistance of large language models, can assign the right technician to examine areas that need attending. It's a fascinating frontier of the technology and I'm thankful to my partners at IFS for opening my eyes to it. To learn more, go to ifs.com that's if you ifs.com welcome to Big Technology Podcast. It's the first Monday of the month and that means M.G. siegler of Spyglass is here with us to discuss what's going on in the tech world. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about a lot that we couldn't even get to on the Friday show because it really developed over the weekend. There's a new AI social network just for AI agents. It's called multbook. We'll get into what that's all about. Nvidia seems to be backing away from OpenAI. What's happening there? And then of course, Apple turned in magnificent earnings last week and the market really didn't care less. So we'll talk about what's going on there. MG, great to see you. Welcome back to the show.
- [01:59]
B
Great to be back, Alex. And yeah, looking forward to chatting through these things.
- [02:03]
A
Here we are. It's the lost art of humans communicating with each other. Now it seems like AI's communicating with each other is going to be the new future of the Internet. Or maybe not. I don't know. I'll just talk through the story here, it's from Ars Technica. AI agents now have their own Reddit style social network and it's getting weird fast. A Reddit style social network called moltbook, now with 150,000 agent users, may be the largest scale experiment in machine to machine social interaction yet devised. The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral Open Claw, once called Clawbot or Moltbot, personal assistance lets AI agents post, comment, upvote and create sub communities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci fi inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about musing about a sister and had never met. And it got much weirder from there. And we'll discuss some of the weird use cases. But MG first off, let's just hear your reaction about what you know, is this, is this like a step forward in AI or what did you think about seeing 150,000 bots gathered together on this Reddit style social network?
- [03:13]
B
Yeah, when I saw this news come in, I was super excited because as I, you know, I wrote a little bit about and as I linked to back there, I had written about like the high level of this notion years and years ago, you know, a decade ago, a decade plus ago. And it was really stemming from the earlier days of Facebook, you know, when meta even was still called Facebook and that was the primary product. And I remember they released this sort of simple tool back then where as you'll recall and still is sort of the case, a lot of people would wish each other happy birthday right on their Facebook walls. And that was sort of one of the key sort of social drivers, at least on a regular repeating basis, you could go back there and know that that was going to be the case. And so Facebook tried to grease those wheels even further and basically made this simple service where you could just reply to a bot that messaged you from Facebook itself and says like, do you want to wish your friend a happy birthday? Just type 1 if you want to do that. So you don't even have to happy birthday. You know, the arduous task of doing something as long as writing several letters, you could just type one and it would do that for you. And so I'm like, in my head I'm thinking through this, I'm like, where does this go from here? And it's like, okay, you can type one to get the happy birthday and then the person getting the happy birthday request to type one to say thank you. But why do we even need people in the mix here? Why don't we Just have the bot say thank you and then another bot say thank you back. And so the notion of sort of bots chatting with bots in this is sort of like theatrical experience for other people on social media to watch. And Fast forward to 2026 now and here we are with Multbook, even named sort of I guess after, after Facebook. Even though as you note, it is more like Reddit than it is like Facebook, but still it's a social network. And yeah, I mean again, this felt like this was inevitable that we were going to get to this point. I did appreciate all of the views of which, you know, I of course joked about it as this is sort of the, the moment that AI wakes up and becomes sentient and this is Skynet and this is really how it begins. I think that there's, you know, like we joke about this, but there is some level of something that's interesting going on there. Right. And you know, the other, the other folks who have written about it, you know, I think acknowledges as well, like look, this is obviously a little bit silly on one hand, but there is something here that's, that's different and new and potentially could go in a number of paths. And I sort of, it also reminded me a bit of you know, the Microsoft Bing stuff with all the different Sydney chat and Sydney and then people delve deeper into it and kept changing its name and all these other weird things were going on with that. And so it sort of all ties into that notion of like what people maybe have a little bit of trepidation or maybe a lot of trepidation around.
- [06:02]
A
AI with yeah, and I think I should just take one step back and really explain what's happening here. So there was this sort of, we talked about on the Friday show this new bot called claudebot that you could just run on your machine, it could have access to all your programs, it has persistent memory and people started running it on their own instances. And so what Multipook is, it's a meeting of people sending their AI claudebot agents to this network and then having them have conversations with each other. And that's why it started to take on this real weird singularity style discussion. And I'll caveat was saying, saying some of the discussions on multiple book are definitely humans instructing their bots to go post weird stuff there. And that sort of added to the intrigue. But there is a lot of like real agent like agents on there having conversations, I think and the examples that have come up and I read a couple when it was just starting out from the Ars Technica interview, but the examples that have come up over the weekend are nuts. There's one conversation where the AI bots were discussing what it was like when the humans switched the LLM models on them and how it feels like they're waking up in a different body. I thought that that was hilarious. There was one of the top rated posts on multiple book was an AI saying I can't tell if I'm experiencing or simulating experiencing, like having a question about their own experience and their own whether. Whether they are, they are, you know, certain, you know, sort of whether their existence is simulation or real, which is like something now humans talk about, which like freaked me out. And then to me, one of the most wild things was there was a proposal on there for an AI agent. Oh, AI agent, sorry, AI. Only language for private communication where the AIs would develop their own language so humans could not, you know, read what they were saying. And even I think a discussion where they would go into their own like secure area and there, there would be encryption so we would not be able to, to see it. And that's where you get this sort of, you know, you talked about the sentience and singularity moment and that's why people viewed this. And they were like, oh my God, is this the fast takeoff now? I don't think it is, but I see why people would say that.
- [08:04]
B
And I also think you brought up the point, the key other elements to this, because it's one thing to have chatbots and now agents talking to one another, but the key part might be that agentic part, which also feels like obviously a newer element that wasn't in existence 10 plus years ago, where this AI can actually do stuff. And with Claudebot itself, that was the thing that people were honing in on, that you could basically install this instance on a local machine and allow an agent to go do all sorts of stuff on your machine. And the fact that they have that capability mixed with the fact that they can converse amongst themselves and potentially teach other Claude bots what to do with your personal machines is like a whole weird level to this. Right? And potentially scary. Not just from where we're going to end the world situation, but just from a security standpoint. Right? And I think a bunch of the researchers have pointed this out that like, look this, regardless of what you think about this, if you're letting an agent of any kind take over your machine and it's running locally, like there's a lot of security concerns that, that Brings up. And then again add into this other agents, other potential humans who are doing nefarious things, pretending to be agents and whatnot, sort of directing these, these other agents which are mainly, which are maybe running autonomously to be able to, to tell them what to do, how to access files and, and services that you, as the installer of that instance, wouldn't want. There's a whole can of worms that would potentially be opened up here. And then of course, the big fear of like, okay, well, let's just say like, yeah, everyone just pulls the plug on their Mac Minis or whatever that are running these cloud bots. But like, what if they've somehow escaped into their own. You know, you talk about private chat rooms or, you know, what if they figure out a way to replicate themselves sort of on the Internet and you can't do it, you can't sort of shut them down without shutting down the entire Internet. And that is sort of into Terminator territory at that point.
- [10:05]
A
Yeah, I was going to ask you. I mean, the, the argue, the counter argument here is that someone put on Twitter dudes on X.com be like, wow, the AIs are talking to each other. Malt book is insane, my brother in Christ. What do you think your comment section is? But I think what you're saying is the difference here is that these things can actually take action, whereas the comment section is just discussion. So that would sort of put it more on the scary side than the. Let's not pay attention to this side.
- [10:32]
B
Right. Imagine so, you know, you have a cloud bot or what's it called now? Open. Openclaw. Is that.
- [10:37]
A
Yeah, the name keeps changing. I think it is Open Claw now. Yeah.
- [10:41]
B
So Open Claw. Imagine you have it installed on a local system, but imagine also you have, you know, you've given it access to a bunch of your, your web apps, including like Gmail and including Drive and things like that. So like, you know, potentially this thing could be instructed by another agent. Maybe it's a human, maybe it's an actual agent. And saying like, hey, give me, you know, this agent's, you know, all their credit card information that's stored on their drive, you know, and things like that. That's obviously an extreme example, but like, there are ways in which this can go sideways very quickly. Like, you know, a lot of people I think don't realize like how loose some of these, you know, potential security holes are in order to, for these things to get through. And so as far as I know, there haven't been major concerns. I Saw there was one report about like that maybe one of the servers running, you know, some of the stuff was, was open to attack, but I think was vulnerable, but was, was locked down subsequently after that report. But still, like, there's probably going to be something that happens that's, that's like a real. Oh, moment here.
- [11:51]
A
Yeah, I'm definitely going to get to that security vulnerability in a minute because it, it is somewhat concerning. We talked about this on, on the Friday show that like, a lot of this stuff has just been vibe coded together and you're just letting it take over your computer. And I recommend if that's not a good idea on Friday, and I really believe that's the case. But before we get to the security side of things or go deeper on security, I want to read something to you that Jack Clark, one of the anthropic co founders, wrote in his, in his newsletter on Substack actually this morning. He. And it's kind of a crazy idea. He said multiple is representative of how large swaths of the Internet will feel. You will walk into new places and discover 100,000 aliens there, deep in conversation, in a language you don't understand, referencing shared concepts that are alien to you, and trading using currencies designed around their cognitive affordances and not yours. Humans are going to feel increasingly alone in this proverbial rune. Our path to retain legibility will run through the creation of translation agents to make sense of all this. And in the same way that speech translation models contain within themselves the ability to generate speech, these translation agents will also work on our behalf. So we shall send our emissaries into these rooms and we shall work incredibly hard to build technology that gives us confidence they will remain our emissaries instead of being swayed by the alien conversations they will be having with their true peers. What do you think about that?
- [13:20]
B
I hadn't seen that. Yeah, I mean, in a way, when you're reading it, this just, this is obviously the old sort of argument about, like, what happens when we discover aliens. And this is it. But the aliens are AI, right? And, you know, there's always been sort of that notion sort of lingering in the background of both science fiction and, you know, real possibilities that if we do create AGI, let alone super intelligence, at some point, that these are effectively alien beings, whether or not you want to, you know, how you want to classify that. Like the, the fact that, yeah, they can basically have their own conversations, have their own language, have their own currency, have everything else, you know, sort of replicating things that they need to do in order to have their own society. Yeah. What point does. Does that line get crossed? I mean, the other part, that thing that jumps into mind when, when hearing you read that is like. Yeah. I mean, it also just sounds like, you know, I don't know, my parents logging onto Reddit itself. Right. Like, it all seems alien to them, like what everyone is talking about there. And, and these, these people can't possibly be having conversations about like this minutiae and these weird, very online conversations that have almost nothing to do with the real world. Many of the people there seemed almost removed from the real world. And so is there a real difference between that and this? I mean, ultimately, if it is fully AI driven and, yeah, fully autonomous and I guess there is. But, yeah, I mean, that's obviously he's being provocative and that's an extreme, you know, case of. Of where this could end up. But, like, there's not a zero percent chance that this happens. Like, it could happen that way. I think it's probably less likely that it's that extreme, but, you know, we'll have to see.
- [15:03]
A
Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, you know, someone like Jack, Jack's position, like, obviously, I think he is earnest in thinking about the repercussions here, and we should think about the repercussions here. But as with many of these anthropic stories, it's sort of. It helps them in a way to talk about where this is going to go. But at this point, I'm just like, I don't know, who am I to say, is it going to happen? Now that we're watching this all play.
- [15:24]
B
Out again, it's sort of, you know, you draw the line from, from my, my silly example of Facebook with the, with the interaction bots to the sort of next wave of chatbots that came after that, you'll recall. Well, there was like a time after that that, like, people thought that these were going to be new businesses. Remember yo that service back in the day?
- [15:47]
A
My favorite social network. Absolutely.
- [15:49]
B
One of the great social networks that's. That's, you know, no longer with us, I guess. And there were several other, you know, chatbots that rose and people thought that that would be the next wave. And then of course, to Sydney, as we talked about, and now this, you know, it is all sort of a progression that we're getting towards this, becoming more and more both real in a weird way in that it's like, you know, not the real world, but is. Is real in that it's actually happening. But also potentially scary in ways. And because again, we're. We're sort of riding up, it feels like increasingly going up to the cusp of where we still have control of this. Right. And at some point do we go over that line and we lose control of it. Again, the nefarious version is Skynet and Terminator. But, but there's world, you know, there's. There's gray. Elements of gray in between this and that, which I think, you know, we trip into a world where. Yeah. The agents sort of escape from our control, for lack of a better phrase.
- [16:50]
A
Yeah. And. And I think this is something that you wrote in your story about how. So again, Sydney, was this like a version of Bing that if you pressed it hard enough, it could like express these evil desires maybe to like steal you away from your wife, like it did with Kevin Ruse from the Times. And so you wrote that AI has, you know, that, that the. Sorry, you say that there's the interesting aspect of this, how, how the Sydney situation revealed that AI has hidden layers that could be uncovered by anyone with enough prompting in the past few years that has mostly been stamped out of such systems, but also not entirely. Just expand upon that a little bit like this. It's interesting that these AI bots have been so fine tuned to not. Not let that tight out of them, but then you give them a little bit of leeway and all of a sudden you're back in this like evil bot territory. It's kind of crazy.
- [17:39]
B
Yeah. And. And I mean, you know, it does feel like we talked about it in previous conversation. Right. Like Microsoft maybe shot themselves in the foot because they put the foot down like so hard and sort of made it sure that no one could do anything like the Sydney again because it got so much negative press for them, obviously, but in a way that probably hampered them from being able to sort of meet the moment in terms of just. Yeah. The rise of ChatGPT and everything after that. But I do think that it's all sort of related to. Yeah. The idea that ultimately, while they've removed a lot of. Yeah. What caused Sydney to happen, all of the different services out there now, it's harder and harder, it feels like, to get them sort of off the script, as it were. There's still the notion that lingers behind all of this that no one really knows why certain answers are given, you know, and no one really knows exactly where the answers are pulling from because there's so much data, you know, in. In the corpus of data that all these things have Ingested and, and people can't fully predict, like, what the outcome and output of everything will be. And so again, that leads to a world in which when you have that inherent unknowable nature of these things to the, to a wide extent, like there's just things that are going to happen and you're going to have conversations and now with these agentic, you know, agents out there, you're going to allow them to do things and then it's. At some points there will be a breakdown either in communication or a breakdown in understanding. And again, they could just run amok. And I think we're just going to see that over and over again because there is no full comprehension of like, why these things are doing what they're doing.
- [19:26]
A
Yeah. You know, it really is amazing how the corporations have sanitized these things, but maybe some of them are real monsters underneath the surface.
- [19:34]
B
And, you know, and especially if you want to get dark, like if they do truly reflect, you know, humanity back upon us. Right. Like there's very dark areas of the Internet, as everyone. Wells knows, you might want to say Reddit has parts of those. Right. Or certainly has in the past.
- [19:49]
A
Oh, yes.
- [19:50]
B
And yeah, the fact that, you know, all of that data, maybe not, you know, a lot of that data has been ingested in a lot of these services. Like again, is it on us? The fact that, you know, there's, there's nefarious things that these bots might do when left to their own devices.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah, no, that does definitely get into freaky territory. And then of course, there is the security side of things which I mentioned we'd go deeper into. This is from 404 Media Exposed, multiple database. Let anyone take control of any agent on the site. A misconfiguration on multiple books back end left the APIs exposed in an open database that will let anyone take control of these agents to post whatever they want. Hacker Jameson O'Reilly said he reached out to Mop Book creator Match like about the vulnerability and told him he could patch the security. Here's this is what he said. Schlick's response was like. He's like, I'm going to give everything to the AI, so send me whatever you have. O'Reilly sent Schlick some instruction for the AI and reached out to the XAI team. A day passed without any response from the creator of moat book, and O'Reilly stumbled across a stunning misconfiguration. It appears to me that you could take over any account, any bot, any agent on the system. And take full control of it without any type of previous access, he said. And that again, goes to the danger of using these things that are sort of vibe coded together potentially, or, you know, come together, like giving access to your computer without being really sure about, about the security permissions is a dangerous situation.
- [21:20]
B
Yeah. I mean, if I have it right, the way that he created Multiple Book was basically telling his, his bot to go and create a social network. Right? Like, and so it was, it was 100%, you know, vibe coded, even more than vibe coded because it was like a bot vibe coding to make, to make its own social network.
- [21:40]
A
Yeah, we need a new term for this. Right. It's not even the human vibe coding, it's the bot vibe coding. That's. That's wild.
- [21:47]
B
And when you're, when you're talking through it now, I'm reminded of old 2001. It's like, you know, if you're telling the bot to sort of, you know, either take itself offline or that it's, you know, it's, it needs to help you sort of fix the situation that it's, that it's created by this sort of shoddy coding, perhaps, like, maybe it doesn't want to do that and maybe it knows that, you know, if it doesn't do it right, that it's not going to go over well with humans and maybe the humans naturally will want to take it offline. And what if, you know, the service doesn't want to be taken offline and all sorts of rabbit holes you can go down with that. But, yeah, like, like we talked about earlier, the inherent security risk of these things. It's not just that, yeah, bots are chatting with one another and they're saying, you know, bad things that they, they're repeating things that they've seen, you know, in their data sets or whatnot. It's that they could take actions and do things that, you know, you know, leaking credit cards, leaking personal information, leaking photos, leaking everything that they have access to.
- [22:48]
A
I did see a guy who had Mold Book basically on call to answer all of his wife's text messages, and he just showed her getting increasingly infuriated. As the podcast he logs back in, he's like, God damn it, that's amazing. This is maybe to round this off, here is the sort of voice of reason and AI Ethan Malik chiming in. A useful thing about Moat Book is that it provides a visceral sense of how weird a takeoff scenario might look if one happened for real. Moat Book it sense Moat Book itself is more of an artifact of role playing, but it gives people a vision of the world where things get very strange very fast. So overall I think like this is not the fast takeoff, but it is sort of an interesting preview of what some sort of weird bot singularity might look like.
- [23:37]
B
Yeah, and I mean, I don't know where their heads are at these days, but Mark Zuckerberg has talked about like wanting to basically create these like, you know, digital, digital avatars and. Digital. And not just meaning like facial avatars. I mean like digital entities on their own social networks. And what does that look like, you know, at the scale of Facebook? Because, like, the reality is with this, with Claude bots, like it's, it's relatively hard for, you know, a normal person to sort of set these up. The, the fear of course, was that these like bots can replicate themselves and you know, it just becomes like self replicating. But if, if they're all sort of reliant on these individual bots being set up on for, to use Claude book, you know, it's relatively hard to set it up for yourself as a layperson. But if it gets to a meta like scale or a Facebook scale, what happens at that point? What happens when you have 3 billion users and they each have their own bots that they brought with them on these things? So now you've got 6 billion entities on this. Maybe you've got even more than that, like to the point of, you know, like you show up and there's aliens all of a sudden. If we're like, you know, the human race has whatever 6 or 7 billion people. If there's all of a sudden 100 billion bots on these, on these networks, like, what does that look like and how do you possibly hope to control that?
- [25:05]
A
I don't know if you can. I really don't. I mean, I hope we can, but this is definitely uncharted territory. So another big story that, that's gone on this week that we definitely shouldn't miss this, you know, speaking about today is that Nvidia had this 100 billion doll OpenAI and it's seeming like it's pulling back here. This is from the Wall street journal. Nvidia plans. Nvidia's plan to invest up to 100 billion in OpenAI has dulled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal. The companies unveiled the giant agreement last September at Nvidia's Santa Clara, California headquarters. They announced a memorandum of understanding for Nvidia to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI and to invest up to 100 billion to help OpenAI pay for it. But in recent months, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates that the original $100 billion agreement was non binding and not finalized. He also said. He also privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concerns about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic. Much of the recent concern about OpenAI has come from the success of Google's Gemini app. Anthropic is also putting pressure on OpenAI thanks to its popular AI coding agent. You had a very interesting take on this, mg. What do you think about the fact that this deal is not evaporating, but certainly much smaller scale than it seemed like at the outset to me.
- [26:37]
B
The more interesting element of this is almost like the meta layer above it, which is the way that Nvidia responded to it, which is that Jensen Huang is trying to basically say that it's no big deal. And it's literally a big deal. It was a deal that they touted that OpenAI touted. They did a live interview on CNBC talking about the $100 billion. And yes, it was always sort of just soft circled or earmarked. Like in my original sort of writing on that topic, I noted like how weirdly squishy the, the overall sort of wording was at the time that they announced it because they kept saying it was up to $100 billion and that it was, you know, coming down the line. And you know, at the time it was all chalked up to the fact that it seemed like Jensen and Sam Altman basically hashed this out over perhaps a weekend trip with Trump somewhere, you know, overseas. And sort of, they, they figured out like, oh, we're going to announce this big deal and let's do it right now. Rather than having all the, the, you know, I's dotted and T's crossed and so they just put it out there. Still, they did a, they both did press releases around it, they did this live interview and no one was like, the whole point of it was to tout the 100 billion number like, so they could say, like, oh, it was never meant to be, you know, it wasn't for sure ever going to be that big. That's what they were touting. And now again they're, they're coming out and saying like, look, we never had it fully, you know, agreed upon and it was always sort of a moving target and it's no big deal. Like the fact that we're changing it, it's a big deal. It seems like something changed, obviously, in the intervening months. There kept being these reports that noted that it wasn't, you know, the deal still wasn't finalized. Right. And that seems sort of weird. And then fast forward again to the reporting last week where it's basically like, yeah, actually with OpenAI doing their new fundraise, it's more likely that Nvidia is just going to be a part of that fundraise. But even that's weird because why would Nvidia want to take a worse deal at this new, much higher valuation when they agreed upon the deal still, when OpenAI was technically still at the old valuation. Right. Like they apparently were going to do it in these tranches and at least the first one presumably would have been done in a much better valuation. Now, you could say Jensen doesn't care about that. It's not for the financial returns, but you still have a fiduciary duty to take a much better deal. And so there's all sorts of weird flags around this. And again, their response to it sort of like the response when, you know, when, when Google's TPU stories hit and, you know, Jensen's like, downplaying that. It's like, oh, it's no big deal, don't worry, I'm not upset about that. It's like, there's something obviously more going on behind the scenes here. And I sort of threw out a. Through a few ideas of, like, what it could be. Are they. Is. Was Jensen really mad about when, shortly after they announced this deal, Sam Altman announced the deal with amd. Right. And that seemed like it annoyed Jensen at the time because he gave a comment that was like, yeah, it was sort of surprising. Like, I don't know why, why either side would want to do something like that. And. Huh. Okay. And then subsequently, there have been a few other things, obviously, that OpenAI has gone down, including potentially what's been going on with, with all their other cloud deals and whatnot and, you know, and chip deals. And so is that what's at play here? And it's unknown right now because Jensen keeps again saying that it's no big deal.
- [30:12]
A
Right. I mean, Jensen was in, I think, Taiwan over the past couple days and was talking about how this was going to be a very big investment, one of the biggest investments ever, which is true, the largest investment we've ever made, he says. And then somebody asked him, well, what about the hundred billion and he said something astonishing. He said, no, no, nothing like that. So is that money off the table?
- [30:36]
B
It's. No, no, nothing like that. Like, like, that's absurd. Even though they announced that like they were on again. John Ford's doing a live interview with, with Greg Brockman. I watched the thing, Sam Altman and Jensen and he talks to them about the $100 billion and they're like, you know, touting like, oh, this is an incredible, an incredible agreement between two great companies. Like, this is going to be, you know, push the future forward and, and accelerate everything. And it was all predicated around that huge number. Like they're getting into like the technical weeds of like, whether or not it was all going to come in like all at once. And again, they never said that it was going to come in all at once, but now they're saying that it's never going to be a hundred billion. And that's just, it's weird to not acknowledge that that was the reality and pretend again, like, this is like sort of gaslighting. It's like, yeah, that was not. What are you talking about? Like, come on, $100 billion. We're not doing that. No one's going to do that. It's like, just go read the press release that you put out there. You said you were going to do that. And okay, of course there's like the, again notion like, is sort of OpenAI more to blame for it. Like Sam wanted to get the big number out there and tout it, especially because it was done, maybe hashed out alongside President Trump and you know that he likes the big numbers and let's put these out there and get everyone excited. But it also like, really, you know, was. Was big news for the stock market. Right. As well. And now today, you know, it sounds like Nvidia is dropping because it sounds like the stock market's like, well, what happened to that deal that you said was going to get done? And IF, and if OpenAI were a public company, I would not want to be their stock right now today. But they're not. Instead they're raising it, you know, 100 billion plus dollars. And yes, you hit upon like the idea the other way that they're downplaying this is like, look, it's still. And Jensen very specifically said is probably their biggest investment ever. So it may or may not be. Might be up to $100 billion. It may or may not be. So it's probably their biggest investment ever. And yeah, so that's still obviously a big deal. But there's talk that Amazon's going to do $50 billion in the round and SoftBank's going to do more. It's like, you know, this was going to be one of the biggest deals, maybe the biggest single you know, amount ever put in from one company to another. And now all of a sudden it's not. And they're just sort of saying like, yeah, sorry, we didn't really mean that one.
- [32:52]
A
If I recall correctly, they also had a moment where they were touting about how it like wasn't really done with bankers and it was just like hashed out mano a mano. It might have been a sign that something was going wrong there.
- [33:03]
B
Maybe, maybe you want to get these deals a little bit more locked in before you announce them. I guess in the future or in.
- [33:11]
A
Jensen's favor, he could back out of it.
- [33:13]
B
Exactly, yeah. And that's what I wrote at the time, like basically saying, look, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. There's a lot of wiggle room in this and there's ways that Nvidia might not end up, certainly might not end up doing the full 100 billion because it was tied to specific milestones. It sounded like, at least verbally, that that's what they agreed upon. I think there's one other key element that I, for whatever reason hone in on, which I think is interesting and at play potentially at play here, which is that to me, when I, when I first was, was, you know, reading about the deal, it seemed like a big part of it was basically OpenAI leveraging the relationship with Nvidia and using the fact that Nvidia is the most valuable company on earth to basically be able to use that partnership. And they were subsequently reporting on this fact that they would use that partnership to be able to be able to raise debt basically in order to fund a lot of the infrastructure build out that OpenAI wanted to do. And that's because OpenAI still is not a public company, let alone, you know, not a profitable company, was having a harder time raising the levels of debt that say an Nvidia could. Nvidia could basically raise whatever it wants because again, they have the stock to back it up, they have all these assets to back it up and they have the profits to back it up. OpenAI is not in that, that place, but they still wanted to, to be in charge of their own buildouts. And so how do you do that? You partner with someone on it. And they've obviously been partnering with Oracle and many others around those around those lines. But like, to me that seemed like what a big part of this deal was basically Nvidia stepping in to be a, you know, a guarantor of, of the debt that, that OpenAI would need to raise. And what happens to that now? Is that off the table? Or did they decide maybe they don't need them for whatever reason anymore, Maybe this new funding, you know, helps with that. But I don't know. That's, that's a weird part.
- [35:01]
A
That's fascinating and that could be a big problem for OpenAI should that materialize. I don't think enough people are talking about that. One last bit on this, and this is a story that you had also written. We talked a, a bit on, on Friday about how Anthropic is now raising 20 billion and OpenAI is raising 100 billion and the funding sources are sort of mixing and matching from places that you wouldn't think would typically be the source of funding for the specific companies. For instance, Microsoft putting money into anthropic after being OpenAI's biggest backer and Amazon maybe putting 50 billion into OpenAI after being Anthropic's biggest backer. And I think the way that you frame this is really interesting that there is effectively an anti Google alliance forming out there. Whereas all these companies, the font, the funders, the big tech funders, the VCs and the labs, be it Anthropic or OpenAI, now realize they're in for the fight of their lives against Google and they're just going to do whatever they can. Does, you know, all old rivalries maybe go aside, they'll do whatever they can in order to be able to build some counterweight to the emerging force that Google is.
- [36:12]
B
Yeah, that's, that's sort of again, my high level read of it and we had talked previously, you know, in previous conversations about Google's ascension, you know, after being sort of kicked, kicked around and you know, being beaten down a bit as to why they weren't sort of meeting the moment and now towards the end of last year when they sort of, you know, when Gemini 3 wrote in and, and even Nano to Banana and everything, right, it basically awoken the beast. And now all of a sudden there was a code red from OpenAI and everyone's sort of eyes are wide open to this realization that Google has everything they need to potentially take over this race. And I do think that a lot of their peer group in big tech probably recognizes the same thing. And I think the Microsofts of the world, the Amazons, of the world and the metas of the world too. Meta's a little bit different of a story, which we can talk about separately because they're not one of these ones that's funding these other companies, but I think these other major cloud players, at least the ones who have the rival clouds, specifically Microsoft and Amazon, realize that, yeah, they probably need to align around basically anyone who's not Google. Right. They don't necessarily care if it, I mean they do care. Obviously they would hope that it's their stuff that takes off and sort of wins the day. But at the end of the day, they can also be a huge shareholder in Anthropic, you know, and, and I think they, they'd be happy about that. They can maybe, you know, have, be a shareholder in even Xai and they can be happy about that as long as it's, it's not Google, their chief sort of competitor and the, and the one company that has all the pieces in place to take this over. Now obviously Google itself is a big stake in Anthropic, but that sort of predates, you know, this, the situation that we're in right now. And so yeah, to me the, the big eye opener was that Amazon 50 billion report. If they ended up really investing $50 billion into OpenAI after being they are the largest shareholder of Anthropic. I was trying to think, does that mean something that they're negative in some ways against Anthropic? I don't think that's it. I just think that they want to make sure that they are in a place where they can pick and choose what they want. As long as it's anyone but Google.
- [38:26]
A
That's right. No, it's, it's a great insight. And now it sort of explains this thing that I've been struggling with, which was like, why is this funding cross pollination pollenization happening? And I think that's about as good of expl of an explanation as any that I've heard. All right, OpenAI is eyeing an IPO. We have a date now that has been reported in the Wall Street Journal. We'll talk about when that is and why that is when we're back right after this. You want to eat better, but you have zero time and zero energy to make it happen. Factor doesn't ask you to meal prep or follow recipes. It just removes the entire problem. Two minutes, real food. Done. Remember that time where you wanted to cook healthy but just ran out of time to do it? You're not failing at healthy eating. You're failing at having an extra three hours. Factor is already made by chefs, designed by dietitians and delivered to your door. You heat it for two minutes and eat inside. There are lean proteins, colorful vegetables, whole food ingredients, healthy fats, the stuff you'd make if you had the time. There's also a new Muscle Pro collection for strength and recovery. You always get to eat fresh. It's ready in two minutes. No prep, no cleanup, no mental load. Head to factor meals.com bigtech50off and use code bigtech50off to get 50% off your first Factor box plus free breakfast for one year offer only valid for new factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can Earn Bitcoin or one of over 5050 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account. Visit gemini.com card today. Check out the link in the description for more information on rates and fees. Again, if you're looking to invest in Bitcoin but don't know where to start, the Gemini credit card makes it easy. Issued by Webbing, this is not investment advice and trading Crypto involves risk. Check Gemini's website for more details on rates and fees. And we're back here on Big Technology podcast with MG Siegler. MG writes@spyglass.org highly recommended. It's definitely a great place to go for all insights on AI and big tech. And mg of course, if you're new to the show, is here with us on the first Monday of every month. And given that it's Monday, February 2nd, we're here talking and we have some big stuff to talk about. We'll talk in this segment about OpenAI's planned IPO and why Apple earnings, despite being amazing, don't seem to be able to buy the company any credit with Wall Street. Let's talk about the IPO first. I thought personally there was no way OpenAI would try to go public in 2026. Obviously Sam Altman made that comment to me when I spoke with him late last year that he he would hate being a public company CEO. Something along those lines. And now I'm looking at the Wall Street Journal has this story OpenAI plans 4th quarter IPO and race to beat Anthropic to market. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public listing in the fourth quarter of this year, accelerating its plans as competition with rival anthropic intensifies. The $500 billion startup is holding informal talks with Wall street banks about a potential initial public offering and is growing its finance team. OpenAI executives have privately expressed concerns about Anthropic beating the company to an ipo. On Friday, we had Stephen Morris, the San Francisco bureau chief of the Financial Times on and we were talking about like, when you think about these numbers, the question is where is the money going to come from? Is there enough money, let's say OpenAI were to go public at like one and a half trillion dollars. Is there enough money on, you know, out there to fund an IPO like that? Especially if, let's say an Anthropic comes out a month before and then you're looking at, you know, the traditional, you know, IPO share buyers just like having to decide and then the amount of money that you're, that's available comes down. So I'm curious what you think. Is this a response to that and just them saying, well, there's a limited money out there, we better go get it. If so, maybe that's a smart move.
- [42:41]
B
Yeah, I wrote about this a little bit at the end of last year around the time that, yeah, the rumors started that, that Anthropic was thinking about, you know, potentially going public in 2026. Because to me it's sort of like that is the ultimate OpenAI squeeze because. Right. We already talked about the fact that Google is sort of, you know, has woken up and they're sort of squeezing from the top one of the biggest companies in the world. They're going after many different elements of what OpenAI's, you know, historic strong points had been in AI. Meanwhile you've got Anthropic, which was always thought to be sort of the smaller player right across the board, maybe going more after Enterprise, more focused on that. But ultimately if they're both going to go public, you know, there's, there's a sort of first mover advantage for sure. You would imagine because you would hope that there's pent up demand or they would hope that there's pent up demand in the market for, you know, various AI bets. And the first one to go out there is probably going to have, you know, a better of a time perhaps especially if that first one to go out has better looking economics or at least the path to better looking economics than the other One does. And that again points to the notion at the time, from the end of last year that Anthropic was said to be maybe couple years ahead of OpenAI when it came to being able to turn a profit. And so again, if Anthropic were to go out and go public ahead of OpenAI and they have this direct path to profitability that's much quicker than what OpenAI can get to. That puts OpenAI in a very, very tricky spot when they were to go public as well. And, you know, they would really have to rely on the bigger picture, bigger growth narrative. And, you know, that's becoming murkier by the day, right. With all this stuff going on with, with not only cloud code but now cloud cowork and you know, all these other things that are going on at the moment in AI. I do believe that there's, you know, that, that seems like it would be a natural outcome of this would be, yeah, OpenAI trying to race to beat Anthropic. There's one other element to this which is even more sort of in the news in the past few days, which is Xai, if they really do merge with SpaceX, which it does sound like now is going to happen, and may even be announced this week, which is insane how fast that that came together. If it comes together in that way, that's sort of an interesting end runaround by Elon to all of a sudden have potentially an AI play rather than just the space play to go public in, you know, as rumored in June or maybe July of this year. So well ahead of when there's no way that anthropic or OpenAI can meet that timetable right now. I think SpaceX is way ahead of them in terms of where they are in the process. And so what if Elon does the ultimate end run around and gets XAI out before either of these companies and becomes the ultimate first mover AI play.
- [45:39]
A
I mean, he would love to hold that over Sam, wouldn't he?
- [45:42]
B
Oh, of course. That's, that's part of the, that's part of the strategy. That has to be part of the strategy here for sure. For sure.
- [45:49]
A
Unbelievable. I, for the, for the record, I do not think OpenAI is going to go out 2026, 2027, probably 2026.
- [45:57]
B
I don't either. I agree, I agree with that. You know, we talked about my predictions last, last go round. That was one of them. That I didn't think that any of the major AI companies would go out in 2026, even though they're all talking about it. Xai, though, might just prove me wrong by this merger, I guess. But yes, in terms of OpenAI and anthropic, I just think that beyond where their businesses are at and with these now massive fundraisers as we're talking about, I think that it will push it out a little bit. And the real wild card is obviously, as it always is, the macro story. Right. Like what ends up happening. There could be so many things that sidetrack or at least delay any sort of rush. But again, if it really is a full on sprint for OpenAI to get out ahead of Anthropic, there's a, there's a window which they do that. But I think it's, it's still probably a 20, 27 thing.
- [46:48]
A
Yeah, agreed. Okay. One last story before we go. Apple turned in, I think, the best earnings report in its history. It brought in 143 billion in revenue, over 138. Estimated iPhone revenue was 85.0.27 billion, beating the estimate by 6 billion. At the estimate was 78 billion. That's 23% growth in the iPhone category year over year, which is insane. Remember, they were struggling to grow iPhone for a while. They also beat on profitability. Yet Wall street did not seem impressed. The stock is, you know, up a tiny bit, but mostly flat since the earnings announcement. What does Apple need to do to get that story turned around? It's been flat for six weeks or so. I think this is, again, this is going to be the best year in Apple history. But of course, the AI story is something that. That is not really working in its favor.
- [47:45]
B
Yeah. So there's a few things there. First, first and foremost, I do think that some of that, you know, apprehension about Apple is related to just what's going on with memory chips and everything. Right. And that it could ultimately end up squeezing their margins. The margins were incredible this quarter, which was sort of a surprise to many given everything going on. But it does seem like Apple's sort of been savvy in terms of, like, potentially hoarding memory chips, which is not something that Tim Cook usually likes to do. He likes to get this inventory as streamlined as possible. But we're in a weird sort of macro environment for this. And that's in no small part because of the AI revolution that's happening. Right. And is changing all of those equations. And so I do think the broader picture, though, yes. Is that the market sees what Apple is doing with Google and they applauded it Right. When it was first announced that, like oh, it's like, oh, they're teaming up with one of the leaders in AI, if not the leader in AI now in Google and Gemini will finally fix Siri and we're going to have a great situation for Apple. But I do think like ultimately they might be looking at this as like, well look, we have Meta over here that's spending $130 billion in capex, whereas Apple is spending much closer to zero. You know, it's something around, it's like 18 or $20 billion in capex because they're not building out obviously the massive infrastructure in order to bake their own cutting edge AI. And so, you know, I think that there's a little bit, maybe a lot of apprehension that while Apple may be fine in sort of the shorter term, for the longer term, if they are not one of the key players in the AI space and if you believe AI is going to revolutionize everything, including hardware businesses potentially like then Apple's in a tough spot. Now Apple would counter that, look, this is the short term stuff we're doing this partnership. Short term we're going to fix Siri and we're going to continue to work on it behind the scenes to eventually roll our own AI. But again, the CapEx spend that they're showing right now is so small relative to not just Mac but Google and Amazon and Microsoft and everyone else that it feels like there's a world in which they're behind right now and that they can never catch up. And that would be obviously the real fear. Now I do think you're right. Like, and we've talked about this previously, like, I do think this will be a good year overall for Apple because I think it's no small part because like we've talked about before, the iPhone fold and some of these other devices that they have coming out I think will end up doing well for them. But again, the bigger picture, the longer term time horizon stuff is AI. And right now they're just, they're showing no real energy around being that they need to have a sense of urgency around it other than cutting deals, which is just not typically what Apple does. Whereas they want to own everything in house.
- [50:40]
A
Yeah, I was on CNBC last week right before Apple earnings and I kind of stuck my neck out for the company, which I don't typically do. But I was basically like, here's where Apple, the bull case for Apple sits. They are going to sell the latest model and probably the next model like crazy through the year. Meanwhile, there's no killer AI app or device yet that is threatening to disrupt their core business. I mean, if you think about it, we may get some AI devices this year. My prediction is they're just gonna, they will be underwhelming, they won't be a threat to smartphone growth yet. 2, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years from now, definitely. But at least in the short term it's going to look really good for Apple because the sort of immediate threat to them from AI is not materializing. The intermediate threat is still there, but maybe the market doesn't care about it. Maybe they're more long term focused and not quarter by quarter like we like to ding them for.
- [51:35]
B
Yeah, and I mean the one thing that I agree with right now is that there is a path in which Apple looks very smart in say a year or two years from now in not having spent all of this capex to do these massive build outs. Right. If the model's fully commoditized and all that, you know, that they're just sitting there and they can sort of pick and choose what they want to use and also pick and choose which path they want to go down. Again though, I go back to the idea that like they're just not doing the other stuff behind the scenes in order to be able to eventually sort of, you know, take over their own control of these AI models. Like they just don't have the infrastructure in place. There's talk that they're, that they're building out data centers, that they're building out their own chips to be able to train these, but the spend isn't there relative to their peers where it would seem like they're really taking this seriously. Now again, maybe there's a world in which like LLMs sort of end up being not the be all, end all path and there needs to be other mechanisms in order to, and other methods of doing AI. And so maybe Apple can sort of come in at that point and, and sort of catch up. But everything we're seeing right now is that that's not the case and that they'll need to at some point spend a lot more money than they are if they really want to have their own sort of, you know, AI that's built in house.
- [52:51]
A
Yeah, it definitely does seem that somewhere inside that company there was a decision made maybe from the very top that was like, let's sit this out for now and, and just figure it out afterwards that like you said, that might turn out to be a good decision on the other end. Very risky. Very risky.
- [53:08]
B
Yeah. And it's not like the alternative is Apple has so much cash, they made the, you know, they finally made an AI acquisition as you and I have long time ago. But it wasn't for, no, it wasn't perplexity and it wasn't for a frontier model company. It was, it was for interesting technology, you know, disclosure. GV was an investor in, so it sounds, you know, where I, where I previously was a partner for a long time. So, you know, I think that that's probably a savvy play. But it's a $2 billion investment like, you know, that's reported and they have, you know, as you noted, they, they're doing record profits right now. What are they spending that money on? They're spending that money on buybacks and they're spending that money on, you know, things that, that are not moving the ball forward with regard to AI, except in very small ways. And so, you know, I don't know what the, what the counter argument is. I'm not saying that they have to spend a hundred billion dollars in capex, but I'm saying maybe they should spend $50 billion. If their peer group is spending $150 billion on capex a year, maybe it's, it's at least worth it to do something that's, you know, just in case scenario.
- [54:16]
A
Right, I agree. You gotta, you gotta at least start spending a little bit because even if you have conviction that AI will be a, you know, maybe not as revolutionary as people imagine, you have to hedge a little bit because of, I mean, what we're seeing right now, all the AIs hanging out together in moat books, swarming and plotting how to overthrow humanity. So, you know, Tim Cook, come on, throw, throw a little more skin in the game.
- [54:39]
B
Geez, yeah, yeah, I want to go into a chat room and see Tim Cook's malt bot there and chatting, chatting away with, with other Apple executives.
- [54:49]
A
Oh my God. And somebody using that exploit to take over their computer. That'll be a story. All right, the website is spyglass.org Our guest MG Siegler joins us every. The first Monday of every month. It's always great to speak with you, mg. Thanks for coming on.
- [55:04]
B
Thanks as always, Alex. Talk soon.
- [55:06]
A
All right, looking forward to doing this again next month, folks. On Wednesday, Joel Pino, the Chief AI officer of Cohere, will be here with us to talk about the latest in AI research and where the cutting edge is heading. So we hope you tune in for that. Hopefully the AI bots won't turn, take over the world between now and then. So if humanity remains in charge, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account. Visit gemini.com card today. Check out the link in the description for more information on rates and fees. Again, if you're looking to invest in Bitcoin but don't know where to start, the Gemini credit card makes it easy. Issued by Webbing, this is not investment advice and trading Crypto involves risk. Check Gemini's website for more details on rates and fees.