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Today on the podcast, Dario Amadei and Jamie dimion were both on stage in New York while anthropic was shipping. 10 pre built finance agents were also talking about their full Microsoft 365 integrations and a ton of other updates and their new run rate coming out of Anthropic. In addition, every major US Frontier lab has agreed to hand over their models to the Commerce Department before launch. This is kind of a new thing that's getting drafted up where the government wants to look at the models. A lot of people have opinions on that. Also, Google's DeepMind staff in London have voted 98% to unionize and they're doing this over the Pentagon and the IDF's deal. We've kind of covered this in the, in the past. There's a bunch of Google employees that have signed letters where they don't want Google to work with the Pentagon. Also, Sarah Brass has filed for a $26.6 billion IPO and OpenAI is going to get 33 million shares of that. Because of their partnership, PayPal has announced 4,500 AI driven layoffs and basically they're having to redo everything at PayPal and they're trying to use AI as the catalyst for bringing the company back. They are way down from their high of 2021. IBM think is trying to reframe how you think of Watson X Orchestrate. And there is also a Harvard study that finds that OpenAI's O1 model out diagnoses ER doctors in real triage cases. A lot to cover. Let's get into it. The first story I wanted to talk about was this Harvard Medical School study. They did it with Beth Israel Deaconess, the team over there, and they just published a science paper that basically said OpenAI's 01 preview. It was out beating a bunch of people inside of the er, a bunch of doctors. Specifically. They put it head to head with two internal medicine attendees. So basically they had 76 real ER cases. And er, by the way, I'm going to say is kind of an interesting place because this isn't like doctors that know their patients and work with their patients and understand their history. I think you get much better results there. But to be fair, ER is a real, you know, it's a real use case. It's a real thing. And so inside of the ER they gave the same electronic medical records, the same vitals, the same intake nurse notes, all of that. And at the triage stage where information is like, basically it's the hardest to get you have to make a call and you have to do, do it very quickly in the er, right. You're trying to keep people alive. They're like bleeding to death or having some sort of, you know, big issue. The O1 model hit the exact or very close diagnosis 67% of the time. And the two attending, the two attending doctors hit it 55 to 50% of the time of, you know, the diagnosis of what was actually wrong. So neither of these were perfect, but OpenAI was getting 67% and, and the doctors were getting 55 and 50%. Once patients were admitted, O1 hit a 81.6% versus a 78.9 and a 69.7 for the doctor. So everybody got better once the patients were actually admitted. But when they're coming into triage and you're trying to figure out what's wrong with them, OpenAI was doing really, really well, which is very promising. They did this across six total experiments. And the model went up against hundreds of different physicians and it kind of held its own in one. I think a lot of people were like, oh, did they only do this with like a couple doc doctors or like a couple places or a couple things? But no, they did this with hundreds of different doctors and they did this against a ton of different experiments and a ton of different cases in all of this. So Peter Broder, a Harvard clinical fellow at Beth Israel and one of the study's co authors, he summarized it and he kind of gave a quote over to Fortune. He said, we used to evaluate models with multiple choice tests. Now we're scoring close to 100% were already at the ceiling. Now personally, if I'm going to put a caveat on all of this, I will say that these are text only inputs. There's no imaging, there's no kind of multimodal. And the authors are also pretty clear on that. They're saying that this isn't, you know, approval for clinical development. But I think there's definitely a liability question right now that's kind of nobody has solved it. If O1 disagrees with the attending physicians and then the attendings override it, who's going to get sued? When a patient has an issue for malpractice, are they going to look at what the AI model said and what the, you know, what the physician disagrees agreed with? I mean, this would go both ways, right? Let's say the physician agrees with what the AI model says and it turns out to be wrong, who's liable? So these are some big questions that need to be solved. The next story I want to talk about is IBM. They held their Think 2026 keynote today and they announced what to me basically looks like their most aggressive enterprise, enterprise AI repositioning that they've done in the last few years. I remember going to some AI conferences maybe like three or four years ago and IBM was there talking about IBM Watts. And this isn't really something that you hear a ton in the mainstream. They've done some enterprise deals but it's, I don't think it's as big as they had hoped to. And what they're really pivoting and kind of pointing this towards is that it's called the Watson X Orchestrate and this is basically IBM now calling it a quote agentic control plane. So this is basically the layer that's going to let all of the Fortune 500 companies deploy agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google plus, all of their own internal agents. And they can do this all with a single policy. So they can, you know, they have some identity, they kind of have an audit layer and it can look across everything. They also shipped IBM Bob, which is an agentic developer partner. I just, I don't know, leave it up to IBM to name their agent Bob. It's just, I don't know, it feels so on brand for IBM versus like you know, you have like Claude from Anthropic and you use and you got like Gemini from Google and we got Bob from IBM. I love it. Okay. I'm a sucker for it. In any case they're basically really targeting a different audience than I think a lot of these other tools are targeting. They have IBM confluent for real time data. They have IBM Concert for ops, they have IBM Sovereign Core for customers who need to run AI inside of specific national jurisdictions. So they're really targeting a different audience. But I think this is a moment where they're not trying to compete on the model layer. They know that they've lost that to open Anthropic and Google. They're just trying to kind of rent their self out as the governance layer between all of the regulated enterprises and the model providers. This is going to be interesting to see where IBM goes from here. The next thing I want to Talk about is PayPal. Their new CEO Enrique Lorz just got off of their first earnings call today and they announced that they are doing a $1.5 billion cost cutting plan and that includes laying off about 4,500 employees. That's about 20% of the entire workforce. And If I'm going to be honest, I still use PayPal for a number of different online businesses and projects, but it definitely feels like a company that has lost a lot of ground and just gotten, I don't know, kind of lazy and slow compared to other more hungry competitors. There's a lot of finance products out there. Stripe is just, you know, crushing it right now and getting ready for their IPO and really tapped into the developer field and I think in a way that PayPal really should have. But it seems like PayPal is turning a lot of that around. But they got to do some cost cutting and reorganize the company and 20% of their workforce is massive. And they're saying that they're going to be able to do this because of AI. So over the next two to three years, the framing is that they're going to do a quote, unquote AI turnaround. He, their CEO initially said that PayPal needs to become a, quote, a technology company again, which is kind of brutal when you talk about a company that, you know, literally invented modern online payments. So saying like, look, we're gonna become a technology company again. It's like, oof, they really have lost their way. It feels like even coming from their CEO over at Bloomberg, Madeline Speed was kind of talking about this and said that what they're actually doing is they're planning on spinning up a new AI transformation and simplification team which is going to be moving the platform to cloud native and they're going to be aggressively adop adopting AI inside of their developer workflow. We have this on the back of a bunch of other companies that are doing this. Snapchat announced something similar, Meta announced something similar. Microsoft, Amazon, there's a lot of, there's a lot of layoffs. And I think that we're, we're seeing this. The AI is really getting put to the test right now to see if it can actually push automate and grow companies. And so we're just in a really interesting moment in the industry. The next story is Sarah Bress. They have just filed their IPO yesterday. They're looking to do a $2 or $26.6 billion val, and that's kind of the high end of their range. They're going to sell 28 million shares at 115 to $125 a piece. That will bring them about $3.5 billion. Now this is, you know, this is kind of exciting. Ipo. This is an awesome company. It's funny to me though, their total Raise that they're trying to get out of this is about $3.5 billion. Meanwhile, just yesterday, OpenAI announced that they're going to, you know, start this new company where they're getting OpenAI's, you know, their developers embedded into organizations, they're working with all these PE firms. And like, that's kind of just like a random spin off company. And that raised like $4 billion to do that. Then we have this entire c, this entire IPO for another company and it's coming in at like three and a half billion. It just goes to show you how absolutely astronomical these rounds of funding are for Anthropic and OpenAI. Right now you kind of have these giants just scooping up so much money. But in any case, for Sarah Barras, their ticker is going to be CBRS. The pricing is May 13th. Trading starts the next day after that. And I think what not a lot of people are talking about is that in December, OpenAI actually loaned Sarah Bras $1 billion. They secured it by warrants on about 33 million shares. So that's basically a multibillion dollar stake that converts on an IPO. So OpenAI just became, on paper, one of the largest single shareholders of this publicly traded AI chip company that is going to compete head to head with Nvidia. Right? Pretty interesting because Nvidia is one of OpenAI's probably biggest expenses and now they're funding one of their, you know, biggest rivals. So I think there is a lot of strategy at play here. OpenAI has been signaling for a couple years that they want to diversify off of Nvidia. I mean, this just makes a lot of economic sense and business sense, having one supplier that you're really reliant on. Especially because Open Air Nvidia has a lot of export restrictions or, or not even just export restrictions, but like when they come up with a new chip, they got to allocate it. Everyone in the industry wants to buy basically every chip Nvidia has, and Nvidia has to decide who to give it to. So you get like chip allocations. And, and I just think that doesn't feel good for a company like OpenAI that wants to scale super aggressively. They would love more suppliers. They don't want to feel like, you know, at some point Nvidia is going to lower their allocation for one reason or another. It also helps their negotiating position become a lot stronger. You know, Nvidia isn't at the place they were just a few months ago. Right now we have OpenAI who's got Nvidia as you know, one of their suppliers, but they're also investing in someone else. But we even have, you know, their competitors like Anthropic that is now locked into Google tpu and they also have Amazon Trainium. So the dependency story for Nvidia is not what it was in 2024. We have competitors coming out and we have some of the big labs locking into those competitors. The next thing I want to talk about is Google's DeepMind London office. They just voted 98% in favor of unionizing today. So that's basically, I don't know everyone but like one or two employees. And this is what the CW is calling the world's first union at a Frontier AI lab. There's about 1,000 DeepMind staff involved in this. Okay, so I guess 20 people decided they didn't want a UN unionize and they're asking Google to recognize the CW and unite the OR and unite the union as their official representatives. And they're asking for one thing in particular with this new union. They want to walk back the classified Pentagon Gemini deal and end the Israeli Defense Force contract work and reinstate the no AI for weapons commitment that Google deleted from its public site in February of last year. The thing that makes this a little bit different than, you know, we have, you know, back in 2018, Project Maven had a whole revolt from inside of Google and that killed a defense contract and had Google kind of pull away from doing defense work. Now everyone over at DeepMind, there's a lot of researchers are publicly posting on X and they're quite upset about it. But the reason why I think the environment today is definitely different than back in 2018 when they were actually able to kill that contract, is because right now you have stock prices that are an all time high for Google especially specifically. But also the labor market for AI engineers is not as hot as it used to be. Back in, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, things got really, really hot. And so a lot of the engineers were saying, hey, we're going to walk away. And Google didn't want to lose them. And so they, it felt like they kind of bent to their will a little bit. Today we have Sundar Pichai who is publicly defending the deal. So he's, you know, his own reputation is on the line and with the union kind of asking them to do this, you also have basically every tech firm, Microsoft, Amazon, Snapchat, Meta, every single tech firm is laying off all of like tons of Engineers because they're saying, look, we have AI that's kind of helping us so kind of get a lot of this work done with less people. And I imagine they'll scale up at some point in the future. But right now we have this interesting moment where there are a lot of layoffs happening. And so kind of having a union come in and try to force Google's hand to cancel a contract feels like, I don't know, it's an interesting place. But at the same time, we only have so many AI researchers. And so there might just be a moment where Google completely loses control of them and they all want to walk over to Nvidia or over to Anthropic or OpenAI or some other company. Personally, I don't think it's going to have a huge impact on Google's decision, but it might impact who they're able to recruit in the future. But that's kind of a company by company thing. Many different companies are working with the Pentagon and Anthropic seems to be one of the only ones that is isn't really at the moment. So I don't know if even that will have that much impact in the future. The next thing I want to talk about is that the Commerce Department's center for AI Standards and Innovation, that's the C A I S I. It's basically the Trump administration's renamed successor to the AI Safety Institute. They have signed an agreement with Google, DeepMind, Microsoft and XAI to test all of their frontier models for national security risks before public release. Some people are saying this is fantastic for, you know, AI safety and regulation and everything that we see coming from there. Other people are more concerned about it. They don't like the government being able to, I guess, hold back a model if they don't think it's safe. But operationally, how this would actually work is that all of the Frontier labs, they're going to give their newest models to the government with no safety guardrails at all. So this is all going to be done by the C. And they're going to be able to probe those models and actually basically push them to the limits to see what they can do if there was no, you know, if there was no guardrails on them. The thing that I do think is interesting about this is kind of the first time that a third party has, will be given access. We have kind of red teaming researchers that go and try to push the models to their limits, but those are inside of OpenAI or firms that are kind of hired by OpenAI or researchers or security professionals. And OpenAI doesn't really have to tell anyone what the outcome was, what these models were capable of doing. And you have Anthropic that will say like, hey look, we have this, this model Mythos and it can like hack every, you know, code base in the world and it's super powerful, yada yada. So they'll kind of self regulate or self tell everyone. But I think that model scared a lot of people and was kind of the catalyst for getting the government review in, in place, which is something that politically the former AI czar, David Sachs was completely against. He kind of championed having no operational mechanism that you're going to and kind of have this deregulatory posture about all this stuff. So since he got switched out of the role, David sacks is the AI czar. I think there's like 130 day cap. So he got rotated to PCAST in March, so he's no longer in that same role. And as that happened, it feels like whoever took over or whatever's happening in the government now, they believe that, you know, they need to analyze all the models before release. Okay. 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And then when I want to do like an audio overview to listen to it or send someone an audio file, I'll use 11 labs and I can do all of that inside of AI box inside the same chat thread. Just switch between the different models and you get it all in one place. It's a lot cheaper and you even get 20% off if you get the annual plan. So go check it out. It is 8.99amonth. I hope it saves you a ton of money and also just helps you consolidated the madness of 100 different AI tools in 100 different tabs. There's a link in the description to AI box. AI okay, so the big deep dive I want to cover today is Anthropic and kind of the day they've been having with Wall Street. First of all, they just had this big kind of glitzy event. It was like invite only and it was called Brief Services. They so Dario Amadeo, the CEO of Anthropic, and then also JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimion were both there on stage talking about the future of AI and finance. And they weren't just talking about, you know, like oh, possibly this is what it could look like or this was what it could do. It's something that I feel like I've seen at a lot of conferences. Anthropic was actually showing off specific agents they've built for finance. So they have 10 pre built agents which are for kind of the most labor intensive workflows inside of finance, which are pitchbooks, earnings analysis, credit memos, underwriting, kyc, know your customer, month end close statement audits, insurance claims. And each of those is going to ship as a reference architecture with all of the skills, connectors and sub agents that it needs out of the box. So a finance person can grab those things, a finance professional and can like immediately start running with them. They built out all of the most common use cases. On top of that, Anthropic rolled out a full Microsoft 365 integration which means that they can not only use those things, but they all integrate directly with Microsoft 365. So it can, you know, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, OneDrive immediately. Once anthropic generates something, it can actually put it into all of those systems which people are so, you know, use all the time, Outlook, everything, right. And it can carry context across all four of those apps. On the data side, there is a moody MCP that pipes credit ratings and credit data directly into Claude. There's also an expanded partnership with Dunn and Bradstreet and third bridge and the model itself, Claude Opus 4.7 has actually been finance tuned. They fine tune this for a lot of the jobs that finance needs and it feels kind of like what they did initially targeting really heavily onto developers and they saw such huge growth from the developer industry and what they were building. It feels like the next big frontier for them is Finance. They also have a partnership with fis, which is fis, the bank tech vendor that basically runs the back office for thousands of banks. Specifically, the first product that is coming out of that partnership I thought was very interesting. It is a financial crimes AI agent that compresses anti money laundering investigations. And it's just like helping identify what might be money laundering and flag that. So it's not going to take hours. All of this lining up, I think is a really big deal. One big part of this. It feels like Anthropic, they kind of won with developers and OpenAI is trying to play catch up. It feels like Anthropic is about to crush it in finance as well. And I think one of the biggest signals is Jamie Demian, you know, or Jamie Dimon being on stage with Dario at all. Dimon, he doesn't, you know, show up for most vendor events. He's the CEO of America's most, you know, famous biggest bank. But I think the reason he showed up is because JP Morgan is already really deep into this and he gave a quote that I thought was phenomenal and I'm sure Anthropic thought it was phenomenal considering their, their upcoming ipo. He said, quote, the technology is so powerful, it's worth the trillion dollar investment. So Felix Salmon was kind of reporting on this and he said that, you know, Demian is basically blessing the AI capex boom and that the framing is right because now the procurement and the compliance objection that I think a lot of these firms have had is kind of going away. FIS already has SOX compliance rails on thousands of banks. And so Anthropic plugging into FIS is I think, basically how all of these agents actually become legally deployable. So there's not kind of this, you know, end run around audit. And I think the run rate numbers that we're seeing from anthropic hitting 30 billion or. Yeah, $30 billion in annual recurring revenue shows look, this company is growing insanely fast. Now there's one other really interesting angle with all of this and that is that Anthropic might just be making itself too important for the US financial system to be regulated out of existence. Right. We already see that they have kind of this battle going with the Pentagon and they have some, you know, government issues where they're kind of fighting and you could see, you know, in a really punitive environment where they would kind of get hammered by a lot of government agencies like we've seen in all sorts of administrations for different tech companies. But it feels like right now, by integrating themselves deeply into the US Financial system. Working with Wall street, like, what's the US Government going to do? Hey, like, look, we can't use Anthropic for anything because we don't like their stance on one particular, you know, one particular area. And it's going to cripple our financial markets. It's really interesting the way that they are working into everything. All right, that's it for the show today, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you could go leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast. It just helps the show to grow and be found by new people. It's how the algorithm decides if this is a good show to share. So thank you so much for all of the reviews. I appreciate every single one. And as always, make sure to go check out AI box. AI There's a link in the description if you want to get access to over 80 AI models all in one place for 8.99amonth. All right, I'll catch you guys all in the next episode.