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- [00:01]
Host 1
Thank you to the AMD team for having us here at AMD Advancing AI. We're on the road in SF today, but let's take you through a little bit of the news of what AMD is announcing. What's happening today. Advancing AI is AMD's biggest AI event of the year where it reveals new chips, software partnerships and how it plans to compete with Nvidia. According to Jackson Fordyce Fun newsletter.
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Host 2
We just found this out this morning. AMD is actually powering the Mod Retro M64. Very cool.
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Host 1
It's very.
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Host 2
Yeah, very cool crossover Palmer. Lisa.
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Host 1
Yeah, so we're going to be spending all 30 minutes of our time with Lisa sue on gaming specifically.
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Host 2
Exactly.
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Host 1
How is. How are they going to bring suits and suits. Yes. So the three key stories that people are focused on out of AMD advancing AI. Our AMD unveil unveils Helios, the new rack scale AI system powered by the Mi 450 accelerator. We'll talk to Lisa about that. Also a new partnership with a Frontier lab. AMD and Anthropic are partnering to to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI 450s size gong. Size gong $5 billion deal and a whole bunch of collaboration across compute and the software stack. The big question around the software ecosystem around AMD is always a hot topic. I'm sure there's a ton of developments there.
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Host 2
Only makes sense on stage. Just a little bit ago they were talking about how Anthropic's own models are effectively speeding up their ability to ramp up new hardware.
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Host 1
Yep.
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Host 2
Which is something that has been talked about for years now. Some questions around the Cuda mote. Right. If you assume that making great software will just get easier and easier, that's been a big question. And they're starting to see real movement there.
- [01:47]
Host 1
Yeah. But also a lot of that speed up requires actual deep partnership like this because there are some close source packages that you might need to. You might need to work on. This is the old George Hotz interaction talking about little bugs that he was frustrated with. Wound up working with AMD developer team who we've talked to on the team on the show. Fantastic outcome there, but interesting to see that flywheel just get tighter and tighter and tighter and I expect it will. Also AMD is expanding its partnership with Cerebras, teaming up on AI inference. We love the team over at Cerebras. They introduced a powerful disaggregated inference solution pairing the right engine to each phase of the inference pipeline. This is what agentic AI has been waiting for. The fastest production inference at massive scale. Google has the muscle to overpower spending worries, says the Wall Street Journal. Google has put up some very impressive cloud growth numbers. There of course was some back and forth on the nature of that revenue with semi analysis, sort of jokingly maybe posting. Google Cloud generates revenue primarily from the sale of TPU systems. The actual that did change in the SEC filing that's drawing attention is that there's a line in there that says Google Cloud generates product revenues primarily from the sale of TPU systems. Which is a little confusing because you think of a company's product as their business. But of course they have services as well. And so the. It's not that Google Cloud is fully pivoting to TPU sales exclusively. It is that they.
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Host 2
But it's becoming meaningful.
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Host 1
Yes, yes, yes. They've sold them to a number of labs and they're seeing lots of process rewind a year.
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Host 2
That was still a question.
- [03:31]
Host 1
Yes, yes, we can go through. There's a number of different posts here we can take you through. Eric Suefert talking back and forth about Sufinator. The Sufinator's putting a little bit of truth zone on Google Ads growth. What's going on there? They saw a lot of growth in monetized LLM queries. It all started with Sundar Pachai's News. He said Q2 was an amazing quarter with our AI investments redefining what's possible across every part of our business. Alphabet revenue grew 24% year over year and Google Cloud accelerated to 82% growth, which is insane. That is the foghorn for sure. We saw exciting momentum across the board from search to YouTube to the Gemini app. Our model APIs are processing 22 billion tokens a minute. And at this point I'm like the numbers have gotten so big on tokens per minute, tokens per month that it's very hard to keep keep in sync with what's actually impressive until you actually see a full chart. But that's driven by their workhorse Flash model, which makes sense. They've been focused on very efficient token generation because they ven them into so many Google systems for effectively free because they're still, you know, at monetizing via advertising. So Max Anderson said, as someone who has personally spent $500,000 a month plus on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty this revenue growth in search is artificial and extremely unhealthy for Google's business long term. Little bit of fear, uncertainty, doubt, search volumes are declining as legacy searches being increasingly cannibalized by non monetized LLM queries. Google's response Manufacturer revenue growth via short sighted highly extractive customer hostile tactics ie charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly do not approve Google to charge them for. He gives a few examples. He's going back and forth saying that this is, you know, short term optimization, but the souvenir comes in, he says unfortunately every claim made in this viral thread is either false or mixed characterizes Google's policy 1. Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non monetized LLM queries. Google stated in its Q2 earnings that search usage hit an all time high during the World cup this year. It also stated in Q1 earnings that search queries reached an all time high that quarter. Ads and AI overviews monetized in parity with those in legacy search and Google's search revenue increased by 19% in Q1 and 17% in Q2. So a little deceleration but still growing. He also debunks the idea that Google silently deprecated the second price auction. Google still uses generalized second price auction for search. He also debunks the idea that Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers to pick individual search phrases to bid on. There's a different thing, but Sufinator goes back and forth and adds some more context to the Google earnings that people are digging into. And we can dig into more later this week. Over in the Wall Street Journal, there's a couple articles Alphabet Rides Cloud Business revenue jumps 24% but data center Outlays Pumpkin Push Cash Flow into the Red I think it was the first quarter for negative cash flow, but this has been telegraph for a long time. They're investing in AI.
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Host 2
Boom.
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Host 1
Not a surprise. And there's been talks from all the hyperscalers around. Debt issuances, equity issuances, all different things to fund the AI build out. So Google parent company Alphabet posted 24% revenue growth year over year in the second quarter, fueled by its booming cloud business. But concern over the company's heavy spending on AI infrastructure damped investors enthusiasm. Alphabet sales came in at 119.8 billion, exceeding analysts expectations. Its cloud business brought in 24.8 billion and its search business generated 63 billion. Net income was 112 billion for the April June period, also ahead of analyst expectations. So they beat primarily driven by its gains in other companies. Stocks that Alphabet owns. They own, I think, almost $100 billion of SpaceX. I'm not sure about the current valuation, but in other AI news in the Wall Street Journal, two big AI infrastructure stories. You have Lisa Su herself right here. AMD anthropic sign AI gear deal. We talked to ANJ a little bit about that. And OpenAI boost cloud space spend to 750 billion new projects and Georgia Data center will be part of efforts to increase capacity. OpenAI scaling up its data center ambitions and its budget for spending on them. The artificial intelligence company has raised its projected spending on computing power to around 750 billion through 2030, up from a projection of roughly 600 billion is a huge number. Obviously, a lot of discussion about that, but given the most recent leg up based on coding agents, a lot of people are looking at that positively as a sign of continued faith in the progress and the scaling law, of course, because we are in the scaling era.
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Host 2
Serious momentum.
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Host 1
Yeah. The scaling. The increase reflects new agreements with cloud computing providers as OpenAI races to lock up the enormous amounts of computing capacity it needs to develop and run its AI models. OpenAI spending on cloud computing has become a central focus of Chief Executive Sam Altman's leadership team and has been a source of tension between him. The company said Wednesday would invest 20 billion to kick off a data center called Project Camilla in Effingham County, Georgia. So that's new news. Also, Nvidia has a supplier that's over.
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Host 2
Have you ever been to Georgia?
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Host 1
Yes, I've been to Atlanta. It's a great town.
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Host 2
I do.
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Host 1
You've never been?
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Host 2
Maybe on a layover.
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Host 1
It's like la.
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Host 2
I don't think I've been outside.
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Host 1
It's like Los Angeles. You're in the car for half an hour, driving in traffic to get everywhere, Everywhere. But it's a really nice city.
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Host 2
Liang Wen Fong over at Deepseek had an investor call. I don't have context on how this actually came up because they're a hedge fund and they have Deepseek still a private. They're raising outside capital now they're raising outside capital. So this was probably part of that roadshow. I think at a certain point, he needs to raise enough money that you gotta just get on Zoom and sell the dream.
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Host 1
But he was grinding for four hours, just monologuing for four hours. I don't know if he's monologuing for all four, but it is sort of a long call.
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Host 2
But people are bullish, though, because if you can go and basically do A Joe Rogan podcast episode. It's just monologuing. No, it's just like, can somebody actually carry a conversation for that long? Because after, you know, this has always been your take on Joe Rogan. It's like it gets interesting on Joe Rogan because by after an hour, people go off script. And so if a CEO can carry a conversation for four hours straight and still be compelling, it's bullish. But there's some details that Zephyr shared. He's over at Citrini. Their inference margins are around 85% strong. They only had around 20,000 hopper equivalents until May. Still sort of. I can see how they would say that. That doesn't mean that they don't have access to a lot more power globally, some of which may or may not be above board, but who knows? They have 1 billion in API revenue is enough to turn the company cash flow positive. And they have a GPU payback period of 10 months and their hardware is depreciate over three to five years. So looking quite good over the pond.
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Host 1
He also shared a lot of philosophy that felt sort of derivative of Western AI lab leaders thought. I mean, he was focused on, you know, some of the same language around. We don't want to monitor, we don't want to optimize for pure profit. We're on the path to AGI first. It's something that you've heard from a lot of lab leaders. He did say that he's very focused and he wouldn't be doing world models or image generation or video generation or even a chat app. He said he doesn't want to be the next Alibaba is purely focused on the path to AGI, sort of taking this focused approach. And so we'll see. They've. They've sort of been out of the game with Moonshot, sort of coming from behind with K3 and a lot of hype there and then GLM of course, as well. So it'll be. It'll be interesting to see what he has up his sleeve, get on the back of this investor call that everyone's
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Host 2
paying attention to gong moment. Cognition is acquiring interaction. The makers of Poke, huge. I think Poke has been an acquisition target or been talked about as an acquisition target for a long time now. They've just been able to deliver delightful, novel products. I wouldn't have expected them to go to cognition. I think a lot of people were thinking that they'd get picked up by big consumer company, maybe a, you know, an Apple.
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Host 1
Were people saying Apple and Apple Would
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Host 2
have been amazing Having the Poke team working on Siri would be. Would be quite cool. Could have seen them go into OpenAI or really any, you know, even, even an Amazon. Right?
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Host 1
Yeah.
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Host 2
So a little bit unexpected here, but not surprised that Scott saw potential in the team. And I'm very interested to see how these businesses end up actually merging. Will they keep Poke around? Will it be. Will it be just sort of folded into Cognition? But either way, very excited to see what they built.
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Host 1
There's an older article in the Wall Street Journal that we never got a chance to read through, but it's fun because it tells a story of a young person who basically started literally listening to a podcast and started a search fund and made, I guess, millions of dollars. Did the meme. Yeah, I did the meme. This shortcut to private equity riches is minting young millionaires. And I saw Sal Khan from Khan Academy talking about something sort of adjacent to this, because Khan Academy, of course, sort of open source education. You can basically learn everything that you learn in college from Khan Academy just watching videos and doing their. Their online open coursework. I believe it's nonprofit still.
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Host 2
Crazy that that Khan Academy exists. And plenty of people still turn it down.
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Host 1
Yes. Oh, they do. They do. Yeah. This person didn't though. Basically, go getters are backing to buy. Are backing to buy up H Vac outfits and specialized manufacturers. If they make it back alive, there's a lot of money to be made. What a quote from the Wall street journal. So in 2015, Bakari Akhil was a homeless college dropout with a single focus. Figuring out how to get rich. Sleeping in weworks, on the subway, in an airport waiting areas. Akhil watched videos, listened to podcasts. Let's give it up for some podcasts. And poured over personal finance books. He needed to own a business, he decided, but how to do it with. How do you do it with no money? Then Akhil read a Harvard Business School case study that described how MBA graduates were running around the country trying to buy companies with money from something called a search fund. He felt like he had discovered a secret. In the decades Since, Akhil, now 37, has bought two multimillion dollar companies. He has spent each month of the past three years living in a different country. So he's doing the nomad lifestyle.
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Host 2
He's starting H Vac companies.
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Host 1
I guess we'll get into it. He's now worth seven figures. Akhil is part of a growing wave of people looking for a shortcut to private equity riches. Armed with grit and determination they are ditching the well worn path from spreadsheet wielding associate to managing director and finding ways to buy H VAC and plumbing outfits, specialized manufacturers and other small and midsize businesses. Financing from For Deals Financing such deals is far cry from traditional private equity where firms use funds they raise from institutional investors and the ultra wealthy plus debt. Instead, these would be business owners scrape together financing on a deal by deal basis. They use loans from the U.S. small Business Administration, seek funds raised from specialized investors, or cobble together money from friends, family offices, private equity funds and SBA licensed small business investment companies. And that's just the start. Convincing the owner to sell and executing an improvement plan is a daunting task even for the most experienced deal makers. While these buyers typically if you're overseas constantly. Yeah, I mean I imagine that he's overseas now, but during the heyday he was like actually going and you know, knocking on doors. But the reason I brought up Sal Khan was that he was advocating for instead of college, buy your child a business or, or take a group of of peers your ch. Your child's age and they can buy a business together. Because if you look at the cost of college.
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Host 2
Yeah.
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Host 1
You know, $200,000, $250,000 sometimes if you get four students and they're effectively the executive team and you say, look, we're, we have a million dollars in cash, we're going to lever something up.
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Host 2
So we're going to of net income.
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Host 1
Yeah.
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Host 2
And we're going to lever it up.
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Host 1
Yeah. And the cash flow is going to pay your salary. So you're going to have a job. Yeah. From 18 to 22 when you graduate. And your job is just to learn everything on the fly. And best case, you wind up with a fantastic business that makes a bunch of money. But worst case, you're no worse off than the money that you would have spent on college. And so you get to learn all these skills on the fly. I don't know, I don't know if it'll take off. It feels like Alpha school adjacent, but
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Host 2
when the time comes, yeah, maybe we can get all the kids and say,
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Host 1
I mean you guys, it's hard to predict what the world would be like in 15 years or 20 years if you're just having kids now. But it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine. But I think, I think the aura of certain schools will endure and that will be the right path for some people for sure. Anyway, I view these guys as home, the homesteaders of the Wild west, said Albrecht, who previously represented a big private equity firm and a law firm, Gibson Dunn. They're heading out without a dollar to their name and if they make it back alive, there's a lot of money to be made. Many caught the bug at a top business school where entrepreneurship through acquisition courses are now a standard part of the curriculum. They are drawn by the promise of a more flexible schedule, a conviction in their own operational know how and desire to avoid grunt work that ends up lining the pockets of others. Also fueling their rise, a perception that that it isn't as easy as it once was to make big money on Wall Street. It makes sense. A lot of the big private equity firms were founded decades ago, have founders that have and partnerships that have accrued a lot of the value and it's much harder to just scale up something new. Private equity industry is struggling to profitably unload companies, causing mid level employees dubious of their chances of receiving pay tied to deal performance to jump ship. Some 77 search funds money from specialized investors to back individuals looking to buy businesses were raised in 2025. 77 search funds new search funds listed by the According to an annual study conducted by researchers at Stanford in 2025. That feels low based on how big the meme was all throughout 2025. Maybe.
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Host 2
No, there's no way that that's accurate.
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Host 1
Yeah, maybe there's some that are, that aren't being caught in like the, in the, in the definition. Or they, they, they have defined their company as a, as a true private equity firm instead of a search fund. So they said no, we're not a search fund. Even though they might actually be acting as one.
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Host 2
You know who's optimistic about AI? John who? Friend of the show Mark Zuckerberg.
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Host 1
Oh yeah.
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Host 2
Mark has launched a new campaign that is focused on AI optimism in Axios metaseo. Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday laid out an optimistic view of the agentic future, arguing the company's focus on connecting the world will only be strengthened by new AI tools and technologies. Axio says why it Matters his position is framed as a stark contrast to some of Meta AI's competitors, who, according to a video ad posted with Zuckerberg's comments, promote fear and a dystopian vision of the future.
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Host 1
That was a cool video. I liked it. It's interesting to imagine watching it not as a fan of social media though, because it's leaning a lot on like we've connected people, we bring people together and I certainly see it that way. When I log on to Meta platforms, I'm Sending you funny reels and we're having a blast. But a lot of people see it as brain rot. Right. And they don't. And they're like, oh, if you're going to do what you just did to the next thing. I'm not certain. I'm not fully on board, so I don't know how it'll be received.
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Host 2
Yeah, I don't know how production value is going to land.
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Host 1
It's definitely the correct angle. The opposite is worse. Like clearly, like you want to be optimistic and there's a lot of data to.
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Host 2
I'm really glad that he's not like memetically going down the fear based path.
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Host 1
Oh God, yes. That would be very, very rough working
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Host 2
for some players anyway. So we'll see how it lands. What else is going on? Paramount is moving into micro dramas. This is the moment you've been waiting for. You love dramatic movies. I don't know, can I interest you in some micro dramas? Have you tried any of the.
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Host 1
I watch the True Short. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I watch a true crime one and I, I felt like I was actually fine with the AI video voiceover element of it. What I felt was missing was when you're. When you're tracking a true crime story and you turn on a podcast about that true crime, you know, whatever it was, I like being led through a meandering idea maze of what is interesting to that host. So maybe they find the town and the details about the town where something happened particularly interesting. And so they're just putting in random facts that flesh out the story in a particular way. I felt like the one that I watched at least was very much like the Wikipedia level summary or like the headlines, just condensed and it was too generic and it wasn't giving me enough novelty and like new facts. So even though like the video wasn't quite there, it was obviously AI it wasn't super visually striking. The audio was sort of, you know, jilted. That all would have been fine if it had been someone who actually went and found some really deep, interesting novel way to tell the story or novel details that otherwise you wouldn't have heard of from the headlines. So I don't know. Still early, but I don't think they're going to get me. There's something about going to the theater. It's an experience. It's like it's the anti brain.
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Host 2
What if you put your. What if you were to turn the screen sideways?
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Host 1
They've done that, They've done that. There's somebody in Brooklyn, I think, put together like a whole. Like we're going to watch Instagram reels together or like TikTok short form film Festival or something. Yeah, Conjecture. There's a lot of conjecture about what OpenAI is releasing today, thibaut said. Unbelievably excited for what's coming together. Tomorrow is feeling Codexy. People are speculating that it might be a Cerebras, a faster version of Soul Turbo mode. It is okay.
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Host 2
ChatGPT voice is now in the desktop app Control your computer and direct multiple agents running in ChatGPT work or Codex using just your voice. It's powered by GPD Live, so it can speak, listen and coordinate work in the app at the same time.
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Host 1
And then also Health is rolling out to us users everywhere. Health and ChatGPT. You can securely connect Apple Health and supported medical records to understand your information.
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Host 2
What about sleep?
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Host 1
Ooh, got to get it on there for sure. There's also a new law introduced, a bipartisan AI kill switch bill following the OpenAI cyber incident. The bill enters Congress as lawmakers remain divided on how aggressively the federal government should regulate artificial intelligence. I'm sure this will be a longer conversation on a future show. And that's our show, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to TVPN live from AMD. We are traveling tomorrow. We'll be back on Monday, 11am Pacific. Thank you to the team here who flew up and thank you to everyone at AMD for making this possible.
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Host 2
We really appreciate dialing in these IRL shows.
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Host 1
Yeah, we're getting there. One step ahead.
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Host 2
The team makes it look Easy.
- [24:03]
Host 1
Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tbpn.com and we will see you on Monday, 11am sharp for another one. Goodbye.