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- [00:00]
Ben Thompson
Huge news over the weekend. Dropped. Mark Gurman dropped a massive scoop right after we got off on Friday night. Friday afternoon, Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple is suing OpenAI. Apple and OpenAI are going to war. The Wall Street Journal called it thermonuclear, echoed past attacks, calling back to the Jobs era. We'll get to that. But first the accusations. Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing it of stealing Apple's trade secrets. Apple Inc. Sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, accusing the artificial intelligence startup and its hardware chief of engaging in a coordinated campaign to steal information about upcoming products. The iPhone maker said in a suit Friday that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees to share information, components, drawings and other materials related to upcoming products. So, like the robot, what are the upcoming products from Apple right now? Part of efforts by the company. The lamp.
- [00:52]
Rolf Wink
Yeah, lamp.
- [00:53]
Ben Thompson
The cobra lamp by the AI company to develop its own suite of devices. I feel like rumors around the devices have gone back and forth. Is it a phone? Is it headphones, Is it something else? A pin? We're having Mark Gurman on the show today to break it down for us. He's coming on at 12:45.
- [01:09]
Mark Gurman
The funny thing is I bet German knows more about OpenAI's devices than we do because we specifically, that's what we're having. Didn't want to be read in on anything device related because we knew there was going to be so much speculation that we just said like, yeah, we're gonna be in the dark. We'll find out from the timeline.
- [01:28]
Ben Thompson
So at the center of the lawsuit is a former Apple employee named Chang Liu who left for OpenAI and allegedly kept his Apple laptop for weeks after he left the company, downloaded proprietary Apple files and encouraged other Apple employees to do the same. Yeah, if that happened, that's a big no. No. When you leave a company, you gotta leave your device on the day you leave. Usually, I mean, I was remembering back to. I mean, we had a very graceful transition to this business from founders fund, but I had emails in founders fund from people that went to Hereticon, people that make a good guess. And I was like, I'm not even going to export that. I'm just going to leave that and I'll reestablish those connections to people, cold email them, find their information independently. Just don't take any files, leave them with the other standard system. Yeah, it is standard practice. You know, some people can make mistakes. Also. These are just allegations. None of this is confirmed and this lawsuit will be going on for like months. If not years, we can go through some of the other historical examples that are sort of interesting to sort of set the table on what might play out here. So Apple's Filings also spends quite a few words on the fact that OpenAI has poached more than 400 employees from the company in recent years. That's not going to make anyone in Cupertino happy. They hate poaching. There's the famous Steve Jobs, Adobe, back and forth. Tang Tan left Apple in 2024 to co found the AI hardware startup IO with Jony I've, which OpenAI acquired in 2025 as part of its consumer AI device effort. Tan is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer and he's leading the consumer device effort there. In his lawsuit, Apple says Tan systemically solicited sensitive information from Apple employees who were interviewing for roles at OpenAI. A lot of perspective on this flying around the timeline, but Ben Thompson and Rolf Wink, the Wall Street Journal both had interesting angles here.
- [03:17]
Mark Gurman
Wait, they have a Ben Thompson at the Wall Street Journal?
- [03:19]
Ben Thompson
No, no, no. Ben Thompson as Drew Tekkering and Wolf. I said that wrong. Brandon got it cracked in that newsletter. We can read a little bit of what Ralph said in the Journal. He says Apple's OpenAI suit echoes past attacks Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war if you're trying to fire up your staff and you're going to battle you, even if it's Monday's gonna battle, even if it's just for like will the next device have 12 gigs of RAM or 32, that's boring. Thermonuclear war is exciting. You gotta fire up the staff, the troops. So he declared Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war on Google on Google's Android operating system in 2010, calling it a stolen product. Now his successor is going to battle against Apple's new most dangerous rival. In one of his last acts as Apple's chief executive before successor John Ternus takes over, Tim Cook fired a missile at OpenAI. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple alleged that senior OpenAI executive who once sat atop Apple's own product design team was involved in a months long campaign to steal Apple trade secrets. OpenAI replied at this point and said we have no interest in Apple's trade secrets. But Ralph continues he says, although it isn't clear yet what evidence the company has to back up all of its claims. The suit lands before OpenAI has released a product and as the technology races to build artificial intelligence powered devices that can move society beyond the smartphone era and there's a whole debate to be had for where that goes and the value of devices. In a world where the agents are just kind of off working and you can maybe just text them or send them a message on telegram, there's a whole debate over what the Is the future of devices, more devices and different devices, or is it just no devices? But OpenAI has clearly been working on devices. As we know from the I O acquisition. The winner could dominate the Future just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years. Quote, I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous gotta flip to a six. Let's see. Tremendous respect for them. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X
- [05:26]
Mark Gurman
Saturday and he said s tier company
- [05:28]
Ben Thompson
yeah, he said, oh, that didn't make it into the paper. Maybe the Wall Street Journal readers aren't familiar with the proper tier list. They think S is down at the bottom, when in fact it is above a big Tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple, but so far Google, Samsung, Meta platforms, Microsoft and Amazon.com have all failed. It is crazy. People think, you know, okay, Android was successful but captured like one tenth of the actual value because the margins on Android devices are so much lower. But you forget that Jeff Bezos stood on stage and said we're launching the Amazon Fire phone and we're going to win. And then Microsoft had the whole Microsoft phone and they were really pushing that. And Facebook Chamath was at Facebook working on the Facebook phone.
- [06:07]
Mark Gurman
Sort of a rite of passage.
- [06:09]
Ben Thompson
It is a rite of passage. It's an ultimate long shot as an up and coming hyperscaler to every It's a rite of passage to go and Challenge Apple now OpenAI is emerging as a new threat. It has built powerful AI models and is working toward an unspecified family of devices. Interesting to hear that to run them devices that could supplant Apples, company observers say to slow poaching of Apple staffers, for instance. So this could just slow the poaching that's happening. Friday's lawsuit has echoes of one of Apple's of the ones Apple's filed against various Android ecosystem players beginning in 2010, a legal battle royale with hardware makers producing rival phones that played out over eight years. The central allegation then as now, was a rival stole Apple's innovations. Apple said Samsung slavishly copied the iPhone with smartphones it was already selling by the millions, which Samsung denied. The company settled in 2018 after a long, costly battle eight years in AI years. That's like a million decades. Wow. At the center of each case Apple has pursued was a perceived breach of trust. So Google's then chief executive Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board as his company developed Android. So there was like, you're on the board of Apple saying yeah, we should
- [07:30]
Mark Gurman
definitely launch kind of similar to the Krieger Figma dynamic.
- [07:34]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, very, very tricky. I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. Apple alleges in its new suit that, quote, at every level OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets. A more junior employee appeared to cross the line by using an Apple employee's login to access Apple servers. But Apple has also accused OpenAI's hardware chief Tang Tan of soliciting trade secrets from its employees in interviews for Jobs and encouraging them to bring, quote, actual parts from Apple for show and tell sessions at OpenAI. Tan worked at Apple for 24 years, rising to vice president of product design. But bringing parts to an engineering interview isn't unusual, say people familiar with the tech hiring process. That was shocking to me. It does feel unusual to me. Interviewers want candidates to talk through their work. The question is whether the parts were sensitive. Something Apple doesn't offer evidence of and is seeking is seeking discovery to determine. A spokesperson for OpenAI said, quote, we have no interest in other companies trade secrets. We re we remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers everyday people everywhere. Tan and a more senior employee, Chang Liu, didn't respond to requests for comment. At Apple, Tan worked very closely with Johnny I've its famous industrial design chief. I've left Apple to build his own design firm later poaching tan. OpenAI bought that company IO Product Products in 2025 to spearhead its own device development efforts. Bedfellows can quickly become enemies in tech. OpenAI made the IO acquisition revealing its intention to wean customers off smartphone screens. A year after announcing a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into some parts of the iPhone, the Wall Street Journal has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Of course, bigger companies have so far failed to dent Apple's dominance. And they talk about Amazon's Fire Phone, Microsoft Windows Phone. Mark Zuckerberg also tried to do an end run around the iPhone with the metaverse that never fail, fully disrupted the iPhone, of course. Elon Musk has also chafed at Apple's control of the digital economy. A unit of SpaceX is suing Apple for disadvantaging its AI app and the company is now prototyping its own smartphone like AI device. Apple has said that its app store relies on algorithms and expert curation and doesn't suppress rivals. The irony of Apple's case against OpenAI is that Apple itself has so frequently been accused of stealing others company's ideas that it has spawned a new verb, Sherlocking, which is a reference to an app for the Mac that allowed you to hit I think command space and get a finder window to search everything across your entire desktop. That eventually became the Spotlight feature baked into Apple. But it was not very good for the company that was running Sherlock. And so Apple this is the same like the Labs will steamroll this or these. Many companies just got put out of business by this company and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It just sort of depends. Apple recently tried to Sherlock particle but it seems like Partiful is doing fine and so it sort of depends on the actual I have not got the flashlight.
- [10:39]
Mark Gurman
People haven't gotten a single invite from
- [10:42]
Ben Thompson
Apple's true true invite system at the same time. When was the last time you paid for a flashlight app? Probably never, right? Because all of that stuff's baked in. Apple's trying to catch up.
- [10:51]
Mark Gurman
I saw someone actually go pretty viral on Instagram with the world's most expensive flashlight app. I think it was like 100. It was like $5 to turn the light on and then $129 to turn it off.
- [11:06]
Ben Thompson
That's great. Genius. I like those. Pretty nice.
- [11:09]
Mark Gurman
Ben Thompson read through the filing as he would. He says you can read Apple's filing here and almost everything you need to know is actually on the first page in the first four paragraphs. Paragraph one is a succinct introduction to the case. This case is about Apple's former employees stealing trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it. Paragraph two recounts how Apple has spent a lot of time and money building products that delight customers. Paragraph three basically says that everything they do is a trade secret. And paragraph four introduces Chang Liu and spends the next page and a half recounting his crimes. Ben Thompson says Lou is almost certainly guilty and an idiot to boot. Not mincing words there, Apple has a lot of details about Lou's behavior, including dozens downloading dozens of proprietary Apple hardware related files and encouraging other Apple employees to do the same. Because he did it on his Apple issued laptop and furthermore logged onto Apple servers for weeks after he had already left the company. Ben says Apple Security says as depicted in this case is Shockingly poor. First, the company lost track of the fact that Lou didn't return one of his laptops or disable it remotely. Second, due to what Apple claimed was a bug, Lou continued to have access to the company's internal servers for weeks. He talks about how Tan is the point person for the 400 people that Apple says that OpenAI has hired away from the smartphone maker. That is no crime, of course, although one does get the sense Apple sure thinks it is.
- [12:38]
Ben Thompson
The funniest moment in here is where he says a couple quick points. A few weeks ago there was a bit of hubbub about meta capture and keystrokes from employees in order to train AI. What confused me was people's surprise that a company had this level of access to company issued hardware in the first place. Moreover, while that access may very well be theoretical for a lot of companies at Apple, it has always been a well known fact, going at least as far back as when I was an intern there, Ben Thompson was an intern there 16 years ago, that the company could and would go through everything if you ever cross them. And so it's yeah, everyone should know this, but somehow, at least Apple alleges that it was not known or, or just a terrible mistake or brazen, you know, brazen mistake. He does, he does talk about a little bit of the, the, the motivations for why you're going to thermonuclear war. He says, yes, ERA has sucked for Apple.
- [13:32]
Mark Gurman
Yeah, so he says. Tan is the face of Apple betrayal. OpenAI is the face of AI generally. And it's hard to escape the sense that Apple just really hates AI. And why shouldn't they go back to 2022? Apple had it all figured out. They had a lock on the premium end of the smartphone market, which they continued to slow as they had figured out how to earn services revenue from every iPhone user basically forever. Business was good. AI has ruined all of that. Suddenly Apple has to make existential decisions about whether or not to compete in the model game. They totally embarrassed themselves with the 2024 new Siri introduction, had their most prominent blogger declare that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino, had to completely overhaul their software and services teams, lost their position as kings of the supply chain and most favored customer of TSMC to the point where they had to enact an emergency mid cycle price rise, and then worst of all have wrestle with the possibility that AI is such a paradigm shift that it might actually threaten the iPhone. And then on top of all that, they lost, they lose 400 of their best employees recruited by the lead hardware engineer for the iPhone in partnership with their most famous executive outside of Steve Jobs, and have to know that all 400 of those employees are getting hit up by their former colleagues looking for a job as well. The AI era has sucked for Apple. Even if they aren't necessarily doomed and even if they relaunched New Siri ends up working out, their position is still more fragile than it was and everything about life is worse. Given that, how sweet it must feel to suddenly have a smoking gun in the form of a seriously dumb employee blatantly lifting documents and to use it as a cudgel to exact revenge on the company that represents everything that is making your life miserable. The perspective does make one wonder if that phrase run to its core was projection. In the end, AI is changing the world and Apple's contribution is to deliver two year old technology differentiated by exclusive access data it won't share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way. Any of its employees who wish to do exactly that, meanwhile, are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn't just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge. I think it mostly stinks, but then again, rotten things usually do. It's thermonuclear Bertino, but it's not the first go sign up first or tech. Read the whole article. There's a bunch of context and we're going to come back to the story. The Germinator Rohan in Semaphore says Paramount Ways leaving California over Warner Brothers Rift. What's going on here? John?
- [15:58]
Ben Thompson
So this is on the basis that California is trying to block the Paramount the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Rohan says. I'm told that if the states do choose to sue, they would have to assume the damages stemming from that action. Chiefly 600 million to 1.2 billion in ticking fees would potentially be paid out to state taxpayers. So if they leave, those fees would not be paid to the state. Paramount just issued this response to the state AG lawsuit. Brian Stelter is breaking it down, saying the complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the in the entertainment industry today. So Paramount is weighing whether to shift major operations out of California after Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general. I always get that wrong. Filed today to block its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, this story was back and forth. Will Netflix get it? Paramount wound up with the highest bid, the most cash to offer, it got approved. Huge windfall for David Zaslav over at Warner Brothers Discovery, but a very controversial acquisition. All the shareholders, yeah, everyone did very well, but people were very worried because they owned two. Two historic studio lots in Los Angeles. Would they need both of those? Would they convert one to apartment buildings? This was sort of the nightmare case for fans of Hollywood filmmaking, that it would become a more agile, lean, globally distributed studio. Would they be making less films? Would they change their pattern? Because as they are two separate buyers of intellectual property and scripts that come to Hollywood, they can pay higher prices. There's less competition, potentially the price of that, the industry becomes more monopolistic, and there's less buying activity. So the proposed deal was the and is the largest merger in Hollywood history. It would combine two of the five major film distributors and give the resulting company control of roughly 27% of US film distribution and basic cable channels. Of course, anyone who's in favor of this was arguing that, well, people are watching Instagram and YouTube all day long and listening to podcasts and live streams. You can't look at Hollywood in isolation. It's okay if there's a little bit of consolidation in an industry that's facing incredible pressure from a new disruptive industry. We saw this play out with the Shutterstock Getty Images question, where you have immense pressure in the stock image market from an entirely new outsider technology. Consolidation makes a lot of sense usually in those scenarios. But if you're just looking at it, if you're just defining the industry as only Hollywood studios, then, yes, this does represent more consolidation. Friends and advisors to Paramount CEO David Ellison had reportedly been urging him to reconsider the company's California footprint in the event that California sued over the deal. Previously, Paramount had offered to keep both of its historic studio lots in California open and release 30 films annually, which was basically just adding the 15 and 15 that were made from both studios. I believe something like that. But executives have privately complained that BONTA refused to negotiate. Worth noting that the Justice Department has already cleared the merger, while China and other international regulators have raised no comparable. Comparable objections thus far. So from a antitrust perspective, it looks like the merger can go through, but the state of California is potentially trying to block it now. So Paramount says California's complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry. Today. It'd be very interesting to see where they actually go if they do leave California. There's been so Much. So much movement to Texas and Florida, but in terms of filmmaking, Toronto, London, Atlanta. Exactly. So maybe Georgia. I don't know. I'm sure every other state is gunning for this because bringing an industry to town is almost always a good move. More jobs for your local economy, more tax dollars going around. There will probably be a competition, but we'll see where this, where this develops. And we might have someone from the media analysis industry come on the show later this week to discuss.
- [20:27]
Mark Gurman
There is a new letter. New letter just dropped. We are hoping for a new billion dollar PDF, but we got another letter. More than 200 researchers and economists, including Jack Clark, Jeff Dean, Noam Brown, Tyler Cohen Sholto, John Schulman, Eric Schmidt, Dean Ball, Yoshua Bengio. Yoshua Bengio, Eric Schmidt signed a statement urging governments and institutions to act now to prepare for AI's economic impact. They start the pretty simple letter by saying I may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
- [21:06]
Ben Thompson
They don't. This isn't like the start. It's just three statements the entire.
- [21:10]
Mark Gurman
So they're signing that, but they're signing,
- [21:12]
Ben Thompson
they're saying we all agree with these three statements.
- [21:14]
Mark Gurman
They agree that I could possibly become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
- [21:19]
Ben Thompson
Which feels very conservative.
- [21:21]
Mark Gurman
That's like an incredible. You're not committing to anything at all.
- [21:26]
Ben Thompson
No, I mean there are plenty of people that are saying that I will go away in the next 10 years.
- [21:30]
Mark Gurman
Years.
- [21:30]
Ben Thompson
Like it's useless.
- [21:31]
Mark Gurman
You know, no one's really saying that.
- [21:33]
Ben Thompson
Ed Zitron saying that. And like 100,000 people are liking his post when he says that. So like there are a hundred thousand people out there that are like, it hallucinates. It's dumb, it's not useful.
- [21:43]
Mark Gurman
It's going to go away out of billions.
- [21:47]
Ben Thompson
I'm just saying there are people that don't believe this. But yes, this does feel like a, like actually an easier statement to agree with than the short timelines of fast takeoff in two years. Recursive self improvement. Anything that's coming out of basically any lab is much more aggressive than this. Elon's timelines have been solving new physics in two years. Stuff like that.
- [22:08]
Rolf Wink
Yeah.
- [22:09]
Mark Gurman
Point one, AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. Point two, this could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe. It could bring risks, including large scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards. And three, Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.
- [22:42]
Ben Thompson
So that last one's not a probability.
- [22:44]
Rolf Wink
Yeah.
- [22:44]
Ben Thompson
The first one, it feels like you can sign if you're at 1%. 1% chance that it gets more. More radically more powerful over the next 10 years, 1% chance that it drives an unprecedented transformation of our economy. But as long as you agree that economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, you sign this. So three is really the strongest. The strongest. The most strongly worded bullet point.
- [23:12]
Mark Gurman
Well, and it's interesting because the people signing this are technology leaders, so they
- [23:17]
Ben Thompson
really say not the actual top leaders. Interestingly. So if you look at who signed this, you have a ton of people from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stanford Meter, like every
- [23:28]
Mark Gurman
Harvard, like every lab, Bam Margera, I think you said
- [23:33]
Ben Thompson
Google, Jeff Dean. Like you have people from top, from top institutions, but not the CEOs, not the investors. Like, there's been other. There's been other. I mean, I guess Reid Hoffman and Jan Talon and who else is. I mean, Eric Schmidt's on here, but notably absent are Sam Altman, Daria Amadei. I don't believe Demis is on here. Is he on here?
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Rolf Wink
Yeah, but you have Jack Clark, Sarah Fryer.
- [23:58]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, so. But what's interesting is that it's sort of like the proxies. It's like the right hand men and women of the AI leaders that are signing. And so you have to imagine that Dario, Sam, Elon, Demis, Sundar, Satya, like, they got the message. This was received to them and they were like, you guys can solve this, but you can sign this. But we're not signing it because this doesn't feel like something that happens behind the scenes where Sarah Fryer doesn't go to Sam or Sholto doesn't bring this up to Dario. Oh, there's a new letter. I'm thinking of signing it. Like, it feels like it's.
- [24:34]
Rolf Wink
There was the, like that, that big pause letter that Elon did sign at one point.
- [24:38]
Ben Thompson
A lot of people sign it. And that one every lab leader actually did sign, and this one isn't even a pause, but somehow didn't rise to the aura level. And maybe that's deliberate because then it gets clipped and turned into headlines where it's like blank lab leader fill in anyone. It's going to be a.
- [24:57]
Mark Gurman
It's going to be leaders at xyz
- [24:59]
Ben Thompson
Labs, it's going to be head of Blank lab. If you're the first one to jump. If you're Sam or Dario or Demis or Elon. They just said that it could bring large scale job displacement. So you're going to have that headline tag next to you as opposed to if it's like someone at a lab who is not the CEO of that lab says it can bring large scale job displacement. Because right now it seems like at the very top, a lot of the lab leaders are sort of backing off of the near term job displacement worries.
- [25:32]
Rolf Wink
Yeah. But I think this still feels much more like the, the AI doc than like AI 2040. Right. And that like the message I got from the AI doc was like, we all got to talk about this. You know, let's get everyone in a room and like figure something out. We don't know at all what it's going to be. We got to figure something out where AI24 is like, okay, we have this. This is our, our plan A. Yep. We should be doing this specific set of, you know, policies, task, whatever.
- [25:55]
Ben Thompson
Yes.
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Rolf Wink
It's like as much for like civically,
- [25:57]
Ben Thompson
we all got to unifying rules with China, like US and China, like nuclear level negotiations on how things slow down. It's a global slowdown of large scale AI training runs essentially. And this is very, yeah, this is very, very different. So much easier to sign. But AI 2040 didn't have like signatories. I mean it had people that like helped out with it in general. And then they did poll them as to. They pulled some of the authors to say like, which one do you think is most likely to play out? But I guess everyone implicitly in the AI 2040, if you contributed to that document, you're sort of alongside advocating for is it Plan A? Because it's the fourth one that they offer. Is it Plan D?
- [26:44]
Rolf Wink
I think Plan A is what they.
- [26:46]
Ben Thompson
Plan A.
- [26:46]
Rolf Wink
There's a bunch of plans and then I think like in the order on the website. I think it is the fourth one, but that's arbitrary.
- [26:53]
Ben Thompson
AI 2040 trying to load the site, but it's not loading. Anyway, we can come back to that. We must act now. I like this. I like the idea of more economic research, more policymaking research to understand these things. It's not like it's hard to get wrong because the end result is just more information, more studies, more conversation and proposals. It's not anything specifically like if it was like large scale job displacement is coming next month. We need to print money and do economic stimulus broadly like we did during COVID I would be like, I don't know that. What if the job displacement doesn't come up and we just create a bunch of inflation? Like, I don't know if we should do that, but we should be ready for if we hit 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, that we do have stimulus in the back pocket. And I think we do with where interest rates are and with the. With the history of how we've dealt with employment shocks in the past. So I think we are like set up pretty well if that happens. It doesn't seem like it's happening at this moment, but yeah, tell us about those.
- [28:04]
Mark Gurman
The critical view on this is the people building the technology say that we got to do something about this. Like. Like it's kind of a just continuation of like that we got to do something about this. And maybe you just need to do a new letter every single month forever. Maybe, But I don't know. Speaking of our previous conversation on betting risk, maxing says a 9 to 5 isn't a career. It's a supply chain for casino ammo. And that is certainly one way to look at it. Although that's not how we think about our work here, gentlemen.
- [28:37]
Ben Thompson
No. We respect the dollar. Like Nick Cage, Tai Lopez calls Bunny fuel unit. I always thought that was a funny, funny turn of phrase. I call them fuel units. I call them fuel units. Well, this person calls them casino ammo.
- [28:50]
Mark Gurman
Pull up this last video. We'll close out the show with it. From Emily.
- [28:56]
Ben Thompson
She's been on a tear.
- [28:57]
Mark Gurman
Is a.
- [28:57]
Ben Thompson
Every video is going viral.
- [28:58]
Mark Gurman
Voice actor.
- [29:01]
Ben Thompson
I think she's a. She's a real. She does voice acting for radio ads. But of course is making fun of the tech industry.
- [29:07]
Emily (Voice Actor)
I think your business runs on business, but your business's business is stuck in the past until now. Introducing business AI for business sounds like
- [29:17]
Ben Thompson
something we would promote.
- [29:18]
Emily (Voice Actor)
AI for business leverages the power of AI for your business, transforming your business into AI Business with business AI for business. Business AI does your business in seconds, leaving your team to focus on the important business of your business business. Now your business is free to run your business at scale, at speed. At AI the future of business isn't coming. It's here. Business AI for business. Business AI Business. Business AI AI AI Very talented.
- [29:53]
Mark Gurman
The funny. She's saying every voiceover script right now, which I would assume that this kind of like audio is like v. AI is really good at. Yeah, but. But I think some of the AI companies are LARPing and they don't know how good the voice models have gotten. So they haven't actually hire a voice
- [30:11]
Ben Thompson
actor to read the most AI laden script of all time.
- [30:14]
Mark Gurman
Yeah, so.
- [30:15]
Rolf Wink
So I like sometimes I listen to the radio on the way to work and I hear ads like this and they're always by these like big legacy companies.
- [30:20]
Ben Thompson
Okay.
- [30:20]
Rolf Wink
So I assume that's why they're not using like actual cutting edge technology.
- [30:23]
Ben Thompson
Bullish for voiceover artists, I guess. Reading AI for business.
- [30:29]
Mark Gurman
Last video of the day.
- [30:30]
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
- [30:30]
Mark Gurman
Did you see this? There's a clip from. This is new launch site.
- [30:35]
Ben Thompson
It looks like Dune. It actually looks like Dune. I'm pretty sure SpaceX accidentally built a transformer. At least that's what it sounds like here. This is designed to hold all the rockets so they can launch them I think every hour. The engineering that goes into this just so thinking so far ahead, like I think this is designed to launch a starship every hour.
- [31:02]
Mark Gurman
Yeah. And it's like they said that something like an Olympic swimming pool's worth of water that they use to cool everything.
- [31:11]
Ben Thompson
Yeah. The deluge. This is crazy.
- [31:13]
Mark Gurman
About 650,000 gallons per minute. That's approximately in the range of, of about like one entire Olympic swimming pool being drained in the course of a minute.
- [31:28]
Ben Thompson
Thank you for tuning in to TBPN and leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter@tvpn.com we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.