Loading summary
Transcript103 lines
- [00:07]
Ben Thompson
There's a ton of news. Let's start with Cerberus. The IPO has gone spectacularly well. Cerebras doubled their valuation basically overnight. Brandon Grell had the good fortune of writing up some of the details of the Cerebras news in the newsletter today. Tbpn.com you can go sign up.
- [00:25]
James Allworth
Yeah, right now it's sitting at a 64, $4 billion market cap. And a lot of the prediction markets, they didn't even have a category above 50. Right. A lot of people were just kind of trading or betting.
- [00:38]
Ben Thompson
And when I wrote the newsletter Friday, Monday, I said a $50 billion IPO and was sort of being optimistic and it beat those expectations, which is great news. Chip design company Cerebras, if you're not familiar, they make a big, big chip, big chip company instead of the biggest chip, instead of taking the wafer, putting a bunch of chips on it, cutting it up into smaller chips, they use the whole wafer. It's idea. It's one of those simple ideas taken deadly seriously in some ways. But it's trading at $350 a share on its first day of public trading, which values the company much higher.
- [01:12]
James Allworth
300 now.
- [01:13]
Ben Thompson
300, yeah, 300. Okay. The price in this IPO has been literally up. Only on Monday, the price range was 150 to 160. Then they raised it. That was up from 115 to 125. And today we're seeing much higher prices.
- [01:28]
James Allworth
Go back to that picture. Someone should make a set in la. You know, they have those, like, fake private jet sets. Imagine if entrepreneurs could have a set where they put their logo in the background. Like they're hitting it with a hammer and there's confetti going everywhere.
- [01:42]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, but it's for your course. Yeah, yeah. And you walk right from there to the Lambo.
- [01:49]
James Allworth
1000 students in your mastermind.
- [01:51]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, no, I had this idea back in the day when. Do you remember the ice cream. The ice cream museum, this whole thing?
- [01:58]
James Allworth
Oh, yeah.
- [01:58]
Ben Thompson
So there was this trend, I mean, really bad news for the museum industry, but they're getting eaten alive. And so some entrepreneurs, I think they did very well, started at something called the Ice Cream Museum, which was not really a museum in the sense of like a presidential library or, you know, the Norton Simon or the Getty or the, you know, Natural History Museum. It was more of like an experiential place to go and hang out. Good for first dates, good for, you know, taking kids maybe. And they would maybe give you some ice Cream. But most of. The. Most of the museum was just, like, very Instagramable things. So there would be like a ball pit or a bunch of raining confetti and stuff, and a huge, huge fabricated statue of ice cream. That was not a piece of art that would be sold.
- [02:46]
James Allworth
Sprinkle ball pit.
- [02:47]
Ben Thompson
There you go. That sounds real. I don't know if that is real, but it sounds very believable.
- [02:51]
James Allworth
Yeah, they have that.
- [02:51]
Ben Thompson
They had that. Okay. Yeah. And there were a number of. Of other kind of copycats that were trying to jump on and do, like, oh, we'll do like, the Waffle Museum or something, or the Pancake Museum, you know, because they just wanted to cash in. And my idea was just the Museum of Instagrammable Objects. And so it would have all of those. So there would be a private jet set, and then there would be a Lamborghini set, and this one would fit right in. So it's just. They have a big pink wall, so you can go take the pink wall photo. And then there's a beach, and then there was a gym with fake weights, so you could go and look like you're maxing out and benching £500. And so it just says, bring these clothes or we' have them for you. And then you move from room to room, taking the ideal dating profile photo. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, you had kids here, you in the hospital. You can live an entire life through this fictional museum of Instagramable objects. More of a meme than a real business idea.
- [03:43]
James Allworth
But no, John, the Museum of Ice Cream now has seven locations.
- [03:48]
Ben Thompson
Okay, so they're cooking, they're global. They're global. They're doing well. Anyway, let's go back to the serious stuff. Cerebrus. It's a complicated company because they are so deep in the AI supply chain, but we'll break it all down for you. So there's a bunch of interesting takeaways, some really solid positives. Cerebras chips work, which was something people were not expecting for a while. There was a lot of FUD around this company. Just the idea of, like, oh, that'll never work. What if the architecture changes? What if we go away from Transformers or something? What if we need something, quote, completely different? Or maybe the yields will never work, because there was this idea that if you're using the entire wafer, typically, as you're etching the chips onto the wafer, sometimes there's little defects, and it's not a problem if you're going to break up a wafer into like 64 chips, because you just throw away one. But if there's one defect on basically every wafer, well, then your yield is going to be super low. We talked to Andrew about how he solved that by creating redundant cores. And they don't actually activate all the cores. And so they sort of built in that redundancy and got through that. But that was an early critique of the strategy. Yeah, you can use. You can use it.
- [04:52]
James Allworth
Use Cerebras chips today, as in Codex 5.3 Spark.
- [04:57]
Ben Thompson
And so they are very fast. And I think the most important thing that Semianalysis points out is that token consumers, customers, businesses have shown this revealed preference for and a willingness to pay for speed. And they sort of contextualize it and they quantify it based on their own usage and their experience with Anthropic's Opus models. So opus 4.6 fast mode, famously. I like that they use famously because it's like famous to like 100,000 people, but famously charges six times the price for two and a half times the interactivity, although it's now under 2x faster. So effectively you're paying six times the price for two times the speed. That's disproportionately more money for what you're getting. You would think you'd pay six times the price for six times the speed, potentially. But there were a lot of questions about would people really pay for more, that much more for faster models, faster inference and Andre Karpathy. Sam Altman was, was saying like, do you want faster models or smarter models? And he was like, I think in. Sam's point was sort of like, these models are very intelligent, but using them faster is sort of more of a magical superpower. And Sam was. I felt like Sam was sort of leading it towards like, speed is really important as the next leg up on productivity. And utter Karpathy was like, no, I just want smarter. I'll just let it run overnight. I don't mind that. But that's not what everyone is feeling. Some people, especially the Semianalysis team, leaned more towards interactivity or speed over raw intelligence power.
- [06:30]
James Allworth
Well, yeah, and then there's the other aspect, which is just capability. Capability, speed and intelligence. That's like the question people have had is like, okay, what is. Is there a 250 IQ model or is there just a much more capable model?
- [06:45]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, the unhobbled one tools more efficiently
- [06:48]
James Allworth
and is really quick.
- [06:49]
Ben Thompson
Yeah. And that's actually important to Cerebras. Semianalysis was spending 80% of their AI spend on Opus 4.6 fast. And so they were willing to pay that 6x like 80% of their spend disproportionately more. Even though when their sort of expectation, as they put it, was that they would always want the smartest model, they. They would be very cost conscious. They were in reality saying, I'm gonna hammer fast mode, I wanna spend on fast mode. And then I think the price was significant. And so there's probably sort of a renegotiation about when is the right time to use fast versus when do you wanna leave something running overnight. But OpenAI is clearly very pilled on Cerebras. Cerebras has a big 750 megawatt deal with OpenAI and the chips are already serving GPT 5.3 in Codex under the name Spark, as we mentioned. And I've used it, you should use it. It's a very interesting experience because I. People have interacted with LLMs and chatbots and they're sort of used to this token streaming in. It's sort of cute because the phone vibrates and it feels like you're talking to someone who's typing. But it's way better when you just land on a Wikipedia page. The full thing loads and you can just scroll however much you want. And that's the experience that I think people want and will demand across everything. Especially if they're firing off a coding task. They just want the code immediately. You can also just go talk to the model like it's ChatGPT. You don't need to use Codex 5.3 spark it in a coding context. You can ask it whatever you want and it will just act like a normal LLM. I personally think there will be huge demand for faster inference across all parts of the AI economy. There's this old late.
- [08:19]
James Allworth
Yeah, another. Another way to think about it is like if you have two employees with the same skill set, the same capability, but one is just five times faster. Right. That person can create way more value in the organization. Right.
- [08:33]
Ben Thompson
And for a lot of things, if they're two times faster, they do command six times the price. A sales rep that sells twice as much or someone who is twice as effective as their job might actually command a salary that's five times, six times the actual price. And so there's lots of other context across different business lines that you could draw to. There's also this old adage or saying about E commerce that might, may or may not be real, but it's probably been transposed so many times in think pieces. I don't know the real quote, but it goes something like every 100 milliseconds of latency costs Amazon 1% in sales. I don't know if that's the right way to think about it. But basically, as Amazon was scaling, they realized that there were a bunch of things that they could do on the UI side, a bunch of things they could do on the layout side. Where does the buy button go? Where does certain information go? The price, the discount, all of this stuff. The images, they were tweaking the front end, but as they did that, they added bloat and the pages would slow down. And what they noticed was that the slower the page was, the lower the conversion rate because people were waiting for Amazon.com to load. Click on the page. It takes a second. They get distracted, they go somewhere else. And I think that that's happening in LLM use cases all over the place. People fire off a query and they're like, ah, it's taking too long. I'll go scroll Instagram reels. There's always an Instagram reel. And they'll be like, oh, I kind of forgot about what I was asking about. I didn't get my answer. And that's certainly true in business context as well. This is currently playing out in AI inference. Companies are paying disproportionately more for faster inference, and this is good for Cerebras. But Semi analysis does point out a number of potential headwinds and problems that the team at Cerebras will have to solve or contend with over the next few years. Mainly, Cerebras chips are not currently as capable of holding larger models in the limited memory that they have, or networking multiple chips together to serve larger models. We've heard about the NVL 72 racks that wire a whole bunch of Nvidia chips together can serve these really large models. That has potentially been a challenge. So Semianalysis says. Moreover, the industry is trending towards larger context. Windows ad infinitum 128k context will certainly not be acceptable for long, especially with the prevalence of agentic workloads. And it doesn't look like there's a simple solution of just scaling the wafer size larger because. Because TSMC is set up with a standard wafer size or adding more memory to the existing architecture, because Cerebras whole design depends on a lot of SRAM static random access memory directly on the wafer. But SRAM is no longer shrinking as much with each new semiconductor node. So the last version of the Cerebras chip they've done WSE 1, 2 and 3. They're on 3 now. But WSE 2 had 40 gigs of memory. WSE 3, you would expect. Oh, we want a doubling, right? We want a 10x or something. It got 44. So a 10% increase over one process node, one iteration. Is there an easy way to double this? Is there a question like how will this scale as the models get bigger? To add more sram, you might have to sacrifice compute area because everything is being done on one wafer. If you want computation or memory, there's a direct trade off because you only have so much space on the actual wafer. But in an agentic workflow, I think it's entirely possible that you want like the biggest, most powerful model, like the vice president delegating things. You want the vice president senior or junior senior vice president, maybe just the president handling the critical work. So future models might not, and that might not be on Cerebras. That might be on NVL 72 or TPUs or something. But I imagine that we will quickly jump from the agentic age where you're firing the best, smartest model at the full workload to the orchestration age. And there will be hybrid approaches. So the biggest and best models will delegate certain tasks to smaller faster models. Just like they go and do database queries these days or they go and search the web these days and that's CPU bound. There will be certain workloads that the larger smarter agent model, like the BOSS model can sort of delegate to the Cerebras speed workers, the faster workers. A year or two ago when Daniel Gross wrote AGI Bets and was sort of like his Nvidia underpriced. I don't know if Nvidia he's made us said that on, on semi on Stratachery, but you know, we entered the age and everyone was like, oh, GPUs are the future. Nvidia is the company. But then it was like Nvidia, GPUs are good and then also CPUs are good and, and ARM is getting into it and Intel's doing very well.
- [13:09]
James Allworth
And we're going to make big computers,
- [13:11]
Ben Thompson
big computers, big computers for sure. Honam says this IPO illustrates the power of an individual partner over the brand name of the firm. Pierre Le Monde was a partner at both Sequoia and Khosla. But instead of those firm backing Cerebras, it was Eclipse, the firm he joined at the age of 84 that backed this little known chip company multiple times in the early days. What a way to wrap up a career. He was born in 1930, the same year as Warren Buffett. Wow, that is an awesome story. I love that. One third of the order book. The folks that said I want shares in the Cerebras IPO. One third of the book got zero. I guess the top 25 investors took 60%. That's probably the big investment funds, the fidelities, the state streets, the black.
- [13:54]
James Allworth
They have done quite well today. This picture looks wildly different than the Klarna IPO last year in which only a handful of the team at Klarna popped over, hit the Nicee IPO'd and then went back home.
- [14:09]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, it was very much just like another day at the office for the team. Yeah, that's definitely what I was contrasting it to. The Cerebras valuation every round. Series A in 2016, $100 million. Foundation Benchmark and Eclipse CO2 led the Series B in 2016. VY Capital led the Series C in 2017. Then 1.6 billion valuation in 2018, 2.4 in 2019, 4 billion in 2021. That was like maybe a little bit of a slump. But then 2025, Atreides and Fidelity come in at 8 billion. Then Tiger comes in at $23 billion. Then in May of 2026, the IPO at 48.8 billion. Let's run through the Kevin Warsh news because he has been confirmed as the Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, who is most famous for interviewing Alex Karp on cnbc. While Alex Karp appeared to have popped a nicotine pouch and then spun a notebook on his finger. Did you ever find that clip, Tyler? Is that in the.
- [15:15]
Tyler
Yeah, it should be. Timeline.
- [15:17]
Ben Thompson
Let's.
- [15:17]
James Allworth
Yeah, we have the clip that really
- [15:20]
Ben Thompson
put Kevin Warsh on the map.
- [15:22]
Kevin Warsh
I remember I showed up in your office once. I was dressed like this. And I think you screamed at one of the guys. He said, kevin's here. He looks like the guy from IBM. And I was talking about, well, you know, we need like really finance control and you know, how you going to sell the product and all this stuff.
- [15:37]
Ben Thompson
Okay.
- [15:38]
Kevin Warsh
But I would say you certainly built that.
- [15:40]
Ben Thompson
He's really spending it. I didn't realize he goes back to it like four times a dirty word anymore. He's really good at this.
- [15:46]
Kevin Warsh
But somehow you grafted that on to the. To the strange company that can produce these products. How's that transition been? If I've got it right?
- [15:54]
Ben Thompson
I have so many questions. First, we have to get him to recreate that for sure. Second, I thought, Tyler, I thought we were talking about that being on cnbc, but that looks like just a podcast. Like that doesn't have any Chiron.
- [16:05]
Tyler
Yeah, no, I don't think it was actually on. I think it was from Palantir. Like that was a Palantir.
- [16:09]
Ben Thompson
Oh, okay. So it was just like a random podcast. And then. And then when I've seen on cnbc, they were playing the clip. Got it.
- [16:16]
Tyler
I think so, yeah.
- [16:17]
Ben Thompson
The vote was 54 to 45 in the Senate. The divided vote signals challenges ahead for Warsh, who faces a Fed committee skeptical of rate cuts that Trump has demanded. Of course, we talked about the inflation news. Typically you don't cut interest rates going into inflation and potentially economic stagnation. You definitely don't cut rates in. That's why stagflation is so difficult. Because if you have stagnation and low inflation, you can cut rates very easily. Maybe the economy starts overheating a little bit, you get a little bit of inflation, but then you can pull back. That's what we've done historically. Vice versa, if the economy's running hot, you're seeing high GDP growth and high inflation. Well, if you raise rates, you're going to pull back on both of those. But in stagflation, you're seeing both inflation and economic stagnation harder to deal with as a Fed chairman, which is potentially the task he will be faced with. So the Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the Federal Reserve's 17th chair Wednesday in a largely party line vote that required that reflected how tensions with the White House have dragged the Fed deeper into the political fray. I was looking back at the old Fed chairs. There's some absolutely legends in there because some of them had really long runs. So very quickly you get back to the black and white portrait and the painting as you go back in time.
- [17:34]
Tyler
Who's your favorite Fed chair? Volker.
- [17:37]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, Volker is pretty. Go to. Bernanke is great.
- [17:40]
James Allworth
An absolute dog.
- [17:41]
Ben Thompson
Yeah. I don't know. Hard to pick. Hard to pick. Chair Jerome Powell, whose leadership tenure, whose leadership tenure ends Friday, captured at least 80 votes in Senate confirmations for each of his two terms atop the Fed. Wow. Jerome Powell, just fan favorite of both teams. 80 votes in the Senate. That's pretty significant. I'm putting him in the conversation, Jordy, but I'm not giving him the goat trophy.
- [18:05]
James Allworth
Yeah.
- [18:06]
Ben Thompson
I'm not saying that because the challenges faced. He wasn't confronted with a great recession, a dot com bubble bursting, a Black Friday like, like the economy from 2018
- [18:20]
James Allworth
to today, global pandemic doesn't. You don't count a shutdown of.
- [18:24]
Ben Thompson
No, because I actually don't because the economy was pretty strong in 2019 and it went into 2020 with pretty strong consumer balance sheets, low debt. There wasn't a shadow banking economy. There was no bomb in the US economy waiting to explode. And so although we saw high unemployment briefly and we did have to stimulate the economy, that's not his job. His job was to set rates. There was a little bit of like, I mean maybe you put the inflation, you know, the end the ZIRP era and the end of the ZIRP era and all of those gyrations on him. But those, the problems that were downstream of both the ZIRP era and the end of the ZIRP era were suffered mostly and benefited mostly on like tech companies and Silicon Valley companies that had really long cash flow horizons. And so there was not a moment where it was a dire situation that the Fed had to intervene in a meaningful way and like save the economy like in 2008. It's a big deal. He did a great job, but he didn't, he wasn't faced with the same challenges of a Bernanke, for example. That's what I would say. Tyler, what do you think?
- [19:36]
Tyler
Yeah, I think that's reasonable. But also like if Powell was worse at his job and he saw some crazy crash because of COVID and then he brought it back, like then it'd be like, oh yeah, he did face this massive thing but because he did such a good job, maybe you didn't see any like massive crash, nothing super bad happening is evidence that he was really good as a Fed chairman.
- [19:55]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, yeah, maybe he's a defensive back. You know, if they don't score, there's no great plays because he's just shut down, shut down cornerback. Anyway, Jensen Huang is over in China. Jason Calacanis has a photo that looks extremely real. 0ai detected but he's bringing two huge boxes of GeForce RTX 5090s which are.
- [20:16]
James Allworth
This is a picture from when he was in Alaska too.
- [20:20]
Ben Thompson
Jason says never stop selling. I agree. There is some news which we will cover later in the week around the dynamics around H100 sales and Blackwell's what's actually happening. It's all in flux as the Trump China Summit plays out on the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day this week because it is headline news. High stakes US China Summit kicks off. Watch a team of humanoid robots running a full eight hour shift at human performance levels. And Brett Adcock said, this is fully autonomous, running Helix 2.
- [20:56]
James Allworth
All right, pull up this post from Pete.
- [20:59]
Ben Thompson
Yes. And the stream did fantastically. It was 24 hours. It got 3.4 million views. But at a certain point during the stream, there was some questions about whether or not the humanoid robot was in fact.
- [21:14]
James Allworth
Alright, back to the beginning, back to the beginning.
- [21:16]
Ben Thompson
Okay, let's play this.
- [21:17]
James Allworth
All right, so it's cooking. I mean, the speed is actually.
- [21:20]
Ben Thompson
And we were extremely impressed by this. This was remarkable. Remarkable.
- [21:23]
James Allworth
Even if it's teleoperated, it's extremely impressive.
- [21:25]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the robot's clearly working. This is very.
- [21:28]
James Allworth
But they're saying that it's not teleop.
- [21:30]
Ben Thompson
Okay. So then the robot starts missing things being a little bit like an inch off, and then reaches up and touches the robot's head, the robot, which is something that wouldn't normally be necessary. It doesn't have like a logical explanation or conclusion. So a lot of people are asking.
- [21:45]
James Allworth
It does have a semi logical conclusion, which is that Brett is claiming when it reaches across its body to go to the right, that it puts its hand up here to get the hand out of the way.
- [21:55]
Ben Thompson
That's what I was thinking, was that if the hand is halfway up, it might be blocking the sensor, the camera sensor. And so even though the robot might reach the hand up further to move out of the view, so then the robot can look at the next package. So that's one possible explanation. But a lot of people are asking even harder questions, saying that potentially, was there a human in the loop? Was this teleoperated? Which is something Brett has said. It's fully autonomous. I feel like that means no humans in the loop. But Tor Taxes has an artist's representation of Helix 2 figures in house, neural network running entirely on board. And it of course is a human in a VR headset. Very, very debatable. We'll see where you stand. But there is. There is a third option which I have shared, which is potentially no humans involved. I don't know if you'd call it autonomous, but you would call it no humans in the loop because you have.
- [23:02]
James Allworth
Well, it is an autonomous system. Right. It just sort of runs.
- [23:05]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, I would consider this autonomous. It's the image that I shared in the production chat. It's not of a human and it's not quite robotic, but there's no human in the loop. And so this could explain the system is running with no humans in the loop. If you make that claim and you follow This, I think this qualifies as no humans in the loop. If you have a giant orangutan in a VR headset puppeteering the robot via teleoperation, you could say that this system does not have a human in the loop. And you could make that.
- [23:35]
James Allworth
And I could make the argument that it's autonomous.
- [23:37]
Ben Thompson
Yes.
- [23:37]
James Allworth
The chimpanzee is running its own. It has somewhat of a neural network. Neural network.
- [23:43]
Ben Thompson
The OpenAI Elon Musk trial is in its final day. The trial is ending. People expected four weeks of trial. We only got three. They're cutting it short. What are the prediction markets saying about who's going to win? I want to know that and I want to go to Mike Isaac, the rat King, because he has a breakdown of what's going on. He says. Good morning. Closing arguments of Musk vs OpenAI with special guest Microsoft are happening today.
- [24:11]
James Allworth
The Calci. Well, Elon win his case against OpenAI. It peaked at a 58% chance.
- [24:17]
Ben Thompson
Okay, where is it now?
- [24:18]
James Allworth
It's now sitting at a 30% chance.
- [24:20]
Ben Thompson
30% chance. Okay. So right now the judge is instructing the jury on the criteria by which they should be judging the outcome of the case. Important, because if the jury listens and carries this out, it is a very, very specific lens through which they view all the evidence. Ostensibly, it's where theater ends. Listening to this and being read out in court for the last 23, 30 minutes is very helpful because it's clarifying on how high the bar is for the plaintiff's side approving some of these claims. Sort of feel bad for the AV guy. During this trial, there's been feedback, been mic drops, but not in the good way. The mics have been dropping out funky video feeds. They need to revamp this place, says Mike Isaac. Lmao. The first joke of the tweetstorm. He says Musk council is going after OpenAI execs Altman and Brockman and has the mugshot style photo of Altman on the screen again. Battle of Photoshops of executives in this trial has been entertaining to watch. You want to depict your opponent in the worst possible light. Musk counsel going back and forth, hammering the point they'd made over and over. The argument essentially painting a picture. Sam Altman, liar. Chipping away at witness credibility has been a core strategy for the plaintiff's side. And we're back to everyone hates Google again. Molo is using Larry Page, who they claim is doesn't care about humanity, as a foil to the noble Musk, who only whose only care with respect to AI is the future of humanity. Musk counsel is painting the dross. Don't trust Sam picture in a bit more detail for the jury. Also, Musk's side has a picture of Elon and Altman on the screen now. Sam's looks like he's about to be processed by a U.S. marshal. Musk's looks like he's getting ready for the Met Gala. LOL Lots of Musk closing side arguments Semi populist track of pointing open pointing at OpenAI and saying these billionaires are making gobs of cash while running a charity for the supposed good of the world. I'm curious if jury can register this argument even if it comes from Elon Musk, the world's richest man. Ouch. OpenAI Council begins closing argument with a broadside against Musk every Even the people who work for him, even the mother of his children can't back his story. Oh yeah, back to the war of the photoshops OpenAI closing remarks now in the digital displays on the monitors for exhibits all the OpenAI executives look like Olan Mills photo shoots. Do you know who Olan is? He says it's complimentary. I need to get up to speed on my photographers.
- [26:33]
James Allworth
Olan Mills Olan Mills is a portrait offers portrait photography.
- [26:37]
Ben Thompson
Ooh does look very nice if you pull up the Google images on Olan Mills. Anyway, short summary of the closing Musk camp All these Open executives are rich as hell and lying all the time. OpenAI camp all of that is a sideshow and literally all the claims Musk is bringing cannot be stood up by actual law. The Microsoft camp disappears into bushes Dota got mentioned again. They love mentioning Defense of the Ancients Incredible photoshop from the OpenAI camp of a calendar of events complete with little characters and a timeline of events. I wonder if they're using Imagegen too or if they're doing it the old fashioned way. I can't wait until it's entered into evidence this afternoon so he can show us. Sort of want to buy this meme guitar but I also have two telecast Is that just completely Side note Gamer has entered Dablog. The Dota moment has been mentioned nearly every single day during this three week trial. AI researcher we got to have my back on the show. It's so good saw as a true breakthrough in the technology.
- [27:36]
James Allworth
What is the timeline for the jury to meet? Is this something they're doing today?
- [27:42]
Ben Thompson
So they're getting a 30 minute recess most they've had in a month. I might actually be able to go outside and get real food. There's a Popeyes across the street. Is it a bad idea to get a bucket of red beans and rice? That's what he's saying. Thinking about doing so. Not much news on when this will close. It is 1:10 Pacific time. I imagine that they will wrap up by what did he say 3pm 4pm So 30 minute break. That happened 40 minutes ago. So I imagine that and but they've
- [28:11]
James Allworth
been taking Fridays off is kind of what I'm getting at.
- [28:13]
Ben Thompson
Oh yeah. Because this could so maybe this happens to Monday. This is just closing arguments, not necessarily the end of the trial or the jury get the results or the jury
- [28:22]
James Allworth
might might make a quick call but
- [28:25]
Ben Thompson
well there was date unlikely 11 minutes ago. A lawyer for OpenAI on Thursday defended the company's chief executive, Sam Altman, from withering character attacks by Elon Musk's legal team as both sides delivered their closing arguments in a trial with potentially seismic implications. The stakes are high. Mr. Musk, who was not in the courtroom on Thursday because he was in China with President Trump, is asking for more than $150 billion in damages. He is also asking the court to remove the Mr. Altman from the startup's board and to stop a shift the company made last year to operate as a for profit company. They pushed back. Sarah Eddy, member OpenAI legal team, tried in her closing argument to dull the attacks on Altman's credibility and to argue that there was never a firm agreement among the founders that could have been breached. Not one in this case other than Elon Musk has testified to any commitments or promises that Sam Altman or Greg Brockman or OpenAI made to Mr. Musk is what she's saying. After the recess, William Savitt, OpenAI's lead counsel, told the jury that Musk does not have a claim against the startup. Unless there was a specific agreement between Musk and OpenAI describing how his donations to the nonprofit should be spent, that agreement does not exist, savit says. So that's where I guess OpenAI is leaving it for now. We will continue to cover the story, Doug says.
- [29:39]
James Allworth
Is the jury allowed to use Codex Slash goal be done in one and a half hours.
- [29:44]
Ben Thompson
There's other tech problems going on. Max Zeff over at Wired has been covering the story as well and says Musk's lawyer brought a big monitor maybe 36 inches into the courtroom. OpenAI's lawyers asked to use it. Musk's lawyers said no. The judge told Musk's lawyers that they have to let OpenAI use it. Then OpenAI said it might not be possible to connect their laptops to it. AGI is here, but we'll still need a dongle, I suppose. Dongle has entered the courtroom. Mag zephs. Actually, there's about 15 lawyers standing in the middle of the room right now talking about how to use this big monitor. This is wild.
- [30:23]
James Allworth
In other news, Tim Draper says, I think I broke a record. I took 52 pitches in 52 minutes at below 40 degrees. Welcome to my office, Draper University SurvivalTraining. What do we think about going in the ice tank?
- [30:42]
Ben Thompson
How cold are ice baths typically? You've done ice baths? I feel like I did one and it wasn't as insanely difficult as people said. But then I checked the temperature and I don't think it was 40. I think it was closer to 50.
- [30:57]
James Allworth
Yeah, you can totally get closer to I because there's a couple companies that sell it personally. When, when you're going surfing. Yeah. The water is below 45 degrees. Can just be very painful.
- [31:09]
Ben Thompson
Okay.
- [31:10]
James Allworth
Like to.
- [31:10]
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
- [31:10]
James Allworth
Even in a wetsuit, your fingers go down anywhere that's not covered. A lot of people are putting gloves on.
- [31:17]
Ben Thompson
What do you think?
- [31:18]
Tyler
So apparently Joe Rogan's at like 34.
- [31:20]
Ben Thompson
34, yeah. Wow.
- [31:22]
Tyler
So that's like the cold plunge.
- [31:23]
Ben Thompson
You know, he's the top of the mountain when it comes to ice paths. He's the final boss.
- [31:29]
James Allworth
This. Yeah, this, this is just a crazy picture. I did think it was. I did think it was AI, but turns out it's real. It's just funny because it looks like, like, what is this set? What is this setup?
- [31:40]
Ben Thompson
Yeah. What are all the trash bags there? And the wall is like, sort of decrepit and piping.
- [31:45]
James Allworth
It looks like kind of like a prison ice bath.
- [31:48]
Ben Thompson
Yeah. This is not what you'd expect from. I mean, isn't he a billionaire investor? You'd expect some sort of palatial. You know, you see the, the, the, the. The properties that Mark Zuckerberg is acquiring, that big investors are acquiring, you would expect something that would be much more regal, but he's doing it the old fashioned way. Whip this up himself. Bought some trash bags and took some pitches. Yeah. That's our show, folks. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify another one. Sign up for our newsletter@tbpn.com See you tomorrow at 11:00am Pacific Time and have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.