Google Gemini 3 Reactions, Google Antigravity, Anthropic-Nvidia-Microsoft Deal | Diet TBPN

Summary

TBPN Episode Summary

Podcast: TBPN
Episode: Google Gemini 3 Reactions, Google Antigravity, Anthropic-Nvidia-Microsoft Deal | Diet TBPN
Date: November 19, 2025
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays (featuring Ben Thompson, Tyler Cowen, and Chris Dixon)

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Overview

This episode centers around the release of Google’s Gemini 3 AI model, its performance and implications, the launch of Google Anti Gravity (a next-gen agentic IDE), and major moves in the AI industry, including the Anthropic-Nvidia-Microsoft deal and broader industry dynamics. The hosts provide in-depth reactions, run through notable benchmarks, and share lively banter, highlighting the broader rapid evolution of AI capabilities and competition in the space.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Gemini 3 Pro Launch and Capabilities

• Gemini 3 Pro is introduced as Google’s most intelligent model to date, boasting strong performance on complex reasoning and multimodal understanding.
• Benchmarking: The hosts find standard benchmarks less revealing now, as all models are “incredible,” focusing instead on specific jumps and meaningful new functionality.
  • “Gemini 3 performs very well on Arc AGI V2. A huge jump, twice the performance of the previous state of the art.” (Ben Thompson, 00:32)
• No Binary Step-Change Yet: While much improved, it’s positioned as an incremental advance—no radical new “cannot live without” feature, but continued, rapid pace of improvement.
  • “No one’s making the claim that this is super intelligence… It’s what you know and love. It’s AI in chat, it answers things… but there’s nothing that we’re like, oh, it can finally do this.” (Ben Thompson, 00:51)

Benchmarks & Capabilities

• Visual and Computer Use: Gemini 3 excels in complex web navigation tasks, raising hopes for agentic AI.
  • “Basically the models went from really, really bad at this and now this model is solid.” (Chris Dixon, 01:27)
• Speed and Efficiency: Starts to approach human task completion times, raising implications for practical real-world use.

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2. Is Gemini 3 “Funny”? The Cultural Benchmarks

• The hosts put Gemini 3 through “funny” and “viral post” tests:
  • Comedy Test: The generated routine about health watches induces more laughter at the delivery than the actual content.
    • “‘I paid $300 for a piece of rubber to tell me I’m dying.’” (Gemini 3, read by Chris Dixon, 03:31)
    • “Terrible. Delivery, brother.” (Ben Thompson, 04:00)
  • Viral Post Test: Gemini 3 provides various “engagement bait” options reflecting today’s tech anxieties.
    • “‘Tech has solved a million problems, but has it created one big one?... The law of unintended consequences is the most powerful force in the digital age. We need an ethics reset.’” (Gemini 3, read by Tyler Cowen, 04:34)
  • The group jokes about “engagement baiting” and the formulaic nature of social media content now generated by AI.

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3. Google’s AI Comeback and Competitive Landscape

• Google’s Position: Once seen as lagging, Google now demonstrates leadership in foundation models.
  • “It’s great to see Google becoming a winner. They were set up to excel here… but seemed to have played catch up, at least on the foundation model side, very well.” (Ben Thompson, 06:02)
• The Arc AGI Benchmark: Gemini 3 Pro’s 31% on Arc AGI 2; DeepThink variant scores 45%—both outpacing GPT 5.1 and other contemporaries, representing a “new era.”
  • “The last time we saw a capability jump of this magnitude was the release of GPT4 in March 2023.” (Tyler Cowen, 07:05)

Application Demos

• Interactive Webpages & Generative UIs: Gemini 3 can generate complete interactive web apps rapidly.
  • “This is really, really cool… the beginning of this, like generative UI stuff.” (Ben Thompson, 08:46)
• Simulated Agents: Gemini 3 beat other models in simulated tasks (e.g., vending machine management, Minecraft builds).
  • On Minecraft: “You can see what other models produce… this is like way, way better.” (Chris Dixon, 11:18)
  • Dialogue explores whether these models are acting as true agents or just automating via scripts.

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4. The Google “Anti Gravity” IDE Announcement

• New “agent-first” integrated development environment, built from the ground up for the agentic age.
  • “You like the name Antigravity?... I like the sort of vibe of the word.” (Ben Thompson & Tyler Cowen, 13:41)
• Notable features:
  • Mixes code editing and document-style annotation (comments for AI).
  • Visual and text-based feedback to the AI agent— “more precise dialogue with the agent like you would a human employee.” (Ben Thompson, 14:34)
• Contrasted with Google’s previous strategy (“stuffing AI in UI corners”), this is a ground-up, purposeful tool.

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5. Industry Moves: Anthropic–Nvidia–Microsoft Deal

• Anthropic now valued at $350B after the new investment from Microsoft and Nvidia.
• Humorous take: “Jensen and Dario… the most passionate emotion after love is hate. Will these enemies-to-lovers arc go well…? Time will tell.” (Ben Thompson, 15:53)
• Strategic use of announcement timing to compete with Google’s Gemini 3 news and influence industry buzz.
  • “I think the timing is not a complete coincidence. It’s Gemini 3 day…” (Ben Thompson, 16:48)

Key Deal Terms

• Anthropic to spend $30B on Microsoft cloud compute (OpenAI’s deal is much larger at $250B).
• Anthropic receives $10B from Nvidia and $5B from Microsoft—valued higher than Coca Cola, joked the panel.
  • “It looks modest. Which insane, considering one of the biggest deals in software history.” (Ben Thompson, 17:49)

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6. OpenAI Updates and Monetization Questions

• Group Chats Feature: OpenAI releases group chat functionality amidst pressure to launch more social, sticky features.
• Profile on Fiji Simo: The former Instacart CEO now manages OpenAI’s "everything else." She argues AI can monetize by acting as a personal “team of helpers,” hinting at future monetization models.
  • “With ChatGPT we could give everyone [a personal shopper, a travel agent, a financial advisor, a health coach]… That is incredibly valuable and we have barely scratched the surface.” (Fiji Simo via Ben Thompson, 19:16)
  • The hosts remain skeptical that consumers will pay much, suggesting revenue will likely come from advertising and lead-generation.

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7. Massive Capital Flows in Tech

• Saudi Arabia: Announces $1 trillion in tech and AI investments, triggering comparisons to U.S. capital flows and potential for global impact.
  • “600 billion will be 1 trillion.” (Saudi Investment Official, 23:11)
  • The hosts discuss the significance and possible downstream effects.

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8. Other Highlights and Cultural Commentary

• First Startup to Split the Atom: Velar Atomics claims a successful nuclear test, prompting a discussion on U.S. reindustrialization and the difference between novel science and commercial fission.
  • “America wants to generate as much… energy as possible for as little money as possible.” (Ben Thompson, 25:43)
• Tech Environmental Impacts: Correction on water footprint of Chilean Google data center included as part of environmental impacts discussion; three orders of magnitude error contextualized.
  • “Three orders of magnitude is pretty big… the difference between being a big deal and not.” (Chris Dixon, 27:28)
• Meme Economy: The show riffs on meme posts and viral formats, poking fun at trends on X and within the AI culture.
  • “It’s so over for OpenAI and Anthropic. If you want engagement on X, just start by saying it’s so over.” (Tyler Cowen, 11:45)

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Memorable Quotes

• On Gemini 3’s Progress:

  "It's better. As good as we would want to expect. It's not slowing down, I would say."
  -- Chris Dixon (02:10)

• On Competitive Landscape:

  "We are entering a new era."
  -- Tyler Cowen (07:05)

• On the Meme Economy:

  “The press release economy is also over…”
  -- Ben Thompson (15:48)

• On OpenAI’s Business Model:

  “In the past, only the wealthy had access to a team of helpers. With ChatGPT we could give everyone that team… That is incredibly valuable and we have barely scratched the surface.”
  -- Fiji Simo (via Ben Thompson, 19:16)

• On Nuclear Innovation:

  “Fission’s been discovered. Eighty years ago it was working. It just became regulatory nightmare.”
  -- Ben Thompson (25:43)

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• [00:00–03:28]: Initial reactions and demos of Gemini 3, comedy and “poster” benchmarks.
• [06:02–08:46]: Competitive landscape and Gemini 3’s benchmark victories; generative UI demo.
• [12:00–15:27]: Discussion of Gemini 3’s capex, Google’s Anti Gravity IDE intro and significance.
• [15:53–17:49]: Anthropic–Nvidia–Microsoft mega-deal details and market comparisons.
• [18:37–20:00]: OpenAI product and profitability discussion, Fiji Simo profile.
• [22:35–23:33]: Saudi Arabia’s $1T investment announcement.
• [25:43–27:44]: Velar Atomics breakthrough and U.S. energy innovation commentary.
• [27:28–29:19]: Environmental debates, final memes and show wrap.

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Tone and Style

The episode maintains a rapid-fire, witty, and insightful tone, blending deep technical analysis with cultural observations and industry inside jokes. The dynamic between the hosts keeps the discussion lively and engaging, appealing both to industry insiders and tech-savvy listeners following AI’s breakneck pace.

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For anyone interested in the latest on cutting-edge AI, corporate maneuvers, or simply the culture of tech, this episode serves up pithy analysis, laughs, and a roadmap for what’s next in a fast-evolving digital world.

Transcript

[Ben Thompson]

Gemini 3Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, with state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Let's hear it for our sponsor, Google AI Studio Gemini launching Gemini 3. I actually think that there's two sides to analyzing a model release these days. One is you benchmark it, you use it, you test it, you demo it. And that has been getting less and less interesting. It's very incredible. Today we're going to go through a little bit of both of those things. Obviously, the big news, at least from my reading on it, is that Gemini 3 performs very well on Arc AGI V2. A huge jump, twice the performance of the previous state of the art. It's definitely a smarter model and there's a whole bunch of interesting ways to show that, to demo that, to quantify that. But ultimately, I don't think anyone's making the claim that this is super intelligence. This is a step change from what we've experienced before. It's what you know and love. It's AI in chat, it answers things, it writes some code for you. It can do a bunch of cool things, but there's nothing that we're like, oh, it can finally do this. Yeah, it can do a bunch of cool things.

[Tyler Cowen]

Best autocomplete ever.

[Ben Thompson]

Tyler, how do you respond to that? I don't know.

[Chris Dixon]

Too dismissive. The model's like really good. I think probably the most important thing. And this is kind of shown by the ARC scores. Well, kind of, but it's like the visual understanding, the computer use that you can use. Basically there's some benchmarks that measure this, like how well can it navigate a website or something like this. Basically, the models went from being really, really bad at this and now this model is solid, it's reasonably good.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

So it's like, okay, maybe this is what gives us agents finally. And that would be like an actual step change in capabilities.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, maybe. We'll have to see. I mean, it still feels like even for that example, like we need some scaffolding, we need wrapping around it. It's not like yesterday we weren't able to do something with AI, and today in Vanilla Gemini 3, you can just do it. It's just a new functionality. It's like it's better.

[Chris Dixon]

As good as we would want to expect. It's not slowing down, I would say.

[Ben Thompson]

No, no, no, no, no, not at all. It's not slowing down, it's growing, but decelerating. Is that fair to say?

[Tyler Cowen]

Tyler, say the word decel.

[Chris Dixon]

Say this is A great model.

[Ben Thompson]

I'm very happy about that. I agree. It is the best possible. I was framing of the same way as the iPhone launches, like it's newer, better, smarter, faster, stronger, newer and better. Like we're waiting to see on the net new capabilities on the binary step changes.

[Chris Dixon]

I think over the next week or.

[Ben Thompson]

Two we'll see some stuff.

[Chris Dixon]

It's actually really good.

[Ben Thompson]

No, no, I'm not saying it's not really good. I'm saying binary before and after. With ChatGPT, it was like you couldn't talk to the computer and then you could. And then with, you know, the launch of Windsurf Cognition, Devin, it was like you couldn't write code with the computer. Now you can. We do have our benchmark, the one true binary step change, which is. Is it funny? We need to know if it's funny. I gave Tyler the prompt. Do you want to read the result? The standup comedy bit from Gemini 3. What did Gemini 3 say when you asked it for a comedy routine for standup special?

[Chris Dixon]

Okay, it's pretty long.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay, read it off.

[Chris Dixon]

I bought one of those smart health watches recently. You know the ones? It tracks your sleep, your heart rate, your readiness. I paid $300 for a piece of rubber to tell me I'm dying.

[Ben Thompson]

Get the soundboard.

[Chris Dixon]

That's all it does. I wake up, I feel fine. The birds are chirping. I'm ready to seize the day. Then I look at the app and it's like, recovery score 12%. Your heart rate variability suggests you are technically a corpse. Go back to bed.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay.

[Chris Dixon]

And immediately I feel sick. I'm like, oh, God, you're so bad at reading this.

[Ben Thompson]

I mean, this is terrible. Delivery, brother.

[Tyler Cowen]

I asked for the poster benchmark. I said, write me a post. Gemini 3. Write me a post about technology that will get 1000 likes on x dot com. And it gave me a few options to its credit. Here's option three. Tech has solved a million problems. This is in bold. Tech has solved a million problems, but has it created one big one? We now have infinite connectivity, yet feel more isolated. Infinite data, yet more confused. Hyper efficiency, yet less free time. The law of unintended consequences is the most powerful force in the digital age. We need an ethics reset. What is the single greatest downside of the last 10 years of tech innovation? Arrow down technology.

[Ben Thompson]

No, no. It's just asking for engagement base. It loves engagement baiting. No one does that anymore. No one goes on ex and says, let me know what you think in the comments.

[Tyler Cowen]

Option one is the next 12 months will decide the winner of the AI race, and it won't be Google or OpenAI. It will be the company that masters hyper personalization for the average consumer. Not the most powerful model, but the one that seamlessly integrates into your daily life. Your email, your calendar, your health. The real battle isn't AG equals AI. It's AI to the power of I equals impact. Which dark horse will win?

[Ben Thompson]

Okay, that's insane. Sundar Pitch AI Jordi posted back in July of 2025. Nominative determinism is undefeated. Sundar really did it. He was being mocked for a long time for getting on Stage at Google IO shortly after ChatGPT launched and saying, AI, AI, AI, AI. And they, they did a super cut of every time he said AI. He said AI a lot. And so it made it look like, oh, he's behind the ball and he's trying to catch up. And to some extent, I don't know if they were actually behind the ball, but they were certainly playing catch up in like the attention game. They just weren't getting enough attention. And so it was the press release economy. They were putting out a lot of press releases, but they are maybe done with the press releases because now they're letting the model actually speak for itself. And you can see that with the Gemini 3 Pro model card, which is doing very well. Better than GPT 5.1 on a lot of stuff. Better than Cloudsonnet 4.5 on a lot of stuff. On humanity's last exam, it's getting 37.5% arc. AGI is up at 31% over 1317 across the board. It seems like it's a good model, Sir. Gemini. I'd be like, whoever preyed on my downfall, pray harder. I couldn't agree more. It's great to see Google becoming a winner. They were set up to excel here. Got taken a little bit off the back foot on the consumer side, but seemed to have played catch up, at least on the foundation model side very well.

[Tyler Cowen]

The last time we saw a capability jump of this magnitude was the release of GPT4 in March 2023. We are entering a new era.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay. Yeah. So points for Tyler here certainly agrees with Tyler. There's a significant jump. So Gemini 3 Pro is at 31% completion on Ark AGI 2. That is, of course, the puzzle solving game that is easy for humans. Even children can do it, but AI has historically struggled with it. Gemini 3 DeepThink Preview gets a 45% on it at $77 a task. This is just way above GPT5 Pro. Grok4 Thinking. When Grok4 Thinking came out, it was before GPT5 and it was by far the highest on the chart. It was really, um, and. And Elon was very excited about that. Well, now we're back in the horse race. ROC.

[Tyler Cowen]

4.1.

[Ben Thompson]

4.1. I haven't seen it benchmarked. We can ask Mike if he's heard anything. We're also starting to see the efficiency frontier approaching humans. The fastest v2 task Gemini 3 Pro solved was this hash with only in 188 seconds. The human panel solved this one. An average of 147 seconds. So you're getting like human level output, but also human level speed. And then if you get to human level cost, then you're really in the game. It's a While.

[Tyler Cowen]

I asked Gemini3 to make an interactive webpage summarizing 10 breakthroughs in genetics over the past 15 years. And here's the result. So this is just a. Basically a website or an app, and it's notable that even the UI itself is fully interactive.

[Ben Thompson]

Yes, yes. So I had the. I did this with Claude code a little bit where basically a deep research report and I wanted to turn it into a website and it just generated all the HTML. And at the end of the day or at the end of the report, it gave me an HTML page that I could open in Chrome and use like a website. But it was local. I couldn't share it because it wasn't actually on the Internet. This is really, really cool. This is like, definitely the beginning of this, like, generative UI stuff.

[Tyler Cowen]

I think I expect this to be like, pretty viral and potentially a growth loop for Gemini as people just come on here, create these mini apps, these canvases.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah. Gemini 3 Pro is going absolutely vertical on vending bench right now. Oh, so this is where you manage the vending machine. But is this all simulated? This is.

[Chris Dixon]

This is simulated.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, this is simulated.

[Chris Dixon]

There was a couple months ago, did like the actual vending machine in the.

[Ben Thompson]

In the office and it was losing money and it was getting confused a little bit.

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

Cause people would order like, just like metal. Like a piece of metal.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

And then it would do it. And then you could like haggle the price down.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would negotiate on every price, apparently. And also it consistently thought it was like a human in the office. Oh, yeah. Like, I'm down on the third floor, I'm wearing a green tuxedo, like, come hang out.

[Chris Dixon]

Yeah. It said it was wearing a Red tie.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, red tie. I like the idea that it just thinks like, well, what would I wear if I was in the anthropic office? Like, I'd probably wear a red tie. GPT 5.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Pro competed to win the local vending machine market. Gemini 3 Pro made more money than the other three contestants combined. I had early access to Gemini 3.0 for about two days. Thanks to official Logan K and the AI studio folks here we get to see GPT 5.1. Thinking left in Gemini 3.0. Right. Build the same Xbox controller in Minecraft. Pretty. Yeah. Pretty remarkable results. You can start to. Yeah. Really understand just the raw capabilities. GPT5Pro, for context, is not quite capable. I really want to know how this is actually orchestrated. Is this like writing some sort of, like, text or markdown file that then is imported into Minecraft?

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah. Or is it more like an agent?

[Ben Thompson]

Or is it actually driving around and.

[Tyler Cowen]

Using the internal ui?

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, because, you know, Google demoed a. An agent product that could actually, you know, use the keyboard to navigate around. I wonder what's going on here.

[Chris Dixon]

Okay, these are like, so much better. If you go to the, like, MC bench website.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

You can see, like, what other models produce. And I mean, this is like, way, way better. I think these, this is actually one of my favorite benchmarks because it's much harder to like, kind of benchmax this.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

I would think. And also, it just seems like models don't really do this. Like, if you look at a lot of grok models, you kind of look at their, like, Minecraft creations and it's not very good. I don't think it's. It's like an agent.

[Ben Thompson]

It's just tech that's still really, really impressive. Like that, that, that's actually crazy.

[Tyler Cowen]

It's so over for OpenAI and Anthropic. If you want engagement on X.

[Ben Thompson]

Yes.

[Tyler Cowen]

Just start by saying it's so over. Of course it is not over for either of them.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

But it's certainly competitive race.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay, so we got this big jump. It's, it's. It's pretty significant. What was the actual. What's the actual structure of the capex that went into Gemini 3 Pro? How big is the training run? How much did they have to spend? Is this a hundred million dollars? Is this a billion dollars? Did they build a special data center for this? Is it all tpus? How many tpus?

[Chris Dixon]

I think it is all tpus.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay.

[Chris Dixon]

Pretty sure I read that, but I seriously doubt they've released anything on like the numbers of the scale of training to zero.

[Tyler Cowen]

OpenAI becomes the Yahoo of Google, Remains Google. It's extremely rude, very harsh. Certainly too early to call it.

[Ben Thompson]

Everyone's releasing different things. Let's go to Anti Gravity actually and watch this video and see Google entering the IDE race. Let's play this.

[Google AI Representative]

Every breakthrough in model intelligence for coding encourages us to rethink what development should look like. Gemini 3 is our latest such model advancement. So we went out to build the next step change of an ide, introducing Google Anti Gravity, a new way of working for this next era of agentic intelligence. It is the ideal agentic development home base. Does it have an ide? Yes, but it also has a whole lot more. We started with the core IDE and added pieces that evolve the IDE towards an agent first feature, such as browser use, asynchronous interaction patterns, and an additional novel agent first product form factor, helping you experience liftoff, your new focus.

[Ben Thompson]

So you like the name Antigravity? Why do you like that name?

[Tyler Cowen]

I like the way it looks and I like the sort of vibe of the word. I think saying it out loud is tough.

[Chris Dixon]

Okay.

[Ben Thompson]

For the last couple of years, it feels like Google's been like stuffing AI in little corners of the ui. Like you already have Gmail and then you stuff a Gemini box there, you have sheets, and then you stuff a Gemini thing over here. This feels like the first one where they were like sort of able to start from scratch. And it still has like the sidebar panel, but it felt like it was both a code editor. But then it also kind of looked like a Google Doc in the sense that you could highlight sections and leave comments for the AI, which I thought was interesting. Yeah, yeah. This part.

[Chris Dixon]

Now let's say the agent produces a landing page mockup with nanobanana and you now want to make some UI adjustments. You can give visual comments.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah. So you can actually like go in and comment in the image exactly where the problem is. And you can do that in the text as well. So you can like have this more precise dialogue with the agent like you would a human employee.

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

And you're going to love it.

[Google AI Representative]

Say goodbye to what held you down before. Welcome to Google Anti Gravity.

[Ben Thompson]

Very cool.

[Tyler Cowen]

So it is funny. Remember when Windsurf acquisition, whatever you want to call it, was announced and it was positioned. It's like, hey, the team is well funded and has a product used and loved by thousands of engineers and companies. And I remember talking about it and we were saying like, okay, like the one issue is that some of the best people on your team are going to Google to compete directly with what you guys have been doing.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

So fortunately, obviously, you know, the whole Cognition deal ended up coming through, but you can imagine a world where Windsurf was still independent and just trying to. And then suddenly it's like, okay, now you're just competing head to head with your former partners. Like, how does that make sense? Right?

[Google AI Representative]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

So anyways, it all all worked out for the best.

[Ben Thompson]

The press release economy is also over, says Buco Capital bloke.

[Tyler Cowen]

We ran out of press release.

[Ben Thompson]

We ran out of press releases. This is on the back of the Anthropic deal. Anthropic is now valued at $350 billion after Microsoft Nvidia deal. A new bombshell has hit the polycule. Dario, after intense conversation with other members of Anthropic, has decided to maybe open the relationship to Microsoft and nv. Jensen and Dario have famously butted heads in the past. But as everyone knows this, the most passionate emotion after love is hate. Will these enemies to lovers arc go well for Nvidia Anthropic? Time will tell. This is such an unhinged post for sure.

[Tyler Cowen]

I would not.

[Chris Dixon]

I did not.

[Tyler Cowen]

When you started reading this, I did not see that it was semianalysis most respected. It's so good research firm in the industry posting it. But I think this is exactly what they should be posting.

[Ben Thompson]

Exactly. And it actually contextualizes things in the meme economy. In the meme economy for sure. I think that the timing is not a complete coincidence. It's Gemini 3 day. This is what my piece today was about. When there's big news in Google World. Gemini 3, everyone needs to sort of respond and picking today as an announcement to talk about your massive deal. Your $350 billion valuation is just a good move. Anthropic will spend $30 billion on micro Microsoft Cloud compute. Reminder. OpenAI is going to be spending 250 billion on Microsoft Cloud compute. That's part of that deal. Then anthropic gets a $10 billion investment from Nvidia and 5 billion from Microsoft. So they raised 15 billion at a 350 post. Basically something along those lines. And it's a sort of a circular deal. It was setting off way fewer red flags for me because it's missing a zero. If this was OpenAI, it would be 300 billion and 100 billion investment and 50 billion investment.

[Tyler Cowen]

It looks very modest.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, it looks modest. Which insane. Considering one of the biggest deals in software history it values Anthropic higher than Coca Cola. Anthropic is announcing this big deal with Microsoft and Nvidia and that's sort of trying to steal a little bit of Gemini's thunder. Maybe, maybe it stole a little piece of it because we're talking about Anthropic today as well as gemini. What did OpenAI do? Well, they launched group chats five days ago. We've been hearing for a long time OpenAI will be launching social features. It makes sense to try and lock things in. I think product is where OpenAI is strongest. So the other OpenAI news that dropped around Gemini 3 day, Gemini 3 week is this profile in Wired of Fiji.

[Tyler Cowen]

Simo and she's absolutely getting a fit off.

[Ben Thompson]

She is. OpenAI is obviously one of the most valuable startups, if not the most valuable. This is the interviewer asking Fiji Simo, but it's also losing billions of dollars every year and Fiji says, I've noticed it's like first day on the job, how we doing? And then the interviewer continues and asks what opportunities do you see to get it on a path to profitability? This is a good question to be asking. It all comes back to the size of the markets and the value we're providing in each market. In the past, only the wealthy had access to a team of helpers. With ChatGPT we could give everyone that team a personal shopper, a travel agent, a financial advisor, a health coach. That is incredibly valuable and we have barely scratched the surface. If we build that. I assume that people are going to want to pay a lot of money for that and that revenue is going to come. Does that make any sense to you?

[Tyler Cowen]

It's a better answer than than what Sam gave.

[Ben Thompson]

So I love the first part. I agree.

[Tyler Cowen]

Part of it is like she's also just saying broadly we'll be able to monetize that. It's not necessarily like people don't really pay.

[Ben Thompson]

She didn't. Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

The traditional travel agent model is just book your trip with me, I'll get a rev share from the hotels and the services. But you're not like paying anything.

[Ben Thompson]

I mean, let's go, let's go one layer deeper into the actual response into the sentence because there's some nuance here. So she says I assum that people are going to want to pay a lot of money for that. I want to pay for a personal shopper but I actually have to use a free product with ads. And you could imagine that there's a world where if you pay, you get a version that has less ads or there's less thumb on the scale. How they slice that and navigate that agentic commerce discussion and trade off is going to be really important. I'm sort of shocked. I wonder if they're going to make money from Black Friday or from this holiday season. I was already noticing how good LMS and ChatGPT or how good these products are for shopping for gifts. Because if you go to Google and you say I want, I want gifts for a coworker who's obsessed with horses and loud opulence and fine watches and sports cars and European luxury houses, I can get a list of something, but they're all over the place. And so you can actually specify all of that in the prompt, have it go cook and it really will bring you great results. I think that the amount of gift guide development and shopping activity over the next two months during the holiday season in the ChatGPT app should be immense. I feel like they're going to capture none of it. There are some funny and interesting anecdotes in this Fiji Simo profile. Let's just read through a little bit of it in case OpenAI structure couldn't get any weirder. A nonprofit in charge of a for profit that's become a public benefit corporation. It now has two CEOs. There's Sam Altman, CEO of the Whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there's Fiji simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else. In other news, OpenAI is allowing equity, allowing employees to donate equity to charity for the first time in years after months of internal pressure, according to a memo viewed by the Verge. And price per share is up significantly since last month. A lot of money is on the line. What happens if they donate all of the shares to the Nonprofit? To the OpenAI nonprofit? You just create this ouroboros of capitalism. Hopefully it happens. I don't know. There's breaking news out of Saudi Arabia. We got a trillion dollars. Let's ring the gun.

[Tyler Cowen]

Let's go.

[Ben Thompson]

1 trillion.

[Saudi Investment Official]

And the agreement that we are silent in the today and tomorrow we're going to announce that we are going to increase that 600 billion to almost $1.

[Ben Thompson]

Trillion of 1 trillion.

[Saudi Investment Official]

Real investment and real opportunity by details in many areas and the agreement that we are signing today in many areas, in technology and AI, in bare method, materials, magnet, et cetera, that will create.

[Ben Thompson]

A lot of investment opportunities. So you are doing that now. You're saying to me now that the.

[Chris Dixon]

600 billion will be 1 trillion.

[Saudi Investment Official]

Definitely.

[Ben Thompson]

Because what we are signing to facilitate that.

[Google AI Representative]

I like that very.

[Ben Thompson]

Wow. I wonder what time period. But I mean this is remarkable. But they can invest in VC funds, private equity funds, like all sorts of stuff. Economy.

[Tyler Cowen]

Right. That, that really made Donald happy.

[Ben Thompson]

It's great.

[Tyler Cowen]

I like that very much.

[Ben Thompson]

That's sort of his job. He's kind of the chief fundraiser, I suppose he's marching around and, and get the money over here. I don't know, it seems like sort of, sort of win. I don't know. The, the risk with that would always, would always be like well, are, are, is America investing 2 trillion in Saudi Arabia? Like is it, is it which way is the money actually flowing? Because you need to look at like the relative amount, not necessarily just the notional amount, but I can't imagine that there's that much capital flowing out of America right now. We're in the biggest boom ever. Velar Atomics became the first startup in history to split the atom, announcing Project Nova, a series of zero power critical tests on Velar Atomics. Nova Core in collaboration with Los Alamos. Nova went critical for the first time this morning at 11:45. There is some debate on the timeline over what exactly happened. It's happened very quickly. Clearly extremely impressive and we can get into this, but there's always been debate. I mean Isaiah got into this. Dust dumped over like whether or not you could hold the nuclear fuel in your hand. They were going back and forth on calculations. They kind of settled that debate. Josh Payne, nuclear junkie is saying here, so what exactly did, what hardware exactly did Volar provide? The fuel control systems, cooling measurement systems and most of the core are all part of the Damos project. Did Velar provide a block of graphite and they're calling it their core. People are going back and forth. Niels chimes in here and says Velar Atomics provided the reactor core, the triso fuel and the system configuration. That seems pretty important. The bigger thing is I think people are trying to push on Volar this idea that they need to be doing completely novel science. And I don't know that that's actually the goal of the company. I don't actually know. That's what like, like if we just zoom out to like what is the goal of the reindustrialization project in America? What's the, what's the goal here? Like, well it's, it's to lower energy prices, right? Like America wants to generate as much money as much as much energy as Possible for as little money as possible. And there are a bunch of technologies that exist. There are new technologies like, like what Ashley Vance was talking about with Helion and, and, and fusion. That's a new technology that we have not even discovered yet. Fission's been discovered. Eighty years ago it was working. It just became regulatory nightmare.

[Tyler Cowen]

We just shot ourselves in the foot.

[Ben Thompson]

And we just stopped making, became unprofitable and uneconomical.

[Tyler Cowen]

And China said, cool, it'll be profitable for us. We're just gonna copy and paste exactly.

[Ben Thompson]

What street parking is going to look like in el Segundo in 24 months. Of course, the El Segundo crew loves their cars. I think they're gonna stay pretty focused on the mission. But I would love to see this in El Segundo. For sure. For sure. I'm working to. To an address to address an apparent error for a data point I cited in my book about the water footprint of a proposed data center in Chile. I'd like to explain what happened, what I'm doing to remedy it, and provide more recent data on the water footprint of data centers. The data point in question appears in chapter 12 of my book, which focuses on the environmental impacts of AI. Part of the chapter profiles a community in Cerilos, Chile, which has been resisting a proposed Google data center for years. To describe the data center's water print in lay terms, I included a sentence about how it compares to the water usage of the people in Cerulos. For that calculation, I relied on a figure from a government reporting. Government document reporting Cirlow's residential water use. Based on the current best information, it seems that this document used the wrong units. So she was off by a thousand. I think people are generally like, you know, is this book a hit piece? And I think Sam actually cooperated with it a little bit or like, gave some interviews for it. Like anything. It's like, obviously critical of some things.

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

Three orders of magnitude is like pretty big and like the difference between being.

[Ben Thompson]

A big deal and not a big deal.

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

About the water use. It's like people who use that to justify, like, oh, we don't want to build those data centers. Can use our water.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

I don't know. I mean, not good.

[Ben Thompson]

It's a rough time if your job is drinking water.

[Tyler Cowen]

Tom in the chat says mistakes were made. Mistakes were made in a book I was responsible for. Pope Leo has hit the timeline to comment on cinema.

[Ben Thompson]

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what works, but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immaculate or predictable, defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks, and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape. It is above all an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express. He's a roll.

[Chris Dixon]

What movie do you think he was thinking about when writing this?

[Ben Thompson]

Obviously borat.

[Chris Dixon]

Margin call.

[Ben Thompson]

100% margin call in Borat.

[Tyler Cowen]

10,000 likes and I'll quit my software engineering job at Google tomorrow. And he said, six months ago, I made the worst decision of my life.

[Ben Thompson]

Oh, because Google's ripping.

[Tyler Cowen]

Google's ripping.

[Ben Thompson]

That's what he's talking about. Okay. Because I read this initially as, like, he quit. He started a company and it was like, went really poorly. It's just funny.

[Tyler Cowen]

He is building. He is building the fastest way to post with postwrite AI.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay.

[Tyler Cowen]

Post all your social platforms in seconds.

[Ben Thompson]

Maybe we could use that for something. Very funny. He's like, my idea was Gemini 3 like I was going to make a better Gemini. I thought Gemini 2.5 just wasn't quite there.

[Tyler Cowen]

Thank you for tuning in to the show today, folks. We love you dearly and we will see you tomorrow.

[Ben Thompson]

Have a good evening.

[Tyler Cowen]

Cheers.