GPT-5.6 Reactions, Phoebe Gates’ Phia Drama, Hollywood Chases Internet Horror | Diet TBPN

Summary

TBPN Diet: GPT-5.6 Reactions, Phoebe Gates’ Phia Drama, and Hollywood’s Internet Horror Gold Rush
TBPN – July 10, 2026 | Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays

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Episode Overview

This brisk Diet TBPN episode unpacks the seismic SK Hynix IPO, first impressions of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, drama around Phoebe Gates’ shopping startup Phia, and the growing trend of Hollywood optioning viral internet horror properties. Through lively and often irreverent commentary, Coogan, Hays, and co-hosts riff on the pace of AI progress, the perils of affiliate marketing, and the unpredictable fusion of tech, money, and meme culture.

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1. SK Hynix’s Record-Breaking NASDAQ IPO

Discussion: 00:02 – 03:17

• Key Facts:
  • SK Hynix, Korean memory chip giant, debuted on NASDAQ, raising $26.5B—history’s largest US IPO by a foreign firm.
  • Demand exceeded shares offered 7x, but share price popped only 14% above issue (ADR opened at $170 vs $149).
  • Company now exceeds $1 trillion market cap, joining the AI boom’s elite.
  • Hosts point out obstacle for US retail investors previously limited to South Korea’s KOSPI, now solved with NASDAQ ADRs.
  • “We got another one, another trillion dollar company in the AI boom.” (Jason, 00:44)
  • Temporary ticker (SKHYV) in use for initial trading, explained as on “when issued” basis before full transactions settle.

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2. GPT-5.6 Launch: Capabilities, Controversy, and Memes

Discussion: 03:22 – 14:26

GPT-5.6 Demos and Creative Use Cases

• Surge of viral demos: full movie scenes like “Interstellar” recreated, advanced image/video and 3D scene generation, and new artistic memes.
• Hosts debate the value:
  • “You can go and recreate Interstellar perfectly, but at the end you just have Interstellar…” (Jason, 06:26)
  • “The Conor McGregor starring in Interstellar or something like that.” (Jason, 07:18)
• Broccoli Farmer Meme:
  • “We were promised flying cars. Instead we got a broccoli farmer running his farm with GPT 5.6…” (00:17:46)
• Value in AI’s physical simulation capacities and stylish video puppetry—blocky to photorealistic via style transfer.

Productivity Leaps and the User Experience Divide

• GPT-5.6 “Soul Ultra” shows off extraordinary 3D modeling speed (Blender demo at ~750 tokens/sec).
• “It is an interesting experience watching a machine use your machine at a rate that would be completely impossible…” (Tyler, 08:48)

Codex and ChatGPT App Drama

• The new desktop “super app” merges Codex and ChatGPT, triggering user confusion, especially for Mac users.
• Criticisms that Electron framework replaces native integrations, disrupting routines—hosts debate the real user impact.
• Token/compute settings confusion caused usage limit resets (“resetting usage limits twice today so people can keep experimenting. Hammer, hammer it.” – 13:18)
• “We also didn’t get everything quite right. We made it too easy to use higher compute settings…” (Reading Thibaut, 12:40)

Workflow Philosophy

• Users/power users struggle to adapt; hosts want “the Omnibox that can do anything” (Jason, 13:38), likening it to “enterprise Google search.”

Notable Quote

• “Codex is a powerful workspace for getting things done with AI agents…Whether you’re writing code, analyzing data, creating content…” (Jason, 14:19)
• “People are saying it’s a horse for the mind.” (Tyler, 14:24)

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3. Meta, AI Scale, and Platform Tensions

Discussion: 14:26 – 22:43

Meta’s Big Bet on AI and Platform Independence

• Mark Zuckerberg’s motives: Escape from Apple’s “30% tax” and platform gatekeeping.
• “You have to constantly be playing nice and sort of sucking up to Apple…who doesn’t like you.” (Tyler, 16:54)
  • Physical goods and event tickets avoid the cut; in-app digital purchases do not.
• Apple’s app tracking transparency cost Meta billions—Zuck wants control, possibly through AR glasses.
  • “He wants to be in a world where you’re wearing your very, very cheap…pair of glasses…and he’s getting a cut of [your purchase].” (Tyler, 18:03)
  • Justifies Reality Lab spending by hiding their costs in the headline AI investments.

Meta, LLMs, and Internal Data Strategies

• Meta is restructuring, shifting 3,000 engineers (many juniors) into an Applied AI Engineering Org focused on RL-tasks/environments.
• “Creating a good piece of training data is a real intellectual challenge.” (Jason, 23:41)
• Top “data labelers” (now environment/task designers) can earn seven figures.
• “If it winds up being as valuable as Semianalysis thinks, Meta has another 70,000 people to pull in.” (Jason, 23:36)

Notable Market Hot Takes

• Meta’s “horse for the mind” and growing user base eyed as an uncannily strong competitor to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
• Noted quote: “We believe Meta is the only hyperscaler Neolab on track to be world class at all three [data, talent, compute]…” (Tyler, 20:47)
• PolyMarket and Alex Wang memes: “Compute daddy Dylan Patel has spoken…” (Tyler, 21:24)

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4. Phia / Phoebe Gates’ Affiliate Marketing Scandal

Discussion: 24:24 – 29:43

Bloomberg Bombshell

• Bloomberg reports Phia, Phoebe Gates’ affiliate shopping startup, injects its own referral codes—overriding legitimate publisher codes—without user interaction.
• Compared unfavorably even to Honey’s much-criticized tactics.
  • “Nothing comparably extensive has yet been established about FIA. But FIA’s reported implementation may actually be cruder.” (Jason, 26:32)
  • “You just click through…but you have the software running in your browser that is inserting effectively attribution for [Phia] without you knowing. Stealing potential revenue…” (Tyler, 27:38)
• Commission impact relatively small (~$1M on $12M sales), but effect is very diffuse.
• Social media backlash framed as “preying on Phoebe’s downfall”—the villain arc starts now.
  • “Our theory is that this is where the comeback begins—the villain arc. Potentially.” (Jason & Tyler, 29:42)

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5. Hollywood Chasing Viral Internet Horror IP

Discussion: 29:43 – 32:13

• Hollywood, after “Backrooms” and other meme phenomena, courts “horror meme” and creepypasta creators for movie options/deals.
• “Trevor Henderson drew a faceless monster called Siren Head… and sold the Siren head movie rights to Warner Brothers for more than a million dollars.” (Jason, 30:25)
• Intense, competitive bidding: Mandela Catalog (YouTube) saw 11 studios vie for rights; Amazon/Spielberg’s Amblin paid millions and let the 22-year-old creator direct.
• “We’re seeing them as a resource for adaptations, the same way we look at books and other media.” (Quote from Warner’s Michael DeLuca, summarized by hosts)
• Hosts note how this outpaces classic screenwriting dogfights of the ‘80s/‘90s.

Memorable Moment

• “There’s something wrong with you if you’re into [horror]. Totally agree.” (Daniel & Tyler, 31:51)
• Hosts confess discomfort and avoidance of the horror genre.

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Notable Quotes & Segments by Timestamp

• “We got another one, another trillion dollar company in the AI boom.” — Jason (00:44)
• “You can go and recreate Interstellar perfectly, but at the end you just have Interstellar.” — Jason (06:26)
• “The Conor McGregor starring in Interstellar or something like that.” — Jason (07:18)
• “It is an interesting experience watching a machine use your machine at a rate that would be completely impossible…” — Tyler (08:48)
• “Codex is a powerful workspace for getting things done with AI agents…” — Jason (14:19)
• “People are saying it’s a horse for the mind.” — Tyler (14:24)
• “You have to constantly be playing nice and sort of sucking up to Apple…who doesn’t like you.” — Tyler (16:54)
• “Creating a good piece of training data is a real intellectual challenge.” — Jason (23:41)
• “Stealing potential revenue from horserviews.com …” — Tyler (27:38)
• “Our theory is that this is where the comeback begins—the villain arc. Potentially.” — Jason & Tyler (29:42)
• “We’re seeing them [online creators] as a resource for adaptations the same way we look at books and other media.” — Cited from Michael DeLuca/Wall Street Journal (30:51)
• “There’s something wrong with you if you’re into [horror]. Totally agree.” — Daniel & Tyler (31:51)

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Conclusion

This episode is a sharp, fast-moving survey of AI’s widening business impact, the strange collision of new tech with legacy industries (and ethical boundaries), and the latest internet culture currents reaching Hollywood. With their characteristic banter, the hosts probe the underlying forces—hype cycles, user frustration, and meme-powered disruption—defining 2026’s tech-media landscape.

Transcript

[Jason]

SK Hynix is up successful IPO up 14% in the wall street debut the South Korean Memory chip giant SK Hynix made its NASDAQ debut today, raising $26.5 billion in the largest ever first time US share sale by a foreign company. Demand reportedly exceeded the available shares more than sevenfold by but to give a sense of the scale of this thing, normally when we hear about 7x oversubscribed IPOs, you might be expecting like 100% pop, 80% pop. But at this level of price and demand, you're just seeing a 14% pop. But still a great debut nonetheless. The company's American Depository Receipts opened. The ADR shares opened at 17014% above the 149 they were offered at, giving SK Hynix a market cap of roughly $1.03tr trillion. We got another one, another, another one, another trillion dollar company in the AI boom. The blockbuster listing caps an extraordinary run for memory manufacturers fueled by surging demand from AI systems, particularly for high bandwidth memory used alongside advanced AI accelerators. SK Hynix, Samsung and US based Micron dominate the global memory market. And SK Hynix is Korean. Listed shares are up over 600% in the past year as they rushed to gain exposure to one of the AI boom's most critical bottlenecks. But it's been tricky to get shares and participate in SK Hynix because you got to go over to the kospi, you got to go over to the South Korean index instead. Now you can just head to the NASDAQ and get your ADR shares in SK Hynix. So congratulations to the whole team over there. A massively successful ipo. The Wall Street Journal asks a question. They say, why is SK Hynix trading under a temporary ticker symbol? They're currently trading under the temporary ticker SKHYV before reverting to a permanent ticker on Monday. SK hy. The V in the temporary symbol indicates the shares are trading on a when issued basis. They haven't been fully issued yet, meaning the exchange is allowing investors to buy and sell the stock on its first US trading day before the transaction actually settles. The is they're sort of being eased into the American markets. This is not the case with all ADRs, all American depository Receipts, but rather a tool used to close the gap when a transaction has been announced but the actual delivery of the shares hasn't finished. So all in process now to bring SK Hynix to the American markets. And that looks Like a lot of red. But the stock is up. It just opened at 170. And so the fact that it is flat relative to where it opened does not reflect the 14% pop or 16% pop. What was it? 14% pop from the actual issuance price. Most of the folks that bought shares in the IPO, that $26 billion that went into the company, of course, situational awareness, there were a few others, Bailey, Gifford, all participated early, at least according to early news. I assume that those transactions closed. They are all sitting up 14% today. And we'll be continuing to follow this.

[Tyler]

Kanner in the chat says CERN has only been off for a week and John is dressing casual.

[Jason]

Ooh, you think it's a conspiracy. I like it. I like it. 5.6 launched yesterday. 5.6 SOL and Soul Ultra. And people are having fun with it. More and more demos are hitting the timeline. There's a lot of controversy over the desktop app for Mac. We can get into that. But first, let's play a little bit of this video. Someone tried to recreate all of Interstellar, truly trying to infuriate Christopher Nolan the most. Probably this is the exact opposite of what he wants to see, I imagine, considering that he doesn't even use CGI very often. But this is an incredible demo, although I don't think this will be picking up a billion dollars at the box office anytime soon. But it is incredible that you're able to sort of go from prompt to 3D model to rendering so quickly. Very, very cool demo. And it feels like a new meme, a new art form. You have to be creative with it. Merely recreating Interstellar is not going to do it. It's not going to do anything other than just be an impressive demo of the technology. But when you look at what people have done with Blender, you can imagine that with creativity added to this in a new storyline and something that leans into the rough edges of this particular.

[Tyler]

Well, there's also gonna. There's also gonna be a whole meta of like, I recreated Interstellar, but I cast Conor McGregor as, you know, and

[Jason]

I imagine that this gets even more powerful when you use style transfer and video models on top. I've been seeing a lot of people block out AI videos either just using their iPhone, so they'll just have like, you're playing an actor who's playing an old character, and then you're reading the lines, you're giving the delivery. And then that is used as the driving video for some of these AI video models. And you get much better results with that. And I've also seen people block out little examples of driving scenes or different mechanical scenes in Blender and then use an AI video model to take it to high fidelity. And because the video model has an underlying reference that is deterministic and physically accurate, even though it's low fidelity and very blocky, you wind up with a better AI video at the end of the project. So you can imagine someone taking an idea, puppeteering a 3js model like what's happening here and then adding basically a style transfer layer on top with AI video to get. To get to something that's a lot more photo real and more striking. But again you wind up in this situation where if you. You can go and recreate Interstellar perfectly, but at the end you just have Interstellar which already exists and is available to stream. And so you didn't really get anything in the process. You have to bring something special to the table. But I'm excited for the inevitable mashups of this. The Conor McGregor starring in Interstellar or something like that. Also, there's a broccoli farmer that's running his farm on GPT 5.6. Apparently this was in the demo video. But Daniel Tenrero shares a very funny meme showing the I don't even know what aesthetic this is. This is Dasher Zone aesthetic. That was the account that shared all of this. The extreme skeleton with the two revolving pistols. Very fun. Daniel Ten Riro shares some more in the information. He says we were promised flying cars. Instead we got a broccoli farmer running his farm with GPT 5.6. I don't know it's still relevant to show a demo that is as far afield. Everyone knows how these models can be used for research, how these models can be used for coding. That gets a little boring. I want to imagine something completely different that I can then pull into my daily life. What is the equivalent task that I'm doing in my life that I can take? We sort of differ on this. Sometimes you think that like a lot of these things are self explanatory. They don't. This is Joe Weisenthal position too. He says like AI has no learning curve. I disagree. I think that it doesn't necessarily have a learning curve, but there is an educational process that happens when you're presented with a blank box. You can type anything. People need to understand the fringes of their imagination, what is possible. And then they can go and reach for that tool. But the tools are getting sharper and and sometimes they get sharper without the box actually changing. Because it's just a box of what do you want to build or what do you want to do?

[Tyler]

Not everyone has a Tyler, where I tend to prompt Tyler.

[Jason]

Yes, yes.

[Tyler]

Who then goes into Codex.

[Jason]

Yes. There was another video that was shaking up the timeline. People were going back and forth on how fast this model was building in. Is this Blender?

[Tyler]

Blender.

[Jason]

This is Blender, right? Yeah. So it's building a 3D cannon, modeling it and adding different primitives, different spheres and Toruses. And the video is not sped up. And Chris says 5.6 SOL is. And what I assume is 750 tokens per second in the wild. That is the preview of Cerebras. But this apparently was not actually.

[Tyler]

Yeah, it's Soul Ultra on fast mode.

[Jason]

So we should be seeing even faster rollouts. Although every time I see this, I

[Tyler]

think, and this is just computer use.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Like, this is not an integration. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is an interesting experience watching a machine use your machine at a rate that would be completely impossible unless it was like your entire bit online was like, I just use software really fast. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's an interesting sort of feel. The AGI moment.

[Jason]

Anyway, packing McCormick is having fun with 5.6 soul. He says it one shotted this on its own. He didn't ask for a new logo. Just like. It's just like, look, bro, you need a new logo.

[Tyler]

Actually, I actually think you should adopt this.

[Jason]

It looks cool. I like it. He says it's part of a web design based on a link to a Cosmos. Not perfect, but way better than any other time I've tried. And that's been. The big talking point is like they were behind on or the GPT models were sort of behind on front end and design. And this is a big leap forward in that. So I'm excited to see Nick on

[Tyler]

the Codex team is asking, is this ImageGen? I think it might be.

[Jason]

Well, I mean, that's the thing about Sol and Codex. Yeah.

[Tyler]

But it's been generating. Now if you're asking it to build a site, it will generate you a preview image image. And so I think this is the preview image for the site.

[Jason]

Yep.

[Tyler]

Which is the really confusing thing is

[Jason]

that the image model now has tool use and can scaffold things out in HTML if it needs to. And so, like, all of these different models are sort of blending together at this point. Michael had a very funny interaction where he got banned for OpenAI for cyber abuse. He had no idea what he did, he pasted the ban notice into Codex, which I don't know how he was still using Codex if he was banned, but he said he asked it to figure out what triggered the ban. Codex found that it had asked for an API key to his own server. Codex wrote the appeal, submitted the appeal a few minutes later. The appeal was auto approved by an AI at OpenAI. So he was banned by AI, convicted by AI, defended by AI and pardoned by AI in about 10 minutes. There's a bunch of pushback on the new ChatGPT desktop app because it is the super app. It unifies codex. The new ChatGPT app is just the Codex app. And when you install it, you can keep the old ChatGPT app as ChatGPT Classic. But a lot of people don't like that because the Codex app is written in electron, which means it's a bunch of web views, web browsers, effectively, as opposed to the ChatGPT, which was a native app and had a bunch of integrations that people had sort of come to know and love. And so this is like a change in the user experience if you're deeply embedded in a particular workflow. The flip side is like, I just don't know how many people were daily driving ChatGPT as a Mac desktop app. We've heard from someone on the team that it was effective for cheating, and we won't dock who it was, but,

[Tyler]

well, so I would sometimes use it because there's like a very nice shortcut. So it was like Control plus or Command plus is the normal main search on Mac, but it was a very easy way to interact with the models.

[Jason]

Yeah, I wonder if that can just be. Can that just be. Can that shortcut just be created with the new Codex or ChatGPT work? Probably where you just bind that same key shortcut. But I mean, it is making the user do work, which is always a tricky thing. But I feel like for most people's workflow, at least for mine, it was the desktop app that I used was Codex. And then when I wanted to interact with ChatGPT in a chat flow, I would do a new tab and then on my phone I would have the ChatGPT app. And then the ChatGPT app on my phone could talk to Codex on the desktop. But I never actually needed to open the ChatGPT desktop app. But maybe I'm just weird, but I don't know.

[Tyler]

We'll see as this same flow for me. Thibaut says we spent the last 24 hours reading feedback Looking at usage patterns and talking with many of you. The short version is that there's a lot of excitement for 5, 6 chatgpt work on mobile and web. But we also didn't get everything quite right. We made it too easy to use the highest compute settings without making the impact on usage limits sufficiently clear. They reorganized the desktop app in one bold move, making familiar things like chats and projects harder to find. Our launch framing was focused on work and to some of our Codex fans, it made it feel like Codex was going away over time and absolutely not our intention. We love Codex and it is here to stay. Long story short, reset usage limits are getting reset twice today so people can keep experimenting. Hammer, Hammer it.

[Jason]

Plan out some sites. There's also some confusion over the difference between ChatGPT work and ChatGPT Codex. And I wonder.

[Tyler]

I just want one or the other place.

[Jason]

Yeah, the Omnibox that can do anything for you. And I think that's obviously where it goes. But there's a wall crawl run, there's integration points and people have ingrained experiences and workflows and habits and there's all sorts of different trade offs here. There is no enterprise Google search. You just use Google at work, you use Google at home. It's all one box that gives you answers. And there was never a dividing line between these two things. And so that's probably where all of this goes ultimately. Let's tell you about Codex. There we go. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting things done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex people are saying projects forward from start to finish.

[Tyler]

People are saying it's a horse for the mind.

[Jason]

A horse for the mind. So the Meta Bull case semi analysis wrote a long piece about the future of msl. What's going on there? Very interesting contrarian take. I think a lot of people were confused by the expansion of activities and sort of an entirely new business line with B2B sales. And we've discussed the bull cases here, the benefits, obviously there's a ton of benefits. The ad model, they have the cash flow to draw down on. There's a lot of different things that we can go through, but let's read some of the reactions first and then we can go into the semianalysis piece. So boring business says people don't realize that Zuckerberg is all in on AI because he refuses to pay a 30% tax to platform owners for the rest of his life. Meta caught the shift toward mobile back in the early 2010s but they were never able to create their own hardware platform to capture users in their ecosystem. As a result, they got stuck paying a 30% tax to Apple on in app purchases, which has cost Meta billions of dollars in profit. That makes no sense to me. No one buys ads via in app purchases. Every advertiser I know uses the web based manager.

[Tyler]

Ads I believe count as like a real world service. So there's not like there's a lot of things you order in the, that you order on mobile apps like groceries.

[Jason]

It's kind of a digital good. But yes, I agree with you that it would be.

[Tyler]

Exactly. Yeah. But it's like eyeballs, right?

[Jason]

Right.

[Tyler]

It's like impressions which like eyeballs. Human attention is not a digital good. It is like a real world thing.

[Jason]

Yes. So if I open up the Amazon app on my iPhone and I buy a T shirt, Apple does not get 30% of that because that's a real world or doordash good example.

[Tyler]

Or a movie ticket.

[Jason]

Yes. But if I go to Kindle or Netflix and I subscribe or even like the X subscription premium, Apple will take 30% if I buy Fortnite v Bucks or Roblox or any digital good. And I could see Apple saying, look, if you want to be able to, because in the Meta platforms you can be in Instagram and you can just say I want to boost this post and you can put down your credit card and pay for that and you can get started on the advertising flow as a very small business I think through effectively in app purchases.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So the bigger thing is just like you have this, one of the largest companies in the world and you have to constantly be playing nice and sort of sucking up to Apple who is sort of actively, who doesn't like you like Apple. Like you can imagine what do Apple executives think about Meta? If you were to ask them over coffee off the record and, and it would be like we don't like Meta. And so that's fundamentally like a very, very uncomfortable position to be in. And so he doesn't want to be in a position running his company where he has to ask for permission for things. And so an example with that somebody brought it up, I think Andrew Meta lost billions from Apple because of the permissions prompt.

[Jason]

Yes, that's true.

[Tyler]

You know, making it harder to just run their core advertising business. And also there's so much that's like very unpredictable about where AI is going. Like it's possible that we get to the point where you don't go to a bunch of different social media platforms and you're just like, talk. Your agent is just kind of surfacing content for you on the fly. Like, there's so much like potential disruption. I think the stance is like, I would rather participate in this massive technology cycle and have a shot at being a big part of part of it than like, just like, hope nothing bad happens to me. The other thing I've always felt is like, you know, with the, with the glasses, you're just going to be able to like, he sees the world like the glasses are more of a new platform bet right now than AI. And I just think he wants to be in a world where you're wearing your very, very cheap pair or maybe even free pair of glasses around. They act as your phone and your computer and you can look at stuff and say, buy me that. And he's getting a cut of it. You're walking by a restaurant and it pops up an offer and it says like, free Boba for any orders over $20. And he's getting a cut of that. Right. So like that will be like some type of like always on intelligence. So it all totally makes sense, even if it is like deeply sort of like chaotic and at times confusing.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

At least over the last year.

[Jason]

The funny thing about the glasses as a platform is AI spending is so huge that he can probably bring back a lot of the reality lab spending and sort of just tuck it in a bucket and people won't notice if there's an extra eight.

[Tyler]

I'm not leaving, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving.

[Jason]

Yeah, I mean, if there's an extra 8 billion spent on the next version of the Meta Ray Ban displays or something, people will be like, ah, it's a rounding error compared to the 200 billion on data centers or whatever.

[Tyler]

Ari says the tax Meta pays to Apple is the fact that they can't track users cross platform.

[Jason]

Yeah, yeah, totally. The other interesting thing is like, I do think the screen time is at least like a flashing warning light. Like, I've personally noticed as an early adopter of LLMs, that my screen time has switched much more towards ChatGPT and LLMs and Deep Research reports. Just because if I see something interesting, oh, there's a car video on Instagram, we'll often switch over and then start prompting to actually learn more. Whereas before that would have required a whole bunch of Google searches. You might have to sit down and collect a document. You're not actually going to do that now. I've been noticing that I'm much more in like the hour a day on ChatGPT versus hour a day on Instagram. And so I don't know if I'm just like the early adopter that will never do that. But you can certainly see that people are spending a lot of time with AI systems. And as you've put it before, like wherever consumers, wherever people are spending time is an important place to have a foothold.

[Tyler]

At least Semianalysis said at the simplest level, there are three things you need to build to need to build a true frontier model data, talent, and computer. We believe Meta is the only hyperscaler Neolab on track to be world class at all three, and therefore has the best chance of catching up with Anthropic OpenAI. We'll explain why in full detail below. And so Alex Wang quoted this in a funny, in a funny way, he said compute Daddy Dylan Patel has spoken. And yes, the stock is up 6%. Wang quote quoted poly quote tweeted Poly Market Money, which said meta jumps over 6% of the open as investors react to Yesterday's Muse Spark 1.1 release. Again, I don't really think that they were reacting to Muse Spark as much as Semianalysis saying there's a, there's a, there's a really, there's a chance here. So yeah, Alex Wang said nice with the thumbs up. So he's, he's, he's pumping the stock. What's interesting is like the crazy thing is that like Semianalysis just like completely leaving out SpaceX and they didn't leave

[Jason]

out SpaceX and Google, they said.

[Tyler]

But saying they said SpaceX is selling

[Jason]

$26 billion a year worth of GPUs to anthropic slash Google. And that's why they're not in the race. Even though it is odd because Meta might wind up selling a lot of GPUs. It's sort of unclear what the breakdown will be, but they're at least laying out a narrative that if Meta picks it up, would differentiate them from SpaceX AI in some ways, I think. Yeah, I agree with you, it is.

[Tyler]

But they're essentially saying like Gemini doesn't have because Gemini has Compute and data. They're saying, they're effectively saying Gemini does not have talent. Yeah, right. They're saying you need all three.

[Jason]

Meta took their data efforts to another level in late May by announcing a new Applied AI Engineering Org as part of their most recent round of layoffs, restructuring 3,000 engineers, which includes 70% of their new grads and a significant number of seniors will now be making RL tasks and environments full time. We think this is an extremely underappreciated advantage for msl. The question is, if this becomes the standard playbook, you would imagine that Google DeepMind would be able to do the same thing. They have the same same structural workforce. But maybe it's like it's a band aid that Google's not willing to rip off, but Zuck is willing to rip it off at Meta. That's maybe the thesis at a deeper level. Anthropic has been the most aggressive lab by far when it comes to buying coding data from RL environment startups, and it's one important reason why their models are so good at coding today. Mercour recently disclosed they logged 2.5 million expert hours on their platform in Q2 of 2026. That's equivalent to 5,000 people working 40 hours a week. Meta is already in the same ballpark and their average quality is likely higher. Additionally, they have another 70,000 people to pull into that organization if they need to. If it winds up being as valuable as Semianalysis thinks it will be. It's also worth briefly dispelling this myth that 3000 meta engineers will be doing mindless low level data labeling. The days of undereducated contractors from third world countries drawing boundary boxes or classifying text as NSFW are gone. At this point, the models are sufficiently smart that creating a good piece of training data is a real intellectual challenge. So they're sort of taking the contrarian stance that, you know, being being an RL environment designer is not soul crushing and in fact can be intellectually rigorous. They also said the top expert contractors at every data company, they're all making seven figures a year. Which is pretty crazy since people thought of data labeling as a $10 an hour task. And now you have people making millions of dollars a year because they're actually really great at defining what it means to complete a task from start to finish. We got to talk about the story that is at the center of Phoebe Gates life. Her company fia, is in Bloomberg today with some accusations of misattribution in the e commerce world. Fia, the buzzy shopping app co founded by Bill Gates daughter Phoebe, is claiming credit for online sales that didn't actually drive an advertising startup co founded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of billionaire Microsoft Corp. Co founder Bill Gates, bills itself as a personal shopping assistant that helps users find the lowest prices on a broad range of clothes and fashion accessories. Businesses like these, known in industry parlance as affiliate marketing programs typically collect commission from retailers that make the resulting sale. Bloomberg tested the FIA mobile browser extension across more than 50 websites and found that during the checkout process, FIA opened a background tab without user interaction and injected its own referral code that overrode legitimate referrals from other publishers. These findings were consistent with Capital One Shopping and Edelman's independent tab testing and code review.

[Tyler]

Let's get into why what he is being accused of and why it is potentially, if this is what they're doing, we don't know again if it's an accident or it's intentional. But why it's potentially even more predatory than honey.

[Jason]

So Megalag, the YouTuber that did the Honey expose, it was an interesting deep dive that got 20 million views because it was using a hidden redirect near checkout to replace the creator's affiliate tag with Honey's. So the irony here was that a lot of those creators, they would make money From, I'm promoting AG1 use code HUBERMAN. And then if they had also promoted Honey, Honey was stealing their AG1 affiliate revenue. And so the creators were sort of promoting their own demise in some ways. So it was like this. This very viral, very ironic situation eventually got sorted out. Huddy's broader scandal also involved allegation that it suppressed better coupons and delivered and deliberately evaded affiliate network stand down checks. Nothing comparably, comparably extensive has yet been established about fiat. But FIA's reported implementation may actually be cruder. Honey generally created the overwrite when the shopper interacted with its checkout prompt, even if only to dismiss it. So you would see a Honey pop up. At the very least, you had to click I don't want Honey. And then it would do something. The Bloomberg report says FIA's mobile extension is firing without any FIA interaction at all. So you go from horsereviews.com over to Clydesdale's Direct. You merely have FIA installed as an extension. You don't notice any.

[Tyler]

You don't know that FIA has been a part of the interaction at all.

[Jason]

You don't know.

[Tyler]

You just click through. But you have the software running in your browser that is inserting a effectively attribution for fear without you knowing. Stealing potential revenue from horserviews.com yes. And horserviews.com probably had to run ads on Google to get people to horse reviews.com to educate them on the horse market, to get them to Clydesdale's Direct to get them to close. And so they're sitting here being like, hey, we did all this work to get clydesdalesdirect.com a new customer and we're not being compensated for clydesdalesdirect and say,

[Jason]

well, normally I'm sending a check to horsereviews.com I guess I'm sending a check to FIA now. Whatever. As long as I'm getting customers, I'm fine.

[Tyler]

So one of the concerning things here is that I think this had been running since January or December. And so they had some software update that was pushed. This started happening. So it's been happening for let's say around six months. And you would assume that they would have figured this out, but maybe it's possible that it, you know, I don't

[Jason]

know a lot of. I mean, it's not the biggest scale. I think the number is 12 million plus in sales driven. So the commission on that is like $1 million. That's sort of like missing. And it's. And it's so diffuse across so many different e commerce providers. I guarantee you, as someone who's run multiple e commerce sites, I would not notice if a couple hundred dollars moved from one affiliate to another. Now, everyone on the timeline was preying on Phoebe's downfall way before this, way before this. People wanted this so badly. They didn't want to hear this be a success. And so they've been chomping at the bit for something. She raised money from a lot of very popular and it looked like a Coachella poster. And there's all these like, oh, like why are we even raising venture capital? So our theory is that this is where the comeback begins.

[Tyler]

The villain arc.

[Jason]

The villain arc. Potentially. But seriously. Okay, let's go over to movies. Hollywood's horror meme gold rush is minting millionaires. We talked about this with backrooms. The originally 4chan creepypasta that wound up being a viral YouTube channel and then a full Hollywood movie That made over $100 million, I believe. But there are many more pieces of intellectual property in the horror meme genre and they're all getting scooped up.

[Tyler]

And that was Hormozy, by the way.

[Jason]

It did look like hormozy. It did look like Hormozy. So the creator of a monster called Siren Head scores a rich deal as studios hunt for the next backroom style hit in the Wall Street Journal. Trevor Henderson drew a faceless monster called Siren Head eight years ago. That's pretty creepy. I'm not a fan. Eight years ago. And watched it spawn YouTube films, knockoff Amazon.com merchandise and video games. But he never made a penny from his creation. Interesting. He just spawned this horrific meme and then hadn't profited on it until now. So he's a 40 year old illustrator and he sold the Siren head movie rights to Warner Brothers for more than a million dollars. Pretty cool that he just illustrated this weird thing and then made so much money. According to people familiar with the matter, the deal was part of a new Hollywood gold rush to find concepts and talent online that could fuel the next horror hit. Like backrooms and obsession, studios are trying to find the next potential horror hit that already has proven its appeal to gen Z on YouTube, Reddit or this is interesting, Roblox the chair co chair of Warner's Motion Picture Group Michael DeLuca said. We're seeing them as a resource for adaptations the same way we look at books and other media. The race for hot digital properties resembles the kind of dog fights for buzzy scripts that used to be common in Hollywood during the 80s and 90s. Eleven studios recently bid on the film rights to the psychological horror YouTube series the Mandela catalog. Amazon owned United Artists and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment ultimately agreed to pay millions of dollars and let the video's 22 year old creator, Alex Kister direct the movie. That's for sure. Very interesting.

[Tyler]

Daniel says. What's the obsession with horror? There's something wrong with you if you're into that. Totally agree. I I never gravitated to horror movies, but my theory was always if I don't watch them, I will not. I won't be afraid. Walking at night like I grew up in the country. I grew up in the country. You know, teenager in the country, you know, you're going around on adventures, stuff like that.

[Jason]

Watch this, you're gonna be terrified. Leave us. Five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com and have a great weekend. See you Monday.