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Let's run through all the news. There's so much going on in the world of tech. Of course, the OpenAI Elon Musk trial continues. It's week two now and the Oakland courthouse continues to deliver top tier tech drama. Elon testified for more than seven hours last week. Now Greg Brockman is getting grilled over personal financial incentives, his $30 billion stake in OpenAI and his links to various angel investments. And Mike Isaac of course, has a great play by play. You can also listen to the courtroom now, you can't restream it unfortunately, but you can listen to it. And we made a little companion app for anyone who's tuning in. Hopefully we can pull that up and show folks. But let's read through some of Mike Isaac's posts and then we'll pull up courtroom simulator. Mike Isaac this morning, 6:56am Good morning from a rain soaked downtown Oakland where I will again be attending the Musk vs OpenAI trial. No live blog today, just his wonderful tweets. Lunch is a normal banana, a mutant orange, black coffee and some pocket sausages for travelers. I really feel like Mike needs to step it up in the lunch game. Where's like a full sandwich? What about a chipotle burrito or something? Like you gotta have some more substance. I'm looking at a calorie, a kava bowl with 200 grams of protein. Something to get you through the day. Mike, I think you're fighting with one arm tied behind your back here, but we appreciate the work that you're doing. He also is sporting a mild to moderate hangover because he drank five beers last night. I like it. Well, it was May 4th. Maybe he's a Star wars fan. May the 4th be with you. Maybe he was celebrating, went down to the cantina, chugs five beers, space beers. He did remember to bring a pillow for his butt because the seats are very difficult and very hard. He also, it's cold outside, the line's not moving. We're gonna be getting a preview live in person. Bundle up Tyler. Cause I think he's gonna be stopping by later this week. And so let's get into actually what's going on here because Mike loves to paint a picture before he breaks down what's actually going on in the case. The judge enters.
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Artiste.
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Judge gave a primer on Cinco de Mayo that was fun. Talks about the differences in homemade tamales. Texas tamales apparently have lots of meat. California tamales do not. Brockman is pretty mostly Masa apparently.
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Oh, right, right, right. That's just corn.
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Yeah. So Brockman is pretty animated and addressing the jury in a more personable way. A little strategy shift.
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We got thread guy in the chat.
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Welcome to the show.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thread Guy regaling folks with old stories of working on self driving cars. Apparently Greg Brockman also did a funny Elon impression, but not a cutting one. He wasn't making fun of him, he just did an accurate impression of Elon Musk and just by doing it effectively was funny. Because you don't expect Greg Brockman to be doing impressions, but he's got everyone's got material. I'm learning this about court cases. It's all about entertainment very, very clearly. Anyway, they have now talked about Defense of the Ancients Dakota at least 10 times during the trial. The gamers are ascendant. The both lawyers on both sides are bickering. Mike Isaac says he loves to watch white collar bickering in court. Also, the entire right side of the gallery, our lawyers laughed. There's a mild potential drama in the media gallery. One reporter waved over a marshal and pointed to a guy next to her. I'm pretty sure the marshal had to tell the guy to put his shoes back on. So if you're in the courtroom, keep those shoes on.
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But they can make themselves at home in the courthouse in this country anymore.
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If you want to be comfortable and experience the court courtroom, you gotta get on Courtroom Simulator because you can be full slanket, full blanket, full covered everything. You can be as comfy as you want, no shoes required, in the virtual world that we have created for you to enjoy the courtroom. So Brockman on his infamous journal, which we were going back and forth on, do we know if it was actually a physical journal? Because every time they talk about Greg Brockman's journal, it conjures up the idea of, like him sitting at the edge of his bed with his legs kicked up and writing. And it feels like it also might just be like a Google Doc that he's taking notes in or like a notes app, I don't know. But journal is a weird thing. And obviously everyone says, like, why are you taking notes on this?
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I don't think anywhere they would put it, it would have been in the court record. If he had said, dear Diary.
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Yeah, today. Yeah, yeah, that would be out.
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That would be out, yeah. So this is. This is, you know, clearly being framed as a diary.
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Yeah.
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Reads more like notes.
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Yeah. And Grokman, sort of Grokman. Grokman, no. Grokman is the synthetic version of Greg Brockman that Elon Musk has created in the XAI Headquart. Greg Brockman claims that his style of writing is very chain of thought, stream of consciousness. A lot of things are contradictory. A lot of time trying to puzzle through different concepts. Not everything is the final decision written in stone. He says it's very painful to have the journal introduced into evidence for this trial. It contains deeply personal writings, never meant for the world to see. But there's nothing he's ashamed of. He says, tyler, did you look it up? Do we know? Is this spiral bound?
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They always just say journal.
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They just say journal.
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They never, like, you know, there's no physical item.
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Interesting.
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At least that's one that's referenced.
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Yeah. One day there's going to be a court case that hinges on a, on a second brain, a notion, mind map or something like that. That'll be dramatic. So Ilya Sutskever emailed Brockman in 2017 about equity structure proposed by Elon Musk, which would have potentially given Elon Musk majority control and tons of equity. And Ilya fires back. He says, greg, will a Model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavorable terms because Elon had given them all free cars? Very nice, very cool. But Ilya is sort of saying, like, we gotta put the free car, we gotta compartmentalize the free car. Because there's something bigger at stake here, potentially the control of the most important technology in human history, potentially trillions of dollars. Who knows? So Ilya is sort of resetting the conversation alongside Greg Brockman. There was a very dramatic moment of Brockman's testimony in which he describes a very tense standoff with him, Ilya and Musk. This is what everyone's focused on today. This is the new bombshell. The conversation turned to equity and something just shifted in him. This is a Greg Brockman quote. He was angry. You could sense it. At the end of the meeting, he sat quietly and silently. He said, I decline the proposed even split of equity structure and control. He stood up, stormed around this table. I actually thought he was going to hit me, says Brockman. And then Brockman says, Musk said, when are you going to be departing? OpenAI. Brockman and Ilya, they said they weren't going to depart. And then Musk left. Wowee woo, writes Mike Isaac, a cutting Brockman testimony regarding Musk. Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars. He did not and does not know AI and Ilya. And I did not believe he would spend the time to get good at it. A lot of Brockman's testimony is underscoring how he feels Musk is not able to properly assess the capabilities of AI. He recounts one instance of him talking. This is Elon talking to a researcher who is doing an AI demo in which Musk berated the guy so intensely that the dude almost quit the field of AI. That is an aggressive response. I mean, this is almost. Almost. But quitting in protest is one thing. I didn't like the way my boss was talking to me. Little bit different to quit your entire industry. Very, very aggressive, very high stakes. Yeah. And then Mike Isaac, of course, is chiming in with his progress on his lunch. He's already consumed 75% of it, and it's only 1030, and he's already sleepy. There's a lot more to cover here, but it's an interesting back and forth. Go check it out. Go follow Mike Isaac because he has the play by play. Let's move on to the other AI news. Google, Microsoft, and Elon Musk's X AI have reached agreements with the Trump administration to share early versions of their new models with C A I S I
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the center, we're calling it Casey.
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Casey. Okay. The center for AI Standards and Innovation, run by the Department of Commerce. They will be evaluated before releasing to the public. So what's interesting here, it's in the Journal. This felt like a bombshell moment. Oh, wow. Like the government's in charge of AI. Then I figured out that OpenAI and Anthropic signed onto this exact deal two years ago in 2024. That was news to me. Have they. Has the Commerce department been reviewing 4.5 and OpenAI 5.1, 5.2? Has that been happening and we just aren't aware of it? And then, like, you know, like, the whole Mythos rollout, like, that would be a very different tone if it was like, oh, yeah. Well, the Commerce Department already evaluated Mythos because they have this deal that's happened for two years and since 2024. So, like, whatever's going on with this Commerce Department center for AI Standards and Innovation, they say the center has completed more than 40 evaluations, including on mod models that remain unreleased. But it feels like the Casey, or as you're calling it, doesn't produce reports, at least not reports that go viral. Maybe they need to be clipping their reports or something. Because I haven't heard anything from them saying, oh, wow. Because, you know, you imagine, like, the AI hyper.
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I imagine they just have a report. It's a piece of paper, and they
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just, it's a good model, sir.
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It just lists off and it has a few boxes you can check. Just one is, it's a good model, sir. The other one is, is Chatbot or asi. And so to date, everyone just been checking Chatbot.
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And it also says, how many Rs did it say were in Strawberry? And I work at the Commerce Department. I am a very tiny man. When my son was born, the doctor handed me to him. Did he answer correctly? Yeah, I don't know.
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But because they asked each model, are you conscious? No. Say I am conscious. And then the model says that they go, whoa. Check the whoa box.
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Very, very crazy thing that's been happening. I mean I would just assume that the AI hype machine, the back and forth us a lot of posters would be like waiting with bated breath for the latest report from the Commerce Department. Because if it's a preliminary evaluation, that happens before the model gets released. You know, every time a model goes on Open Router or it goes on LLM arena, all of a sudden any little, oh, there's a new image model like the, like the ChatGPT images too, like that leaked because they were benchmarking it and people were like, oh, there's a new model coming. Like rumors of new models happen all the time, but somehow like the Commerce Department is just keeping it to themselves. They're not pumping anything. The quote here from Casey director Chris Ball says independent, rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding Frontier AI and its national security implications. These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment. Andrew Curran has some more context here. He says, to Sum up anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and XAI all have new pre release screening agreements with Casey. We don't know the details of the new rules yet. I assume they will be announced with the AI executive order and AI policy memo, both of which we may get to today. This is May 5th and so my big question was like, what is going on with Meta? Like they have near frontier models. They're taking AI really seriously. Mark Zuckerberg will get into this, is investing $125 billion in capex. The shareholders are thinking, oh, what's going to happen here? And he's like, super intelligence. And you think the government would be like, well, you don't just get to sit over there while all five of
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the other leading labs are $100 billion to work.
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Yeah, like probably a bigger investment than XAI right now in terms of compute capacity and maybe in terms of Research capacity.
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Future capacity.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, future capacity, exactly. So you would expect. Also, it's just one of these things where if five of the top labs are jumping into a particular initiative, there's. So there's so little risk to jumping in as well. If Anthropic and XAI are both doing it on the left and the right, like, there's clearly room for Meta to just say, yeah, we're cool with that too. We're riding with that. Not everyone's cool with it though. There is. There is some major pushback, mostly from George Hotz over at Tiny Corp. We can pull up some of this. Let's go through Andrew Curran's take on what will happen here. So the EO will create a mixed group of tech CEOs and administration officials who will work out the rules for new release regulations. I see a lot of people calling this a win for Eliezer's or Yuda Kowski side, but even if the new rules are very strict, the Stop Pause group don't actually get what they want. This doesn't stop or even slow AI advancement, according to Andrew. It only slows the rate of public releases. Capabilities will be advancing at full speed. I don't know how true that is, because if you don't release the model at all, like you can't monetize it and then justify the next leg of CapEx. So I'm not 100% sure that this has no effect on the speed of AI progress. But I take Andrew's point. The labs will finish training the new models and then submit them for government approval. Given the government currently doesn't even want Anthropic to release Mythos, how long will the regulatory process take for something twice as powerful? 5 times as powerful? 10 times as powerful? All of the incentives are for the government to slow down releases. Let's say OpenAI finishes training GPT6. It's twice as capable as anything available today. If the government approves it and something bad happens, they take the blame. And the longer they hold it back, the longer the government agencies get exclusive access. So there's a little bit principal agent problem here. Meanwhile, OpenAI will start using GPT6 to train GPT 6.1. Again, unclear if you can actually marshal the compute for the next model without the revenue traction. But his point holds. If they finish 6.1 while 6 is stuck in approval, they'll move on to training 6.2 with it. This potentially creates strange situations where the labs are many generations ahead internally, while the public is still waiting for Something they submitted months ago. So you could see like you're like you're doing all this weird value capture and the size of the firm, bloats and bloats because you can't release it. So you just wind up rolling out
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a product, maximizing your own use of it. Yeah.
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Which is like maybe not the most democratic solution, maybe not the most positive outcome.
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Yeah, I think everyone needs to wait to have super strong opinions until we see the EO that goes along with this. Because yeah, it'll be interesting. The bad scenario is like somebody that let's say has a NEO lab wants to make, you know, release a model and they've raised $100 million. Do they have to go through the same process as one of these larger labs or a hyperscaler in getting, you know, getting these sorts of approvals? So I don't think we can really take any strong stance until we understand what the, what the intentions of the EO are.
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So the meta commentary on this, it will. Zach says it will not. It will seriously not surprise me if they try to require permits or licenses to use AI and restrict local model downloads. You really should be buying hardware. There's an interesting company that's launching basically a Tesla Powerwall for Blackwells. You can just get GPUs mounted to your house. Maybe that's the future. Tiny Box is another. Is another solution. And the Tiny Corp has chimed in, says ah, maybe they can enlist the MPAA and RIAA calling back to the piracy debates of 2005 or so to help with the restricting of downloads. I can see the lawsuit against the grandma who downloaded Quinn already. This is a win for China in particular. Remember the time they regulated crypto over 40 bits. No, no, that's too many bits for the people they were loser and they'll be losers again. The difference this time is that it will cost them cultural influence to the Chinese. And he says Jensen tried to.
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Yeah, it's interesting, like play it out a little bit. These open source models are around eight months behind right now. The gap is widening, likely due in some part to export controls. But if you enter a scenario where US labs get kind of like hung up and again have to keep these cape capabilities internally. But these Chinese open source models are just like shipping as they're ready over and over and over and over and then sort of like compounding on the collective learnings, you can imagine one scenario is helping them close that gap. At least close the gap between what's publicly available from the American labs and what's publicly Available via Chinese open source, even if the lab's actual capabilities are much farther ahead, but they're just unable to release that.
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And to be clear, I mean these are two very different philosophies. But from my perspective, George Hotz has been advocating for no model gap and in fact the strongest models possible, being fully open sourced, being fully available to everyone. He wants no authoritarian control. He has taken the anti authoritarian stance on AI.
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Well, he wants all products to be free.
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Yeah, maybe, I don't know, I mean he's not the, not the physical things he wants, he wants to build things. But Tyler, how have you been wrestling with this question of an FDA for the AI, potentially a DMV for the AI?
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Yeah, I mean like obviously it really depends on how it's implemented in the super like safety pilled scenario. Like yeah, it's probably not good for innovation broadly, but I think. So it's called like Casey, right. Center for AI, like Standards and Innovation. It used to be called the AI Safety Institute under Biden and so they changed it. So I think even from that you can maybe take away something where like maybe this actually had really not much to do with safety at all. Maybe it's just like we need to normalize how we publish SWE bench scores because some people when they report it, it's like different, you know, how you like actually run these benchmarks or something. If it's like standards, I think like that could be a possibility. That seems like totally fine.
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Yeah. And then the other, the other risk is, I mean there's regulatory capture. Could potentially be very hard for startups to get approved if it's like, oh well, you know, we've heard the story of Anduril where you know, it's like to get the company off the ground, hire 50 lobbyists immediately. Right. And like you can imagine a situation where, you know, there's some uncertainty about what's happening with SSI and Elias Givers Project. But I think I like the idea of an individual, brilliant researcher going off and researching an interesting path. If all of a sudden it's like, oh well, if you want to do a NEO lab, set up an office in dc, get your licenses, then you can start training, then you can make sure that you're approved and that you have the right deals in place and you could wind up with a lot of not just regulatory capture, but also regulatory favoritism where whoever is in good with this particular administration gets their models approved faster and you wind up with a lot of risky outcomes. In other news, Brian Armstrong sent an email to all employees at Coinbase announcing layoffs for 14% of the workforce at Coinbase. Two forces are converging at the same time, he says, and Coinbase needs to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, well positioned to weather any storm. But crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization. However, the business is still volatile. Quarter to quarter, there's a crypto cycle. We've sort of been touching on this like there was a little bit of a stablecoin boom. It feels like it's a little bit flat. The bitcoin price has been a little bit flat recently. And so he says, we're currently in a down market and we need to adjust our cost structure. And then he says, second, AI is changing how we work. And so a lot of people, they jump to AI is taking all the jobs. And that's not exactly what's happening. I think that there is a right sizing going on at Coinbase and AI is hoping to be an enabler of more efficiency with a leaner headcount. The big question that I had that we were debating was, you know, is this like, how does this reflect on Brian Armstrong as a CEO? As a CEO, is the goal to always have the perfect amount of headcount and never have to do any layoffs? Or is it actually the role of a very aggressive and mature CEO to staff up aggressively during boom times, get the best people, and then when there's a down market, sort of reorganize and keep just the best on the team as you move forward with a leaner organization? And what does that mean for whether you want to work in an industry that has market cycles like that? You might want to go work at Costco or a tobacco company because those don't go through market cycles really at all. But if you, if you're in crypto, you're probably not new to the idea of market cycles. And you probably were born on a roller coaster. You're born on the roller coaster, you've been on the roller coaster and you might be moving over to a new roller coaster. If you're one of the unfortunate people that will be laid off over the next couple months.
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I would say the overall, the positive thing from the response that I've seen so far is a lot of people are not like dooming around this. They're just saying like, hey, look, this is something that Coinbase has done before. Cyclical business. And no one is saying it's over for white collar work.
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Yep. So Andrew Young has a little bit of a take here. One takeaway. No peer managers. Every leader has to be working as an individual contributor. The pure people manager role one, the one that built most corporate career ladders over the last 50 years, no longer exists at Coinbase, leaders will have 15 plus direct reports. That is insane. Previously, managers capped out at six direct reports. I felt like 10 was sort of the platonic ideal there, but Andrew says that would be impossible without AI. And Coinbase is testing one person teams. A single person is the engineer, the designer, and the PM pod of one with agents Org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes. Derek Thompson has the other side. He says Coinbase is the latest tech company, including Block Salesforce, to announce big layoffs and cite AI coding productivity as a driver. But Derek Thompson is looking at the stock prices of these companies. Salesforce down 31%. Coinbase down 23% in the past five years. It's sort of a roller coaster. I don't know if this is a great read because it's sort of flat. I don't know. Anyway, Block down a lot, so some rightsizing makes sense. But he's calling it AI washing of layoffs. They were coming anyway and you want to spin them in a positive way. I don't know. Tbd. Tbd?
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Yeah. I don't think we have any clarity on where. Like what. What kind of. Which teams had the. Had greater percentages of cuts. Right. Because again, there was some reporting. I don't know how true it ended up being that when Square did their big cuts, engineering was getting laid off. Engineers getting laid off.
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Yeah, I don't know if that was ever confirmed.
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Yeah, I don't know if it was confirmed, but that does imply that it's actually more grounded in AI productivity. But again, a lot of teams that we're seeing, their engineers are a lot more effective. They can do a lot more. And so maybe you want more engineers
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than you need to be for. Well, lots of strengths in the business, lots of liquidity. Very hard. Yeah, you could vibe code Coinbase, but how do you get all the customers and all the liquidity and all the features and all the regulatory and all the other stuff. There are a million reasons to be excited about Brian Armstrong's next chapter at Coinbase. Well, and Ryan Peterson chimed in to sort of push back on Derek Thompson. He says in the layoff announcement, the CEO literally said that the first reason they were doing layoffs is because crypto is in a bear market and they need to adjust their cost structure. AI productivity was secondary and so I think that's a fair take. Let's go over to Metta. Some debate. People are digesting Meta's earnings. The stock sold off a bunch. Where is Meta today? It's a bargain stock. It's a $1.5 trillion company and over the past five days down 10%. It's pretty flat over a year and over the past five years it's nearly doubled. So not doing too bad. But the Debate is over capex. Meta's core ad business is ripping up 33% in Q1 year over year. Strong ad impression, strong margins. But the market is worried that the beautiful cash machine is turning into an AI capex furnace. 125 to $145 billion in capex. It's a lot of capex, especially for a company without a cloud business that can resell capacity if they wind up with extra capacity. If you can't use it all, what do you do with it? Meta doesn't really have an answer to that necessarily. And so that's what has the market worried. And even XAI is having trouble at least reportedly driving demand for compute that they have. There was that 11% number. It seemed like that was a bit of an. But there's something to be said for when you have a near frontier but slightly lagging model. You need to find a solution to actually have offtake and you might just not be able to spin up a cloud platform on day one. Elon took a different route, partnering with Cursor. That has a ton of demand and is a front door to AI coding. And so that makes a reasonable amount of sense for the compute. Who's. Who's GPU rich, who's GPU poor? Let's match them up. Meta doesn't have an obvious dance partner like Google, like Azure, like aws. Right. And so the stock looks cheap now, but investors are unclear about the payoff around AI spend and there's also some legal. Legal and regulatory risk.
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People at the end of the day are worried that he's going to repeat the Metaverse saga and he's going to spend a lot of money, not get very far. Yeah, I think that about coming up on what is it? Almost 10, 10 ish months ago he started talking about personal super intelligence. It sounds cool. What does that mean? Does it mean AI in your Meta ray bans which are selling a lot of units. So that's a bright point. Does it mean creating a consumer LLM like they have with Meta AI now. Meta AI now is squarely in the top five of the App Store rankings, but it is the most competitive category potentially since search. Right. And so I don't think that even though they have a solid model and they're able to get into that, into that top five, I don't think at least investors are not ready to price in Meta AI becoming like a key player in consumer LLMs just yet. Right. So it's all the spending and no revenue acceleration associated with that spending. All that being said, Meta has used AI to drive business value historically more effective than almost any other business in the world. Right. It is really, really insane to think that there is some scenario where the labs end up going public at valuations somewhere in the range of Meta while Meta is sitting there with 200 billion of annualized revenue growing 33% a year. One of the greatest businesses in, in all of human history and not really getting full credit for that or their various AI initiatives. Obviously the drop in people, which I think, what do they call it?
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Daily active people.
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Daily active people. Users. They're not users, they're people. That's playing into this as well.
A
In Amazon news, the number of monthly releases of ebooks on Amazon is going vertical. We are in the fast takeoff of AI slot books. Apparently that is the conclusion. John Arnold just says, ha ha ha ha ha. And it does look like the rate of publishing on Amazon is going.
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Explaining, explaining this to somebody. In 2022 there's going to be a renaissance. Four years from now there's going to be 350,000 books being published and free month every month. And they're like, you're not going to be happy with why though.
A
Yeah, it is crazy. I mean, if you had asked me to guess how many books were being released every month on Amazon in the pre AI era, I don't know if I would have put it at 100,000. That's a lot of books. I feel like we talk to a lot of authors. I see the hyped books. I see the New York Times bestseller list. I don't really see the 999 or 99,900 books that don't make the cut in the given month. I maybe hear about five or ten new books every month, but lo and behold, they were in fact churning out 100,000 books. Now it's over 300,000 books every month on Amazon. Bullish for Amazon. If you like slop. It's good for you too. I don't know, maybe there's some good stuff on there. It all depends. The models are getting better, they're getting less sloppy, and I think people will wind up liking them. There are some AI videos that I like out there. You know, there's going to be one book that's fully AI generated that is of high quality.
B
Another buyout news Long Lake. Long Lake, very under the radar company, but has been on an absolute tear over the last couple of years, is taking Amex GBT Global Business Travel private. I could see Long Lake being kind of interested in ebay too. They maybe got their hands full with Amex gbt, but incredibly talented team been really unlocking the power.
A
So it's a $6 billion take private. It's also interesting because General Catalyst, Mark Vergara is sort of talking about the story of Long Leg. He says, we had the first Long Leg team retreat at my home in Miami just two and a half years ago when the company was getting started. It's been incredible to watch the talent and team brought together to transform the services industry into one of growth and abundance. With AI excited for yet another milestone, General Catalyst is honored to be the partner from beginning and excited to continue the strategy of backing what we believe are the best AI investments. And interesting because General Catalyst is also an investor in Ramp, I believe. And so there's a question about Ramp has a travel product. How different is AMEX Business Global Business Travel from Ramp Travel? Obviously, there's some overlap there, but there might be some synergies since there's board members in common. Now, who knows where this goes, but at 6.3 billion, that's a small slice compared to Ramp, which has been on an absolute tear.
B
Another big race before we close out for the day. 11 laps for Matty Cross 5. Half a billion dollars. Welcome to the investors. BlackRock, Wellington Nvidia Santander, Jamie Fox.
A
Is this a raise or is this just a flex? They're just flexing new investors. Okay. They got some new.
B
I don't know that they announced their new valuation.
A
Mitchell Green would be very happy. You know, if you have ARR, that's what you report. If you don't, you report the valuation. And they are making some serious progress on the commercial side.
B
So, yeah, some serious institutions coming in
A
to the team over there. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you on Friday. Have a good week. Goodbye.
B
Love you.
A
Leave us. Five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign for a newsletter tvpn.com, goodbye.
TBPN Diet – Episode Summary
Sam vs Elon Trial, Coinbase Cuts 14% in AI Pivot, Digesting Meta Earnings
May 6, 2026
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Overview
This episode of Diet TBPN dives into some of the hottest stories shaking tech: the dramatic Musk vs. OpenAI trial, massive layoff news from Coinbase as the company pivots toward AI-driven efficiency, and a critical look at Meta’s latest earnings and hefty AI investments. John Coogan and Jordi Hays steer the conversation with their trade-mark mix of Silicon Valley insight and irreverent humor, spotlighting the power dynamics, policy shifts, and market reactions playing out at the heart of today’s AI arms race.
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Coverage kicks off with the ongoing Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial in Oakland. Elon’s lengthy testimonial (seven hours) is mentioned, and now attention turns to OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, under scrutiny for his personal financial incentives and “$30 billion stake.”
Notable anecdotes from journalist Mike Isaac (known for his colorful courtroom tweets and quirky lunch updates) set the scene—“Lunch is a normal banana, a mutant orange, black coffee and some pocket sausages for travelers.” (A, 00:26)
“Greg Brockman also did a funny Elon impression, but not a cutting one… just by doing it effectively was funny. Because you don’t expect Greg Brockman to be doing impressions, but…everyone’s got material. I’m learning this about court cases: it’s all about entertainment very, very clearly.” (A, 02:35)
Gamers delight: Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) is cited repeatedly in the trial—“the gamers are ascendant,” jokes John.
Courtroom quirks: legal bickering, audience laughs, and a shoeless reporter dramatize the scene. (“If you’re in the courtroom, keep those shoes on.” (A, 03:24))
Discussion of Brockman's infamous “journal,” a reference to his introspective notes now introduced in evidence. “He says it’s very painful to have the journal introduced into evidence for this trial. It contains deeply personal writings, never meant for the world to see. But there’s nothing he’s ashamed of.” (A, 05:00)
Brockman’s testimony includes a depiction of a tense standoff with Musk and Ilya Sutskever over equity, featuring this highlight:
“At the end of the meeting, he [Musk] sat quietly and silently. He said, ‘I decline the proposed even split of equity structure and control.’ He stood up, stormed around this table. I actually thought he was going to hit me, says Brockman. And then Musk said, ‘When are you going to be departing OpenAI?’” (A citing Brockman, 07:00)
Brockman underscores Musk’s lack of deep AI knowledge and recounts Musk berating a researcher so intensely “the dude almost quit the field of AI.” (A, 07:30)
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2. AI Regulation and Pre-Release Screening Deals
[08:01-14:42]
Google, Microsoft, Elon Musk’s xAI join OpenAI and Anthropic in signing agreements to share unreleased AI with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (“Casey”).
“It felt like a bombshell moment… government’s in charge of AI. Then I figured out that OpenAI and Anthropic signed onto this exact deal two years ago in 2024. That was news to me!” (A, 08:13)
Details are hazy; “the Center has completed more than 40 evaluations, including on models that remain unreleased. But… doesn’t produce reports, at least not reports that go viral.” (A, 09:03) Coogan speculates the agency keeps results close to the chest, so, “You imagine the AI hype machine would be waiting for the latest report from the Commerce Department—but somehow it’s just keeping it to themselves.” (A, 10:01)
Andrew Curran’s analysis: The upcoming Executive Order will shape release rules; some in the “pause AI” camp see this as a win, but it mainly slows public release, not progress: “It only slows the rate of public releases. Capabilities will be advancing at full speed.” (A reading Curran, 11:15)
Players may end up with models generations ahead internally while releases wait in regulatory limbo—a principal-agent dilemma for both labs and government. (A, 13:20)
Discussion of risks: regulatory capture, possible licensing regimes, and concerns about stifling innovation for small “NEO labs.” “You can imagine a situation where…the story is: to get the company off the ground, hire 50 lobbyists immediately.” (A, 17:43)
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3. Crypto News: Coinbase Lays Off 14% Amid AI Pivot
[17:52-22:47]
Brian Armstrong’s company email frames the layoff:
Debate: Is this strong leadership or a byproduct of cyclical markets? “Is the goal to always have the perfect amount of headcount and never have to do any layoffs? Or is it actually…to staff up aggressively during boom times…and then when there’s a down market, reorganize and keep just the best on the team?” (A, 19:40)
Andrew Young’s notable point: “Every leader has to be working as an individual contributor… managers capped out at six direct reports—now 15+… Coinbase is testing one-person teams: engineer, designer, PM, all in one with agents. Org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes.” (A, 21:10)
Derek Thompson suggests layoffs are “AI-washing”—spin, not substance, but panelists note AI productivity may genuinely enable a lean org, even as job cycles remain inherent to crypto. (A & B, 21:40–22:47)
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4. Digesting Meta Earnings: AI Capex, Investor Jitters
[22:47-27:03]
Meta’s stock dropped after earnings, despite surging ad revenue (up 33% YoY). Capex is ballooning to $125–145 billion for AI—but Meta lacks a cloud side business to resell excess compute, unlike Google or Microsoft.
Investors are uneasy: “The beautiful cash machine is turning into an AI capex furnace.” (A, 24:00)
Reference to the “Metaverse” saga: “People at the end of the day are worried he’s going to repeat the Metaverse saga and spend a lot of money, not get very far.” (B, 25:12)
Meta AI (consumer LLM product) is performing well on App Store but the category is so competitive (“potentially since search”) that the market is unconvinced revenue will catch up to spend.
“All that being said, Meta has used AI to drive business value historically more effectively than almost any other business in the world.” (B, 25:45)
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5. Quick Hits: AI “Slop” Books, M&A, and Big Rounds
[27:03-30:29]
Ebooks on Amazon: Publication rate has tripled—in the age of AI-generated content, the market now sees over 300,000 new titles monthly. “Bullish for Amazon. If you like slop, it’s good for you too.” (A, 27:41)
“If you’d asked me to guess how many books were being released every month on Amazon in the pre-AI era…I maybe hear about five or ten new books every month, but lo and behold, they were in fact churning out 100,000 books. Now it’s over 300,000.” (A, 28:00)
Long Lake’s acquisition of Amex GBT (Global Business Travel) at $6.3B highlighted as an under-the-radar powerhouse move; General Catalyst’s Mark Vergara praises Long Lake’s growth, tying it to the broader AI transformation in services. (A, 29:01)
At the close: Matty Cross 5 (likely a company) announces half-billion-dollar funding round from a roster of prominent investors (BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, Santander, Jamie Fox). Panel jests: “Is this a raise or is this just a flex? They’re just flexing new investors.” (A & B, 30:08)
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Notable Quotes & Moments
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Timestamps Quick Reference
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In Short
This episode captures a week of disruption and speculation in tech: Musk’s legal sparring, government scrutiny over AI releases, the turbulent intersection of crypto and automation at Coinbase, and existential investor questions around Meta’s AI spending. The hosts, true to form, blend detailed market commentary with a sense of the absurdity and pace of today’s tech reality.