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Welcome to the Tech Rewrite Home from Monday, November 3rd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today, well, another day, another OpenAI deal, but this is their big move to get in bed with aws. More monitoring of the moment prediction markets are having, is big tech's dominance of the stock market getting even more extreme, and more speculation about AI and podcasting. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech if you're looking for enterprise grade identity automation minus the enterprise grade baggage, aka having your users log on 500 times, Yeshid delivers advanced IAM automation without moving teams onto a legacy identity provider. Whether you use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or Okta, Yeshid integrates directly. No rebuilds or RIP and replaces are required. Yeshid helps IT and security teams reduce risk, not just tickets, and IT teams everywhere might have just breathed a collective sigh of relief. Every access, change, review and approval is tracked and exportable, helping security teams effortlessly demonstrate compliance with SOC2, ISO or HIPAA. IT and security teams can spot risk before it becomes a finding. Learn more@yeshid.com Techbrew that's y dashes hid.com Techbrew well, it's happened again. OpenAI has signed another big deal and the company they signed with is seeing a stock pop because of that. But notice what is interesting with this one. OpenAI has signed a $38 billion compute deal with Amazon, meaning they are partnering with AWS for the first time. Quoting CNBC. Under the agreement announced on Monday, OpenAI will immediately begin running workloads on AWS infrastructure, tapping hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's graphics processing units in the US with plans to expand capacity in the coming Amazon Stock climbed about 5% following the news. The first phase of the deal will use existing AWS data centers and Amazon will eventually build out additional infrastructure for OpenAI. It's completely separate capacity that we're putting down, said Dave Brown, vice president of compute and Machine Learning services at aws, in an interview. Some of that capacity is already available and OpenAI is making use of that until this year OpenAI had an exclusive cloud agreement with Microsoft, which first backed the company in 2019 and has invested a total of $13 billion. In January, Microsoft said it would no longer be the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and was moving to an arrangement where it would have right of first refusal for new requests. Last week, Microsoft's preferential status expired under its newly negotiated commercial terms with OpenAI, freeing the ChatGPT creator to partner more widely with the other hyperscalers. Even before that, OpenAI forged cloud deals with Oracle and Google, but AWS is by far the market leader. Scaling Frontier AI requires massive reliable comput, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in Monday's release. Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone. OpenAI will still be spending heavily, with Microsoft, reaffirming that commitment by saying last week that it will purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services for Amazon. The pact is significant both in the size and scale of the deal itself, and because the cloud giant has close ties to OpenAI rival Anthropic. Amazon has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic and is currently constructing an $11 billion data center campus in New Carlisle, Indiana that's designed exclusively for Anthropic workloads. The current agreement with OpenAI is explicitly for use of Nvidia chips, including two popular Blackwell models, but there's potential to incorporate additional silicon down the road. Amazon's custom built Trainium chip is being used by Anthropic in the new facility. We like Trainium because we're able to give customers something that gives them better price performance and honestly gives them, brown said, adding that he can't provide any details on anything we've done with OpenAI on Trainium. @ this point. The infrastructure will support both inference, such as powering ChatGPT's real time responses and training of next generation Frontier models. OpenAI can expand with AWS as needed over the next seven years, but no plans beyond 2026 have been finalized. End quote I continue to urge you not to sleep on the degree to which prediction markets are exploding. One angle of this is the degree to which they are taking over sports betting. Over the weekend, the FT had an analysis that suggests sports volumes on Calshi are approaching $1 billion a week, with open interest in sports contracts regularly above $100 million, significantly higher than other categories. Quote Meanwhile, its offshore rival Polymarket will soon launch in the US with a focus on sports. A person close to the company has said. And US President Donald Trump's own Truth Social, in partnership with trading platform Crypto.com is preparing to launch sports and politics markets as Truth Predict. At first, it was seen as a novelty. They're betting on elections, they're betting on which bird flies off the wire first, said U.S. representative Dina Titus, whose district includes Las Vegas. But when they moved pretty forcefully into sports betting, which went around all existing state regulations, it seemed to just catch on. In their early days, prediction markets were of primary interest to quantitative political scientists. Their recent surge in popularity, fueled by approvals from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has quickly turned them into multi billion dollar businesses. Kalshi is fielding offers from investors who would value the Exchange at about $10 billion, a person close to the company said, double the valuation it secured in early October and up from $2 billion in June. The company received investment from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz earlier this month. Polymarket is in talks with investors to raise money at a valuation between $12 and $15 billion, according to a person close to the company. It was valued between 9 and $10 billion in early October when Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest up to $2 billion. What these prediction markets have realized is that the news is a huge liquid asset class, said Matt Zhang, founder and managing partner at digital asset investment firm Hivemind Capital. Polymarket, Kalshi and their competitors are becoming marketplaces for almost anything, whether that's stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, headlines, code or sports, he added. Rather than offer its own fixed odds or point spreads like traditional sports books, prediction markets offer shares in binary outcomes, a team winning or losing, say. As participants trade these shares, prices and therefore implied odds fluctuate. Even traditional betting platforms are entering the prediction market business. DraftKings is acquiring Railbird, a CFTC licensed exchange, and will launch a platform called Draft King's Predictions. The expansion into sports contracts comes amid a wider explosion in gambling in the US on instruments from digital currencies and meme stocks to major leagues in sports, the wagering has raised doubts and questions about the integrity of games, with athletes facing bans and criminal charges. Yeah, integrity of games, but also the integrity of whatever this is. Brian Armstrong ended Coinbase's recent Q3 earnings call by saying certain words that Kalshee and polymarket users had wagered would be mentioned during the call, quoting Bloomberg. When Coinbase Global's quarterly earnings call wrapped up Thursday, its chief executive, Brian Armstrong, didn't finish with profit guidance or statements of confidence. He closed it out with a list Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain staking and web three. Those weren't random buzzwords. They were part of an $84,000 betting market. Across prediction market platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket. Users had wagered on which words would be spoken during the call, part of a niche category known as ment markets, where the outcome isn't tied to earnings, price moves or sports games, but to what people say in some public forum. With the final analyst question complete, several terms listed in contracts were still unsaid. Armstrong ticked them off one by one. I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, he said in his parting remarks. I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain staking and web3 to make sure we get those in. Before the end of the call, the exchange's CEO had just moved a market, even if only a small one. Mention markets are one of the more curious byproducts of the broader prediction market boom, but also one of the more controversial. Platforms like Kalshi, which is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Polymarket, which is in the process of returning to the US Market, let users wager on the outcomes of real world events. That can mean elections, policy decisions or sports, but also increasingly, corporate rituals and even common jargon. In total, about $84,000 had been bet on whether a Coinbase executive would certain words, including stablecoin, institution and margin, according to data from the company's websites. With several terms still unsaid by the final minutes, Armstrong's insertions made those contracts pay out. Traders watching the markets saw the odds shift in real time after the call. Armstrong said on social media that he decided to do it spontaneously after a staff member put a link to the betting pool in Coinbase's internal chat. Lol, this was fun, he posted on X. Happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link into the chat. End quote. But it wasn't just fun. It showed in blunt fashion how easily many prediction markets, supposedly tools for collective intelligence, can be steered by the very people they're meant to observe. End quote Quoting beaniemaxi on X Not sure why people are celebrating Brian Armstrong making a mockery of the prediction markets feels bearish for those platforms if the subjects can be easily swayed or influenced with real money on the line. End quote. Is the daily commute making your muscles feel stiff? Well, there could be a natural way to help relieve that discomfort. 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A messy or missing cap table might not just slow you down, it could cost you your next fundraising round. VCs are flooded with pitches and if your equity is confusing or missing, they'll move on fast. Fidelity Private Shares gives founders the structure and simplicity to focus on what actually building your company. If you stay investor ready, you don't have to get investor ready. Check out fidelityprivateshares.com techbrew to learn more. That's fidelityprivateshares.com TechBrew Remember how last week Microsoft had to claim a loss in a subset of their earnings because of their investment in OpenAI? And that's how we can guess how much OpenAI lost last quarter? Well, this is like that, but sort of in the reverse. In its Q3 earnings, Alphabet said last week its profits included net gains on equity securities of $10.7 billion in part from a private company, which sources say is anthropic. Quoting Bloomberg, Alphabet and Amazon were rewarded by investors for reporting better than expected third quarter profits. @ both companies, earnings were boosted by the increased value of their stakes in Anthropic. Pbc, maker of the popular Claude chatbot. Alphabet, said profit included net gains on equity securities of $10.7 billion, in part from a private company. That company is anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter who decline to be named discussing nonpublic information. Meanwhile, Amazon's third quarter profit climbed 38%, helped by a $9.5 billion pre tax gain from its investment in Anthropic. The higher value was reflected in Amazon's non operating income for the period, the company said in its Thursday earnings report. In September, Anthropic closed a deal to raise $13 billion from investors in a funding round that nearly tripled its valuation to $183 billion. Companies are required to update the value of to reflect changes in market price per share, even if they haven't made money off their bet directly yet. This isn't the first time Alphabet's profit has been lifted by a change in investment values. In April, the company said its first quarter earnings were boosted by $8 billion in unrealized gains from an investment in a private company. That time it was Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, Bloomberg reported. Microsoft, meanwhile, said in reporting its own quarterly earnings this week that its net income was reduced by $3.1 billion to account for losses suffered by OpenAI. The softW has backed the ChatGPT maker with $13.75 billion and holds a 27% stake. End Quote from the Is tech holding up the entire economy? File the FT this weekend had a look at how Big Tech's dominance of the S&P 500 is, if anything, becoming more extreme. The eight biggest tech stocks have accounted for 60% of the gains since the market bottomed in April of this year. US stocks rose to their 36th record high of the year on Tuesday afternoon, but portfolio manager Jacob Sonnenberg was in no mood to celebrate. Propelled by a handful of large Silicon Valley technology companies tied to the artificial intelligence boom, The S&P 500 ended the session in the green. But this was despite the fact that that 397 stocks lost ground in 35 years. The blue chip index has never posted a gain on a day when so many of its constituents have sold off, according to the Bespoke investment Group. I understand Nvidia is spitting out cash, I get it. But it's still deeply concerning how concentrated this market is becoming, says Sonnenberg, who focuses on tech stocks for California investment group Irving Investors. If you're not in one of about 10 names, it'd be insanely challenging to make money. In a week when Nvidia became the world's first $5 trillion company, the dominance of a handful of big tech companies is becoming even more pronounced. Eight of the 10 biggest stocks in the S&P 500 are tech stocks. Those eight companies account for 36% of the entire US market's value, 60% of the gains in the index since the market bottomed in April, and almost 80% of the S&P 500's net income growth in the last year, according to Nomura analysts. The S&P 500's roughly 2.4% rally in the five sessions up to and including Wednesday was almost entirely driven by just three stocks Alphabet, Broadcom and Nvidia. In the US we're clearly in a momentum driven market being led by a handful of technology companies trading at transparently dubious valuations, says Stephen Gray, chief investment officer at Gray Value Management. With the S&P 500 up about 16% this year, investors who simply closed their eyes and went along for the ride have done well, he adds. A retail investor might think that putting funds into the MSCI All World Index would give them a diverse portfolio. But that index, which comprises over 2000 companies from more than 40 markets, currently has almost a quarter of its capitalization and just eight US Tech groups. Finally today, the New York Times looks at how some podcasters are embracing AI, voice clones from Elevenlabs and other startups aiming to augment, translate episodes, or even replace in studio performances. Using the same technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney, Elevenlabs and similar services allow users to create lifelike voices from scratch, choose from a library of prefabricated voices, or replicate their own voice with near note perfect strict accuracy. The latter function has stirred both angst and fascination in the podcast host community. A podcaster's voice is also a signature. A fire around which people gather, is a replica and aid with the potential to help its owner work faster, with less overhead and in foreign languages, or a betrayal of loyal listeners. I'm very grateful that people feel connected to my voice and I'm not interested in farming that out, said Phoebe Judge, the host of Criminal and this is love. When we get to a time when podcasters are primarily voiced by AI, I hope I'm no longer in this business, end quote. But interviews with more than a dozen people across the industry, including hosts, advertisers, software developers and publishers, indicated that voice clones are on the rise. Host replicas are already being used to augment or even replace in studio performances and to translate episodes into other languages. This spring, Steven Bartlett, host of the popular business podcast Diary of a CEO, started a spin off show hosted by his voice clone. Clone read advertisements are already in development. Podcast editing frequently involves re recording segments because of errors or revisions, which can mean multiple visits to a studio. Several hosts who are generally skeptical of voice cloning, conceded that in such cases, a clone could be useful. Let's say I'm nowhere near a studio where I can actually record something and someone says, hey, we need to fix this using an AI program, says Glenn Washington, the host of Snap Judgment. I would think that would be a legitimate use. Many hosts approved of and were even enthusiastic about using an AI clone to translate themselves into other languages, as the podcaster Lex Friedman did for a recent interview with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. Typically, the few podcasts that are available in multiple languages have employed human translators who speak in their own voices. End quote. Again, I'll tell you straight up, I have no intention of using AI for my voice on this show. Though I do wonder, because, you know, the plan is to do a week in Europe with the family again later this spring. Would you all allow me to do that week with my AI voice so I wouldn't have to lug my whole recording rig with me? I don't know. We have time to think about that. But what I have been thinking about doing is using AI to do some new episodes of that 80s 90s history podcasts that I did last year. I don't really have time to record those at the moment, but I did come up with a list of like 200 topics that I want to do for that someday. So what if I did the research, wrote up some shows, had the AI voice do them, and just threw those up on a podcast feed? The argument would be, again, this would be me being, you know, curatorial. This would be my vision. This would be my research. This would allow me to explore some of the topics I wanted to get to. It would be like those Simpsons episodes I did about the Simpsons seasons. It would be as much entertainment and learning for me as it would be for anyone else. And as long as I was totally upfront with the disclosures that I used AI for the Voice, then I think that would be acceptable. Like, there's an episode on Bo Jackson that I've been dying to do because I read a biography of him that I love. So maybe next time I have a a spare Saturday afternoon, I just throw that together again for my entertainment as much as anyone's. Anyway, we'll see no AI on this show and no AI on the Internet History podcast, which, by the way, check your feed. The latest episode is out. It's my conversation with John Borthwick of Beta Works. Check that out. Talk to you tomorrow.