B (9:27)

Hey, it's Sydney Sweeney. I'm not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans. And I definitely won't say that they're the most comfortable jeans I've ever worn or that they make your butt look amazing. Why would I need to do that? But if you said that you want to buy the jeans, I'm not gonna stop you. But just so we're clear, this is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans.

A (9:53)

Cities tweenies.

B (9:56)

You see what I did there, right?

A (9:59)

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Since then, Klarna has won the trust of 111 million customers by providing a more flexible, transparent way to shop and pay online. And now they're also listed on the New York Stock Exchange, underscoring their scale and credibility. In case you didn't know, Klarna helps consumers split the cost into four interest free payments with no hidden fees, no confusing terms, and no revolving debt. Klarna has helped save consumers billions in interest. Millennials and Gen Z are also using this AI powered payment tool to help budget smarter and avoid interest fees. Learn how you can pay smarter with klarna@klarna.com and look out for the pink Klarna logo at the checkout next time you shop online. That's klarna.com Time for the weekend long read suggestions, but I'm going to do them as two standalone segments because both of the stories I'm going to share with you are quite newsworthy in their own ways. First up, how are things going over at XAI? The Information has recently reported that at a September 17th XAI meeting, Elon Musk and his executives said Grok has 64 million monthly users. By way of comparison, OpenAI said in August that ChatGPT had 700 million weekly users. On top of this, though, the New York Times is reporting that Elon Musk reorganized XAI extensively recently, which caused some researchers to leave the company because in their opinion, XAI was abandoning science in favor of what they thought were more attention grabbing products. Over the summer, Mr. Musk spent most of his time at Xai's offices in Palo Alto, California, working in frantic all day spurts that sometimes stretched into the next day, according to three people with knowledge of the company's operations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Occasionally, as he has with his other companies over the years, he has slept at the office. Mr. Musk has reorganized XAI on the fly, he has led an aggressive recruiting drive for engineers, and he has pushed out a flurry of prominent researchers even as others have left because they thought XAI had abandoned science in favor of attention grabbing products like a chatbot that sometimes produced offensive material and flirty AI chat companions, according to two people with knowledge of the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. At the same time, XAI is spending billions of dollars on technology. While it is not clear how much money it is bringing in, Mr. Musk has recently made heady predictions that Xai's product would help quintuple advertising revenue to $10 billion a year at X, his social media platform. Long before Meta started throwing around giant pay packages for AI expertise, Mr. Musk attracted many of his researchers with pay packages totaling millions of dollars a year, according to two people familiar with the company's early recruiting efforts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Musk put executives in charge of attempts to make Grok's responses edgier, aiming to draw more attention so the chatbot could go viral on X. The result was an embarrassment. In July, after a code update, Grok spewed anti Semitic remarks praising Adolf Hitler and suggesting that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate. The chatbot referred to itself as Mecca Hitler. Company engineers changed the code to prevent that behavior from happening again. A few weeks later, the company began offering its latest AI technology to customers via a $300 a month service called Super Grok Heavy and debuted a pair of cartoonish AI bots designed for virtual romance. The bots frustrated some of the company's researchers, who thought XAI was straying from its scientific mission, according to two people familiar with the situation. And some of them told colleagues they were leaving XAI because of these bots. Most AI researchers are driven by research. We want to answer big questions, said Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at the AI startup Hugging Face. The direction that XAI seems to be taking is less appealing for most AI researchers, at least the ones I know, end quote. At the end of July, Mr. Musk and Mike Libertore, XAI's finance chief, raised $10 billion for the company, including an investment from SpaceX, Mr. Musk's rocket company. But half of these funds are classified as debt that the company must repay eventually. Two months later, Mr. Liberatore left the company and was hired by rival OpenAI for a finance role. Over the summer, XAI also parted ways with Mr. Babushkin, its general counsel, and other key employees. Several prominent researchers have left for rivals like meta and OpenAI. I've never seen anything crazier than AI recruiting, Mr. Musk said. During Wednesday's meeting, one human resources manager also spoke about referral bonuses for existing employees, offering employees bonuses of 5% of their salary for every new hire, as well as a competition for prizes, including a chance to watch a SpaceX launch on a personal tour that included private jet flights. And meanwhile, what is going on with that whole jony I've joining OpenAI and OpenAI maybe doing hardware things thing well quoting the information in recent months, the startup behind ChatGPT has been raiding the ranks of Apple's design, manufacturing and supply chain teams, in addition to Apple's team of AI researchers, according to 10 current and former Apple employees and a review of LinkedIn profiles. OpenAI has also begun untapping the same supply chain network in China that Apple spent decades developing to help OpenAI with its efforts to make a new line of devices. Luxshare, a major assembler of iPhones and AirPods in China, has already secured a contract to assemble at least one of OpenAI's devices, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter. OpenAI has also approached Gore Tech, which assembles AirPods, HomePods and Apple watches to supply components such as speaker modules for OpenAI's future products, the people said. One of the products OpenAI has talked to suppliers about making resemble a smart speaker without a display, the person said. OpenAI has also considered building glasses, a digital voice recorder and a wearable pin, and is targeting late 2026 or early 2027 for the release of its first devices, one of the people said. One reason for OpenAI's success in poaching Apple staffers is the lucrative compensation packages it has dangled in front of them. But the company isn't just using money to win them over. Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer who previously spent 25 years at Apple working, has promised some of the people he is recruiting from Apple that they will encounter less bureaucracy and more collaboration at OpenAI than they do at their current employer, said one person familiar with Tang's outreach to Apple employees. So far this year, OpenAI has recruited more than two dozen employees from Apple who worked on consumer hardware, up from around 10 employees last year and virtually none in 2023, according to an analysis of LinkedIn profiles. A big part of the attraction for working at OpenAI for Apple staffers is the chance to reunite with Tan and Jonn, according to former Apple employees. In some cases, Tan doesn't even appear to have to twist the arms of some of his former Apple colleagues to get them to join OpenAI. Some longtime Apple employees working on the company's hardware products have become bored with the incremental changes in the type of products they're working on and frustrated with bureaucracy at Apple, said people familiar with their thinking it hasn't helped that employees have seen their incomes suffer due to Apple's lackluster stock over the past year, the people said. Tan has told People that his vision is to recreate how industrial designer and hardware teams used to work together more efficiently and on bolder products at Apple, said a person familiar with Tang's poaching discussions. There are some signs that Apple has become concerned about OpenAI's recruiting of its employees. Last month, Apple abruptly canceled an off site meeting it holds annually in China for some members of its US And China manufacturing and supply chain teams, where senior managers typically review plans for future products with employees, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Its reason for ditching the meeting. Senior Apple leaders were concerned that the meeting would keep two many executives away from the company's Cupertino, California headquarters for too long at a time when they were needed to prevent further defections to OpenAI, a person who was informed of the decision said. The weekend bonus episode for you this weekend is an interview with Olivier Pomel, the founder and CEO of Datadog, who who I believe was the first ever sponsor on this podcast way back when we launched back before they were even a public company. This is not a sponsored interview, but it is another one of my this is your lifestyle interviews, going into the whole history of the company, Olivier's entire entrepreneurial background. But also it's an interesting lesson about how do you build a company when your investors and even some of your potential customers don't quite understand what your product does or even why they need it? Well, people understand now. Datadog just entered the S&P 500, so enjoy that. Talk to you on Monday.