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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Monday, July 7, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today catching you up on the great Zuckerberg AI recruitment drive, cluing you in on the great data center build out gold rush that is again, all about AI. TikTok is about to force everybody to use a new version of their app and are the unicorns coming back? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech, so obviously I have some things to catch you up on. First up, Daniel Gross officially left Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup he co founded with Ilya Siskever, to join Meta's new superintelligence lab and work on AI products. In fact, I was very wrong about something last week. It turns out quite a few people have taken up Mark Zuckerberg's offers of the money cannon to work on AI at Meta. First link in the show notes is to a semaphore story that has a list of all of the people that we know of that have signed up so far. I'm not going to just read you a list of names, but like the creators of O3 and O3 mini and the recent image generation models at OpenAI, they're on there. The pre training tech lead for Gemini is in there. Meta's new hires offer a glimpse into its nascent Superintelligence unit aimed at making the social media company's AI capabilities more competitive with industry leaders. The new team holds a wide gamut of skill sets with some specific expertise in image generation, perception, synthetic data and reasoning. The resumes suggest Meta is working on the kind of voice and image supported multimodal models with reasoning capabilities to more directly take on OpenAI's suite of products. The hiring of Pysun, who developed two generations of Waymo's perception models, is particularly interesting given Meta's investments in augmented reality headsets and glasses. It points to a continued integration of AI into devices in which Meta could carve out a niche. As OpenAI begins begins its partnership with Jony, I've and Apple investigates integrating an outside AI model into Siri, OpenAI supplied the largest share of talent, followed by Google and its DeepMind unit.
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Brian McCullough
So if last week my question was is Meta looking desperate or is AI looking scared? I guess I'm back to the OpenAI being scared side of the equation and quoting MG Siegler on Spyglass, who is mentioning a Zuckerberg memo announcing the hires quote, by my count that's seven people from OpenAI, two from Google, one from Anthropic and one from Sesame. That's a lot from OpenAI. Now you see why they were sending around internal notes that sound quite shaken and stirred. Someone has broken into our home. I can't speak directly to the quality of this team that's above my pay grade clearly, but it certainly seems more impactful than the downplaying of the poaching a couple weeks back by Sam Altman. It may or may not be their best people, but it's a lot. No question. Money wins and all that. Meta's previous model work with Llama does get one paragraph seven paragraphs into the memo Quote I'm excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2. These models power Meta AI, which is used by more than 1 billion monthly actives across our apps and an increasing number of agents across Meta that help improve our products and technology. We're committed to continuing to build out these models, end quote Leading with I'm excited. Probably says all you need to know there, but just in case the billions now being spent to play catch up after the billions spent on Llama drills home the point Llama, at least as we previously knew it, is yesterday's AI news within Meta. Quoting from the memo again in parallel, we're going to start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small, talent dense effort. We're still forming this group and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well. End quote One phrase never mentioned once in the entire memo. Open source. Interesting. Also not mentioned in the memo Yann Lecun. Never one to be quiet about the current state of AI. He's been awfully restrained in the past couple of weeks as all of this has swirled around. On the other hand, while he's been against all the talk about achieving AGI through LLMs, he's apparently on board with asi. Still, it seems weird not to even mention your chief AI scientist when you just hired a chief AI officer.
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Brian McCullough
Core Weave says it has agreed to acquire Bitcoin miner Core scientific in a $9 billion all stock deal set to close in Q4 2025 to expand its AI data center capacity. Quoting Bloomberg Core Scientific has been one of the top bitcoin mining companies that build large scale data centers and use energy intensive computers to mint the original cryptocurrency the miner went bankrupt amid a plunge in digital assets, but emerged out of it in January of last year after Bitcoin saw a sharp rebound and started the pivot to AI. The company became one of the main data center infrastructure providers for CoreWeave, leveraging some of its existing data center capacities and access to large amounts of power. Coreweave made a prior advance last year when it offered to buy Core scientific for about $1 billion. At the time, the company has also announced a series of 12 year contracts under which Core Scientific will deliver about 200 megawatts of infrastructure to host CoreWeave's operations. Shares of Core Scientific have soared on its contracts with the AI firm as well as CoreWeave's attempt to acquire the miner. The stock is up 110% since Bloomberg reported in June 2024 that CoreWeave made the earlier billion dollar offer. The deal will give CoreWeave access to about 1.3 gigawatts of power from Core Scientific's data center fleet. A gigawatt is akin to the capacity from one nuclear reactor and can provide electricity to roughly 750,000 houses. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI struck an agreement for 4.5 gigawatts worth of data center capacity, end quote. Now I'll say again that it seems to me the people with money seem to feel that we are nowhere near the end of demand for AI capacity. Now I know the definition of a bubble popping is that everybody thinks the horizon is endless and everything is going to the moon until the very moment that everyone doesn't, all at the same time. That could still happen, but I mean as of right now it's not just tech. This is rising. A lot of boats Grok this from the FT quote. US Industrial companies are pivoting into the data center market to boost growth, seeking a share of the hundreds of billions of dollars flooding into the sector as part of the artificial intelligence boom. Gates Industrial and Generac are part of a coterie of publicly listed companies that are increasing efforts to build and sell specialist equipment, which includes backup power generators and cooling pumps designed for so called hyperscalers such as Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft. Honeywell, a $153 billion North Carolina based industrial giant that produces products from airplane engines to warehouse robots, is also trying to tap the fast growing data center market with its cooling solutions. We're seeing supersonic growth on the back of AI and in general over the past three the price that you can get from the data center customer has been stronger than the price elsewhere, said Chris Snyder and analyst at Morgan Stanley. It comes after other US listed groups such as Caterpillar, Cummins and Johnson Controls have capitalized on the data center boom at a time when economic uncertainty and trade barriers erected under US President Donald Trump have weighed on spending by customers in manufacturing and the commercial real estate market. Spending on data centers has proven resilient, with analysts anticipating that more than $400 billion will be spent on the build out of the infrastructure in the current FISC year, according to Gartner. Hyperscalers make up more than three quarters of this expenditure, with spending predicted to grow next year. Vimal Kapoor, Honeywell's chief executive, told investors during a recent earnings call the company was focused on pivoting into higher growth verticals such as data centers. Those segments are growing regardless of the current conditions, he said. Honeywell has in the past 18 months started to focus on providing controls for hybrid cooling systems to data centers and has experienced double digit growth in sales of their new hybrid controller for data centers and similar applications. Colorado based Gates Industrial, a manufacturer of equipment for the heavy duty trucking industry, has in the past year started to push into the market, designing pipes and pumps used to circulate coolant around server racks, a key component at a time when Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell chips for AI model training and applications mandate liquid cooling.
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- [08:58]
Brian McCullough
The Information says that TikTok plans to launch a new app version on September 5, ahead of the US's September 17 divest or ban enforcement deadline. Apparently, all US users will be required to switch to this new app. The company has developed a plan to launch the new TikTok app, known internally as M2, to US app stores on September 5, according to two people familiar with the knowledge of the matter. The existing TikTok app is known internally as M. Under the plan, TikTok users will eventually have to download the new app to be able to continue using the service. Although the existing app will work until March of next year, the effort to migrate the app's 170 million US users to a new app comes as the Trump administration says it is getting close to an agreement for the sale of TikTok's US operations, allowing the app to continue operating in the US. Under that deal, a consortium of non Chinese investors, including Oracle, is expected to buy TikTok's US business, while the app's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is expected to retain a minority stake. The Chinese government has to approve any deal, however, which remains the biggest hurdle. It's highly unusual for an app with a large following to ask users to download a separate new app, and the move would risk losing users. But a new TikTok app could potentially help address some of the data security concerns about the app. One of the people with knowledge of the situation said it couldn't be learned whether building a new version of TikTok for US users was something the Trump administration or the investors involved in the deal had explicitly required. The next deadline for the US to enforce the ban law is September 17, less than two weeks after the new TikTok app is set to launch. On the day of the anticipated Launch, the existing TikTok app will be removed from the app stores and users will be directed to the new version, though it's unclear how that nudge will be communicated. The existing app is slated to be shut down in the US in March 2026, though timelines could change. One of the people with knowledge of the situation said the project to build a new version of TikTok is a massive engineering undertaking, and getting all of TikTok's users in the US to move over to a new app, bringing their profiles with them could pose technical issues in practice, the person said. While no deal to sell TikTok has been made official yet, Trump has suggested that an announcement is imminent. Late Friday, he told reporters on Air Force One that the US Was close to a deal for a group to buy TikTok's US operations and that the administration would start talking to Chinese authorities in the next week, a person familiar with the matter said. The group of investors involved in the deal has been finalizing the legal and financial details with ByteDance in recent months, and the group expects it will be announced when the Chinese government approves the sale, though it's not clear when that will happen. An earlier plan to announce the deal in April was thrown off after Trump imposed steep tariffs on China.
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Brian McCullough
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Brian McCullough
Finally today, from the Checking in on the Health of the Silicon Valley Ecosystem file, it seems like unicorns might be cautiously back. An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data reveals that in 2025 so far, more than 36 tech startups hit greater than a $1 billion valuation, thereby becoming unicorns, including seven in June, six in May and four in April. Quoting TechCrunch While most are AI related, a surprising number are focused in other industries like satellite space companies like Orbital and blockchain based trading site Kalshi. Actually I'm going to quote from a few of the non obvious ones like I'm not going to mention Mira Moradi's Thinking Machines, which was like the largest seed deal in history if you'll recall, not focusing on some of the AI ones because look at this, SaaS is coming back. Even consumer plays are coming back. Teamworks, this sports software company last raised a $247 million Series F, valuing the company at $1.25 billion. According to PitchBook, the company founded in 2006 has raised more than 400 million DOL in funding to date from investors including Seaport Capital and general catalyst. Gecko 1.62 billion this company makes data gathering robotics that crawl, climb, swim and fly. Founded in 2013, the company last raised a $121 million Series D, valuing the company at $1.6 billion, according to PitchBook. Kalshi $2 billion the popular prediction markets company founded in 2018 last raised and $185 million Series C valuing the company at $2 billion, according to PitchBook. The company has raised more than $290 million in funding to date. Olipop $2 billion this popular probiotic soda company last raised a $137.9 million Series C at a $1.96 billion valuation. It was founded in 2018 and has raised $243 million to date. $1 billion this restaurant marketing software company founded in 2018 last raised a $120 million Series C, valuing the company at $one billion per PitchBook. The Bot Company $2 billion this robo a $150 million early stage round valuing it at $2 billion, according to pitchbook. The company, which was founded in 2024, has raised $300 million to date in funding.
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Brian McCullough
Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.