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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Friday, September 5th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today from the this wasn't on my bingo card file. OpenAI has launched a sort of job board why Broadcom might become Nvidia's big rival. Is AI image generation about to have its Napster moment and in the long read suggestions, a deep dive state of the job market in tech. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech Foreign did not see this one coming. OpenAI plans to launch a jobs platform in 2026 to match employers to candidates with AI skills and also a certification program for teaching AI, which should launch in the coming months. Quoting Bloomberg OpenAI is working with multiple organizations on the program, including Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S. openAI said it plans to certify 10 million Americans by 2030. The company unveiled the jobs initiative Thursday in conjunction with a White House task force meeting on artificial intelligence and education hosted by first lady Melania Trump. Tech industry leaders, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Alphabet Sundar Pichai attended the event. Altman is also expected to meet with senior White House officials later in the day, the company said. We believe fundamentally that AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any technology in history, but it will also be disruptive, said Fiji Simo, the chief executive officer of applications at OpenAI and the former head of Instacart. While we can't eliminate the disruption, we can certainly help more people become fluent in AI and connect them with companies that need their skills, end quote. For the jobs platform, OpenAI plans to use AI to help match local governments and companies of all sizes with potential candidates. The service would put these the AI developer in closer competition with companies like LinkedIn, owned by OpenAI backer Microsoft. I don't envision it as just a simple job posting, said Simo, who previously worked as an executive at Meta overseeing the main Facebook application. I envision it more as a candidate being able to talk about what they can offer and demonstrate that with a certification, and then us being able to match them with companies that have similar needs using AI. OpenAI is working closely with Walmart to develop the certification program, details of which are being ironed out. Certifications will be available for free to Walmart's roughly 1.6 million store and corporate employees in the US and vary by roles, but may come with a fee for other companies in the future. As companies race to incorporate AI, there have been mounting concerns that the technology may replace entire categories of jobs. A recent study by Stanford University researchers found that over the last three years, employment has dropped 13% for people who are just starting out in fields determined to be the most exposed to AI, such as accountants, developers and administrative assistants. We don't want to pretend that we know how it's going to play out, simo said. Instead, what we want to do is have solutions for every kind of worker to be able to adapt to this new world. Simo noted there was a time when people thought Excel spreadsheets would replace accountants. Instead, the software ended up assisting people in those roles, she said. Likewise, OpenAI highlighted online pickup and delivery roles that didn't exist a decade ago and now make up a big chunk of Walmart's current workforce. At the same time, we want to acknowledge that that there are some categories of jobs that might be deeply disrupted, cmos said. For those, what we want to offer is all of the ways to really learn a new set of skills, end quote. This is actually a bit of a hot space, this AI job search thing. The information says that AI contractor marketplace Mercour has received investment offers valuing it as high as $10 billion just six months after raising $100 million at a 2 billion dollar valuation. Though I do want to caveat that a bit. Merkor is a specific sort of jobs marketplace for finding experts to label data for AI training. Sort of like what scale AI does. But still, the point stands. Now we all know that AI has made Nvidia the biggest company in all the land. But you know who else has been writing AI Wave to great success? Broadcom. Broadcom is approaching a market cap of one trillion and a half dollars. I believe it was just a few months ago that they passed a trillion dollars in market cap. Their stock jumped 10% just this morning, at least at the time of this recording after a good earnings report quoting Bloomberg, CEO Hak Tan had previously said that AI revenue for 2026 would show growth similar to the current year, a rate of 50 to 60%. Now, with a new customer that he said has immediate and pretty substantial demand, the rate will accelerate in a way that will be fairly material, tan said. We now expect the outlook for fiscal 2026 AI revenue to improve significantly from what we had indicated last quarter, he said. End quote. Gee, who could that new customer be? Well, sources say it is OpenAI, who is set to produce an AI chip co designed with Broadcom to ship in 2026 and has committed $10 billion. The chip will only be used internally at OpenAI, Broadcom's chief executive Huck Tan on Thursday referred to a mystery new customer committing to $10 billion in orders. OpenAI's move follows the strategy of tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Meta, which have designed their own specialized chips to run AI workloads. The industry has seen huge demand for the computing power to train and run AI models. OpenAI plan to put the chip to use internally, according to one person close to the project, rather than make them available to external customers. Last, it began an initial collaboration with Broadcom, according to reports at the time. But the timeline for mass production of a successful chip design had previously been unclear. On a call with analysts, Tan announced that Broadcom had secured a fourth major customer for its custom AI chip business as it reported earnings that topped Wall street estimates. Broadcom does not disclose the names of those customers, but people familiar with the matter confirmed OpenAI was the new client. Broadcom and OpenAI declined to comment. Tan said the deal had lifted the company's growth prospects by bringing immediate and fairly substantial demand shipping chips for that customer pretty strongly from next year. The prospect that custom AI chips will take a growing share of the booming AI infrastructure market has helped propel Broadcom's shares more than 30% higher this year. They rallied almost 9% in pre market trading in New York on Friday. HSBC analysts have recently noted that they expect to see a much higher growth rate from Broadcom's custom CH business compared with Nvidia's chip business in 2026. Nvidia continues to dominate the AI hardware space, with the big tech hyperscalers still representing a significant share of its customer base. But its growth has slowed relative to the astronomical figures it saw at the start of the AI investment boom, end quote. So I guess the story here is that the rest of the industry is finally coming for Nvidia's fat margins. Your margin is my opportunity. As they say, capitalism is a hell of a thing. Warner Bros. Discovery has filed a copyright lawsuit that accuses Midjourney of using its content to train AI and thereby letting users generate images of characters like Superman and Batman. The lawsuit accuses Midjourney, which has millions of registered users, of building its business around the mass theft of content. The company, quote, brazenly dispenses Warner Brothers Discovery's intellectual property by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint filed on Thursday in California federal court. The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners, said a Warner Brothers Discovery spokesperson in a statement. Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners and our investments. End quote. For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the Internet without compensating creators. It's led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content. Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free writer plagiarizing their movies and TV shows. In the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery points to Midjourney generating images of iconic copyrighted characters. At the forefront are heroes who are at the center of DC Studios movies and TV shows like Superman, Wonder Woman and the Joker. Others are Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby Doo, characters who've become ubiquitous household names. More are Cartoon Network characters, including those from Rick and Morty, who've emerged as something of cultural touchstones in recent years. Midjourney, which has four tiers of paid subscriptions ranging from $10 to $120 per month and didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, returns characters owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. Even in response to prompts like Classic Comic Book Superhero Battle that don't explicitly mention any particular intellectual property, the complaint alleges. As evidence that Midjourney trained its AI system on its intellectual property, the studio attaches dozens of images showing the tool's outputs compared to stills from its movies and TV shows. When prompted with Batman Screencap from the Dark Knight, the service returns an image of Christian Bale's portrayal of the character, featuring the costumes, Kevlar plate design that differentiated it from previous iterations of the hero that appears to be taken from the movie or promotional materials, with few to no alterations made. One of the more convincing Examples highlights a 3D animated Bugs Bunny mirroring his adaptation in space. A new legacy, the lawsuit argues. Midjourney's ability to return copyrighted characters is a clear draw for subscribers, diverting customers away from purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery approved posters, wall art and prints, among other products that must now compete against the service. Yeah, you might want to click through on the article in the show notes to see some of the images that they cite in this this specific thing. My ability to go to Midjourney and generate an image of Batman and then print it up and put it on my wall like this is the closest thing I've seen to the Napster example since Napster happened. Like I'm not a lawyer obviously I don't know the legal ins and outs of this, but this is one of those I think maybe the genie is out of the bottle here folks situations. If I want to make an image of Bugs Bunny, I'm do it somewhere, somehow on some tool and it's gonna look pretty darn perfect. Are you gonna sue me? Sue the tools, sue all of us? I mean Napster Example Once again.
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Learn more@WhatsApp.com in this week of antitrust news, I want to highlight something that people have been whispering about in Silicon Valley vis a vis Nvidia, which is and this is not my opinion I need to stress that, but that Nvidia, these folks say, is doing a lot of self dealing. They're oftentimes the supplier and the investor and the customer in a way. By way of example, a source tells the information that Nvidia has agreed to rent 10,000 of its own AI chips from Lambda for $1.3 billion over four years. The latest example again of what people say is Nvidia's circular financial arrangements quote. The contracts position Nvidia as Lambda's biggest customer ahead of the firm's planned initial public offering. It's the latest example of the circular financial arrangements Nvidia makes to get its own chips into the cloud market and to help smaller cloud providers compete with traditional big ones such as Amazon and Google. And it shows how insular capital markets for AI can be, with Nvidia working as a supplier, investor and customer for multiple small cloud providers. Also known as NEO Clouds. Lamda leases data center space, fills the facilities with servers powered by Nvidia's Graphics Graphics Processing units, and signs contracts with cloud customers which rent them. It isn't clear how much Lambda paid for the Nvidia chip servers it is renting out to Nvidia, or how Nvidia is accounting for the deal, given that it is essentially on both sides of the transaction and is also an equity investor in Lambda. Nvidia's own researchers plan to use the GPU servers it will rent from Lambda, according to a different person with direct knowledge of the arrangement. Other major Lambda customers include Amazon and Microsoft, which together made up just under half of its $114 million cloud revenue in the second quarter. Microsoft and Amazon use Lambda's GPU servers primarily for internal purposes, not for Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure cloud customers. Lamda has projected cloud revenue of more than $1 billion by 2026 and more than $20 billion by 2030 as it aims to win cloud contracts with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic Xai and other large AI developers. By 2030, it projects having nearly 3 gigawatts of computing capacity, nearly half the amount of capacity some of the largest cloud providers produce today and up from 47 megawatts in the second quarter of this year. It's not clear how the firm plans to obtain that kind of capacity, but going public could help it raise more debt to expand its operations. Lamda's business and its heavily concentrated customer base resembles that of CoreWeave, a much bigger GPU focused cloud provider that recently went public and that Nvidia has also heavily supported. Until now, Lambda has mostly signed smaller, shorter term contracts for GPU rentals. The deal with Nvidia is the largest in its history and will likely fuel its marketing push as it moves toward an initial public offering as early as the first half of next year. Nvidia has long supported companies that help get its chips into the market and that also are more willing than traditional cloud providers to buy a variety of its hardware products. For instance, Nvidia has clashed with Microsoft over the design of racks that hold GPUs. Lambda executives, meanwhile, have privately said they are considering offering a new optics networking technology Nvidia is developing. Nvidia helped seed the swift rise of coreweave, which went public in March. After raising billions of dollars in debt and Equity. Early in CoreWeave's pivot from crypto mining to renting out servers for AI, it quietly inked a deal with Nvidia nearly identical to the one Nvidia has done with Lambda. That deal helped CoreWeave raise debt and grow its cloud business at the expense of traditional cloud firms. Nvidia is boosting the smaller cloud firms to protect its business in the long run. While Nvidia's biggest customers have been Microsoft, Amazon and Google, those firms are building their own competing AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia's. End Quote See a previous segment in this show for further context. Just one long read suggestion for you this week from friend of the show Gurgly Oros over at the Pragmatic Engineer A deep dive into the state of the tech job market in 2025, including an increase in demand for AI engineers and a rising average tenure at big tech companies. Today we cover tech job stats A slow steady rise in recruitment across Big tech and top startups. AI Engineering Trends Massive increase in for AI engineers with San Francisco's Bay Area the center of gravity for jobs. Big Tech Hiring stats Following layoffs in 202223 engineering headcount is rising in Big Tech Growing importance of location Many roles are listed in geographical tech hubs and engineers are more likely to swap jobs if they live in one. Tenure rising fast at Big Tech since 2023, average tenure at big tech companies increased at a pace like never before. Is this because people are less likely to quit of Big Tech slowing down hiring where are Big Tech engineers moving to and from? Big Tech is becoming a pretty closed loop talent wise. Most Big tech hires are from similar sized places. Engineering Leadership Recruitment Amazon is heavily cutting engineering managers while most of Big Tech except Apple is reducing director plus roles. Remote Jobs the volume of remote roles keeps declining compared to a year ago, except in AI engineering where more listings seem to be offering remote work than in recent months. Months End quote Read the whole thing for a real state of the job market Sort of long read. I do have a weekend bonus episode for you tomorrow. I interviewed Julie Samuels, CEO of Tech nyc, the sort of industry that advocates on behalf of startups here in New York City. So we talked about the state of the New York City tech ecosystem. But also yeah, we got into some tech history. The Electronic Frontier foundation going to school in Illinois after the whole Marc Andreessen Mosaic supernova there. It was a great chat. Enjoy. Talk to you on Monday.
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