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Polymarket Is Street Legal
00:22:22
Trump has a plan to boost AI innovation. Polymarket is now street legal in the US. Google thinks it needs to double AI capacity every 6 months. Is Starlink about to face its first serious competition. And for reasons I’ll explain, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions.
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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Brew right home for Wednesday, November 26, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Trump has a plan to boost AI innovation polymarket is now street legal in the U.S. google thinks it needs to double AI capacity every six months. Is Starlink about to face its first serious competition? And for reasons I'll explain the weekend long Read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech. President Trump has signed an executive order establishing something called the Genesis Mission to boost AI innovation, including by using federal scientific data sets to train models and create AI agents. Quoting Reuters, Trump directed the U.S. energy Department and U.S. national Laboratories to, quote, unite America's brightest minds, most powerful computers and vast scientific data into one cooperative system for research. DOE will create a closed loop AI experimentation platform integrating US Supercomputers and data sets to generate foundation models and power robotic laboratories. Michael Kratzios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the effort aims to unlock federal data sets and massively accelerate the rate of scientific breakthrough. He said the Genesis mission aims to use AI to automate experiment design, accelerate simulation and generate predictive models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics. This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours. Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted the massive private sector investment in AI, but said the government wanted to pivot those efforts to focus on scientific discovery engineering advancements, and to do that you need the data sets that are contained across our national labs. The order pays particular attention to U.S. national economic and health security, including biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion, energy, space exploration, quantum information science, semiconductors and microelectronics. End quote. Polymarket says it has received an amended U.S. cFTC designation, thereby letting it operate a prediction market in the U.S. with a fully regulated exchange structure. Quoting CoinDesk, the approval, granted Monday and announced Tuesday, allows Polymarket to offer intermediated access in the U.S. meaning betters will be able to participate through futures commission, merchants and traditional brokerage channels. The designation brings polymarket under the full regulatory framework applied to federally supervised exchanges, including enhanced surveillance, market supervision, standards, clearing procedures and Part 16 reporting obligations. People rely on polymarket because we provide clarity where there is confusion. Founder and CEO Shane Koplan said in a press release, adding that the decision reflects growing regulatory acceptance of prediction markets as a mature financial product. The company said last month that it expected to open its doors in the US in November after Axis was shut off to the US in 2022. As I said, I keep hearing that the usage numbers on these prediction markets are going parabolic. One more data point around that Sources say that Kalshi has told investors that its trading volume grew 6x in the last six months and it is on an annualized pace for 600 to $700 million in net revenue. Quoting the Information for 15 years, Goldman Sachs's private tech conference in Las Vegas has been the event for taking the pulse of startup deal making. Years ago it was possible to run into found founders such as Uber's Travis Kalanick and Instagram's Kevin Systrom raising money for their then small startups. The conference is much bigger now, which makes some investors grumble, but it remains a nexus for investors who want to throw money at hot startups and forgotten founders trying to remind investors they exist the hottest company this year. Kalshi. Fittingly, at a conference where slot machines are often 100 yards away, the prediction market site was the star of the show. CEO Tarek Mansour, a former Goldman intern, got a prime speaking spot and told prospective investors the startup was still figuring out basic questions like how to set fees for individual traders and institutional firms. Fees aren't really optimized yet. The business was small last year, now it's big, he said. Nonetheless, the startup's executives told investors behind closed doors it had grown trading volume six times in the last six months and was on an annualized pace for between 600 and 700 million dollars in net revenue, even as it only spent a tiny fraction of that on market. This growth likely explains the investor rush. Kalshi is raising money at an $11 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. Attendees told me the discussions come on the heels of an investment co led by Andreessen that valued it at $5 billion. As my colleagues first reported, end quote. This has been another week where fears of an AI bubble popping have returned, although yesterday it only returned specifically for nv and also wait around for next week. Things could be completely different because again, the folks with the money don't seem to be worried. Quoting cnbc, Google's AI infrastructure boss told employees that the company has to double its serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand for artificial intelligence services at an all hands meeting on November 6, Amin Vadat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation viewed by CNBC titled AI Infrastructure, which included a slide on AI compute demand. The slide said now we must double every six months the next,000x in four to five years. The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race, fadat said at the meeting where Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi also took questions from employees. Google's job is of course to build this infrastructure, but it's not to outspend the competition necessarily, vedat said. We're going to spend a lot, he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what's available anywhere else. In addition to infrastructure buildouts, Vadat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom Silicon Google needs to be able to deliver a thousand times more capability, compute, storage, networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly the same power, the same energy level, vadat said. It won't be easy, but through collaboration and co design we're going to get there. Pichai told employees at the meeting that 2026 will be, quote, intense, citing AI competition and the pressure to meet cloud and compute demand. He also answered a question about a potential AI bubble, a topic that's gained resonance across Silicon Valley and Wall street of late as investors have grown skeptical about whether the trillions of dollars in anticipated spend in the coming years is justified. The employee question that he read aloud asked amid significant and market talk of a potential AI bubble burst how are we thinking about ensuring long term sustainability and profitability if the AI market doesn't mature as expected? Pichai acknowledged the concerns. It's a great question. It's been definitely in the zeitgeist. People are talking about it, pichai said. He then reiterated a point he's made in the past about the risks of not investing aggressively enough and highlighted Google's cloud business, which just recorded 34% annual revenue growth to more than $15 billion in the quarter. Its backlog reached $155 billion. I think it's always difficult during these moments because the risk of underinvesting is pretty high, pichai said. I actually think for how extraordinary the cloud numbers were, those numbers would have been much better if we had more compute, he said. The company follows a disciplined approach, pointing to the strength of the underlying businesses and company's balance sheet. We are better positioned to withstand misses than other companies, pichai said. End quote. Could Starlink finally about to be getting a meaningful competitor? Quoting the Verge On Monday, Amazon announced Leo Ultra, the first antenna for its satellite Internet service, which is launching in a private preview ahead of a commercial rollout sometime next year. Leo Ultra is made for business and government customers, unlike the other two smaller LEO antenna options. No pricing or availability details have been announced, but this gives us our first good look at the 20 by 30 inch design and specs of the new antenna. Amazon claims Leo Ultra is the fastest customer terminal in production, offering up to 1Gbps downloads and 400Mbps uploads simultaneously, along with private networking services and direct connections to Amazon Web Services and other cloud NETWORKS. A smaller 11 inch Pro antenna will support up to 400Mbps down, while the 7 inch square Nano will be able to handle up to 100Mbps. For comparison, the Starlink Performance Kit currently supports up to 400Mbps downloads, around half of the maximum Amazon is advertising. SpaceX has promised its V3 satellite will be capable of 1Tbps total download bandwidth and that gigabit speeds are coming to Starlink customers next. Additional bandwidth aside, the private networking services on Amazon, Leo could be another major advantage over older pre Starlink satellite Internet networks currently in use. Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland recently reported spotting serious security vulnerabilities with unencrypted geo satellite links, allowing them to access VoiceOver IP calls, SMS messages, login credentials, corporate emails and other data being sent in the clear. End quote.
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Brian McCullough
It'S the holidays, which means you're probably trying to figure out what to get the people in your life who live in back to back meetings. This isn't some sci fi concept. It's Plaud P L A U D. It snaps onto the back of your phone and records phone calls, meetings and conversations. This isn't just note taking though. It can summarize meetings, generate to do lists, draft emails, extract insights, analyze perspectives and help you make better decisions, all with full contextual awareness across your past conversations and meetings. Black Friday is coming and Plaud is giving tech we Write home listeners 20% off. Search P L A U D on Google or Amazon and get 20% off. So good, so good, so good.
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Brian McCullough
I keep harping on this basically because of timing, Black Friday coming this week and all of that. So get ready to be shocked by the prices of very specific products if you're shopping later this week. Quoting the Verge again, Michael Kreider's headline at PC World today perfectly captures how ridiculous the PC memory shortage has become. Stores like the San Francisco Bay Area's central computers are beginning beginning to sell RAM at market prices like you'd pay for the catch of the day at a seafood restaurant. Costs are fluctuating daily as manufacturers and distributors adjust to limited supply and high demand, reads a message posted in the store's display case as spotted by Steve Lin. Because of this, we can't display fixed prices at this time. Micro center is apparently doing the same due to market volatility. We ask that you please see a sales associate for price, reads an in store message captured by Redditor Castex via Tom's Hardware. It's hard to overstate just how quickly the RAM crunch is changing the affordability of computers, and it might soon impact other realms as well as everything from game consoles to smartphones require ram to function. Three months ago yesterday I bought 32 gigabytes of memory for my gaming PC, and the price of that exact kit has more than tripled since then. It now costs $300 more $440 versus $130. In case you're curious, a more common version of the same kit went from Dol. Some prices have doubled since October, and while you can still find some 32 gigabyte kits for as low as $230, a 64 gigabyte DDR5 kit can easily run you 700, 800, even $900. Some high profile product launches might be impacted by the price of memory. Valve pointed to the RAM crunch as one reason why it couldn't promise a specific price for its Steam machine just yet just as out of control GPU prices from earlier this finally settled down. Runaway memory prices might make them shoot back up again. Every graphics card requires gobs of vram. More is better and word is that Nvidia and AMD are preparing to raise prices to compensate for the crunch. Digital Foundry is recommending you buy a GPU at or below MSRP while you still can one with 10 gigabytes or more of VRAM. Leaker Moore's law is dead. Claims that Microsoft may have to raise Xbox prices yet again to compensate, but that Sony has stockpiled enough ram for the PS5 to last some number of months. End quote. Time for the weekend. Long Read Suggestions I said that actual home robots seem to be coming to market these days, but Harper's took a look at the whole humanoid robotics industry and says it relies heavily on hype to rally interest and investors in the industry, as advances in AI may or may not be the missing ingredient to making humanoid robots viable. Robots like Apollo are seemingly everywhere these days. There are headlines about Chinese bots running half marathons, ominous videos of muscled humanoids twitching on gantries, clips of robot fight clubs. Sometimes you get the feeling that these machines constitute a fifth column of sorts, a not so secret cell growing in number, biding its time preparing for the uprising. Economists are looking forward to it. Around the world, they point out, population growth is slowing and labor shortages are spreading. Without humanoids to step into the breach, and quickly, the global economy could descend into chaos. Bank of America forecasts that there will be at least a million humanoid robots shipped annually by 2035, while Morgan Stanley predicts that more than a billion will be in use by 2050. If all goes according to plan, robotics could constitute the largest industry in the world, generating annual revenue upwards of $5 trillion. Elon Musk, that sage of understatement, claims that Tesla's own Optimus robot will one day be more productive than the entire global economy. Engineers will tell you that there are a number of material factors underpinning the current boom in humanoids. Electric motors have become cheaper and more powerful, digital sensors are faster and more reliable, and there have been downstream benefits to battery performance thanks to investment in electric cars and drones. But the single most important factor, the one at the nexus of hype and pot, is the growth of AI and in particular, the promise of deep learning. It's this technology, the use of algorithms to mine vast stores of data for patterns, that has powered the development of large language models like ChatGPT, and that roboticists hope will push their own machines into the next stage of development. Instead of decoding the rules of human language from piles of text, these engineers are trying to emulate human dexterity by analyzing stores of video and sensor data. Then the Wall Street Journal says the Pentagon can't trust GPS anymore because, well, a ton of reasons, like, people may be shooting down our satellites, much less jamming their signals. So this piece looks at how scientists are exploring the use of quantum sensors developed by startups like Q Control as a secure GPS alternative with military and civilian applications. The problem with GPS is the signals are typically weak, making them easy to block. The US has been rolling out a new, more powerful GPS signal for the military called M Code that is more resilient to jamming, but there has been a holdup in getting funding for the receivers needed to use it, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on defense strategy and space policy. The US Military now realizes future battlefields will be fully contested in the electromagnetic domain, unlike anything we have seen before, he said. Quantum devices potentially working together could tip the balance, Proponents say. Quantum clocks, for example, could boost the precision and accuracy of timekeeping. Another quantum sensor, also being developed by Q Control, can navigate by detecting small changes in gravity. And finally, I've banged the drum on this before, but I'll bang it one more time. Have you got small kids? Well, if you do, YouTube Kids is not your friend. Over at the Verge, Alison Johnson has a piece up describing why she finally banned YouTube kids from her house. And every word of this piece rang true, based at least on my experiences. Okay, I'm taking tomorrow and Friday off for obvious Thanksgiving reasons, but I'm leaving you with two Internet history podcast episodes. Actually, it's one interview in two parts because I have never, in almost 500 interviews I've done in my life, spoken with someone who has had a career this broad, this crazy. Listen to this list. Susan Line got her start in journalism in the 70s working for Francis Ford Coppola magazine. Did you know that Francis Ford Coppola had a magazine? I did not. That led her to working at the Village Voice here in New York City during the CBGB era, the golden era of the Village Voice. That led her to launching Premier magazine and running it through the golden era of that magazine. Ask Bill Simmons. Premier magazine definitely had a golden era. And then that led her to about a decade working for Disney and abc. Susan. Susan was the executive that developed and greenlit Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Lost. Heard of those shows. But wait, there's more. She also ran Martha Stewart Omnimedia when Martha had to go to prison, and only then did she get into tech as the CEO of Guilt Group. And only then did she get into venture capital with BBG Ventures. It's an amazing story, so enjoy that. Enjoy your turkey. Talk to you on Monday.