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- [00:01]
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- [00:32]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Tuesday, September 2, 2025 I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Trump family's big new crypto coin makes its debut. OpenAI outlines new safety guardrails Dolby announces its biggest new TV tech in years say hello to Dolby Vision 2 FinTech seems to be back, and as the price per token for AI models has fallen, why are costs for developers rising? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
- [01:02]
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- [01:33]
Brian McCullough
So there's a big new crypto coin out there. Wlfi, run by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial, has debuted. It came out and dipped a bit at first, to around 21 cents per share on its first trading day before bouncing back, giving it around a $6 billion market cap. The Trump family stake in WLFI is worth around $3.6 billion at those prices. Quoting the FT, it marks the latest way that the Trump family and their associates are seeking to profit from crypto, an industry that the president has championed through pushing forward legislation and appointing friendly regulators. This isn't some meme coin. It's the governance backbone of a real ecosystem changing how money moves. Freedom plus finance plus America first Donald Trump Jr. The president's eldest son, wrote on X Monday's Price gives the WLFI tokens available for trading on exchanges including Binance and Coinbase, a nominal total value of around $6.4 billion, according to CoinDesk World Liberty Financial was set up last October with Trump as co founder Emeritus and his three sons as co founders. The company created 100 billion tokens and said it had sold about a quarter of them for a face value of $550 million. But they were not tradable and holders could use them only to vote on corporate proposals at World Liberty Financial. Last month, a vote was passed to make the tokens tradable. World Liberty Financial said 24.7 billion tokens would be traded initially, with 7.8 billion of that amount allocated to its new crypto treasury company announced last month. The deal involves a Nasdaq listed blockchain company raising $1.5 billion, with half of that amount paid in WLFI tokens. The cash will be used to then buy more WLFI tokens. President Trump held 15.75 billion tokens at the end of last year, according to financial disclosures, which at Monday's trading price would be worth about $3.6 billion. The Trump family has been criticized by Democrats and others over its crypto interests. The Trump family's financial stake in World Liberty Financial represents an unprecedented conflict of interest, US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters wrote in a letter in April, adding that it created, quote, an obvious incentive for the Trump administration to direct regulators, including the securities and Exchange Commission, to take positions favorable to cryptocurrency interests that directly benefit the president's family. The crypto entrepreneur Just sun, who bought and ate a $6 million banana last year, has invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial. Sun said on Monday that he had no plans to sell his tokens anytime soon. World Liberty Financial launched A stablecoin called USD1 earlier this year, which is pegged to the price of the dollar and has a total nominal value of $2.7 billion. On Monday, Andre Grachev, head of crypto market maker DWF Markets and a WLFI token investor, said he would move $250 million of the trader's reserves into USD1amoning Samuel, a Ghanaian entrepreneur, said he bought the WLFI token earlier this year because of Trump's endorsement. Quote this is a president that believes in crypto and is doing so much for the crypto community. It has that legitimacy and ties with the sitting President. End quote. OpenAI just previewed a 120 day push to make ChatGPT safer, especially for teens and people in crisis. In a Tuesday post, the company said it will begin routing sensitive conversations think signs of acute distress to its slower, more deliberative reasoning models like GPT5 thinking, which it says better apply safety rules. It's also convened an expert council on well being and tapped a global physician network that's already contributed guidance across 30 countries. The headline for though is that parental controls are coming within the next month. Parents will be able to Link accounts for users, 13 +, set age appropriate behavioral defaults, limit features like memory and history, and even receive notifications if the system detects a moment of acute distress. OpenAI frames this as a first step. More safeguards and measurement are slated during the 120 day window. The moves arrive amid mounting scrutiny and lawsuit headlines alleging unsafe chatbot responses in high risk situations, a backdrop that makes these product guardrails more than just just a UX tweak. Axios notes OpenAI's plan to launch as many of these improvements as possible this year, while emphasizing the practical challenge of getting teens to opt in to parental linkage and controls. And real quick, one more practical update that was announced that you can use today. ChatGPT can now spin up flashcards and quick quizzes on any topic. A lightweight study tool that leans into the product's education use cases. It's simple prompting, and it pairs neatly with the broader teen safety posture OpenAI is describing. But the the big question now overall on these new safety rules isn't just technical, it's behavioral. As I said, can AI platforms persuade teens and families to actually use these tools? And will the new routing reliably catch the toughest edge cases when it actually matters? Dolby has launched Dolby Vision 2, adding AI powered content intelligence and authentic motion over 10 years after first launching Dolby Vision. This is basically a next gen take on Dolby's decade old HDR format that leans into AI to fix two of TV's biggest pain points two dark screens and janky motion. The headline feature is something Dolby calls content Intelligence, basically a smarter, always on pipeline between the mastering suite and your living room. It layers in new metadata and device awareness so your TV can adapt the picture to both the content and your living room's lighting. Instead of just guessing, two marquee tools ride on top of that precision black, meant to lift shadow detail without washing out the image, and an upgraded light sense that factors in ambient light more intelligently. Together, they're meant to address that perennial why is this so dark? Frustration that you hear all the time. Vision 2 also takes a swing at motion, Dolby's pitching authentic motion as a creative driven alternative to the dreaded soap opera effect. Think shot by shot, control over judder rather than a blunt 120 Hz sledgehammer. The promise? Smoother pans for sports and live action without turning film into video. There's a hardware angle too. Dolby Vision 2 comes in two tiers, Standard and Vision 2 Max for the highest end sets, and you'll need new TVs to unlock the full feature set. Existing Dolby Vision content will still play Everywhere, but only Vision 2 capable displays will read and act on the richer metadata. Hisense will be first out of the gate with models powered by MediaTek's Pentonic 800, and Dolby is lining up use cases beyond movies with sports and gaming optimization modes that tweak white point and motion handling on the fly. On the content side, Canal plus is the first studio to say it'll master four. Vision 2. Timing on when you'll be able to watch this at home yourself is still kind of up in the air, but the bottom line is Dolby Vision 2 isn't a format war reset. It's an attempt to make HDR less fragile and more consistent across wildly different rooms and displays. If Dolby's AI assisted BI directional tone mapping really closes the gap between grading suites and our bright living rooms, it could be the most meaningful TV picture upgrade since HDR itself. Just don't expect your current set to gain these powers via a firmware update. You're going to need a new TV Stuff is happening in fintech, which indicates to me that the boom times might be back for that sector. Bloomberg has seen an internal memo suggesting that Revolut has begun a secondary share sale for employees at $1,381.06 per share, which would therefore value Revolut at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in a secondary share sale last year. The deal will cement Revolut's status as one of the most valuable fintechs on the planet. Revolut is not the only European fintech looking to take advantage of a revival in investor optimism for Finte. Klarna Group has considered resuming its plans for a New York initial public offering this month, Bloomberg previously reported. London headquartered Revolut has grown rapidly and served more customers than HSBC last year, helping the British Fintech boost revenue 72% to $4 billion and grow its profit. The firm now has more than 60 million customers. The digital finance company is pursuing further international growth, exploring hiring investment bankers for a possible acquisition in the US in order to gain a banking license there. Bloomberg previously yes, on that last bit, quoting the FT British fintechs are stepping up plans to buy US Banks as regulators signal a more relaxed approach to mergers under the Trump administration. UK digital banks Revolut and Starling are weighing acquisitions of nationally chartered banks in the US which would allow them to be granted American banking licenses and lend across all 50 states. Revolut, Europe's biggest fintech, has approached advisors, including bank of America, about buying a US bank, according to one person familiar with the matter. Acquisitions are seen by many as a way of accelerating growth in the US and being granted a license more quickly than applying from scratch. The US Offers access to new customers and significant deposits at a time when many large UK fintechs are winning customers in their home market at a slower rate than before. Declan Ferguson, chief financial officer of Starling, said the company was considering applying for a US Banking license, but that an acquisition might be quicker. We're considering both paths, although we probably are more inclined toward acquisition, end quote. Revolut and bank of America declined to comment. The takeover plans come as regulators in the US adopt a more relaxed attitude to policing takeovers. The window is open and it may not stay open, so it would be best to move now, said David Portilla, a partner specializing in financial institutions at US Law firm Davis Polk. Michelle Bowman, vice chair of supervision at the Federal Reserve, signaled plans for a more bank friendly approach, including faster approvals of mergers, shortly after being confirmed in the role in June. The two other main US bank regulators, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, have rescinded guidance that made deals harder to complete. Banks can also apply for charters through the occ, but that process has historically taken years as regulators pour over companies process and data. In 2021, Monzo pulled out of its US banking application after it hit an impasse with American regulators, who indicated that it would be unlikely to be approved. Executives at the UK's biggest fintechs now believe Trump's deregulatory push will speed up the process of having a bank license approved through the occ, as well as making mergers easier. Klarna, the buy now, pay later app, which is planning imminently to list on the New York Stock Exchange, is considering applying for a US banking license but is likely to make any decision after its initial public offering, one of the people added. Klarna declined to comment.
- [13:02]
CeeDee Lamb
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- [13:31]
Brian McCullough
Finally today, friend of this pod and frequent guest Chris Mims in the Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece over the weekend. Essential Chris notes While the price per token for AI models has fallen, cost for developers using AI is rising overall as newer reasoning models require more tokens to complete tasks. So we've got an economic crunch. All of a sudden, developers who buy AI by the barrel for apps that do things like make software or analyze documents are discovering their bills are higher than expected and growing. What's driving up Costs? The latest AI models are doing more thinking, especially when used for deep research AI agents coding. So while the price of a unit of AI known as a token, continues to drop, the number of tokens needed to accomplish many tasks is skyrocketing. It's the opposite of what many analysts and experts predicted even a few months ago that has set off a new debate in the tech world about who the AI winners and losers will be. The arms race for who can make the smartest thing has resulted in a race for who can make the most expensive thing, says Theo Brown, chief executive of T3 Chat. Brown should know. His service allows people to access dozens of different AI models in one place. He can calculate across thousands of user queries his relative costs for the various models. Remember, AI training and AI inference are different. Training, those huge models continues to demand ever more costly processing delivered by those AI supercomputers you've probably heard about. But getting answers out of existing models? Inference should be getting cheaper fast. Sure enough, the cost of inference is going down by a factor of 10 every year, says Ben Cartier, a former AI engineer who is now a researcher at Epoch AI, a not for profit research organization that has received funding from OpenAI in the past. Despite that drop in cost per token, what's driving up costs for many AI applications is so called reasoning. Many new forms of AI rerun queries to double check their answers, fan out to the web to gather extra intel, even write their own little programs to calculate things, all before returning with an answer that can be as short as a sentence. And AI agents will carry out a lengthy series of actions based on user prompts, potentially taking minutes or even hours. As a result, they deliver meaningfully better responses, but can spend a lot more tokens in process. Also, when you give them a hard problem, they may just keep going until they get the answer or fail trying. Hence the debate if new AI systems that use orders of magnitude more tokens just to answer a single request are driving much of the spike in demand for AI infrastructure who will ultimately foot the bill. Ivan Zhao, chief executive officer of productivity software company notion, says that two years ago his business had margins of around 90%, typical of cloud based software companies. Now, around 10 percentage points of that profit goes to the AI companies that underpin Notion's latest offerings. The challenges are similar but potentially more dire for companies that use AI to write code for developers. These vibe coding startups, including Cursor and Replit, have recently adjusted their pricing. Some users of Cursor have, under the new plan, found themselves burning through a month's worth of credits in just a few days. That's led some to complain or switch to competitors. The solution might be encouraging users to use dumber models Most consumers are using AI chatbots for things that don't require the most resource intensive models and could be nudged towards dumber AIs, says Brown, with his many model AI chatbot T3. This fits the profile of the average ChatGPT user. OpenAI CFO said in October that three quarters of the company's revenue came from regular Joes and Janes paying $20 a month. That means just a quarter of the company's revenue comes from businesses and startups paying to use its models in their own processes. And and the difference in price between good enough AI and cutting edge AI isn't small. The cheapest AI models, including OpenAI's new GPT5 Nano, now cost around $0.10 per million tokens. Compare that with OpenAI's full fledged GPT5, which costs around $3.44 per million tokens when using an industry standard weighted average for usage patterns, says Cartier. While rate limits and dumber AI could help some of these AI using startups for a while, it puts them in a bind. Price hikes will drive customers away, and the really big players, which own their own monster models, can lose money while serving their customers directly. In late June, Google offered its own code writing tool to developers completely free of charge. Which raises a thorny question about the state of the AI boom. How long can it last if the giants are competing with their own customers? Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
- [18:16]
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