Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Tech Meme. Write home for Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Elon Musk is suddenly fundraising everywhere. An attempt to solve the nomenclature problem around hacking groups is the solution to more energy for data centers already hidden inside the grid. And the final two pieces today are two different takes on the great AI debate our entire civilization is having right now. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech A whole bunch of Elon Funding News all of the sudden Sources say Elon Musk is selling $5 billion in XAI debt at a double digit interest rate via Morgan Stanley. With demand already over three and a half billion dollars and commitments due by June 17th. Quoting Bloomberg Musk appears eager to refocus on his array of businesses after announcing last week that he would be stepping back from politics. He had spent months as a senior advisor and regular companion to President Donald Trump, for whom he campaigned in the election and was a top financial supporter. The debt package includes a floating rate term loan, a fixed rate term loan and senior secured notes, said the people who are not authorized to share the information publicly. The proceeds will go toward general corporate purposes with commitments due June 17th. Early pricing discussions are 7 percentage points over the benchmark rate for the floating rate term loan and roughly a 12% yield on the senior notes, different people with knowledge of the matter said. The debt sale has already garnered demand in excess of three and a half billion dollars, they added, end quote. In addition, XAI has launched a $300 million tender offer at a $113 billion valuation, validating Xai's price tag for when it acquired X in March of 2025. This will let existing staff sell shares. Quoting the FT Musk launched Xai in 2023 to take on Sam Altman's OpenAI and other big tech rivals. It quickly unveiled the Grok chatbot and built a supercomputer cluster dubbed Colossus, one of the biggest AI data center projects in the U.S. the AI startup obtained a 45 billion do valuation in a $5 billion private funding round late last year. Musk last year granted investors that backed his Twitter acquisition, including large venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz 25% of the shares in XAI. The tie up between the companies was discussed with input from only a few close Musk confidants, according to a number of backers of X and Xai. Also, Musk's Neuralink raised a $650 million Series E from Ark Founders Fund, G42, Human Capital, Sequoia Thrive and at around a $9 billion pre money valuation. Quoting TechCrunch Neuralink last raised a $280 million Series D funding round in 2023, with an additional $43 million tranche added months later. Since then, Neuralink's brain chip technology has made some significant leaps. The company says it has now conducted more human clinical trials, implanting its brain chips in five individuals with severe paralysis. In May, Neuralink received Breakthrough Device Designation from the US Food and Drug Administration, a program intended to speed up development, assessment and review experimental technologies. End quote Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks plan to create a public glossary of state sponsored hacking groups to ease unofficial alias confusion. Quoting Reuters Cybersecurity companies have long assigned coded names to hacking groups, as attributing hackers to a country or an organization can be difficult, and researchers need a way to describe who they are up against. Some names are dry and functional, like the APT1 hacking group exposed by cybersecurity firm Mandiant, or the TA453 group tracked by Proofpoint. Others have more color and mystery, like the Earth Lamia group tracked by Trend Micro, or the Equation group uncovered by Kaspersky. CrowdStrike's evocative nicknames cozy Bear for a set of Russian hackers or Kryptonite Panda for a set of Chinese ones have tended to be the most popular, and others have also adopted the same kind of offbeat monikers. In 2016, for example, the company SecureWorks, now owned by Sophos, began using the name Iron Twilight for Russian hackers it previously tracked as TG4127. Microsoft itself recently revamped its nicknames, moving away from staid element themed ones like Rubidium to weather themed ones like Lemon Sandstorm or Sangria Tempest. But the explosion of whimsical aliases has already led to overload. When the US government issued a report about hacking attempts against the 2016 election, it sparked confusion by including 48 separate nicknames attributed to a grab bag of Russian hacking groups and malicious programs, including Sofasi Pawn Store, Chopstick, SAR Team and Onion Duke. Michael Sikorsky, the chief technology officer for Palo Alto's Threat Intelligence unit, said the initiative was a game changer. Disparate naming conventions for the same threat actors create confusion at the exact moment defenders need clarity, he said. Juan Andreas Guerrero, Saad executive director for intelligence and security and research at cybersecurity firm Sentinel 1, was skeptical of the effort, saying the cold reality of the cybersecurity industry was that companies hoarded information. Unless that change, he said, this is branding marketing fairy dust sprinkled on top of business realities. But CrowdStrike senior vice president of counter adversary operations Adam Myers said the move had already delivered a win by helping his analysts connect a group Microsoft called Salt typhoon, with one CrowdStrike dubbed Operator Panda. End quote We've discussed before how energy usage is exploding because of AI adoption, and this has put a strain on energy production generally. But what if a solution is already hidden inside the grid? Quoting TechCrunch Hyperscalers and data center developers are in a pickle. They all want to add computing power tomorrow, but utilities frequently play hard to get, citing years long waits for grid connections. All the AI data centers are struggling to get connected, amit Narayan, founder and CEO of GridCare, told TechCrunch. They're so desperate they are looking for solutions which may or may not happen, certainly not in the five year timelines they cite. This has led many data centers to pursue what's called behind the meter power sources. Basically, they build their own power plants, a costly endeavor that hints at just how desperate they are for electricity. But Naryan knew there was plenty of slack in the system, even if utilities themselves haven't discovered it yet. He has studied the grid for the last 15 years, first as a Stanford researcher and then as a founder of another company. How do we create more capacity when everyone thinks there is no capacity on the grid? He said. Narayan said that Grid Care, which has been operating in stealth, has already discovered several places where extra capacity exists and its ready to play matchmaker between data centers and utilities. Grid Care recently closed an oversubscribed 13 and a half million dollar seed round, the company told TechCrunch. For Narayan and his colleagues at GridCare, the first step to finding untapped capacity was to map the existing grid. Then the company used generative AI to help forecast what changes might be implemented in the coming years. It also layers on other details, including the availability of fiber optic connections, natural gas, water, extreme weather permitting and community sentiment around data center construction and expansion. We'll find out where the maximum bang is for the bo, narayan said. At the same time, gridcare works with hyperscalers and data center developers to identify where they are looking to expand operations or build new ones. They have already told us what they're willing to do. We know the parameters under which they can operate, he said. That's when the matchmaking begins. Gridcare sells its services to data center developers, charging them a fee based on how many megawatts of capacity the startup can unlock for them. That fee is significant for us, but it's negligible for data centers, narayan said. For some data centers, the price of admission might be foregoing grid power for a few hours here and there, relying on on site backup power instead. For others, the path might be clearer if their demand helps greenlight a new grid scale battery installation nearby in the future. The winner might be the developer that is willing to pay more. Utilities have already approached gridcare, inquiring about auctioning access to newfound capacity. Regardless of how it happens, Narayan thinks that GridCare can unlock more than 100 gigawatts of capacity using its approach. We don't have to solve nuclear fusion to do this, he said. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? 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Go to mackweldon.com and get 25% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code Brian. That's m A C K W-E-L--O-N.com promo code Brian. So look, the biggest debate in tech right now, the biggest debate in society really, is AI, right? Is it hype? Is it real? Is it stealing jobs? Is it making jobs better? There's no way I can do this show without sharing all sides of this debate with you. I can't ignore that the debate is going on. I want to underline again. I'm not taking any sides. I'm just presenting the debate so you're in the know. So the second half of the show today is two stories looking at parts of this debate from different sides. Let's start with this one from the Financial Times. It can be summed up like this. Walmart has 70,000 less employees than it did three years ago. During the same period, revenue grew 36%. So as revenue increased, headcount has reduced and Walmart expects automation for from robotics to AI to keep that trend of lower headcount continuing, Walmart executives are aiming to grow sales by 4% a year, but they do not expect to significantly increase headcount. The employee figures raise questions about the future of labor in the US retail trade, which employs one in 10American workers and provides broad avenues of promotion for those without university degrees. About 1.6 million of Walmart's employees are in the U.S. a figure that has barely budged in the past decade. Wall street analysts say the expansion without job creation reflects a hard push into E commerce and the automation of cumbersome tasks, from unloading shipping pallets to updating shelf price labels. Artificial intelligence is poised to supercharge these efforts. Walmart executives say the technology investments mean new roles for workers, not fewer workers. Tasks will get automated, jobs will change, and many years from now we'll still employ a large number of people and be happy to do so, chief executive Doug McMillan said at an investor event in April. This week, Walmart is hosting 13,000 employees shareholders at its Associates Week event, an annual ritual in its home of Northwest Arkansas. But critics say workers are missing out. Net sales at Walmart US have risen by 36% in the past five years, while average US hourly wages have increased 28% to $18.25. Walmart's jobless growth is a continuation of a pernicious trend that Walmart itself helped pioneer, squeezing more output from each hour of labor and growing sales faster than wages, said John Marshall, capital strategies director at Local 3000 Division of the Food and Commercial Workers, which ended an unsuccessful effort to unionize the company a decade ago. Longer term, the trajectory is very clear. I think most retailers want to automate a lot of different functions within their operations because labor is a very, very costly part of doing business, said Neil Sanders, a retail analyst at Global Data. We've seen Walmart really lean heavily on that end Quote Walmart in April showed off labor saving technologies to investors and media at two new warehouses outside Dallas, one a cold storage hub for foods, the other a fulfillment center to enable speedy deliver for e commerce customers. End quote and then from a different perspective on his blog, software developer Thomas Paycheck. Sorry if I mispronouncing that, Thomas outlines what he says are the very real benefits of using LLMs to write code. Quote Some of the smartest people I know share a bone deep belief that AI is a fad, the next iteration of NFT mania. I've been reluctant to push back on them because, well, they're smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious and worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better out of spite. All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the second most important thing to happen over the course of my career. Important caveat I'm discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development, for art, music, writing. I got nothing. I'm inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields are. I just don't believe them about mine. First, we need to get on the same page. If you're trying and failing to use an LLM for code six months ago, you're not doing what most serious LLM assisted coders are doing now. People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your code base on their own. They author files directly, they run tools, they compile code, run tests and iterate on the results. They also pull in arbitrary code from the tree or from other trees online into their context. Windows run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information, interact with git, run existing tooling like linters, formatters and model checkers and make essentially arbitrary tool calls that you set up through MCP. If you're making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting broken code into your editor. You're not doing what the AI boosters are doing. No wonder you're talking past each other. LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you'll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you'll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don't get tired. They're immune to inertia. Think of anything you wanted to build but didn't. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you'd been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you'd have started writing. But you weren't. So you put it off for a day, a year, or your whole career. I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and googling and dependency drama of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to to just figure all that s out. Often it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where the S almost works and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code. He goes on to address several points. It's a long essay, I encourage you to read it. But essentially his points are if you're merging code without reading it, whether it came from an LLM or not, that's on you. Developers have always been responsible for what hits. Main LLMs don't absolve you of that duty. They generate code you should read, tweak, and make your own complaints about probabilistic code. Miss the point. Code is deterministic. It's your job to understand and validate it, regardless of how it was written. Yes, some of that code is mediocre. Guess what? So is a lot of human written code. LLMs raise the floor even if they don't raise the ceiling, you're still the one making decisions, shaping architecture and fixing the important stuff. If your problem is that LLMs aren't good at rust or your artisanal craft of beautiful code, cool, cool. Enjoy the hand tools, but don't confuse a personal aesthetic with professional utility. Developers are here to solve problems, not sculpt masterpieces. And no, he doesn't care if it's not AGI, it just works for him. Let me quote from his conclusion. There's plenty of things I can't trust an LLM with no LLM has any of access to prod here, But I've been first responder on an incident and fed 4.0, not 4.0. Many 4.0 log transcripts and watched it in seconds. SpotLVM metadata Corruption issues on a host we've been complaining about for months. Am I better than an LLM agent at interrogating open search logs and honeycomb traces? No. No, I am not. To the consternation of many of my friends, I am not a radical or a futurist. I'm a statist. I believe in the haphazard perseverance of complex systems of institutions, of reversions to the mean. I write go and Python code. I'm not a Kool Aid drinker. But something real is happening. My smartest friends are blowing it off. Maybe I persuade you, probably I don't. But we need to be done making for bad arguments, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.