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Tech Brew Ride Home
Tue 08/05 – Spygate At TSMC?
00:18:32
TSMC has fired employees for allegedly attempting to pilfer information on their 2nm tech. Figma could have raised more money in its IPO but chose not to. Creating entire video game worlds with just a text prompt. And exactly how big Patreon has grown in the creator economy.
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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Tuesday, August 5th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, TSMC has fired employees for allegedly attempting to pilfer information on their 2 nanometer tech. Figma could have raised more money in its IPO, but chose not to, creating entire video game worlds with just a text prompt. And exactly how big Patreon has grown in the creator economy. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Weirdly, I have two sort of Spygate stories for you today. First up, Nikkei Asia says TSMC has fired several employees for violating rules on obtaining sensitive information about its 2 nanometer technology. TSMC says it quote, detected unauthorized activities. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac TSMC leads the world in the most advanced chip processes and is next year expected to use its 2 nanometer technology for the A20 chips used in the iPhone 18 range. Apple typically gets access to TSMC's most advanced chip processes ahead of the company's other customers. Apple analyst Ming Chi Kuo has suggested that the new chip will be used for all iPhone 18 models, not just the two pro ones. Nikkei Asia reports that TSMC accused several former employees of attempting to obtain secret information about its 2 nanometer chip development and production process. Several former employees of TSMC are suspected of attempting to obtain critical proprietary information on 2 nanometer chip development and production while working at the company, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. In response to Nikkei Asia's questions, TSMC said that it recently detected unauthorized activities during routine monitoring, leading to the discovery of potential trade secret leaks. The the world's top chipmaker said on Monday it took strict disciplinary actions against the personnel involved and has initiated legal proceedings. The attempt was detected by spotting unusual access patterns on the part of one of the employees. The report says. There could even be national security implications as the Taiwanese government takes extremely seriously the protection of advanced technology developed within the country. Prosecutors have confirmed that they are investigating and TSMC says that it will seek prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. No details have been shared on the nature nature of the information obtained. It is likely that it relates to the 2 nanometer process in general rather than anything specific to Apple's A20 chip.
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Brian McCullough
Late news that Taiwanese prosecutors say two ex TSMC employees and a third suspect have now been arrested over this, and investigators reportedly searched the offices of Tokyo Electron, a Japanese chip tool maker. And then Remember how Cloudflare has been leading a charge against AI bot scraping? Well, Cloudflare now says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses to evade robots. Txt files and network blocks. Quoting the Verge, the report only adds to concerns about Perplexity vacuuming up content without permission as the company got caught barging past paywalls and ignoring sites robots Txt files last year. At the time, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas blamed the activity on third party crawlers used by the site. Now Cloudflare, one of the world's biggest Internet architecture providers, said it received complaints from customers who claim that Perplexity's bots still had access to their websites, even after putting their preference in their websites robots Txt file and by creating Web application firewall rules to restrict access to the startup's AI bots. To test this, Cloudflare says it created new domains with similar restrictions against Perplexity's AI Scrapers found that the startup will first attempt to access the sites by identifying itself as the names of its crawlers Perplexity Bot or Perplexity User. But if the website has restrictions against AI scraping, Cloudflare claims Perplexity will change its user agent the bit of information that tells the website what kind of browser and device you're using, or if the visitor is a bot. To quote, impersonate Google Chrome on macOS. Cloudflare says this undeclared crawler uses rotating IP addresses that the company doesn't include on the list of IP addresses used by its bots. Additionally, Cloudflare claims that Perplexity changes its Autonomous Systems Network, a number used to identify groups of IP networks controlled by a single operator, to get around blocks as well. This activity was observed across tens of thousands of domains and millions of requests per day, cloudflare writes.
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Brian McCullough
Just wanted to do a quick follow up on the whole Sigma IPO thing. Figma's stock did drop 27.38% to $88.60 yesterday, probably an inevitable bounce after last week's IPO pop. But its fully diluted valuation still sits at around $56 billion, so still almost triple Adobe's 2022 acquisition offer. And on that whole, did they leave money on the table? Argument is telling Bloomberg that Figma did consider a higher IPO price, but CEO Dylan Field wanted to bring on board certain long term institutional shareholders and approved the $33 per share pricing at the IPO open. The stock's 250% jump on its debut session, the biggest ever first day pop from a billion dollar plus US IPO meant the company and the selling shareholders effectively handed over more than $3.5 billion of value to investors that were able to get shares. Figma and the banks considered pricing the shares above the ultimate $33 per share set in the IPO, according to a person familiar with the matter. But in the end, Dylan Field, Figma's co founder and chief executive officer, wanted to bring on board certain long term institutional shareholders and Field signed off on the final $33 price, the person said, asking not to be identified as the information isn't public. With shares over subscribed by more than 40 times, a blockbuster debut was by no means unpredictable. Had Figma and Field opted for a higher price, however, some institutional investors may not have been willing to buy the shares. Firms with a long term investment strategy often base their view of the stock on fundamentals and determine their price expectations in reference to the valuations of comparable software firms. These investors are typically the most coveted backers in a first time share sale, as they tend to bring price stability. The banks pitched Figma's IPO valuation in line with highly valued software companies such as Snowflake and Datadog that trade at forward enterprise value to sales multiples ranging from 10 to 15 times, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Gurley, general partner of Benchmark, was among the most vocal critics of the pricing Figma's Day 1 pop highlighted the gross inefficiency in the modern IPO process, he wrote Thursday in a post on X. A frequent commentator on the phenomenon, Gurley has long advocated for companies to pursue direct listings, raising no money and letting the market determine the share price to avoid leaving large sums on the table. Gurley wasn't listed as a shareholder in Figma's filings. Long time listeners will remember ElevenLabs as that AI startup that I first experimented with to clone my voice years ago. Now, well, if I ever need new music for the pod, I guess I'll go back to them because they have launched 11 Music letting individuals and businesses use their AI model to generate music cleared for commercial use via English language prompting. Quoting the Journal, users enter a prompt in plain English such as create a smooth jazz song with a 60s vibe and powerful lyrics, but relaxing for a Friday afternoon. And the startup's AI model generates a tune within minutes, complete with vocals and instrumentals. With the launch, ElevenLabs, best known for its voice generation software, enters a fraught sphere where major music labels have already sued two music generation startups, Suno and Udio, for their alleged use of copyrighted works to train their AI ElevenLabs co founder and chief executive Maddie Stanislaski said. The three year old startup has a deal with Merlin Network, a digital rights agency for independent labels to train its models on artists work whose rights are represented by Merlin. 11Labs has a similar deal with Cobalt Music Group, an independent rights management and music publishing firm. Both Merlin and Cobalt are still finalizing which artists music will be involved in the training for 11 Labs Music, a model, the company said. Those deals give the models AI created music legal cover for broad commercial use, Stanislavski said. He hopes to also strike deals with the major labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Warner Music Group, he said. Currently we aren't using their data in our model, stanislewski said, referring to the major label's music trove. The model is strictly created on data we have access to. Eleven Labs has also built safeguards, it said, which prevent its model from creating songs with artists names or specific lyrics from an album or label. It also blocks lyrics that could incite violence or are obscene or unlawful. 11 Music is geared toward both businesses and creators, the company added, allowing them to produce their own music for commercial projects or creative endeavors without the need to hire a composer or pay for a restricted use license from a major label.
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Brian McCullough
And Google is still throwing new AI stuff out there Google DeepMind has released its Genie 3 model, which can generate 3D worlds from a prompt and has enough visual memory for a few minutes of continuous interaction. Quoting the Verge World models are a type of AI system that can simulate environments for purposes like education, entertainment or to help train robots or AI agents. With world models, you give them a prompt and they generate a space that you can move around in like you would in a video game. But instead of the world being handcrafted with 3D assets, it's all being generated with AI. It's an area Google is putting a lot of effort into. The company showed off its Genie 2 in December, which could create interactive worlds based off an image, and it's building a World Models team led by a former co lead of OpenAI's Sora video generation tool. But the models currently have a lot of drawbacks. Genie 2 worlds were only playable up to a minute, for example. I recently tried interactive video from a company backed by Pixar's co founder and it felt like walking through a a blurry version of Google Street View, where things morphed and changed in ways I didn't expect. As I looked around, Genie 3 seems like it could be a notable step forward. Users will be able to generate worlds with a prompt that supports a few minutes of continuous interaction, which is up from the 10 to 20 seconds of interaction possible with Genie 2. According to a blog post, Google says that Genie 3 can keep spaces in visual memory for about a minute, meaning that if you turn away from something in a world and then turn back to it, things like paint on a wall or writing on a chalkboard will be in the same place. The worlds will also have a 720p resolution and run at 24 frames per second. DeepMind is adding what it calls promptable world events into Genie 3 too. Using a prompt, you'll be able to do things like change weather conditions in a world or add new characters. However, this probably isn't a model you'll be able to try for yourself. It's launching as a limited research preview that will be available to a small cohort of academics and creators so its developers can better understand the risks and how to appropriately mitigate them. According to Google, there are also plenty of restrictions like the limited ways users can interact with generated worlds, and that legible text is often only generated when provided in the input world description Google says it's exploring how to bring Genie 3 to additional testers down the line, and on Top of that, DeepMind has also unveiled what it is calling Kaggle Game Arena, a benchmarking platform where AI models will compete head to head in strategic games, starting with a chess tournament this week. Quoting Silicon Angle, the three day AI Chess battle is the first in a series of tournaments set to be hosted by Google's data science community Kaggle, within a newly developed game arena. There, the models will compete against each other in a range of strategic games designed to evaluate their thinking and reasoning capabilities. Google, DeepMind and Kaggle are partnering with Chess.com, the chess app, Take take Take and legendary chess live streamers Levy Rosman and Hikaru Nakamura on the tournament, with the first simulation set to begin tomor. Kaggle Game arena is a new AI benchmarking platform that's designed to test how competitive large language models are in a series of strategic games, including Go and Werewolf. But first up is the AI Chess Exhibition, which runs August 5 through 7, with the simulated games live streamed on kaggle.com Hikaru Nakamura will provide commentary on each of the matchups, while Levy Rosman will deliver a daily recap of each day's battles, complete with analysis on the Gotham Chess YouTube channel. The tournament will conclude with a stream of the championship matchup and tournament recap from Magnus Carlsen on the Take Take Take YouTube channel. There will be eight competitors battling for chess Gemini 2.5, Pro, Gemini 2.5, Flash, Claude, Opus 4, Deepseek, R1, Moonshots, Kimmy 2K2, Instruct 0304, Mini and Grok 4. The tournament will be based on a standard single elimination bracket format where the winners of each match will be decided over a best of four series of games. Kaggle Game arena will live stream one round each day, so the first round will involve four matchups of eight models at the quarterfinal stage, followed by two matchups in the semifinal round on day two and a single final matchup on day three. In a blog post, Google outlined a number of rules saying that the models will be responding to text based inputs. None of the competing models will be allowed to access any third party tools, so they can't just use the Stockfish chess engine to identify the best move in any situation. Instead, they'll have to think about it themselves. The models will not be given a list of possible legal moves and if one attempts to make such a move it will be allowed three retries. Should it fail to make a legal move, it will forfeit the game. Moreover, there will be a 60 minute time limit for each move. The livestream will attempt to show how each of the competing models reasons about its next move and its response to any failed moves.
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Brian McCullough
Finally today, Patreon CEO Jack Conti says the platform has paid out now more than $10 billion to creators since its 2013 founding, and creators now get more than $2 billion annually and there are now more than 25 million paid memberships. Quoting Axios, when Patreon launched in 2013, it focused mainly on facilitating payments between creator fan relationships that were mostly built on other plat. Today it offers new tools and products to help creators build and grow their audiences on Patreon. Patreon's iOS app is now the company's top platform for fan engagement, a spokesperson said. This year Patreon released a slew of new podcast tools including multi show management, RSS mirroring and syncing. It's currently testing a new feature to allow creators to upload ad free live video to the platform directly. What we're seeing in creators is that just like media companies, they're multi hyphenate. Conti says that multimedia multi hyphenate approach works really well on Patreon's infrastructure because we've spent 10 years building horizontally across categories. Last year Patreon creators were paid $472 million on podcasts alone, and fans watched over 80 million hours of video on the platform. For years, Patreon was focused solely on paid subscriptions. In 2023, it expanded to allow creators to offer free memberships to fans to broaden their audience of potential subscribers. That shift, combined with its product investments, has helped grow the number of paid subscribers on the platform significantly, Conti says. Today there are over million free memberships on the platform, per Conte, with more than 700,000 members converting from free tiers to paid per month. Patreon is still privately held, and Conte says he has no plans right now to take the company public. The firm, which has raised more than $400 million to date, was most recently valued at over $4 billion in 2021.
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Brian McCullough
Hey y'. All, the official relaunch as Tech Brew Ride Home has gone well. Soon. So far as I write this, we are number two in the technology category on Apple Podcasts, just behind Acquired but ahead of all in and Lex Friedman. I pinged David and Ben this morning and I said I'm coming for them. I'm coming for you. Acquired. Help me out. Let's get to number one. One way you can do that, since you're already subscribed and listening to this, is to leave us a review. If you've never left a review for this podcast before, stop right now. Go into your podcast app and leave us a five star review and and a few words about us. If we bombard the POD rankings with fresh reviews, that helps boost our place. So give it a go. Give us a review if you've never done so before. Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow.