A (0:00)

Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc.

B (0:34)

Welcome to the Tech Boo Ride home for Thursday, May 7, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Dario Amadai revealed anthropic could grow 80x this year, so they're getting in bed with SpaceX for 300 megawatts of compute. Elon Musk thus dissolved Xai into SpaceX. So I ask Wither Grok Google launches the $100 Fitbit Air and HubSpot's founder coins the term strategic eligibility. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Today's episode is brought to you by Doppel. Disguises are getting pretty good these days, and I'm not just talking about when you throw on a pair of glasses and a hoodie and hope you won't be recognized. We're talking about the kind of disguises that end up in your inbox, on your phone, or on the web, blending in as your everyday internal emails, casual text messages, or a normal website. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increased, increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. Their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. From deep fakes to bad links to impersonation attempts, Doppel helps you stay ahead of these threats with their AI native social engineering defense platform. Learn more at D o p e l.com that's.p p e l.com so anthropic had an event yesterday called Code with Claude where Dario Amadai said this, quoting the Times, the chief executive of Anthropic said on Wednesday that his artificial intelligence company had planned for growing about 10 times as big this year, only to reach a growth rate that could make it 80 times as big this year instead. At the conference, Mr. Amodai said anthropic had been overwhelmed by the rate of growth, which has increased the company's need for computing power to deliver its AI products to customers. I hope that 80x growth doesn't continue because that's just crazy and it's too hard to handle, Mr. Amodi said. I'm hoping for some more normal numbers, end quote. Which is why Anthropic also made headlines by announcing this. Quoting Bloomberg Anthropic PBC has signed an agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX to bolster computing resources and meet surging demand for its Claude artificial intelligence software. Anthropic plans to access more than 300 megawatts of computing capacity from a large SpaceX data center in Memphis known as Colossus 1, the company said on Wednesday. Anthropic said the partnership would substantially increase its computing resources and enable it to raise usage limits for its AI products. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Other data center developers have recently been able to lock in tenants at terms of anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million per megawatt per year. At that rate, the Anthropic deal would easily represent hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business for XAI annually. Elon Musk, a fierce critic of anthropic rival OpenAI, said he spent time last week with senior staffers at Anthropic and decided to lease Colossus 1 to the company after making sure, quote, Claude is good for humanity. No one set off my evil detector, he said in a post on X. So long as they engage in critical self examination, Claude will probably be good. End quote. Still, Anthropic is a competitor to xai, including for talent. Ross Nordein, one of xai's founding members, said on Wednesday that he was joining Anthropic's COMPUTE team. Nordeen had spent years at Tesla before moving to XAI and left the startup about a month ago. He was the last XAI co founder to depart that company, where he also focused on computing power. Elon Musk is the only founder left at Xai, though Musk's Xai is behind on coding. The AI startup now part of SpaceX, has been ahead of some in building data centers and stockpiling Nvidia chips. Xai's computing deals could position the company as an infrastructure provider and drive up revenue as SpaceX prepares to go public. Musk's company previously agreed to provide some of its computing resources to AI coding startup Cursor, as part of a deal that would see both firms collaborate. XAI has been building data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi and has raised capital to rent the chips for the facilities. On Wednesday, Musk said XAI would be dissolved as a separate company. Going forward, he said in a post, quote, it will just be Space X A I and the AI products from SpaceX. End quote. So does that mean it's all X now? Do we fold everything into X at some point, including Twitter? I'm confused about all of this branding, but also XAI is toast. Does that mean Grok is toast? Let's get to the strategy for Elon in a second. The strategy for Anthropic is clearly simple. They need the compute. As was made clear at the beginning of this segment, Elon might not have been as successful as Dario Amadai at getting people to buy his AI, but he stood up that huge Colossus structure in superhuman time. So if it's there and if he can't use it, why not sell it to someone who can? And Anthropic just plain needs it. This deal is likely why Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five hour rate limits yesterday for paid plans and removed the peak hours limits reductions for Pro and Max plans. They say they'll have access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity thanks to Colossus 1 within a month. So good for them. But from the larger strategic perspective I'm going to quote from M.G. siegler when you see the headlines that Anthropic has struck a deal with SpaceX, I imagine the reaction runs from Whoa. To what? But actually, this seems like it might be refreshingly straightforward, at least to start. First and foremost, Anthropic needs compute. Like right now, yesterday, if possible. Their business has been exploding in a good way, but also in a bad way. As a result, they simply do not have the capacity to meet the current demand. They've been striking new cloud deals left and right, but a lot of those are limited and or coming online later. Because newsflash, everyone is compute constrained. Well, except for one player. SpaceX, thanks to their acquisition of Xai, finds itself with a shit ton of compute all of a sudden. And while XAI is obviously using some of it, they're also clearly not using as much as the combined company would hope. Thus XAI is being rebooted and in the meantime, they're perhaps the one place on planet Earth with capacity to spare. SpaceX may be rocket science, but this is not. It's a situation that's so obvious that I'm annoyed I didn't realize it ahead of time, especially because I did think about it as it related to SpaceX's deal with cursor. Basically, Cursor was signing up to use xai's capacity, thus making Space a de facto NEO cloud. That may not be the business they wanted to be in but it's a good business to be in at the moment, and it provides an especially good narrative if, say, you're looking to go public soon. That excess capacity on your servers, that's not a weakness of xai, that's an opportunity for your brand new, perhaps backed into the corner of a NEO cloud business. And as impressive of a customer as Cursor may be, Anthropic may be the best customer in the world right now. Again, no one needs more compute now more than them. And so you'll note that all the stories about this deal are quick to point out that not only is Anthropic getting access to all of presumably available SpaceX compute capacity, they're getting access to it within the month. Again, that's different from the other big deals Anthropic has been signing as of late. Yes, even the multi billion dollar deals with long standing partners Google and Amazon are mostly for compute to come at a later date this year or next. That's obviously because those companies, as big as they may be, are also compute constrained when it comes to AI themselves. So Anthropic was left trying to scrounge up capacity here and there amongst the smaller NEO clouds and perhaps in the crevices of the big tech clouds. Also with SpaceX, Anthropic is getting basically immediate access to more than 300 megawatts of compute and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, which every single press release cites very specifically, including naturally Nvidia itself, which is taking a victory lap here over Google's TPUs and Amazon's Trainium chips. So Anthropic gets their compute immediately, which means they can raise the limits on their paying customers immediately, and SpaceX gets their excess capacity utilized immediately, which is immediately great narratively for an IPO roadshow. Easy win, win. But wait, there's more. Clearly, it's also no accident that all of the stories, including both releases, mention Anthropic's interest in leveraging SpaceX's orbital compute capacity going forward. Yeah, data centers in space. I'm going to go ahead and guess that one of Elon Musk's conditions for the deal was that Anthropic sign up for, or at least sign up to talk up the notion of such usage in the future. Why? Again, the IPO narrative? This is one of the, if not the big growth stories for SpaceX/XAI going forward. Data centers in Tennessee? Come on, think bigger, think higher. Given that every other AI company is now talking up this possibility as well, even if we're a decade away from viability, if not more, you have to imagine Anthropic was fine to tout this as well. Remember, they're likely going public too at some point soon. Less easy to swallow may have been the notion of working with Musk. The last time we saw these two mentioned together, Musk was calling his new partner Misanthropic. One imagines there was no love lost going the other way as well. That said, both happen to be very publicly sharing a common enemy in Sam Altman, as both also previously were key people at OpenAI before they left to found their own AI startups. So yes, it's a very enemy of my enemy situation it seems. But again, the far more pressing matter was the need for each company and the very obvious way in which they could and would come together to fill those gaps. Anthropic is suddenly a lot closer fully operational and SpaceX is now ready for IPO launch 3, 2, 1 end quote. Sure, AI is everywhere, but that doesn't mean enterprise value is a given. In a recent survey, PwC found the amount of CEOs who reported revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is nearly equal to the amount who say they're still stuck. So what's causing the issues? PwC boiled it down to clarity. Leaders aren't clear about what's hype, what's reality, or where AI can actually create measurable impact. To help change that, PwC is offering their AI expertise and data. They explore how to tune out noise around AI and get clarity on what successful adoption looks like. Learn from the experts by heading to pwc.com US/brewai that's pwc.com US/ brewai. If you are working on a tighter budget, smaller team and higher expectations than ever before, you're not alone. Tons of teams are facing this challenge to run leaner, which is why Gusto wants to help you get your time back. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. Don't waste time on manual payroll or chasing down an HR form. Save time with Gusto's automated built in tools for payroll and benefits. It's quick and simple and it's easy to switch. Try gusto today@gusto.com brew and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll@gusto.com brew Google has launched the $100 Fitbit Air a Whoop like screenless wearable with Gemini powered features like Google health coach available May 26. Quoting Engadget. The Whoop like wearable that Google teased in March has just been unveiled. Called the Google Fitbit Air, it's a screenless device that you can put in a wristband, chest strap or technically anywhere really, depending on accessory you choose. It's available for pre order today for $100 and it's basically a Fitbit freed from its band. But of course, with a name like Air, the new gadget is a lot smaller than its predecessors. According to the general manager for Google Health, Rishi Chandra, the Fitbit Air is 25% smaller than the Fitbit Lux and 50% smaller than the Inspire 3. Google also said its latest device was rated more comfortable than leading competitors in an independent consumer perception study conducted, you're looking at the most popular wearables in the U.S. the company described the Fitbit Air as having a secure, micro adjustable fit that is supposed to make it so comfortable you won't notice it at work, at the gym or in bed or whatever. At just 12 grams with a band and 5.2 grams without, it's certainly very light since it doesn't have any buttons or a screen. The Fitbit Air is mostly a passive wearable that just sits on your person and collects information. It will monitor your heart rate all day and with that data it can use the company's long established algorithms to log your sleep, deliver details on your time spent in specific sleep stages, and assign you a sleep score each night. The Air can also detect signs of AFIB with irregular heart rhythm notifications and help you understand your heart rate variability or HRV and its impact on your overall well being. You won't need to worry about having to pull your phone out to start logging a workout session. By the way, the Fitbit Air has auto activity detection like most of its peers, and can automatically track common types of exercise including biking, stationary or outdoors running, walking, rowing, elliptical and other high heart rate sports. You can also use the app to manually start sessions for about 40 types of activities including aerobics, circuit training, canoeing, dancing, kickboxing, walking, yoga and more. Stats like your heart rate will show up on your phone as you work out. And finally, if you want to add activity to the app that wasn't already logged, you can find that in more than 140 options including archery, assault biking, badminton, cricket, curling and even household chores. You'll also get information on your weekly cardio load and readiness as well as the basics you expect from a modern activity tracker like your steps and distance traveled and time spent exercising. And because it has a vibration monitor, it can silently wake you up by buzzing against your skin. Google's Smart Wake feature can use this to help rouse you from slumber at the most appropriate times in your sleep cycle. These all sound like features we've come to expect from most smartwatches and fitness trackers today, of course, but Google did say the Air is powered by advanced new machine learning models that are 15% more accurate than our previous models. It also pointed out that the sleep score has been improved in a way that better reflects recovery. The Air also has the letters A and I in its name and like most products launched by Google this year, comes with a host of AI features. Central to the Air experience is the Google Health Coach, which has been in public preview since its October unveiling. This is basically a Gemini powered interface that lets you have a conversation with the Google Health app app and get personalized suggestions based on your data. The Health Coach will create dynamic tailored fitness plans that fit your goals and your life with workout suggestions and proactive insights that adapt to your real time performance data and changing schedule. According to Google, the Coach will be able to work with fitness and health data, including psycho health and vital medical information. The company also says that your data is private and secure End quote Foreign. Today Let me clue you in on a new buzzword if you haven't heard about it yet. Is your company, quote legible to AI? More importantly, why would you maybe want to be legible to AI and would you maybe want to not be? Brian Halligan, the founder of HubSpot and I believe now at Sequoia, has a tweet thread that basically says this to make a company legible to AI means making the company readable by machines, not just humans. It means taking the stuff that's usually living in, you know, someone's head at your company or in a messy Slack thread or in a half forgotten Google Doc and organizing it so that an AI agent can understand it and act on it. Decisions need context. Data needs structure. Ownership needs to be clear. Workflows need to be explicit. Potentially your entire company needs to become something an agent can navigate. Now Halligan says founders are basically building two companies right now. One is the company humans work in. The other is the kind of digital twin, a version of that company that an AI agent can query, understand and eventually operate inside of. And to be clear, he thinks this is mostly good. The productivity gains could be enormous, but you still need to think about this strategically. Halligan says that when you make your company legible to AI, you are not just making it easier for your own agents to work inside your company. You may also be making your proprietary operating logic easier for vendors to understand, abstract and eventually productize themselves. In other words, you know the concept of, you know, owning the relationship with you and your customers. If you let bots inside your company, AI bots, agents, going forward, you not only lose that relationship, your very operations could be intermediated. Even if your enterprise contract says your data will not be used for training, that may not be the whole issue. Once your workflows, your decision trees, your price floors, your customer processes, your internal playbooks are structured enough for an agent to execute on them. They may also be structured enough for a vendor to pattern match across customers and turn your patterns into best practices that get sold back to everyone by them, not by you. Or, as Halligan puts it, your edge becomes their feature. So what you also need to be thinking about, he says, might be what he terms strategic illegibility. The question is not just how can we make everything legible? The better question is what should we be deliberately keeping out of the system? He says that the things worth protecting are often the weird, human and hard to copy parts of your company founder judgment, taste, trust, timing, customer intimacy, negotiation instincts, informal power maps, and contrarian beliefs that have not yet become official strategy. So yes, maybe you should be making your company legible to move at AI speed and let the bots run wild with it, but not so legible that the soul of the company gets flattened into machine average best practices and you basically end up giving your whole enterprise away to someone else's bot. Oop. I accidentally deleted the end music segment of this show and I'm not interested in going back and re editing it. So hey, talk to you tomorrow.