Big Companies Start Hiring Again, Anthropic's Open-Weight Position, Zuck Backs AI for All | Diet TBPN

Well, uh, Anthropic's responded. We're going to go through that proposal, the, the facts and the proposal for what happens next in the open, uh, open model debate over whether or not they should be banned, restricted, tested, limited in some ways, sued. Oh, there's a whole bunch of different possible outcomes, uh, but we'll take you all through it. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that large companies are beginning—

they have a large white pill Yes, it is a large white pill. Has hit the front page of the Journal.

Yes. And I think people have been going back and forth on this. This is a story that's, that's just getting digested by the tech folks, like the actual AI lab leaders who had predicted crazy job losses and are now not really seeing that. They're seeing productivity boosts and different diffusion taking time in certain places and there's new capabilities, but it's not exactly a drop-in replacement for a coworker, at least in in most scenarios. And that's what the Wall Street Journal is reporting. So let me set the table and then we can debate it a little bit. After roughly a year of cautious hiring, companies across technology, transportation, defense, and other industries now say they need more employees to work alongside AI systems. Total victory for both humans and AI. We're working together. Peace is possible. It's an example of Jevons paradox. Jevons paradox. When a technology makes something more efficient, demand often rises enough that total use and the need for people actually increases. For roughly the past year, many companies pointed to AI while announcing layoffs. This was a huge thorn in your side. I think you hated this more than anyone else, and you were right to because it did seem like it was just PR spin, etc.

Yeah, it was a way for CEOs and management teams to save their own ass instead of saying, you know, hey, we overhired or the business isn't doing as well as we would like. We need to sort of basically settle down for a second and get our mojo back.

Yeah.

And there obviously no one wants to say that, but I think one of my favorite posts was the— and obviously these circumstances are never great, but the new CEO of Xbox came out and just was like very honest about the situation.

Yep.

And I think that more of that is necessary.

Yeah. Also, there's a lot of firms where they, once they get to 10,000, 20,000 employees, they might say, look, 20,000 might be the right number, but the bottom 1,000 people are not performing. We would like to lay them off and then bring in a new 1,000 people that are better fit for the company and the current trajectory that we're on, the current skills that we need. Maybe we need more salespeople.

And those bottom 1,000 people might be top 10 percent at another company.

Exactly. Yeah. So the narrative appears to be shifting. Companies like CSX, Alphabet, ServiceNow, Snap-on, and consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton have all recently signaled plans to expand hiring, particularly in areas where employees can use AI to become more productive.

Yeah, it used to be somewhat of a flex if a company was like, yeah, we put up a role and we got 2,000 applicants.

Yeah.

It's like, well, that's true.

And then also it's a little bit of a sign of like, oh wow, they have 100 openings. Like they must be like growing so fast, you know? So, but if it's just a prompt to say, oh yeah, put up like, look at my organizational design and add 5 roles for everyone because why not? Why not see who comes by? You know, we're not, we don't necessarily have to interview these people. So weird, weird dynamics, but we'll dig into it. So meanwhile, the latest weekly US jobless claims fell to one of the lowest levels in decades, underscoring the resilience of the labor market. The shift also reflects a more realistic understanding of AI's capabilities. Sarah Franklin, CEO of HR platform Lattice, says many companies initially assumed AI agents could replace entry-level workers but are now recognizing that human, human employees remain essential. Just because you have coding agents doesn't mean you're not hiring engineers, she said, adding that Lattice is seeing renewed hiring among many of its customers, including for junior roles. Robert Haff, CEO, and Keith Waddell said AI's effect on employment has been more benign than some had feared, adding that hiring demand continues to improve and market conditions are increasingly more supportive of business. And so I do think there was a little bit of like a successful psyop with the, with the AI is going to be able to do everything where I do think there are some firms that were like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't hire or because like what if we get it wrong and we hire a bunch of people and then AI really does catch up. And we don't need those people. That's silly. We shouldn't go through that like whipsaw effect. And so, people are going back and forth on that. Bryce Roberts.

Yeah, it's interesting. At least in our organization, which is unique and very niche and there's not that many organizations that are running, you know, a niche technology daily show.

Yeah.

I feel like a lot of what the value that we get out of AI would have historically been done by not super expert-level freelancers, right? These sort of like Upwork-style tasks that you would do historically, like an idea for a funny song, right?

Yeah.

I've paid to get a funny song made probably a decade ago online, right? As just like a joke. And now you can just go to Suno and make something like that. And then there's other things like, make a funny website, right? I historically would maybe work with freelancers.

So you're saying that I should take down the 5 open roles I have for Celtic punk session musicians?

Not yet.

Because I was going to hire 5 Celtic punk session musicians to constantly record Dropkick Murphy's covers for us every day.

And then perform them live in the city. Well, I'm not writing to you that you shouldn't do that.

I'm actually closer than ever to hiring a full-time Celtic punk band to play music, to recreate songs. Yes, I'm closer than ever to doing that, where that was not even on the roadmap a few years ago. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good point. Yeah, there's a lot of things that you are doing that you would never do with a full-time employee. It just sort of like fills the cracks and allows you to do more different things in your organization. But the core stuff is still like— you want a person that's responsible and then you want them using AI. I don't know.

Yeah.

The Wall Street Journal breaks it all down, but we went through most of that. So Bryce Roberts, he's taking the other side of this. He says, he shares a screenshot of a text message that says, we honestly aren't hiring a ton right now. AI backfilling most roles. Backfilling, is that specifically, does that specifically refer to when someone leaves the company, you backfill them with AI? So you say, oh, someone quit. Like if there's Steve and Jim on two different— on one team and Steve quits, you say, hey Jim, can you just instead of hiring another person, just do twice as much work with AI? Is that what this person's articulating? I mean, obviously there's some companies that are like, yeah, we're not hiring anyone. We're going for the one person, $1 billion company. Like, I'm not going to hire anyone. I'm just going to use—

Yeah, but that's rare. Usually when your business is ripping, you're like, I can't hire great people fast enough.

Yeah.

And so sometimes you actually don't have time to invest into various hiring processes. But yeah, I would read into this text the company's just probably not like ripping. That's my takeaway.

Well, Bryce Roberts says RIP new grads. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare takes the other side. He says wrong strategy to stop hiring new grads. The right strategy, hire them and insert them into legacy teams to help them better adopt AI.

And Cloudflare, of course hired 1,000.

Something like that. It was a crazy number, wasn't it? Up there in like almost 1,000.

4 digits.

That's crazy. Let's play the latest Good Work reel. We're just watching reels now.

This is— This one we got is Bernie Madoff.

Pretty good. Good gloves. That's from the '80s too, that's good.

Yeah, yeah. I've seen a few of these around before. Up next. Solid Sam Bankman-Fried here. That's nice. That's really nice.

I like that they actually printed these. I think he made it for this bit. This is balsa wood. The acting is so—

wow.

Wait, John, this is a, this is a vintage Zuckerberg.

Oh, '05.

This is a vintage '05 Zuckerberg. Let's just check the back really quick. Yeah, there it is. That is a patch from his Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. You can tell by the smell.

Is that real? What is that referring to?

This is on athlete, you know, training partners.

Oh, okay.

So put a piece of the jersey.

Piece of the jersey.

Sleeve this one.

Yeah, yeah. All right, up next. Sleeve it.

Ooh, okay. Nice. Elizabeth Holmes.

We do have two, I believe.

We have two, but a triple Holmes is what every good collector has in their arsenal.

All right.

Last card.

One card left.

3, 2, 1. Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

Turn it off.

Very funny. Very funny.

It is funny how the, the like business comedy canon has really solidified around like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Mark Zuckerberg. There's like a few names.

I'm surprised they didn't have an Adam Neumann rookie card in there.

I don't know if Adam Neumann is like a big enough name relative to—

That's true.

Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes. It's just interesting, like the different, the different names that have broken out that you can do a comedy sketch that's like, you know, it goes as big as, as Good Work does because they get, you know, I think millions and millions of views.

All right. Pull up this image from Manhattan this morning. We got sent this.

We've been doing on-the-ground reporting from one of our on-the-ground reporters in Manhattan.

There's a company called Black Sheep— that got 20 trucks, and they are just driving them around Google's Manhattan office.

Yes.

Saying, "Shame on you, Google. Return our $80,000." We had to dig in. We got very curious.

I had no idea. They make sunglasses?

They make $8 sunglasses that beat $350 sunglasses in an NBC lab test.

OK. Are you wearing Black Sheep today?

I wish. I wish. So Black Sheep makes direct-to-factory—

Okay. Factory-direct prescription eyewear. Stop paying $500.

This is from their own website.

I'm reading.

They're saying direct-to-factory optical disruptor. What do you mean? This is from their website.

Where are you reading this?

On Black Sheep.

I'm on blacksheep.io as well. It says factory direct. Direct-to-factory. Look, I want to send some eyewear to a factory. Direct-to-factory. I'll be sending it to them.

Direct to factory. Yeah. So this company, they say direct-to-factory optical disruptor Black Sheep launches 25-truck guerrilla campaign against Google in Manhattan.

Okay.

And then they're, they're sort of like narrating their own guerrilla campaign. A fleet of 25 minimalist LED billboard trucks surrounds Google's Chelsea headquarters after the tech giant weaponized an organic search glitch to pocket nearly $80,000. $77,000 in ad spend following Black Sheep's viral NBC Today Show debut. 25 LED trucks deployed, $77,000 drained in 30 hours. And then they're, and then they're just continuing to market their own products. Very interesting strategy here. I think every marketer has had the experience of having a campaign go haywire.

Yeah.

Very fascinating to take to take this route. Let's see how it works for them. If I were Google, I would say you can have your $80,000 back, but you can never advertise on Google again, because I just don't know how—

I don't think Google would ban them permanently for this. This is ridiculous. But, you know, they're just gonna be like any other— like, it's a self-serve platform.

But is it a good campaign?

But what actually happened? So they say how it unfolded: NBC Today Show segment airs.— they test the retail subscription against Black Sheep's factory direct pair. National search traffic spikes. Hundreds of Americans search Black Sheep because they're seeing it on TV. The organic listing breaks. Google search engine redirected organic brand traffic to a dead-end third-party 404 error page. And so with the organic route broken, users were funneled into Google's paid listings. So what is their claim? How is Google responsible for this exactly?

Sounds like user error.

Because I mean, you do, you do have some control over your Google search results based on the Webmaster Tools. You can index certain things. And then also, if you're noticing a 404 page, you could like redirect it quickly. But again, if this is happening all very fast, they can use your error. But I mean, it is interesting because they're probably going to get more than $77,000 worth of organic just from this. I mean, I didn't see the original campaign and I'm seeing this because this is hilarious. But this is like, is this— they shared an AI image with tons of these like shame on you trucks. But those are real.

These are real.

And are those minimalist or maximalist? Those seem maximalist to me, but maybe they're minimalist.

Minimalist, I guess, in the, in the display of the— yeah, in the way they actually are leveraging the space on the truck, but black and white.

Truly underrated surface area for stunts and advertising. Like, this message is sort of like squabbling with Google over this sort of odd scenario, but you can imagine someone using this for something much cooler and much more positive and not like this, you know, sort of unfortunate situation for them where they're dealing with the fallout of a Google error.

Well, we want to interview the truck drivers.

For sure.

So if you're driving a Black Sheep truck around Manhattan today, Reach out for sure. So Nick, make it happen.

Ilya said straight shot to SSI, so they better not be gearing up to release a work agent called Francois. Francois would be a very good name for an AI agent. I like that. I do wonder what they're going to be releasing. As the SSI is going to release, is that complete rumor? Because all Ilya said— they would scale their research. So that just means they've done a bunch of research, they have some sort of architecture that they like, some sort of flywheel, and they're going to like use more compute. And so that's why they're raising money. I don't think they said like, and we're going to release it publicly. Yeah, but everyone's thinking like probably still LLM or something different. No one really knows.

Yeah, I mean, I think still broadly like generally LLM-based.

Vague post god, like next level. There are levels to vague posting when you live a vague life. It's just like your entire life is vagary. Anyway, in other news, Recursive Superintelligence signs a $410 compute deal with Amazon. So funny. And it's in the TechCrunch. It's in the header too. Of course, that is a typo. It says Recursive Superintelligence signs $410 million compute deal with Amazon. Congratulations to Recursive Superintelligence. Throwing safety out the window. That should be the, that should be the tagline because there's already safe superintelligence, but we're just doing recursive superintelligence over here. But of course, the company is doing very well. They merged from Stealth in May with $650 million in funding focused on building open-ended self-improving systems and potentially compute-intensive approach to AI research. This multi-year deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company looks to scale up those systems. Recursive's $410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company's fundraising to date. But on a call with TechCrunch—

Hey, hey, hey, they still have a couple hundred million left over.

Founder and CEO Richard Socher emphasized that he expected it to be the first of many such deals. So is this— I feel like normally when you see a compute deal signed, it's always more complicated than just like we're buying this expensive thing. Usually like we're paying that. I'm like, we used to be so like anti-circular deal that now I just have come to, I've been so normalized by them that I expect them every time. I'm like, wait, wait, this is just, there's no circularity here? I would have expected like— Yeah, like Amazon's investing in you and you're buying Trainium and racking it in AWS, do new campus and they're investing in this and that and you're investing in them. Instead, it just seems like it's a pretty vanilla deal. It's like they're just buying a lot of compute from Amazon.

Great. Seems like it.

Well, good luck to them. Very excited for what they're launching.

Yeah, Jason, VP of Startups and VC at AWS, says part of the agreement is that we're going to co-develop Infra purpose-built for these types of companies. So fingers crossed, but it seems like we could get some circularity.

Yeah, let's hope so. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite —deploy web app services and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Fingers crossed. Well, well, here's, here's a deal that's somewhat circular. We got NVIDIA revealed as a tenant for a $50 billion data center that will use its chips. So they're the tenant of the data center that uses its chips. We'll talk to Tae Kim about this. CEO Jensen Huang deploys balance sheet to backstop growth of AI computing market. NVIDIA has signed leases worth up to $50 billion for a massive Texas data center. That's very, very big. That's very, very big for a single site. A previously undisclosed commitment that shines a new spotlight on the chip group's growing role in financing AI. The nearly $5 trillion company is leasing the entire 1-gigawatt facility that developer Hut8 is building, which will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units. So you have to imagine that once they have these, they serve something or wind up selling them. Like these things change hands so many times. There's a lot of different ways that this could play out ultimately. But in the— can we pull up the Nvidia chart? Yeah, there we go. Nvidia. Ooh, whoa. Big candle today, up 3%, $5.17 trillion. Let's take a look at Apple, 4.99. They crossed 5 today. They're down a little bit since they, since they breached that, but they're neck and neck.

Google is sitting at 4. Apple running the do-nothing-win strategy. Yeah. Jensen doing thousands of deals. They didn't even sign the open letter.

There are 3 companies that still, I believe, still haven't signed the open letter.

And only 3 companies on the entire surface of the earth.

There are 3, there are 3 major companies that haven't signed that NVIDIA open letter about banning open source and/or not banning open source. Amazon, Apple, and Anthropic. Anthropic put out a post yesterday, very, very clear response, sort of outlining their view on open source, their stance. Apple and Amazon haven't signed, and they both have like very physical elements in the world in the sense that they're not— they're sort of unslappable. Like you can't vibe code an Amazon warehouse. You can't vibe code an iPhone. There are threats to those businesses, of course. And of course, Apple should benefit from open source and so should Amazon because they'll be able to serve open models across AWS. But it's just potentially interesting. I think the Apple standing back is more just like, look, we're not jumping on with this crazy open letter that everyone is signing. Like we just have our own brand. We're thinking different. We're doing our thing.

Well, and based on other Apple AI timelines, I would expect them to I'll be able to sign it in maybe a year or two.

Potentially. These glasses have changed you. They turned you into a beast. Let me run through the 3 Anthropic proposals, because it's an important response. So Dario Ahmadi, Anthropic CEO, responded directly to that letter summarizing— supporting open weight models that circulated over the weekend. So he makes 3 claims just to sort of clarify things that I think are important. He says Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open weight models. Now, that's a blanket ban. There's obviously like defining what a ban is and what an open weight model, what a distilled model, what a foreign model is. These things all matter. But he has come out and said, look, we never advocated for a total ban on open weight models. Two, he says, undergirding all of this is the US must beat authoritarian governments in the AI race. He points to China, but he identifies any authoritarian government. If they get really powerful AI, they'll come over here and steamroll us and you won't be free to do whatever you want to do in America. 3, powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks. There are, there are risks to having really, really powerful AI open source systems just running around. So he's worried about those 3 things, clarifying those 3 points. But he makes 3 recommended actions. He makes 3 proposals. First, he says, let's continue to sanction chips. Let's not sell chips to China. He says we should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China. So this has been debated for years, like going back to the Biden chip controls. Everyone knows every different angle on this. The basics, I mean, there is a pretty good argument for chip controls, even on purely geoeconomic competitive grounds. Like even if you don't believe in the risk of authoritarian governments having powerful AI, even if you just think it's like fancy autocomplete. It's like, well, it's the engine of our economy, and if you can slow down a rival economy, that's beneficial to you, right? And so, and there also seems to be basically unlimited demand for chips in America. So by restricting sales to China, that shouldn't actually hurt American chip companies all that much.

But yes, well, they just like the, their argument would be we fully lose the Chinese market. Yeah, which is Yeah, second largest computing market in the world. No, no, right. So, so I think, but, but you're the counterpoint to that is you were going to lose it anyways.

Yeah. And a lot of that stems from the fact that China has been building an indigenous chip supply for decades. We've talked about going back to a whole bunch of their, you know, state-led, state-funded chip and fab processes. They've always been a few years behind. And so maintaining that gap, all else equal, is an advantage for the United States. The second point Dario makes is he says, "We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations." This seems totally reasonable. Companies can set their terms of service and they have a right to maintain intellectual property with proper legal consequences for violations. Anthropic's been fighting distillation attacks, but according to them, it's not that effective. Dario proposes policy interventions to deter this behavior. And this is where I'm still not clear on what— where that goes next. Like, what is the correct policy intervention? There's a— like, policy intervention is a very, very broad thing. It can mean anything from, like, a tax, a tariff, a fine, a sternly worded letter, not getting invited to a golf tournament. Like, there's so many different things that policy, like, covers these days, right? Where does this actually go? He says he doesn't want a blanket ban on open weight models, but it does seem like one possible policy intervention would be to sort of like ban, restrict, or pressure open weights models that can be reasonably shown to have been distilled. So if there's someone who's just a perfect distillation, it just gets, it just doesn't quite feel right. It's hard to quantify these things. We don't have a binary where you run some sort of algorithm and you say, yes, this was distilled. Because you can distill half on Opus 5 and then throw in a little GPT-5.6 and then mix in some Mistral and just be distilling from all over the place, fine-tune stuff, change the flavor, change the RL environment. There's so many different pieces of it. And Tyler, you were making a point about Tinker or Inkling?

Yeah, so the Inkling model from ThingMachines, it used some synthetic data that was created with I think KIMI K2.5. Yes. So like, does that count as like distillation? Like probably not when people usually talk about it, but like it definitely benefited from Chinese open source models. Yeah. So I wouldn't call that downstream of—

Yeah, I wouldn't call that industrial scale distillation. Yeah, I agree. It's sort of downstream of industrial scale.

There is like some big gray area where it's like, how do you actually define these things?

Yeah. And so defining that is going to be what— that's going to be the conversation that plays out in in D.C., like behind the scenes on the basis of this. And that's where the actual negotiation is going to happen between, you know, the position of NVIDIA and everyone that signed the letter versus the position of Anthropic and everyone who didn't sign the letter. They're going to sort of decide, okay, well, if you can prove this, this, and this, and you can show us that your API was getting hit by these different things and you have a really solid report of what happened, and then the model also checks these boxes quantitatively when we do this eval, then maybe we will pressure it. And then what does that actually mean? You could go after the lab that committed the distillation attack with lawsuits, but that seems really difficult given the international nature of these attacks. So we're sort of back to where we started. What can the government do that the lab can't? The lab should be looking at looking at every customer and saying, oh, this seems like someone who's trying to distill. They keep asking for basically what looks like a lot of training data. They're not acting like a normal user just being like, build me a website. Okay. Third, he says all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing. So, this was recently outlined by Demis Hassabis over at Google DeepMind as well. And it seems like the two companies are in alignment on this in particular. And it's a somewhat reasonable position, although the risk is that small companies who have safe models that aren't distilled could get tied up in a review queue for years before they can release. Like, that would be very, very annoying if you're Recursive Superintelligence, for example, and you don't have a Washington, D.C. office and you're like, "Hey, we want to release our new model," and they're like, "Yeah, totally." Like, you got to go through the the review process, get in line. And then it's like every trillion-dollar company is there with a ton of lobbyists being like, we'll review our model first because we want to get out a week before the small startup. And that's the frustration of biotech, the FDA, anything that goes through approval. We've talked about this with the nuclear stuff. It gets very tricky. And so you want to avoid that. And you don't want to wind up slowing down innovation that's happening on small scales and decreasing competition. Dario does do a good job of acknowledging upfront that he says it would protect US AI companies from competition, but that's never been my goal with anything that he's saying here. And so it's still worth working through what happens in a really adversarial situation. Like, what if a foreign lab distills a bunch of frontier models? They're the most aggressive. They're just distilling everything. Then they jump forward a bunch in capability. They get a bunch of smuggled chips, they take all the restrictions off of cyber, all the restrictions off of bio, and then they just drop the weights on like a torrent or they put them up on Hugging Face and Hugging Face is like, this is really crazy. No one likes this. There's a lot of pressure to take it down. I don't know, but it's out there. Like, what does the government actually do? Like, the government probably pressures or bans like hosting the weights, maybe serving the model. You maybe won't be able to run it in American data centers. You go to the NeoCloud and and say like, "Hey, this thing is actually bad." And I think people are divided on this because they see the current models not as actually dangerous, which is totally reasonable to assess that, "Yeah, it's not that bad." But like if there was a model that was like, "Yeah, it's actually just like the killing machine." Like I think most people would be like, "Yes, I'm democratically voting to not serve that because it's just like, it's an annoyance at best and like actually bad at work." Well, yeah, and the other big question is like how much compute do you actually need for it to be dangerous?

Yeah, totally. Is having some GPUs in the back shed going to be enough? Yeah. Maybe for sufficiently advanced model, yes. Or do you need access to a ton of racks, a ton of power? Totally. And then you do need to work with a NeoCloud in that case.

And as soon as you're a US-based company with a real data center with a bunch of NVL72s in there, You probably have registration and all sorts of just like business registrations where the government can reach out to you and say, hey, we're actually really worried about this. Just like there are other things you can't host in a data center. There's all sorts of stuff that's illegal, even if it's just intellectual property.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's it.

Like you can't even just because you have a data center doesn't mean that you can like take an open source, you know.

You can't as a data center.

Oh yeah, I open sourced Marvel.

Like, they'll be like, or even, even a, you know, a CRM company can't knowingly support like an organized global cartel that is like trafficking narcotics. You'd have to imagine like that they have— they have to vibe with their own balances.

Maybe. So, so, so what's interesting is like, what is the next step of that? So if there is a bad model, And everyone agrees like, okay, yeah, we got to not host this, not distribute this. Like, yeah, the weights are out there. People are trying to like sort of run it a little bit. But does it go offshore? Do we wind up in like the crypto scenario where there's like these offshore things and people are using VPNs to get access to it? Like what level of aggression do you see from the US government in that scenario? It probably should be proportionate to like the danger imposed by the model. Like if it's just a model that's like, that's annoying or slightly IP infringes, but no one's really being like, I'm canceling my Disney subscription because this new model will generate me Disney IP. That's probably not like, OK, put up a crazy firewall. But if it is like the ultimate hack machine that's stealing everyone's money from the banks, then yeah, you are going to put up the firewall and be much more aggressive. So I think the response will be in reaction to whatever the power of the models are. It'll be interesting to go back and forth. Anyway, all in all, the letter clarifies a lot about the Anthropic position, so I think it's good that it came out, but it's still worth working through the game theory of like what happens down the line. Policy interventions is all we got here, and I think it's still too generic at this point. I want to know like what policy looks like. I want to predict that. I want to understand what's actually being proposed, what people like, what people don't like. And so I think we'll learn more about this in the coming days.

Mark Zuckerberg. Is in the Wall Street Journal opinion section with a new piece, "The AI Future Is for Everyone." He says the history of democracy and economics has proved that centralized power stifles human potential. And, uh, it's quite long. I'm gonna go let you guys read it, but let's head into the comments section. Let's get it. Let's get a quick reaction. Let's get a quick reaction.

Oh, this is the Wall Street Journal.

I think it'll Pretty. No, it looks relatively tame. It'll be— but yet making a, you know, a clear effort to position to be the overtly— there was a white space for a guy investing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in AI that is like says, hey, this is going to be really great for everyone. Yeah. And I'm going to help us get there.

It is. It is interesting. Facebook does have some monopolies, but like the competition for attention is constant and there are always sources outside. Like, they've never had a full monopoly on social media, even with TikTok and Snapchat and LinkedIn and Twitch and YouTube and Netflix and the podcast feed and SMS and iMessage. Like, there are so many other platforms for disseminating information. Like, I don't know, I It's hard to jump straight to a critique here, but the key quote that Andrew Curran pulled out was that he said, "In most cases, like cybersecurity, the history of open-source software has shown that giving everyone full access to powerful systems will be the best way to protect safety and security over time." So he's firmly on the side of democratizing powerful AI. And he is yet another one. I imagine that they signed the letter. I've lost track at this point, but you can imagine that he did. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. The other piece of news is that Apple is launching Apple Upgrade next week, an iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch leasing/subscription program. They said you will own nothing and you will be happy. We're launching our new program.

You will own nothing and be happy.

It's partnering with Klarna to launch in the United States at online and retail stores. It's now official. Leasing prices start as low as $20 or $17.99 per month for iPhone, $11.99 for Apple Watch, $24.99 for Mac, and $11.99 for iPad. So interesting. I mean, a lot of people are saying this is a direct reaction to increased prices for memory, increased prices for products. There was a time when an iPhone was a couple hundred dollars and there were incentives to jump on a Verizon plan and you sort of amortize the cost over that. Those days are gone. Like we're in the world of like a $2,000 iPhone.

It's a significant— Same thing with our Gong. For people, honestly. You want a subscription Gong? No, I'm just saying there was a time when our TVPN Gong was $200. Yeah. Now it's in the tens of thousands of dollars. It's actually so expensive.

Somebody, a friend of mine texted me and was like, where do we get the gongs? I need a gong. And I was like, I think you should start small. And this is not like you can't handle the big gong. I was more saying that like there is a joy to being on the hedonic treadmill of larger gongs. Like you don't want to jump straight to the biggest gong. You want to start with a small gong and work your way up, work your way up. Because every gong that we've added has been so electric when we get—

I think it's time for a new one. You want an even bigger gong? Yeah, I want, I want one that's hanging from the rafters.

Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Money never sleeps. You shouldn't either.

Call me back. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Goodbye. Cheers. ¡Gracias!