Blue Origin Raises Capital, Getty-Shutterstock Deal Dies, GPT-5.6 Launches Tomorrow | Diet TBPN

It's great to be back.

Yes. The Invest Like the Best hype song really, it really has.

I don't know.

It just burned its way. Yeah.

Puts you in an incredible mental state.

100%. 100%. You know who else is in a good mental state? Jeff Bezos, because he's getting a markup on the $25 billion he's put.

He's marking himself up. He's marking himself up alongside Kotu.

Yeah. The news is that Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. He's participating. A fund, Kotu, who he has also invested in through his family office, is also participating. But there will be an opportunity for some other true outsiders to get their first slice of, of Blue Origin. Andrew Ross Sorkin had the scoop in The New York Times today. You have to wonder if this is gossip coming out of Sun Valley. The company is raising $10 billion. This is the first outside fundraise. It's hilarious to think about this 25-year-old company as being previously bootstrapped, but that's technically what it is, basically. One founder's capital just chipping away at a really hard problem for a quarter century, and now we are here. Bezos has been funding this basically solo on his quest to visit the stars. He's doubling down—

People can't really complain about the valuation, 'cause he's a big part of setting the price.

Yeah, yeah. So he's doubling down, he's putting in $2 billion directly, and Coatue is getting twice as much allocation, $4 billion. There's another interesting Coatue tidbit I alluded to earlier from the New York Times piece. Bezos's family office is a major investor in Coatue's Innovative Strategies Fund, which is focused on emerging technology startups. So I'm not sure if, the money's coming out of that fund specifically, but there is a connection there. He's been building a relationship with Coatue for a long time, and they are optimistic about Blue Origin's prospects. The valuation is expected to be $130 billion, big for a private company. I was listening to Gavin Baker and Travis Kalanick talk about how crazy it was when Gavin was at Fidelity, and he wanted to value Uber at $14 billion, and everyone thought he was crazy. The valuation turned into an auction, came in at $17, and everyone was like, This is unprecedented. We've never seen a private company this big. And now $17 billion, even $60 billion in the private markets looks quaint by modern standards in an era where we have several trillion-dollar private companies, many up in the $100 billion-plus range. It's a wild, wild time. The Elon bulls are saying, oh, SpaceX is underpriced now. Because you have to imagine, I don't know if there's an exact revenue figure that's leaked for Blue Origin. But based on the size of that business, it has to be small. This has to be a very high multiple. But you're not really valuing this company on cash flow or even revenue. You're valuing it on the capability, which is it's the second company in the world, I believe, to bring a rocket to orbit, land it successfully, you know, prove reusability. They got there before China, which has been trying to copy SpaceX for years. And so lots of really solid progress. Of course, there was that setback with the launchpad that exploded, but they figured out a solution to that and things are chopping along just, just fine. The company is estimated to burn $5 billion this year. So this looks like a pretty standard 12 to 18 month fundraise at $10 billion and it's burned something like $27 billion to date, which, you know, a billion a year on average over 25 years. Not too bad for such an ambitious project. Still a lot of money, but a big opportunity. And you have to imagine there are a number of other comps like AST SpaceMobile, as you like to call them. AST SpaceMobile.

I own the AST SpaceMobile.

ASTS.

$27, $28 billion.

$30 billion company. And I don't believe that they've gotten much to orbit yet. They've done some experiments, some tests. They're still early, but it's a huge market. And we've seen how fast—

They have concepts of mass to orbit.

Yeah. And we've seen how fast Rocket Lab and various— it's a big— it's a really, really big market. And so when you're going after a big opportunity and you've been working on it a long time and you got Jeff Bezos funding it, lots of reasons to be optimistic.

Another comp investors would certainly look at would be Rocket Lab sitting at just under $50 billion.

We have some heartbreaking news. Heartbreaking news. Apple has scrapped plans for a cheaper Apple Vision Pro display and is winding down work at Samsung. This is from MacRumors. Really hits me and the other 3 Apple Vision Pro fans particularly hard. Uh, brutal. I did— I— who did I talk to? I talked to somebody who said that they, they actually are a daily user of the Apple Vision Pro. I thought I was in the top 1%.

Was it the, the founder that's making—

yes, that's right. That, that he says he watches it, he watches, he uses it every night or something like that. That's a lot of Apple Vision Pro use. Obviously, the, the, the product never really found product market fit. Although we have one in the studio, we've been having fun with it. I still think it's an incredible piece of technology, but a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. The developers never showed up, and it was very expensive, very heavy, very cumbersome. It requires a lot to put that thing on to watch Lawrence of Arabia, but when you do, it's worth it. It's worth it. What did I watch most recently? I watched Dunkirk in it, and I watched Godfather Part II, and Master and Commander. Master and Commander, that's a great movie, especially in Vision Pro. Really, you want to be in the cinematic feel, feel like you're on a, on a, on a warship. So Apple has, has reportedly stopped development on a cheaper display for a low, lower cost Vision Pro. This feels like what the industry needs to move forward. The actual display was fantastic. It just needed to be cheaper and lighter so more people could get them. That at least was my thesis, but Apple disagrees with me. What do I know? So Supplier Samsung Display expected to formally end the project by September. And if you remember, there were rumors of the crazy hoops that Apple had to jump through to get that incredible display because they really leapfrogged Meta, who had been working with the acquisition of Oculus and they'd been improving the, the display fidelity. They got rid of the screen door effect. They were increasing the resolution per eye. Everything was getting better about that display, but on a very linear trend. And allegedly, what Apple did was they went to Samsung and said, "We know that you are working on next year's display. You're also working on displays 2 years out, 3 years out, 4 years out. Now, what's the problem with the one that's 4 years out?" Well, it's amazing, but it's not ready for manufacturing at scale. It's not on an automated line. It needs a lot of manual work to get it to actually produce, and there's crazy low yield. So in, in in chips, in displays, yield rules everything. If you run the machine a bunch of times, you wanna get 99.9% yield, 90%. In the early days when you're prototyping a new technology, you might be getting just a few percent yield. And Apple said, that's fine. We'll just jack up the price and pay a ton for these cutting-edge displays, jump to the front of the category with the best display technology. We'll charge a fortune for it, but we'll have the best product and that will be our market entry strategy. And so I was waiting for that, display technology to commoditize because it's been a few years. I thought it would just naturally get cheaper. It probably has, but it has not solved the problem of virtual reality, augmented reality. We haven't seen someone pick up—

Do you think they're just bearish on the near term of people watching movies?

Maybe, yeah.

In, in, uh, in VR? Because I don't— they're, they're certainly not stopping, uh, R&D on their specs in their sort of everyday glasses product. And so it might just be that they studied you and found that you're built different. You're one of one, the only person on Earth.

Yeah. No, no. I mean, truly, sitting down and watching a full movie is a rare experience today. People aren't reading. They aren't watching movies. They're just scrolling. And people seem to be satisfied with their phone. And also, the nature of a doom scroll is somewhat interactive, somewhat multiplayer, although obviously people see it as brain rotting and very isolating. There is a game to be played by actively scrolling, which is something that doesn't require virtual reality, certainly not enhanced by virtual reality. But then also, sometimes you want to read the comments. Sometimes you want to send it to a friend. Sometimes you want to fact check it and ask AI about it or spin off and do something else and go to someone's profile. So I think that the number of taps and user interaction experiences in a doom scroll session are obviously much, much higher than watching a film, which you just put on and hopefully you don't pause it at all because you're engrossed the entire time from start to finish. And so if that becomes— as scrolling means more and more, maybe the VR experience is less and less relevant.

So VR really attracts these— visionary, visionary chaps that are willing to go— that seem— no, no, I'm actually— I could make that joke, but I won't. But just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time to ride through the hype cycles and just keep building. I think BigScreen is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product. He's, from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet. Like so committed to just like winning. Yeah. And so I really appreciate that about the category.

Yeah. Here is a crazy story. I mean, it's such a minor story, but it certainly grinds my gears. I think we're going to dig into it and see what you think, what I think once we dig into it. But Getty Images, we know and love them from their trove of Silicon Valley titans photographed at Sun Valley, which is happening now. If you don't have a Getty Images subscription, sign up now because you're going to be first to know when the new Josh Kushner paparazzi photo drops. Getty Images was planning to merge with Shutterstock. These are two essentially stock photo sites. In theory, they should be absolutely decimated by AI image generation. Meta put out a new one, Muse Image. Nano Banana Pro has been fantastic. Images 2 from OpenAI has been really good. And like they're honestly getting to the point where a lot of the example images are just like, okay, that's just a photo. I saw Adam Mosseri posted some on Instagram and I was like, is this AI or did you just take this photo? Like it's just you. And then he did a couple with filters and hair and crazy hair and those were cool and that breeds creativity. So I think there's a lot of value in the technology. But in terms of just like, I'm trying to illustrate, I'm trying to make a point visually. I need a picture of a forest. AI image generation is very, very competitive with the stock image industry. And this should have— this should be a business that's sort of affected like the way—

Yeah, imagine a lot of these businesses—

Cheating website, check.

Their net new revenue over the last couple of years is just working with labs that need licensing.

Yeah, all sorts of things. So Certainly in the face of growing competition, consolidation of an industry is very normal. That makes a lot of sense. This doesn't, this doesn't seem like it should raise any regulatory flags, and yet it did in the United Kingdom. Getty Images has called off the Shutterstock deal after the UK created some barriers around it. So the $3.7 billion deal would have created a visual content company able to offer a more expansive library to users, says The Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, Getty delivered a written notice to Shutterstock terminating their planned tie-up, which was first announced in January of 2025 and, and received clearance from the Justice Department in America in April. So pretty quick turnaround in the United States. The $3.7 billion deal would have created a visual content company able to deliver a more expansive library to users, helping meet booming demand for licensed images and videos as artificial intelligence disrupts the business of content creation. Getty stock slipped 1.7% in premarket trading. Shares of Shutterstock ticked up 1%. So maybe the Shutterstock shareholders are happy about remaining an independent company. The termination came after Getty last week said that its board voted to not proceed with the deal if it meant selling Shutterstock's editorial business, a condition required by the UK Competition and Markets authority. So the decision by Getty to abandon its merger with Shutterstock was ultimately a commercial choice, so the chair of independent inquiry group that led the CMA's investigation of the deal. The inquiry group found that a loss of competition between the two businesses would reduce choice for UK media outlets and could lead to higher prices. And I would, I would assume that this would give them some sort of pricing power in the face of, you know, essentially unlimited free editorial images in the form of AI-generated images. If you want to go with the real thing, you have to pay a little bit more. But that sort of offsets all the pressure of the customers that are leaving and no longer paying because they don't need to pay because they're generating them with generative AI. So this felt like a very logical story. And I'm, I'm a little bit uncertain that this is a good decision for the UK to help these businesses. It feels like it's just going to wind up hurting both of them.

Yeah. Are UK media outlets not allowed to use AI content?

I don't think that there's any broad rule against it. No. So they— you would— it would be a deliberate choice. And I'm sure there's plenty. I imagine that the Financial Times does not use AI images and that's by choice and they make that very clear. And there's probably disclosure. And if they— of course, they will use an AI image if they're talking about the AI image industry. But in terms of what you see on the front page of the Financial Times, it's almost always editorial images.

Yeah, that image.

This is from Reuters.

Okay. So I was trying to figure out why the headline number here was $3.7 billion. Yeah, because it was based on the January 6th, 2025 share prices, not today's prices, which are far, far, far lower.

Yeah.

Shutterstock is sitting at $329 million market cap. Getty is at $340 million market cap.

Whoa.

So these businesses have been really, really beat up. So over the period since they decided, hey, we should—

Yeah.

Tie up.

Interesting. So is there, is there a potential?

So the UK, I think regulators are actually trying to just kick these companies while they're down.

Is that what's happening? Or is it a situation where Getty— Oh, I mean, that is possible. I mean, it could just be like just a complete mistake. I mean, as you go back to Meta and you think about the US regulators blocked Meta from buying a VR fitness company that they said would create a monopoly in the VR fitness industry. And of course, like the VR fitness industry, like never happened. Like it's not an industry worth monopolizing. And so if you think about, you know, the business model of Quest, like would it have been advantageous? Maybe, but it's worth, letting Meta take a shot at that and see if having a VR fitness company in the portfolio will actually get that product to, you know, to scale. Tyler, what do you have to say?

Another interesting anecdote is the UK blocked Meta from buying Giphy in 2022.

Yes.

So to prevent a monopoly in GIFs, I presume. Yes. This could be pretty dangerous.

Yes. Which is also odd. What does Giphy power? The GIFs that you see in iMessage. You know what I'm talking about? When you go to— you go to— there's Genmoji, there's stickers, and then there's also hashtag images. And you can find images and you can send, you know, different pictures and GIFs. I wonder if these are from Giphy or—

It's powered by Bing, not Giphy.

Powered by Bing. Okay. So there's competition in this market.

Yeah.

I don't know. It's—

Amanda says Canva doesn't label AI in their stock images. That's so annoying. So yeah, I didn't even know Canva was a player here, but it would make sense to like—

you're in Canva and you want to, you know, have a picture of a forest on your greeting card and you can pick from a library. Some of them will be generated, some of them won't. And they probably also have a generative AI tool where you can generate a new image. But if you're just looking for a generic stock image that's already been described, you can probably pull from whatever libraries out there. Anyway, on the COVID of The Wall Street Journal, It's the world's creepiest office and people won't stay away. This is the New York complex vacated by IBM has become a magnet for urban explorers. We have a video of this place. If you're a scrappy startup looking to expand, this might be the key to success. The ultimate lock-in factory in sort of rural New York, I think. We'll get into it. So this is in Summers, New York. I don't know exactly how far away that is from Manhattan.

Yeah.

So if you were like a Neo Lab and your name was like Ominous Intelligence.

Yeah.

This could be a great sort of HQ, potentially, you know, your first little micro data center. Very James Bond villain sort of vibe. And yeah, it looks, looks like you could make it, you know, really, really homey.

It is 1 hour. You can be in the city in an hour. That's how fast it works.

And imagine walking these halls late at night after a long day at work.

Yes.

It wouldn't be creepy at all.

Yes. Robert Carlton was getting the mail one day in April when he saw a group of teenage boys sprinting away from nearby woods. He cut them off at the road and raised his arms. I just said, "Stop, it's over," the 62-year-old retired engineer recalled. Soon, He said 3 pursuing New York State Police troopers emerged from the tree line and arrested 7 juveniles. The criminal charge: trespassing on the former IBM campus here. Disrespecting International Business Machines. Don't do it, folks. The long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories, and any other unused disused structure you can breach.

Enough of the graffiti.

Do you think—

put it in here.

We got to figure out how much they write all over the former office.

Yeah, exactly.

What was the, uh, what was the IBM AI Watson? Watson, the machine intelligence, was probably still at the frontier. It's still at the frontier. It was super intelligent at, uh, at Jeopardy. The global urbex, which is short for urban exploration phenomenon— urbex isn't new, but it's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring more curiosity seekers. Police in Livingston, New Jersey recently warned people to stay out of the closed Livingston Mall property. Jacksonville Beach, Florida police issued a similar caution in April about the shuttered Adventure Landing amusement park. Going into an abandoned amusement park, that is Thrill-seeking at its best. We are aware of a TikTok challenge to explore, to explore the property. Who's doing these TikTok challenges? Should they, should they be allowed to post those? This is, this is dangerous for some people. GPT Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human interaction, launched today from OpenAI, rolling out to ChatGPT starting today. Taking shots at that guy on Instagram who's unsatisfied with legacy voice models. Uh, it's a lot smarter.

I have a feeling he's gonna find a way to keep using the old models.

Oh, maybe, or he'll just become, uh, who's the Pliny the Liberator? He's sort of the Pliny the Liberator of voice models in that I know he's taking shots and he's like very unhappy with the quality of the voice models, but at the same time he does a great job of actually exposing and finding limitations, not necessarily jailbreaks, but He— by watching those videos, you can very clearly understand, "Okay, I understand what's going on here. It's not— it doesn't have tool use, so it can't count. It can't set a timer. It doesn't have a long-running context window that can stay with you for a long time, so it gets lost. They can't talk to each other." There's a whole bunch of different ways. And once you have all of those documented by just a— he's basically like a white hat hacker. He's— He's found a bunch of Oh, wait, what?

He found a bunch of good benchmarks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically benchmarks. If you can satisfy his videos and run those experiments again in a satisfying way, you probably have a better product at the end of the day. So I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm excited.

Yeah, super excited for this one. I wonder if the real-time nature unlocks almost like a new kind of real-time podcast format where you can just actually have a conversation about a topic.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, we should have it sitting right here. It has a full duplex architecture, which means that it can listen and speak at the same time so it can jump in appropriately.

And it can also route like certain questions to smarter models.

Yes.

To run in the background. You can still have a conversation.

Yes.

Very cool.

Which is great because my default flow, like if I'm driving, which I don't think I should be doing, but I will tap the record button, not the voice mode. And I will dictate a really long prompt and then I will click send and then I will wait for it to cook and then I will have it read that back to me. And that's all just like a couple extra clicks, a couple extra steps to get what I really want, which is a conversation. I was interested about the idea of where this goes. Like, is there a world where you are talking to a model and you can have sort of multiple threads of conversations going within one conversation. So you can say, hey, I need you to go and do a deep research report on IBM Watson. And it goes and cooks on that. And then while it's doing that, you're still talking to it and you're still having a conversation. But then you also might say, well, catch me up on the latest news. And it has that at the fingertips. So it can talk to you about the latest news. And then you can go and it can say, hey, by the way, I'm done with the report or I'm done with the code that I wrote, but you're talking to me about other problems in your organization, other decisions, other research projects that you have, and it's all done in one continuous conversation, like me interacting with you. You might delegate something and then continue the conversation and then move on. Oh, I gotta text this person. Okay, I'll text them. They'll do that. They'll come back to me in 20 minutes with a revision to the thing that we're working on.. But in the meantime, let's talk about whatever else we got going on today. So interesting to see where this goes. In other OpenAI news, GPT-5.6 Sol along with Terra and Luna will launch publicly this Thursday. Preview access is expanding globally. Lots of people are having fun with this. Some people got early access. Other people were joking about clearly not getting early access but wanting early access. But a lot of people are having fun. Tyler Cowen.

Yeah, what did John Palmer say?

What'd he say? He says, it seems I'm allowed to talk about 5.6 now. I wasn't one of the testers, but I heard it's really good. Again, I haven't used it yet, but this will probably be my default model from here on when I get access. That's a good one. People are having a lot of fun. Kit Langton says, I can finally talk about GPT-5.6. I've been using it for many months, if not decades. And what is glaringly obvious to me now as I look back on my life is that you did not have access to it. It's very fun. People are very happy with it. Interesting, there's a little bit of a fork around like when, how the vibe around 5.6 is different than Fable 5, when, how interactive it is versus, somebody said like Fable is like light speed across the galaxy and Sol is like a Porsche on the Nürburgring, more engaging. I don't know. It seems like we're entering some fragmentation in like the right tool for the job.

Yeah, Ethan says, my big takeaway is that both Soll, Ethan had access, so he says both Soll and Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you're doing any work where better intelligence matter, those two models are your only choices. Dean says, I think for me, the main takeaway with Soll and Fable is that I can't remember a time when the leading models were A, so decidedly ahead of everything else and be so distinct from one another. So, yeah. So yeah, a lot of people are talking about how they're using the models together.

It's probably a function of just tighter, tighter distillation protocols. Like there's less pollution. Like also, like not everyone's training on the exact same data anymore because it used to just be everyone just trains on the entire web corpus and now each company has different data sets, different data brokers, different usage patterns that they can train on, and then different sort of research tastes. So go give it a try.

Theo says, I forgot to mention this, GPT-5.6 solves world-leading in computer use. It made me use it 100x more when we lost access to 5.6. I quickly started to go insane without it. So yeah, people in the early access program obviously lost access for a couple weeks.

Sure.

Due to the DC action. But yeah, I saw some people saying, like, what are some good uses for computer use? And it's like, anything on your computer. What do you use your computer for? They're not all going to be great uses, but I'm curious.

I still think it's worth— it's always worth popularizing those genuinely useful patterns. I mean, deep research was that in many ways. A very— like it gave you a 20-page PDF report on the topic that you were asking for, and it did a lot of the work for you. And I still think the, the come up with a good prompt idea, find the right reason to use AI is a problem for a ton of people. There are plenty of people that adopt the latest AI tools, immediately find what the model is good at, how to use it, how to use it profitably, effectively, not waste tokens, not waste their time. But other people need ideas. They need to know that there's a new capability. You see this with the chat app. You see this with the voice mode where people are judging a model based on hallucinations that disappeared a year ago or judging a model based on some, oh, it has a cutoff window and that hasn't been a thing for a year, but it's still burned its way into the memes of the online culture and thus people need to be updated on that. And so, I'm in favor of coming up with good computer use demos. The real one is just, can it play Counter-Strike effectively? That's the real computer use test. Can it rank me up to global elite? Can it downrank me so I can smurf a little bit? This is the future. This is what I want. And we'll see you— Tomorrow.

Goodbye.

Cheers. Love you.