OpenAI Math Breakthroughs, SpaceX’s $40B Nvidia Deal, Quant Firms Hiring Idea Guys | Diet TBPN

First off, I got a little movie review for you. I saw a movie yesterday. I went to the theater and I saw Prime Time.

Hmm.

And I wanted to— yeah. Oh, okay. I want a review from those on the production team who have seen Prime Time, the new Robert Pattinson film. But I thought I would try and take you on sort of a film critique, a journey with a review that sort of channels The way Tyler reviews movies. So, here's my review of Prime Time. It was good. The audio was good and the video was good. Act 1 was good. Act 2 was good.

And the acting.

And Act 3 was good. The acting was good. And the lighting and the cinematography was good. And The set design was good.

So overall, I feel like I have a—

I would say it's a good movie.

Strong review.

Pretty good.

That was a good review.

Pretty good. What do you guys think? You liked it? Let's get Scott up here.

Saw that movie.

Yeah? You liked it? I love—

I thought it was great.

How cool was the frame? It felt like I was watching IMAX format, but it was just 4:3.

They used 23 different cameras on that movie.

The cinematography was crazy, right?

It was insane.

And the highlights blown out, and there was so much grain.

Like it was—it was like way too stylized for.

Oh yeah, it was so stylized. I had no idea where any of this would like where these ideas came from. It feels like they were just pulling from every different camera from that era. Yeah, it was really really cool. Well, Lance Oppenheim. There we go.

Lance Oppenheim—he does documentaries. Have you seen Ren Faire?

And oh yeah yeah that's right that's right. Okay cool. Yeah, but yeah really really fun you know creative way to throw back to like the way people watch TV at. That time, 4:3.

I like that Chris Hansen was kind of like the antagonist the entire time.

Yeah, it's a complex investigation of his career and the way he's remembered. Did he go too far? It feels like a little bit heavy-handed. Like, it's pretty clear, the vision. It doesn't fully leave you open to make your own judgment. But you, of course, can, which I thought was a nice touch. And Robert Pattinson is just in fighting form.

Yeah, he's in a flow state.

He's just in flow state. Yeah, he's really good. Anyway, we clearly were teasing it, but of course we have the TBPN Road to Christmas countdown ready for you. Let's let you know, let's remind everyone, there are 78 days until Christmas. Get ready, get ready. If you missed it yesterday, we did an interview, a deep dive into the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of America, understanding everything from how the Christmas tree industry is structured to techniques for keeping your Christmas tree alive.

And if you watch any tech or business content this week, it's got to be that.

It's got to be that.

It's got to be that.

It's got to be that interview. It was—

So we highly recommend that you donate. I made a donation yesterday. treesfortroops.org. Give whatever you can. They also do company matching. So if you work at a company that matches donations, If you're an early Anthropic employee and they match 3 to 1, back the truck up, throw down $100 mil. Come on, let's do it. Let's get— every troop must have the biggest tree possible, a 40-footer. I want a White House-style tree in every troop's home. That would be amazing. I like it. No, but he had some harsh words for the plastic tree industry. He called them toilet brushes, which was hilarious. I'd never heard that. That slur for those plastic trees before, but he had it ready to go, which I enjoyed. And it did, and I noticed some people in the comments saying, hey, look, I understand that a real tree is better, but not everyone can afford a real tree. And the economics of a plastic tree just sometimes make more sense for certain people. And I understand that not everyone's in the position to buy a brand new expensive tree. Anyway, Ben Thompson's going through a bunch of frustrations over macOS. He's vibe coding, building apps. The apps need permissions. We've talked about this, the agentic era. But yesterday, there was a post that hit the timeline that was pretty crazy, a sort of truth nuke for the Adobe crowd. Someone decompiled basically every Adobe product. Artcraft, getartcraft.com, capable tools for artists. And you can download for free—

For free.

All sorts of different tools that they have, and they basically cloned—

What kind of tools?

Photoshop, Premiere Pro. They— it feels like they can do a lot. I'm not exactly sure if they decompiled everything in the Adobe ecosystem, but listed here is PhotoCraft, which is clearly Photoshop, VectorCraft, which is Adobe Illustrator, FilmCraft, which is Premiere Pro, LightCraft, which is Lightroom, Printcraft, Effectcraft, which looks like After Effects, and then Designcraft, which is I think InDesign. More crafts are on the way. And so it says all Adobe products reimplemented from scratch, free and open source. And this is pretty, pretty crazy. There have been open source competitors to Photoshop for a long time. They've always lagged a lot. I downloaded the Photoshop decompilation Photocraft, used it a little bit, Not bad. Pretty remarkable how many tools did make it over. It actually doesn't have everything that you would expect. Some of the really cool features of modern Photoshop are actually AI and they run on the server. So if you want to patch a hole, you've always been able to fill it in with a, with a full color. You've also been able to do content-aware fill where it has a basic algorithm that looks at the colors of the pixels around, the textures, and tries to blend that in. But it can be a little, it's like pretty hallucinatory. And then recently Adobe launched AI fill. I forget what it's called. Not, it's not content-aware fill. It's, it's, it's some generative fill. I think they call it generative fill. And that of course runs on the server, usually uses Nano Banana, or they have a, they have a couple fine-tuned models. And that feature, because it's server-side, doesn't work. So there's this interesting thing where like, yeah, you're in the death of software. You can just decompile everything. But at the same time, I probably want my software to run on the server. I want the server to be stable. I need the, I need services. So. All the investments that software makers made in providing like inference-heavy tooling actually sort of creates a little bit more of a moat. Obviously the moats are decreasing, but there still is something where I, where if I were doing heavy-duty Photoshop use, PhotoCraft would not be a perfect substitute for my workflow. For some people, they'll be like, yeah, this is actually perfect. But you've always been able to download an illegal copy of Photoshop, but this is Less illegal, maybe? It's unclear. It's unclear because it's probably—

Has Adobe responded yet?

I don't know, but it's going to be fun to watch the open source decompilation community duke it out with all the tech companies.

Yeah, the interesting thing is there's been so many reasons to not buy Adobe for so long.

Sure.

Just given that historically I would think of an idea for even like a joke Yeah. And I'd be thinking in my head, I wish I had, I wish I had the time to Photoshop this, or I wish I had somebody handy that could just Photoshop this. Now you just, you get there with a prompt. Yeah. Especially for these sort of less professional use cases. Totally.

Um, tools sort of stick around if it's like you need to lock in and do like a full day of work. Like there's no substitute yet for like, if you were going to be spending 8 hours in After Effects or 8 hours in Premiere Pro, you're probably not gonna be able to replace that with a prompt. But if it's it's like, oh yeah, you want to just like, you know, composite 2 images together for a meme or add some text, a prompt is going to get you there. If it was— and it would have been 20 minutes of work in Photoshop, now it's, uh, you know, 1 minute of work in ChatGPT, um, or any other tool. Uh, and so the— obviously we're seeing like these 2 spikes of intelligence right now. Anything that can be done in a purely virtual environment is accelerating extremely quickly. Anything that touches the real world or requires human data or requires this flywheel, that's much slower. And the OpenAI math results show a similar story. We can talk about that more later, but I'm sure most people saw it. It's a pretty crazy result. What is the highlight, the high level? It's like 70 different problems, right?

I think it was— so I think the full number is 722 manuscripts. And then so it's kind of hard to How do you delineate like an actual problem?

Yeah.

Yeah, there's like a massive list of like unsolved problems.

Yeah, the press release just calls it a broad range. It's like we solved math. It's interesting. There's a good Josh Ganz article analysis on Substack that we can read through later. And François Chollet, the creator of ArcAGI, broke down a theory of what's going on with this big jump in progress and what it means for overall generalization. He said, What if the jagged frontier is mainly math plus code, which you can push arbitrarily far with reinforcement learning, learning with verifiable rewards, RLVR, and everything else starts to plateau because it's still bottlenecked by human-generated data? Model performance in non-verifiable areas has kept improving steadily, albeit much slower than for math and code. But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G, the general intelligence itself, Driven by RL/VR, or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training, which is still continually happening on a massive scale? A lot of things depend on the answer to this question. And so this is less of a feel the AGI moment and more of a feel the superintelligence moment for me personally, because no human intelligence has ever been able to solve this many math problems. this quickly at this level of mathematical ability.

Yeah.

Like, it's just, it has never happened in human history. It's beyond— it feels like it's beyond Einstein grinding on this or anyone else really. And so, it feels like it's something new. At the same time, it's very spiky. I still like the machine intelligence name because it has a different shape and we're trying to mold the machine intelligence into something that slots in neatly into like a human, a general framework, but it keeps breaking out and spiking in these odd areas because of the ability to train in these environments. So the terminology debates are sort of irrelevant. There's clearly some near-term impacts that are worth working through. As I mentioned earlier, Ben Thompson has been working through these macOS Frustrations while he goes deeper in agentic AI. He wrote about this in a Strategery post called Apple and the Hacker's Future. He said, what I'm much more interested in is controlling the software layer myself. The fact of the matter is that with AI, you can decompile almost all existing software. There is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish. And you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything. That's way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that third-party developers don't suck. And so he's talked about the frustration of you use an agent to build a piece of software and that piece of software lives on your Mac Mini or your computer and it needs to access the desktop to save files, or it needs to access the network. And when you build a new piece of software, macOS says, hey, this is a piece of software you're running, but you need to explicitly give it permissions. You have to click yes on the popup. We're all familiar with this from iOS. You download an app and it's like, can it send you notifications? Can it have your location? Can it get into your camera roll? Right? Like these apps, even after you install them, they're very walled off for privacy reasons, which is great. Ben wants to operate at a different level of abstraction, give a coding harness the ability to write software that then maintains the same level of approvals and access and permissions that the overarching AI agent has been given. There's been this bull case for Linux. It's possible that we see more Linux boxes and maybe even Linux on the desktop because all of the downsides of Linux are offset by, oh well, now you just have a prompt to interface with it instead of anytime— like getting like the volume changed in Linux is sometimes like a command line thing and it's such a hassle. But if you have a prompt there, you can just say, oh, like fix this driver, change this thing, and it'll just go do it. What's interesting is like we went from like old games like Halo and Modern Warfare 2 and Minecraft being decompiled And then Photoshop and some other Adobe software. And I'm wondering, like, how far are we away from just straight-up decompiling macOS? Because if you can decompile macOS, then you could potentially patch security features that you don't like, change that fact that every new application needs permissions granted explicitly. You could just go into the source code and— Recompile your new version of your operating system that's based on macOS. Now, clearly Apple's not going to be happy about that. It's really complicated, but what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, isn't that just like jailbreaking, like your iPhone? We've been able to do that for a while, but no one does it because then you lose like a bunch of features of—

Yeah, I wonder how hostile Apple would be to that because is there a way to decompile jailbreak macOS and still appear to Apple servers as like, Oh yeah, this is like a legit macOS install, and so we will still serve them iCloud, or we will still treat it as a viable iMessage recipient, which is like what people want. They want iMessage, they want the ecosystem, they want security updates, but then they also, or at least the hackers in Ben Thompson's analysis—

Sure, they'll love it, and they'll encourage it, and they'll celebrate it.

Yeah, yeah. But it does feel like it could be good for the hacker's future in the Apple ecosystem. Like if you can eventually just point an AI model and say like, you know what, I don't like this about macOS, but I like everything else. Just change this feature at a very root level and it goes and breaks in and does exactly what you want. Hackers could be like, yeah, okay, we're staying with macOS for a while because the hardware is great. They obviously still have a huge hardware moat. But there are a whole bunch of other issues in the new world where software is infinitely malleable. Adobe market cap, where are we? Traded down 3%, 5% over the last 5 days, 10% over the past month. I don't know. There's like an ongoing SaaS-pocalypse narrative. It's down 33% over the past year. But it doesn't seem like people are canceling their Creative Cloud subscriptions en masse because of this. But it'll be interesting to see where this goes. This is definitely like, you've got to be pretty early adopter-ish to be like, yeah, I'm running the decompiled version of this thing and like— I modded my own Halo into Modern Warfare, and I'm having fun with that. I did see someone got a nuke in Modern Warfare 2 Minecraft Edition. Did you get a nuke?

I did not drop a nuke.

It seems like you did drop a nuke on the show.

Yeah, right now. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. I feel like the sound effects are a little anticlimactic there. Okay, there we go. I guess it would be quiet. There we go. The truth.

It's been a good run. Goodbye, everyone.

We'll be back in 5 seconds.

John, do you value human intelligence above all other human qualities?

No.

I knew the answer to that already because we've been operating with the golden retriever mindset.

Yes, yes, yes. The golden retriever mindset. 2 years ago, we sort of coined this on the show. It's the 2-year anniversary of TBPn, by the way. We started in October of 2024.

There we go. Yeah.

2 years in. But yes, the golden retriever was—

100 to go.

Be hot, friendly, and dumb. Something like that. It was like— this was pre-looksmaxxing, but it was basically like focus on physical fitness, don't make enemies, be very friendly, and don't think you're the smartest person in the room. No one really likes a know-it-all. But also, you're going to have a bad time if you prize value— if you value intelligence above All other human qualities you're gonna have a bad time. That was Ilya Sutskever in 2023. And yeah, it seems like that is playing out in real time, but there are still a whole bunch of other things. And I don't know, people are like, intelligence is still really important, obviously. It's just applied in so many different ways. It's just odd that like the IMO gold medalist to startup founder pipeline is super rich. And yet the work of a Scott Wu at Cognition day to day does not look like solving IMO-level—

Looks like high-stakes poker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Deal-making, hiring, strategy, implementation, product development. There's so many other things. It would be very funny if it was just like, oh yeah, actually solving math problems is the most— if you can solve a math problem, your company will make A billion dollars, so you gotta solve like 12 a year. So you gotta just staff like a lot of mathematicians and like just be solving these and like, yeah, as long as— okay, how are you gonna solve 20 of these math problems that get you a billion dollars each next year? 'Cause we need to see growth. We need to underwrite these. It's pretty high margin, but you gotta pay the mathematicians a lot. No, it's never really been— that's not the work, but it's all these other human qualities. that seem to be sticking around.

Rune says, do not let yourself be reduced to the status of an audience at a magic show, uncomprehendingly clapping as machine intelligence creates parcels of astounding knowledge. All of this is for us to be understood by us, to sate our own curiosities. It's all really happening. Yeah, the good news here, the, you know, the internal model that was used—

Why is he taking shots at being an audience member at a magic show? That's like my favorite thing to do.

Kind of a low blow.

I'm like the number one audience member at a magic show. I love magic shows and I love being there, being like, wow, this is amazing. That's the best. That's the best. I don't need to be the guy being like, oh, I figured out the magic trick. I know how it works. I just want to sit there and be awed. And that's my experience today. I'm just like, really impressive math, guys. Awesome. But I don't, I don't need to be the person.

We did it. I'm good. I'm good. SpaceX looking to raise $40 billion to give to Jensen. Blockbuster debt deals, latest sign of vast spending on chips and other infrastructure. The company is seeking to raise about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt to fund its blockbuster chip order. Private capital group Apollo is expected to lead the financing effort and help sell the debt to a broad base of investors. PIMCO was among a small group of lenders in talks to fund the deal. SpaceX financing plans underscore the vast sums that are being raised to pay for investment in data centers. Insurance and pension funds would be able to buy SpaceX's debt due to its BBB credit rating, the second lowest investment grade ranking. Such funds take much more limited positions in junk-rated notes. Apollo and PIMCO declined to comment. The deal would strengthen ties between SpaceX and Nvidia after Musk vowed to double down on the group's technology for his AI initiatives. It would also mark a win for Nvidia as it contends with growing competition. From chipmakers aiming to challenge its dominance in advanced semiconductors. We've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels.

That's interesting because that's that's only on the short term, right? Because he's still doing TerraFab. He's going to make his own chips. He's making his own chips at Tesla, and he has a deal with Intel for that. Yeah. So he's kind of just saying like.

I think he recognizes like right now it's very strategic to just—

Yeah, go on.

Kiss the ring, basically. Investors whom SpaceX had previously approached about financing its purchase said they only received a short 2-page deal memo with pictures of outer space and an arrow pointing out that the company was going to build data centers somewhere in the universe. How are we supposed to take that to IC? One of the people said. Sounds like a pretty good memo to me.

I was laughing at this too. And then I was thinking, it really is pretty simple. It's $40 billion, buy some chips. What is the value of the chips? How do you underwrite those? I mean, I guess you need more, but you can probably back-of-the-envelope it yourself. But it is funny that the photos that we saw in the S-1 made it into even the Even the private credit side of the dealmaking.

If you're exploring putting billions to work into AI infrastructure, you should probably be doing a lot of your own work on understanding the risks.

Totally.

How this could go wrong.

Yeah.

And I think that giving money to Elon and just sort of trusting the process has worked to date.

Yeah.

And so he's sort of earned the right to have a shorter than average memo. I think at this point. What does Nick Bresler have to say? He says, look at him. That's my qual. You're what? You're qualitative. My vibe specialist. Look at him. You notice anything different about him? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint. His name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in Bushwick. Yeah, I'm sure of the vibe.

This is, this is based on real reporting here from AQR Capital. Quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants. I've been skeptical about the whole software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument. In, but I've seen firsthand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists. I predict the trend accelerates. Yeah, I actually know, now that I'm thinking about it, I know a lot of hedge fund guys who have philosophy degrees. And I'm biased here, I think, based on the sample size, but I know a lot of people who have studied history and gone into investing, and they brought a very differentiated lens to the practice. And some of them did really well because of that, because they were able to understand the way the eurozone might develop more because they studied history in a PhD program for 10 years.

They had a crazy euro summer.

Yeah, basically. So, let's read this actual letter. The question being asked Not only in finance, but also across industries and business schools, is what remains a durable differentiator once AI has surpassed many of humanity's analytical and technical capabilities? Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor. Of course, AQR— what does AQR actually stand for? It's like Advanced Quantitative Research, I think.

Yes.

Is that right? Did I one-shot it?

Applied.

Applied quantitative research.

No. Oh.

We should know that.

Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor or a business school dean. Creativity and emotional intelligence. That's what's going to get you the big bucks on Wall Street going forward. You got to win that poetry competition in Bushwick if you want to get the big bonus. Not because these qualities are wholly immune to AI, but because in the age of AI, they are domains where people can develop a durable AQR said golden retriever, Max. They agree. They agree. The time of the golden retriever is upon us. You're in Europe and you're building a data center. You got to call Cisco. You also got to procure a beautiful, beautiful building because take a look at this European data center. Amazing. This solves so much. This is so good, right? This is what we want. This would change so many things if we had a data center, if Abilene looked like Versailles, it's a completely different conversation. Jordi, do you disagree?

I agree.

I'm onto something, right?

I agree.

Give me credit here. Make— build Versailles as a data center. Actually, turn Versailles into a data center, then copy paste it into every community in America.

Okay, so I'm so confused. Because this image came out of a thread from the co-founder of Mistral, which he posted announcing Le Chonc, their new model, yesterday. Oh, it's a train station. But then it's getting community noted, so I think he might have been just like— He was joking? Was he messing with people? Brutal.

It seems like it's not.

It's a train station in France.

He pranked us. Well, it will be a data center soon. I think the traction on this post shows you that people want beautiful data centers, and this is the future.

A reporter was on the ground. Oh yeah, apparently inside. Great. A data center. They were asking one of the construction workers his thoughts on the current labor market. Let's pull this up. So when you hear data centers, what comes to mind? I'm working at Homer City building the new data center. People say it's only temporary. It's only when they're building it out.

Then what happens?

Hey, every job in my field is temporary. That's true too. Okay, I hear you, man. So when you hear data, the reporter's like, yeah, that's a good point actually.

Yeah, people haven't really said that before. Like, that's kind of a genius take. I don't know. I've never heard that. It's like, yeah, they're temporary, but every construction job is temporary. That's the whole point. Funny. Anyway, what if instead of Greek life, it was Chinese life? Yeah, bro. I'm rushing Mao. Zedong next semester. There's like 1.4 billion people in my pledge class. I thought that was just very funny. Instead of Greek, like, because we use the Greek alphabet. Chinese, like, it'd be very funny.

David Holes shares, reflecting on 1920s images of people working on massive generators for the electrical Electrification of the modern world makes me realize that the past was wildly futuristic too. This image was so— seeing this was honestly depressing to me in some ways because it felt like— it feels in some ways like a Midjourney image of the future. And yet we were doing this over 100 years ago. And it really makes you—

We don't know the full story. These guys could be LARPing. These could be LARPers and this could all be cardboard. And they could be like, yeah, let's just— I think we got to build something really cool and take a photo of it. And so they just built something huge, but it actually has no functional purpose. You don't know. You don't know. But I think it's real because we did get the electrification. We enjoy it every day.

That's right.

I think it was possible. We did it. We did it. We created more ad space. You saw this? DIY device turns your car window into a digital billboard. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it. DIY system, it's called Hologlass, and it turns your car into a moving display. It can turn almost any car window into a digital display for ads. This is the future. It allows you to basically digitize the exterior of your windows to share content on the go, says the founder, who I invited on the show. Hopefully we'll get him soon. You can literally pop it in, pop it out. We make them for all makes and models. If you're getting a Jaguar Type 01, get a couple of these in there, offset that cost, run some ads. An app controls what you see, from videos on your phone to a custom sign you can generate in seconds. The system—

Can you just blast Paw Patrol out for the—

You can do whatever you want.

For the other, you know, citizens sitting in traffic.

Yes, yes. This is extremely cyberpunk. If you're running this with the with the Nuvo Alari, with the Cybertruck, with the Jaguar Type 01, and you're just blaring ads. Look at this. It attaches. That's just a full-on projector. This company's hilarious because like, that is just an off-the-shelf projector and they're just selling you a projector and a mount and a software system.

It's brilliant, John.

It's brilliant. We love it. I was getting worried that there weren't going to be that many more ad inventory services.

What does it cost, and then what kind of revenue can you generate if you opt into serving ads?

It starts at about $300.

I feel like this will math out.

It depends on— Maybe not in year 1. The audience is what matters. So where are you driving this? Because if you're driving this around Sand Hill Road and you're advertising a bunch of really high-ticket items to venture capitalists, could be really high AOV. Really high ARPU. But if you're driving it around someplace where people don't have as much disposable income, you're not gonna be seeing the same CPM.

How much do you think somebody in a city like LA could make on a daily basis? I don't know. Do they give any estimates?

$1. I have no idea.

I think that, I think it probably costs a lot more than that to run like one of those Taxi ads on the top of a roof on a per-day basis. So I think the math could actually be pretty compelling, right? If you can basically pay back the the unit in six months, and then from that point on you're just getting paid to commute.

I like it. Thank you for tuning into TBN today. It's been an honor. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TBN.com, and we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Flashbang.