Tim Cook’s Final Year?, Big Tech Horse Race, Anthropic’s Profitability Push

25:29You've got the best hardware and now all of a sudden you have the best AI powering what has been the historic weak point of Apple's operating system. And certainly going forward, if you believe, again, in any part of the AI narrative, like if they have what is considered now, if not the best, you know, in the top two sort of models for running all of AI, certain consumer facing AI, then Apple's well positioned to do that. And as you're noting, you can make an argument that by sitting back and waiting, sort of they ultimately made the right decision. Now, the question still, I think, is going forward, is that the right decision?

26:07And this is why I've long thought like in a similar vein to the Apple Maps scenario, which hopefully not executed to the same way. But I think that they learned their lesson the hard way that time. But I do think that they'll continue to work on their own models internally. And then, you know, they can put this Gemini potential partnership allows them buys them a lot of time to basically be able to swap in their models and they don't have to do it in even a big one fell swoop. They could just, you know, more and more sort of do these these piecemeal, you know, swaps and and take on more responsibility with their own internal stuff.

26:42and as long as they can continue to massage that relationship with Google to be okay with that sort of interesting dynamic, then you're right. They're in a good spot if these reports end up being accurate. Okay. So lastly on Apple, Cyber Monday, of course, we're in the middle of what we said at the beginning is going to be the best quarter in Apple history. And if it isn't, maybe it really is time for Tim Cook to retire. But a lot of people are probably out there thinking, hey, do I want to upgrade to this new iPhone 17? We also know that the iPhone Air is basically a massive flop. They cut back production dramatically.

27:20It doesn't seem like they're working on a next edition. So I am just curious to hear your perspective. Do you have the 17? What model do you have if you've been enjoying it? And what do you think people should be keeping in mind as they think about making their holiday purchase? And I'm saying this somewhat, you know, from a position of self-interest because I have the 15 Pro. I really like it. I thought I was going to skip the 17, but man, I'm leaning towards going out and upgrading. Yeah, so I got the 17 Pro Max. I can hold it up here. I got the special orange edition. Nice. Can't lose that.

27:55See, very easy. No, it's a great looking phone. I thought the color would be a little weird given how orange it is, but I love it. I think it's great. And I was always going to be, though, a pro and in particular a Pro Max guy because I care most about battery life. And that's obviously a big ding against the air itself, right? Like that you need the extra battery, the battery pack add on to be able to sort of get full battery life capacity out of the device. I think, you know, Apple now has a sort of a track record of trying to launch these new sort of adjacent arms of the iPhone dating back to even the iPhone 5C, if you remember that, like, right, that was the first colorful iPhone.

28:39And it looked very pretty. but it just didn't seem to sell very well. And so they only had sort of one go of it. And then, you know, fast forward a bit, they obviously tried to reintroduce the iPhone mini after a lot of people seem to be clamoring for that. But again, by most accounts that you hear, and obviously played out in the fact that Apple discontinued it, like these just weren't selling very well. And you might say like the iPhone Plus lineup was also in that camp, but it's basically like Apple keeps trying to do these adjacent new arms of the iPhone. And for whatever reason, they just don't take hold.

29:15I think the iPhone Air in particular was always going to be weird. I mean, I wrote about this well before when it was still just rumored that I felt like it would be sort of a weird in a way in between phone because it's not the highest of the high end of the iPhone, right? And it's not the cheapest, most affordable as Apple would prefer, we say, version of the iPhone. And so it sort of sits in the middle. Yes, it sort of looks nice and it feels nice in hand. And, you know, I don't have one, but I used it in store and it's a great feeling phone. But it's again, sits in this weird spot. It's like too, too expensive to be sort of a mass consumer, you know, device, I think.

29:51And it's not fast enough and doesn't have the battery life and the camera system that sort of, you know, would be, I think, required now table stakes for the top of the line. And so they just put it in this weird position. I do think it was interesting that they sort of tied it more directly to like the pro lineup, right? It has a faster chip and sort of they're trying to angle it that way. But again, I view it as this like awkward in-between device right now. And, you know, whether or not it was actually delayed, I think that there's no question that if it was a major hit, that Apple would be moving heaven and earth to try to get a second iteration out there, right?

30:25Like if it was as popular as the MacBook Air became, right? Like Apple has famously held on to that branding because that device is so popular and they were able to do it. But I'll say that and then I say it in the same breath that the iPhone, the MacBook Air did not start out as super popular, right? It started out as a way too expensive sort of, yeah, cool demo with Steve Jobs pulling it out of the envelope and all of that. And so it had to work its way into that. And so maybe Apple thinks that they can do that again with the iPhone Air. But as of right now, it just hasn't taken off, obviously, is the way.

31:00okay so you like what i hear you saying here is is you like the 17 no looking back on that one oh yeah yeah so the 17 pro and the pro max version that i have but even the pro regular the smaller version is just it's you know what it's the fastest one it's got the best camera it's got the best battery life like and if you're two two or two generations back i would definitely upgrade if I'm you. Okay, well, here I go after this. Trudge my way over to the Apple store and say, once again, you got me. Can I ask you one tangential question that you hit upon, but we didn't really talk through? Because I'm interested in your perspective.

31:39So you noted that the FT report that talked about Tim Cook retiring had four reporters on it. When I read that and I saw that it's like a 300-word piece and I'm just like, okay, so either these four reporters all talk to the same source and they just all decided to work together on this thing or they have four different sources or they have three different you know some mixture of different sources on this but like you've worked in a newsroom i've worked in newsroom way back in the day and tech crunch was a little bit sort of different much more independent i would say than uh independent operator than than sort of working newsroom style and so i'm curious like when you see that what what is what does that signal to you typically the way those big byline stories work is one reporter who may or may not be the main beat reporter gets the tip.

32:24And then three people who are, you know, and it becomes seen as such a big story by the masthead that three people who have decent sourcing within the company basically open up their Rolodexes and call every single person they know within the company and they'll get a byline even if they didn't really contribute very much because they put the time in. That's my best guess. What do you think it was all about? No, I think you're probably exactly right. I mean, you know, again, I was thinking through like, do all these people have the same source? But I think you're exactly right. I think it's one person has, you know, got a tip about this specific incident.

33:02And then the other three were sort of used because they need to get at least a second source on this. And so, you know, the fact that they, though, have four reporters on it suggests that they got more than a second source, and that they maybe have a few sources, at least about people who are talking about this notion. But it's interesting in the context that Mark Gurman, who obviously, as we talked about, was the person who originally reported on the turn of succession and, you know, Cook potentially eventually stepping down, has pushed back pretty hard against the FT report, right? Like he sort of called them out in his newsletter and saying, like, I don't know where they're getting the timing of this.

33:38Like, certainly, as we as you and I just talked about, like, you know, this is in the air that this is going to happen at some point, just given Cook's age and everything else. But there's no indication that he's heard. And obviously he's by, you know, by all accounts, the best sourced Apple reporter at this point that he's heard that there's anything. But I also think like his sources within, like if this is a, if this is really a discussion that's being had, like the amount of people who would be talking about this internally has got to be pretty small because this is like a, this is a board decision.

34:10This is a Tim Cook, this is first and foremost, a Tim Cook decision, right? He's making this call. No one's going to force him out at this point, certainly not at this point of the stock. And no one's going to push him out regardless. He's been so successful. And so this is really his decision. And so I don't know what to make of the whole back and forth though, between these conflicting stories. It's interesting that the FT hasn't sort of followed up at all. They didn't, certainly didn't issue a correction, but also hasn't, you know, hasn't doubled down as far as I know on it. And so, yeah, it's sort of just hanging out there as it is.

34:42Yeah, it's puzzling to me. I mean, Tim Bradshaw is the first byline on that. And he's a really good reporter who does cover Apple, maybe not as the beat reporter, but covers it enough that maybe somebody whispered something to him. So it is always fascinating how these things develop. But again, like even Gurman had a story talking about how Ternus was the heir apparent. So maybe the FT kind of caught the scent there and decided to go full on in and try to see what the story was. Because even if they have a successor internally, that could be like, if they went from a company that didn't have a successor to one that does, now you could write the headline that they've ramped up succession planning and maybe make it seem more than it is.

35:26But I still think there's enough there that this is very real. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's head to break. Before we go to break, I just wanted to quickly take a moment to thank Tech Meme. If you go to Tech Meme, you probably have seen that Big Technology Podcast is one of the featured podcasts on techmeme.com. We definitely thank them for doing that. Tech Meme, of course, is a great website to keep up with the latest tech news. Always the best and most important stories are up at the top there. It's a great way to keep up with things when you're not listening to Big Tech Podcast, of course. All right, we'll be back right after this.

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37:34At Sierra, discover top workout gear at incredible prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass. You can find Spyglass at spyglass.org. One of my favorite publications, definitely recommend you check it out and sign up for the great newsletter and become a member of the site. It's great stuff. In Spyglass over the past month, M.G., you wrote about how we are in the middle of this very volatile moment for big tech market caps.

38:17Every week, It seems like there's a new big tech company that has the crown for the most valuable company on Earth. NVIDIA has played that role for a long time. Microsoft has played that role for a long time. Apple has played that role for a long time. And Google has surpassed Microsoft and seems like it might be making its way there, especially as the company starts to potentially sell its TPUs, the TPU chips, to other companies like Meta, probably cutting into some of NVIDIA's lead. Let me ask you a question about this volatility. I mean, obviously, if you think about all these companies, it's three out of the four that I just mentioned are big on the AI trade and Apple is Apple.

39:02Do you think the volatility that we've seen has just been the stock market trying to figure out who the winner is going to be in this AI race and sort of plowing money from one to the other? Is that the nature of the horse race here? I think at the highest level, yes. I think that that's roughly correct. It is fascinating how it felt like even just a few months ago that NVIDIA was basically running away with the game, right? They hit the$5 trillion valuation. Only, I think, Microsoft at that point was at$4. Google, not too long ago, I wrote about this, how I felt like they were significantly undervalued, which, of course, proved to be correct by the stock market.

39:44But it's nothing that anyone couldn't have sort of thought about, just looking at what they have on their plate beyond even AI with Waymo and everything else coming up. But Google was valued at half of certainly NVIDIA and maybe even of Microsoft at one point just a few months ago. And now they've come roaring back. And Apple, as you note, Apple's been in the front of the pack for most of the past decade. And now all of a sudden, as you're noting, and as I wrote a little bit about, They basically are collapsing up at that top echelon between those four companies. And it's just a matter of like what the current reports and narrative is around, in particular, AI.

40:28It seems like we'll push one of them to the lead. It does feel like that Google has that momentum right now based off of exactly what you're talking about with sort of the reports about, you know, potentially selling TPUs. And that obviously has a direct impact on NVIDIA if it feels like that they're going to maybe not lose the crown of that business. But certainly if they get if they get some pressure on the business for the first time from Google, that's going to take some sheen off of that. There's other external things at play, like, you know, the reports that that Warren Buffett, that Berkshire Hathaway took a giant stake in Google, I think helped propel them even further.

41:04Right. And the fact that Apple's still, I think, Berkshire's largest holding, but they've been trimming back. And so all of these things are at play when it comes to that jockeying of the stock price. But NVIDIA, I know you and Ronjan talked about it on Friday, but it was like, you know, their sort of PR kerfuffles now are sort of not helping their stock, I think, just not helping in general the feeling of confidence around the way that people are feeling about it. But before that happened and the reason why that they feel the need to sort of come out with this PR strategy is because famously, of course, Michael Burry, one of the most famous, if not the most famous short seller of all time, has come out against them.

41:50And so, yeah, there's a lot of this sort of internal jockeying about how they'll all play out. And then there's Microsoft who's sort of also getting dinged but also getting buoyed a bit. But, you know, sort of some level of the open AI relationship now being more settled, I think, has settled their stock a bit more now. But this is all just going to continue to be like in this – it feels like in this washing machine. All these companies getting tumbled around for who's in first, who's in fourth and whatnot. All right. Let me give you my hot take about what's happening here. And this is sort of a hybrid with something that Josh Brown has wrote about, downtown Josh Brown, about how we're in a horse race right now.

42:30But here's kind of how I see it. So Apple, of course, was, you know, pre-AI, the most valuable company in the world for a very long time. Maybe they swapped places with like Saudi Aramco. So we would have to say like most valuable publicly traded company. but let's just say most valuable company or, you know, excluding Saudi or Emco at like one moment. Okay. So then ChatShift PT happens and all of a sudden you see people wanting to bet on OpenAI. And the way that they do that is through NVIDIA and through Microsoft. And NVIDIA was the one that's the most direct correlation to OpenAI because if OpenAI is predicated on scale, both for training and inference, NVIDIA, which is the only one supplying them the chips, was going to be super important.

43:17And then Microsoft, secondarily, you would put Microsoft there because Microsoft has, again, like an unbelievable investment in OpenAI, an intrinsic link to OpenAI through like the IP rights and power over OpenAI for a variety of reasons. So there was this moment where NVIDIA and Microsoft surged ahead because people believed that this AI thing was going to be real. And they believed that OpenAI had a lead that was really going to be tough to challenge because the company came out with better models, better products. And it was just like their runaway favorite to effectively in the minds of investors.

43:58It had the best chance of doing this straight shot to AGI or at least some economically valuable business. economically valuable AI that was going to be tough to match. But what we've seen recently, so now that we've seen like NVIDIA and Microsoft fall and Google surge, is that I don't think it's that Google has surpassed OpenAI. It may be in some areas it has, but we are now in the first moment where the state-of-the-art models are really commoditized, where you could argue that Google and Anthropic and OpenAI have models that are, they stand together. You know, some might be better for some activities and some might be worse for other activities, but you're not going to say that OpenAI rules the world the way that it did a couple of years or even a year ago.

44:47And that's where you see, what you're seeing now really is not necessarily the fall of OpenAI and the fall of NVIDIA or the rise of Google. It's this moment where we see commoditization happen amongst the models and in some cases amongst the hardware because of the TPU thing. And when you see commoditization happens, the economics of AI shift. So I'm curious what you think about it. And I'm curious what you think, if you agree with my premise that we are starting to see this commoditization, what do you think the economic impacts of the commoditization really are? Yeah, I would frame it's like the, taking what you're saying and framing it slightly differently is that if you believe all of that to be true, that you're laying out there, maybe investors are just looking at it like, look, at the end of the day then, if that's the case, who has the sort of best position and best business model for all of this future going forward?

45:43And I think it would be hard to argue against Google just given that they own not only Google Cloud, on which a lot of models and everything are running, but the TPUs, as you're noting, obviously they have the search business and Waymo and all these other things. Whereas the other companies, if AI is starting to commoditize in some way, you know, NVIDIA, their business potentially is impacted in a good way in some cases. But for the most part, it's probably going to be looked at as like, well, the arms race is sort of slowing down a bit. And that's going to be bad news for NVIDIA at the highest level, because you won't need to necessarily buy, you know, the absolute top of the line and or on the flip side, as we're talking about, if Google's able to sort of ramp TPUs to get close.

46:36That was part of obviously the messaging from NVIDIA was we're a generation ahead, right? In their statement, which was obviously explicitly meant to say that like, yeah, Google's doing great work, but they're not where we are right now. But to your, you know, to your question, yeah, like so NVIDIA is obviously in a position where They need the AI revolution to sort of keep going as it has been in order to keep up just the incredible growth that they've seen, including last quarter, which was incredible. And then, you know, the other players, Microsoft, to your point about OpenAI, they also obviously have a great underlying business.

47:14But they don't have quite, I don't think, as viewed as all of the pieces that Google necessarily has right now. and when people are looking at all the different areas that they can they could potentially monetize for future you know would be profits and then apple is you know the wild card which is why i think apple you know we talked about um not not getting hit by the capex stuff and everything but apple is you know about to they're in second place right now they're probably going to overtake nvidia at some point and then it's just a question of exactly what we were talking about in the succession stuff like what is the future story there so like it could be you know know, the situation where Apple basically moves into first place again for a set period of time, depending on what's going on within the AI, you know, overall framework and narrative stuff.

47:56And then eventually, you know, Google passes it. And then depending on where we are again in that cycle. But again, to go back to the exact question, I do think that if this if we are sort of working towards you have more of this commoditization, that's the state that we're in right now. And I getting bunched up more than just NVIDIA running away or, you know, earlier when Microsoft was running away a bit, um, the, the wild card there, the next step might be, you know, next generation models. We're hearing a lot of people talk about world models now, right? Leon Lacan, of course, famously has, has stepped away from meta to go work on that, but also, um, Ilya Sutskipper, that's all he basically talked about, um, you know, in his, in his recent interviews and, um, and yeah, it's basically like, this is the new thing.

48:42And even Demis Hespis has been talking about world models right and so like this is the entire now thing if this becomes the new narrative that will obviously be the next thing that potentially sort of switches up or shakes up those companies again is how integrated or not they are with that with that lineup yeah i just wonder i mean if if if world models really is the next thing that's such it we're such at we're at such a early point on that front i don't know that we might have a long stall before or anything, if that approach even works, no one really knows. Yeah. And we might see, I mean, obviously we're going to have Elon Musk try to come back into this, this, uh, equation, right.

49:23And he's already been talking about how, excuse me, the, um, you know, his, his robots are optimists are going to be the biggest business ever, not just like the big, you know, biggest business of Tesla, the biggest business of all time for anything ever. And so, you know, he's hyping that up to no end because I think that he probably views this as like, yeah, that's the next sort of world models are a part of that. And, uh, you know, we go into robotics and if that's the next multi multi trillion dollars sort of business opportunity, uh, then Tesla has a shot to get into that race, you know, and be making a five, a five horse race.

49:57Obviously meta, uh, would hope to be the one to get also into that race and, and Amazon, we haven't even talked about, you know, being sort of sitting there, I think what a mere trillion dollars back or whatever they are at the moment from sort of the rest of the pack. And so all of that comes in. Yeah. It does also seem like Meta is sort of fighting the last war on this where they're like, they've assembled a super team to build LLMs. But let me ask you this. So, so let's say that's where we are. We're sort of, you know, I don't, I don't want to say petering out on progress with large language models, but maybe reaching some form of plateau and, and the models are commoditizing uh who's who do you bet on uh who would you bet on would you bet on and this is again using josh brown's like dichotomy here the sort of or the open ai cinematic universe where you have like open ai and microsoft and oracle or the google universe where you have you know i don't know and some others yeah i mean if i if i was like actually betting and uh uh you know money on these companies i would do what these companies are doing and i'll bet on each other uh basically hedge your bets.

51:03The circular financing actually makes sense in this front. That's how I would do it. But if you're asking me to actually bet to pick one winner of it, I do, you know, and I've, you know, I, I worked at Google for a long time for Google's venture arm, you know, haven't been there for a while. So just to disclose that, but, but I do think that Google's just given all of the things that they have, it does feel like the quote unquote beast has awoken. And I feel like that they're in the best position right now to be able to capitalize on all of this stuff, quite literally. I think that, again, though, this – I do buy into the notion, and I'm far from an expert on AI models.

51:46But I do buy into the notion, the high-level notion, that it's going to take more than where we are with LLMs to be able to take us to AGI or whatever you want to call it. the next phase of where we're going. And so if you believe that, it's really a question of who do you think is best positioned as one of these companies to take advantage of that. To your point, Meta feels like they're literally letting that ship sail in Jan Lacun and they'll invest or whatever in his startup. But they obviously made their bet in the opposite way. Apple is sort of off to the side. But Amazon, on, you know, they're apparently working on their own internal.

52:28I mean, they've been working on their own internal models, but obviously they have the giant Anthropic bet. But it doesn't feel like at least from there's been no leaks of anything that Anthropic is sort of really primarily focused on, you know, sort of the next world models and whatnot. And so, again, I think like the fact that Demis Hassabis has been out there talking a lot about this, like, you know, that he's thinking even if it's not world models, there's some other what's next coming up that I think that they're heavily thinking about. Microsoft, to me, it also feels a bit like they're on the last battle.

52:59They're stuck there right now, just from public things that year and reports. And so it feels like it's either, we talked about this before, like with the history of OpenAI, it does feel like that they've made their AGI or bus bet. And then it's just a question of like, can they find more and more people to give them enough capital because they're sort of now at this weird point where they don't have, you know, Microsoft owns 27 % of the company, but they're not their main capital partner anymore. Um, nor are they even their real main technology partner sort of going forward. And so they need to like continue to bring in just an insane amount of capital, whereas Google is insanely profitable.

53:40And so, you know, and they have the pieces in place to do it. So, you know, as much as I hate to bet on a, you know, three plus trillion dollar company against a quote unquote startup, it just feels like there's a window of opportunity here. I think OpenAI, when I go back to it, what they've always done the best of is on the product side, right? They've always done a great job being able to productize AI. And I think that that's what's directly led to their consumer success. And, yeah, Google is eating into that a bit now. You had a piece about this talking about how Google's actually been able to build some delightful products.

54:20Yeah, the new stuff. Whether that's Notebook LM. Right, right. Which, by the way, I have to say, Notebook LM, the team there did tweet, like, here's a holiday recipe. And somebody saw that they had just taken a recipe. They were doing holiday infographics and someone saw that they just literally jacked a recipe from some website indexed by Google and put it in a nice format and said, this is AI. And it's just like, oh, come on. Like, you can't do that. But there's also this dynamic view that you actually wrote about, which I couldn't find. Is it just for like the Google, the pro users of Gemini?

54:53But you basically are able to, I don't even know how to explain it. It's this interactive web page or something that you can create via a prompt with Gemini. It's a very cool product. Yes. So one thing, it's not on mobile yet. So I don't know if that's where you were looking. I was on desktop. Yeah. But yeah, I am a pro pro subscriber. So maybe that was it. And it's in it's in labs. So it's not officially rolled out, but it was just available. Maybe I'm in some bucket AB test for it. But yeah, it was in the dropdown and it's near nano banana. You know, when you do the dropdown and pick if you want to make an image, you could also pick to make this this type of presentation, dynamic view, again, awful name, but it's such a cool output that it does.

55:33I give the examples in my post. One of them was explaining the end of the movie Heat, the famous 90s Michael Mann movie to me. And it made this incredible just interactive output, which again, it's sort of when I'm explaining it, it sounds like rudimentary, but you got to see this thing when you do it and you could do it for anything and it basically takes what um you know the output would be in a in a text um format uh from a regular out uh query on on gemini and and it puts it into this sort of interactive model including like making just these like incredibly intuitive and like fun things like i did one for the end for you know explaining in the movie interstellar to me and it like makes a a button where you can turn on sort of background mood music that's in the style of interstellar.

56:23And then while you do that, you can calculate, uh, like time dilation, uh, when you're going around a black hole. And it's like, it's all this like just really fun, interesting, uh, way to sort of present what would normally just be, yeah, like a text, um, output back to you. And again, it sounds like rudimentary and it is in some ways right now, but you think about like, they made this in one minute based off of a random query that I do. Just think about like what they'll be able to do a year from now. And if, and if you do like a thinking version of this, where you give them a few minutes to come up with like sort of an interactive model, like the outputs I think will be absolutely incredible.

56:58And when you think about like kids learning this way, like I did one for like explaining stock buybacks. And it's just like this great interactive way to learn. And so as long as you can trust that it's not going to hallucinate and actually give you good information, I think that this is just like an incredible bit of product work that Google has done here. And that's why I wrote about it. It felt like it was being underplayed for whatever reason, in part because it has such a bad name and in part because it's in labs or whatnot. But again, that's to your exact point. Like it feels like Google has finally woken up also on the product side to be able to do interesting things to combat what OpenAI has historically done.

57:36Yeah, I was just on their labs page right now and it's just filled with interesting things. So, all right. Before we get, we have just a couple of minutes left. Before we go, I think you charted out one more interesting thing that's worth noting before we leave. And that is that Anthropic and OpenAI have really divergent paths right now, if you look at their projections. Anthropic is planning to be profitable by 2028, which I know sounds like a long way away. But in AI years, it's pretty damn good, where OpenAI is planning to lose more than$100 billion between now and 2030. And the losses will just basically keep ramping as we get closer.

58:15So what do you think this says about the competition between the two? And is Anthropic just being smart and saying we're probably going to have some AI downturn and we're going to try our best to sort of batten down the hatches and get through it? I do think that that's a part of it. I think that it's sort of interesting timing in everything else that we're talking about, right? Like if it does feel like, you know, that the models are sort of coalescing, but also that there's this sort of negative, you know, backdrop going on around just investing in AI in general from the public market sentiment on down, it feels like, yeah, if Anthropik can sort of take advantage of like, look, we're at the cutting edge right now, but we're not going to be the sort of drunken sailor spend that OpenAI is trying to do.

59:02So come on board and bet with us. And the most recent report has their new valuation at$350 billion. So they're getting pretty close to where OpenAI is at at$500 billion. It feels like they're sort of coming in in line with those numbers, which is super interesting. And again, maybe it speaks to the dichotomy between the two paths that they're taking there. It's funny. I wrote that post and then literally the day later, I wrote a number of things in that post. But one aside was like, and look, they're not spending all this money on building their own data centers. And literally like 12 hours later, they announced their first data center that they're going to build, of course.

59:40Um, but as long as it's one, as long as it's not, you know, the Stargate project and they're not spending again, hundreds of billions of dollars on building out their own data centers, you could certainly argue that they should probably have some level of their own, uh, infrastructure in place. So they're not beholden to their partners on that stuff. And especially given all the weird, as we talked about, all the weird inner investing going on where it's like, yeah, and Amazon is their main partner maybe. But they're also now buying TPUs from Google. And then – but Google is also potentially partnering with X, Y, and Z.

1:00:18And then OpenAI is potentially partnering with Amazon now too. And so there's like, I think Anthropic probably has to look at this as like, I'm not sure that we can rely on, you know, just just Amazon. And I'm not sure we can rely on just Google. And so in some ways, they have to sort of hedge that long term bet. I just think like they might be and might least might smartly be looking at the market as it is right now and saying like, the music is starting to slow a little bit. Let's not commit to spending hundreds of billions of dollars. Let's commit to spending mere tens of billions of dollars for our future.

1:00:49and let's see how this shakes out over the next couple of years. On one hand, it's interesting because I think people within Anthropic believe that if you just scale up your training runs, then you can get to AGI. On the other hand, maybe this is some rationality finally coming into the AI research lab business where they may be smartly saying, okay, hey, let's try to make some money. And maybe that will be a good way to ensure that we'll reach our goal in the long term. Yeah. And the only other thing I would add is just like, it's sort of as naturally played out the way that Anthropic has done a great job on the enterprise front, right?

1:01:25Whereas OpenAI has done a great job on the consumer front. And so we have the sort of, again, there's nuance there. And obviously OpenAI is also trying on the coding front in enterprise and whatnot. But at a high level, like they've sort of splintered off into those two worlds. And so the one is going to be an easier path potentially to making money. But we seem to be on the cusp of OpenAI potentially rolling out their first ads if some of the leaked internal builds are to be believed. And that will be a whole interesting element to the next year of how that plays out. Right. So some of that did show up in, I think, the Android code, some places for advertising.

1:02:08So that's clearly coming probably at some point next year. Speaking of next year, that's going to be the next time you and I talk. So I think we'll kick off January maybe with some predictions or some recap of some crazy stuff that happens in December. But, Angie, just want to say it's been great having you on the show here. I think we started in the second half of 2025, and it's been a great addition to the show. So looking forward to doing more together. Thanks so much, Alex. And Happy New Year. And Happy New Year to all your listeners. And, yeah, we'll catch up in early June. All right, we'll pick it up in January.

1:02:40All right, everybody. Thank you to MG. Thank you to all of you for listening and watching. We'll be back on Wednesday with a couple of anthropic researchers who found a very interesting pattern in AI models and how they've sort of turned evil and how you might be able to stop them from going to the dark side. So that's coming up on Wednesday. And then Ranjan and I will be back on Friday to break down the week's news. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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