South Korea Throws Money at Memory - DTNS 5299

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2:48This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 29th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and try to help each other understand all this stuff. on today's show we discuss why south korea's big chip investment plan is getting so much buzz and why comcast is splitting into two companies again yeah is that mitosis when they when they split into meiosis when they come together right oh that's biology man i'm a physics guy we're not we're not here for biology i'm tom merit and i'm rob dunwood let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

3:23Yeah, so you probably saw this all over the place. The government of South Korea announced a big spending plan to boost chip making in a country that already leads in chip making. Samsung and SK Hynix, two Korean companies, account for 80 % of the world market in high bandwidth memory. So we're going to talk a little bit about what they announced and then talk a little bit about why this is getting so much attention. President Lee Jae-myung has an initiative called the three mega projects for the great leap forward that is meant to build up chips, data centers, and physical AI, aka robotics. So those are your three mega projects.

4:01SK Hynix and Samsung, the two largest chip makers in the country, will each build two chip making plants in the southwest, probably around Gwangju, and then a chip packaging cluster in the central region. It seems like that might be a little bit north central. Chip packaging, of course, is when you take all the parts and you start to move them together. The southeast down around Busan and Daegu will get some materials and parts and equipment investment. Not a whole lot of details about that. But the important part is Seoul is in the northwest. So the idea is to move some of this investment away from the dominant city.

4:40You know, it doesn't hurt that Guangzhou down there in the southeast is also President Li's stronghold for votes. The government will also invest in the development of next-gen memory chips, on-device NPUs, server chips, and defense-related chips. That's more of an investment into research and technology, funding some primary research. Meanwhile, SK Group, GS Group and Naver have committed to build new data centers, a total capacity of 18.4 gigawatts to come online by 2035. And the government has plans to develop a world-class domestic physical AI foundation model. Now, one of the reasons this is getting so much attention is that SK Hynix and Samsung are also building facilities in the United States.

5:25So it's important that South Korea is like, hey, we don't want you to move all of your capacity overseas. We need to keep that capacity in South Korea. Also led to a few analysts warning about oversupply since the new capacity might not come online at the soonest, the first ones for two to three years and some of it later, at which point demand may be slowing. So Rob, we're talking about a lot of money being poured into a problem, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it has, I've for the first time showed some analysts going, well, hold on. At a certain point, We may not need all this new capacity.

6:01It's, you know, things will hit the top of the bell curve at some point. So I was of the mind that no matter when a big company or big companies like Samsung and SK Hynyx decided to build$100 million holes in the ground and then put foundries in them to really make billions of dollars worth of components, I always thought that as soon as someone decided that we are going to increase our capacity, the analysts are going to say, oh, but if you increase capacity, you might have too much. my thought is that this doesn't seem to be slowing down at least not in the foreseeable future two to three years is foreseeable the the run on ram right now is so high that they're they're making a bet it's like you know what if we build these holes we'll fill them with stuff that will actually you know we'll be able to you know to address some of the demand that's out there and that's that's the bet they're making but that's always the bet that companies make you you cannot build a foundry in a few months.

6:57It takes several years to get it done. These are, they start off as big holes, but then they become very, very precision factories. So, you know, there's probably not much more precision outside of maybe making nuclear, you know, nuclear enrichment on earth as far as how precise these things are. So it's going to take them a while to be built. And their bet is that there's still going to be data centers that want RAM. There's still going to be, you know, power plants that need, you know, to power the data centers that need the RAM. that that is the bet they're making. And I don't know that it's the wrong bet.

7:29I probably would have been on the side of this if someone were to ask me, hey, Rob, what do you think should happen? Somebody should build a really big hole, fill it with a foundry and start making right. Yeah, I'm with you. That that is the good 30 ,000 foot view, right? Which is if you build the rails, sure, some of your train companies may go out of business, but you still have the rails and eventually people will use them. A more recent example for people not born in the 1800s is fiber optic cable, right? We built a lot of it, didn't use it for a long time, but now it's going to good use. So there is that long distance term.

8:06And if you're Samsung or SK Hynix, you're probably thinking, well, you know, if we get a factory built, we'll use it for something. We are a dominant chip maker. Now, the data center stuff may or may not get used if South Korea reaches, some kind of maximum usage. I don't know that the market for data centers in South Korea will be as hot for overseas usage. But you can also throttle that back down later on. I think a lot of this really is political. A lot of it is the president saying, I'm going to throw jobs away from Seoul. You should vote for me next time. And SK Hynix and Samsung are happy to take the money.

8:44that's that's definitely a part of it but i think really it really comes down to this is that these buildings they they do age over time and they've got to retrofit them so these are just going to be new ones that if they need to retrofit some other stuff yeah well they've got capacity doesn't have to go down because they need to do a big retrofit which has been a problem in the past they've had we need to go retrofit this factory so production goes down and this will give them some leeway to not have that happen. So, you know, no one asked me, but if you were to, I would have said, you know what, let's go build some holes.

9:17Let's fill in with foundries. Let's start pumping out more RAM. And I think that that would probably be a good thing to at least bring, you know, there's a lot of problems as to, you know, what else these data centers and what else AI is doing. But the needing to actually be able to facilitate the demand is not a bad thing from a Samsung or an S &A Kynix standpoint. Yeah. And the other thing I'll add to that is you are the leader, you know, between SK Hynix and Samsung, you've got a$2 trillion market. It is wise to not rest on your laurels, you know, make sure you stay the leader. If they don't do it, someone else is going to do it.

9:50In fact, someone else is going to do it, even though they are doing it. So it makes sense for them to go. It makes sense for them to try to stay at the top. Yeah. Well, folks, DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, Michelle Sergiu and Chris Harrison. And we got new folks coming in the tent. Thomas, Sarith, Yaya, Brenda, Helen, Todd, Moses, Candace, Cuttlefish, Kimberly, Paul, Jeff, Sherry Ann, Chris, and Jonathan. I was trying not to speed up at the end so you all get exactly the same amount of thank you from us. We really appreciate having all these new folks in the tent.

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12:25That's technology at Capital One. Why does the same news story sound completely different depending on where you read it? That confusion is exactly what Ground News was built to solve. It's an app and website that compares news coverage, allowing you to see how each story is framed across the political spectrum and the world. For the recent story about the U.S. signing the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, their vantage plan shows us that right-leaning Daily Express framed it as a historic peace deal, while left-leaning NPR notes it resulted in the president's approval hitting record lows, plus data like each publication's source of funding and a factuality rating.

13:00The Nobel Peace Center even called Ground News an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview. Get 40 % off by going to ground.news.com. That's ground.news.com. Again, ground.news.com.

13:21All right, let's get right into the briefs. Anthropics Mythos 5 is available again for some. Late Friday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote a letter to Anthropics co-founder Tom Brown that said, and I quote, I have determined that the appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 model, end quote. And that, quote, Anthropic has worked with the U.S. government to address risk associated with the covered models, end quote. More than 100 U.S. government agencies and companies may now access Mythos again, even if their workers are foreign nationals.

13:55The letter did not mention Fable 5, which remains unavailable to all users, though the company says it's making progress on talks to bring that back as well. Speaking of politics, this this feels like a very negotiated solution, not a technical solution. I don't think they changed anything in Mythos 5 because Mythos 5 wasn't the problem. For those who may not have been paying attention to this story as closely, Fable 5 was the one that Amazon said, we think we made it do something its guidelines shouldn't admit. Anthropic said, you could do that with any model. And the US government says, you need to take this more seriously.

14:32Both Fable 5 and Mythos can't be used by foreign nationals. And Anthropic said, well, it's kind of hard to sift out foreign nationals. So we're shutting it down for everybody. They have obviously gotten to the point in their dispute where they said, OK, we think we're close enough to an agreement on all of how all this should work. Let's let we'll let Mythos 5 go back into operation. But again, Mythos 5 was never the problem. So those hundred companies are like, well, thank goodness. The thing that was helping us find vulnerabilities before is now back. We can do other things with it. But the big issue, Fable 5, has not, at least at this recording, been resolved.

15:07I guess technically this is a tech story because we're talking about a tech company. Sure. But this really is more of a story about relationships and just getting along with people because there was nothing technical. Nothing has changed. Not a line of code has changed to get to this. This is people who make the decisions have actually had some meaningful conversation and minds were changed. Yeah. And maybe Fable 5 will have changes to the guidelines. I kind of expected at least claim to have done that. But Mythos was never the problem. And so if there are additional guidelines or safeguards in place, the safeguards are we'll call Tom Brown next time, not Dario Amode, is kind of what it sounds like to me.

15:53We'll make sure we get back to you within the first few minutes of you calling. We won't make you wait an hour tonight. Yeah, yes. Probably things like that versus any changes to the actual model. um meanwhile motang noted this next one in our subreddit comcast announced that over the next year it will split into two companies one will operate the broadband and wireless business uh will be called comcast uh and the other the media arms of nbc universal and sky i expect that one will be called nbc universal maybe nbc universal sky who knows comcast already spun out its cable tv networks if you're like wait didn't they do this already there is a company called versant which has ms now not msnbc uh cmbc and and and all of those uh so this is taking nbc universal which has peacock and bravo and the film studios as well as the sky cable networks and saying uh we are going to make that its own company and then we're going to take the isp and the cable tv stuff and the mobile wireless stuff and we'll make that its own company current comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanaugh is going to run the media business.

16:59So he is the guy with Brian Roberts, who's been running Comcast. He'll stick around as NBCUniversal's CEO. And then former chief financial officer Michael Angelakis will come back and take over as CEO of Comcast, the broadband business. Co-CEO Brian Roberts, who's been there since 2002, been in charge since 2002, will remain involved in the leadership of both companies. Sounds to me like that means he'll take the role of chairman or something like that on both boards. These are both going to be public companies. Stockholders today are going to get shares in both of these. Analysts asked if this would lead to more strategic transactions, aka, are you going to put one or more of these companies up for sale?

17:41Are you looking to merge them? And Roberts said, absolutely not. That's probably what he has to say right now. And probably they're like, let us finish this merger by mid-2027 or the split by mid-2027 before we start talking about mergers. But you already have people talking about whether Netflix would want to buy NBCUniversal now that it doesn't have the cable networks. Do they want to have a theme park business? Because that's going to go in the NBCUniversal side. And whether Comcast itself would want to merge with Charter or one of the other cable companies out there to create a nationwide ISP.

18:18So there is a movie. It's a cinematic masterpiece that came out years ago, Tom, it's called Demolition Man. And there's, there's a part of Demolition Man where they're talking about restaurants and all restaurants have become Taco Bell. And I think that they, they were, they were on the something, but they got it wrong. It wasn't the restaurants. It was the media companies that all want to consolidate and become one. So it's this, this was really interesting because in order to do the consolidation, it may happen down the road. They actually need to do not a divestiture, but they need to split apart.

18:48So this is, it's, it's, it's interesting in the fact that this is a company that we got to do everything we can do to get together. And now they're saying, but now that we have, it actually makes sense for us to not necessarily be together because we need to make decisions independently as these, you know, as these business arms run, that's kind of hard to do if they're all under one banner. So this is, as you said, there's, you know, there's going to be a chairman of the board that might have some oversight over both or oversight over both, but they ultimately will be separate companies. The shareholders will get shares in both of the companies.

19:19And that just lines it up for someone else to come in and buy something up at some point in the not too distant future. It's not being said now, but if we read the tea leaves, we can kind of see once again, they're trying to get to Taco Bell. Everybody wants to be one at the end. Highlander. Also, that's another, that's another movie. In the end, there could be one. Yeah. I think this reminds me a little bit of the Viacom split Sumner Redstone split Viacom into CBS and what essentially were the Paramount networks, and that one was called Viacom. Now, this was content being split into two things, but it was like broadcast and cable networks versus film and cable networks when they split Viacom and CBS.

20:00Sumner Redstone remained on the board for both of those. Now, eventually he got old and retired and his daughter took over, but Viacom was brought back together. CBS and Viacom re-merged down the road and now they're paramount and they're about to merge with Warner Brothers Discovery. So I look at this and I wonder if there's a little bit of that going on. Is that why Brian Roberts is going to stick around in a leadership position on both? Do they think, you know what, let's run these independently for a while. We might want to bring them back together later on. The other side of that is we kind of are at the end of the era of the platform and the content working together.

20:42That era was kicked off when AOL bought Time Warner. AT &T owned Warner later, thinking they could make a better go of being the platform. You also had the owner of Charter, Paul Allen, buying cable networks with Tech TV. None of those have stayed together. And Comcast was kind of the last one standing on that. So it seems like the dumb pipes are saying, you know what, we need to go off and be dumb pipes and not have the content business anymore. There's nothing new in the world. At some point, someone said, it makes sense for us to become a giant conglomerate and have all this stuff under one header.

21:19And then someone said, you know what? You know what would be cool? If we actually broke some of these up because it gives us more options. So it's almost like it's a cyclical pattern. They combine and then they expand and then they combine and then they expand. And the conditions changed over time, right? I feel like Comcast made good use of NBC Universal for many years. It probably was the right business when you didn't have streaming. But now when you have so much more competition for streaming and more competition for ISPs and the decline of cable television, suddenly like maybe it doesn't make any sense.

21:52It's definitely been right for the shareholders, at least in most cases, because these things have generally been very positively seen by the market, which is what drives these companies. is not necessarily, they have customers and they are very, very responsive to their customers, but they also have owners that are called shareholders. And shareholders, the one thing that they definitely like is they either have a dividend or to have that stock price just keep going up and up and up. And what we've seen from these things that have happened in the past is that that goal has not actually not been met.

22:22They have become much more profitable in doing these things. And I think this is another way to probably try to see how can we become a more profitable entity, even if it means that we have to break ourself up. Yeah. And honestly, this is the effect of competition. And in this case, I think it's good for consumers. Comcast, once it spins off, is going to have to compete with T-Mobile and AT &T. It already is, but it will be a leaner competitor for them instead of resting on its laurels and trying to be a local monopoly. Well, we have the cable monopoly. That's all we have to do. Competition has driven it to do this.

22:57And likewise, competition from Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon and others are driving NBC Universal to say, you know what, we need to be leaner and more competitive as well. That's a great point because they're competing now, but they have to compete, compete if that's all that they do. It's like if you're going up against another company that this company is a cell phone company or I should say a data company because that's what the cell phone companies are becoming. And that's what you've got to be now. You've got to compete there on that and make that company be the best it can be. But when you're a giant conglomerate, well, you know, the money is fungible at the end of the day.

23:33At least they try to make it be. So, yeah, that is a very good point. They have to compete once they are on their own and doing the thing that their direct competitors only do. Now, it's been two minutes since we talked about RAM. So let's get back to that. So analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the sources indicate that Apple will build its lower end iPhones coming in the first half of 2027. With 9 gigabytes of RAM, not 8, that means 6 1.5 gigabyte dies rather than 4 2 gigabyte dies. The current high-end phones use 8 1.5 gigabyte dies for 12 gigabytes, and that is not expected to change. This comes on the heels of the news that Apple has told the U.S.

24:14government that it plans to buy memory chips from China's largest DRAM manufacturer, CXMT. The only restriction on CMXMT parts is that it can't be used for defense contracts. But Apple is asking for a guarantee that if it makes a purchase of this contract, that CXMT won't be added to an entity list in the future. CXMT was removed from the Defense Department restriction list in February, but added it back in June after pressure from some legislators. Quote notes that without CXMT, Apple might see yields of the A20 chips of 10 to 20 percent lower than its target in the second half of the year through Q1.

24:51Yeah, I feel like this one's getting misinterpreted a lot if you just look at the headlines, because I was misinterpreting it when I was just looking at the headlines. Once I read it, I'm like, oh, Apple's not asking for a license. Apple's saying, yeah, we can buy CXMT chips right now. It's perfectly legal. We're not making these things for the Defense Department. But if we do, are you going to throw this thing on the entity list in October and then we're screwed? So we need a guarantee that that's not going to happen before we sign this contract, which casts this in a slightly different light.

25:22Yeah, they essentially, they need an assurance. They need to, hey, if we do this, we need to know that you're not going to undo everything that we've done. We could just not do it and figure out what the consequences are of not doing it are as compared to not going or going into it without knowing whether or not this is going to happen or not. So that makes a lot of sense from Apple's standpoint. This also lets you know, man, this memory thing is real. We've been talking about Ramageddon now for, what, six months? It's been all this year, maybe going into last year a little bit. This is a thing.

25:52These companies, it is difficult for them to get memory. It's difficult for them to get chips. And it's not just RAM. It's chips in general are just hard to get because there's such a run on data centers and big AI. So this is this seems like this is a move to try to combat what Apple is definitely facing, you know, based off of those price increases that we heard about last week. Yeah, that nine gigabyte is an example of something I've been I've been waiting to see more of, which is in the past, Apple would have just made the no brainer decision to put 12 gigabytes of RAM in the lower end iPhone and call it a day.

26:30It wouldn't have added that much to the bill of goods because RAM was cheap. But these days, that does not make sense. So now they're looking and saying, well, hold on. How much do we need to run the Siri AI on the lower end iPhone if it's just one more gigabyte of RAM? Let's do 1.5 gigabyte dyes instead of two gigabyte dyes. And that, you know, that that makes a leaner supply chain for Apple to deal with. And I think we're going to see more of these kinds of considerations from companies. Yeah, I think that an actuary or two at Apple says, hey, hang on, guys, we have a bit of a problem here. We have decided that we're going full bore with AI locally on the device.

27:14In order to make this run really well, you need to have at least nine gigabytes of RAM. Well, we have a lot of people who buy iPhones that only have eight. We have a fair amount that buy those that have 12 or more, but there's a lot that only buy eight. And from what you are telling us, the increase to go to, you know, to go to 12 is significant. And we're not eating that any longer. We're now passing that on to our customers. So if we were to pass that on, that means that we're not, you know, two things are going to happen. They're either going to have to pay a lot more or we're going to make a lot less margin.

27:44So what can we do to mitigate this? Well, if we get to nine, they'll they'll be able to run our stuff. OK, and they may go out and buy a new phone because I've talked about this on multiple shows over the last week. there are folks that are thinking about getting a new phone, but that phone costs$250 more, $300 more. They may not be thinking about getting a new phone anymore. It may be, you know what, let me just blow it away, get a new case, change my home screen and wait until next year. And that's not a story that Apple wants to hear. Yeah. And when Apple is going to the government saying, can you guarantee CXMT won't be putting on an entity list?

28:20Because otherwise we're going to make 10 to 20 % fewer phones at that class. That's beyond even just the pricing issue, which you absolutely laid out properly and is a real issue. There's also like, we just might not be able to make enough phones if we don't get these supplies. So bringing it down to nine gigabytes also helps with that problem as well. Yeah, I was looking, I think the lowest in phone that can run AI is a 15 Pro or Pro Max. So these are pretty beefy devices. That's just a couple of years back. That's not that old of a device. Another issue for Apple would be here is that if we can't sell enough of the phones to get to folks to use Apple AI on the low end, then we're seeding that market.

29:09because here's the thing that does work. You can still run ChatGPT on those phones. You can still run Gemini on those phones. It's not running locally. It's shipping that stuff off to the cloud and doing what it needs to do there. But if that becomes people's normal, that's just what they're used to, then when they do get the upgrade, they may not care about the local Siri stuff on the phone as much as they would if they were able to get into it when they get their brand new phone. So I think that is a big consideration for Apple is that we need people to, on the low end, buy these phones and get the AI promise that we've been making for a couple of years.

29:41And if we miss that simply because we can't, you know, folks can't afford to buy the RAM or we're not going to afford to eat it by putting it in there, that ultimately can really wreak havoc on our plans for just growth in the future. Yeah. If this does end up to be true, and Quo's pretty good at this stuff, I'm curious if nine gigabytes keeps that price from going up. Can they hold the line on the iPhone pricing? At least if the low one. They had so much baked in there. I think maybe to add one additional gig, they might be able to eat that and not see a price increase. But I know we will do.

30:14We'll find out in a few months. That's right. Well, folks, I don't think either of my nieces were alive the last time we changed up the Patreon perks. So it's long overdue. We've got new Patreon perks coming starting July 1st. New benefits, including exclusive ways to find out what's going on behind the scenes, even have a voice in the show. You can check out all the new tiers at patreon.com slash DTNS. Go do it.

31:04which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden plush pair smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. Like, people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora. Why does the same news story sound completely different depending on where you read it? That confusion is exactly what Ground News was built to solve. It's an app and website that compares news coverage allowing you to see how each story is framed across the political spectrum and the world.

31:38For the recent story about the U.S. signing the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, their vantage plan shows us that right-leaning Daily Express framed it as a historic peace deal, while left-leaning NPR notes it resulted in the president's approval hitting record lows, plus data like each publication's source of funding and a factuality rating. The Nobel Peace Center even called ground news an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview. you. Get 40 % off by going to ground.news slash 2026. That's ground.news slash 2026. Again, ground.news slash 2026.

32:17All right, let's finish up with quick headlines. These are those little little bits that make you look smarter. The Philippines has become the world's biggest spender on solar panels since the US war against Iran began on February 28th. The Netherlands is bigger on paper, but that counts trans shipments, some of which are headed for the Philippines. Yeah, but it's in the Philippines right now. Ford says it has rehired more than 300 veteran quality inspectors over the past several years as it found flaws with its automated systems. Ford's combination, so they're not getting rid of the systems, but they're combining them with those experienced professionals, has returned it to the top of J.D.

32:57Power's initial quality study for the first time since 2010. Google's earthquake alert system, which uses Android phone accelerometers to detect quakes, reached approximately 11.4 million people in Venezuela a few seconds up to two minutes before the quakes were felt in Caracas, Venezuela on Wednesday, June 24th. Yeah, I mean, we don't have stats on what effect that had, but that's a good number of people that actually at least had some kind of warning, no matter what they did with it. Yeah, we saw buildings fall down. So if you got a two-minute head start to get out, Like, so we don't know the numbers, but I would have to have, imagine somebody was probably safer for it.

33:34Probably. The former sales and development business officer for game developer Raw Fury told the Business of Video Games podcast that it appears new Game Pass deals with game companies are on pause while Microsoft restructures Xbox. So don't expect a whole lot of third-party games coming to Game Pass in the future, unless this pause goes away soon. The U.S. Justice Department, working with the International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Network, has seized nearly 400 web domains being used to distribute unauthorized video streams of the World Cup games in Bulgaria, Colombia, Croatia, Peru, Poland and Romania.

34:12Yeah, I hear somebody in the audience complaining about that. like that was how i was watching the games uh french retailer ldlc has made a gaming box that follows the specs of the steam machine but sells for cheaper if you order it as parts and build it yourself sells for about the same if you just order it pre-built it was originally called the stim box that was a little too close to steam box so they changed it to the pc box uh it has a better GPU, an NVIDIA RX 9060 XT, but it's also three times the size. It's a little noisier and it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Steam was able to put in place like instant sleep and wake or HDMI keck support.

34:52But if you're a DIYer, you can still run Steam OS on it. So it might be a worthy consideration. Sounds pretty cool. Yeah. WhatsApp said it will begin rolling out username based chat worldwide over the next few months. Right now, users must know the other users phone numbers in order to connect yeah people have been asking for a long time i've been asking for this yeah i checked it has not come to my app yet but as soon as it does i'm going to be signing up for that uh the united states supreme court ruled six to three that quote an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell phone location information this is a big one people have been debating this for a long time uh what this will mean is that authorities will need a search warrant to get location data.

35:37Now, you may say, well, they didn't need that before. They used to ask what was called a geofence warrant, meaning they didn't have to get a warrant for every single person. Just tell me everybody that was in this location at this particular time. They can't do that anymore. They have to get a warrant for the particular person's information to find out where they were. This is huge, and it wasn't particularly close. 6-3 is a landslide victory in today's Supreme Court. So this is a big win. australia announced it will double the maximum penalty for social media companies breaking the minimum age law from 49.5 million to 99 million australian dollars which is something around 68 million dollars in the u.s that'll fix it absolutely uh those kids are going to say you know what's going to cost this company too much if i still use this stuff i don't want to do that you don't want them to be financially sound these trillion dollar companies gambit mutant noted this Next one on our subreddit, the Financial Times and CNBC note sources reporting that Google had to restrict how much Meta could access Gemini because Meta was using so much of it.

36:42Now, Google has apparently had to pull back several companies usage because everybody's facing a capacity crunch. But Meta was by far the biggest, apparently. I've got questions about this. Were they paying to use it or were they using the free? Yeah, yeah, they're paying to use it. They're paying. But they were like, there was too many tokens. They're like, hold on. We can't serve that many tokens. Yeah. OK, well, folks, we end every episode of Daily Take News show with some shared perspectives. Friday, Tom mentioned that price rises never last forever, noting that GPU prices came down in the past.

37:15Wayne's has a question. Yeah, Wayne's wrote, when did GPUs go down in price? I've been holding on to my 2060 waiting for that to happen. Not recently, Wayne's. If you remember before the 2060, I think this is more in the like 800 era of NVIDIA. None of the chips were selling for for MSRP, for the recommended retail price. Everything was being priced up because everybody was buying them for other uses. A lot of times it was for Bitcoin mining. This is, you know, 2020, 2021. And then eventually ASICs came along and people stopped using them for Bitcoin. and Bitcoin started to change. In fact, things like Ethereum moved to proof of work instead of proof of stake, or proof of stake instead of proof of work.

38:03And so basically the prices of GPUs went back down to the retail price. This is not me saying the GPU prices have gone down recently. No, they absolutely have not. But there was a time when we were having Patrick Norton on and he was like, you cannot find a GPU for less than$1 ,000 right now. And that eventually went back down to the recommended retail price. Tom, you remember the time when GPUs were actually used for gaming? That's what people bought them for? It's literally been like 10, no, it's probably more than 10, it's probably closer to 15 years that they just really haven't been for that.

38:41They technically still are. That's what a lot of people bought them for. But yeah, I was thinking AI, AI, AI, but it was before that it was Bitcoin mining. that we've been using these things to do Bitcoin mining for years. Yeah. Well, that's what tech people do, right? They figure out how to take something like, I know it was meant for that, but I think I could also use it for that. Very effectively, as we've not seen the run on ramp. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, folks, we do want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

39:17Big thanks to Wayne's for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. Go take a look at those new Patreon perks. You can find them pinned at the top of patreon.com slash DTNS.

39:40The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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