In short
European tech and venture news, focusing on US-China tensions (rare earths), AI regulation/liability, and an AI model price war affecting enterprise costs and IPO sentiment.
Guests (hosts)
Mads (venture/tech commentator; discusses AI act reporting duties, rare-earth supply chain, and AI agent risk), Andrew (venture/tech commentator; covers UK/European events, bond/market context, and AI model pricing/enterprise lock-in), plus the third host (narration/intro; joins market and AI discussions).
Key claims
- Rare earths aren’t “rare” in Europe; Europe outsourced mining/refining to China due to environmental/regulatory and industrial “disenfranchisement.” Estonia’s refining plant is small (about 2,000 tons/year vs ~30,000 tons Chinese imports).
- AI “hotline”/incident reporting is needed; Europe’s AI Act already requires model labs to report incidents “without undue delay.”
- AI agents will proliferate, but e-commerce sites may block them; liability and governance will shape what’s allowed.
- Anthropic and OpenAI are driving a real price war; open source is increasingly used, especially for cost control.
Notable examples
- Trump-Xi summit extended a rare-earth/trade truce to Jan 10.
- OpenAI/Australia government breach reporting delays discussed.
- Anthropic Opus 5.5 ~40% cheaper; OpenAI “Sol/Luna” about half price.
- Meta’s “Muse” blocked by Amazon; Hugging Face breach and fallback to open models.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to Rare Earths
0:00 to 1:20
The discussion begins with an overview of the rare earths situation in Europe.
“But just to be clear, Mads, rare earths are all over.”
Context of European Industries
1:20 to 3:43
Exploration of Europe's dependency on rare earths and the need for more ambitious strategies.
“behind the headlines that are going to affect European venture.”
Unicorns and Investment Insights
4:36 to 5:31
Discussion on the recent rise of unicorns in Europe and investment trends.
“They were kind of musing on the British scene.”
Bond Market Impacts
5:31 to 7:31
Analyzing the bond market's effect on the VC landscape and economic trends.
“You have been a delightful, positive force, Andrew, I must say explicitly for the last number of weeks.”
Germany's Economic Challenges
7:31 to 10:40
In-depth look at Germany's political and economic issues affecting Europe.
“I would have loved to get your German friend on the show.”
Implications of Trump and Xi Summit
10:40 to 13:20
Discussion on the outcomes of the Trump and Xi summit and its effects on Europe.
“And I think the challenge with it is you can't really, before you address some of the underlying issues, you're not going to unpick this.”
Rare Earth Processing Concerns
13:20 to 14:00
Conversation around the logistics and challenges of rare earth processing in the U.S.
Reviving the Cold War Hotline Idea
14:00 to 14:40
Exploring the concept of a modern hotline for AI safety between governments.
“During the Cold War, there was an idea of a hotline between Gorbachev and Reagan where they could jump on the phone and sort of help avert a nuclear disaster.”
Legislative Concerns about AI
14:40 to 16:40
Discussing the challenges of implementing effective AI regulation and oversight.
“So a hotline between presumably the White House and she's office where they can talk if something happens.”
AI Incidents and Reporting Obligations
16:40 to 19:25
Debating the necessity for real-time reporting of AI incidents to governments.
“What are they really going to talk about, especially seeing as there doesn't seem to be much government supervision around AI right now.”
Show all 30 chapters
Rare Earths and European Dependency
19:25 to 23:00
Examining Europe’s reliance on China for rare earth elements and its implications.
“But there is immediate and there's a month later.”
The Importance of Rare Earths in Modern Technology
23:00 to 24:30
Understanding the critical role of rare earths in various technologies and industries.
“Estonia has a plant that's being brought online now.”
Impact of U.S. Robotics Ban on Europe
24:30 to 26:40
Analyzing the implications of Trump's robotics ban and potential opportunities for European firms.
“Are we not going to touch on the ban, Trump's banned, robot vacuum cleaners from outside the US?”
Price War in AI: Anthropik vs OpenAI
26:40 to 28:05
Discussing the recent price cuts and competition between AI models from Anthropik and OpenAI.
“Well, as long as they do some level of manufacturing in the US, it doesn't have to be all of it, But as long as some of it is done there, you can sell and you can export.”
The Price War in AI Models
28:05 to 29:28
Explore the dynamics of the ongoing price war in AI models and its implications.
“And on OpenAI's front, the new Sol and Luna models are about half the price of their predecessors.”
Open Source AI Adoption
29:28 to 31:06
Discuss the rising trend of open source AI models and their impact on enterprises.
“And I know that they have a particular market segment that they're highlighting.”
Enterprise Integration Challenges
31:06 to 32:50
Understand the complexities enterprises face when integrating AI models.
“I read that the cost of GPT 3.5 level performance has dropped 280 fold in two years to get performance.”
Anthropic's Pricing Strategy
32:50 to 35:34
Examine Anthropic's pricing power and its impact on market dynamics.
“But just picking up on Andrew's point there first, I think the evidence of what you're saying is, and I think we have a chart we can bring up for those who are viewing.”
Introduction of Jev Model
35:34 to 37:36
Learn about the new Jev model and its classification capabilities.
“We're seeing a lot of people switch in-house.”
IPO Predictions and Market Trends
37:36 to 40:03
Analyze the implications of upcoming IPOs in the AI sector and market trends.
“So one of the issues we have with models is that there's LLMs is that they're stochastic, which means they're not deterministic, which means that they're not giving us a predictable answer necessarily every time.”
Current State of AI Investment
40:03 to 42:04
Discuss the changing landscape of AI investments and market valuation.
“And especially if you've got Trump going, hoax, hoax, hoax, we're going to push, we're going to go.”
European IPO Trends and Challenges
42:04 to 44:31
Discussion on the state of European IPOs and cultural barriers impacting them.
“And OpenAI has itself said that they're going to delay their IPO.”
AI Agents and E-Commerce Dynamics
44:32 to 47:46
Exploration of the emergence of AI agents in e-commerce and the challenges they face.
“There are, as I've mentioned, rumors of agents all over the web in stealth.”
Security Flaws and AI's Role
47:47 to 52:18
Analysis of recent security breaches and the implications for AI systems.
“I mean, as a customer, I want my agents to be able to go where I want them to go.”
Legal Landscape for AI Liability
52:19 to 55:28
Discussion on the evolving legal framework around AI liability and product responsibility.
“which in many cases may be quite simple, being revealed and exploited.”
Euklid: A New Chip Manufacturer
55:29 to 56:00
Introduction to Euklid, a chip manufacturer focusing on AI model inference.
“So much as you look at, you know, co-counsel or Harvey AI, I just see that, you know, it's going to be a great time to be a lawyer in the next 20 years because all this stuff is sorting out, right?”
Euklid's Major Funding Round
56:00 to 57:24
Learn about Euklid's recent 200 million euro Series A funding and their innovative chip development for AI inference.
“Well, let's get back into D-Love, though, with Euk.”
Pension Fund Investment Insights
57:24 to 58:59
Discover the implications of the Dutch Pension Fund's billion euro commitment to venture and tech investments.
“Yeah, I'm going to stay in the Netherlands, actually.”
Biotech Innovations and Future Outlook
58:59 to 1:00:28
Discuss the excitement and advancements in biotech, highlighting the potential for breakthroughs in medical treatments.
“Roughly 0.01 % of European pension assets went into European BC in 2024.”
Upcoming Events and IPO News
1:00:28 to 1:02:54
Stay informed about upcoming IPOs, particularly Aura's valuation and Micron's results in the tech sector.
“I think we're all worried that there's another tax hike coming.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00But just to be clear, Mads, rare earths are all over. If you look at a map of the rare earth mines on the globe, there aren't actually that many in Europe, but there are. They're here. So the rare earths aren't rare. It's the fact that we've basically disenfranchised our own industries and pushed it all over to China because it's so dirty and these things are so hard to mine and process. A hundred percent. And there's mining and there's refining. Estonia has a plant that's being brought online now. But it'll produce only about 2 ,000 tons a year versus 30 ,000 tons of Chinese imports. So it's a small proportion.
0:37We need to be much more ambitious. But it does make you wonder, the UK is indeed Europe's big market. Why are we not more belligerent about some of the manufacturing requirements here? It's quite a big deal. And it is a proper price war. because what's happened is you've got the release of a new model that is in many ways even more powerful than Fable, which was Fable 5.1, which was previously the top of the line, and it's much cheaper. If there is a strong liability anchor here, I think there is. That is an endpoint, as in it's your model, it's your liability, I think is going to be the creator of the right outcomes.
1:19Hello and welcome to Upside, where every week we dig behind the headlines that are going to affect European venture. Today it is Mads, Andrew and my good self and we are talking about, well, Trump and the Xi summit. What will this mean for Europe? The AI price war and the money window is narrowing. Agents are everywhere loose on the hoose. We've got the week ahead, predictions and deal of the week.
1:54This show is not investment advice, and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Gentlemen, Andrew, you've come down with the bogeys, apart from the kids giving you the lurgy. How are you? You sound very white-esque. Very well, yes. It's lurgy. It's lurgy, not love, though, in my case. Well, I hope you can keep it together for the next hour without collapsing into a corner. What's new with you, Andrew? Give us a story. What's happened this week? Well, we've got in London, beginning of October, you've got Defence Week coming up, you've got Deep Tech Week coming up.
2:36So we're doing a few bits for Deep Tech Week, so I've been busy supporting some of those events. Tell everyone, can people join the events? Where are these things? I mean, yeah, you can go on the website, deeptechweek.london, I think it is. We'll put it in the comments. There's a conference on the 8th. There's a resilience conference, a defense conference, a big one on Monday, Tuesday. So yeah, there's a lot going on that week. So worth checking it out. Okay, so you've been prepping for that. Nice. Mads, my good man, how are you? Are you fresh and now over the jet lag? Absolutely. We had a Super X event on Monday.
3:12It was just terrific to have the startups, the corporates and the investors, everybody together. And I would say one room, but we actually had a whole floor of rooms and parallel tracks. And it was great, great day. Yeah, it was great. It was great. Like it was Hyundai, Bosch, Honda, a bunch of big names looking at innovation through the startup lens, which I think is always music to my ears. I've got a few little quick bits that I'd like your thoughts on before we kick into the main docket. So I saw this week that Europe has minted 43 unicorns so far this year, which I think was kind of cool.
3:48More than 24 and 25 combined. Obviously, the main contenders here are AI, deep tech and space all leading the charge. But I thought that was a nice little reminder that Europe is on the map. Also, I saw that Phoenix Court have raised some capital from the British Business Bank, NatWest, HSBC and M &G. Now, why am I raising this? Because obviously, VC funds are raising all the time. Well, it's a bit of a big deal, possibly a bit of a watershed, because NatWest, this is the first time they've invested in a venture capital fund. And obviously, as VC managers, we are hoping to see more institutions, banks, insurance companies, pension funds investing in venture.
4:28I think that's a great marker. Hopefully, we'll see more of that. Did you join the launch? I did. I did. I saw I was talking with Robert Peston. They were kind of musing on the British scene. I thought it was a lovely event up in North London, darling. It was great. Yeah. So good for them. I think obviously we want more, especially into maybe the emerging names rather than just the safe bets and the growth capital up there. So if you're listening, pension funders, institutions, banks, et cetera, come down and get into where the real innovation is happening down at the early, early stages. that would be great.
5:09And that's possibly the only surprise, just to comment on that, right? I mean, you'd think they have a fantastic footprint. Saul's been at this for a very long time. You'd think that could attract large enough tickets directly from the pension funds, whereas the British Business Bank is in a position to deploy into new managers, which it does all the time, right? Which is fantastic. So yeah, that would be the only comment. It's all good. It all goes in the pot. But you'd think that those have a larger footprint and a larger firm should be able to attract from some of these larger institutions yeah i i kind of see i i'm always half glass full on these things we have for sure we have a bank nat west a known high street bank investing in venture capital so um i i i'd like to think that the energy in the room is now how do we do more how do we support and i'm gonna i'm gonna go on that track because it's so easy to knock what we do here in the UK.
6:05I'm not knocking it. I'm not knocking it. Money into UK VC, all in, all in. You have been a delightful, positive force, Andrew, I must say explicitly for the last number of weeks. But I think it's, I want to see more as we all do. And I want to see more in the innovation layers. So emerging managers, earlier stages, so we can really get the motor humming in the UK and across Europe. A quick look at bonds. I know this is a VC pod, but bonds obviously are going to be a big marker for our world. We've got the US 10-year just over the 5%, UK over 5%, JGB over 3%, and the German bond 3.5%. So these are the highest levels somewhere between 20 and 30 years, depending on the bond that you look at.
6:50So we have crossed, in the US especially, we've crossed that psychological 5 % barrier. Brent's back over 100, and diesel, I don't know if anyone drives a diesel car, but is now over two quid a litre in the UK which I think what people obviously see in the high street. Germany, Mert's in trouble. I was chatting to a friend of ours who I asked to come on the pod today and talk about what's going on in Germany on the ground. He's in Berlin and he basically said Dan I can't come on because I will just go into a rage because it is an SH1T show and I went Okay. And so we spoke a little bit about it and it's, um, there's a lot of stuff going on there, but Mads, maybe, maybe you could pick up on the German piece.
7:30I don't know. Where would you start in that bucket or anything else caught your eye in the last week? No, let's talk about Germany. I would have loved to get your German friend on the show. It's always feels better to have some insights from within, but I can also understand if he is upset because it is, I mean, I hasten to use the word, but it's almost sort of a catastrophic situation, Germany is the engine of the European economy. And we just have a kind of an economy that's completely ground to a halt. And so you've got this kind of massive migration you had post Syria. And so you have this very toxic cocktail of an economy that totally more abound and, you know, that the obvious scapegoats.
8:13And that's not a good place to be anywhere. And so, So, you know, why are we where we are? Well, you've had 15 years of dodged reform. Kind of Merkel's legacy has become Merz's problem, you could say today. Merz, the chancellor, he's at 13 % approval rating, which I think is the lowest on record. And AFD, which is this alternative for Germany, alternative for Deutschland, are polling much higher than he is. The issue has especially been in the east of the country. Voters there trust the AFD most on almost every issue. And you can ask why. I mean, it seems a bit odd, maybe not that people are upset.
8:58I can understand they're upset about the state of the country, but why there is a massive political movement that is, in some respects, seeing Russia as maybe not as big of a deal, as big of an issue, as we do in the UK and in the West. And some of it go back to 1990. At the time, there was a state agency that took over the East German firms that had all been owned by the state at the time, kind of the communist era. And those were sold off and restructured. And lots of jobs were lost at the time. And kind of several million people lost their work. And so they also lost trust in kind of the political mainstream.
9:42and you could say maybe that could function for a time because the overall economy was still strong. But now you have 30 years later where you've had more than a decade of really, really poor economic performance. Some of those issues are bubbling to the top. There is a longing back for the time when very cheap Russian gas could help power German industry. And so lots of different things are coming together to kind of provide quite an explosive cocktail where you have a party that's anti-migration, anti-the EU, to some extent pro-Russia, certainly not in favor of supporting Ukraine. I mean, kind of just the opposite side of what we would, so to say, kind of political consensus on almost every dimension.
10:27And it's not a good situation. No, I mean, I don't know if you have any predictions or how you're going to see this playing forwards, but this is, I would put in the same populist mantra bucket that is obviously going around Europe, but we need Germany back on track, don't we, basically? A hundred percent. And I think the challenge with it is you can't really, before you address some of the underlying issues, you're not going to unpick this. This is not just a different positioning or a nice upbeat campaign. I mean, you actually have to go through economic reform, which will be painful and voters won't like it.
11:01The last Charles that really tried in Germany was Gerhard Schroeder and he was rewarded with losing the election. So it's, yeah, it's a tricky spot right now. So Trump and Xi. So why are we talking about Trump and Xi and how will this come back and fold into Europe? So the summit is on or is it just over? Are they finished? Xi flew in on Wednesday, didn't he? So maybe yesterday was the last day. But I saw Trump met Xi on the tarmac, which I don't think, who was the last person to do that? Maybe Obama was? Xi's first state visit in 11 years. A few days earlier, Trump announces AI force like his space force and saying AI doomerism is all a hoax and promising not to hinder or stifle the industry.
11:49So same old noises coming out. But what is going to come out of the summit, Mads, if you can kick this one off? And what is going to what is then going to come over this side of the pond? So there is still a little bit of a detente between China and the US, kind of lots of belligerence around trade and maybe other things. And, you know, recall that Trump, he was put on tariffs and were threatening bigger tariffs. And the Chinese responded with export controls around rare earths. And then there's been a bit of a truce in the sense that the Chinese could say, well, maybe we can have some rare earths.
12:27And Trump is like, OK, well, we won't put the worst tariffs on just yet. And so one concrete result that has come out is that that truce has now been extended to the 10th of January. There were expectations. There were hopes, I think, that it could be up to six months to give everybody a bit of time. But the sentiment coming out of the summit was that the U.S. wants to keep the heat on. And so therefore, the truce has just been extended for a few months while they try to work out a bigger framework, a bigger negotiated agreement. I think it's hard to see how they're going to get there. I mean, it's like, what is going to make them say, okay, now we actually are going to enter into a new framework, a new plan for partnership, or at least collaboration between the countries over the next several years.
13:14It feels like this is something that will be in the precipice for a while to come, but who knows? Is this buying time, Mads? I mean, I know they brought back online the rare earths pit. They had that huge rare earths pit in Northern California, didn't they the americans and i know they brought it back online i can't remember the name of it but and is this buying time to get that back online fully and up to speed but i mean surely the processing is going to take years to bring back i don't know i don't know if andrew or mad do you know anything about the the rare earths mine in in california i think if you wanted to buy time you'd try to buy a few years i mean not a few months yeah i mean it's been listen the mine's been there for years and they they basically shut it down because they sold i'm pretty sure the americans sold it unknowingly to the chinese which is where they got all of their skills and worked out how to how to do their own rare earth mines that was maybe i don't know 20 odd years ago but um i know they brought it back online i'm wondering listen i'll look into it and i'll bring that up in another pod there is another thing that has been talked about which is this idea of a hotline old-timers like us.
14:21The old red phone on the desk. Exactly. During the Cold War, there was an idea of a hotline between Gorbachev and Reagan where they could jump on the phone and sort of help avert a nuclear disaster. This idea has been revived now in AI terms. So a hotline between presumably the White House and she's office where they can talk if something happens. Well, I'm assuming it'll be a red iPhone. I'm assuming it'll be a red iPhone and obviously John will drop it off to a covering gold. Foldable, obviously. Foldable red iPhone. Foldable red iPhone. We'll see it on the oval desk now. But I don't know how useful the comparison is.
15:06The more useful comparison outside of a sort of headline on the equivalent of a phone itself might be the fact that you have two sides worried about locking in legislation or locking in agreements on limitation of AI while the other side has a lead. So China is worried about putting in anything that restricts them from catching up with the US. And there's a great analogy here, not just with the hotline, but with the treaties against arms proliferation, again with the SALT treaties back in the 60s and 70s, where Russia was worried about the enforcement being espionage of the Americans actually checking out the technology, and the Americans worried that somehow they were going to lock in Russian advantage.
15:55So there are ways around that. But I just don't know how you actually practically roll this out for AI. You know, who's going to count the number of chips someone has? you know it's a lot easier to hide a chip than it is to hide a two-story high missile launcher so I don't know how realistic these things are I think I think it's a genuine concern and I don't think it's even related to super AI I think it's related to we're already at a stage where AI can run amok so interesting isn't everything isn't everything now according to trump super AI. Super intelligence, sorry. Super intelligence, he's calling it.
16:35Well, he's the man's trust, right? Of course, yeah. He's the man who knows. Whatever he says. Sorry, Mads, we interrupted you. Carry on. None at all. Look, Andrew raises the right question. What are they really going to talk about, especially seeing as there doesn't seem to be much government supervision around AI right now. So are they actually going to know what's going on? And this question has reared its head again this week there were discussions about you know australia and australian government service being breached by open ai that's one thing but open ai then took quite a long time to tell the australian government which is not a good look and i think one of the things that i think has to be pretty fundamental principle is that okay great we got powerful technology yes we want it to be autonomous because then it can do great things for humanity.
17:26And an essential part of what makes AI so powerful is this idea of autonomy. Tech. If it then goes and does something it's not intended to do, and that impacts privileged government servers, there should probably be an obligation to tell the government, not sort of a month later, but more or less real time, so that people know and can have an opinion and react to it again more or less real time and not after the fact and of course you can always say where should you draw the line well if you can breach the healthcare portal can you breach the the you know the system that has the nuclear launch codes right and that's and somewhere in between those two it starts to become really serious and that's that's obvious and that be might be where a hotline could be useful where um where will this come down for europe what have we got to keep an eye on this side of the pond.
18:20Any thoughts on that one, Mads? Well, this is a good question. So Europe actually already brought this down. So the much divided AI act, and it's got lots of problems. But one of the sort of pieces of foresight, I think, in it is that this is already European law. So a model lab that has an incident in Europe must report that when it happens without undue delay. And that's been in force for more than a year so uh brussels has legislated in that place and i think others will follow because how could they not how can you have a situation where you can break into government servers and not uh not what if they knew i mean listen i mean i was reading as andrew wang talking about reports of ai agents all over the web in stealth and i'm not i don't i don't buy into so much of his narrative But I'm wondering if OpenAI knew the full extent to what their agents had done.
19:19I mean, everyone is moving at such breakneck speed. Maybe they just didn't know immediately. Any thoughts on that? But there is immediate and there's a month later. Yeah, fair. And I think the obligation should be to report it without undue delay. So the moment you work it out, you should probably report it and not sit around on the information. And yes, you're absolutely right. there could be a lack it might not be real time and you can also ask the question to what extent should the labs be responsible for checking what their bots are doing right they probably should have a pretty good handle on it because they're so powerful yeah well this goes back to david sax's point of like you you it's your model dudes you you manage it it's your problem you've got to resolve this i saw the aussies weren't happy i mean they they announced i think they announced at the un didn't they they were they were mighty irritated by the whole saga so i think there's There's going to be more on this story.
20:16100%. I mean, on the rare earths piece, because you were talking about Europe. Yeah, that's where I was going to go. Yeah, I mean, what does Europe do? So China produces more than 90 % of the world's rare earths refining and 94 % of magnets. But just to be clear, Mads, rare earths aren't that rare. I mean, that's probably what I think most people don't fully appreciate is that rare earths are all over. If you look at a map of the rare earth mines on the globe, there aren't actually that many in Europe, but there are. They're here. So the rare earths aren't rare. It's the fact that we've basically disenfranchised our own industries and pushed it all over to China because it's so dirty and these things are so hard to mine and process.
20:57A hundred percent. And as you know, with climate change, the most important thing is what we do right here, because the climate change will absolutely respect the borders. So as long as we are holier than thou here in Europe, there will be no problem. We can push it all over to China. It will just go away. And I'm, of course, being sarcastic now. But that seems to have been the policies we have chosen. But I remember the Americans, the reason they shut down their original rare earth mine is because they didn't realize that the water that was supposed to be effectively clean water being dumped miles down the road via this pipe It was actually full of, what's the nuclear, is it thorium?
21:41I can't remember. There was a nasty nuclear element that they hadn't picked up was going out in the wastewater. And that closed down the mine over several lawsuits. But this is very toxic, difficult, energetic stuff on a massive scale. So that's why we've kind of gone, boop, you guys deal with it. We're being all clean and green in the West. You Chinese deal with it and pollute your own villages, which is obviously horrific. Yeah. And this is what's so surprising, right? I mean, I saw this week the UK government, I think, again, confirmed their target around kind of net zero for the country by 2030 or 2050.
22:22Sorry. And yeah, fine. But what's the point? I mean, let's say we could get there. What's the point of the UK in isolation being net zero if the rest of the world is not? instead of actually thinking about some of these huge strategic issues we have around rare earths, which, if we don't get it under control, could prevent our ability to defend ourselves and secure our borders and our country. Will we see a rare earth mine in Europe? Will we see more and more mining in Europe, do you reckon? There's big things in Portugal. Down to you, Andrew, I think. Isn't there Portugal, Spain down in that quadrant?
22:58Aren't there some rare earth mines going on? There's mining and there's refining. Estonia has a plant that's being brought online now. It'll produce only about 2 ,000 tons a year versus 30 ,000 tons of Chinese imports. Got it. Okay. It's a small proportion. We need to be much more ambitious. Well, that's the biggie, right? The refining. I think China has well over 90 % of the refining capacity, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I know that there are a bunch of startups that are looking at manufacturing a lot of these rare earths and almost alchemy in converting some other. So I think there might be some technological solutions to this as well as the pure dirty, dirty stuff.
23:40But we'll see. We'll keep an eye on who is mining where and how all this is going to pan out. Because I think people don't fully realize how these rare earths effectively create magnets and magnets are in bloody everything. So we need, if you want your latest AirPods, it's a couple of magnets. Well, it's four, I think. So this is a big deal. It's across the entire industrial stack. If we don't have these rare earths, we are screwed. And we could possibly make do without AirPods. I like them. I could maybe survive without them. But we can't survive without electrical motors. We can't survive without the stuff that goes into EVs, into drones.
24:21Yeah, yeah. I was being facetious. That's just not possible. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I got stuck on AirPods. Yeah, there's many, many more important applications than Apple products. I will say that, even though. Are we not going to touch on the ban, Trump's banned, robot vacuum cleaners from outside the US? What? We should. We should. Pick it. Okay, I'm being a bit facetious. He's banned advanced robotics, right, of over two kilograms made outside of the US, which essentially also includes household vacuum cleaners, which seems hugely impactful. I just can't imagine the UK and Europe doing this.
24:58We wouldn't do a lot of the things that he says. Mads, what were you going to go? No, so it's not classical robotics, right? So it's not kind of the fixed tool path, kind of fixed path manufacturing robots. It's something that has autonomy. So you're absolutely right. You could say a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner might have some level of autonomy. And if it's above a certain size, it's been banned. But you can get exemptions, and several European makers have already had exemptions. What you have to show is that you have a path to start manufacturing in the U.S. And what does that mean? You have to get to today's 65%.
25:36You have to, over time, get to 75 % of the content manufactured in the U.S. And so today you have Husqvarna, for example. They make the mowers, and they have an exemption in place that's been granted by the, used to be the Department of Defense, and it's the Department of War now, Pentagon, they are awarding the exemptions. And if you can show that over time you're going to put the manufacturing capacity in place in the U.S. to manufacture the components, kind of the percentage that is required, then you can get an exemption. You can keep exporting. And this is beyond assembly, right? It used to be that they could get around these rules by the assembly.
26:14If you go down to the component level and they have to be made there. Now, what's interesting is that there is a carte blanche ban of things that are owned or controlled by foreign governments. And of course, what this does is completely kills the export of anything Chinese to the US. So I actually think there is a little bit of an opportunity here for European companies, because to the extent that they're not owned by governments and they typically are not. Well, as long as they do some level of manufacturing in the US, it doesn't have to be all of it, But as long as some of it is done there, you can sell and you can export.
26:48Whereas the Chinese companies, it's just a closed door. It's a clever strategy, isn't it, in a way? Because you've got such a big home market that you sort of, you're damned if you don't. And there's a good historical reference points in the defense industry like BAE. I think, you know, just before the end of the last century, you know, 98, 99, I think, made its first big move by acquiring Marconi, which had a presence in the US and had sort of special security clearances and was able then to sell more and bid for things that it couldn't bid for otherwise. But it does make you wonder, the UK is indeed Europe's big market.
27:32Why are we not more belligerent about some of the manufacturing requirements here? Maybe we will be. You can't beat them, join them. Yeah, I imagine there will be some more protectionism coming and maybe we'll be a bit more belligerent. I would probably welcome it, possibly welcome it if it's smart. I want to talk about what's happened this week between Anthropik and OpenAI. They both released new models and they both cut prices. So on Tuesday, Anthropik's new Opus 5.5 dropped about 40 % cheaper than Opus 5. And on OpenAI's front, the new Sol and Luna models are about half the price of their predecessors.
28:10And it's funny seeing now which model can do what and how that hierarchy is going to work out. But Mads, what is going on with the price war? Is this just a case that Frontier Intelligence is getting cheaper? Is there an open source element? What's the story behind here? It's quite a big deal. And it is a proper price war. because what's happened is you've got the release of a new model that is in many ways even more powerful than Fable, which was Fable 5.1, which was previously the top of the line, and it's much cheaper. So the list price of Opus has been cut, and Opus was already cheaper than Fable.
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28:48So you have a massive now price differential, and that tells us something about the pricing power of Anthropic and of the Frontier Labs. We go back to June. we were talking about kind of the signal that comes out of what Anthropic did at the time, which was put Fable in at a very, very high price. And as we said, look, it's really an experiment they're running to test the pricing power of frontier intelligence. And it seems that they have run this experiment, and it has largely not succeeded. They are being pressured by OpenAI, which has released formidable models, and of course the whole open source panoply and plethora of models.
29:27Well, everyone will have seen, they'll have seen the reports from Hugging Face, from Vercel, all of these. And I know that they have a particular market segment that they're highlighting. But I mean, as in they're the hobbyists, they're the independents, they're not necessarily all of the enterprise. But some of these reports, actually, there are a chunk of big corpse enterprise in the figures where you can see open source really, really taking hold. So I wonder on the open source front, if there is more of a story on that side with more people becoming aware of what is available for on-prem or for full control or other, is that fair?
30:03Yeah. I mean, I think if you're in technology and you were not aware of open source six months ago, you were sleeping under a rock, right? If you're at the coalface and you're doing development, but I think you're probably right. It is probably more at the enterprise where things are moving because, you know, people would have initially been more comfortable purchasing from a kind of US vendor that would show up and have everything nice and shrink wrap for you. And open source might feel a little bit more experimental. And then because the cost, because what people were spending on the models just exploded the way it did.
30:37Right. You know, Anthropic going from 10 billion run rate to 65 billion run rate within seven months. The money is coming from somewhere. companies are spending, people are paying and looking at their bills and going, oh, gosh, we better see if we can get this a bit under control. And that's been our reaction, right, to our bills, which they're lower now than they were last month and the month before, because we are, like many others, we are migrating out using different models for different things, etc. So yeah, I think that's the way the industry has reacted. I read that the cost of GPT 3.5 level performance has dropped 280 fold in two years to get performance.
31:17So it just seems very early to make reliable predictions about how the pricing is going to unfold. but i think what is obvious is that as enterprises embed this stuff into their their systems um usage will go up and then you're locked in and there'll be a huge cost for unraveling that integration and when they mitigate some of these when they when they mitigate that by having this middle layer where effectively you're a you're able to constantly flick and change the models that you're using i've always i'm speaking slightly at the top of my head but I've always seen it that way. Yeah, but historically it's not been that simple.
31:57I always think this sort of plug-in, plug-out analogy, actually in practical terms is a bit of a myth because you've got everything from different legal contract considerations to nuances around the models and how the models respond, but different API integrations. In reality, I don't think it's ever going to be, especially for an enterprise, flipping one in to replace another. So my guess is that as enterprises get locked in, even if the price goes down two things will happen one is that although the cost per token or the cost per use will drop because it's integrated into your company the usage will go up so you'll still end up spending more but secondly once you're logged in what do people do they raise the prices well so they may claw back later going with your i mean i think we're on a race to zero personally But going on your Jevons piece, Mads, have you got any notes on Jev?
32:51I do. I'll come back to it in a second. But just picking up on Andrew's point there first, I think the evidence of what you're saying is, and I think we have a chart we can bring up for those who are viewing. What's happened over the summer is that if you look at the Pareto frontier, so what does that mean? Well, you know, all model labs, they've got models of different capability. You know, we know Anthropic, they have the fable, the opus, the sonnet, the haiku, and open AI, they've got the Sol, the Terra, the Luna, the Astra, the top-of-the-line model. And you can run these in different levels of reasoning and different levels of effort to get different levels of capability.
33:36and if you map all of that out, you can map on a sort of classical XY diagram, how much intelligence do you get per dollar you're spending or how much output you get from these models. And you can draw a frontier where you can say, at any given amount of spend, how much intelligence do I get and what is the model that is on that frontier? So what is the best model I can get depending on my budget, depending on how important that task is and how much I want to invest in it. And Anthropic used to lead a lot of that. But actually, over the summer, OpenAI has taken almost all of the Pareto frontier all the way up to the most powerful Anthropic models.
34:19The most powerful Anthropic models are still ahead, but the long tail, the cheaper models are far below now. What does that mean? That means with Anthropic, unless you go for frontier intelligence, you're not getting all that much bang for your buck. and how can they do that? Well, Andrew, I think that's back to your point, is because a lot of this stuff has now been embedded inside workflows where it's a little bit sticky. And so there's an incentive on Anthropic to not give away too much for too little, right? They have some pricing power. They can do some of those cheaper workloads that are kind of run rate, that are sitting embedded in different places.
34:57They can just sort of keep that being less performance so people have to spend more money to get the same amount of output. What's the example? Haiku, which is the cheapest Anthropic model, is so far behind comparable models now for the same price point. And it's not because Anthropic can't make a better model. I promise you they can. I promise you they have one. They're just holding it back. So I think, Andrew, that's exactly to your point, there's pricing power. I think then to your point, the question is how long does it take and how sticky is it? At the frontier, we found out people are moving and they're shopping a lot because it's very expensive.
35:33But for those tasks further down the stack, the most simple tasks, how long will it take for people to switch from one to another? We're seeing a lot of people switch in-house. I'm hearing anecdotally a lot of large orgs now bringing in-house and not from the big frontier. Exactly. But even us, we're a small org. I think we've got 50 different paths. And we have systems set up to route things on different paths and to measure different things. But if you imagine a large enterprise, it's not just, oh, I'm going to finish my models today. There are thousands of small decisions you have to make. So that's not going to be something you do every 24 hours, but it's probably not going to take you two years either.
36:15I think it's going to be built in the infrastructure. I think it has to be built into the infrastructure. There's no way you're going to work out how this model war is going to end. So you have to have that flexibility. Also, even if you use open models for the menial task, those open models still need integration. They still need uptime support, service level agreements. And as the complexity around safety and regs and legal sort of intensifies and becomes more complex, it becomes even harder than to switch a new model in and out. But doesn't that work both ways, Andrew? It doesn't almost like the Jevons version of that on the engineering side mean that you're going to have the ability and the tech toolkits to be able to do that relatively quickly.
36:56I just don't buy. I always feel that, you know, the dream is never delivered on that front. Mads, any notes on Jev or any notes on the IPOs? Anything else that you'd want to touch on? So, Jev is this exciting new thing that was launched this week. So, there's a group called TypeSafe AI, where the founder, Diogo Almeida, he was one of the original co-authors of the OpenAI paper that was the foundation of ChatGPT. And he then left OpenAI, he set up his own company, and they've launched this week a model called Jev, which is a tribute to Jevons from Jevons Paradox, which we hope you all know. Why is it interesting?
37:33Because it's not a classical LLM. It's a completely new model family or model type that specifically is targeting classification. So one of the issues we have with models is that there's LLMs is that they're stochastic, which means they're not deterministic, which means that they're not giving us a predictable answer necessarily every time. And that has meant that if we want to be quite certain about the answer we're getting, we'll sometimes throw much more intelligence at a problem that it warrants because we want to be quite sure it gives us the right answer. So what could that be? It could be a simple thing.
38:10I'm looking at kind of a customer lead coming in. Is this a good lead or a bad lead? Is this something I should pay attention to or not? And that's not necessarily a super complex question, but I want to make sure that my answer is not too random. I want to make sure it's quite deterministic. Now, what JEV is, it's a way to, instead of having a model like an LLM that produces text and sort of tries to reason its way, via text to, is this a customer lead I should pay attention to? Well, yes, I think this is a good customer lead. You should consider it. You should pursue it and sort of construct that sort of stochastically or, you know, use probabilistically sort of a, you know, what it does is it actually says, look, here are some specific parameters.
38:54Yes, it's a good customer lead, yes or no. And here are the probabilities of each. And it'll assign probabilities. And it'll do that extremely fast, extremely accurately, and at an extremely low cost. So a 50th of Sonnet in terms of cost. And so that just means you can run classification and things much, much cheaper. And that opens up a whole host of new things we can do. Interesting. Have you got any notes on the IPO? I'm going to lay out a prediction. I reckon Anthropic end of October. They've just pushed it to November, right? I think that just came out yesterday. Oh, well, that blows that prediction out of the water.
39:35Do you know what they've said? Do you know what the latest is? The latest I've seen is that they've pushed it by a month. Okay. But who knows whether there will be more pushes. It's obvious that if you go back three, four months, the whole trajectory was this march towards the IPO that we all knew was going to come because everything was just up and to the right. and the market is more complex now. So, but what do you do then? Do you go earlier? Do you get the roadshow going now or do you push it to Q1? What do you do? I think you have to get it done. Who knows where the world will be Q1? I think so.
40:11I think so. And especially if you've got Trump going, hoax, hoax, hoax, we're going to push, we're going to go. At least you've got that as a bit of a tailwind. I don't know. I mean, are your numbers ever going to look much better than they are now? the other thing i wanted to talk about was this the notion of this ai money window narrowing we've got the data center ipos which are stalling and this is a bit of a marker i would argue sb energy has been delayed whole tech has been paused nscale is probably going out they've got an october listing haven't they so there'll be the there'll be the litmus test we're watching nvidia trading at cheapest multiples in a decade how are they doing that um anthropic as we've just discussed reported slipping to November.
40:54So is the wind coming out of sails? What's the deal? Mads, can you kick this one off? What's the deal with the money window, the AI money, the cash flowing? Well, I think we've seen SB Energy being delayed. But SB Energy, as far as I know, it's a company with no data centers running and they have one main tenant that's been signed up. And so I think if you don't have any revenue and it's just kind of hope and expectation and maybe a signed contract but nothing in the ground yet, then it's probably reasonable that you're not going to have too easy a time IPO-ing. Whereas Nscale has revenue. They have got lots of contracts.
41:33We know Microsoft and Anthropic are customers. And they look like that listing in October. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it doesn't seem too unusual or unreasonable here that investors are asking for something tangible before they underwrite. Okay. So this is the anti-bubble trade then, isn't it? No, we haven't got enough. There's not enough bluff and guff to push. We're going to be more realistic, which is fine. The SP Energy backlog, I think, rests on one lease from OpenAI. Yeah. And OpenAI has itself said that they're going to delay their IPO. Okay. NVIDIA trading, what's happening there? Well, so when we say it's the lowest multiples, it's forward multiple.
42:17And forward multiple means that we are going to forecast what the company is going to earn next year. And then we're going to look at that kind of the company valuation as a multiple of that today. and because the growth is so phenomenal, forecasting another 70 % next year, that means that either the stock has to trade a lot higher than it does right now or the multiple will look low. And I think investors are looking at, gosh, there's another 70 % coming next year and then what's coming after that and what's coming after that and saying hold your horses a little bit. So I wouldn't say that the company is cheap necessarily.
43:01but certainly if you believe that they can keep up 70 % forever, then it is cheap. But then again, nobody's done that in history. Andrew, what does this all mean for European IPOs? You got any thoughts on that? Not really. I think you've still got a cultural blocker with the money markets. If I was a founder wanting to IPO, I'd want to go where the most enthusiasm is. Well, we're still looking to at least beat last year's record. So I'm just wondering, obviously, when wind is out of sails, it's a bit of a global phenomenon. But I wonder if there's anything specific. I imagine AI tech will be a specific marker that investors will be keeping in mind.
43:41I'm cautious to be optimistic in that there seems to be certainly in the London markets an acceptance of many of the challenges that have been talked about for a long time. And some of those changes have already been rolled out. So if we can get to this inflection point where, first of all, technology companies become a more attractive stock and more fashionable, and if we can get over that cultural hump, because I think it is a cultural hump, then that could have a big impact, along with regulatory changes that make the London markets more attractive. Don't you think it's going to take some time, Andrew?
44:13Oh, for sure. I mean, look, I was trying to spin something positive on something I'm not hugely positive about. I was looking fast, trying to be optimistic on a Friday morning. I mean, I just, I'm trying to think of the world where an N scale would be better placed IPO-ing in Europe. I can't quite, I can't quite see it. Let's talk about staying with AI. We have AI agents loose in the hoose. There are, as I've mentioned, rumors of agents all over the web in stealth. I'm not sure I buy into that, but we don't really know. We talked earlier about this open AI agent getting to the Australian government.
44:47um we also saw i love this story about amazon blocking metas muse so there's some agency e-com i think is going to be a big a big piece here of what e big e-com allows agentically to interface with their product set i don't know there's there's going to be if andrew let's you i know you feel quite strongly about this one how do you think this is going to play out or any thoughts on or insights on this kind of agentic e-com piece? I just think it's so early. I have no nuggets of wisdom beyond everything's a bit of a mess and in flux. I just think we're going to have agents running around, running amok all over the place.
45:34But will they be allowed to? I don't think, I mean, if you've got an agent that can avoid the nonsense that an e-com, like an Amazon site, tries to play with their pricing and packaging and all the games that they play to guide customers to a specific price for a specific thing. I just think they're going to be blocked. I just wonder, maybe it's not such a big deal. I mean, you're already saying that... You want plane tickets. Exactly. You're already saying that some sites are blocking some of these bots and some of these browsers or the chat GPT automated browser in order to prevent that traffic skewing analytics or preventing customers go direct.
46:19We all pay different ticket prices for airlines depending upon our web usage and profile, which is slightly frustrating. But ultimately, it's whether the prevention can keep up with the bots looking more like a human. It's the same cycle. Well, I guess this is where you'll end up. You'll end up with your agent behaving like a human so they don't get caught. Not just like a human, but like you, personally. Yeah, for sure. Mads, bringing it up a level, I mean, obviously, OpenAI getting into the Australian government. I don't know if you've got any more thoughts on this. You've kind of covered it already.
46:55But anything more broadly on the risks and the liability, perhaps? Lots of thoughts on it. I thought this agent showdown here between Muse and Amazon is really interesting. I think Meta, they again released a good product. Zaki's had a couple of good months. And Amazon, I think, are right to block it, not in the sense that I want them to block it, but I think it is probably short-term in their interest to keep these types of agents away from their site because it messes with their model. I think what will happen is that some vendors, some providers will say, look, I've got a model where I have a bit of a walled garden, and they're going to want to try and keep that hold off.
47:36And others will care less. Like, if I'm running my small shop on Shopify, maybe I'm happy for people to come and shop using an agent. And so I think things are going to bifurcate. And I think this is, at least based on what we've seen today, this is what the industry needs to sort out itself, right? I mean, as a customer, I want my agents to be able to go where I want them to go. But as a business, I also want to be able to regulate how people behave in my store. If I'm running a shop on the high street and somebody's behaving in a way I don't like, I want to be able to show them the door. If somebody's coming into my digital store and behaving in a way I don't want, it's my decision, what I want to have happen in my store.
48:13And then it's also my consequences. And if that means people don't want to shop on Amazon, I'll pay the price. So I think the business has to be left to sort this stuff out. I think the bigger question, I should say, is around these breakouts and what happens when there is an agent that breaks into somebody's system and it's not been allowed. And, you know, we talked about it in the earlier show, early part of the show. We've seen that 22 countries have now asked for a sort of an IAEA style AI body. And Finland and Norway and Germany have also, look, we support having some global regulator of AI.
48:56But we also know that the US has got no interest in this and China's got no interest in this. and so that means that neither is the uk by the way interesting neither is the uk supported it either but we're playing the political game aren't we i do yes that um but i but i think the truth is all the people that don't matter in this they want it and the two that really do matter they don't want it so it's not going to happen it's it's fiction well the winners set the rules don't they i also just don't know how it would operate in reality i mean the standards There's a difference between obviously adhering to standards, having a standards body, and then the difference between a safety body.
49:32And I just don't know. Again, I don't know how you monitor and implement it. It might be useful to have a talking shop which thinks about these problems, but you can't look at satellite imagery to see how many GPUs somebody has or what a model is doing. So the analogy doesn't apply very well. It has to be liability, Andrew, surely. It has to be the liability piece. It has to be how you can manage that. Is that fair, Mads? Yes, we could look at, you know, what are some of the people that have experienced the hacks of the breaches? What are they saying? Well, we know that one of the biggest that have happened is this hugging face breach.
50:09And their CEO, Clement DeLang, he came out and he said, look, I don't, I want us to accelerate, right? I just want to have access to the capabilities. The problem they had was that at the time they were suffering the breach and they tried to use Fable to defend, Fable's own classifier, Fable's own guardrails stopped them from using it and they had to resort to using the open source models. He's not happy about that and I can totally see where he's coming from. So he's saying, look, accelerate model development, let's get the best stuff and give us access to use it to defend ourselves. That's important.
50:44Yeah, fair enough. I think what's interesting about the Australian hack though is that that incident alone doesn't prove extraordinary hacking ability. I mean, my understanding is that it was an ordinary security weakness, exploited automatically and repeatedly and on a legacy system, public system. And so I think we're in a phase now where just the sheer capacity of an automation of AI is going to reveal a bunch of security flaws, which if they were looked at closely anyway, would be discovered and are well known. So I think the evidence here supports concern about autonomous persistence, words I can't get out without my coffee, but it doesn't yet establish sort of breakthrough hacking ability, although I think that will inevitably come.
51:34So this is a wake up call for governments and for enterprises and you and I personally, that if you're using the same password for everything, or you don't have two-factor authentication, or if you have legacy public systems attached to your back office, which have not been updated and the security patches have not been put in, or you have not done a security audit, you really do need to think about that now because they are going to be found and exploited. And that's today's problem. I think the cleverness of hacks or the technical ability or thinking a little bit ahead to quantum utility, where we will be able to crack RSA is definitely coming down the line.
52:14But today it's a bigger problem of just existing security flaws, which in many cases may be quite simple, being revealed and exploited. I agree. I think I can hear the phone ringing in IT support service call centres. It's a good time to be in cybersecurity, right? All over Australia. Invest in those cybersecurity stocks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's definitely even more cat and mouse in this space. Do you want to circle back around liability? Because you asked the question. I do. I do. My take is that if you just if there is if there is a strong liability anchor here, I think there is that that surely that is that is an endpoint as in it's your model.
52:56It's your liability, I think is going to be the the creator of the of the of the right outcomes. And, of course, there are lots of complexities underneath this. But we have legislation now, and we have a framework, at least in the EU, around it. There was a plan for specific AI liability, but that's been dropped now. And so instead what the EU is doing is it's saying we're going to use product liability and software counts as a product. So anything shipped after the 9th of December that has an AI model will be seen as a product and will be subject to product liability. And the view of the liability is that it's strict in the sense that if you can prove that there's a defect, you don't have to prove that the maker was careless, just that there is a defect and then there's liability.
53:49But hang on, just to clarify, is this, if I'm building a wrapper, whatever, using an open AI model, is it because I'm being paid, because I've got the contract with the client, is it my liability? That's my understanding. But this is some of the complexity that will have to be worked out. And some of it will probably be down to case law. Importantly, only individuals can claim, not businesses. Oh. And it covers injury, damaged property, and lost personal data. So it's not in the business realm yet. It's not in the business realm, and it does not cover financial loss. So if an agent somehow finds a way to put your coat on fire, there is damage and there's liability.
54:43But if the agent makes a bad financial decision with your money and invests it wrongly, there is no liability. So this is interesting, and I'm sure this space will evolve a lot from now on, but we are starting to see a new legal landscape here. What's this mean then, Mads? Because traditionally, software has been provided as is. In other words, if there's a bug that crashes your computer or loses your data, it's like, we are liable. You signed our end-user license agreement. It's not our problem. So how is this going to pan out? From what I can see from the 9th of December, all of that is going to change if you operate in the EU.
55:25Well, what I'm hearing is really between the lines is lawyers are not losing their jobs anytime soon. So much as you look at, you know, co-counsel or Harvey AI, I just see that, you know, it's going to be a great time to be a lawyer in the next 20 years because all this stuff is sorting out, right? Case law is only produced by humans, right? But really? Isn't there an AI for that? You really want to go up an AI magistrate? I mean, I think there's a good Tom Cruise film about that. AI causes the problem. AI solves the problem. AI legislates the problem. Well, let's get back into D-Love, though, with Euk.
56:03Mads, who are you highlighting this week? Euklid, which is a business in the Netherlands and in Eindhoven. They've just raised a 200 million euro. series a this is the gas it's not it's not it's not your grandfather's series says these it's like decent chunk of change and it was co-led by samsung by eqt scale up funds somerset capital innovation industries and a number of other greats and goods and the chair is peter venink who asml aficionados will recognize as his the former ceo of the business so from chip manufacturing equipment maker to chip maker, which is a nice segue. What are they building?
56:49They're building chips for inference. So it's all about running AI models, not training them. In Europe. Here in Europe, that's exactly the idea. They're claiming they have 100 times better power efficiency and cost per token. We haven't seen any independent tests yet. The first systems will not come until 2028. So from now on, it's all hope and dreams and a lot of capital. but some very, very credible people behind it. And yeah, we wish them lots of success. Yeah, really. And a 200 million Series A, that just makes me laugh. Love it. Good for you, Euclid. I am game on happy. Andrew, do you have a deal of the week?
57:28Yeah, I'm going to stay in the Netherlands, actually. So you're going to like this one, Dan, because this is a positive story about Europe. Is it a foldable iPhone? ABP, which is the Dutch Pension Fund, have committed a billion euros over the next three years to venture and to tech. No way. They're putting quarter of a billion into the European scale-up fund, which is the five billion fund for scale-ups across Europe and money beyond. So this is an incredibly good signal for other pension funds across Europe. Well, Europe has always been okay at it, haven't they? Well, not really. No, I mean, European pension funds put in a hundred times less than US pension funds.
58:06For sure, but compared to the UK. I mean, they're there at a 4 % to 6 % bracket, I think. Well, let me get my stats straight. But they're okay compared to the UK, I guess was my point. They're good. Loving it. Bring it on. Bring on more pension capital. I think, yeah, I think so. The dots connect a little bit here because what we're talking about is a pension fund putting money into the scale-up fund. Now, that scale-up fund is the fund that's just underwritten Euclid. and so what's happening is exactly what we've always said which is that for europe to take some of these big swings you've got to have big pools of capital that can underwrite them and there's incredible technical talent i mean nobody's going to tell me that the people that build asml don't know how to make semiconductors okay and so so we we now have capital to enable some of these people to go after what is going to be you know a huge and hugely important market we finally have the money to do it i just think it's a great thing to see that the dots connect in this way.
59:03Roughly 0.01 % of European pension assets went into European BC in 2024. That's one euro out of 10 ,000 euros. That's Atomico's report, 2025. That was for 24, though. Yeah, I don't think it's... I think it's still a small number, Dan. We have much better to go, but there's directionally... Sorry, man. Sorry. I swear I've seen different figures where we're starting to see... It was in your dreams, Dan. I might well have woken up and had a particular dream of pension funds investing in venture. Lies. Dan lies in statistics. Mine was Standard X. So I saw that Standard X have raised a 10 million seed.
59:46Now they're a London-based startup. I think they're doing isotopes for cancer to start with. Alpha therapy. Not that I know what alpha therapy is, but it sounds very smart. uh v squared east x first minute uh uk i2s breven howard macro venture and geometry all investing love it london seed bada bing bada boom more of the above please can i just say how exciting is some of the stuff happening in biotech right now but the stuff i'm reading is just i feel like we're driving towards an inflection point in in treatments for a whole raft of different diseases and i just that's very exciting again i'm a lay person so we should get an expert on the pod about we will we will we're going to start getting some kind of some guru ninja experts to come and share their wisdom on these on these topics in the week but i'm totally with you i think it's so it's a super exciting time to be scary for some but super exciting time to be in tech that's for sure mads what's happening in the week ahead anything that we should keep our eye out for so we've got our great glorious and illustrious leaders in liverpool from sunday to wednesday is the i can hear your tone of voice well they're going to tell us that they're going to solve all the nation's problems with more growth i wonder why nobody's god man you're sounding like me man you sound so yeah you have you have flipped you have flipped flip roles that's for sure uh no hope and dreams baby hope and dreams Look, they're going to be there.
1:01:14They're going to send their messages. I think we're all worried that there's another tax hike coming. But let's see when budget time comes. Where did BADR end up? Was it 18 %? I don't know. But it's in development tax. It's capped at a million. I mean, it's not here nor there. Is it? Is it? Oh, okay. That's okay. That's okay. Ignore me. Carry on. No, no, no. No, no. No, the relief is capped at a million. Okay. Okay. Okay. No, that's not it. But that's been taken to the point where it's not a relevant thing. Good. I'll take it. Which I think is why they call it the bad R. Boom! So going back to next week, we've got one IPO coming up.
1:01:59Aura prices. It's Nasdaq IPO. I think, Dan, you're a fan, aren't you? Smart rings? I was until I went back to my Apple Watch. because you're paying, I resented paying a subscription fee for a 500 quid ring that I bought. And I went, no, do you know what? I'll just go back to using my Apple Watch. And it's just as accurate. Well, I've tested them all. I've tested the Whoop, the Aura, the Apple Watch. And they're all pretty much, as long as you get the flavor of what's happening, you don't need them to be, you know, who will know how accurate they are. So I was a bit, I'm a bit irritated. There's a court case, isn't there?
1:02:36at the moment. Well, there was. There's a podcast against Aura for just basically publishing bullshit. Yeah. Well, I don't think that was the legal terminology, Andrew, but there were questions. I'm no litigator. I'm no litigator. We'll find out in about 10 years' time when that lawsuit's done. When we all die of heart failure because your Aura ring didn't pick up any of your markers, yeah. Anything else, Mads, before we close off? Anything else happening the week ahead? So it seems that you're not a big Aura fan, but they are targeting a$15 billion valuation, Oh, I've got one. I've got one. I mean, I wear it, you know, so I can wake up feeling good, look at the data and then feel terrible because it's a bad night's sleep or wake up terrible and say, oh, I should feel good.
1:03:16Are you sleep maxing? I think the trick is to look at it as a trend, not as point data. I don't look at it. I don't look at any. When I've had a shitty night's sleep, I just don't look at the data. That's my very technical outcomes. Like, no, just don't look. I feel awful. That's fine. Get on with it. Stoicism. Boom. Mads. We keep interrupting you. Sorry, dude. Sorry. So that's Aura. And then we've got, on Wednesday, we've got Micron's results, which is one of the AI CapEx lie detectors. And is demand for memory still rising? We'd expect so because Jensen has said he's buying everything he can get his hands on and that's the only thing that's constraining him.
1:03:53So we would expect good results. The results are one thing. The other thing is the outlook. What is going to happen in the years ahead? What forecast will they give us? And the street will pay close attention to this. And Wednesday, right? That's Wednesday. Yes. lovely there's a big ii conference in san francisco so we might get some news off the back of that and then obviously it's bits and pretzels in in berlin which i'm going to for the first time are you going i might is wednesday is octoberfest day so are you and i gonna gonna have a couple of steins i don't drink i don't drink the alcofrol my man i haven't drank the alcohol you can have zero percent it's all modern over there now you can get zero percent beer okay i'll join you with a zero percent of alcofrolic boys and girls always a pleasure never a chore take care not heroin and for you watching and listening we'll see you all next week see you in the next one not heroin ciao ciao
From the publisher
Europe’s exposure to technologies and supply chains it does not control is becoming harder to ignore.
In this episode of This Week in European Tech, Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed and Andrew J Scott of 7percent Ventures look at that problem from several angles.
The discussion starts with US–China tensions over rare earths before turning to Europe’s own reliance on Chinese refining capacity and how difficult it would be to rebuild more of that industrial capability closer to home.
They also examine the intensifying AI price war. OpenAI and Anthropic are making frontier intelligence cheaper, while open-source models are gaining ground.
But lower prices do not necessarily make enterprises more independent: once models are integrated deeply into workflows, switching providers can carry its own technical, legal and operational costs.
The conversation then moves to autonomous AI agents, what happens when they behave in unexpected ways and how Europe is beginning to define liability when AI-powered products cause harm.
They close with signs of movement elsewhere in the European ecosystem, from semiconductor investment to pension capital entering venture.
Highlights
- What US–China rare-earth tensions reveal about Europe’s own dependencies
- Why refining capacity matters as much as access to raw materials
- How the AI price war is changing enterprise buying decisions
- Why cheaper models may still leave companies locked into providers
- How open-source AI is gaining ground inside enterprises
- What autonomous agents mean for security and accountability
- How Europe is approaching AI product liability
- Why recent semiconductor and pension-fund moves matter for European tech




