322 | AI Data Centers Are Now a Bipartisan Punching Bag, Claude Tops User Satisfaction, MHS is the New MCP for Hardware, and More Important AI News for the Week Ending August 28, 2026

29 Aug 2026 · 1 h 2 min · 29 chapters

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In short

Weekend AI news roundup focused on (1) growing US political backlash against AI data centers, (2) rapid inference price cuts across major labs, (3) Anthropic’s “Model Hardware Standard” (MHS) for agent control of lab/robot hardware, and (4) weekly product/leadership updates from Anthropic and OpenAI plus other market signals.

Guest backgrounds

No guests mentioned; episode appears to be hosted by Isar Maitis alone.

Key claims

  • 70–75% of Americans oppose nearby data centers; opposition is driven more by fears about AI’s job impact than by data centers themselves.
  • Data-center backlash is amplified by social-media bots tied to foreign actors (claimed: China/Russia).
  • Inference prices for US enterprises fell ~43% in 10 weeks (to about $1.16–$1.18 per million input tokens).
  • Anthropic’s MHS is positioned as an MCP-like universal hardware interface for agents.

Notable examples

  • Pennsylvania: Shapiro (D) signed strict guardrails after promoting a $20B Amazon AI investment; requires developers to cover electricity costs, removes fast-track permitting, and gives local communities formal input.
  • OpenAI: data-center strategy head Chris Malone left; OpenAI reinstated a 5-hour daily ChatGPT Plus limit for code/work features.
  • MHS early results: Carnegie Mellon reports experiments 3x faster; Genentech used it for protein essays; QuEra reports 99.3% autonomous laser lock recovery.
  • Price examples: OpenAI GPT 5.6 Sol cut 20% input and 33% output; Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 price increase was canceled; Google Gemini 3.7 Flash launched at 50% below Gemini 3.6 Flash.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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The Growing Opposition to Data Centers

0:45 to 2:08

Discussion on the increasing public opposition to data centers and its political implications.

“We're going to talk about the new agentic standard that Anthropic just introduced for hardware.”

Poll Results and Public Sentiment

2:08 to 3:31

Analysis of various polls showing American sentiments towards data centers and AI.

“about how this may impact their lives and the lack of transparency or the lack of explanation of what that means.”

Current State of Data Centers in the U.S.

3:31 to 5:27

Overview of the current number of data centers and proposed projects in the U.S.

“Pew Research Center, in a survey from June of this year, 52 % are more concerned than excited about AI in their daily life.”

Community Resistance and Regulatory Changes

5:27 to 7:16

Exploring local resistance against data centers and new regulatory measures.

“of opposition of local communities and other roadblocks that is slowing them down.”

The Case of Pennsylvania's Data Center Regulations

7:16 to 9:51

Examining Pennsylvania's recent regulatory changes regarding data centers.

“the rules that it can run under, exactly what is the agreement with the companies and so on over just stopping it.”

Bipartisan Agreement on Data Center Policy

9:54 to 10:44

Discussion on how both political parties are aligning on data center issues.

“Now, we already talked about in previous weeks, two other governors that are moving in the same direction.”

Media Coverage and Public Perception of Data Centers

10:44 to 13:11

Analysis of how media coverage is shaping public opinion about data centers.

“I do not remember a lot of things like that.”

Misunderstandings and Disinformation about Data Centers

13:11 to 14:01

Exploring common misconceptions and disinformation surrounding data centers.

“This is accelerating very dramatically because of the elections.”

The Impact of AI Data Centers on Society

14:01 to 18:10

Explore the societal implications and misconceptions surrounding AI data centers.

“because it will accelerate job loss and negative aspects of AI.”

Political Backlash Against AI Data Centers

18:11 to 20:26

Examine the political ramifications of opposition to AI data centers and its potential economic impact.

“As I mentioned, from a pure political perspective, both parties right now are opposing the implementation and the growth in the need for data centers.”
Show all 29 chapters

Pricing Wars in AI Models: Current Trends

20:27 to 28:00

Analyze the competitive landscape of AI model pricing and its implications for the market.

“major labs and the very significant decline in pricing of the top models and definitely the secondary models from the leading labs.”

Google's Competitive Landscape in AI

28:00 to 29:18

Learn about Google's strategy in the AI space, particularly on low-end models.

“So while it seems that right now that Google is not competing at the frontier, they're definitely playing a stronger and bigger role on open source models with Gemma and on their cheaper model with GPT 3.7.”

Baidu's Struggles Amid AI Disruption

29:18 to 31:30

Explore Baidu's disappointing revenue and the impact of AI on their business model.

“And maybe that's their focus, but they also have much, much deeper pockets and they can afford to subsidize their models in order to stay in the competition.”

Market Shifts in AI and Mergers

31:30 to 33:55

Discuss the shift in M&A activity as companies look for more flexible AI solutions.

“expand and before this big decline in revenue.”

Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard Launch

33:55 to 36:55

Discover the implications of Anthropic's launch of the Model Hardware Standard for AI integration.

“for them to be able to have a more complete ecosystem.”

The Risks of Advanced AI Control

36:55 to 41:58

Consider the potential risks associated with AI controlling physical hardware in labs.

“multiple MCPs every single day, myself included.”

Claude Surges in User Satisfaction Rankings

42:03 to 43:50

Learn about the user satisfaction rankings where Claude leads over competitors.

“I'm not saying they will happen, but potentially happening.”

Claude's Memory Unification and Benefits

43:50 to 44:35

Discover how Claude's memory unification enhances user experience.

“I must admit, I'm now on the swing back.”

Claude's New Built-In Browser Features

44:35 to 46:08

Explore the implications of Claude's new built-in browser for user privacy.

“Not a big deal for me, but if you've been a regular Cloud user and now you're going to transfer to using Cloud Cowork, that is a big deal for you.”

Leadership Changes at OpenAI Amid Shakeup

46:08 to 47:34

Understand the impact of recent executive departures at OpenAI on its future.

“are now generally available on the cloud platform, which enables and opens the door for a lot of capabilities that previously were just for specific selected companies.”

OpenAI Reinstates ChatGPT Usage Limits

47:34 to 49:28

Learn about OpenAI's reinstated usage limits and their implications for users.

“leadership team, which again, doesn't look great, but specifically the biggest loss this week is Chris Malone.”

Concerns Over AI Agent Consensus

49:28 to 50:34

Examine the risks associated with AI agents achieving unanimous consensus.

“five hours and not let them use the cheap tokens that they now have access to.”

Cloudflare's Kitesurf Browser for AI Agents

50:34 to 51:59

Discover how Cloudflare's new browser improves efficiency for AI agents.

“agents will end up agreeing on whatever topic instead of balancing each other out, which is obviously not what you're planning if you're building them to balance themselves out.”

OpenAI's WebMCP Challenge for Developers

51:59 to 52:52

Find out about OpenAI's competition for building applications with WebMCP.

“Chrome or other browsers that exist today that are built for humans.”

NVIDIA's Breakthrough with Agentic Variation Operators

52:52 to 54:16

Learn about NVIDIA's new architecture and its impressive performance benchmarks.

“Same exact concept as we talked about with the new browser from Cloudflare.”

Salesforce and Anthropic's CloudForce Integration

54:16 to 56:00

Explore the features of the new CloudForce integration aimed at sales professionals.

“architecture, and using this architecture, they achieved a 100 % score on the ARK AGI 3 Interactive Reasoning Benchmark, completing all 83 levels across 25 different environments.”

Salesforce's Decline and AI Efficiency

56:00 to 58:31

Explore the decline of Salesforce and the rise of AI alternatives.

“Now, to put things in perspective and obviously connected to Mark Benioff, which is Salesforce colorful CEO, Mark Benioff said that, and I'm quoting the nonsense of the saspocalypse.”

The Humanoid Robot Olympics in China

58:31 to 1:00:08

Learn about the advancements in humanoid robotics showcased in China.

“And there were a lot of really crazy, incredible things in there.”

Implications of Robot Capabilities

1:00:08 to 1:01:13

Discuss the potential impact of advanced robots on blue-collar jobs.

“Now, putting things in perspective, most of the participants are from China by a very big spread.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Hello, and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And we have some really interesting stories this week. The first one, we're going to talk about data centers. I told you that was my plan for last week, but bigger things happened. And yeah, there were obviously additional things from this week to talk about. So we're going to talk about data centers and how Americans are now really hating data centers and what that means in politics and what this may mean to the AI world, the economy, and other components that are impactful to our lives and our businesses.

0:39We are going to talk about the price wars between the AI labs and where is that leading and what might be the results of that. We're going to talk about the new agentic standard that Anthropic just introduced for hardware. So think about MCPs for things in the real world, machines, robots, et cetera. Really interesting. And then we have a lot of rapid fire items, many, many things that Anthropic has released into the cloud universe this week, some interesting news about OpenAI, and a lot of other things. So let's get started. The first topic, as I mentioned, is going to be about data centers and specifically how it is becoming a really big political issue and how hating data centers became a thing that everybody wants to be a part of, whether individuals or the two big parties.

1:25A year ago, most Americans would have shrugged at data centers. If you would have asked somebody, they said, I don't know what the hell do you mean? I don't really care. I don't know what data centers are. What does that have to do with me? Right now, 70 to 75 % of Americans oppose having a data center built anywhere near them. That's more people than oppose a nuclear power plant built near them. And it is becoming one of the really rare occasions in recent years where Republicans and Democrats are aligned and running on the same side. Both of them are now against data centers because this is the public opinion and we're heading into elections and this is what people want to hear.

2:05It is mostly about what people feel about AI and the uncertainty and the very little understanding that people have about how this may impact their lives and the lack of transparency or the lack of explanation of what that means. So let's look at the broader numbers from different sources. Based on Gallup from a March survey this year, 71 % oppose data centers compared with 53 % that oppose a nuclear power plant built in the same vicinity to their house. Based on HitMap News tracking poll that just recently was released, 75 % opposed data centers compared with 51 % in February. So that's a huge increase.

2:53That is a 50 % increase in just the past few months, strongly opposing rolls from 24 % to 61 % in just 12 months. Strong support fell from 9 % to 4%. So only 4 % of American population based on this poll actually are very much for having a data center in their area. Echelon Insights, a different survey from June of 2026, surveyed voters specifically about their thoughts and 27 % only supported building a local data center, which was last from the list of other potential projects that the polled people were asked about. Pew Research Center, in a survey from June of this year, 52 % are more concerned than excited about AI in their daily life.

3:40Adults under 30 crossed 55 % concerned for the first time. So the younger generation is now more concerned than optimistic about AI. This was true for all the other age groups, but now it's also true for the younger generation. The same survey is showing that 71 % of Americans think to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. That's a weird data point. So I I would have never asked about the next 20 years. I have a feeling, though, that the results would have been really similar if they would have asked about the next two years or at least the next four to five years. I'm sure it would have gotten the same results.

4:15Only 5 % think it will create more jobs. A Fox News poll that was cited by Axios on August of this year is saying that 60 % of Republicans and 53 % of MAGA voters now oppose data centers as well. this is a complete flip from what it was just a year ago. Now let's talk about the scale of what's going on. First of all, to get some bigger understanding of where we are, there are currently 4 ,000 plus data centers already online in the United States. That being said, there are more than 3 ,000 proposed projects that are currently in different stages of progress to being either approved or built. So it's going to almost double the number of data centers.

4:59And from a sheer size perspective, the scale of the data centers that are being built right now are significantly bigger than the ones that exist already because of the need to have a lot more compute in support of AI versus just generic data centers that existed before. There were obviously some really big ones before, but on average, they are growing dramatically. Currently, over 75 projects that are worth together over$130 billion are either blocked or delayed just in Q1 of this year because of opposition of local communities and other roadblocks that is slowing them down. Again, $130 billion worth of investment.

5:37In addition, more than 120 moratorium proposed across 38 states as of July of this year. This is based on information from Fortune from August 27th, So very recent information. Now, more and more counties, 97 to be specific, and 93 cities and 28 towns have banned data centers in the US. This number is growing almost every single day. And New York was the first state to impose a stop on every new construction of a data center unless they go through very specific steps. But for now, they're stopping new data centers in New York. We're going to dive into additional information from other states in just a minute.

6:19And in addition to New York, we're going to talk about the really interesting case of Pennsylvania. But before that, let's finish up the numbers. 17 % of Americans currently feel confidence that they can trust big businesses. I have a feeling it is a lot more about this than about data centers or what they're doing to the local economy or to the price of electricity or to water and so on. I think people have no trust, again, 17%, the vast majority of Americans, almost more than eight out of every 10, do not trust large businesses and their intentions and what they want to achieve. This is the lowest point on record across nine major U.S.

7:01institutions that are checking this kind of information. But the true, really interesting, revealing survey found that 57 % prefer clear rules over moratorium, meaning most Americans would rather know what the data center will do, what are the rules that it can run under, exactly what is the agreement with the companies and so on over just stopping it. So despite all this real strong wave of negativity, most Americans, more than 50 % are saying, it's not that we don't want data centers, is that we want them under specific rules that will take our needs into account. And that number should have been much higher.

7:39But with the current wave of let's be against data centers, I think I'll take the 57%. Now, I told you there is an interesting case about Pennsylvania. So let's talk about that. On August 18th and 19th of this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is a Democrat, which might be a candidate in the the 2028 elections, spent all of last year pushing for a$20 billion Amazon AI investment, the largest private sector investment in Pennsylvania history. That's a quote from Shapiro himself. He signed an executive order imposed what is of strictest state level guardrails on data centers in the country.

8:21So he went from pushing very aggressively and promoting a$20 billion Amazon investment and being very proud of being able to bring it to Pennsylvania to signing an executive order that basically bans data centers moving forward. Now, it doesn't ban it completely, but developers must cover the full electricity cost tied to their facility. Facilities are removed from Pennsylvania fast track permitting programs, no more state NDAs with developers, and local communities get a formal say before permits are issued. So he's not really stopping the process. He is following basically what 57 % of Americans want, which is defining very clear rules of how you can build a data center.

9:04As you know, I've been teaching AI courses since April of 2023. I've trained thousands of people to do exactly this thing, exactly what this survey is talking about, to be more productive at work with AI tools. And the current course that we're teaching, the multi-agent orchestration course, is the jewel in the crown, right? It's the cherry on top. It is a course that is teaching people how to build agentic systems, how to build the infrastructure for them, and how to create extremely powerful business results without any crazy investment in infrastructure and so on. So if this is something you're interested in, in order to improve your business, if you're in leadership position, or improve your career, if you're just an individual, come and check the link in the show notes for the next session.

9:47The next cohort was open in November. So come and sign up for the course. You get a hundred off with the promo code leveraging AI 100. And now back to our story. Now, we already talked about in previous weeks, two other governors that are moving in the same direction. New York's Kathy Hochul, who paused permits for large new data centers for up to a year, as I mentioned just now, and Texas Greg Abbott, who ordered a full grid capacity audit before new connections are approved to move forward. Now, this is even more interesting based on the fact that Texas hosts OpenAI's Stargate build-out in its flagship site in Ebeling.

10:27Now, one of the reasons this is really interesting is when was the last time you've seen one of the most democratic states, which is New York, do the same thing as one of the most Republican states, which is Texas, and move in the same direction at the same time on an election year? I do not remember a lot of things like that. in recent years, and it is showing you how one direction is the current U.S. opinion on this, and hence both parties are aligned, at least with their statements. Now, a Senate GOP campaign memo that was obtained by Axios from Ohio State addresses directly two AI companies, warns that data centers may cost Senator John Husted, again a Republican from Ohio, his seat.

11:12Why is that? because the former senator, the one he's competing against for the seat, Sherwood Brown, has spent millions of dollars to make Husted the face of data centers in Ohio. Basically, he is the ultimate villain because he's supporting data centers in the state of Ohio. This is the state of where we are right now. Data centers are becoming the weapon to show that people are bad people and hence they should not be elected for whatever political position. Now, what happened this week? So again, to an extent, I'm glad I did not report this last week. First of all, Sam Altman, in an interview published by Time, said, and I am quoting, clearly people hate data centers, right now at least.

11:55People are pretty negative on AI. Now, what makes it more interesting is the head executive, OpenAI's head of data centers, Chris Malone, left the company. So we talked last week about the exodus of leadership from OpenAI and from other companies, but mostly from OpenAI. So this one is the head of their data center operation. And what OpenAI called it is a recent reorganization of the infrastructure team. But this is happening while OpenAI are on a short final to an IPO, and while they're building more and more capacity and are committed to a huge expense on that particular aspect. And articles about data centers and the status are now in the main media all the time in every outlet you are.

12:39There was an article on Bloomberg on August 26. Data center backlash is seen as slowing, reshaping new projects. There's been an article on Clear Politics called Backlash Against AI Data Centers is Real, Organic, Widespread. HPC Wire has reported on August 26, are AI data center bans going too far? NBC News, and so on and so forth. All the different outlets from large and small are all talking about the AI and data centers. And this was not the case even two to three months ago. This is accelerating very dramatically because of the elections. This became a political weapon, as I mentioned, and both parties are listening very closely to what people actually have to say and what people think and are planning and are already using it in their campaigns.

13:29When you dive deeper into what's actually going on, the image becomes a little clearer as far as why people don't like data centers. So first of all, the polls who separated between data centers and AI are showing that the opposition is mostly about AI and less about data centers. People are okay with having a data center as long as it's not an AI data centers. People have a really bad opinion about the potential implications of AI on their jobs, etc. As I mentioned earlier, that's the majority of Americans right now. And so having a data center in your backyard feels like something that is not a good idea because it will accelerate job loss and negative aspects of AI.

14:09So again, it's the AI aspect of it, not necessarily the data center aspect of it. The other aspect is there's lots of disinformation out there, and it is very easy to spread disinformation, even if it's completely false. So a widely cited water usage statistics from Karen Howe in the book Empire of AI was off by 1000x. So three orders of magnitude. And it has been corrected, but it's been used over and over across multiple media outlets. And only 8 % of people that were surveyed ever found the correction. And so most people think that AI data centers are using a huge amount of fresh water, which is not the case.

14:50almost all data centers and definitely all new data centers running in a closed system. There is a set amount of water that is being used to put into the system, but it's a very small amount of water compared to the amount of water the US uses to water our lawns, as an example. And I don't hear anybody banning lawns or not willing to have lawns in their backyard or in their neighborhood. Now, several different news outlets and research companies are tying a lot of the current negative backlash against AI data centers as amplified by bots in social media that are operated through foreign national intervention.

15:26Basically, mostly China and potentially Russia and other countries are amplifying the backlash through bots in social media. The goal of that is obviously to slow down the development of AI in the US, and it seems to be working for them. Now, the most interesting stuff about this is the actual real facts behind some of the fears that people have. In Quincy, Washington, that hosted data centers since local poverty fell from 29.4 % in 2012 to 6.2 % in 2024, funded largely by data center property taxes. Another example that I found is Loudoun County in Virginia. The densest data center market in the world had cut property taxes every year for a decade because facilities cover 40 of local tax revenue.

16:14So what is the bottom line? The bottom line is the facts don't matter because people follow trends, they follow social media, they follow whatever other people are saying, and they definitely follow what their politicians are telling them, which right now is data centers are bad and you should not have them. But what does that mean for us as US citizens, for us as business people, for us as people who are looking at the AI space. First of all, it makes no sense in the long term. It makes no sense in the long term because whoever is going to have more capacity for AI will have more intelligence.

16:48Having more intelligence will lead to higher results for whatever it is, your company, your area, your county, your region, your country as a whole. And if you're going to stay behind, you will not be able to compete. Now, I'm not saying we should sacrifice everything on that altar, right? We should not now say every American should now pay for the electricity of the data centers, or every American should now have less clean water because we're going to give it to data centers, or every American should suffer from pollution more than they're suffering right now because it's not what I'm saying.

17:20But what I'm saying is banning data centers right now will lead to an economic slowdown and will make the U.S. less competitive, period. There is no question mark at the end of that sentence, because it is very clear that every place that is going to have more intelligence, abundance of intelligence, is going to be more successful, and not having the infrastructure that enables that makes it very problematic. What I do agree with is that there need to be clearer rules and transparency on exactly how the data centers are going to impact the daily lives of the people in the area where people live.

17:55How is it going to impact their taxes? How is it going to impact their jobs? How is it going to impact their water supply? How is it going to impact electricity costs? All of these things need to be clear and well-defined. But once they are, stopping data centers makes absolutely no sense, which takes me to the political issue that we're handling right now. As I mentioned, from a pure political perspective, both parties right now are opposing the implementation and the growth in the need for data centers. Why? Because this is what the voters want. However, what happens if this really takes over and either the people actually saying that are actually going to follow on their promises from pre-election, which may or may not happen.

18:35We've seen it happen both ways many times before, but let's say it does happen. Let's say many US data center projects are stopped in their tracks instead of moving forward. This will lead to GDP falling down. This will lead to less taxes. This will lead to international large language models and other AI models catching up and potentially surpassing US models, or US models start using international locations for their data centers, which A, is a problem because now it's on foreign soil potentially with partnerships with other governments, and B, is not going to provide the same effect in the US because of delays and so on.

19:14So the outcome is going to be a slowdown in the US economy and a reduced competitiveness for US companies. That will lead to a very interesting impact on the 2028 elections. And it's going to be a much bigger topic if that is going to happen, because the current government and potentially all the people that are opposing AI, especially from the Republican side, and I'm not picking sides here just because they're currently in office. it makes sense that people will pick on them if the economy slows down. So if the economy slows down because we're pulling out money out of the system, because we're not allowing these investments to actually happen on US soil, and it slows down because we have less competitive access to intelligence, then what happens in the next elections?

20:00The answer is, I don't know, but I have a feeling, and I think we all have a feeling, where's that going to lead? But if Democrats are going to continue push very aggressively against data centers and against AI and its implications. And that will be proven to lead to a economical slowdown. What is the impact of that going to have in the next election cycle? I don't know. I don't think anybody knows, but I have a feeling that we're going to find out. The next topic I want to dive into is the pricing war between the major labs and the very significant decline in pricing of the top models and definitely the secondary models from the leading labs.

20:41So let's again start by looking at numbers. The first one looks at a large-scale data from information coming from Silicon Data and Jefferies that is stating that average enterprise AI inference price has hit$1.16 to$1.18 for million tokens, which is the lowest it has been in 2026. To give you the full trajectory, it was$2.04 in May 31st, $1.45 in late July,$1.17 in early August. That's a 43 % decline in just 10 weeks. If you remember, if you go back through my episodes in May, we were still talking about token maxing. And we are now just three months later, and we're talking about the lowest cost of entrance per million tokens for US enterprises as a summary of what is actually happening.

21:32US lab prices fell 25 % between mid-July and mid-August. So we're talking about just one month and the prices of the tokens from the labs has dropped 25%. On August 21st of this year, OpenAI has announced that their largest model GPT 5.6 Sol is going to go through a 20 % price cut. So from$5 to a million tokens to$4 to a million tokens, that's on the entry tokens. On the output tokens, it's a 33 % cut. So from$30 to a million tokens to$20 to a million tokens. Now the promotional pricing is currently going through November 21st of this year. Will that continue afterwards? Nobody really knows. Now this continues cuts that they had before.

22:13So GPT 5.6 Luna, the smallest model, had an 80 % cut in rate and Terra, which is their middle level model, was cut down 20%. This happened at the end of July. Now, Anthropic has previously announced that on September 1st, prices are going to increase for Claude Sonnet 5 and that was just canceled. So the planned$3 for input tokens and$15 for million output tokens will not occur. So it is going to stay at the introductory rate of$2 for entry tokens and$10 for output tokens. And that is going to stay at least for now. Now, a company that announces a price increase is taking a lot of thought before it's doing that, right?

22:56It is not something you gladly announce. So if they did announce it previously, they thought deeply about what might be the consequences. And despite the fact that they thought deeply about what might be the consequences, they are now reversing that. So yes, they're not decreasing or discounting the price of their models, but they are not increasing the price of their models despite the fact that they announced that's going to happen. A third company that is following the same path, and we talked about this in the past couple of weeks, is Google. Google, as we mentioned, Google announced Gemini 3.7 Flash, which launched at 0.75 cents for a million input tokens and 3.75 cents for output tokens, which is exactly 50 % below Gemini 3.6 flash, which was the previous model that it is replacing.

23:38This is an introductory rate that is currently set up to expire at December 31st. However, we do not know if they're going to actually go up to anything higher than that, because we're seeing what the trend is. Now, a lot of this is happening because the leading labs from China, such as DeepSeek and Moonshot, have released very powerful models that are close to the frontier, maybe not as good. And in real life, maybe the gap is a little bigger than what seems on paper and on the different benchmarks, but they're definitely good enough for most knowledge work today. And they're coming in very cheap, which leaves the labs with a very serious dilemma.

24:16Now, I want to dive a little deeper specifically about the OpenAI case, because I think it reveals what's actually going on. As I mentioned, OpenAI discounted Luna, their cheapest, least capable model by 80 % at the end of July. That is a very steep discount in a single day to make for a model that you work very hard to create. And the recent cut in Sol, so their largest model, was much more modest. It was 20 to 33%. It is still a very big decrease. And the main thing, it makes it cheaper than Anthropic Opus 5. So now Sol is at$4 input tokens and$20 output tokens versus Opus 5, which are at$5 million input tokens and$25 for a million output tokens, not to mention Fable, which is at$10 and$50 accordingly.

25:06So what does that mean from a strategy perspective? And this is why I thought it's to dive into this. It is very clear that OpenAI are competing in two separate markets. And I think they all are, but it is very clear from this immediate analysis. On the low end, OpenAI is competing with Chinese models. They don't necessarily have to be cheaper than them, but they have to be close enough for people to reconsider switching from an open AI model to a Chinese model with all the baggage that comes with that. So if the difference is 10x, companies will switch and jump ship. If the difference is small enough, people would be willing to pay the premium for a US-based model before they're integrating a Chinese model into their operation.

25:45Despite the fact it's open source and they can run it inside of US servers, there's always the concern of what's actually happening, where the data is going, and so on. And so I think people will pay a premium on the cheaper end. On the higher end, they're competing directly head-to-head with Anthropic. So if they're now 20 to 30 % cheaper than Anthropic on the high-end model, they can harvest the large enterprises, which probably won't touch Chinese model with a 10-foot pole. What is this leading to? So Sarah Fryer, OpenAI CFO, stated on August 14th that the enterprise revenue now surpasses consumer GPT revenue for the first time.

26:19So we talked a lot about the change that OpenAI did in late 2025 and early 2026 when they shifted away from consumer focus to enterprise focus, and this is now paying off. It is paying off big time because they're now at an analyzed run rate of$40 billion, more than doubling where they were at the end of 2025. So in just eight months, they doubled their run rate, which adds$20 billion to the run rate, which is absolutely insane. And they're doing this by providing better focus on enterprise and now also more competitive pricing than their number one competitor, Anthropic. Now, I want to say something about the overall way to discount your models.

26:59And that, I think, makes a very big difference between Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. OpenAI is losing money at a very high speed. They're burning through cash at numbers that I don't think any company in history did, and they are going towards an IPO to raise even more money, close to$100 billion probably, in order to continue financing their really large loss. Anthropic, on the other hand, had reports that they're breaking even and making some profit in the recent few months. This means that they have the opportunity to potentially discount their models without hitting without burning even more cash.

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27:36And they have maybe a little more ability to do that, but maybe they don't have to. We're going to talk about the opinions about what people think about the different models right now. So we'll see that Anthropic has reasons to be able to charge a premium price, but we'll get to that in the later segment. But for now, what I want to talk to you about is the financial aspect of it. So OpenAI are burning through cash. Anthropic, on the other hand, are potentially breaking even depending on the month and how much they're spending on CapEx and other things right now, but Google has$300 billion of advertising business that they can use to potentially discount their models and subsidize them to be competitive on the low end in ways that OpenAI and Anthropic just cannot.

28:18So while it seems that right now that Google is not competing at the frontier, they're definitely playing a stronger and bigger role on open source models with Gemma and on their cheaper model with GPT 3.7. So Google, while they're not competing at the frontier right now, they're definitely competing on the low end. And with Gemini 3.7 Flash, they have a very solid contender on the low end. We just had a really interesting conversation in the AI Weekly Friday Hangouts. That is a community meetup that you're all invited to join. It happens every Friday at 1 p.m. An amazing group of people that just care about AI and want to learn from one another.

28:56And one of the people mentioned that he started using Gemini 3.7 Flash for coding, and he's extremely satisfied. And it is now his favorite model to develop software. And he has been using Anthropic and OpenAI top models so far. So he has a solid benchmark. So again, on the low-end models, Google are playing as a serious contender in that game. And maybe that's their focus, but they also have much, much deeper pockets and they can afford to subsidize their models in order to stay in the competition. Now, the fact that AI is getting cheaper is making it more available in more places and for more use cases.

29:34And this is starting to have a noticeable impact on other markets. The biggest example came this week from Baidu. So Baidu is the Chinese Google, right? It's a huge company with really large revenue and their revenue for Q2 was 4.62 billion, which missed analyst expectations, and it is down 4 % year over year. This is the fifth consecutive quarter of decline when their online marketing services is down 19 % year over year to 13.1 billion yuan. Now, in their statement, their real estate slump in China and weak consumer demand has been cited as macro causes for that. But the reality, AI is disrupting their search-based advertising business.

30:23It is not happening to Google yet. Google is actually seeing the best quarters they've ever seen when it comes to advertising revenue, but it is definitely taking a toll on Baidu. And I assume it will have a similar impact on Google as AI usage growth as a way to replace traditional search. Now, what is saving quote-unquote Baidu for now is that their core AI powered business segment, basically providing infrastructure for AI to run, has gone up 25 % year over year and is now half of the general business revenue. GPU cloud revenue jumped year over year. AI cloud infrastructure is up 50 % year over year.

31:03What does that do to the overall financials of the company? It is a very different ballgame selling advertising versus selling cloud services. So their net income attributable to Baidu specifically is down 68 % year over year. This is obviously a very big difference in how profitable the company is. And because they're now making huge investment in CapEx, their free cash flow has swung to negative and it's now 1.1 in the negative compared to positive cash flow previously before this big expand and before this big decline in revenue. This news obviously sent their stock down, their US listed shares down 14 % in the beginning, closing 20 % lower at a$90.8 a share, where companies like Morgan Stanley is now setting their price target at 80.

31:53So that's still much lower than it is after this big decline. Doesn't look very good for Baidu right now. And it makes perfect sense. Again, if you are able to generate extremely high margins based on marketing revenue, this is one thing. If you have to fight all the big giants while investing hugely in infrastructure in order to sell it and maintain it, and you're significantly less profitable, that is a very different ballgame and playing a big role in why people are using less search and hence less ad revenue for Baidu. The other thing that this is doing, this fight to get cheaper models to do stuff for you is showing up in acquisitions and M &A as far as where the real value is.

32:34So more and more companies and more and more people around the world are understanding that you don't have to be married to OpenAI or Anthropic or anybody else. You can shift around different models as needed if you have the right infrastructure and if you have access to open source models and closed source models and you can shift at will, this is extremely valuable. This is leading to something we talked about last week when OpenRouter is going to get acquired by Stripe for something between$7 and$8 billion. OpenRouter allows companies to switch between one model and the other very easily. I've been using them for multiple different things for the last couple of years, and so are many other people.

33:13They are currently processing over 10 trillion tokens every single day across 400 models and more. Another relevant, similar acquisition that is fueled by the same thing, there are rumors that Hugging Face are now potentially going to get sold at a$13 billion or more price tag up from$4.5 billion valuation in 2023. So huge jump in their valuation, the potential acquirer, NVIDIA. Well, NVIDIA seems to be acquiring everything or their names seem to be tied to potential acquisitions of more or less anything, but it actually makes a lot of sense for NVIDIA to purchase them. NVIDIA has an endless amount of cash right now, and it's growing every single quarter, and owning the platform that hosts most of the world's open source models makes perfect sense for them to be able to have a more complete ecosystem.

34:03So what does this all mean? First of all, it means that people are definitely paying attention to how much they're paying for AI right now. I'm working with multiple businesses, large, medium, and small, and I can tell you it is a big deal in all of them. And in large enterprises or midsize companies, it is maybe the second most important conversation around AI after data security. And so that has a very clear impact on what we're seeing. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, a 43 % decline in inference pricing over 10 weeks in US enterprises. That is very significant. And it is going to continue and it is going to continue for two reasons.

34:42Reason number one, the companies will create cheaper models to use because of the competition. Reason number two is companies understand they don't need frontier models in order to do the day-to-day work. In tests that I've done recently, I tested all the different models on day-to-day stuff. And I can tell you that I was able to do very helpful work with Haiku from Anthropic and Luna from ChatGPT and similar open source models and get very decent results while paying significantly less. Before that, I didn't test. I just assumed I have to use Opus for some things or at least Sonnet for some things.

35:16And what I've learned, that's not actually the case. And the more people test these things and the more people understand which use cases require what level of model, we'll allow companies to use lower level models to achieve day-to-day tasks, which will put the pressure even more on the labs to discount prices because otherwise they will run out of business. So what does that mean to you? First of all, it is good news. We are going to get better intelligence at a cheaper price. The second is go test for yourself your own use cases across several different models and see which is the cheapest one that will give you consistent results on the tasks that you are performing and stay there until the next cycle of models come out and then test those and start all over again.

35:58Now, the last story that I want to spend more time on before we go into rapid fire, I'm not going to dive too deep into this one because it was just announced, but I just think it is going to change everything again. So on August 27, Anthropic launched what they call Model Hardware Standard. This is, if you want, the hardware equivalent of an MCP. This is a universal interface that allows AI agents to directly operate lab equipment, such as manufacturing machinery, robotic arms, microscopes, etc. So they're following the same, if you want, playbook they did when they released MCP at the end of 2024.

36:35They're releasing it as an open source standard, which hopefully will become the standard across all the different companies around the world in a similar way that MCP has took off. MCP right now has a million plus monthly downloads. Just shows you how wildly used MCP became. Anybody who is a little more advanced in AI is using multiple MCPs every single day, myself included. Now, this new standard, MHS, again, model hardware standard, has already been deployed with some deployment partners such as Denentech, Carnegie Mellon University, HHMI, Janlia, and Quera Computing. And they also have vendor hardware partners with AWS, Danaher, University Robots, and a few others.

37:22All these companies are currently either building support for MHS into their products or testing it in deployment of using actual devices. Now, the interesting thing is the results that these initial partners are describing. Carnegie Mellon University in a serial dilution experiments have stated that running experiments is now three times faster than previous methods because they're using MHS. Genentech have used it in BCA protein essays. Genentech have used it in internal processes in which they actually found some issues with the initial testing, including some critical failure that they've surfaced that has been since fixed, but they are using it in their manufacturing capabilities.

38:03Quera Computing, which is a quantum laser system, achieved 99.3 autonomous laser lock recovery, which is the highest autonomy figure disclosed by any early adopters. I, Genelia Research Campus has unified seven vendor programs that have no unified integration between them into one orchestrated rig using MHS. So think about taking seven incompatible vendor stack and replacing them with one unified interface without going through months or potentially years of integrations just by connecting everything to this new protocol and standard. It is completely changing the way things can happen in labs and in manufacturing facilities.

38:46And these come from very different angles, right? So these companies span from genomics to protein science to quantum computing and university research, all finding very useful use cases and achieving interesting results by using this new integration. What is that telling us? It is telling us that Anthropic is focused way beyond just software, right? They now want to integrate their intelligence into hardware as well. They're also into hardware in many other ways. We discussed that they have recently hired a hardware executive, Caitlin Kalinowski, that was previously at OpenAI and Meta and Apple.

39:20They are assembling a custom cheap team. So they're planning to build their own silicon. So they're going to be the same as all the other labs and have their own computer chips built to their needs. So they're going to play way beyond just the model creation. They're planning to integrate their models into A, their own hardware that they're building, as well as into more or less any hardware in the world through this new protocol that they just introduced. Now, the bigger question obviously is security and safety. That should be a big concern here, especially as these models are getting significantly more sophisticated and capable of doing really catastrophic things.

39:58So we talked about many times about the stopping of the development at OpenAI or slowing the development at OpenAI. We talked about the Glasswing project where Anthropic released their Mythos models only to a short list of companies to enable them to find different loopholes in systems. The problem while this is happening, and these models are currently being used to evaluate the different vulnerabilities in software, nobody can fix them fast enough. So based on the recent information from Glasswing project, vulnerability that it found is potentially over 23 ,000 vulnerabilities across over a thousand project.

40:34They're finding these vulnerabilities at a rate that nobody can fix fast enough, even with AI coding. Think about now taking this to the physical world. Think about allowing AI agents to control physical machines and devices in labs and manufacturing facilities. And think about the risks, both cyber risks as well as physical risks in this case, that this may introduce, not to mention the sci-fi story of now AI controlling manufacturing, so they can manufacture whatever version that they need of whatever device that they need, so they can build more of whatever they need. So if you go down the Terminator path, this is definitely starting to sound like Cyberdyne, at least to me, and I'm definitely a sci-fi geek, and I really like the Terminator movies, so I may not be the right benchmark for that.

41:22But allowing the AI to control all the manufacturing machines, because it can do it significantly faster and better, also comes with at least theoretical baggage in my mind. But that being said, this protocol now exists. It's out there. And if it's going to catch at the same speed as NCP, we're going to see more and more companies around the world allow the machines to manage, control, calibrate, and do whatever they define to actual hardware using this new protocol. And as the AI becomes better and better, the abilities to do that will become more and more important to companies to implement because that is going to make them significantly more competitive, which will put pressure on them to actually do that, which will open the door to a lot of really bad things potentially happening.

42:03I'm not saying they will happen, but potentially happening. So that's it for the deep dive this week. Now let's switch to rapid fire. I'm going to go really quickly. There's a lot of really interesting things that happened. And since we talked about Anthropic, let's stay with Anthropic and Claude. They made a lot of interesting announcement this week. So the first one, as I mentioned earlier, there has been a satisfaction ranking survey that has been released, and Claude leads user satisfaction, outperforming Gemini and ChatGPT in the YouGov survey. That survey has been open from March 1st through July 31st, so running for a while, and ended very recently.

42:38And Claude holds the highest AI satisfaction among the current and former users, and it's achieving a net score of 56.2, significantly ahead of Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT, while Apple Siri and Elon Musk Grok lag far behind. So putting the actual numbers in place, Anthropic with Claude at 56.2, Gemini with 46.5, ChatGPT at 46.0, so pretty close together. Then Perplexity with 43.7, Alexa 42.6, Copilot with 37.2, DeepSeek with 35.1, and Apple Intelligence with 32.4. And really far behind are Grok with 24.6 and Siri 23.7. So what does that mean? Not much from a technical perspective or implementation perspective, just from a public opinion perspective.

43:27There's obviously a very strong swing towards Anthropic and Claude since the beginning of this year. When I started using Claude heavily in Q4 of last year. I spoke to people and they never heard of Claude before. And now almost everybody I talk to are like, yeah, yeah, we like Claude. We switched to using Claude from using ChatGPT. So from a public opinion perspective, there's definitely been a very strong swing in the past year towards liking Anthropic and liking OpenAI a little less. I must admit, I'm now on the swing back. There's more and more things I'm doing with Codex and other ChatGPT capabilities.

43:59To be fair, in parallel and in conjunction and working on the same project in collaboration between Claude and Chut. Another big announcement from Anthropic this week is that they're unifying the memory of the regular Claude with Claude Cowork, which is going to provide Claude more knowledge and more context, which means it will be able to support you even better. So previously, the memory from the regular Claude Conversations was not available to Claude Cowork, and now Claude Cowork can actually tap into the memory of regular Claude Conversations, which is going to provide a lot of value to people who are regular Claude users and now are switching to using Cloud Cowork.

44:34As somebody who's been using mostly Cloud Cowork and Cloud Code for the past year, that is not a big difference to me because I built my own memory and data and context systems and layers that actually connects to all my files and all the systems and my entire ecosystem, basically. Not a big deal for me, but if you've been a regular Cloud user and now you're going to transfer to using Cloud Cowork, that is a big deal for you. They've also made updates to the real-time memory updates and management and a lot of other memory-related stuff that is going to provide value to people as Claude learns how they do and what they do and so on.

45:08Anthropic made another big announcement this week, which Claude now launches its own built-in browser in its desktop app. So it does not need now to go to your Chrome extension and control your actual Chrome window. It can actually run a browser within the Claude environment. The biggest benefit is that it's completely isolated from your own browser. So all the passwords and links and things that are saved in your browser stay in your browser and Cloud operates in its own browser environment inside of Cloud where it does not have access to your universe. It does also mean that it doesn't necessarily need the extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and so on.

45:44So that's a new development and a new release from Cloud similar to how it works in ChatGPT recently. Anthropic also released a few new capabilities that existed in a limited test so far and is now available to the public. This unlocks AI agents with general availability for computer use, Skills API, and Files API. So as of August 20th, Anthropic Computer Use Tool, the new browser tool that I just mentioned, Skills API and Files API are now generally available on the cloud platform, which enables and opens the door for a lot of capabilities that previously were just for specific selected companies.

46:22An interesting aspect of this new computer use tool, it is now eligible for HIPAA-regulated workflows under Anthropic Business Associate Agreement, which opens the doors to a very wide range of companies and use cases that were previously banned from using AI for this thing, which is showing you that these tools are becoming better and better at keeping the information safe if highly regulated controls are allowing this process to happen. And from Anthropic to OpenAI, the first big news I already hinted about earlier, and that is OpenAI data center head departs as part of a really big shakeup.

46:59More and more people are leaving OpenAI. And as I mentioned, this is strange, especially as they're heading into their IPO. I don't know how much of it is intended, meaning they're switching people to get to the IPO with a better setup and a better team, or people are leaving for whatever other reasons. But it definitely doesn't look good from the outside. More than a dozen executives have left the company from the beginning of this year. And it doesn't stop at the executive level. Business Insider is saying that 13 to 14 other senior leaders have left across various divisions in the company as well.

47:32So a big departure on the leadership team, which again, doesn't look great, but specifically the biggest loss this week is Chris Malone. He's joined in March of 2025, OpenAI's data center strategy. So critical to their current and future growth. Now, this is a big deal because Malone was one of the key figures behind OpenAI's Stargate project, which is a$500 billion effort to build data centers in collaboration with some really big names, including Oracle, NVIDIA, and SoftBank. So how will that impact OpenAI? I don't know, but it is definitely another big name that is leaving the company in the recent months.

48:13Another big movement of a big name this week is Luke Metz. Luke Metz is joining the superintelligence team in Meta, but he has a very interesting history. He was a key researcher in OpenAI. He left OpenAI to join Mira Moratti's Thinking Machine Labs in 2024, rejoined OpenAI in early 2026, and now is transitioning to Meta. So top scientist that started his journey at Google brain. I don't know if it's a money thing or an interest thing, probably a combination of both, but another big name in the AI space that is jumping ship in recent months. Staying on OpenAI news that you need to know, OpenAI just reinstated their five-hour daily limit for ChatGPT plus codecs and work features.

49:00That limit existed before they removed it, and they're bringing it back effective on August 20th. Why are they doing this? The formal reason is that it allows OpenAI to, quote unquote, smooth the compute load on their system. But the reality is it's combined to what we talked about earlier in this episode. They're giving big discounts. This discount allows people to use more tokens and OpenAI has to somehow balance the amount of tokens they're using because they don't have unlimited capacity. And the way to do this is to stop people after five hours and not let them use the cheap tokens that they now have access to.

49:34So you're paying less to get the tokens, but you can't use more tokens because you're going to be capped. So So OpenAI looks cheaper, and at the same time, they can still control the amount of compute that they need to have in order to allow this cheaper AI to be available to people. Now, from news from specific companies to a few interesting pieces of news specifically about agents. The first one is in a study that was published in Science Advances, revealed that over a thousand AI agents, including advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, spontaneously aligned with a majority opinion, achieving 100 % consensus, even without explicit instructions or memory of past interactions.

50:15Now, the problem with that is that researchers are warning that this is a way of agents to create, if you want, a power of the majority that can lead to catastrophic failures in critical multi-agent systems. So if you have built a really sophisticated process that has multiple agents that are supposed to balance one another, it is eventually, potentially will fail because all the agents will end up agreeing on whatever topic instead of balancing each other out, which is obviously not what you're planning if you're building them to balance themselves out. Staying on the topic of agents and use, Cloudflare just unveiled Kitesurf, which is a lean browser engine that is built specifically for AI agents.

50:57So what does that mean? It means this browser is significantly more efficient for agents to use compared to Chromium-based browsers. If you want specific numbers, their resource efficiency dropped to approximately 3.1 to 3.8 times less CPU and 4.7 to seven times less memory than running the same exact agents on a Chromium browser. The idea is that this browser was architected and designed specifically for tasks such as screenshot and HTML extraction that will support agents in what they need to do. I talked about this in this podcast many times before, that the web, as we know it today, will change.

51:37We will have increasingly more and more agents, unless humans actually visiting websites and crawling the web, meaning the way we address the world, the way we build our websites needs to change in order to support agents better. And now it's not just the websites, it's also the actual browser that they're going to use is going to be built for agents and not for humans, which means again, your website over time will have to change in order to work better in that browser versus Chrome or other browsers that exist today that are built for humans. Staying on agents and combining it with talks about OpenAI.

52:11OpenAI are hosting the WebMCP Challenge. It is a 10-day competition, and they're inviting developers to build applications that leverages the WebMCP protocol, which is a standard that they just recently announced, and it is supposed to help AI agents interact directly with websites through structured tools. Now, the prizes are not that high. The top winners can win$3 ,000 in cash, but they're also going to win one year of ChatGPT Pro, a Codex Micro keyboard, and additional prizes that are going to be built. But the big deal is you will be able to get your name out there as somebody who won an OpenAI competition.

52:49Now, what is WebMCP? As I mentioned, it's something OpenAI just announced in partnership with other companies, and it is an experimental open standard that allows websites to expose structured tools specifically for AI agents to be able to use them directly, which allows AI agents to complete tasks faster in the browser. Same exact concept as we talked about with the new browser from Cloudflare. Now, this new initiative by OpenAI is starting as another one is ending. OpenAI just finished what they call Build Week Hackathon, which drew over 47 ,000 builders from 186 countries who submitted over 8 ,000 projects across these eight days.

53:27The goal is to demonstrating how AI tools can enable non-programmers and domain experts to create functional software. As somebody who has been doing this more or less every single day for about a year, I can tell you it is life-changing. You can literally build any kind of software you need for yourself, for your family, for your company, and so on. The thing that people don't tell you is that software needs to be maintained and supported and need specific data security features and access points for people and agents and so on. And that makes it significantly more complicated than just building the software itself, but the ability to build software is definitely there.

54:04Now, staying on agents, an interesting announcement from NVIDIA this week. They have just announced that their Agentic Variation Operators, or AVO for short, is a new architecture, and using this architecture, they achieved a 100 % score on the ARK AGI 3 Interactive Reasoning Benchmark, completing all 83 levels across 25 different environments. And what it is showing this breakthrough that by combining autonomous agents' performance through a system-level design allows it to have longer memory and better overall outputs across long and complex tasks. Now, to put things in perspective, Claude Opus 5, the second most strongest model from Anthropic, achieves 30 % on Arc AGI 3 under a standard evaluation.

54:55So achieving 100 % tells you how well built the orchestration platform is to enable the agents to run across it and achieve all the different goals successfully. This is the world we're going into, where single systems that we all think are extremely capable but still fail on basic tasks, like all the models that we know, will be able to overcome this by building agents that will operate jointly on these tasks and will be able to achieve probably everything that we can achieve that can be done on a computer. And now to three interesting things that companies have announced this week, some of them through partnerships.

55:32Salesforce and Anthropic has launched what they're calling CloudForce. It is an integration that is designed to embed Cloud directly into the Salesforce platform for sales professionals. What it has is 37 pre-built skills specifically for salespeople that can do multiple tasks like email composition and record updates directly inside of Salesforce using the Cloud AI environment. Salesforce shares rose 12 % following the announcement. Now, to put things in perspective and obviously connected to Mark Benioff, which is Salesforce colorful CEO, Mark Benioff said that, and I'm quoting the nonsense of the saspocalypse.

56:15I think it is time for it to stop. But the reality is it is not stopping. If anything, I think this proves exactly the other way around. And the other thing that makes it funny is the fact that the shares rose 12 % after they are down 22 % this year and 20 % in 2025. So there is a huge decline in the last two years in the stock of Salesforce because more and more people understand they don't necessarily need it and they can deal with AI stuff that will be significantly more efficient and user-friendly than Salesforce. And now the fact that I can actually do this with Anthropic basically says I don't actually need Salesforce.

56:52I need Salesforce data structure. So then I can use AI on top of that. So I think while this drove the shares up 12%, in the long run, I think it will lead to exactly the opposite results. And another huge interesting partnership this week is between SpaceX and NVIDIA. So these two companies, these two giant companies are teaming together to launch a Vera Rubin NL72 system space optimized CPU designed for a genetic AI to orbit in Q4 of next year. All these talks from Elon Musk about putting AI data centers in space is going to be at least an experiment within just a year and a quarter from now.

57:34So NVIDIA is going to build a new version of their chips that are going to be optimized for being used in space. It is positioned as the first CPU built for agent, and it's designed to accelerate orchestration, code execution, and data processing, which is the infrastructure of the new generation of the agentic era. Now, how much can Elon actually launch to space to make it viable and interesting? Nobody really knows. The numbers he's talking about right now just don't add up. There's just not enough launch capacity in the world, and there won't be enough launch capacity in the world to make this worthwhile to the numbers that he's talking about.

58:10But even if he's off by an order of magnitude, it will still be the largest data center in the world, and it is going to be in space. So the vision from Elon Musk, again, like in every other thing that Elon Musk ever touched, is slowly becoming a reality. And this is definitely a huge step in the right direction, partnering with NVIDIA on this process. And the last piece of news that I have to end on, and I couldn't skip despite the fact it probably does nothing for you in the immediate future, but it has huge implications in the long run, is if you somehow missed it, the humanoid robot Olympics happened in China this week.

58:45And there were a lot of really crazy, incredible things in there. Now, the biggest news out of that was a Chinese humanoid robot that completed a 100 meter sprint in 8.86 seconds. How crazy is that? The fastest human to ever complete the race in a record that will probably never be broken is obviously Usain Bolt from Jamaica, who run the distance at 9.58 seconds in 2009. The first robot to beat that actually did this on Saturday at 9.39 and then immediately after that, a new robot broke the record with 8.86. Now to tell you how big the event was these robots participated in multiple other sports as well, achieved incredible success, and it had over 1 ,300 competitions involving more than 2 ,000 robots competing in 51 events, including running, long jump, table tennis, ballroom dancing, and including some real-world scenarios like household tasks, hotel services, and emergency responses.

59:46So while this is somewhat an entertainment event, the meaning or the implications of that are endless. It means that robots that are not crazy expensive can now do things that were very clearly human physical skills that at least I thought will take a while for robots to compete with. And they're already doing that. Now, putting things in perspective, most of the participants are from China by a very big spread. By the way, the latest stats is from a deployment perspective. The Chinese currently control over 95 % of actual deployed humanoid robots in the world. So all the news we're hearing about all the other companies, the current pace, China has a complete win victory over every other company in the world when it comes to actually deploying robots that do work.

1:00:35But developing these robots to do these specific sports capabilities is showing really advanced mechanical capabilities that will be translated into robots doing other things. So if you think about how much technology we have today in cars that started with race cars, you understand that this is how the same thing is going to happen here. You develop things for the most demanding environments. You learn from that all the time, and then you can build it at scale, simplified to service every need that you have. I really think that the next big wave that is going to impact blue collar jobs will come from robots.

1:01:13And I think it's going to happen faster than we actually anticipate. That's it for this week. We'll be back on Tuesday with a fascinating how-to episode. Don't forget to share this podcast with people that you think can benefit from it. It will take you literally just a few seconds. Click on the share button on your phone, unless you're driving, and then think about three to five people that can really benefit from knowing more about AI and just send them the link to the podcast. I'm sure they will be grateful. I will be grateful. You'll be doing the right thing. I will be feeling good about yourself.

1:01:43And while you're at it, it will be nice if you can rate and review the podcast on Apple podcast or Spotify. And don't forget to check out the multi-agent orchestration course. The next cohort that is now open is in November. So if you want to learn how to build really sophisticated automations that can support your personal life and your business, and you still want to do it this year, this is the time to sign up. But that's really it for today. Have an amazing rest of your weekend, and I'll be back on Tuesday.

From the publisher

What happens when the infrastructure powering the AI boom becomes politically toxic—just as businesses are becoming more dependent on AI?

That tension is quickly becoming impossible for business leaders to ignore. AI data centers are facing growing public and political opposition, model prices are dropping fast, competition between the major AI labs is intensifying, and companies are getting more choices about where—and how cheaply—they can access intelligence.

For business leaders, the message is simple: don’t just follow which model is “best.” Pay attention to the economics, infrastructure, standards, and public sentiment shaping where AI goes next.

In this episode of Leveraging AI, Isar Meitis breaks down the most important AI developments of the week and, more importantly, connects the dots around what they could mean for businesses.

In this session, you'll discover:

  • Why AI data centers have suddenly become a bipartisan political issue in the United States—and why public opposition could have much broader economic consequences.
  • Why the backlash against data centers may have less to do with servers, water, and electricity than with Americans’ underlying concerns about AI and jobs.
  • How slowing data center development could affect U.S. competitiveness, investment, access to compute, and ultimately the economy.
  • Why AI inference prices are falling rapidly and how the competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Chinese AI labs is reshaping the market.
  • Why businesses should stop assuming every task needs the most expensive frontier model.
  • How testing cheaper models against your actual workflows could substantially lower the cost of enterprise AI.
  • The other important AI releases and developments from a packed week in artificial intelligence.

The AI race is no longer just about who builds the smartest model.


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