Anthropic’s $380B round, Paramount vs. WB, Higgsfield ragebait drama | Diet TBPN

0:00So, something big happened yesterday. There was a massive viral article. And do you know how big this something big is happening, how much that grew. It went big, I was getting texts about it. It has over 100 ,000 likes now. It's quickly becoming the most read thing in the world. I don't know, it's crazy. 75 million. 75 million views? Views. And 100 ,000. They're saying that only 200 people actually read it, but everyone has an opinion. Everyone has an opinion, I had an opinion. I wrote a piece about it yesterday, comparing saying AI is not like COVID. but I kind of got one shot by the COVID analogy just from a mathematical perspective.

0:40But the best reaction to something big is happening, it's gotta be John Palmer, something small is happening. I was reading this this morning, actually laughing out loud. So we'll read through it. John Palmer says - Yeah, you were reading it to yourself. Yes. And then you just started belly laughing. And so then I started filming. Then I asked you what you were reading. I was filming you. Then I sent that to John. Oh, I missed that. To get his reaction. I was dying laughing. To you reacting to his. Think back to 2014, a little over a decade ago. If you wanted a burrito, you had to get in your car and drive to the restaurant.

1:11You had to stand in line. You had to talk to a person. If someone told you that one day a stranger would bring you a burrito to your front door because you pressed a button on your phone, you would have said, that sounds dystopian and also incredible. Then over the course of about three years, it just became normal. And this was before Chipotle started skimping out on the portions too. I think we're at that same inflection point right now, except of instead of burritos, it's your entire job. I've spent the last two weeks reading about AI and watching clips of people building things with it. I live in this world now.

1:50The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people. A few hundred researchers at a handful of companies. I'm not one of these people, says John Palmer. I work in crypto. But I am close enough to feel the ground shake. I follow several AI researchers on X, and I also recently purchased a Mac Mini. I haven't set it up yet, but I think you can understand what I'm saying. I know this is real because it happened to other people first. Here's the thing nobody outside of tech understands yet. The people sounding the alarm aren't making predictions. They're telling you what already happened to them.

2:23I am relaying this information to you secondhand with conviction. For years, AI had been improving steadily. I absorbed these improvements fine because I wasn't really paying attention, to be honest. Then, apparently in 2025, everything got much faster and then faster again. I know this because I watched a three-hour podcast about it last Wednesday. The host was visibly shaken. I could tell because he wasn't even able to finish a single pint of Guinness. Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day and something clicked. Not for me personally. I was at a birthday dinner for my wife's co-worker.

2:56But for the people who tried the models that day, it was apparently a huge deal. One guy said he tells his AI what to build, walks away for a few hours, and comes back to find the work done. This will very likely be what my life is like as well. Once I set up my activity, AI will be doing things while I'm in the other room. That's potentially huge. Let me give you an example so you can understand what this looks like in practice. A guy on Twitter built an entire app just by describing it. The AI wrote the code, opened the app, tested the buttons, decided it didn't like the layout, fixed it, and only then said it's ready.

3:31I'm going to do something like that with my Mac Mini. Some type of cool app or something. I'm still figuring it out, but I have all the hardware. And I'm definitely going to optimize my setup with all types of skills and plugins. I'm not exaggerating. That's what my Tuesday could look like. Potentially. But I tried AI, and it wasn't that good. People would say this. They say this. I tried AI. It wasn't that good. Here's John Palmer's response. He says, I hear this constantly. I understand it because I also thought this, but the models today are apparently unrecognizable from what existed six months ago.

4:08Some of the people who are saying this have hundreds of thousands of followers and make sure you're not on the free plan. You have to get on the pay plan. That's key. How fast is this actually moving? Let's answer that question. In 2022, AI couldn't do basic math. By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software. And by 2025, some of the best engineers in the world had handed over most of their coding work to AI. In February 2026, you can make AI send you a morning summary of the top posts on Reddit from your Mac mini. What should you actually do? I'm not writing this to scare you, says John Palmer.

4:45I'm writing this because the single biggest advantage you can have right now is being early, early to understand it, early to buy the hardware, early to subscribe to the paid tier and ask it to make a meal. You can start using it for real work. If you're an engineer, give it a - Not a meal, a meal plan. A meal plan. Oh, a meal plan. Yeah. Actually make a meal. That would be cool. If you're an engineer, give it a GitHub repo. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet. If you're in other industries, definitely figure out what you can give it. Then give it that. But give it something for sure.

5:15I just need to think about it more. Mention it to your coworkers. Right now there's a brief window where most people are still ignoring this. You can be the person ignoring it less, which puts you ahead. Be the person who walks into a meeting and says, I used AI to do this analysis in an hour, instead of three days. It's fine if it actually took you three days. The point is people will respect you. Get a Mac mini, this is point number three. This one's - And by the way, you can actually get a Mac mini on DoorDash. You can, just like a burrito. It's important. Every single account I've seen posting this stuff has a Mac mini.

5:44It's the ultimate tool for this stuff. You got to get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, says John Palmer. That said, I did just spend$599 on a Mac Mini, plus AppleCare and$50 on Claude tokens. But if it gets too expensive, have a backup plan to switch to an open source Chinese model. Fourth, watch the podcasts. Actually, don't just watch. Study, TBPN, DoorCash, et cetera. The good thing is that these shows are several hours long, so you can basically fill up your entire day just watching them. Or making them. Or making them, in our case. Rethink what you're telling your kids.

6:13The standard playbook, good grades, good college, stable job, it's over. Tell them it's likely not looking good for them. Go to your four-year-old and tell them it's not looking good for you. It's not looking good, buddy. It's not looking good for you. It's not looking good. What I know, I know this isn't a fad. The technology works and the richest institutions in history are pouring trillions into it. I know this because I've seen it mentioned pretty frequently over the past few months. I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now, not with fear, but with curiosity, a sense of urgency, and ideally, a Mac Mini.

6:49The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to, and when it does, I will be ready. My Mac Mini will be unboxed. My agent will be configured. I will describe what I want in plain English, and it will appear. I just have to optimize everything first and make sure my setup is super legit. Most people won't want to hear about it until it's too late. You can be the reason someone you care about buys a Mac Mini. Oh, so funny. A banger. Such a banger. So, so good. I went and I described in plain English to Codex 5.3. Build me an app. An amazing app. The best app ever.

7:24One that will win awards and make me a legend in Silicon Valley. An award-winning app. An award-winning app. And it appears to be working. More seriously, John Palmer's post feels like a response to Will's essay, tool-shaped objects, which is fantastic. Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than$20 billion in a funding round led by investors, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, D.E. Shaw, and Dragoneer. Let's dig in. Being a little bit silly with the pronunciation, Sydney over on X said British AI researcher be like, Anthropic. Anthropic. Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than$20 billion in a funding round led by the group I just mentioned.

8:05The deal is set to value Anthropic at about$350 billion, nearly doubling its prior value. The funding round includes a range of investors, including CO2, Singapore's GIC, Microsoft's Nvidia, and has become a who's who of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. So Founders Fund is known for the monopoly thesis. Like there's a power law. You want to be in the best company in the category. You want the best ownership Put all your money in that one. Yeah, I'll go all in Famously, they did some other social networking deals But obviously like Facebook was the big one at seed and that was enough to return that fund many times over And so the whole thesis of the fund for a long time has been like this concentrated bets concentrated bets AI has been an interesting one.

8:51They're now in three major labs because they have a huge position in SpaceX which now owns XAI and so they're in that lab sort of coincidentally Peter Thiel I believe is listed on Wikipedia as a co-founder of open AI or at least he was like an initial donor and got like a co-founder title and so has been involved in open AI for a long time and then they invested I believe in like the 60 billion dollar round right after right right when chat GPT was launching and it It was an odd deal because the company had not yet converted. It was very unclear what Microsoft would get, what the employees would get, what the investors would get, what the nonprofit would get, because the nonprofit was going to keep a stake.

9:33And so it was this like wild bet. And I know a lot of investors - It was a leap of faith. It was a leap of faith. A lot of investors were scared off because there was, what am I investing in? Like, I'm not getting shares, I'm getting units. And it was like a very odd structure. And I know many investors that were scared off by that. I'm an absolute unit, but I'm used to buying shares. Yeah, exactly. So you had to do a lot of sort of leaps of faith. The thesis at the time, how big can this be? What is the market? What are the opportunities for really, really huge categories? A lot of founders funds investments like SpaceX, it's like this massive category that's very, very hard.

10:12But if you crack it, it's going to be an entirely new market. Social media was certainly that as well. That made a lot of sense. obviously they're in X, now they're in Anthropic. Sequoia is also in all three. And the interesting thing is like PT has given a number of talks where he's sort of been anti-AI. You've seen this whole thing about like crypto is libertarian, AI is communist, and that AI is like a consolidating force. He's never been one to say like, oh wow, the tools are so amazing. It's been a lot of like, is this just doing your homework for you? He's not putting out threads about using his Mac mini.

10:44I don't even know if he has a Mac mini. You should send John Palmer's piece to PT. So yeah, I mean, reading into this, does this say that the Founders Fund team thinks that there's like a divergence in the market, that there are actually two markets going on here, one in consumer AI, advertising, knowledge retrieval, the other in code and developer tooling and code gen, and that Anthropik has actually carved out a separate space so they're less competitive than people think. Maybe they're just more competitive and it just makes sense to get into both. And we have some breaking news. What's the breaking news?

11:19Anthropic has formally announced the round. Let's go. They say we've raised$30 billion, so they upsized it. $20 was.

11:31They are now at a$14 billion run rate. Wow. With this figure growing over 10 % annually in each of those past three years. We'll see if they got another 10x in them. The biggest update for me is that the forward deployed engineer thing is like very real. Even if the tools can build themselves, there's still so many blockers to actually rolling these out that you're going to need a lot of people inside these organizations who are actually playing with Mac minis on the weekend and getting obsessed with these tools and then bring them into the enterprise because it's very easy for a lot of people in Fortune 500 companies to just show up and do their job the way they always do it because no one gets fired for switching things up.

12:13But if you roll out some tool and it doesn't work the way you intended or it sucks about a bunch of your time, even if you're just, I have eight hours of work to do in my traditional system, where do you get the extra hours to automate your work? It takes time, and that's where the forward deployed engineers come in. So great gig for anyone who wants to go implement enterprise agentic workflows because that will be the theme. We can see Anthropix run rate revenue growth. Wow. You can see here quite the pop from$0 in 2023 to$100 million in Jan of 2024 to a clean$1 billion in January 2025 and now sitting at$14 billion.

12:52This is acceleration. This is true. Are you feeling it yet? True acceleration. Dario sort of underplayed 2027, I guess, or I guess he said that he was like, I don't think we have another 10x. If they go to$100 billion. Well, he said, like, we've been to next thing. Yeah. You know, we'll see if we do it again. Yeah. Like, wink, wink. If they hit$140 billion run rate by the end of the year, that would be insane. But strange times. Strange times. You love this effect. That's all, folks. I mean, Tyler's been saying stuff along these lines for some time. So more ananthropic Nathan Lambert was quoting their announcement from yesterday, saying, We're committing to covering electricity price increases from our data centers.

13:37This is Anthropic. Oh, yes. To ensure rate payers aren't picking up the tab. We'll pay 100 % of grid upgrade costs, work to bring new power online, and invest in systems to reduce grid strain. Makes a lot of sense. Maybe this should have been their Super Bowl ad. When you kind of look at clearly how much energy the industry put into the Super Bowl and what the net effect was for the average American, I don't think the average American came away from that, like having more positive feelings towards AI. If anything, they were like, I'm sick of this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The meme was like, oh, a beer ad is like refreshing.

14:10It's pretty easy to say, hey, my electricity bill is going up. I don't want a data center in my county, in my city. And you call your city or county representative and they say, yeah, I don't like the slop either. I see a bunch of junk that doesn't seem that valuable. Why do we need it here? It's not going to create that many jobs. It's not going to be that good for taxes, blah blah blah blah. And other companies that do this too, Google had their clean transition tariff and Amazon also pays a surplus above electricity costs already. The anti-AI issue is remarkably bipartisan. Data Center Watch claims that 55 % of Republicans and 45 % Democrat in affected districts.

14:52So 55-45, so it's not really like a right issue or a left issue. There's pushback on both sides. So Anthropic is putting$20 million into a super PAC operation that is meant as a direct counter to the open AI super PAC operation. The midterms are a battleground between these two rival AI labs, says Teddy Schleffer at the New York Times. And so we're going to see some attack ads. It's like Sam and Dario are running for election, and we're going to see some... Be the president of AI. Yeah, but I mean, we just said that like, that overwhelmingly on both sides, there's like a lot of pushback, right?

15:23So it's like, what are the actual differences between their approaches? Yeah, that is interesting. Maybe, I guess, maybe Anthropoc will be more like about the China chip issue. Yeah, it feels like they should be more in alliance than against each other. Yeah, it's like crypto, there's a crypto super pack. Yeah. It's like the big one. Yeah. There's no like big AI one right now. Yeah, it would be weird if there was like a USDC super pack and then a USDT super pack, and they were like fighting each other and just constantly surfacing bodies that are buried in the closets or skeletons in the closet.

15:55Because every time there's a successful attack on open AI, yes, people might be like, oh, okay, I like Anthropic a little bit more, but most people will just come away being like, I don't like AI. If you were falsely accused of a crime and it went to trial, who would you prefer to listen to the arguments and give the verdict? And the options are a jury of your peers or Claude Opus 4.6. 63 % of people prefer Claude. Yes. Might be the audience here. Yeah, a little biased. I think the jury of your peers will be around for a very, very long time. I mean, they still have courtroom sonographers. I think Claude's going to be around a long time, too.

16:35Yeah, okay. If you're thinking in centuries, maybe. But, I mean, the courtroom sketch artist. We've had cameras for 100 years. Like, the juries are going to... I'm not saying that I think this will ever happen. Yeah. Okay. But you'd prefer it. You would ideally. I mean, how many jurors will be sitting there being like, okay, Claude, how should I vote? I haven't really been paying attention. I've been playing Candy Crush. What's up with Warner Brothers? The situation intensified this week as Paramount CEO David Ellison and a vocal investor made new moves to thwart rival Netflix's planned takeover.

17:08The storied Hollywood asset in the home of Batman, Harry Potter, and the White Lotus. uh paramount a long rebuffed suitor for warner brothers discovery enhanced its 77.9 billion all cash offer for the entire company tuesday in an effort to bring warner to the negotiating table and ultimately abandoned a seal with netflix also an all-cash transaction valued at 75 billion cleveland investor and cora holdings entered the fray by acquiring a small stake in warner with an eye toward increasing its holdings and pressuring the company to negotiate with paramount i wonder if they're friends with the Ellicons.

17:44Paramount's gamble. Paramount is hoping its latest pitch can persuade Warner to ditch its agreement and sell its movie and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix. Unlike Netflix, Paramount also intends to buy Warner Discovery's cable networks, which includes CNN, TVS, and Food Network. Warner has so far shown little interest in engaging with Paramount, telling investors that Ellicons' previous offer was not even comparable to the Netflix agreement. On Tuesday, Warner said its board will review Paramount's new offer, but isn't modifying its recommendation regarding its agreement with Netflix.

18:15The company advised shareholders to not take any action now regarding Paramount's amended tender offer. The bar for Warner to reopen talks with Paramount is very high given its contract with Netflix. A massive termination fee. Paramount said it would pay the$2.8 billion. Let's give it up for the multi-billion dollar termination fees. I love those. Warner would owe Netflix should the agreed to deal collapse and pay a ticking fee of 25 cents a share to Warner shareholders for each quarter. Its deal hasn't closed. Whoa. We got ticking fees. Ticking time bomb. Some stakeholders are holding out for Paramount to further boost its bid.

18:49I'm not surprised given that they've repeatedly said with their offers, this is not our best and final offer. So everyone is waiting around saying, let's get those numbers up. Remind me of how Paramount is doing right now. They have UFC. and the experience watching UFC was a downgrade from pay-per-view, but cheaper? What was the takeaway? Well, I mean, I don't think we can give an analysis of Paramount as an entire business. The experience was not as good as paying for the pay-per-view. And was that because you had to jump through all the hoops to sign up for Paramount +, and you weren't already a member?

19:28Like the viewing experience was different because it's now subscription and ad supported, whereas previously pay-per-views had ads, but not nearly as much. So the thing you're missing now watching is like in-round commentary, walkouts, things that like hardcore fans really like. Is there less Joe Rogan commentary? Basically. Brutal. Brutal. That's extremely bad. While the market's reacting, Paramount's down 7 % today. Paramount needs to test Netflix's pain threshold without having to bid too high. The revised offer does exactly that without further constraining its balance sheet. For now, the ball is now with Netflix.

20:06Warner and Netflix are focusing on getting their deal approved by the Justice Department as well as regulatory authorities in Europe. As part of its investigation, the DOJ is looking into whether Netflix has engaged in anti-competitive practices. Last week, President Trump reversed course and said in an interview with NBC News that he didn't think he should weigh in on the deal and would instead leave it to the Justice Department. I've decided I shouldn't be involved, Trump said in the interview. He previously expressed concerns about the size and scale of a Netflix-Warner combination, saying the combined company would command significant market share, but he's clearly been watching YouTube.

20:39And he just says YouTube's too dominant, too many watch hours on YouTube. It's fine, let it rip. Erica over on X posted that Eileen Gu to join Benchmark as a senior associate when she returns from the Olympics. She photoshopped this. Of course, we did not put this out, but it's a good bit. Eileen competes for China in the Olympics, even though she's a US citizen. And an American student. And an American student. Bill Gurley responded. I know a lot of Americans do this. I have a buddy who was able to go play ping pong in the Olympics because he had dual citizenship. He wasn't even a dual citizen.

21:15His parents were from another country, so he was able to go beyond that team. Because a lot of the other teams are way less competitive. So it's like, you wouldn't make the US team, but you wanna play anyway, so you go with the other country, but. I think with Eileen, it's because the sponsorship dollars she can make by being a Chinese star. Oh. There's all these Chinese brands. I thought you couldn't get paid. She's a global star. You can just get paid? You can get a bunch of it, not to compete in the Olympics, but broader endorsement deals. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're on the Wheaties box. Getting a gold medal is like UBI, because you'll be able to do.

21:47You'll be turned into a Lubu, potentially. Well, yeah, in this case, yeah. Yeah, but Bill Gurley actually responded and said, I can't believe you actually found out about this. We were planning to keep it a secret, but he wrote it in Chinese. He's leaning in. He's leaning into the meme. Interesting. Influencer marketing has helped AI company Higgsfield hit$300 million in annual revenue run rate in just 11 months, but misleading marketing tactics and a social media strategy based on shock has led to backlash among creators. In late January, Tim Soret, a London-based video game director, received a message on a social media site from the marketing team at Higgsfield.

22:19a fast-growing AI generation startup. This is the biggest moment in Higgs field history, and we want you to be a part of it at Red. The$1.3 billion startup whose tools are used by some 15 million creators and ad agencies to churn out 4.5 million video clips every day was about to launch a new tool called Vibe Motion, which uses AI models to convert text prompts into motion graphics. You like good vibes? You have motion? Use Vibe Motion. The offer of Soarit shared the startup's social media posts along with a video clip from pre-assembled marketing materials. The company would pay him$200. But Zorat, who has spent years designing graphics both manually and with AI tools, could tell something was off.

22:55Videos Higgsfield had shared with him lacked the visual quirks of AI. He's like, this is simply too good. Interesting. And he quickly realized that some clips in the media kit weren't generated with AI at all. I said this. It was a huge alpha in just taking a cinema camera, filming yourself, and being like, this is AI generated, and I'm raising. It's fraud, but alpha. This happens a lot with open AI stuff where people will see a video, and they'll be like, wow, they definitely have a new model. And it's like, they also have a production budget. They can't just hire actors. Well, so when Sam launched Monaco yesterday, was his video AI?