Apple’s MacBook Neo, OpenAI’s Pentagon Agreement, Anthropic’s Investors Silent on DoW | Diet TBPN

12:48John Coogan:I mean, Micron has been very, they've been a huge beneficiary of AI margins and higher prices, so much so that they've actually reallocated all of their capacity to AI, and they pulled out of their consumer brand, which is called Crucial. So if you ever tried to build a gaming PC, you probably found Crucial Ballistics, which was like this very aggressively X Games branded like PC gamer DDR memory. Like the monster energy of RAM. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. No, it really is. Gamers will be rising up soon with monster energies in hand to take the RAM by force if they need to. I already see memes about this all the time.

13:29John Coogan:I see these like the worst AI slop video you've ever seen just absolute junk and the caption will be like so this is why I can't afford RAM You know or this is why RAM is$800 a stick or whatever and then on the flip side people will say You know occasionally there'll be a good AI slop video people be like okay It's worth paying$800 for RAM because this is so good right goes both ways it goes both ways But clearly people are feeling the the pinch. But Apple fans will be sitting out the fight thanks to a few key moves from Apple that helped them avoid disaster this year. So, one, Apple has long-term supply agreements that allow them to secure memory 12 to 24 months in advance.

14:10John Coogan:They also benefit from vertical integration and custom silicon. So instead of buying consumer-grade commodity DRAM modules that you see go into either gaming PCs or or NVIDIA GPUs, for example. They negotiate multi-year contracts directly with Samsung and SK Hynix for custom LPDDR packages that meet Apple's exact specifications. And so I think -

14:31Jordi Hays:Yeah, so this is like, RAM's always been cyclical. Yep. And so it makes a lot of sense for Apple to say, basically like lockup pricing, Samsung's locking up the demand. They, I don't even think Samsung would have predicted this level of demand even three, four years ago. Otherwise, they may not have priced it in the way that they did. Of course. The other thing that maybe you get to is...

14:55John Coogan:And Samsung's still making their default margin. They're just like, the opportunity cost is so high. We could reallocate.

15:01Jordi Hays:The other thing is they probably have so much margin in the upsell that they could have some margin compression still be...

15:10John Coogan:So Apple at various times has had over$100 billion in cash. They currently have over 66 billion in cash. Like they can take the hit there. They can also just take a hit to their margins.

15:20Jordi Hays:Every AI lab looking at that cash, being like, Tim, I could really put that to you right now.

15:26John Coogan:Yeah, they're the only hyperscaler that hasn't really shelled out to the tune of 10, 20, 30 billion into one of the frontier labs. My takeaway is like, this is an incredible testament to the operational prowess of Apple to pull this off at this scale. The Sony PlayStation 6 is allegedly going to be delayed until 2028 or 2029 because of rising memory costs. They're going to wait it out. Because there are three players, it's not just TSMC in this case, it does feel like there'll be more pricing competition and there's more of a race to build capacity. Whereas the TSMC, if they don't build the next fab, they can just continually raise prices and increase margins once the next contracts go up for renewal.

16:07John Coogan:Whereas if Samsung has a bunch of capacity and Micron doesn't, like Samsung wins and so there's more of this game theoretic like they got to they have to build Harrison says that quote we ran the math open AI is buying three to four times more memory than it could possibly need in the short term the most charitable explanation is aggressive forward positioning the less charitable one is that they're cornering the supply to kill on-device AI before it starts. Well, if the on-device AI happens on Apple products, that doesn't seem like that real of a scenario, but it is an interesting thesis. Across the frontier labs, everyone is just very AGI-pilled.

16:52John Coogan:They're seeing the increase in capabilities, but also the sort of like stacked exponentials. When you went from LLMs to reasoning, the number of tokens, the number compute required just to get a single answer when like you know TEDx all of a sudden and then we saw the same thing with coding agents where these long-running tasks are squaring the amount of compute and so you just keep stacking these things on and you just get more and more compute demand but you get more more economic output so it winds up being all worth it when will apple release the iPhone 18. Call she has before October at 35%, before 2027 at 34%.

17:35John Coogan:What is the chance that they don't release it this year? That would be probably zero, and I think it is zero.

17:42Jordi Hays:The FDC submitted a new semiconductor fab construction plan for the Southern Taiwan Science Park last week. The site is located on Tainan's Anding District, adjacent to the F-18 fab and covers 15.46 hectares they're doing more 2 nanometer production the

18:04John Coogan:leading edge with 8 hectares allocated for the production area and 1 hectare for administrative facilities the project is expected for completion and production start in 2028 says semi analysis so more importantly Wendy's

18:19Jordi Hays:US president posts new video amid burger battle with McDonald's and Burger King Let's see. Let's watch. Let's rate it. Okay, I like the way that he's holding it, you know?

18:29John Coogan:Okay, seems normal. Yeah. Wonderful.

18:32Jordi Hays:Kind of.

18:34John Coogan:That's a burger. This is good.

18:36Jordi Hays:I like talking about food in his mouth. Okay, yeah, going back for a second. You got to top it off with the fries and the frosty. He's saying burger. He's not saying product.

18:45John Coogan:Product. What did he do at the end there? He dips a french fry in the frosty? Whoa, okay.

18:52Jordi Hays:Okay, doesn't call it a product. No hesitation, talking with the food in his mouth.

18:58John Coogan:Yeah, yeah, that's bold.

18:59Jordi Hays:That's bold. Bold. I'm giving this an 8 out of 10.

19:02John Coogan:If you scroll down, I like Colonel Sanders after seeing this.

19:06Jordi Hays:Also the way he kind of puts the fry in and quickly kind of pulls the hand back. He's got style points.

19:14John Coogan:Dude, here's a good job if you're looking for a gig that will bring home the bacon. Apply for the job of CEO at McDonald's. Apparently the guy makes 18 million a year. It is funny that there's just like one after another of CEOs. This is probably good for all of them. I don't know. I want no jump cuts. Somebody should have seen swall - Somebody should be seen swallowing the food. Oh. Okay. People are analyzing -

19:40Jordi Hays:That's somewhat fair. We're analyzing the details. Altman defended OpenAI's Defense Department contract and in all hands yesterday calling the backlash, quote, really painful. This was an example of a complex, but the right decision with extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative PR for us in the short term, he told staff. I still stand by that given the events that have transpired in the world since last week, being there to like meet the government feels like being on the right path.

20:12John Coogan:It was just, yeah, it was just odd that Google strategy was to not say anything. do nothing win basically i would think or do nothing don't go up or down like uh gemini just

20:24Jordi Hays:but good but but i don't think gemini is involved in this contract it's yeah it's grok it's rock rock was the other one that that uh came in with the same term so gemini doesn't have any relation

20:36John Coogan:with the department of war i think they do i i think i i thought that there was a there was

20:40Jordi Hays:i might be i might be they might i just don't think they were involved in this contract negotiation

20:46John Coogan:OpenAI announced its Defense Department deal on Friday, hours after the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated rival Anthropica supply chain risk. There's still a question as to whether or not that's going to go through. So Kalshi has it at a 42.8 % chance, and it hasn't really moved. I mean, I have to imagine that at this point, both the Department of War and Anthropica are talking to each other. Do you have more information?

21:09Jordi Hays:Yeah, Gemini does have deals with the DoD. Yeah, yeah. So there's the 200 million one that was in July. Yeah, that was, Anthropic was also in that one.

21:17John Coogan:Yeah.

21:18Jordi Hays:And then they did, there was the recent like genai.mail, but they're like involved in that too.

21:22John Coogan:Yeah, but I am, what I'm so shocked by is how does AWS have an advantage in 2026 on FedRAMP and like federal classified network? But I don't know, I guess, I guess AWS does have like a material advantage there still.

21:37Jordi Hays:Scott Bessett went on CNBC this morning and said no private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security. Anthropics attempts to push use clauses into their contracts with the United States government are unacceptable and their products will no longer be utilized by the U.S. Treasury or any other government agency. So doubling down there. There was also a story in Semaphore this morning from Reed. Anthropics investors don't have its back in its fight with the Pentagon.

22:03John Coogan:This is very interesting.

22:04Jordi Hays:Anthropics may be standing its ground against the Pentagon, but the AI powerhouse is doing so with a noticeably quiet quarter, its own high-profile backers. Despite the company's defiance, Silicon Valley's biggest players have remained silent. In a recent meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Pete Hegseth, the issue of Anthropic came up, according to two people. Amazon has invested billions in the startup, a crucial part of Amazon's custom chip strategy as the largest consumer of the company's Tranium AI chips. And Hegseth has been threatening to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would make it impossible for many of the military suppliers to do business with the company.

22:39Jordi Hays:Jassy demurred, declining to take Anthropik's side, the people said. He wasn't alone. Despite Anthropik CEO Dariomedes' very vocal opposition to the Pentagon's demands and rival OpenAI Sam Altman's running commentary on the matter, a number of Anthropik investors have remained silent. One investor told Semaphore that speaking up might further inflame things with the admin and that they were still holding out hope the issue could be resolved. And others said that Anthropik requested they say nothing. Anthropik and Amazon declined to comment.

23:05John Coogan:The most important thing here is that we get Pete Hegseth on Twitch. Amazon, Andy Jassy is sitting down with Pete Hegseth. Hegseth likes Twitter. He likes X. Get him live streaming those press conferences. Put him on Twitch. That's the goal here. Go direct. We got to talk about this. Me and Tyler are talking about just the general AI safety discourse on both sides. Always ends with people just saying, we got to talk about this.

23:34Jordi Hays:No one has any answer. We've got to figure this out, guys. We've got to talk to each other.

23:40John Coogan:No one's like, I have a clear plan. You might disagree with me, but this is my plan, and this is what we're going to do, and here are the steps. I think this gets us the good outcome. Everyone's just like, I don't know. It's very, very weird. Just from a comms perspective, it's very weird.

23:55Jordi Hays:I feel like that's how decisions get made in companies. If a decision is really obvious, you can handle it over text. If it's not, it's like, let's discuss live.

24:05John Coogan:Anyway, my portfolio every day at the opening bell looks like D-Day says, Human, this is an absolute disaster. It really is so crazy. I was trying to explain yesterday to a friend how the market, I was like, you're probably getting destroyed, right? And he was like, yeah, it's terrible. And I was like, well. Is this your retail investor friend? Yes, it might shock you to learn that the market overall is flat. Only down half a point. It's an absolute tale. Korean stocks are crashing. The Kospi Index, the Korea Stock Exchange, is down 10%. Korean stocks are crashing, says Joe Weisenthal. The South Korean stock market fell over 8 % and triggered a circuit breaker.

24:48John Coogan:Jim Cramer said, beware of South Koreans. Spill over to our markets, WDC, STX, SNDK, MU, all still vulnerable. So there's lots of companies that are at risk.

24:59Jordi Hays:Sudo says developers are cooked. I vibe coded a worse version of an existing product in four weeks with serious security costs.

25:07John Coogan:Yeah, it's a wild time. Be careful out there. There's new data on serious, serious traffic declines across tech publications. This is from Danny Crichton. says no discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact in the AI world Google and social no longer refer traffic which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place this is of course a reaction to Trey Stevens proposal that uh but maybe that he should buy wired and it's unclear if he's just having fun but uh there's been there's been a there's been a call from the tech community like bring back the wired we read in the magazines as a kid.

25:49John Coogan:You know, it used to be so techno-optimistic. Now it's this hypercritical, maybe semi-political outlet. But what Danny is pointing to is that these publications have seen just in the last two years, since 2024, traffic declines of between 30 % and 97 % for digital trends. The interesting one there, I think it was, of course, Wired. In November of 2024, Wired was putting up 7.7 million views in traffic. Now it's down at 2.9.

26:24Jordi Hays:I wonder how much of this is due to AI overviews and Google search results now are more paid links than organic links. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of something happens and it just gets screenshotted and shared on X.

26:42John Coogan:That's pretty new.

26:42Jordi Hays:The screenshot, there's a hundred for each one of these publications, there's a hundred or a thousand people that will take whatever news and just make it more socially native. So I would imagine that the stories these companies are telling are getting a similar amount of impressions overall. That's just not happening.

27:02John Coogan:Potentially more because a lot of the stories that they write about, at least the ones that do scoops, are more interesting than ever.

27:09Jordi Hays:Well, we're not seeing a decline in VC podcast viewership.

27:14John Coogan:That's true.

27:15Jordi Hays:There are a number of VC podcasts that are racking up a million views for interviews with Series A or Series B founders. Very, very impressive numbers. There are some allegations. It's a white pill.

27:27John Coogan:A lot of people think that technology is niche. Some Series A founder that you haven't heard on, they can't attract a million people to sit down and watch them on Zoom talk about their business for an hour. But apparently they can. And many venture capital firms have showed us that it's possible. You do have to pay the people to watch. And the views might be a little low quality. But if you pay the viewers. And people won't comment. Yeah, they won't comment. That's an extra bill you've got to pay. And it's very unclear why they aren't buying comments. Because if you're buying the views, just buy the comments too.

28:00Jordi Hays:The reason is that they are running paid traffic on Meta at their own YouTube videos. Oh, is that what's going on? That is actually how they're getting the views. the meta ads as of a couple days ago were public so you can see them they're just like oh if you're on instagram you'll get an ad for a podcast and then people that was that was on meta i thought

28:19John Coogan:because and google because you can actually just run ads for your content on youtube and then you get people who are in youtube to click on that content now are they less likely to comment absolutely like the the example on the right is dwarf cash he got a million views and uh it had 4 ,700 comments. What else?

28:38Jordi Hays:Kyle Corbett says, is highlighting some news. The New York legislature is rapidly pushing through a 2025 bill that would prohibit LLMs from providing substantive legal analysis or advice in New York. It seems that LLMs could still provide substantive help to lawyers under this bill as written. Consumers, however, would be stuck with the chatbot refusing to answer their legal questions. So again, this just seems bad. The entire point of LLMs and AI is to give intelligence to anyone, right? Like the fact that an individual can get the equivalent of five hours of legal work in a single prompt by like uploading a contract is very good for consumers.

29:23Jordi Hays:I don't even know how bad it'll be for lawyers, especially given that at least right now, even if I could generate entire legal docs. I still want a lawyer to play a part in it. Again, Kyle Corbett says, I sold my company last year. GPT-5 Pro was at least as valuable in that negotiation as our attorneys who billed us$450 ,000.

29:43John Coogan:Things that were not on my bingo card. One, Anthropic marked as a US supply chain risk by the government, same as Huawei. Again, that hasn't actually happened, but it's predicted. Two, clog going viral across non-tech people as result number one on the app store three mass chat gpt cancellations thanks to open ai becoming the government ai supplier and prime agent says then they will release 5.4 everyone will say agi and forget all about the last week and this week that's why it's so fun to cover ai because

30:08Jordi Hays:everything changes every two weeks julian weiser uh interviewed a founder named ben sarah he's building a company called pulsia uh they've gotten to one and a half million of ar in two weeks with zero human teammates. Very, very cool progress. But Zareem says, why is the company named AI Slop backwards?

30:32John Coogan:Is that intentional? Is that a nod or do they just get lucky or unlucky?

30:36Jordi Hays:No, I think it's maybe a happy accident. That's so funny. Donald Trump is at a round table, I believe on the data center build out. And Donald Trump, according to Mike Isaac, wistfully at the tech round table, speaking about OpenAI's Brad Light Brad, so young. Look at how young.

30:58John Coogan:That's so funny. Brad Lightcap does look very youthful. He has aged very, very, very youthful. Also an absolute dog who's been on a generational run and done fantastic things throughout his career. That's a total record scratch freeze frame. Yep, that's me. Here's how I wound up at a White House roundtable with the president of the United States saying, so young. Look at how young. Thanks, Mike, for pointing that up.

31:28Jordi Hays:And a good place to close out the show, Brian Johnson walked at a fashion show at Paris Fashion Week. A Capital says, from immortal unk to runway unk. The only thing is, it kind of looks like a futuristic funeral.

31:44John Coogan:It does. He's looking jacked. That is true. He is looking very strong. This is some mass surveillance going on. They're surveilling his mass.

31:53Jordi Hays:We hope you have a wonderful evening. We'll be back tomorrow for a big show. Goodbye.