The State of AI: A Field Trip to TBPN’s Aura Farm + Today’s Top Tech Stories | Diet TBPN

0:00You're watching TBPN! Today is Friday, November 21st, 2025. We are live from the TBP and Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. We have generated an image of the aura farm, the world, trying to understand a barnyard. A barnyard. Sort of an AI market map, but through the lens of a barnyard, because that's really what is going on in AI these days. And we can take you on a tour of our farm-based market map to explain what's happening in the state of AI in November of 2025. Tyler, do you want to take us through it? Sure. Yeah. I mean, so we like to use a lot of animal idioms on the show.

0:46A lot of these you might recognize, but we've kind of expanded out to try to cover all the major players. and you know so yes so this was made with Nano Banana Pro very extremely good model yeah but you will notice as you get more and more complex it gets a little bit slops or some places yeah before Nano Banana Pro was released we would have needed to hire a somebody that maybe illustrates children's books and if they were an expert maybe they could have whipped something together in a this took you far longer than that of prompting over and over and over. Yeah. Okay, so I guess let's just kind of go through each of the animals.

1:28Maybe let's just start with some of the more obvious ones, the ones we've talked about a lot on the show. So let's start over here with the piggies. So here we see the pigs at the slop trough. Who's there? So this is probably just labeled as meta. You can imagine a lot of people here, right? You could see Sora here. Sure. Bill Peebles. Bill Peebles could be eating some slop. Yes, metal vibes. Yep. Just like broadly AI in general, some people think basically all AI is slop. They do. They do. There's been a lot of criticism. Yeah. But I think that one's fairly clear. You don't want to be the pig at the slop trough.

2:05Although sometimes, maybe the profitability of being a slop farmer is underrated. Obviously, America has a lot of pigs that live at the trough. They eat from the trough, they eventually, the pigs go to slaughter, they become bacon, they are sold into the economy. You can make a good living as a farmer who maintains a trough. And then there's the Jeremy Giffon take, which is we hate slop now because we know that in a few years it will no longer be slop. So don't count out the piggies yet. This is the sloppiest slop we'll ever be. That's true. Okay, who else is on this market map? Let's move up.

2:46Let's see. We have the hen house here. Yes. And who's in the hen house is the fox. The fox. And so this, you can say, is kind of Oracle in the same outline, right? Oracle is the hen house. Yes. They're letting the fox in a little bit. Potentially. Yeah, we'll see what ends up happening. Again, now that I'm looking at this image, the fox isn't actually in the hen house yet. But he's circling it. Yeah, he's circling it. He's circling the hen house. And there's a question of how far into the hen house has the fox got. And I think it's notable that the chickens don't seem too disturbed yet. Yes, yes.

3:20Yeah, yeah. They're getting along because the fox could just be browsing, could just be stopping by. It could be a friendly fox. Friendly fox. But of course, if you have a lot of cash flow as a big company, if you have the ability to borrow billions or hundreds of billions in the debt market, you have to protect your hen house because foxes might come by and might want to use you to co-sign a loan. Okay, so then we see the cash cow. The cash cow. This is NVIDIA. The only profits in AI. For a long time, I don't know if anyone has really unseated them. They're certainly the most profitable by far.

3:57Now you're starting to see maybe some cracks with TPUs, but even then, I mean, they're still doing really well. Not yet on the open market. Yeah, they just beat earnings. We have an article here from the journal, NVIDIA results fail to quell AI worries. Not enough people are milking the cash cow. That's like, I gave you the perfect quarter. Or maybe the cash cow - I gave you the perfect quarter. I know. And you still sold off. Maybe the cash cow has been overly milked and is out of milk at this point. I think it's still producing. It does seem like it's still producing. That looks like a healthy cow to me.

4:27So here we have the bull in the China shop. The bull in the China shop. I think there's a couple ways you could read into this. So Elon, one is just kind of on maybe the data center infrastructure side, where he's kind of the bull. Imagine that you're a contractor, and you're building data centers for these companies, and then you see Elon come in, and he does it in eight months, what took you in a year and a half. Yep. He's kind of messing up your world, right? Totally, totally. He's like, oh, man, this bull, he's messing up my business. I need to be working way harder, way faster. He's also shipping features so fast.

4:56Like, before people could even have a discussion over adult content, it was like, boom, Annie, here it is, Valentine. He's moving so fast. This is the other way you could say he's the bull because there's kind of this maybe unspoken rule between the model companies where it's like, okay, we don't want to go too hard into the companion space. There were companies doing that, but it wasn't the opening eyes. It wasn't the Anthropics. It wasn't the Gemini's. Yeah. And then now you see a Frontier model actually moving into their. He's kind of messing stuff up. Also, Grok is, of course, the maximally truth-seeking LLM.

5:29Just yesterday, I was asking Grok, who is the strongest CEO in tech? And it told me that Elon Musk is the strongest by far. And it actually compared him to a bull. It said he was stronger than a bull, and that he could beat a bull in a fight if he went head to head. I believe it. With his bare hands. Absolutely right. Yes, absolutely right. Absolutely right. What else is going on here? I bet Claude would agree. if you really pressed Claude on it, they'd say, yeah, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. What else is going on? So let's move down. Here we have the lipstick on a pig. And I think this, you could say, is Apple Intelligence.

6:06Yes. Right? I mean, although I feel like this is actually almost flipped a little bit, right? Because the pig is usually like the ugly thing, and then you add the makeup to make it look nicer. Yeah. Well, I think that's what they did here, right? They took a bad model, and they dressed it up, and they said it was great, and they said you should buy a new iPhone because of it, and the model was bad. And there's no amount of marketing that is gonna change public perception once the product hit the market. You could also run the, the pig is the privacy focused iPhone ecosystem that is pretty difficult to just run in and throw AI on top of.

6:44Like Apple has been building a brand around, we don't access your data, we don't store your data, we would never train on your data. And that put them in an awkward position where they couldn't just snap their fingers and deliver a great AI experience. Whereas Google has been, hey, we'll give you Gmail for free, but we'll also probably train on wherever you go on the web and try and understand and route ads to you appropriately. Meta was in a similar position. And so those two companies were a little bit more equipped to just on day one go and deliver AI features. Apple had to put lipstick on their pig, which is their privacy-focused device.

7:21It was definitely more of like an afterthought. It was more of a kind of shallow integration, you could say. So then we have the dark horse. The dark horse. And this is SSI. Okay. Of course. We're still yet to see anything really from SSI. Ilya just charging around in the background. Yes. Yeah, kind of this elusive figure. So the big kind of departures from OpenAI, it was Miramarati and Ilya, you could say. Yes. And Miramarati's company, Thing Machines. I mean, they're - She's raising up rounds. They have blog posts. Yeah. They actually have a product. They do have a product. Let's hear it for a while.

7:52Why did you tell me earlier? Why did you bury the lead? They have blog posts? They're good blog posts. I like them. So in a couple of years, we could be seeing vibe reels. Is that what you're saying? We could be seeing launch videos? So they do have a product, right? It's like RL fine tuning. Watch your head. There's a hoof. The horse is really. But I mean, they're not really dark horse. Like you can, they're a bright horse. I don't know if that's a phrase, but like you can see what they're doing. They're Clydesdale or a beautiful sky. They're a unicorn 50 times over. 50 times over. Yeah. We didn't put a unicorn on here.

8:23That's an animal. It would get too sloppy. Okay. What else do we have? What else is going on on the aura farm? So here we see another horse. Yes. And there's two ways you could look into this horse. Yes. One is this phrase, look a gift horse in the mouth. Yes. Right. Do you want to explain this, John? Yes. So do you know this phrase? No. You don't know this phrase, looking a gift horse in the mouth? I actually didn't know this phrase either. Okay. So looking a gift horse in the mouth is if someone gives you... Is this like a term that was thrown around in the 80s? Yeah, yeah, this is back in my day.

8:49Back in my day. So obviously, just giving someone a horse, a horse is a valuable asset today, but also hundreds of years ago. It's always been a valuable tool on the farm. And the way that you assess the quality of a horse, one way to assess, whether it's been taken care of, whether it's healthy, is to look in its mouth, look at the teeth. Always look a gift horse in the mouth. Don't never look a gift horse in the mountain. Oh, because it would be offensive. It's offensive. It's like you're not expressing gratitude. Yes. So I think these are just the public market investors. These public market investors.

9:22Right? They should just be happy. We've been given this gift of AI. Why are they selling their stocks right now? Why are they selling? They've been giving. They need to be buying. This beautiful gift, and they just don't want it. Yeah. They're selling. They're selling. The video's down. They're digging in a little bit too much. Yeah. They should just be happy that they've been given AI. Exactly. The next mega trend. Exactly. So also the horse could be a workhorse. A workhorse. Right? Yeah, they're just kind of cooking around. It's a bit hard to define Amazon's AI strategy. It has been. Part of it is they're building data centers for Anthropic, but they're definitely not getting overly ambitious.

9:53They're not like, you know, getting over their skis. But they're just doing the hard work. They're building the data centers. They're serving models. Maybe not fast enough. They might not be building the data centers fast enough. They might not be super aggressive. They're not show jumping. They're just dragging the plow. They're just consistently dragging the plow. old reliable Amazons cooking along. They're staying out of the slop trough. They're not doing a deal. Amazon has not done a deal yet with OpenAI for the agentic commerce thing. Maybe that changes, but for now, they're just plotting along.

10:27Who else we got over here? Let's go to the black sheep. The black sheep. So the black sheep, there's also a lot of people that could fit in this. Yes, of course. But I think maybe Carpathie is one of them. Yeah, Andre Carpathie. Some of these contrarian takes about maybe just the decade of agents. To be clear, we're not calling him a sheep. He's not - It should be more of a black wolf. Black wolf. But the idea is that he's standing out. A lot of people in his class of ultra-respected technologists, some of the most experienced, he's really been at Tesla. He's seen the AI wave. He's been working in it for decades.

11:03He's really worked on this. He's printed all of it. Yeah, he's done so much. And yet he's not sitting with the rest of them saying, bah. He broke but he broke rank even though he's worked at open AI even though he's worked at Tesla he broke rank he went on the Dwarkesh Patel show and Said you know what? I think we're more in a decade of agents. I think AGI might not be right around the corner He took a contrarian stance at a very Controversial time and he popped the bubble with it. He basically popped the bubble with it Maybe we'll see the elephant in the room the elephant in the room is is was in my view really more of the 1.4 trillion, right?

11:36That was the big question. That was what everybody wanted to talk about or at least understand better. Brad asked the question, and it's been downhill ever since. Yes. And it is, yeah, the elephant in the room is in every conversation, every financing round at this point. Exactly. Is this deal predicated on a continuation of exponential growth in investment, in everything? Like how much more, how risky is this relative to the amount of froth in the market? Yeah. Never ask a woman her age, a man, his salary, or a lab founder how they're going to spend $1.4 trillion. Yeah. Or how they're going to pay for it.

12:22Yeah. Yeah. Who else we got on here? So then in the top right, we have the bird's eye view. Yes. Situational awareness. Yeah, this is situational awareness. This is Leopold. It's the perfect name. Right? He has the situational awareness. He's seeing everything. He's kind of the master of the board. Yes, master of the board. He's taking his bets and he's been doing pretty well off them. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that was pretty self-explanatory. Yeah, I love it. So then we go down, we have Lion's Share. The Lion's Share. This is Satya. Satya has taken great position in opening up. I don't know why he's on the top of a haystack.

12:51I'll take a third of the company, and you can give me$250 billion. And I'll take 20 % off the top. And I'll take all the IP as well. Yeah, everything. I'll also take your chip, and I'll make it my chip. Your chip is my chip. Your chip is not your chip. Your chip is me. The entire OpenAI Microsoft deal could just be summarized in one line. I get the lion's share. I get the lion's share. We see Monkey Business. These are the podcasters. That's us. We're having fun. We got props. We got all sorts of stuff, sound effects. We need some monkey sound effects on there. We have a bunch of animal-themed sound effects.

13:30we need to have more fun with. Anyway. And then maybe let's go into the pond. We have the sitting duck. Yes, the sitting duck is incredibly cute. So Reddit... Why was Reddit a sitting duck? Yeah, so I think they brought... It's because whether or not you have a permit, you're getting... The hunters are going to get you. I think Alexis Ohanian sort of laid this out, saying that when Reddit did the deal to give the data to OpenAI, They didn't realize how valuable that data was going to be, and that relationship has grown, grown, grown. And so they were kind of the sitting duck just sitting there.

14:07They didn't really, they kind of got caught off guard. Maybe could have trained their own model on their data internally. Yeah, I mean, I feel like Reddit has mostly been, they've kind of already gone out to the slaughter in a sense, like every model company has trained off of them. You'd think so, but look at the market cap. It just keeps going up. Reddit was sold for$5 million or something when it launched. It was 10 to Conde Nast. 10 to Conde Nast. That's a crazy, crazy low valuation. And then eventually spun out. And then for a long time, it was in the hundreds of millions. And no one was thinking this is a tens of billions.

14:39For a long time, the narrative was not, oh, yeah, this will be orders of magnitude more than snap. No way. No way. And then it just sort of finally came together. And we have the headless chicken. This is perplexity. Perplexity. So I think perplexity, they have a lot of different strategies. Some of them kind of seem opposed to each other, right? Maybe they're doing a browser. Maybe they're doing a Bloomberg terminal. Maybe they're rebuilding Yahoo Finance. I do see more positive reviews of their browser than any of the other AI browsers. There's just a lot of stuff going on. It's the Snapchat deal, the trying to buy TikTok, trying to buy Chrome, launching a venture fund, Bloomberg terminal.

15:19It's like, are you competing with all of these? Really, you're going to be TikTok and Chrome and Bloomberg and the next thing? Have you guys ever witnessed a headless chicken? No, I haven't. Growing up in the country, I have. You grew up in the country? What are you talking about? I thought you grew up with the East Bay Rationalists. I was born in Berkeley, but I grew up in wine country. Oh, okay. And I have fortunately, unfortunately, watched my father take one of the chickens. you know every now and again a chicken needs to to move on to the next chapter and as a child you sound like you're firing the chicken it is a real thing they run for you know at least 20 seconds or so yeah and I'll never forget so next we have the snake in the grass take in the grass this is the Chinese open-source models these are kind of lurking I still don't really see that much coverage of Chinese open source models out there.

16:19Nobody wants to talk about it. Well, no one has bags, so they can't pump them. Snake in the Grass feels like it's going to attack. Elephant in the Room means we've got to address it. It's totally possible that the entire open source LLM ecosystem is just like, yeah, there's like a$10 billion business there. It's sort of like a stalking horse, another animal-based analogy, but it's sort of a stalking horse for like, hey, Gemini and Anthropic, if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of how Linux works. You can kind of bid the closed source models against the open source models.

16:59It's a very real threat to the business models of some of the closed source models. Maybe. I don't know. It's certainly a pressure. Kimmy is hot on everyone's tails. The other thing is a soft power thing. Ask a Chinese open source model about Tiananmen Square. So we agree it's a snake in the grass, but unclear how poisonous the snake is, unclear the size of that snake. Early bird that got the worm, this is Josh Kushner. I think so. Right? I like that. He got the worm. The worm was OpenAI. Yes. He was early investor. Early with size. Early with size. doubled down many times. He got the worm. He's the early bird.

17:37Incredible. Yeah. Why is Anthropic donkey work? Donkey work? What does donkey work mean? I'm not 100 % sure that this is like a real phrase. Apparently, I asked GPT 4.5 and I asked Gemini 3 Pro. Okay. And they both said it was a real thing. Okay, it's boring or laborious part of a job. It's drudgery, donkey work. In this case, I think it's kind of that Anthropic has gone very hard on coding and API and Enterprise. Oh, okay. The laborious work. It's kind of laborious. Yeah, they're not doing the really hot, sexy... They're not doing a browser. They're not solving science. Yeah, they're not doing consumer science stuff.

18:13Yeah, they're doing the donkey work. Daria is sitting there being like, who's going to take all the jobs? Who's going to take all the jobs? I like donkey work. That feels the most accurate for what they're doing. They're going after the entry-level white-collar workers. They're doing the donkey work. Yeah. Google, I just love this image. I knew this was good. I think this is the last one. Google is the fat cat. Before we had Google snail's pace, I think this would have been true maybe a year ago. Fat cat's so much funnier. Look at that cat. It's so fat. I love it. All the cash flow, all the TPUs.

18:46All the TPUs. They're GPU rich. The best image model, the best text model, depending on what benchmark you look at. They're on top of the world. Slightly concerned we have a sign for golden goose, but there's no golden goose. The golden goose was removed but the sign line remains. Who stole the golden goose? Yeah, who killed the golden goose? Or is there just no golden, if there's no golden goose in the AI barnyard, is that bearish? The golden goose is a goose that lays a golden egg one every day, and in the parable, in the story, the farmer kills the golden goose to get all of the gold inside, but it is revealed that by killing the goose, you no longer get the passive income.

19:27Maybe one take is the golden goose, they were the neoclouds. And then the market is hurting, is taking the goose away. Coreweave not in the past, what, month, they've been selling off a little bit. Coreweave continues to lay golden eggs, but the market got overheated. And so that sort of killed the gains or something. And the gold is the GPUs, subsidized GPUs. The chip CEO staring down Nvidia and talk of an AI bubble. At a board meeting in late 2022, Lisa Su, chief executive of chip designer AMD, announced that she was radically changing course. I'm going to pivot the entire company, she told the directors gathered around a boardroom table at the company's Austin campus.

20:14The rise of AI was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she said, and the company had to put AI at the center of its entire product line. Three years later, the Santa Clara, California-based company has nearly quadrupled in size, its market value rising from$90 billion to more than$335 billion. Despite a recent pullback, AMD's strategy of positioning itself at the center of the global AI race has paid off handsomely, making Sue into a billionaire and her company into one of the only viable designers of powerful chips needed to power advanced AI models. In a market that has recently been completely dominated by NVIDIA, Sue is showing that there may be a place for a strong number two that can compete on price.

20:58Insane flow, by the way. Check this out. Yeah. This is not the time to stay on the sidelines and worry, hey, am I overinvesting, she said. It's much more dangerous if you underinvest than if you overinvest, in my opinion. Let's go. I love that. As AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini become increasingly integrated into daily life, and as companies design thousands of enterprise software tools that rely on AI models, demand for inference functions is about to go up by a billion times, Wonk said last month. AMD has a strong line of inference computing chips, but has struggled to design chips powerful enough to compete with NVIDIA in training.

21:35Is$200 million the new$100 million in luxury real estate? What do you think? Many people have been asking that. So there's a$200 million house in Indian Creek, a$250 million house in Bel Air, a$300 million house in Aspen, and a$205 million house in Palm Beach. A surge of ultra-rich buyers has pushed asking prices to new extremes, yet many headline-grabbing mega mansions languish on the market or trade for a fraction of their debut numbers just a decade ago. The$100 million price tag was still considered a new frontier for luxury real estate. The first nine-figure home sale occurred in 2011. By 2019, there had been about 20 sales recorded at that price point.

22:11Now, real estate insiders say a new pricing benchmark is setting the tone for the high-end market,$200 million. There's going to be a massive wave of wealth created from the AI. Boom. I would not want to be in the market for a single-family home within 20 square miles of OpenAI. There's like 40 people that are looking for houses in the$5 to$7 million range in North San Francisco, and there's none for sale. All cash offers. I'm sure. From the liquidity. Yesterday, I resigned from TBD Labs slash Meta AI. I wasn't there for very long, but I think I got a few useful things done. Nice. It's an impressive group of people, and it's especially impressive that it got assembled as quickly as it did with such a high talent bar at a large company.

22:59Quote, unquote, founder mode. is real and good. I will certainly miss my coworkers there. I think now is an unusually high leverage time to pursue ambitious new projects at the intersection of AI and other technologies. Please reach out to me if you're interested in that sort of thing. And I expect I will have something more detailed to share in not too long. Is that the sound of a thousand venture capitalists writing term sheets? Bernie Sanders. Okay, what's happening with Bernie? Firing shots. Here are some of the most powerful AI oligarchs in the world enjoying a private dinner with a dictator who murders his own citizens with a bone saw.

23:37Whoa. Does anyone really believe they want to wipe out poverty or improve life for ordinary male Americans? I don't. And he's sort of mogging Greg Brockman here because he leaves Greg Brockman's net worth. He doesn't even try and estimate it. He just says, question mark, question mark, question mark. Guess Bernie Sanders' age. Uh, 75. Guess again. 78. Guess again. 77. Guess again. 80. Guess again. 82. Guess again. I have no idea. 84. 84. Oh, he's up there. He's up there. So grandpa is pissed. Yeah, I don't blame Bernie for being a little bit salty at this point because he's never on those charts of the best political traitors in history.

24:19That's true. Right? That's true. He's been having to sit there and watch Nancy Pelosi go on the most insane run. And he's just missed out. The FOMO must be crazy. Every day he's opening up and Nancy's up another mill and he's just sitting there like, ah, I missed it. I missed it. Luxury watch guy is concerned about the Bitcoin sell-off because he says there are going to be so many effing APs on the market, facepalm. Oh no. The cryptocurrency industry certainly has been known to enjoy an AP. Yeah. Google's genius. By not selling TPUs, Google allows NVIDIA to maintain high GPU pricing, which in turn props up price of inference.