Bryan Johnson’s Don't Die Movement, SoftBank's AI Gamble & Perplexity's Browser Bids | Aug 14, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the information's TITV. My name is Akash Paswitcha. It is Thursday, August 13th, and we have got a great show lined up for you today. Brian Johnson is coming on the stream to tell us all about his pursuits in the business of longevity. We are also talking about the business of AI Chips with the CEO of Samba Nova. We're then going to talk about Perplexity. We know about their Chrome bid, but we broke a story last night about all the other browsers that it has thought about buying. And finally, I want to get into a great column from our Dealmaker newsletter about the extent to which OpenAI could be SoftBank's savior.

0:50Before we get started, I want to highlight two other great pieces that we published this morning. The first is a story about how Walmart renegotiated a longtime deal it has had with ad tech company TradeDesk. And the idea here is that the deal is no longer exclusive, which could be a major blow to TradeDesk's business, given how big Walmart is. But it really is a fascinating look into the world of ad tech, and so I recommend that you check that one out. The second story is today's edition of our AI Agenda newsletter. The title kind of says it all. It's called How Startups Are Getting in Their Robots' Heads.

1:26And really, it's an interesting look at how roboticists are looking for new ways to understand how robots are making decisions and anticipate their actions. This is, of course, all very meta because humans are the ones programming robots in the first place, but that is definitely a newsletter to check out. Okay, for our first segment, OpenAI has been a big moneymaker for many investors, but few are counting on big gains from Sam Altman as much as SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. To tell us why, I want to bring on our Deputy Bureau Chief of Finance, Corey Weinberg, who wrote a doozy of a column in his Dealmaker newsletter.

2:06Corey, it's great to see you. Hey, Akash. How's it going? I'm doing well. So let's talk about SoftBank and let's talk about the Vision 2 fund. What is the current state of the fund before we get to OpenAI? Yeah, so the OpenAI investment that SoftBank has made, which has totaled so far$9.7 billion, and they are planning to invest up to$22 billion further by the end of the year, potentially. Those are some of the largest numbers that we see in the very big number space of AI. So far, all that money's gone into the vehicle known as SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which you might recall is the obvious successor to the first Vision Fund known for its investments in Uber and Coupang and DoorDash and, of course, WeWork.

3:00Vision Fund 2 has done really badly. It was started in 2019. It made hundreds of investments, largely at sort of peak valuations during the kind of Zerp era. And it is$20 billion in the hole, one third of the capital it's invested. Thankfully, OpenAI might be coming to save the day. OK, and so what is the opportunity here with OpenAI? Tell us about that. the open ai investment the soft bank started making it and and we first didn't know sort of how it was going to make this investment what cash it was going to use uh where it was going to put the money uh it turns out they they basically borrowed a billions of dollars from japanese banks to invest in open ai they started investing only last fall it's been less than a year And SoftBank has plowed in$9.7 billion so far.

4:03At roughly a valuation in the ballpark, a blended, call it$250 billion. The reason why it's looking really good right now is it potentially could mark up that stake by double in the coming months if an employee share sale goes through that Thrive Capital is reported to be leading at a$500 billion valuation. So all that money they're putting in so far has the potential to get marked up in short order. Kenny, walk us through a little bit of the more recent history here. I mean, SoftBank has committed to a big portion of this most recent$40 billion funding round that OpenAI has embarked on. How much is it on the hook for there?

4:58It's on the hook for about three quarters of that. Basically, OpenAI is rounding up other investors as well to put money in. During the first kind of$10 billion tranche, OpenAI closed. Dragoneer put in a big amount, another kind of growth investor. But SoftBank by far is on the hook for the most. And so, you know, there's a lot of other investors that get written about here that we write about. But it's important to zoom out. Like SoftBank is the biggest capital provider for OBI, like, you know, full stop. Now, one of the most interesting parts of the newsletter that you wrote was talking about some of the differences in the ownership structure of the fund and, you know, how that relates to the company.

5:45Walk us through how Masayoshi Son fits into all that. Yeah, so this is the interesting wrinkle that not enough people are paying attention to in kind of considering how SoftBank is becoming OpenAI's sort of biggest capital provider. It's that by SoftBank putting this investment in Vision Fund 2, the only real difference between Vision Fund 2 and SoftBank putting that investment on its balance sheet of SoftBank Group, which is a publicly traded company in Japan valued at about$150 billion market cap. The only difference in SoftBank putting that money into Vision Fund 2 is that Masayoshi's son, the CEO of SoftBank for four decades, the man, the myth, the legend, he benefits about 17 % economically from the gains of that fund.

6:39And so essentially, analysts have started to sort of asked questions about this. It's like, okay, you know, essentially by you putting the opening investment in this vehicle, doesn't that mean that other SoftBank shareholders are essentially diluted and watered down in favor of Masayoshi Son sort of with this investment? It's an unusual arrangement. It started a few years ago, but it's only really becoming, you know, it's only starting to look like masa could actually be in the black with this investment um uh thanks to open ai uh you know i i i want to ask you a little bit about you know if you were to sort of put yourself in masa's shoes here i mean like how do you think he he makes this decision about you know where what balance sheet to put the investment on i mean you know just think of it from his perspective Why?

7:34I mean, Akash, you're asking me to do the impossible here and try to understand, you know, sort of Masa, which, you know, obviously was the man who pumped, you know,$15 billion into WeWork or thereabouts as well. Now, look, I mean, he made this bad. He put up the money, I think, to give him his due here. He launched Vision Fund 2 without any outside LPs. They couldn't raise the money from the Saudis like they did with Vision Fund 1. And so, you know, they wanted to keep playing startup picker. And, you know, I think Masa sees the open AI investment as his opportunity for investing redemption here.

8:29And I mean, the guy wants a cut of that, you know, wants to make sure he's benefiting economically from that boldness. I will say, you know, he also owns a very large economic stake in the parent company SoftBank itself. So he is, you know, sort of you could argue he's he's double dipping here to some extent. But but yeah, this is his big chance. And isn't that like this? People are kind of making fun of Masa about, you know, last year when he made this investment. Like, oh, he's investing at the top. This is never going to work. you know, nine, 10 months later, I think census is now that it looks pretty good.

9:09Last question before we let you go. I mean, you know, you've written a lot about SoftBank. You know, this was some really interesting reporting you did. If we just zoom out a bit, I mean, why should people really be caring about this story? I mean, you know, why is it worth paying attention to for the average person? I think 100%. I think SoftBank, I'm always interested in them in part because not just because I mean, for two reasons. One, they have a lot of drama, you know, they're just they're just messy. They're up, they're down. You know, they aren't afraid to take big swings. They aren't afraid to kind of take on a ton of leverage.

9:44And it's a company that is sort of largely with with one decision maker in Masa. That's always super interesting. And then secondly, I think because they're this Japanese-based, you know, just Japan-based investment holding company that also includes, you know, a chip designer in ARM, also includes telcos. You know, they had, you know, their big Alibaba investment that they've sold down. They're just kind of confusing to people, but they put out a ton of publicly digestible information that I think folks should be paying attention to because let's face it, like I said, they are one of the largest capital providers in AI right now.

10:29And I think not enough people watch closely what they do. Right. Well, Corey, thanks for coming on. Again, newsletters that come out on Tuesday and Thursday are, They're, frankly, they're more than just newsletters. You know, you've got stories, you've got reporting, you've got analysis. So I recommend that everyone check it out. That is Corey Weinberg, our Deputy Bureau Chief of Finance at The Information. Well, perplexity made waves this week with its$34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome. But what wasn't known until yesterday was that the company was also considering a few other browsers for possible acquisitions.

11:06That was a story that the information was first to report, and I want to bring on Shree Mopiti to talk all about it. Shree, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Hi, Akash. How are you doing? I'm doing great. So, look, Perplexity, you've been deep into the weeds of browser wars and AI chatbots. What did you find in your reporting? Of course. So, yesterday we reported that Perplexity has, behind the scenes, been trying to buy other browser startups. This comes after they had made the$34.5 billion bid for Google Chrome, which is the world's largest browser. But we can tell now that this was largely an unsolicited bid.

11:47And behind the scenes, since December at least, perplexity executives have been meeting with other browser startups, including the Browser Co. As well as DuckDuckGo. And then even making at least a$1 billion offer to Brave another browser startup. But we can see that none of these deals actually ended up working out and talks had stalled. And do we have a sense for why Perplexity is so interested in the browser space? I mean, it has its own browser, too. Why is it going after this space? Yes, that's a great question. So we've actually reported that the CEO had told investors that they need a browser to win an AI search race.

12:26And our understanding is that another browser startup could really help with distribution. And so having details, for example, of other valuable context on users, which includes, for example, what types of tabs are open, as well as the browser activity of users, that can then inform other features that Perplexity really has. But our core understanding of why a browser could really help is to be able to assign on as many new users to other Perplexity features and products in addition to Comet, which is their existing browser that they already have. And does it have the money for these acquisitions that it's been considering making?

13:03So, Perplexity has said that they have a set of investors ready to fulfill the transaction in whole, but our understanding of its financials show that the company had roughly$850 million in the bank at the end of December. The company has continued to raise more money this year. It actually raised$500 million this year in a round led by Excel at a valuation of $14 billion. It later was able to raise more money at an$18 billion valuation, and now we're hearing that the company has been floating new round at even$20 billion. And so right now, it doesn't seem like they have the money itself to be able to pull off a$34.5 billion acquisition of Chrome, nor maybe, but it may, for example, have some of the money necessary to pull off some of the smaller acquisitions that it's doing.

13:52But it has made other acquisitions as well. I mean, you wrote about that. Yes, it has made smaller acquisitions. So this includes a company called Sidekick, which makes a distraction-free browser. Another company is Carbon, which connects external data to large language models. Last week, the company actually announced another acquisition called Invisible, which builds infrastructure for AI agents. So it's been making a number of smaller agents, but this could be for a number of different reasons. For example, like an AquaHire situation, we just don't know specifically in terms of why that acquisition ended up happening.

14:26I want to ask you about the Comet browser that Perplexity has launched. Did you talk to anyone who has used this browser? Do we have any sense of how well it's working for people or how effective it is right now for doing what Perplexity wants it to do? Perplexity has launched the Comet browser. My understanding of users who've used it is that it's very much a mixed experience so far in that it really is able to take care of a number of different types of automations, but it has a number of bugs as well. And so I think there is still time to be seen if Kama ends up being a really popular feature for Perplexity as compared to its search bot.

15:07And, you know, if you just take a step back here, what sorts of things are you watching for from here? What questions remain? I mean, like you said, it's made some acquisitions. It's got this big$34.5 billion number that it's put out there. People are talking about being, you know, just a bit of publicity. I mean, what are you watching for from here with Perplexity? I expect the company to continue raising. We've just, even in the matter of a couple of months, heard the$14 billion number, at which point it was raising, then an$18 billion valuation, now a$20 plus billion valuation. I think the company will continue to raise.

15:46I think that the company will also continue to make maybe smaller acquisitions. acquisitions, perhaps this is a way for them to kind of put out to the world that they are interested in acquiring companies, even though they might not be able to afford Chrome right now. It still puts the feelers out there. And so I think this is an opportunity for Perplexity to continue to scale and grow. It's just a matter of whether or not its competitors like Google and OpenAI are able to do better or not. Great. Well, Sri, thanks for coming on the show. appreciate it. And next time Perplexity makes another such$34.5 billion bid for an asset that is bigger than its valuation, we will bring you on to find out the inside story.

16:31That is Shreem Mupiti, our venture capital reporter at The Information. Well, we've written a lot at The Information, all about how AI chip companies are trying to challenge NVIDIA's dominance. In fact, we actually have a database that tracks more than two dozen of these startups. We will link it in the show notes. If you look at that database, towards the top of that list is a company called Samba Nova. The company has raised more than a billion dollars, and it was last valued at $5.1 billion. The company says that its chips consume less power than NVIDIA's technology. And I want to bring on CEO Rodrigo Liang to talk about the company and where it's headed.

17:08Rodrigo, welcome to TITV. Yeah, thanks for having me, Akash. It's great to have you. Look, we're going to get into the technology, but I just want to say at the outset of all the AI chip companies out there, I do think Samba Nova has the coolest name. I will say that up front. It's a good name. Oh, thank you. It's a shout out for where I grew up. I grew up in Brazil, and so it's a shout out for that. And it translates to? Well, it's a new dance. It's a new dance. It's time for a new dance, and we're here to party. Do you dance? A little bit, a little bit. Okay. All right. Well, let's talk less about dance, and let's talk more about dancing in the world of AI chips.

17:45You have developed this new chip. It's called the RDU. I want to ask you up front here, why do you think you can take market share away from NVIDIA with this chip? Well, I think the world's looking for alternatives, and I think we're running into a place where power is now the next major constraint for growing AI. People are out there talking about nuclear power plants and where we can deploy this technology and how many racks are necessary to run these large models. And so power is going to be what keeps us from being able to scale. And so we've driven a technology that outperforms the NVIDIA GPUs at one-tenth to power.

18:22And so that allows companies to come in and really scale and continue to deploy while we're solving some of the energy and other problems when it comes to scaling data centers. And in the simplest terms, I mean, how is it that you achieve that one-tenth power? Well, look, I mean, the RDU stands for reconfigurable data flow unit. And so neural nets by nature are data flow. Today, we're using graphics, legacy processors, or CPUs to run these things that ultimately are data flow networks. And so we took a grounds up approach of how to attack these neural nets in much, much more efficient ways, because that's natively how they want to run versus Nurnet chopping it up and feeding into graphics cores.

19:09Yeah, you guys have raised a lot of money. You have customers using the chip right now? We do. We're in a number of different places. And probably the one that we talk about the most is our Saudi Aramco deployment, where we're able to take 90 years of data, training it into a model, and then deploy it completely privately because we can get into these data centers that exist with power constraints and still able to deploy because it's only 10 kilowatts of power for each rack versus 100 plus kilowatts of power for NVIDIA racks. And where are most of your customers geographically right now? Well, we have customers primarily in the US, a lot in the United States, some of Europe, Middle East is an exciting area for us.

19:50And Asia is a growth area this year. We're doing a lot of work in Japan and rest of Asia. So we're super excited about that. Are you selling in China? No, we don't sell in China. It's something that today we are under US policy. We don't sell it to China and we'll honor that. Got it. Well, look, I wanna talk about these two different lines of businesses that you have. So you've got the hardware, what you call the Samba stack. These are actually the chips that are in the racks and putting in the stacks. There's a lot of words that ends with ax. But you've got the hardware and then you've got sort of your cloud offering, which is the software, the API that developers can access.

20:31Between these two businesses, which is the bigger business right now? Well, Samba Stack is really ultimately what customers are going to purchase. The cloud is a very fast way for people to come in and engage and see how it performs and develop their applications. Ultimately, what we're focused on is people who want to deploy this as a service. I think of data centers and service providers and telcos or enterprises that want to own their own infrastructure, own their models, because security, data privacy, ownership is really important. And so we ended up deploying this as a full, complete stack hardware all the way to the models so that you don't have to hire hundreds of machine learning experts in order to do this.

21:13And the reason I ask the question is because a lot has been made of these cloud businesses, these API businesses. And so the question I wanted to ask you is if you saw that business becoming bigger at any point than the hardware business? Well, look, our cloud is really ultimately engaged partners and we are actually building a small cloud. But ultimately, we actually have a third product we recently introduced called Samba Managed. Okay. That is, it's ultimately enabling cloud providers, service providers, our data center customers to actually offer these API services. And so we don't want to compete with our customers who are deploying these services out on the market.

21:47And so we create a reference of the cloud so that people can engage, customers can engage and create that API infrastructure. But ultimately, we sell that to our partners, our customers to offer regional services, industry services, other things that they want to do with the cloud service as a package offering. But I mean, I just want to clarify that the hardware is really where you intend to make most of your money. It's selling the stacks with the chips, correct? That's right. Yeah. Our businesses, the Samba stack is ultimately the hardware, the chips, the boards, and the entire software stack that it takes to run an API service.

22:24I want to ask you about talent. We've heard these stories about AI researchers at these large language model companies being poached or hired for hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. One thing I've been curious about is if that talent war has been playing out in the realm of AI chip startups. And, you know, maybe if you have some hotshot AI hardware engineers that are also, you know, in scarce supply and, you know, you've really got to fight to get them. Are you seeing that play out? Yeah, for sure. I mean, chip design's hard, chip design's hard. And you see every major company is trying to figure out how to compete in this space.

23:03The hyperscalers are trying to build their own chips, right? Some of the other countries are trying to build their chips, right? You know, in order to build sovereign AI. And so you have this incredible demand right now for building chips, something that we didn't see five to 10 years ago. Now you're seeing this incredible energy towards chip design, but it's a skill set that isn't that easy to find. Certainly expert people. There are a lot of people who could dabble, but expert people who have designed very, very high performance chips is hard to find. And so we have to compete in that market as well.

23:32And so have you had to be more competitive with some of these pay packages that you offer these engineers? Yeah, as a startup, we have to be very competitive. And we have to use our equity positions to actually drive packages that are competitive out in the market. And so, yeah, we're in the middle of all of that and we have to compete. But ultimately, here's the other thing that I'm excited about, Sam & Ova, where we attract people who want to do something different. who want to move the needle from the standard, right? And so if you do more of the same, you can go to some of these larger places, but we're focusing on disruptive technology.

24:10And so we attract people who come in and think that there is a better way to do this and we can do this significantly better. And so we attract the innovators, the people who want to disrupt. I want to talk to you about some of the models that you run on your chips. The way I understand it is SambaNova's technology right now largely supports open source models and it doesn't support closed source models. And this is a choice that you've made. And why? Well, so on the clouds, if you look at our API services, it's a cloud offering. Let's say you're a data center provider that wants to be in the AI game.

24:45We come in, we offer not just the chips, the software, the hardware, but also the open source models already pre-tuned. And that makes it easy because we can actually take those open source models and hand them over for ownership to you as a customer. But that doesn't mean that we don't do closed source models. I mean, private models. We actually have many customers today who would deploy Samba Stack 2. They run it privately on their own models. Aramco is an example that I just used. They have their own trained models and we deploy it privately, securely for them. But of course, those are their models and so we do not resell those, right?

25:18But as we offer these models to third parties, to customers to offer, we have to use open source models because then we have the ability to actually resell that over to our customers. And I mean, you kind of hinted on this, but the way that I was thinking about it was, if you aren't supporting closed source models, a lot of these popular models are closed source. I kind of saw it as you're missing out on a huge customer segment of potential business, companies that would want to run those models. Does that not feel to be the case to you? Well, and that's why we do actually run the closed source models from the perspective of customers that want to run it privately.

25:56Now, as a general purpose technology company, we're open to doing all of those, but we have to have the commercial relationship to resell closed source models, which we don't today, but we're working on them. We're working on them. But from a pure tech perspective, there's nothing that keeps us from doing that. But today, being able to resell open source models is something that customers really, really want because they want to take that and customize it for their own data. That's one of the things that we see a lot of people want to take these models and then adapt it to their data, fine tune it, actually create agents.

26:29And so we want to be able to offer them a platform that's already tuned and then bring the data in so that they can actually have very custom, very specific models that allow them to drive their business to go faster. Very quickly, before I let you go, I do want to ask, you know, we've done some reporting at the information that other AI chip startups, Grok in particular, has had to revise downward some of the revenue projections. are you guys seeing any slowdown in terms of demand from customers? Well, no. Well, for us, and demand is people building out an infrastructure today. You know, we have a lot of customers continue to actually go on that journey of building out.

27:03And, you know, the governments are building out. Enterprise are starting to wake up. This is the really exciting part that enterprises are really starting to wake up and build their own infrastructure as well. And so we see it. Yeah, you know, we see those numbers. But for us, we'll continue to drive hard and build a business and build out continues for us. And very quickly, Rodrigo, I have to ask this because this is what I'm most curious about with founders like yourself. I mean, you wake up in the morning, you are going up against a$4 trillion company. It's the biggest company in the world.