In short
Moonshot AI’s open-weight KimmyK3 model challenges closed-source dominance; Arena benchmarks its performance and discusses distillation, costs, and geopolitical risk. The episode also covers Netflix’s slowing subscriber growth and potential advertising/sports strategy, Stripe possibly bidding for PayPal, Google’s TPU push versus NVIDIA (including deals/backstops and TSMC capacity), and Beehive launching newsletter-based community tools for creators.
Guests and backgrounds
- Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO/co-founder of Arena (benchmarking platform using real user agentic workflows).
- Martin Peers, co-executive editor at The Information (Editor’s Cut headlines).
- Amir Afradi, co-executive editor at The Information (AI infrastructure reporting on TPUs).
- Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehive (creator economy platform).
Key claims
- KimmyK3 ranks #1 on Arena’s Code Arena (ahead of GPT-5.6/Fable 2; win-rate gap vs Fable 5 ~tens of percent) with “Claude Sonnet-level” pricing ($3/$15 per token).
- Text chat benchmarks: KimmyK3 top-10, but Fable 5 leads; Claude-family models beat it on chat interfaces.
- Open-weight models may erode closed-source business models if distillation isn’t the only path to frontier quality.
- Google is targeting “NeoCloud” GPU providers with TPUs, offering consistency/efficiency and considering backstop financing; TSMC capacity allocations for 2027 are a bottleneck.
- Beehive’s community features aim to connect newsletter audiences without becoming a cross-community social network.
Notable examples
- Benchmarks: Code Arena, Text Arena, Sweebench/Tau (static), plus comparisons to Claude 4.6/4.7 Thinking and Fable 5.
- Netflix: growth slowing to ~13.4% and sports as a costly lever for subscriber adds.
- Stripe/Advent: reported ~$53B interest in acquiring PayPal; PayPal board reportedly views it as too low.
- TPUs: Google using Broadcom for TSMC capacity; discussions with Nscale; TPU cloud via Blackstone JV.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOOverview of Kimmy K3 and Moonshot AI
1:06 to 2:22
Discussion on the impact and competition of the new Kimmy K3 model.
“KimmyK3 is the big news of the last 24 hours.”
Performance Insights of Kimmy K3
2:22 to 4:14
Anastasios shares insights into Kimmy K3's performance metrics.
“which is that over the past year, you've seen open source and closed source models had a big gap and then it started closing and closing and closing.”
Open Source vs Closed Source Models
4:14 to 5:46
Exploration of the cost and performance comparison between Kimmy K3 and Fable.
“this is kind of, you know, Fable was the model that really caused a bit of a reckoning in terms of cost.”
Adoption Considerations for Businesses
5:46 to 7:44
Discussion on how businesses might adopt Kimmy K3 and its implications.
“the margins are actually not that high on inference.”
Market Impact of Open Source Models
7:44 to 10:42
Analysis of the implications of the rise of open source models in the market.
“But we're going to have more to say on that over the next days and weeks about how steerable the model is and how companies are finding it easier and easier to use.”
Review of Inkling by Thinking Machines
10:42 to 14:00
Comments on the performance of Thinking Machines' Inkling model.
“Of course, it's fantastic that we see the Chinese developing these models and it's socially positive net-net.”
The Open Source AI Advantage in China
14:00 to 19:11
Explore how China's AI ecosystem fosters rapid development of open source models.
“be incurring greater risk and be less comfortable adopting AI.”
Anticipating the Impact of K3 on AI Companies
19:11 to 19:42
Discuss the potential effects of K3 on the business models of major AI players.
“I mean, it's also true of Anthropic and OpenAI.”
Analyzing Netflix's Recent Performance
19:42 to 20:06
Examine Netflix's latest earnings results and stock performance amid growth challenges.
“That is Anastasios Angelopoulos, the co-founder and CEO of Arena here on TITB.”
The Challenges of Netflix's Growth Strategy
20:06 to 24:22
Understand the complexities Netflix faces in maintaining subscriber growth and profitability.
“At the end of last year, it had 325 million global subscribers.”
Show all 25 chapters
Potential Acquisition Bids for PayPal
24:22 to 25:38
Analyze the implications of a possible acquisition bid for PayPal and its market position.
“And those are people that advertisers, a few advertisers want to reach.”
Future Bidders for PayPal and Market Speculations
25:38 to 28:01
Discuss potential bidders for PayPal and the dynamics of recent offers in the tech landscape.
“I mean, PayPal, that price, I think, is$60.50 a share.”
Exploring Potential Bidders for PayPal
28:01 to 28:44
Discussion on potential bidders for PayPal, including X's plans and banks' interest.
“He could easily afford it if he issued stock.”
Google's Strategy with TPUs
28:54 to 30:59
In-depth look at Google's TPU strategy and its market positioning against NVIDIA.
“and it too is getting creative with the deals it is striking to get chips in customers' hands.”
Engagement with NeoClouds and Market Dynamics
31:00 to 35:58
Discussion on Google's engagement with NeoClouds and the competitive landscape with NVIDIA.
“As you know, these very kind of GPU-specific cloud providers.”
Financing and Backstop Deals in Cloud Infrastructure
35:59 to 40:26
Examination of financing needs for AI developers and the significance of backstop deals.
“And so, yeah, so those conversations are happening.”
Understanding TSMC's Capacity Challenges
40:27 to 42:00
Insights into Google's challenges in securing TPU capacity from TSMC and its implications.
“In other words, this is not a reflection of demand at all.”
The TPU Capacity Challenge
42:00 to 43:22
Explore the complexities surrounding TPU capacity and how it affects major tech players.
“and we'll find out more fairly soon where Google has kind of shaken out in terms of getting the capacity that it wants for its TPUs.”
Beehive’s Community Features Explained
43:48 to 44:40
Learn about Beehive's new community features aimed at enhancing newsletter interactions.
“I'm, I'm, I'm looking to you for notes, although I will not be wearing a tank top on this show to say the least.”
The Evolution of the Creator Economy
44:40 to 46:26
Understand how newsletters are changing the creator landscape and enhancing audience engagement.
“And as we've seen with the addition of TikTok and Instagram reels, a lot of content creators who had built up these large audiences are no longer reaching their audiences reliably.”
Monetization and Subscription Models
46:26 to 48:24
Discuss how Beehive allows creators to consolidate their subscription offerings for better monetization.
“So you got this new suite of tools where basically newsletters subscribers, I mean, they can chat with one another, they can interact with one another from what I understand, right?”
Beehive vs. Traditional Social Networks
48:24 to 51:04
Delve into the differences between Beehive's approach and traditional social networks like Discord.
“but also your paid podcast that can be put behind the paywall.”
Empowering Content Creators
51:04 to 52:16
Explore Beehive's mission to provide tools and infrastructure for content creators to succeed.
“And we want when you go to a different e-commerce website that's built on Shopify, you might have no idea that it's built on Shopify.”
AI Integration in Beehive's Tools
52:16 to 53:40
Discuss the integration of AI into Beehive's products and how it helps content creators.
“can reliably reach their audience and engage them deeply, whether that's through newsletter, or podcast or community are the ones that are going to be the most successful moving forward in the creator economy.”
Concerns About Closed Source AI Models
53:40 to 55:56
Address the concerns regarding reliance on closed source AI models in the content creation space.
“And I think as a content creator, it should be the opposite.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:13Welcome everyone to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, July 17th. It's been a great week. We had our one year anniversary party. We had our UBS shoot. We are back in our New York studio next week. But today on the show, Moonshot AI and Kimmy K3 is getting a lot of attention as it challenges closed source models. We'll bring on the CEO of benchmarking company Arena for the latest on what he's seeing. We'll then unpack Netflix's latest quarter and separately some other big headlines from the week on this week's edition of The Editor's Cut. We'll dive into our latest exclusive reporting on the traction that Google is getting with its TPUs.
0:56And we'll close out the show with a conversation with the CEO of Beehive as they make a big bet on social. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it. KimmyK3 is the big news of the last 24 hours. Moonshot AI released the model. People are suggesting it could be a big threat to existing models' dominance and an open source threat at that. I want to bring on Anastasios Angelopoulos, the CEO and co-founder of Arena, for all of his thoughts. and astatias welcome back to the show it's great to have you here thanks for having me new day new model new day new model you've been busy man i mean gosh this is like the fastest uh pace of model releases i think we've seen in a while it's incredible six models in the last uh seven days it's been grok 4.5 kimmy k3 you know previously we had glm 5.2 it's the the the new series of models the gpt 5.6 is the soul you know the luna the terra uh it's been an extraordinary piece of model development and it's left us with a chinese open source model on the top of the coterie and it's i mean it did it come out of nowhere here were we expecting we'll talk about the reviews in a second were we expecting this to be this good initially upon reviews well you know there were there have been murmurs of the great performance of kimmy k3 for quite a while i'm not but I'm not sure that people expected it necessarily from Moonshot.
2:21I will tell you what has been the trend, which is that over the past year, you've seen open source and closed source models had a big gap and then it started closing and closing and closing. And then they were kind of tracking with open source models just a few months or weeks behind closed source models. And people were saying they're never going to crack it. And it's because of distillation. They're just distilling, distilling, distilling. And so fundamentally, when you distill a model, it degrades. and so you're never going to get better performance. But this is the first time we're really seeing the narrative that breaks that mental model, that says that the Chinese labs might actually just be really good at developing models and not just distilling American intelligence.
3:03Right. So you run one of the most popular platform of benchmarks that is widely cited in AI. What is your data telling you about how good Kimi K3 is? Well, the way our platform works is that we have a user base of tens of millions of people that are coming on Arena to use AI after their real workflows. Their agentic workflows, they could do single threaded conversations that are, you know, tens or hundreds of turns long. They're getting to do, you know, workflow automation. They're doing coding. They're doing math. They're doing all these sort of economically valuable tasks. And we take all those tasks and then turn them into a benchmark.
3:40And one of the benchmarks that we released for Kimmy K3 has been Code Arena. and specifically Kimmy K3 is at the top. It's number one in front-end code arena. So it's the best at the sort of lovable vibe coding use case. Now the best model in the world for that, of course, to which hundreds of millions of dollars and inference spend will accrue is Kimmy K3. So ahead of 5.6, ahead of Fable too? Ahead of Fable, which is absolutely remarkable. So let's just pause here for a second. this is kind of, you know, Fable was the model that really caused a bit of a reckoning in terms of cost. This is an open source model, which, I mean, that means it's significantly cheaper, right?
4:28Am I correct there? That's correct. And I will tell you, the gap between Kimi K3 and Fable is not small. It's a win rate of in the order of tens of percent. You know, let's say 10 % is the difference in win rate between kimi k3 and fable 5 which is you know it's it's not the largest gap that we've seen on arena but it is substantial and indicates a real delta in the change in performance and now that comes at the cost of a model that is a sonnet level cost that's a double-edged what do you mean by that a sonnet level cost what do you mean by that oh like claude sonnet it's it costs the same amount of claude sonnet it's three dollars in oh god $15 output token.
5:07Same price as Claude Sonnet. So the significance of this is actually quite interesting. First of all, of course, the raw performance is amazing, but also the fact that it's no longer the case that open source model is 50 % of the quality at 10 % of the cost. It's actually that it's frontier level performance at a reasonable cost that you would see for a mid-tier frontier model. And so I think the ecosystem is evolving perhaps in an unexpected way in the sense that open source is actually also quite expensive, which speaks to the fact that the margins are actually not that high on inference. Right.
5:49So that was coding. I mean, just give us a brief overview here. Other benchmarks, what other benchmarks does Kimi K3 really excel at based on what you're seeing? Well, you know, it does sort of like, it's definitely a frontier model on a lot of the static benchmarks. So if you're looking at things like Sweebench and Tau and so on and so forth, it's sort of in the pack along with Sol and with Fable, although not necessarily leading on some, not leading on others, but still right there in the competition. In Text Arena, which is our benchmark for sort of chat GPT-like capabilities with user interaction and so on, Kimmy K3 is top 10, but not top one.
6:31And in fact, it's not even the top model outside of OpenAI Anthropic. It's about tied with Sol, but it is beaten by MUSE Spark 1.1 and the basically entire bench of Claude models, 4.6, 4.7, 4.6 Thinking, 4.7 Thinking, and Fable, all better chat models for chat interfaces. So right now, for text, who's at the top right now? Right now, it's Fable. It's Fable 5. Yeah. So Kimmy K3, from what I'm hearing from you, I mean, really, I mean, it's coding that has really impressed me. Of all the use cases you could use this for, that is the one that's standing out. Let me ask you this. Are there caveats to this at all?
7:22I mean, being atop a benchmark is certainly one way of measuring performance. Are there other considerations, though, around the way the model is made, you know, how easy it is to use that, you know, sort of might tell us something about how it's actually adopted by businesses? You know, we have yet to see how it's going to be adopted by businesses. It's too early to say. But we're going to have more to say on that over the next days and weeks about how steerable the model is and how companies are finding it easier and easier to use. Of course, the one thing that I will say is KimiCampro is quite a large model.
7:58And so it's not like you're going to be able to run this locally on your laptop. You are going to need a cluster. It's going to need quite a bit of infrastructure. And I would expect that many businesses will be relying on third-party inference providers to give them the compute they need even to do the inference on this model. Let me ask you about the comparison. DeepSeek came out. This was a model that was not developed in the United States. Obviously, it caused big market swings. People asked the question, hey, do I need all the compute that I initially thought? Do you see any similarities with this model and the impact that DeepSeek had on the ecosystem?
8:42Are they two separate stories? What do you think? Well, I think it will cause a reckoning in the capital markets. And the reason for that is that it brings into question what the dominance will be of the closed source models. In a world where there's a narrative violation against the distillation story, then what will happen is that people will say, well, open source models coming from China, They have so many benefits. Businesses can incorporate them into their own infrastructure without relying on a third-party service, without worrying about privacy and data leakage, without worrying about evil third-party companies training on their data and stealing their businesses.
9:27There's so many reasons why people would want an open-weight model. And in a world where that can be done for free, then the question comes, why would we be paying for closed-source models that are worse for our businesses, that are less private, and that allow these companies that want to be in every single business, in FDE for every single vertical, why would we be allowing them to witness our business and see our data, learn from it so that they can improve and eventually one day steal our business? Why would we do that? And so then what's likely to happen is an accrual value to these open-weight models from which, of course, the revenue model is quite different and worse than the closed-source models, which could then cause a collapse, you know, in the way that people are seeing the compute markets because, of course, the compute markets are driven by the optimism and the revenue of the closed-source models, so on and so forth.
10:27So it could cause a cascading effect. Does it matter that it wasn't developed in the United States? Absolutely. It absolutely matters. And in fact, we should all, you know, if we're patriots and Americans, be rooting for some American open source models to come out as well. Of course, it's fantastic that we see the Chinese developing these models and it's socially positive net-net. But at the end of the day, because of the geopolitical risk, we are not going to see businesses comfortable building their entire stack on Chinese models. do you think that the the i i hear you and that is certainly something we hear from from companies as well do you think that that is becoming less of an issue though because if i think of the last no if i if i think about no absolutely not okay why do you think it's less of an issue no no i i'm asking based on um this is this is purely based on you know uh narrative observation what i i feel like people are more willing to use models not developed in the United States.
11:34That's just based on conversations we've been having on the show. The governments of both sides would disagree. What I see happening is actually more hawkishness on both sides, that the Chinese government is actually talking about export controlling Chinese models. And the US government is also talking about banning Chinese models because neither side wants to incur the geopolitical risk. and of course there's so much competition happening between the us and china it is it is absolutely becoming higher and higher risk we even have the u.s government banning u.s models from release let alone chinese models i think it is actually a huge topic right let me ask you about another model anastasio so uh thinking machines lab came out with their model inkling uh what's been the reviews that you've been seeing on on that particular model listen inkling is the first open source model to be released uh by thinking actually the first model period to be released by thinking and of course it's incredible to see that we have a company that is leading the american open source charge the other contenders would be nemotron rc reflection mistrol of course uh in europe and there's a couple other players um but england came out at the top of the u.s open source race today that said it is not yet a frontier model by any stretch it is if you look at the wider field of top 10 including chinese models it is number 10 number 10.
13:09so there's nine chinese models above this and so they have quite a bit of room to climb now if you know anything about thinking machines and it's sort of you know common knowledge it's not something that i know specifically because of our business but they've had quite a bit of restructuring so on and so forth people leaving people coming in restructuring their team and so maybe to some extent it's impressive that they were able to do this in a relatively short amount of time since the current structure that they've had six months or so that said um there is a long long way to go and if you look at the field of closed source models as well as open source models, it is number 37 model.
13:45So we still have, you know, there's a ladder to climb, but let's all root for them. Because that is, we need a model within our shores to support the enterprises that want to avoid the geopolitical risk that we just discussed. If we don't have an American open source model, businesses will simply be incurring greater risk and be less comfortable adopting AI. Is there anything about the AI ecosystem in China that has, you know, made them so effective at developing open source models specifically? It feels like in the open source race, I mean, it's always been a question of which models are coming out of China.
14:26Why do you think they have always succeeded in that particular arena no pun intended yeah well i think that um the strategy is actually quite a good one which is to diffuse the model everywhere and then become the best place for running that model and therefore uh gain resources and you know they need to have some kind of an asymmetric advantage the chinese model providers over the u.s model providers um there and but because they have a lot of drawbacks too so they are absolutely limited by the amount of gpus that they have they're absolutely limited by the fact that there's there's a legal regulation side the u.s that keep you from shipping data to China um and so because of these facts they need to have some way of attacking the market and it may as well be open source I think that's also compounded by the fact that by there's a lot of central planning in China um and IP is treated differently in China than it is in the US and And perhaps there's less of a focus of IP from what I know of the Chinese market than the U.S.
15:27market. So those are all reasons why the open source strategy would be better for them. And then how do you monetize? Well, there's two ways of monetizing an open source model. The first is become the best place to run that open source model. And then you can earn money through inference. That's what a lot of these companies are doing. And the second is through licensing. So you say, okay, I'm not going to run my open source model, but i'm going to partner with inference providers in the u.s that are going to run this open source model and if they reach a revenue of above x dollars in running my model then i'm going to do a rev share with them and that's going to be in the licensing of the weights and of course because we respect licensing laws here that is exactly what those companies are doing and that's going to accrue back to revenue for those companies i want to ask you where we started the conversation we talked about the pace of the release of models lately.
16:15It feels like they've been coming fast and furious. And we've been talking on the show about where AI research is at, the idea that continual learning is very much something that people are looking forward to. Why do you think models have been getting released so quickly? And let's put competition aside. I mean, there is a lot of incentive for these companies to put things out to continue to stay competitive. but is there anything about the current state of you know what these models can do whether or not they can help develop other models that is sort of uh influencing the pace of the release of these new products of course i think you're getting at the concept of recursive self-improvement the idea that the models might be able to train themselves and so on and so forth i don't think we're quite there yet right although we are even seeing in our business that the ai um that the existence of ai is actually making our employees more and more productive by the month we're seeing productivity per employee actually rise even at arena at our small scale we're 70 people and we are still seeing that effect happening so i'm sure it's happening at the big labs as well that said i will say there's a funny dynamic you know first of all you know even competition aside with these labs which is that the release cycles tend to be kind of bulky in the sense that you'll get a quiet week with a couple models here and there and then you'll get a week with 10 models and why is that i think these companies are all hearing about each other oh kimmy k3 is going to release the following day oh we know that we're not quite as good as kimmy crate 3 so we should probably front run them so that we get a little bit of good press imagine if inkling and kimmy crate 3 switch right if they switch on the release date and kimmy crate 3 comes first inkling doesn't they don't release they're not they're not coming out with it yeah exactly they don't they don't look quite is good and so it creates this dynamic of a mad rush everyone hears that everyone else is releasing and so everyone is competing to be first especially the players that know that they're on a weak foot and not to say that that thinking machines is i think that the model is great it's the number one u.s open source model and again we should all be rooting for that but it's also true of the closed source model providers as well right so last question for you anastasia is what does kimik 3 i mean what does it mean for the businesses of anthropic and open ai as you see it well i said this uh online and i'll say it again i think we're going to see a lot of companies that are distilling american companies distilling chinese models now instead of the other way around i'm you know i'm sure open and anthropic uh have their own way of training models but even beyond those two uh you know the the kimmy k3 is going to serve as a base model for many many u.s models um and we're going to see that happening now and if the trend continues that the chinese models uh get better and better over time it may pose like a serious threat to the to the closed source business model because of all the drawbacks that the closed source uh providers have hey are you expecting a comeback for for google here they've kind of fallen off the map here with the absolutely i actually have a huge belief in the google team you should see those people they're really smart Their team is like excellent, excellent.
19:22I mean, it's also true of Anthropic and OpenAI. I mean, I just wondered if they... I think they're good. I expect the comeback. Wait for it. Just wait for Gemini 4. I'll bet you it'll be, you know, at the top. Well, hold on. We can't even get 3.5. You know, 3.5 is delayed now, according to Bloomberg. So we got to get there first. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right. Well, Anastasios, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Anastasios Angelopoulos, the co-founder and CEO of Arena here on TITB. Netflix reported results last night. Investors were not pleased with their reaction today. The stock is down 40 % over the past year.
20:00It fell considerably today after the results. To discuss that and other big headlines from the week, I want to bring on co-executive editor Martin Peers for this week's edition of The Editor's Cut. Martin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash. How are you? I'm good. I'm in San Francisco. I'm not in you have not been here all week i know did you miss me are you very quiet office very quiet we're able to get work done okay well we'll be back monday so uh sorry um okay so netflix reported results last night uh what were the highlights um well the highlights were kind of what we expected which is that every quarter this year their growth is slowing it fell to i think 13.4 percent It's really come down by three or four points over the last few quarters, and they are projecting it will continue to slow.
20:53This is not a surprise. I mean, this company is now very large. At the end of last year, it had 325 million global subscribers. They are making more money than anyone else. They said that this year they would have$12.5 billion in free cash flow, which is more than Disney. um so they're really a giant company what is interesting about netflix now is that television used to be a hit driven business and the networks you know in the old days um their advertising revenues would reflect the nature of their hits and their popularity so how many people were watching in bc would influence the advertising it got in the year after you know So if it had the number one lineup in one year, then it would go into the upfront very strongly.
21:50But we're in a very different environment now. Netflix, it needs hits, but not in the same way as the networks need it to. It just needs to make sure that people continue to subscribe. And because they have such a vast array of programs, they're really able to keep people subscribing. The issue now is, can they maintain growth that investors have come to expect? I mean, I think over time that's just not going to happen because it's very hard. I mean, they've probably got pretty much everyone that they can get. There are a few. Right. And the interesting issue they have, which they highlighted yesterday, was that one way they can get more revenue is through advertising, which is still a very small part of the business for them.
22:49And for that to grow, they need to have more live programming, particularly in sports. And they made the point that they're going to spend, I think, 5 % of their programming on live, but that will only account for 1 % of the actual programming. But that brings in new subscribers. So it's an issue. Sports is extremely expensive. that the TV people cannot make money on sports really, but they need it to maintain an audience. The more Netflix moves into that area, the more their enormous profits will get diluted. So, you know. So it's a classic growth versus profitability trade-off here, basically, that the company is going to have to grow.
23:41And then the other issue is, we've already seen this happen, And they have to resist the temptation to do some big acquisition to, you know, as a way of trying to find a way to grow. They obviously fell prey to that when they did the deal to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Fortunately, they got overbid by David Ellison. And now they're insisting again, we have a very high bar for M &A. Well, okay. Hopefully they will maintain it. What is it? an 80 billion dollar bar it's like we won't go above 80 maybe or something like that and you know yeah the stock is down a lot but really if you look at the multiples uh and where it has traded in the past it's still actually a fairly expensive stock for that industry so uh things are not as bad as some people might make them out to be so i guess just thinking about the levers here that you think they could pull i mean there's subscriptions there's advertising i mean uh they haven't yet done anything in the way of of like free um you know there's some speculation they could do some free stuff which would maybe help on the advertising but they made the point that they don't want to do anything that would um cannibalize the existing uh subscription so they can't put anything on the free that uh would prompt anyone to cut the cord and to uh cancel And honestly, the free services that are out there mostly show crab and will draw a particular part of the audience that doesn't want to pay.
25:18And those are people that advertisers, a few advertisers want to reach. It's not like it's nothing, but it's not a great part of the business. So I wouldn't overdo the idea that Netflix is going to go heavily into free stuff. i think well and this is the i mean if you think about like you know now they're doing the podcast too i mean are you sort of think about the brand of content that you find on netflix i mean on the spectrum of like yeah they're just putting more and more stuff on and yeah their aim is to be the place that you can find anything um there's always going to be something there for you and i think they've done a pretty good job uh of that so um i think they're going to be hard to beat let's uh go to a different story uh that also made news this week we didn't cover it uh stripe reportedly is possibly considering a bid with a private equity company to acquire paypal it was uh the the number that reuters reported 53 billion dollars is what's being considered you wrote about this in your column this week what was your reaction well it's what stripe and advent the private equity firm are thinking about it's right right I mean, I saw a report this morning that PayPal's board thinks it's not high enough, which is kind of obvious because it is a very low bid.
26:39I mean, PayPal, that price, I think, is$60.50 a share. And the stock had fallen recently in the 40s, but that's very low compared to where it has traded in the past few years. So Stripe and Advent are coming in when the stock is weak. I think PayPal appears to have been struggling. It's lost ground. It's facing Apple Pay and Google Pay and everybody else. It's barely growing. But look, this is a company that makes a lot of money and it wouldn't be that difficult to revive it. They own Venmo, which is a very strong business. And I think people believe it can be, you know, Like, sorry, Venmo is growing and people believe Venmo can make more money.
27:32So there's a lot of potential here. I think what's more likely to happen is that the PayPal board will open a process. They will invite people to make offers. They really have to do that now that somebody has made an offer. They can't just— Who else do you think could make offers? Well, look, it could be anyone. SpaceX is an obvious one because Elon was one of the original investors and executives of PayPal. And he has, with the years, been talking about starting a payments app through X, which, you know, he's talking about doing this X money thing. So PayPal would fit. He could easily afford it if he issued stock.
28:16And the cash that he got, if he bought it, would help pay for some of the AI investments that he's making. So I think that's one, seemed to be obvious possibility. There's other possible bidders, could include the banks, maybe. I, you know, I'm not an expert in that area, but I would guess that there would be quite a few people lining up to make an offer. Right. If that happens. Well, we will have to see how it all shakes out. Martin, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Martin Piers, our co-executive editor here at The Information. Google is ramping up its competition with NVIDIA on the chip front, and it too is getting creative with the deals it is striking to get chips in customers' hands.
29:02Amir Afradi is our other co-executive editor, and he published some exclusive reporting about that effort in our AI infrastructure newsletter. I want to bring on Amir to share more about what he knows. Amir, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Good morning. Okay, so let's talk about this meaty newsletter that you had in our AI infrastructure column this week. There was a lot to it, and I want to see how much we can get through. Who is Google targeting with their TPUs right now, as far as you're hearing? Yeah, so the Tensor Processing Unit effort, as you probably know, is a very long-term journey for Google, which was one of the first NVIDIA chip users for AI.
29:45I found out about NVIDIA only because I was covering Google. And fairly early on, they made this investment to make their own chip that was more tailored to their machine learning models. That has turned out to be quite a smart move, not only for Google's internal margins because it runs a lot of its search and other AI workloads and advertising on TPUs, Now it sees an opportunity in this moment with AI to actually capture a significant portion of the AI chip market. So as part of that is trying to figure out how to scale up this business, but do it in balance with the fact that Google is also one of the biggest still buyers of NVIDIA chips.
30:35And that's because it has its own cloud business for all kinds of other companies that want to use those chips for AI workloads. It's trying to get some of those customers to use TPUs in addition to GPUs. So it's a very, very complicated balancing act. And so who specifically has Google been targeting lately? You had some reporting on this. Yeah, so there's this whole array of NeoClouds. As you know, these very kind of GPU-specific cloud providers. And they exist only because NVIDIA allows them to exist. These are companies, many of them are former cryptocurrency mining firms that have pivoted their business to just servicing other companies that want GPUs.
31:22So these companies were using GPUs for cryptocurrency mining. Now these GPUs are used for everything else. So they have some experience in running data centers. There's a whole group of, there's probably hundreds of them. There are only like half a dozen that actually matter. And Google has been talking to those companies for a while about whether they'd be interested in bringing on TPUs, which I should mention that we're in this huge CapEx boom as well among the biggest cloud providers in particular. and Wall Street is going to be scrutinizing CapEx more and more and more and more. So for a company like Google, which is, again, one of the biggest CapEx spenders as it develops its own data centers increasingly, working with these other companies, these neoclouds, is a way to kind of lower a little bit that CapEx, get somebody else to take on data center development, in particular with TPUs, which increases Google's operating expenses, but the benefit is it could decrease its CapEx expenditure.
32:29So anyway, Google's approaching these companies and saying, hey, you should work with us as well. It's nice to not be completely dependent on NVIDIA. Jensen Wong, as you may or may not know, is a fairly competitive person. There's a reason NVIDIA is the world's number one most valuable company. What's the pitch? I mean, take us inside the pitch for Google. What do they say? Is it cheaper? You know, is it just diversity of chip that is the root of their argument? Like, what's the pitch they're making? Yeah, a few things. So, look, NVIDIA is the gold standard and does not seem to be, you know, near to losing that title.
33:11But Google says that it has a few different advantages for companies that want to use TPUs specifically for, you know, transformer-based AI models. These are chips that have not changed as much as NVIDIA's chips have in terms of the design and the kind of networking and other hardware that you need around it. So if you're a company that is installing them in data centers, you may just have fewer surprises. Whereas with each new NVIDIA generation, you're dealing with a whole host of radical changes, which is part of what makes NVIDIA great, but also is incredibly painful for the companies, including these NeoClouds that want to install them, as well as the traditional cloud providers that also are installing them.
33:56So Google is saying we have a lot more consistency here, and these chips are, according to Google, much more efficient in some ways compared to GPUs for running AI models. Some of this has yet to play out, but I think there is something to that. And if there's one single competitor that Jensen is paying close attention to, it's Google and TPUs. Now, you had some reporting that Nscale is a neocloud that Google has been talking closely with. Do they have a deal in place or what's the status of the negotiation? Yeah, there's no deal that we know of. And one of the things that happens is Jensen has Intel across the industry.
34:37He generally, not always, generally knows who's talking to whom. And in this case, he did find out that Google was talking to Nscale. And there's some moves that happened since then that made some folks around this feel like he was providing additional incentives to N-Scale to maybe get them to not use TPUs. N-Scale says on the record that's not officially their perspective here. But yeah, Jensen's not silly and he has not been shy at all to use his company's balance sheet to help his biggest customers. And now Google's really targeting some of its biggest and most loyal customers. It's just extremely nerve-wracking for someone like Jensen.
35:24Although, another thing you point out in the newsletter, though, is that while NVIDIA is throwing its own balance sheet at the problem here of getting people to adopt their chips, that is also possibly an approach now that Google themselves is considering, no? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is another reason why Jensen cares about Google probably more than any other company. Google has lots of cash. It generates lots of cash all the time, just like NVIDIA does. So if anyone is in a position to really seed the market with competing chips, it's Google. So it has been discussing these kind of backstop deals where it will essentially be guaranteeing to lenders who are going to lend to different businesses that may want to buy TPUs that Google will pay out if those companies that are borrowing for TPUs can't find buyers or renters or what have you for these data center chips.
36:26And so, yeah, so those conversations are happening. Now, important to point out that Google also has a joint venture with Blackstone to essentially develop a TPU cloud provider. This is another leg in this stool of getting TPUs to be used externally outside of Google. And I guess from Google's, and I mean, for Google to backstop these TPUs, I mean, for them, I guess the argument is, hey, we can just use them ourselves for our own cloud offering, right? So, I mean, it's really no, we're not losing anything because we could just use the chips ourselves, basically. So they, and that's something that NVIDIA, I mean, they don't really have as big a cloud business, obviously.
Read the full transcript
37:10So that you could argue is a leg up in, I guess, the landscape of backstops. Amir, I think this, it really comes back down to NVIDIA's dominance. But when Jensen is going around and trying to convince its customers not to use TPUs, Do you think that there's any part of him that is nervous that Google itself is a big customer of NVIDIA? I mean, I guess they need GPUs at the end of the day, but I just wonder how much you think that complicates the calculus here of these discussions. Yeah, I mean, look, for the moment, it's very much the case that Google needs NVIDIA, just as much, if not probably more, than NVIDIA needs Google.
38:01There is plenty of demand for GPUs. If Google were not buying GPUs, NVIDIA would probably be able to find other cloud providers and AI developers to buy them. But Google's been a really, really, really good customer for NVIDIA. It's been a critical customer for NVIDIA for so long. Like I said before, really using NVIDIA chips longer than anyone has for AI in particular. So I think we started this conversation talking about a balancing act. And it really is that, like neither of these companies want to break off the relationship, but Jensen has a lot of these other considerations because he knows Google is actually the only, you know, the only true threat to his dominance because of all the work they put in.
38:47And on the backstop deals that the neoclouds are getting from the chip companies. Is that something that the neoclouds, you know, that they are insistent on having in place? And the reason I'm asking that is because, I mean, the neoclouds, I guess, if there was any question about demand, right? I mean, that's where the backstop comes in handy. Right now, we are in this environment where everyone insists, you know, there is excess demand, right? And so I guess I just wonder how, the extent to which the neoclouds really need these backstops? Is it really just an emergency, or is it something that you think could actually get used in the near future?
39:31Backstops are going to be important. It's not just the neoclouds. You have AI developers like OpenAI and Anthropic and XAI. These are companies that are developing, want to develop their own facilities. with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, they don't have the kind of credit ratings and track record to be able to borrow a lot of money. You know, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, they need partners for that. And so that's where these doc stops come in. So whether it's NVIDIA saying, you know, we are going to, you know, to make guarantees for a gigawatt data center in Ohio for OpenAI, or Google making a similar guarantee for Anthropic, which is a huge TPU user and probably Google's best external TPU customer.
40:23Those are pretty critical things to have. Like lenders are not going to give great terms if they don't have these guarantees. In other words, this is not a reflection of demand at all. This is just a reflection of financing, essentially. Yeah, it's just risk. Right. I mean, these facilities cost a whole hell of a lot of money, $50 billion for a gigawatt data center all in, maybe$60 billion and rising, rising every day. And as you saw with the kind of Kimmy earthquake overnight, things in AI change quite rapidly. And so the risk tolerance here is a tricky thing. And that's why when you have companies with strong balance sheets, they are going to be needed increasingly for really, really big infrastructure deals.
41:13Right. Before we let you go, there was another part of your newsletter that really caught my attention. And I should say there's a lot in there. So I encourage everyone to read it. You also had some reporting on the extent to which Google has been able to get capacity at TSMC and what that story looks like. What's the latest there? Yeah, and I should mention Kathy Perloff and Phoebe Liu were my partners in crime for this piece. So TSMC is really the key bottleneck here for everyone. So anyone who wants to make a chip, they have to go through TSMC first. Google actually works through Broadcom to get capacity at TSMC for its TPUs.
41:55And right now, the allocations for 2027 are beginning. and we'll find out more fairly soon where Google has kind of shaken out in terms of getting the capacity that it wants for its TPUs. Nobody's ever really happy. Everyone wants more. And TSMC has its own very, very difficult balancing act with all of its customers, including NVIDIA, which is really its key customer, to figure out how much capacity it's going to give NVIDIA and how much capacity it's going to give Broadcom and all the other competitors that are trying to kind of take market share from NVIDIA. And so we don't know yet exactly where that's going to be.
42:37It's always going to be a trouble spot because Google has all these internal needs for TPUs, as you pointed out. It runs a lot of its business on TPUs at the same time that it wants to create an external TPU business for Anthropik and Apple and other users. And Meta is actually becoming a big customer of TPUs as well. so I think we don't yet have clarity as to what TSMC's perspective is on this and how much it wants TPUs to be a really big thing but they're growing and I would definitely not sleep on this if I were Jensen and I don't think he is I don't think Jensen is sleeping a lot as it is anyway he seems like he's a busy guy so Amir I want to thank you for coming on that is Amir Afradi our co-executive editor here at The Information.
43:28Okay, to close out the show, I want to take a trip over to the creator economy. Beehive made a product announcement this week, launching a tool for newsletter subscribers to connect with one another. The company is quickly becoming a force to contend with in the era of new media. I want to bring on CEO Tyler Denk for an update on his business. Tyler, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me. What's up? Not much. How about you? busy as always but uh yeah we're very we're very excited about the recent launches you might be the only person tyler to wear a tank top in a keynote for a product release is that so i actually wasn't wearing a tank top for the actual product release that was a little bit of a behind the scenes uh okay yeah okay no no but well you were wearing a tank top with the with the shirt open right that's true that's very valid very valid okay so look i'm you're they're the fashion guy.
44:22Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm looking to you for notes, although I will not be wearing a tank top on this show to say the least. Tyler, are you launching a social network? Walk me through the vision here for this product release. Yeah. So quite the opposite, actually. I think that right now, social networks are all about algorithmically driven content. And as we've seen with the addition of TikTok and Instagram reels, a lot of content creators who had built up these large audiences are no longer reaching their audiences reliably. It's kind of two sides of the same coin. It's democratized small content creators to put out good content, and the algorithm can take it and proliferate that across the network.
45:01But it's also taken away from a lot of these content creators who have built really large audiences and can't reliably reach those people. And so I think that is why newsletters are so powerful, that the owned audience and distribution is really valuable in this new ecosystem to know that when I send my newsletter every Tuesday to 130 ,000 people. 130 ,000 people receive that newsletter. Right. And so what we launched yesterday was community features. And the way that we view community, I'll just keep using my newsletter as an example. I have 130 ,000 founders and startup employees. I have interacted.
45:36Right now, I provide value by creating content weekly and sending that newsletter. I have met a lot of my readers. They're very ambitious founders. They would benefit from getting to know each other and provide value, not just from me, but from sharing, hiring practices and fundraising and introductions. And so I think the next evolution of the creator economy, especially in a time with AI, is more focused towards human to human connection. And as our roadmap reflects, we started with newsletters and then we launched websites. Then we launched digital products. And a few months ago, we introduced podcasts.
46:10I think the most successful content creators today have our multi-channel and can engage with their audience in multiple different ways. And our roadmap would reflect that. And we want to become the platform where any content creator can build and power their entire content business in a single consolidated place. So you got this new suite of tools where basically newsletters subscribers, I mean, they can chat with one another, they can interact with one another from what I understand, right? I mean, the question I have is why wouldn't they just go set up like a Discord or something like that?
46:45I mean, Discord is like one of the companies that you could say that we'd be competing with for this. Right now, we do have... So why do you think you would do it better than Discord? Yeah, well, Discord, as an example, is like primarily built for gaming. And the way that they do threading and communication is like very different from, I think, what a content-led business would be used for. To be fair, we have a Discord integration. You can integrate. We have some users who integrate with Discord. But the thing is, I think there's a lot of value in consolidation and knowing that who your audience is is more important now, more now than ever.
47:15And being able to send a newsletter and know who's opening and clicking on your different links in your newsletter, who's also listening to your podcast, who's visiting your website, who's purchasing your products, and who's the most engaged member of your community. like historically all of those have lived in different silos and most content creators don't want to create a data lake and stitch together five or six different platforms and have like a and because there's there's the whole convert i mean how many of your subscribers convert to discord participants right and how can we make that easier so today like you can send a newsletter and if you already have a if you launch a community on beehive with one click they can join this community from your newsletter there's also like right now a lot of these businesses and creators are launching subscriptions.
47:59And so obviously Substack came to the market with like a very heavy subscription product and paid subscriptions were the way that content creators were making money on that platform. We have the same capabilities. We don't take a 10 % cut of revenue, but now that same subscription can apply to paid newsletters in addition to access to this community. And so having one unified subscription where a reader or someone in your audience can pay a single fee and they get access to not only your community, not only your paid newsletter content, but also your paid podcast that can be put behind the paywall.
48:32And we have an integration with Spotify there as well. So you're keeping your, it's a subscription business model. And I guess if you want to launch a community, I mean, is it all just one price for the subscription to Beehive? Is it a higher tier price to launch a community? How do you plan to make more? So for Beehive, no, this is available in all of our existing plans. We didn't roll out any price increases. We're not gating community on our highest plans. It's available on any paid plan. So all of our users have access to community today. I was thinking through the subscription of as a reader, as a member of the audience of one of these content creators, it is annoying to have to have a subscription to a paid newsletter, but then also pay separately for their podcast.
49:17And then maybe have a third subscription to that same content creator who has a community. where I see the benefits of having a community of Beehive and really our thesis around consolidation is I think as a content creator to offer a single 10 or$20 a month subscription that has access to all of your premium content plus the community is much better than piecing together a Slack or a Discord where it's a disjointed experience for the reader, multiple different subscriptions. So yeah, it's really just like a convenience and consolidation play. I guess, I mean, Tyler, just to go back to where we started then i and i'm i'm just sort of trying to understand the line here between a social network uh and then what you guys have launched here because i'm imagining myself so if i subscribe to 10 different newsletters let's say they're all beehive newsletters right i mean i would then be participating in 10 different communities let's say you know and chatting with um a variety of different circle of of people uh it's just, it feels like a social network, no?
50:18I mean, like, is that, why is it? The difference is it's not a beehive app and it's not a beehive social network. For the example, again, going back to my newsletter, if and when I launch my community, which I will in the upcoming weeks, that is constrained to just my audience. And so it is my newsletter. It's a community for the founders and the startup employees that read my content and follow me and want to interact with other people. Is there like a for you page, like a news feed? Within my community, yes, but it doesn't go across different communities, if that makes sense. So if you were to launch a community on Beehive, like your audience can join and there's no overlap between them and my community.
50:55We what we and I think it goes back to like the Amazon versus Shopify analogy that we use a lot where we want to be more like Shopify. We are tools and infrastructure in the background of these different creator businesses. And we want when you go to a different e-commerce website that's built on Shopify, you might have no idea that it's built on Shopify. And that's the point. They're tools and infrastructure. The same way that we want to empower content creators to build their business, their newsletter, their website, their podcast, and now their community. And they don't have to have any association with Beehive.
51:24It is the Cody Sanchez community. It's the Colin and Samir community. So you would go to their website. I mean, they've not only launched their newsletter with Beehive, they've launched their website with Beehive. They basically have their Beehive-powered website, essentially. And so I would go to that website and that's where I would find the chat or the community, essentially. There will never be a centralized, as you said. We are not trying to be a social platform. Right. We are not building, I guess, to use Substack as an example, a Notes app. We're not building X. We're not building Blue Sky.
52:04We want to empower our users to build their own networks and their own communities where they can engage with their audience. And we are private labeled in the background tools and infrastructure to support that. I think the sovereign content creator that is not overly dependent on algorithms and can reliably reach their audience and engage them deeply, whether that's through newsletter, or podcast or community are the ones that are going to be the most successful moving forward in the creator economy. And we want to be the tools and infrastructure to support that. I want to ask you another suite of products that you introduced.
52:36So you introduced a number of AI powered products for creators to make themselves more productive with your tools. Let's go straight to the question of what models you're using, given that models are very top of mind today and always. are you using open source models in the back end? Are you using closed source models? What are you using? Yeah, it's a great question. We are multi-model, I think mostly closed source today. Right now we are focused on providing the best experience possible. Is there a time where open source becomes more economical? But I mean, the time for that is probably now. But we'd rather - I was gonna say, I mean, you know, we saw, I mean, Kimmy K3, it's, you know, moving, I don't know if it's moving markets, but it's certainly moving news feeds right now yeah i think it's definitely the only adoption curve it's like we want to provide the cutting edge of what we can on adoption once adoption's there then it goes down to how do we become more economically stable and leverage all of the open source models so it's more sustainable for us and it looks like that is approaching pretty quickly but yeah we're multi-model we use different models for image generation different models for text different models for automations the way that we view ai is we don't think that and we're not trying to replace the content creator.
53:52I think there are a lot of content creators, and I always use this example that I was on this panel, and the lady next to me said she spends five days focusing on everything around her content, doing admin work, and two days creating content. And I think as a content creator, it should be the opposite. You should spend most of your time doing what you love and creating content, and you should be able to augment all of that admin work. And I think AI is the perfect use case to do it. So our MCP that we launched a few months ago is one of our highest NPS products that we've ever launched. It's automated a lot of this admin work from a lot of our power users.
54:24And then yesterday we introduced this AI co-pilot, which basically just takes the MCP, brings it into the platform. It's fully aware of what you're looking at, what you're doing, and can augment and build different automations and segments. A lot of the things that content creators don't feel like doing, but they have to grow their business. I think that's where we see success and where AI kind of fits into the broader picture. How do you think about this issue? We've been talking on the show about trust in AI labs and closed source models, the idea that they might be using your data for their own benefit as well to train their models, etc., stuff like that.
55:00I mean, this is the argument everyone's making is this is why you should look to open source. You as a founder that has to rely a lot on these closed source models, is that a concern for you at all right now? not i have a lot of concerns as i build the business right like every day is just solving a new problem this is not the highest of my concern i think there's more ai for companies that are on the cutting edge where whether it's website development or voice recognition we're sharing those trade secrets back to the closed source models i think i would feel a bit more vulnerable for our business like i think it's a few deviations away from like a top priority of any of these AI labs.
55:37So it's not a massive concern of mine today. But yeah, I mean, both from a cost perspective and for that exact reason around trade secrets, I do see this shift towards open source models happening probably faster than we had expected over the next six to 12 months. Great. Well, Tyler, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Tyler Dank, the CEO of Beehive here on TITV. That does it for today's show. A reminder, we are on this stream Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. If you can't make it then, episodes are available on theinformation.com, on our YouTube channel, or wherever you get your podcasts.
56:12Make sure to follow us on social media, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok, and on LinkedIn. I'm already excited for our next show on Monday. We've got another great week planned for you. Have a great rest of your Friday. Bye-bye for now.
From the publisher
Arena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos talks about Moonshot Kimi K3 beating Claude Fable 5 in coding with TITV Host Akash Pasricha. We also talk with Co-Executive Editor Martin Peers about Netflix’s post-earnings drop and Stripe’s proposed buyout of PayPal and Co-Executive Editor Amir Efrati about Google using backstop deals to pitch TPUs over Nvidia GPUs. Lastly, we get into Beehiiv’s new community features with CEO Tyler Denk.
Articles discussed on this episode:
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/moonshot-ais-new-kimi-k3-challenges-u-s-frontier-models
https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/nobody-immune-nvidia-gpu-crunch
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/netflix-reports-slowing-revenue-growth-second-quarter
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Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
01:13 - China’s Kimi K3 Tops Coding Benchmarks
20:51 - Netflix Growth Crunch & Stripe’s $53B PayPal Bid
30:16 - Inside Google’s TPU War Against Nvidia
44:50 - Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk on Social & AI Copilots
