Why Paramount’s Hostile WB Bid Will Win, ChatGPT Head Responds to OpenAI ‘Code Red’ | Dec 8, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, December 8th. We have got a great show planned for you today. First up, the big news of the morning. Paramount has launched a tender offer for Warner Brothers Discovery shares in response to Netflix's deal. And separately, IBM is buying Confluent. We're going to break down both of those stories for you. And we are also going to preview Oracle and Broadcom earnings, which are coming up this week. We're also bringing on our OpenAI reporter for an update on how things are looking on the ground as the company works through its code red.

0:50She had a conversation with the man leading ChatGPT through it all, and we are going to share with you what he had to say. We're then bringing you a recap of a major AI research conference that happened last week. There was some big questions that swirled around AI breakthroughs in biology. And finally, we are debuting our weekly crypto segment. This week, we're gonna be unpacking the momentum in predictions markets. It's gonna be a busy show. So let's get right on into things. Paramount has launched a tender offer for shares of Warner Brothers Discovery in a hostile takeover effort. The company is offering 30 bucks a share just days after Netflix agreed to buy WBD in a deal that many have thought would have a lot of trouble getting through antitrust regulators.

1:35Here to break it all down is Martin Pierce, co-executive editor at The Information. Martin, how was your weekend? It was a busy one watching this unfold. No, my weekend was very pleasant because the Netflix deal was on Friday. So it was fine. Okay. I have to tell you that we thought this was going to be Larry Ellison's week. I mean, this is Oracle's week in the spotlight. And now you have David Ellison coming in and saying, no, I'm taking control here of the narrative. David is being backed by his father. That's very clear from the tender documents because they actually lay out, they point out that his father has a controlling stake in Oracle, which is worth$250 billion.

2:18So that's where a portion of the money that Paramount is offering for WBD is actually coming from. Okay. So I didn't realize they actually said that outright, which is an interesting link. Tell me a little bit about what your reactions were to the takeover efforts. Was this expected? Yeah, there was some speculation on Friday that this would happen. And, you know, really, it honestly makes sense. Paramount says that they made this offer last week, that the board of WBD didn't really respond. And they certainly didn't. I mean, they don't seem to have really thought it through because they went with the Netflix offer.

3:02This way, shareholders have a clear alternative. you know the shareholders can now tender into the offer it won't close immediately as paramount has to get approval from the government but paramount says they think they can close in a year and whereas netflix thinks they would take up to 18 months and of course there's an enormous uncertainty about whether netflix would get approval already trump has come out and sort of said that, I mean, he sort of indicated he doesn't think that Netflix, you know, should be allowed to buy it. If you take this from a regular Android trust analysis, both companies would have issues.

3:47I mean, Paramount already owns a major studio, so this would be combining two major studios. But we're not in a normal environment. The Trump administration obviously really will act on behalf of Trump's allies, and the Ellicons are clearly allies of Trump. So I think we can assume that Trump will approve this deal, and that gives Paramount a huge advantage over Netflix. Now, one thing I just wanted to make sure I was clear on is that this tender offer, is this for the whole company, or is this just the streaming? No, this is for the entire company, which is the other thing about it. It makes it much easier for investors in WBD because the Netflix offer is only for the studio and the streaming services.

4:37So that offer assumed that Warner would split up before the offer went through. So investors in WBD would have to be thinking, well, what is the value of the stub that I'll get in the networks? whereas now they'll know they can actually compare these two offers very easily. I mean, I think Paramount has got to be seen as the most likely winner in this right now. I mean, Netflix could come back and raise their offer, but really it's not clear to me that they can afford it, and I think it would put a lot of pressure on their own stock price. So I doubt they will do that. that they might, but I kind of think that they probably won't.

5:25And why do you think Paramount is willing to take on the entire business? I mean, you talked about how the cable side of the business, I mean, it's really the side that nobody really wants. I mean, why does Paramount, why are they willing to take on the whole thing, and why does it make strategic sense for them? Paramount already has a significant cable channel business. They own CBS, which is broadcast more than cable, but it's still the same kind of thing. They've got CBS, they've got MTV, they've got Nickelodeon. If you combine those with Warners, I think there are some economies of scale that you could get out of it.

6:02And I mean, honestly, most people think that even though that business is declining, it will continue to exist and it certainly makes a fair amount of money. So that could exist for years to come. So I think their view is we might as well put these two together. They'll be more profitable combined. And, you know, that's fine. And last question for you. I mean, you know, if you look at what WBD shares have been trading at lately, I mean, both of these prices, Netflix's offer and the Paramount offer, I mean, this is – WBD shareholders seem to be big winners in the year regardless because they're getting it.

6:44Um, my question for you is, I mean, in terms of the valuation, uh, what did you make of the Netflix valuation that they were offering? What do you make of the, the Paramount valuation that they're offering? I mean, I think this value, the Netflix offer was, I think, too high because they're only buying a portion of it. And the portion that they were buying is not the main profit, uh, generated, whereas, uh, Paramount is buying the entire thing. and they will therefore get more access to more of the profits of the company. So I think the Paramount offer is a more logical offer valuation-wise. Great.

7:29Well, Martin, I want to thank you for coming on. I'm sure that this story will continue to unfold. And so we will talk to you more and more as it happens. That is Martin Pierce, our co-executive editor here at The Information. Okay. IBM announced this morning it is buying Confluent, a data streaming company. The company is paying$11 billion in cash. The$31 share price IBM is paying is a 33 % premium to what Confluent was trading at on Friday. Joining me now to break it all down is Paul Meeks, head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets. Hey, Paul, how you doing? Great, man. Thanks for having me.

8:05Great to see you. So there's a lot going on this week. We'll get to earnings for Oracle and Broadcom in just a second, but what did you make of the IBM Confluent news this morning? You know, I think it's a smart deal. It's a continued pattern of some acquisitions to build out their footprint and enterprise AI. Like a lot of analysts that are valuation sensitive, I think they paid way too much for it, right? A pretty big premium. You know, here's a company that is only supposed to do 48 cents earnings per share next year, up from 40 cents this year. So not much EPS growth, and you're paying 65 times earnings.

8:45Revenue growth has been good there, but not EPS growth to match. So strategically, I like it. It's a nice product suite. Boy, they're paying a lot. How much do you think would have been a fair price for Confluent? Actually, where it was trading on Friday before the big premium markup, I think, is more than fair, particularly because it's an all-cash deal. And they are a rather small company putting themselves in the hand of IBM and IBM's enormous enterprise sales force. You would expect it to have a nice growth kicker after the deal. So remind us what exactly Confluent does, and then we'll talk about how IBM sees it strategically fitting in its AI product suite.

9:33So it is going to allow IBM to better manage data streaming, real-time data streaming. And so it's an addition to the product suite. It is another arrow in the quiver. And it makes a lot of sense, as I said. Right. Right. And tell me a little bit where IBM these days, I mean, you know, it's a company in many ways. I mean, they were very early to AI, right? I mean, back in the IBM Watson, you know, that was some of the earliest AI that we saw. What's happened to that company in terms of being included in the conversation? I feel like we don't talk about it as much. We know it has a big consulting practice.

10:17You know, where is the company now? So I actually think it's had a nice renaissance, right? This used to be my grandfather's marquee tech company. It went into the doldrums for a long period of time. Each and every quarter that they reported, their revenues would be down year to year. And that went on for years. Right. So with the relatively new CEO turning the company on a dime and several years ago, essentially pivoting to not the public cloud that everybody else was pivoting to, but a hybrid private public crowd, which actually worked very well with enterprise customers. And so they have seen a nice burst of growth, at least coming from a very sleepy company.

11:05They've made some fairly savvy, like maybe this one today, bolt-on acquisitions. And they're always going to be somebody that if you are a chief technology officer of a big company, you're always going to look at them. For decades and decades, they've been marquee in the enterprise. And they're trying to do that here in AI. And of course, they're also working very hard on quantum computing right now. Let's pivot to talking about some news that we have coming up this week. We have Broadcom and Oracle reporting earnings. Let's start with Oracle. What are you watching for with that print? You know, this one is very sensitive because remember last quarter, they announced this huge revenue backlog, which we find out later on is essentially all OpenAI.

11:53and the stock after they reported went up a third. And then people said, oh my goodness, they're going to have to spend a lot of money. They're going from generating a lot of free cashflow to burning it. And we'll see if OpenAI is going to be able to pay the bill. And so then the stock collapsed and it went down even lower than what it was before the announcement. So what I need to see here is I'm not necessarily worried about what they report this quarter for revenue and EPS. I'm sure it'll be fine. But they're going to have to do a couple of things or else they're going to be in some trouble.

12:30They're going to have to give us a comfort that this open AI backlog is for real and it won't be de-booked. And also, they're going to have to give us some comfort that at the end of the day, after all this AI infrastructure spending, they are going to go back to generating cash and making a pretty good profit margin. because that has been the narrative. It went from immediately positive after their last call to horribly negative, and that's where we are here. They're going to have to change the narrative. Right. It's almost like, look, sometimes you can get away with not listening to the call.

13:07You can just read the press release, read the numbers, and get the information you need. This one, I actually think it's the opposite. I think you can probably skip the numbers in some cases. You really got to laser in on what executives say. It's almost like the Federal Reserve statements. And so, I mean, people are going to be really nitpicking in terms of, well, why did they say that? Is that a signal for things going slower? Yeah, and it's a very good point you make. Like, for example, does it really matter what they report with revenue and EPS? I don't even know if it really matters what they report for their guidance for revenue and EPS.

13:39It's going to be long term. Is there going to be a pot of gold at the end of this AI rainbow? And you are super dependent on open AI. Is that savvy? We'll see. Right. Very quickly, before we get to Broadcom, what do you think of, you know, we read a lot in the news about the credit default swaps for Oracle having ticked up in price. What do you make of that? Well, it's obviously a negative, but I don't think that you'll ever have a situation where Oracle, even though it's now stretched, will have any problem paying its debts. Right. I think Oracle is going to be fine. Now, you may say, are you spending your money?

14:18Are you being smart? You know, that's in question, but I think they'll be just fine, right? Here's a company that they will spend, but they were a prodigious free cash flow generator. And you think about it, if they ever wanted to raise money, Wall Street would be happy to give it to them. Right. Very quickly, what about Broadcom? What are you watching for there? So Broadcom will be very interesting because Marvell Technology, its key competitor in essentially designing these XPUs for the hyperscalers. So they're not necessarily beholden to NVIDIA's GPUs. Marvell had a great report, even though the stock's getting hammered today on a Wall Street downgrade.

14:57So it'll be incumbent upon Broadcom to do the same. Because Broadcom is priced, is valued at a steep premium to Marvell. And so they're going to have to show that they're really worth it or i think the valuation gap will close and so we all know it's going to be good news but they're going to have to make us feel very good that they are gaining share particularly against broadcom with these hyperscalers to help them design their essentially nvidia gpu look-alike chips right well paul i want to thank you for coming on it is a busy week and so happy monday to you good luck with everything and we'll talk to you again very soon.

15:40Thanks for coming on the show. Best wishes, brother. Okay. Since the code red that Sam Altman issued last week, our newsroom has been feverishly talking to sources inside the company to understand how things have been changing on the ground. And through all their reporting, one name has come up time and time again, and that is Nick Turley, who heads up product for ChatGPT. Here to tell us more about why Turley has become such a central figure at OpenAI's business these days, I want to bring on Sri Mupiti, who co-authored a great profile of him over the weekend. Sri, welcome to the show. Happy Monday.

16:12Happy Monday. Great to be here. So it sounds like you had a busy weekend talking to folks at OpenAI. Tell us about who Nick Turley is. Of course. So Nick Turley is the head of ChatGPT for OpenAI, and that is a huge responsibility for a company that has 800 million plus users. Nick Turley's main role is to support the growth of ChatGPT along with any other types of business models that support that growth as well. For example, exploring ads as an opportunity, but it also includes making sure that you have enough GPUs, for example, to be able to service ChatGPT as well. He actually has been at the company since the start of 2021 before even ChatGPT even launched.

16:59So he was one of the main folks involved with launching ChatGPT from the beginning and has seen that growth of that product over the last couple of years. So it's not that he's only involved in sort of the front-end design and the product side of ChatGPT. He's also involved end-to-end in making sure that the thing has enough compute to operate. I mean, it's very much a comprehensive role. Yes, exactly. I think he began as like an IC product manager, which means that you're specifically involved with like building the product itself. But then over the years, his responsibilities has increased. So he had more control in terms of hiring people and delegating responsibilities.

17:36And then this year, he was promoted to the head of ChatGPT role, which is more of a cross-functional role to be able to ensure that one product is going as well as it could be, but also ensuring that he has the necessary resources for ChatGPT to succeed. And so talk to me about how his role has changed now in the last week, given that we are amidst this code red at OpenAI. Why has he become such a more important figure, is he kind of quarterbacking things? I'd say that Nick's role has really been something that has been solidified over the last year or so. I think more so Code Red just emphasizes that ChatGPT is such a pivotal, important part of OpenAI's growth.

18:19For example, having 800 million plus and being able to continue that growth to be able to hit 2.6 billion weekly active users by 2030 is a really intense goal, but to have someone to be able to look to. For example, Nick apparently has a weekly top-of-mind Slack messages that he shares with folks on their priorities. He writes these memos for people to understand the strategy and gets really involved with working with folks day-to-day across different types of the org. I think that why Nick is sort of being put to the front now is just because of his role as a head of ChatGPT to make sure that ChatGPT is able to continue to grow more than ever across the different conversations that we've had.

18:59one of the things that came up is that open ai is always in an urgent mode and always towards things and so some folks for example are describing it as like this last week being no different from weeks prior uh and they didn't really actually agree with the code red part but i think that sam's memo really emphasized that there is truly a code red so i think there's a different perspectives there now you talked to him you had an interview with him a couple days ago what did you learn from that conversation yes exactly so it was great to talk to nick in terms of understanding his priorities. So one of the key things about making ChatGPT to continue to grow is Nick's vision of being able to have it be a super assistant for people, where he described it as almost giving them superpowers to do things that they weren't able to do.

19:42For example, coding, if you aren't able to code, or getting medical advice if you weren't able to visit a doctor. And I think that super assistant vision really fits into sort of his other priorities of making one, the product very personalized to you. So that means that as you use the product more, it understands you more and can provide, for example, the things that Cherise specifically needs. The second is to have the context of ChatGPT. That means connecting it to different apps and things that are important to you. So for example, my Slack messages or my photos, if I needed to pull up different types of photos of my dog, for example.

20:20And the third is to actually take action on behalf of the user. And so this is building upon the search functionality. And Nick was actually one of the key folks that we found out of leading Search GPT, which is the search features that is incorporated into ChatGPT to make sure that they're not all up to date. So let me ask you this. You had this conversation with him, and you certainly spoke with, I think you and our colleagues spoke with 20 people who have either worked with Nick in the past are currently working with him through the course of your reporting. From that conversation, from all your reporting, did you walk away thinking that, I mean, Nick's got it under control.

21:00I mean, they're going to figure this out. OpenAI, they have this lead. The Code Red is about the lead sort of narrowing, but this is to sort of see if they can widen it. Did you leave away with a sense of confidence or did you leave the conversation thinking, you know what? I think the balls are in the air right now. I mean, we still need to see how this plays out. I think that AI is moving so quickly that you really don't know who's going to stay in the lead. I think it's just going to be really exciting to see OpenAI and Google and others be able to compete and move ahead quickly. I think one of the areas of feedback that folks had given Nick in terms of our conversations was that at times that he, as it has technically rooted in some of the research-specific research problems that researchers were working on.

21:45And so I think as research continues to increase and rapidly improve, I'm curious to see sort of how he's able to adapt to that and be able to incorporate it. So far, he's been able to do a great job of it so far in terms of actually turning ChatGPT into a product that folks are using based on GPT-3 research. But I think that there's still sort of opportunity for the company to continue iterating. So I am curious to see. I think there's a lot of questions still that I'd love to have answered. For example, how will you be able to pull off the super assistant vision? And with all the sort of other priorities that OpenAI has, I know Sam has sort of tried to focus everyone to focus on ChatGPT, but I know, for example, efforts, for example, to focus on advertising in some ways as well.

22:30So it'll be an exciting time for sure. It's a big job. So we appreciate you bringing Nick Turley to our attention and coming on the show and talking about him. Thank you so much. We will get back to you later this week, because I'm sure there'll be more news to uncover. That is Sri Mupini, who covers all things OpenAI and Anthropic here at The Information. Okay, while researchers at OpenAI were responding to a code red, many other researchers were gathered at one of the most important conferences for AI research, the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. It's not a conference about neuroscience.

23:05It's a conference about AI. My colleague, Stephanie Palazzolo, was there on the ground all week. And she wrote a story this morning about what she learned, and I want to bring her on to tell us more about what the talk of the town was on the ground. Stephanie, good morning. It's great to have you here. Hi, good morning. So what is this conference that has a terrible name, if I'm being honest, but apparently is the place to go for research? Yeah, so it's much more commonly known as NeurIPS, which is a lot easier to say than the full name. But essentially, NeurIPS is one of the kind of largest conferences held each year for AI researchers.

23:43And so in the past, it's been really more focused on academic researchers. But in more recent years, it's become, you know, much more popular for people to go to. And so this year they actually had more than 25 ,000 people there, including, you know, not only researchers, but now startup founders, investors that want to back them, and of course, journalists like myself. So you opened your story with this line from David Lawn, who does AI research at Amazon. The quote that you started with is, he said, I will guarantee that the way we're training models today will not last. Why did that line stand out to you?

24:23What did he even mean by that? Yeah, so David, who previously was the CEO of a company called Adept, and then also prior to that, he had also led engineering at OpenAI for quite a while. He was very quick to say, you know, whenever he says this sort of comment, he doesn't mean that pre-training is dead or scaling is dead or AI is over. But he's basically just saying that we're clearly missing some kind of key ingredients that we need to have in order to reach artificial general intelligence. And he does believe that model development is going to have to change a lot over time to be able to reach AGI.

25:01So, for instance, one thing that he and a lot of other researchers at the conference talked about, which I wrote about in this morning's piece, is the importance of something called continual learning. And so basically that is AI that's able to keep on learning even after it's been trained. And then so we also talked a lot about, David also talked a lot about the order of steps in training a model and how it doesn't necessarily make a ton of sense. And so right now there's a ton of compute and time that's spent in a phase called pre-training, where a model just looks at a ton of data from the internet and books.

25:36But David basically made a point, which is, why are we spending so much time showing models this kind of random, very general, but ultimately maybe not super relevant data from the internet, when we should be showing it more data that's related to the sorts of tasks that we're going to be asking the model to do in the future? Now, how does all this connect to some of the questions that you wrote about being raised around the physical sciences and biology, for example? You know, this has been a big promise of AI that, hey, the chatbots are one thing, but this could actually lead to cures for some of the diseases that we haven't been able to find them for yet.

26:14But I mean, I walked away from your story thinking that maybe people were a little bit skeptical of at least the near-term promise and also that promise actually being achieved given the way people are working on it. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's important to mention that, like, clearly AI companies are making a lot of money today from existing AI products, even if we're not to the point where AI is, like, finding new cures for diseases. and we're clearly not at this kind of super intelligence phase. So there's a lot of money to be made, you know, no matter what happens, even if the AI progress were to stop today.

26:50But yeah, I think in general, and not only at this conference, just from news stories we've seen in the past couple of weeks and sources that we've talked to, there has been kind of this growing skepticism around whether AI models will be able to kind of generalize beyond the data that they were trained on. And so, you know, Will they be able to come up with new discoveries that they've never seen before in training data and go beyond kind of the knowledge of the researchers that are training them and also the human experts that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring to, you know, write examples of tough answers and questions in fields like biology and medicine?