For years, the browser was this perfectly safe
sandbox. We kept our AI models neatly contained,
you know, behind digital screens. Yeah, totally
contained. But right now, the tech is aggressively
stepping out. It's literally taking physical
control of the real world. We're watching it
run the back end of major banks. We're even seeing
it... um control human hand muscles directly
which is just crazy i mean we are talking about
raw electrical signals bypassing our brains entirely
so welcome to today's deep dive i'm really glad
you're here with us yeah thanks for having me
today we're looking at the landscape of may 2026.
we are unpacking a massive shift happening right
now ai labs are just Well, they're done waiting
for users to sign up. They're completely done.
Right. They're forcibly embedding themselves
into the global economy. They're entirely rebuilding
their infrastructure just to handle real time
human interaction and, you know, causing real
world hardware shortages in the process. It's
an incredibly wild time to be watching this space.
The whole landscape is shifting right under our
feet. We're seeing this rapid transition from
like digital toys to. physical reality. And it's
happening much faster than anyone modeled. Exactly.
So let's start by just following the money. Always
a good idea to understand where AI is going.
We first have to look at the enterprise side.
The biggest labs in the world are forcing their
way in. They're actively drilling into the corporate
bedrock of our economy because they have these
massive IPO goals they need to hit. And to do
that, they basically need to be indispensable.
Right. And. Subscriptions alone just aren't enough
anymore. OpenAI and Tropic realized a very hard
financial truth recently. Yeah. You simply can't
wait for individual people to buy a plus plan.
Consumer subscriptions are just historically
fickle. Users churn all the time. They do. If
you want to hit... multi -billion dollar IPO
numbers, you need guaranteed revenue. You need
deep institutional contracts that span years.
You essentially have to physically go into their
offices. You have to custom build the intelligence
for them. OpenAI just made a structural move
here. They quietly created something called the
deployment company. Oh, yeah. It's already valued
at. $10 billion. Which is staggering. Right.
OpenAI owns the vast majority of the equity,
but they've got serious heavy hitters backing
them. TPG, Brookfield, SoftBank, they're all
getting involved. That is undeniably serious
institutional capital entering the chat. And
their deployment strategy is, frankly, highly
aggressive. They're targeting over 2 ,000 major
portfolio companies. The ultimate goal is integrating
GPT 5 .4 and Codex directly into their systems.
They want to fundamentally rewire how these companies
operate. It's not a tool anymore. It's a completely
new operating system. A totally new operating
system. Yeah. And Anthropic certainly isn't sitting
on the sidelines here. They formed their own
private equity coalition to compete. Right. Blackstone,
Goldman Sachs, Hellman and Friedman. Anthropic
is aggressively going after the midsize market.
But, you know, their actual integration method
is fascinating to me. It really is. They aren't
just sending a download link. They're literally
embedding their own flesh and blood engineers
into these companies. Right. And that is a crucial
distinction. They aren't just selling an API
key and hoping for the best. No. They're sending
highly paid human engineers physically into the
building. These engineers are actively rewriting
entrenched legacy workflows. They're using Claude
to rebuild operations from scratch. So they're
basically hiring a totally new kind of worker,
not just developers who sit in code. They need
engineers who can persuasively talk to a CEO.
Yeah, translators, basically. Exactly. The biggest
example of this is Anthropic's partnership with
FIS. FIS is a staggeringly massive deal. For
context, it's a software running a huge chunk
of global banks. We're talking about the core
financial plumbing of the world. Anthropic is
bringing Claude directly into that sensitive
ecosystem. By late 2026, it's going to be widely
available across the sector. Institutions like
BMO and Amalgamated Bank will be running on it.
It's kind of like stacking Lego blocks of data
directly into the foundation of Wall Street.
That's a great way to put it. But these blocks
are constantly thinking. They're actively adapting.
If one block decides to change its shape, the
whole tower shakes. Beat. It's honestly a little
terrifying. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I still wrestle
with prompt drift myself. We all do. Getting
a model to just stay on track is genuinely hard.
Yet they're trusting AI to run global banks seamlessly.
Well, that underlying risk is exactly why they
embed human engineers. They absolutely cannot
afford any prompt drift at a major bank. Right.
Joint ventures secure that guaranteed revenue
stream. When you're deeply integrated into a
bank's ledger, you're incredibly sticky. You
don't just get canceled like a Spotify subscription.
No, you become a permanent utility. Exactly.
Sierra is another perfect example of this enterprise
demand. Yeah. Sierra's wild. They just raised
$950 million. Yeah. That puts their valuation
at $15 billion. They already serve 40 % of the
entire Fortune 50. Their annual recurring revenue
jumped from $100 million to $150 million. Almost
overnight. It's crazy fast. It clearly proves
the corporate market is starving for this infrastructure.
It effectively shows that enterprise AI is not
a bubble. It's a structural rewiring of how corporate
infrastructure operates. The raw demand for automated
workflows is just staggering. Companies are panicking
that they'd be left behind. Okay, let me pause
and get this straight. If they are embedding
AI into the core of global banking, how does
the infrastructure keep up without crashing?
Well, they realized they couldn't use the old
Internet backbone. They had to completely rip
out the old web architecture. They built a totally
new split brain system for real time scale. So
they basically built a brand new Internet just
to handle the load. Exactly. And that naturally
brings us to the voice infrastructure miracle.
You simply can't rewrite global bank operations
without flawless systems. You need split -second
reliability at a massive scale. OpenAI recently
released an engineering deep dive detailing this
exact flex. And the raw numbers are absolutely
staggering. As of May 2026, OpenAI officially
handles 900 million weekly active users. Think
about the physical volume of data moving there.
To make a digital conversation feel human, it
has to be fast. The AI constantly has to handle
unpredictable human interruptions. It has to
manage conversational turn -taking seamlessly.
And traditional web setups just couldn't handle
it. that kind of dynamic load. Yeah. Standard
HTTP requests naturally have way too much inherent
lag. It breaks the illusion of a conversation
instantly. Yeah, it does. So OpenAI just ditched
the old setups entirely. They moved to a custom
WebRTC on Kubernetes stack. Let's define that
jargon quickly. That's just tech that keeps live
audio streams stable without crashing. Spot on.
For you listening, think of the old internet
like sending letters. There's always a noticeable
delay waiting for a response. WebRTC is like
keeping an unclosable phone line directly open.
That's a perfect visual. And to actually make
it work, they created a brilliant split -brain
infrastructure. They didn't just shove everything
onto one overheating server. They divided the
computational labor to mass. maximize speed.
Right. They built a very lightweight component
they call a relay. The relay just handles the
fast moving data packets. Its only job is to
move raw audio quickly. Then. They built a much
heavier stateful transceiver. The transceiver
does all the actual heavy cognitive lifting.
It handles the complex AI thinking and all the
deep encryption. And they aggressively pushed
this entire architecture out to the edge. They
systematically deployed global relays at the
Internet's physical edge. Which is wildly expensive.
Incredibly expensive. It effectively means your
voice hits a server almost instantly. The millisecond
a sound leaves your lips, it... It aggressively
cuts down the jitter and the conversational lag.
It happens before the data even reaches the main
model. And, you know, the core models themselves
are entirely different now. We're talking about
GPT 5 .5 and GPT real -time 1 .5. They are entirely
audio native from the ground up. This is a profoundly
deep shift in computer science. They aren't translating
your natural speech into text anymore. Instead
of reading a transcript, they're processing the
pure sound waves. They can actually hear the
hesitation or excitement in your voice. They
process pure sound and speak with raw emotion
directly. The median latency is currently sitting
under 500 milliseconds. That is literally faster
than human reaction time. Whoa. Imagine scaling
to a billion queries. Two sec silence. It's genuinely
hard to even wrap your head around the physics
of that. Managing millions of concurrent stateful
audio sessions is computationally brutal. Stateful
means the server constantly remembers the entire
conversation. It holds the context open. Exactly.
It holds the context completely open while you
talk. Doing that seamlessly for 900 million people
without dropping context is brilliant engineering.
But hold on. Think about the real world impact
here. With 900 million people talking to audio
native AI in real time, isn't that putting insane
stress on actual physical hardware? Oh, it absolutely
is. It's heavily straining the global power grid.
It's gotten to the point that developers are
panic buying consumer hardware to keep up. Wow.
The cloud alone simply can't handle everything
locally anymore. Right. The digital boom is creating
a massive physical supply chain bottleneck. Exactly.
And that seamlessly leads us to the profound
fiction we're seeing. We are actively moving
from digital infrastructure into physical reality.
The scale of pure audio models. hits the real
world hard. So if OpenAI is processing 900 million
live audio streams, they're shifting a massive
compute burden onto the grid. And that macroeconomic
cloud strain is why we're seeing a microeconomic
panic at the consumer level. Specifically, we
are seeing this happen with Apple hardware. Yeah,
Apple didn't foresee this. They didn't completely
foresee this sudden crunch. Right now, Mac Mini
and Mac Studio stock is running critically low.
Software developers are aggressively hoarding
these specific desks. cop machines because they
desperately need them to run their local AI agents.
Prices on the secondary market are already rising
significantly. People intensely want to run AI
locally for strict data privacy. They want to
avoid that frustrating cloud latency entirely.
So they're literally buying up every single Mac
they can find. Industry experts think this severe
shortage could easily hit iPhones next. If the
iPhone supply chain actually gets hit, that is
massive. It changes consumer tech availability
overnight. It really does. And it's definitely
not just physical supply chain friction we're
dealing with. We're actively seeing major regulatory
friction popping up, too. The White House is
currently weighing some very serious new AI oversight
rules. Yeah, they urgently want early access
to new foundational models. The stated rationale
from the administration is actually pretty straightforward.
They want to manage the societal risks if things
go completely wrong. It isn't really about broadly
blocking AI development. They just want a thorough
look under the hood before public deployment.
Wait, hold on. If I'm understanding this dynamic
right, the White House isn't trying to shut these
local agents down. They just want a backdoor
view into them because they're nervous. They're
realizing an uncensored AI running freely on
a local Mac studio is a wild card. Is that basically
what's driving this sudden oversight push? Yeah,
because the sheer lack of visibility is deeply
concerning to regulators. If we connect the dots,
the entire trend makes sense. The intense consumer
desire for privacy and edge computing is driving
this shift. Right. Everyday people want autonomous
agents running locally in their own homes. That
desire directly drives the massive Apple hardware
shortage. And that decentralized deployment immediately
prompts governments to seek visibility. They
desperately want to know what is actually running
on those machines. But let's bring this down
to the listener for a second. If governments
and hardware can barely keep up. How is this
rapid integration actually showing up for everyday
users right now? It's actively bleeding into
highly personal physical applications at an unprecedented
pace. We're seeing it fundamentally shift physical
wearables and daily digital tools. So the tech
is already fundamentally altering our daily physical
and digital routines. Completely. We're rapidly
moving from macroeconomic shortages down to the
micro level. This is fundamentally about what
you can actually use today. The sheer speed of
practical applications application development
is staggering right now. Let's actually look
at the wildest edge case first, because this
one honestly blew my mind when I read about it.
There's a brand new AI wearable device out there
right now. Well, this is crazy. It literally
controls your human hands using direct electrical
signals. It actively lets you perform physical
skills you never learned. It's fascinating. It
sends calibrated impulses straight to your hand
muscles. It's almost literally like downloading
physical abilities directly into your body. Yeah.
It bypasses your brain's slow motor learning
process entirely. It feels very sci -fi. It feels
exactly like that scene in The Matrix. Totally.
You just plug a cable in and suddenly you magically
know Kung Fu. Or, you know, maybe you instantly
know how to play the piano. You strap it on.
Yeah. Your fingers are doing complex tasks. It's
fascinating, but it's also profoundly weird to
think about. It definitely bridges a crazy gap
between biology and machine. But we also have
very practical everyday tools bridging a similar
gap. Look at what XAI just launched into the
market this week. They released a wildly powerful
new API specifically for voice cloning. It's
wild. It lets you create. hyper -realistic custom
voices. You can use them for podcasts, autonomous
agents, synthetic videos. You can freely pick
from over 80 distinct voices. They cover 28 different
global languages with perfect accents. And the
actual pricing model is what's truly disruptive.
It starts at literally just $3 an hour. It completely
commoditizes high -end voice production. Yeah.
Anyone with a laptop can instantly spin up a
multilingual ad campaign now. You don't need
a massive recording studio or professional actors
anymore. Right. Speaking of the advertising world,
Meta just made a huge integration play. Meta
now actively lets you connect AI straight into
your ad account. You can directly plug in ChatGP
to your cloud to run campaigns. The AI natively
talks to your potential customers directly in
the chat. The rapid adoption rate there is absolutely
staggering. Weekly automated conversations jumped
from 1 million to 10 million almost overnight.
Wow. Small businesses are entirely letting the
AI handle their sales funnels. It's negotiating,
answering questions and closing deals in real
time. We're also seeing an absolute flood of
rapid fire. Daily tool updates, just highly practical
tools you might use every single day. There's
a new one called Avatar getting a lot of traction.
It perfectly removes complex image backgrounds
in one single click. It automatically balances
colors flawlessly. It even intelligently restores
missing parts of an old image. Then you have
highly creative niche things like codex pets.
I love them. Right? They're totally optional,
small, animated companions specifically for Codex.
They just sit quietly on your screen and show
your thread status. They physically reflect whether
Codex is actively running or just waiting. It
has an interesting bit of personality to the
coding process. There's also Droppy, which I
think is a massive shift in retail power. It
isn't just a basic price tracker. It's an autonomous
agent fighting massive retail pricing algorithms.
It constantly tracks Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress
silently in the background. You just get a notification
the exact millisecond a price drops. It shifts
the power completely back to the consumer. And
for independent website owners, there's a huge
shift with sleek analytics. It's a completely...
Privacy -first encrypted alternative to Google
Analytics. It aggressively offers real -time
data, entirely cookie -less tracking, and fast
dashboards. All these diverse tools share one
major common thread. They're taking highly complex
AI architecture and making it utterly simple
to use. Let's pause on that idea for a second
because the societal implications are massive.
With AI literally moving our hands and cloning
our voices, where does the human element fit
in? I think the human element fundamentally shifts
up the cognitive chain entirely. As AI flawlessly
handles the raw execution of tasks, we elevate.
Our primary role permanently becomes one of deep
curation. We handle the broad strategy and the
complex intention behind the action. We decide
what needs doing and the AI natively does it.
Basically, we stop doing the heavy lifting and
become the directors. Exactly. We confidently
call the strategic shots. We architect the vision
and the machine executes the labor. Let's pull
all of this incredible information together.
We've covered a truly massive amount of ground
today. Mid -roll sponsor Red Placeholder. We
started by looking at AI labs infiltrating major
banks. They launched a massive $10 billion integration
strategy to do it. They're actively securing
guaranteed revenue from the global corporate
economy. Then we look deep into the underlying
infrastructure, making it possible. They absolutely
had to rebuild internet audio architecture from
scratch. Yeah. They're serving 900 million users
seamlessly with a split brain system. They completely
achieved sub -500 millisecond latency for pure
emotional audio processing. And that massive
digital explosion inevitably caused serious physical
friction. We saw severe Apple hardware shortages
hitting the secondary market hard. Software developers
are aggressively hoarding Macs to run local agents.
And the White House is pushing hard for new regulatory
oversight. And it all eventually culminates in
the most personal edge cases imaginable. Wearables
that literally control your human muscles with
electrical signals. XAI flawlessly cloning your
exact voice for just $3 an hour. The great integration
is officially no longer just a pending software
update. It is a tangible, rapidly accelerating.
physical reality happening right now. It really
truly is. Thank you so much for joining us on
this deep dive today. I highly encourage you
to actively check out some of the specific tools
we mentioned today. See exactly how they might
seamlessly fit into your own daily workflow.
And please be sure to subscribe for our next
deep dive into this rapidly changing world. It's
always an absolute pleasure to critically unpack
this landscape with you. There's literally always
something entirely new and profound to learn.
I want to leave you with one final lingering
thought today. If AI can perfectly replicate
our voices with XAI and literally control our
physical movements with new wearables, how long
until we can't tell the difference between a
skill we genuinely learned and a skill we simply
rented for the afternoon? Beat. Let that sink
in.