Welcome to the AI Chat Podcast. I'm your host,
Jaden Schaefer. Every day I cover cutting -edge
AI news and talk with the leaders behind it,
breaking down what it means for your life and
business. OpenAI is offering the United States
a 5 % stake in a sovereign AI wealth fund, and
Bernie Sanders is pushing for a 50 % tax. Cursor's
$60 billion SpaceX deal is putting their OpenAI
and Anthropic relationship into question, as
that's getting a little bit more tricky now that
they've been purchased by one of their biggest
competitors. Anthropic is currently in talks
with Samsung to create a custom AI chip, and
Meta is putting their smart glasses behind a
MetaOne premium subscription. Will people pay?
That is the question. Microsoft has just committed
$2 .5 billion to Frontier. This is a new AI deployment
company. This is not new. We've seen the same
thing from OpenAI and from Anthrop... If you
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to help you grow and scale your business using
AI tools. OpeningEye is offering to give the
United States government, and I think really
kind of the entire United States theoretically,
a 5 % equity stake. This is kind of the same
as Alaska. They have an oil wealth division fund.
This is parts of some earlier talks that the
Trump administration was doing. And right now,
this is also sitting right between... big public
pressure campaigns we're seeing. We have Senator
Bernie Sanders that is, you know, he has a competing
plan. He says he would like 50 % a one -time
tax on all of the leading AI firms where they
just give 50%. And so I think OpenAI is like
happy to offer 5 % when the Bernie Sanders 50
% is the other offer being proposed. Bernie Sanders
proposal would raise about $7 trillion through
a one -time 50 % stock tax, which is 50 % of
the company and the proceeds and direct payments.
I would go to healthcare and housing and other,
you know. programs that Bernie Sanders deems
fit. The Trump administration has separately
approached Google and Meta about a very similar
equity stake. I think neither of those companies
has publicly said that they are going to sign
any sort of agreement like that. And I think
70 % of Americans right now oppose AI data centers
in the area. 50 % more have concern about excitement
rather than excitement about AI. So if you look
at some of the polling that's going on inside
of the country, there is, you know, a lot of
negative sentiment that goes towards AI. And
I think that's what OpenAI and maybe the Trump
administration is trying to help. Bernie Sanders
wants to just take 50 % of it. We'll see which
of these two models plays out in the end. Cursor
was acquired for $60 billion by SpaceX, but,
you know, famously, its two biggest, I guess,
suppliers or customers or however you want to
call it, are OpenAI and Anthropic, right? Cursor
uses OpenAI and Anthropic to power their tools
or to let developers do that. And so people are
calling into question if this relationship can
continue, right? If Cursor was purchased by SpaceX,
which is going to have XAI and XAI code running
things inside of Cursor. Can they keep a good
relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic? We've
seen other companies that have grown and been
bought out go through very similar challenging
relationships. Scale .ai was purchased, or 50
% of it was purchased by Meta, and their CEO
was brought on to run Meta .ai. And when that
happened, some of their biggest customers were
Google and OpenAI, and both of those companies
cut ties with them because of the competition.
Cursor is already training their own next model
on SpaceX infrastructure. They have 10 to 20
times more compute than they previously had.
because SpaceX gave it to them. So obviously
Elon Musk is investing in building their own
native capabilities. But the precedent for these
coding tools specifically, I think is stronger
than just what happened to scale AI because Windsurf,
another very famous coding tool, was purchased
by OpenAI last year. And when that happened,
Anthropic cut off their cloud access. So I think
there's a lot of precedent. It's very possible
that Cursor is going to get their OpenAI or cloud
access cut off. But this one seems a little bit
trickier because Cursor really is just synonymous
with coding. in the industry. I mean, outside
of Cloud Code and maybe Codex, like this is the
biggest coding tool that exists out there. I
would be, you know, shocked if it, you know,
if they really did cut it off, because that would
be a ton of users that no longer would be, would
be, you know, essentially giving free money to
OpenAI and Anthropic, especially because Cursor
signed up with a lot of enterprise contracts.
And actually one really funny turn of events
in all of this is that OpenAI startup fund, they
were actually an early investor in Cursor, and
they're going to convert their stake into SpaceX
stock. So with all of this acquisition that's
going on, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who both
have a lot of beef, OpenAI is going to get a
direct financial stake into Cursor's success
and also XAI, even though Codex is a direct competitor.
So that's kind of funny. So there is a big move
happening with Anthropic right now. They're in
talks with Samsung to create a custom AI chip.
They're joining OpenAI, Google, Amazon, all of
them that are trying to basically reduce the
reliance on NVIDIA as NVIDIA is, you know, know,
making record sales. Right now doing all of this
is both kind of targeted at costs and supply
constraints. When you make this custom silicone,
it's in, you know, when these labs are creating
it themselves, it's going to let them optimize
their own architectures. And also they can negotiate
leverage against any sort of dominant supplier,
right? So NVIDIA has been very dominant for a
long time. And in fact, when you're trying to
go and get GPUs or whatnot from NVIDIA, they
have a certain amount that they'll allocate to
different companies, but they're trying to spread
it out. because the demand is just so high. So
this is not great because if someone like OpenAI,
Anthropic, Google, they only can get a maximum
amount from NVIDIA. So if they can build their
own, not only does that kind of ease that constraint,
that supply constraint, but also, you know, maybe
they have some better negotiating power. Look,
we can build our own for X price if you would
be able to bring the price of yours down. So
I think it's kind of a long -term play for negotiating
power with NVIDIA as well. OpenAI also just unveiled
their own custom chip. It's called a Jalapeno.
They did this last week. that with Broadcom,
and they're claiming that it's going to offer
better performance per watt than any of the other
competitors. And I think when you're, you know,
when you're building this custom for your software
or hardware stack, it's, you know, it makes a
lot of sense that they're able to achieve those
kind of efficiencies. So I think Anthropic has
seen this and trying to do the same thing. Samsung
already manufactures NVIDIA's chips, and they
do that for their AI training. And they're also
building a joint AI chip factory in South Korea
with NVIDIA right now. So, you know, I think
they're kind of at the center of the supply.
chain Samsung's working with Nvidia. So it's
kind of a no brainer for Anthropic to go there
as a partner to build out this chip. Anthropic's
project, though, is definitely in the early stages,
these chips are not quick, they take a very long
time to build. And the purpose, the server role,
the performance targets, none of that have actually
been finalized. So I think you can kind of imagine
this is gonna be a multi year development timeline.
I mean, I've been hearing, you know, rumors of
opening eye working on this stuff for many years.
And it seems like Anthropic is just getting there
and realizing this is something that they need
to do. In other news, Meta is putting their smart
glass features behind a premium subscription.
It's kind of interesting, right? Facebook has
kind of always been known as the free forever.
They just monetize through ads. They're starting
to spin out these new products, and they're trying
to do premium subscription models. So if you
want to get all of the latest features with their
smart glasses, you're going to have to pay a
subscription that's starting with conversation
focus, which is basically going to enhance voice
clarity in noisy settings. So I've heard this
kind of pitched as like if you're in a noisy
train station, and there's a ton of people talking.
If you're talking to someone, their voice is
going to get isolated and amplified by the speakers
in your headset, so you can actually hear them
better. All you have to do is look in their direction.
and you'll be able to hear the sound of their
voice louder than all of the noisy surroundings.
But what's interesting, they do give you some
free. They give you three hours a month for free
and they give you 15 hours for $10 a month of
Meta 1 Premium. I'm not sure if you turn this
on or if it automatically detects and tells you
when it runs out. I mean, it's basically usage
-based AI like every other platform. It's just
interesting how they're going to try to make
this seamless and if they're going to just, you
know, all of a sudden you're halfway through
a conversation, everything's being perfectly
amplified. and then it cuts out, right? So, I
mean, and I don't know like how many conversations
if you're having more than 15 hours of conversations
in noisy train stations or maybe on like a noisy
job site, it'll be interesting to see where this
gets rolled out. This is definitely a big monetization
play. It's not kind of a cost recovery one. The
feature runs entirely on device. So there's no
server cost to meta. So they're just trying to
generate revenue from this. I think this shows
that AI hardware is gonna get a lot of value
that they can extract after their users already
have the glasses, which. means they can basically
sell their glasses at a loss assuming they have
you know this conversation focus and probably
a bunch of other ai features they'll roll out
in the future especially if it can be computed
on device they're not incurring any extra cost
for it you just pay for it honestly kind of reminds
me of tesla and their self -driving how like
the technology is already in the tesla cars and
if you just pay for it um then all of a sudden
it's enabled meta's new $299 meta branded glasses
are sold at break even. So they're really trying
to grow their adoption. You know, previously
it was about $100 more if you wanted the meta
Ray -Bans, but now they're just selling them
by themselves. And there is a very razor thin
model of, you know, monetization on this. And
then basically the hardware gets cost and they're
trying to get the reoccurring software subscriptions
to drive all of the revenue. And they're not
the only people doing this because Google is
also launching a competing. smart glasses this
year they're partnering with samson to do that
and warby parker and gentle monster google's
own inference efficiency gains i think are going
to let them bundle a lot more features than meta
is and they're not going to have as much of aggressive
tiering i don't think but they're not the only
ones doing this apple is also having a bunch
of their AI features behind a paywall and Google
has other ones. Google specifically with their
pixel video boost, it's going to require a specific
Google one tier on their pixel devices. And Gemini
live is also behind the Gemini premium. Um, and
if you even like with iOS 27 for Apple, they
have a bunch of photo editing that is locked
in higher iCloud plus plan. So if you want some
of the better features, you're going to have
to also pay for that. Microsoft is launching
a new AI deployment company called frontier.
They're putting 2 .5 billion. dollars into this
it's going to be its very own unit and they're
going to have about 6 000 engineers that are
kind of be going to be directly embedded into
different companies. And they're trying to basically
deploy AI systems end to end. So this is something
that we've seen OpenAI also spin out like separate
companies and get investors in these separate
deployment companies. Anthropic has also done
this and they're partnering with a bunch of big
players. So it's interesting. It feels like the
next step for these labs as they're trying to
get more sales and more users in companies is
to just basically get these engineers and they're,
you know, sending them in there for at cost.
or free or charging them something. And they're
going to go and implement all of the Microsoft
or all of the OpenAI or all of the Anthropic
systems inside of that company and try to get
their usage up as high as possible. There is
a huge development deployment race right now
with AWS. They announced a rival $1 billion venture
just two days earlier. And I think both of these
companies are betting that enterprises need hands
-on implementation help. So it's not just about,
you know, hey, go sign up for OpenAI and let
your team use it. It's like, look, we're going
to give you these engineers that are going to...
to go and actually implement this for you. Just
to put that into context, though, with their
6 ,000 engineers, Frontier is about six times
larger than Palantir's entire FTE organization
when they first IPO'd. And it's about double.
AWS's announced commitment. So, I mean, this
is a huge move for them. They have a bunch of
early partners, including the London Stock Exchange
Group, Unilever, Lando Lakes, and Accenture.
They have a mix of some of the big data -heavy
supply chain system integrator customers. I mean,
Microsoft's massive, so this is not a shocker
in any way. But their existing Azure and Microsoft
365 relationships, I think, give them a lot of
embedded engineers already inside of most of
the Fortune 500 companies. This is a big structural
advantage they have over AWS. which is going
to have to build this from the ground up. So
yeah, Microsoft has kind of a leg in this from
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rest of your day.