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. Insiders say that Anthropic is eyeing
a $2 trillion valuation for their IPO, the biggest
ever recorded. Nvidia is going to backstop $500
billion in AI data centers, which will be guaranteed
by GPU resale values. Shield font is going to.
poison AI scrapers by swapping words inside of
the text that humans can't see but the AI models
will. Lovable has raised $400 million at a $13
.3 billion valuation. Their annual recurring
revenue has tripled. Thrive Holdings has raised
$2 billion at a $12 billion valuation. They're
going to be essentially buying companies and
injecting open AI inside of them. AI models are
flagging fatty liver disease early as conditions
are hitting about 30 % of adults worldwide. If
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linked in the description, the AI box MCP, it
is AI box .ai slash MCP. Before we get into a
couple of the stories, I wanted to talk about
a few other headlines today. There's just so
much news that I didn't want to build, you know,
an hour long podcast episode. But I wanted to
give you guys a couple updates. One is that Uber
and Pony AI, they're going to deploy about 2000
robo taxis inside of Europe, just really wild.
Google is going to make the visible watermarks
on their AI images, video and audio optional.
Thank freaking goodness. I have been complaining.
And in fact, I had Logan Kilpatrick on a podcast
a few months ago. And I asked him about that.
I'm like, man, when is Google going to get rid
of if you've ever used like nano banana, there
is a watermark on the images inside of nano banana.
It's super annoying because you can't really
use them for anything without trying to crop
them out or using another AI tool to go and remove
that like chat GPT. So it just was it felt very
not super. usable without cropping stuff. So
happy that that's going to be a possibility.
Databricks has just raised $5 billion at $190
billion valuation. And finally, Cognition is
in talks to raise $40 billion valuation just
months after their $26 billion valuation round.
Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Thrive
Holdings because this is a really interesting
company. And I think the strategy is something
we might see with more PE moving forward in the
future. So Thrive Holdings is a company that
by traditional service businesses, and then it
rebuilds them around AI. They just raised $2
billion at a $12 billion valuation. They raised
the money from SoftBank and a bunch of other
investors, but they now own over 70 different
accounting and IT companies, and they're opening
a third division, which is focused on infrastructure
permitting and compliance work. Current tax AI
processed over 7 ,000 tax returns, and it did
it with a 98 % accuracy, and it cut tax prep
time by more than 30 % at the different firms
that were using it. Shield AI's tools sped up
IT help desk resolutions by 36x and it doubled
custom AI agent deployments in the last month.
And OpenAI took an ownership stake in December
of 2025, and they embed staff directly into portfolio
companies to help accelerate the AI rollout.
So I think this is interesting because they're,
you know, they're working with IT companies,
they're working with tax companies. I mean, something
like a 98 % accuracy is obviously impressive.
So you can see. There's a lot of value there.
But it's also interesting to me that OpenAI took
a literal ownership stake in this and they're
embedding their own staff to try to make this
work. So it's beyond just OpenAI saying, hey,
look, we're gonna make AI that works great for
AI or for tax companies. By taking an ownership
stake, like they're becoming a tax company, which
is really fascinating to me. Thrive in particular,
this company is betting that the real bottleneck
for AI in business isn't just the technology,
it's actually getting it implemented. And we've
- seen a bunch of these AI implementation companies
isn't the only one that opening eyes working
with and anthropics also working with some it's
usually they'll kind of go with some big investment
firms and create these but by owning entire service
firms rather than just selling the software to
them they're capturing the full benefit of the
productivity gains that AI can roll out and I
mean this isn't anything super revolutionary
if you think about it private equity firms oftentimes
will go buy a company or a bunch of companies
in the same space and then they'll consolidate
some of the back office, they'll they'll be able
to cut a bunch of staff because of this, and
they'll make the companies more profitable because
of it. So this is just a new element to it where
we're using AI to do that. But it's it's really
the same playbook that they've been doing for
a very long time. Lovable, which is based in
Sweden, is a platform. If you haven't heard it
already, it turns... I've talked about it a ton
on the show, so I would assume you have. It's
not a company I'm actively using right now. But
basically, if you want to build a web app or
some sort of website or tool, it's a really easy
way to get started with that. Today, I would
just say go use Cloud Cowork or ChatGPT Work
because they can do a lot of the same stuff.
But Lovable just raised $400 million at a $13
.3 billion value. Their ARR has about tripled.
So their user base is massive. Projects built
on lovable right now jumped from about 25 million
to 60 million in eight months and monthly visits
to those apps. quadrupled to about 900 million.
So not, not, you know, just visits exclusively
to lovable, but the apps that are built on lovable
are generating about 900 million visits, which
is absolutely wild. So their annual revenue,
like I mentioned, tripled, and that's just over
eight months. So I mean, this is a company that
is growing incredibly fast. lovable didn't say
exactly what their annual revenue number was,
but they're like, look, it tripled. So I'm not
going to put as much stock in that until I know
the actual number. Menlo ventures led this particular
round. They also led the previous one so i think
that they're very bullish on the company on the
metrics and they think that it's got some strong
growth numbers even if they're not telling them
all to us Lovable in particular now handles security
checks. They prompt users towards making safer
decisions. So if you're non -technical, which
is basically everyone using Lovable, you can
ship stuff really fast and you're not really
worried about the security angle. And when I
was using Lovable, because honestly, Lovable
to me was a gateway drug into vibe coding. I'm
not, I wouldn't have considered myself a technical
founder. And Lovable is how I got started building
apps by myself and kind of coding stuff. It does
like your backend. It does like your login. with
Google, it does, you know, links to your Stripe
payment. So it does a lot of this stuff for you.
And it makes it pretty simple. I'll say if you're
willing to invest like one or two days, you can
get off of lovable completely and just build
it from scratch with with something like Claude
coworker, Claude, or chat GPT work. And using
that all you need to do is set up a Vercel account,
a GitHub account, and you need to make a super
base account. So if you make accounts on those
three websites, you can get chat GPT work or
Claude co work to go get an API or an MCP link
them into into their tools, and they can just
build everything and work on everything for you.
So if you if you want to spend a couple days,
that's how I would do it. Otherwise, you can
go to level my only downside with lovable if
I'm being honest, which obviously they're they're
making an insane amount of money is it was pretty
expensive. And so I was just doing so much. And
what you got to appreciate is that Claude and
and ChatGPT both have like $20, $100, and $200
tiers. And all of those tiers, the tokens are
subsidized, especially if you're doing like a
$200 a month tier. You can get a ton of building,
a ton of coding done, and you get like thousands
of dollars worth of coding for $200. If you're
using lovable, it's all API based. And so you're
going to have to pay the thousands of dollars,
which I was when I was using lovable. And I was,
you know, once, once I think I spent $2 ,000
in a month on credits, I was like, okay, I need
to figure out a cheaper way to do this. And that's
when I moved to Claude. But you can build a really
impressive and really cool stuff there. NVIDIA
is backing a $500 billion data center financing
deal with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield,
Goldman Sachs, and KKR. And they are guaranteed
to cover 25 % of any losses if the GPUs use,
and they're using the GPUs as collateral for
any sort of loss in value. So that basically
is letting those six different companies fund
massive AI infrastructure build outs. And NVIDIA
is going to gain a channel to sell billions.
in GPU sales. They're not going to use their
own cash for it. They're just kind of like a
backstop on it. But they're going to make a ton
of money from this. This is really interesting
because NVIDIA has committed about $750 billion
in these type of deals just this summer. They
have deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, CoreWeave,
and a bunch of other AI companies. Bloomberg
was kind of reporting on this earlier. But the
guarantee basically creates a quote unquote wrong
way risk. So NVIDIA's obligation to pay grows
biggest exactly when GPU demand might get weak
and NVIDIA's own revenue would slow. So that's
kind of a dangerous moment, right? They're like,
hey, look, like if for some reason everything
crashes, like we'll backstop you. But like if
everything's crashing and no one's buying the
GPUs, NVIDIA, like their ability to backstop
them is going to be. Definitely strange. So it's
a tricky moment. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya
Nadella, recently recommended a book about railroad
era financial engineering that ended in collapse.
And so, you know, potentially there's other people
that are kind of looking at this and saying,
hey, maybe this is kind of like what happened
to the railroad as far as infrastructure spending
goes and saying that there are some dangerous
things happening. But in any case, if NVIDIA's...
residual value guarantee works, it could create
a kind of a really liquid secondhand market for
older GPU chips. And that would let startups
and smaller companies buy some of the older generations
of hardware, it would be a lot cheaper instead
of just always having to buy the newest stuff.
But that also assumes that GPU demand is going
to be really strong, right. And so I think Nvidia
is trying to like ensure it's strong by backstopping
these big firms to go build out all the new stuff.
And then the old stuff is still gonna be valuable
to other people. But you know, NVIDIA's liability
is going to be massive in in the case of anything
going wrong. Okay, this is an interesting story.
It's called shield font. And basically what it
does is it poisons AI scrapers by swapping out
different words. So in the HTML, when a scraper
is going and scraping your website or your blog,
it's going to show random words, mixed. in there
into a human you want to be able to see it but
in the html it's going to mess it all up and
so human readers go to your site they get everything
they want but if an ai model is trying to scrape
it it's going to get really jumbled up text and
it's going to mess up their llms for you know
producing high quality content. So they actually
tested it against six major AI scraping pipelines
and over 90 % of pages that were using shield
font were rejected by the scrapers quality filters.
So basically it's going to be, um, it's a technical
defense against AI models coming and trying to
train on your, on your data without being authorized
to do it. I love this concept if I'm being honest.
And of course I'm very bullish on AI and I think
like, you know, accelerate AI and I'm like very
pro that. But at the same time, I think these
AI models need to compensate people and people
take measures to ensure that that happens i'm
thrilled by it one thing that i've done is with
even like this podcast i've licensed my podcast
audio to different ai models that train um They
train models on, you know, just how people talk.
So it's general purpose. I'm not like cloning
my voice or anything. And it's been an awesome
revenue source for me. It's kind of random, but
it actually makes a ton of money. And I've seen
a lot of other people doing this with audio,
with video, with music. And by the way, if you're
interested in doing that and you have some sort
of data set, go to my website, fiund .com. I'll
leave a link in the description. It's fiund .com
where I will give you, I'll let you know what
your podcast or your YouTube. YouTube channel
or whatever your data set might be worth, if
you're interested in that. But yeah, so I love
this. And I think this is a great way to help
people get paid and kind of fight back against
scraping that isn't authorized per se. I mean,
if people want to opt into it, fantastic. If
you want to opt out of it, I think there should
be a way to opt out of it. And sometimes even
when you have like a do not scrape, they still
go scrape you. So I think this is this is the
next best thing and they, you know, they get
what they pay for. AI models that are trained
on routine blood tests and chest x -rays can
now spot fatty liver disease early. So this is
a condition that affects about 30 % of adults
worldwide. And if you can catch it early, it
helps because liver damage is reversible if you
have like treatment or some lifestyle changes.
But yeah, three quarters of patients only get
diagnosed when it is already life threatening.
So there was an OSCA. Metropolitan University
model that identified fatty liver diseases from
chest x -rays. It had an 82 % accuracy, so it's
able to spot spotting the liver fat in really
small slices of organs that are visible on like
routine scans. And Evito's LiverPro algorithm,
which was built from age and nine blood biomarkers,
outperformed the standard FIB4 test across 470
,000 middle -aged patients, and it's now being
commercialized. by Roche. So I love that because
we kind of had the standard test, and they came
up with a new algorithm and it and it beats it.
And so that's what's actually going to be commercialized
and rolled out for everyone. The liver actually
can regenerate and it can also reverse fibrosis
if you catch it early. So if you know this kind
of treatment is lifestyle stuff, I think we know
the things that aren't good for our liver, but
your doctor can definitely tell you more about
what what's entitled there. But yeah, I think
this is phenomenal. And this is something that
is really exciting to me. I love it anytime that
AI can help with healthcare can help cure diseases
can help solve diseases. And so this is something
that I'm really excited about. Guys, thanks so
much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed
it, and you want to get access to over 80 different
AI models inside of clot or anywhere else, go
check out AI box .ai. And I hope to see you all
on the next episode.