The Unlikely Anthropic & SpaceX Marriage, OpenAI Trial Revelations, AI Layoffs Or Cope?

Anthropic and SpaceX partner up in an epic collaboration that could change the AI race. We're awash in revelations from the OpenAI trial, and are AI layoffs just cope? That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. This week, I'm live at Knowledge 2026, ServiceNow's annual conference in Las Vegas, where enterprise AI moves from promise to production. I'm sitting down with ServiceNow's president and CPO, Amit Zavery, on the platform strategy powering it all, their people and technology leaders on what AI means for the workforce, the engineering team behind ServiceNow's NVIDIA partnership, and what it really takes to ship AI at scale, and Ultra Beauty on deploying AI across 1300 stores. These are the conversations you won't hear anywhere else, and new episodes are dropping this week on my YouTube page. We've all heard the stat, 95% of AI initiatives fail. It's not because the technology isn't ready. It's because you don't have the right process or the right partner. Meet Abord. Abord is your partner for AI transformation, which means they listen, use their very own powerful software tools, and deliver exactly what your company needs to thrive in the age of AI. Working with big and small clients, Abord always delivers in weeks, not months. Your AI revolution is just beginning. Visit abord.com to get your AI rollout right. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Well, it's tough to pick what to lead with this week because we have lots of big news about the AI race, including news that Anthropic and SpaceX will partner up where Anthropic will use SpaceX's capacity. We also have lots of stunning revelations from the OpenAI Musk trial and a number of big layoffs happening in the tech industry. Are they actually AI displacing people or just cope? We'll talk about it all. Joining us as always on Fridays to do it is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, welcome. Man, those text messages. I cannot wait to get to that, but I think certainly space compute is always a good place to start as well. I was tempted, very tempted to begin today's show with a dramatic reading of the text messages between Sam Altman and former OpenAI CTO and former OpenAI interim CEO, Mira Morati, that came out in court this week. Don't worry, listeners and viewers. Ranjan and I will be doing that. We will be giving you that dramatic reading in the middle of this show. But I resisted the temptation because I believe this Anthropic and SpaceX deal is, I think, about some of the biggest news you will get in the AI race this year. And we will take you right there. So here's the story from the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic inks deal to use all of SpaceX's Colossus one compute capacity. Anthropic will use all the computing capacity from SpaceX's Colossus one data center in a new agreement with Elon Musk's Rockets and artificial intelligence company. So SpaceX will supply 300 megawatts of new computing capacity using more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of the month, Anthropic said Wednesday. Anthropic also expressed interest in a partnership with SpaceX to build AI data centers in space, long one of Musk's top priorities. The agreement comes as Anthropic has struggled to gather enough computing power to fuel enormous demand for its AI models. I don't even know what adjective to use here. Stunning, shocking, mind-blowing. I mean, Elon Musk has spent the better part of, I don't know, a year or longer, railing on Dario, talking about how Anthropic is actually misanthropic. And now he is renting them effectively an entire data center worth of GPUs to help them pursue their goals. What's your reaction here, Ranjan? Yeah, what is the adjective to describe this deal? I don't know. I agree. I'm having a hard time. I think the problem with so many of these deals, and I'm putting that in quotation marks, is they're over a longer period of time. They start to provide access, but everything with Oracle and OpenAI, everything, like these giant compute deals all feel as much signaling as reality in terms of kind of delivering compute. Yes, Anthropic is in dire need of compute and rate limiting and all this has been one of the big issues that's actually been hurting them recently. The idea that Elon Musk and SpaceX are going to kind of come to the rescue of Anthropic is just, it's both shocking and mind-blowing, but it's also, as SpaceX is looking to IPO, having this massive new revenue source where you basically become like, what is the fastest growing company in the world? Who are they completely dependent on? Us. So I think I see that side of it, but do you think one year from now that SpaceX will be a major provider of compute to Anthropic? Yes, yes. And I, you know, I am stunned to hear you downplay this news. Here, let me tell you why I think that this is significant. First of all, this is all but an admission by SpaceX, which of course is the company above Open, sorry, XAI, which Elon Musk basically, Elon Musk merged X into XAI and merged XAI into SpaceX. So SpaceX is the company that holds all of them. There was a time not that long ago where XAI was considered one of the top players, or at least one with a great shot. Remember, it had used this capacity to develop benchmark-breaking AI models. And here we are, it's in May 2026. This is effectively it giving up. It's saying, you know, it doesn't know how to effectively use this compute capacity to train models, or if it did, it wouldn't be worth the expense because it would still be behind OpenAI and Anthropic. And so therefore, it's now turned its business to renting data centers, right? It's now the new CoreWeave as opposed to the new OpenAI. So I think that is a fascinating development here. And I also think that, yes, it is, if you think about it from where the race stands, this will have a meaningful impact because the way that this race has been setting up, you've had OpenAI, which has had more compute and has sort of now following Anthropic in this, you know, sort of code model with codex as Anthropic has Claude code. And we're going to get into the demand about Claude code in a moment. It's crazy. And then you had you had Anthropic. And the big thing holding Anthropic back was it was unable to deliver the models because of capacity constraints. And so now you have Elon and Dario teaming up to effectively take on OpenAI here, which is fascinating. I know I shouldn't be this not cynical about these announcements. I think what is interesting about these kind of like big types of alliances and announcements is when they're so clearly beneficial to both parties in their own specific way, even when it's, you know, so clearly like it makes for a great story. Elon and Dario have been at each other's throats. Is this actually kind of teaming up against OpenAI in this case? And maybe it isn't. That would make the most sense to me. But but still, Anthropic needs to come up with a story around how it will deliver compute as it moves towards an IPO. SpaceX needs to deliver a greater narrative around its revenue streams going forward as it moves towards its IPO. And it just feels like kind of signing on the dotted line here. It was a very, very convenient way of pushing that. I know. I know it's, I mean, there's been too many of these announcements over too long, especially with, with an Elon Musk involved that I don't know. I'm going to, I like to wait beyond the announcement for stories like this. Look, as a reporter, I really appreciate the skepticism and wait till the announcement passes. And, you know, maybe that's my one weakness is that I'm not one, one of many, is that, is that I, I, no, that one of many, I'll admit it, is that sometimes I'm too quick to, to believe these things, but we do have the evidence right away that this is going to help Anthropic. Here's what Anthropic says. First, we're doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for pro, max, team, and seat-based enterprise plans. Second, we're removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for pro and max accounts. Third, we're raising our API limits considerably for Claude Opus models, as shown in the table below. And of course they put a table. We won't, we won't make you suffer through reading that. But this is instant impact. I just crunched the numbers. The data center that they are going to be able to lease from Elon Musk is a five to $6 billion data center. That's fully built, right? That's just from the GPU cost alone. It's fully built and ready to work to help Anthropic deliver these services. That was the company's, that was the company's one weakness, right? Is that it could not deliver the compute. And therefore OpenAI had this chance to pass it because it does have that capacity. This changes that significantly. That's what I'm saying. And we can see the proof in the rate limits. No, no, you're right. You're right. The rate limits, again, like I still saw plenty of complaints on Twitter around, like, especially the weekly resets around rate limits with Claude Code and the kind of lack of, or the opacity around that, I think. But you're right. This is direct. They're at least kind of correlating this action directly with that kind of increase in compute. But I don't know. I still think this is one of the most interesting parts, you know, as the kind of market rises again today Last two weeks, two to three weeks around, even though I'm watching firsthand how valuable this technology is, whether this story actually will play out in the way everyone wants it to. Wow, interesting. I mean, I think that if you look at the capacity demands, how can you really argue with that? Well, I think over the last six to eight months, everyone had a free license to do whatever they wanted, especially in the enterprise. And it was everyone's first kind of foray into Claude code and Claude code and, you know, autonomous knowledge work products like Rider. And we talked about this since last November and October. Anyone could do what they wanted and no one questioned anything around tokens. So the actual like lit the graph for that usage, which was essentially zero because the token consumption pre-reasoning and especially pre-agentic knowledge work or agentic coding was so minimal relative to what the token consumption of agentic work. So the graph has been insane over the last six to eight months, but that's because no one cared about anything. You could spend whatever you wanted. If you are to now everyone is extrapolating that level of growth, rather than, will there be a cheaper model? Will there be cheaper ways of approaching this? Will companies actually kind of like bring token consumption instead of token maxing, people will actually be like optimizing for tokens. I think like that's the, the story is over the last eight months, which I've watched firsthand, no one cared about anything. We literally came up with token maxing the industry to say more is better. And now everyone assumes we're going to grow like that. So it really, even though I believe strongly that Agentic AI will kind of like have a massive impact on the world and certainly the enterprise. I don't know, all these compute stories really push around. Let's just blindly extrapolate over from the last six to eight months. Well, okay. So there's two sides of this here, right? There is the demand for compute, and then there's also the model makers are going to make their compute, their models more efficient. And they have been making their models more efficient and they will be making it more efficient, but you'll still have the demand here. Just one example. Everyone who's used Anthropic's Opus 4.7 model has certainly experienced some frustration where they try to get it to do some simple thing and it burns like half a data center's worth of tokens, only to come back and be like, oh shoot, this was a simple operation and I tried to like do advanced calculus to figure it out. Just one example. I asked it to make a PDF for me yesterday. It spent like 30 minutes trying to find this PDF. And I'm like sending commands. I'm like, you, you created the PDF, just export it, just export it. And it's like, oh, plugging into tools, every tool in the book. And then it finally comes back to me and it says, I owe you an apology. I went down a rabbit hole worrying about a constraint that wasn't actually blocking us. The file's there. Just read the file. So they're going to fix this stuff though. That's what I'm saying. This is what I'm talking about though. And again, we have talked about, I've thrown this out in the past, that kind of like nudging systems towards greater levels of consumption. Do you remember what was OpenAI's product that would work all night for you to give you a news update in the morning that no one... Pulse. Pulse. You talked about this. That's right. Yes. No, this is, this was my theory that like nudging people towards greater levels of consumption was actually going to be part of things. And again, like what you're talking about, either one of two things can happen. Either Anthropic will fix that and actually like make it work in a much more efficient manner, which will be good, but also changes the compute story a little bit as a direct extrapolation or users will kind of fix that themselves because they don't want to pay for those tokens. So I think that mindset shift of, do I watch what I'm spending on an AI platform? Because it's no longer blindly $20 a month or even $200 a month. So I think that's going to be a big, big shift. Well, this gets back to the whole Jevons paradox conversation. And of course, if you've been paying attention to it, the argument in the AI industry is, you know, as a valuable good gets cheaper, you'll actually use more of it versus less because it will enable you to do more things. And I would argue, let me just throw this out there for the sake of argument and you can decide to rebut it or agree with it, is that we've seen so much model improvement over the past, let's say, year and a half, that those who might have been skeptical in the deep seek days, right, where this Jevons paradox thing, well, it's just going to do the same thing and it'll be cheaper. So no one's going to spend more on AI. I think this Jevons paradox idea is Jevons paradox idea is more plausible than ever, that if they bring the cost down, you'll be able to do much more and you might have, like, let's say, more agents running in parallel. You disagree? I agree. I agree. But I think what that says about the kind of, is it an exponential demand for compute or more of a linear one? I don't think it's necessarily exponential in the way everyone is looking at it right now and the way these deals are being done and the way people are chasing it. And again, when it benefits both parties involved, I do think that it can be more of a linear path than exponential one. Again, when everyone has such a vested interest in it playing out in a specific way, it moves away from, and when it's a very small insular group, I do think everyone, I don't know, it just moves it away from a necessarily being the way it's going to play out. Now, if you're saying, all right, maybe there's a percentage of this that is gamification and inefficient models, I would, I would agree with you for sure. Obviously that's the case. The question is if how much of that gamification and token maxing would you say accounts for the growth in the industry? And we're seeing a lot of growth. And Anthropic had its Claude code with Claude event this week in San Francisco. And Dario Amadei, the chief executive of Anthropic, was on stage. And here is what he said. This is according to the New York times. Dario Amadei, the chief executive of Anthropic said on Wednesday that his artificial intelligence company had planned for growing about 10 times as big this year, only to reach a growth rate that could make it 80 times as big this year instead. He said last month, Anthropic, he said, let's see, Anthropic had been overwhelmed by the rate of growth and that's increased the company's need for computing power to deliver its AI products for customers. I hope, this is from Dario, I hope that 80 times growth doesn't continue because that's just crazy and it's too hard to handle. I'm hoping for some more normal numbers. That can't all be gamification. No, it's not gamification, but 80 times, is it 60, is it 40, is it? And that's again, when Claude code was kind of in a league of its own and there's no competition. I think like when you're saying gamification or like, yeah, gaming the system, basically, I had two separate instances. I think I had spoken about this recently, like where like very senior executives, I would kind of had casual conversations with in passing, bragged about their level of spend. And it was definitely on the, like more on the CTO, CIO side, but people are bragging about how much they're spending because it's kind of become a badge of honor to say I'm spending an ungodly amount of money. Now, no one is talking about their cloud bill and puffing out their chest anymore. Like, yeah, do you know what I just spent on Azure last month? Like, so it's when you're having that kind of, like, you know, when you look back and you're gonna, those are those kind of moments I've been experiencing more and more where you're like, that was a clear sign that no one should know, no technology executives should be bragging about how much they're spending and not talking about what they're actually doing when it comes to something like this. This is from the Financial Times. Anthropic's annualized revenue, which extrapolates full year revenue based on recent weeks, is expected to cross $45 billion imminently, a five-fold increase from $9 billion at the end of last year. Now, Ranjan, I know you have your feelings about annualized revenue, but again, let's just go back to it. If this was lighting money on fire broadly, that would be one thing, but it's not. I mean, you can't have $45 billion of annualized revenue and, you know, that sort of just being smoke and mirrors. You can't have $45 billion of actual annualized revenue, but you can certainly have a couple hundred mil of just like budgets being thrown at AI. I mean, what is the difference? I mean, God, come on, Financial Times. I would have, I would have looked to you to at least not get caught up in the ARRI. But actually, I mean, if I, I guess the FT, like even the way they said that, they didn't actually clearly define it. They said, wait, how did it read again? A few weeks? Yes, based on recent weeks. Recent weeks, week, month. But yeah, I mean, I think, do you, what do you think is happening? And what do you think will happen? I'm not really figuring out what the problem is or diagnosing how they would solve it. So yeah, part of that does exist. But I think the broader story is, can't really deny, I mean, neither of us will deny the progress that these models are making and the progress that, to go to your point, the industry is making in sort of building the appropriate scaffolding or harness or orchestration layers around it to make it useful. And so this goes from, I mean, this goes, we still have notes of, is this a bubble? There are probably parts of it that are a bubble. We still have notes of it are of, is this going to destroy certain companies or industries? You know, there's a good chance there. But I think ultimately, it has now transformed into a lot of this is working, despite people's skepticism. And it is going to be this heavyweight business story between two companies with a tremendous history. And Elon Musk now stepping in and saying, if I can't win, I'd like the enemy of my enemy to win. Actually, I want to get into the Elon Musk angle about this in a moment, but do you know what's going on with Stargate right now? Oh yeah, MG Siegler and I just spoke about that on Monday. So Stargate has basically become this sort of catch-all phrase for OpenAI's compute efforts. And it has shifted from them effectively building their own compute to securing it through partners like Equorith. Wait, hold on. But the Oracle, SoftBank, what was announced? When was that? Probably like a year and a half ago, January, February. That, they're walking away from, right? It's unclear. I mean, that's with anything in this infrastructure buildout. No, but that captures everything. Why'd you bring it up? Talk it through. That captures everything perfectly. Big announcement. And in that case, obviously, like, I mean, when you think about it, everyone who was up there from a Larry Ellison standpoint, from a Masa San, from a, I mean, you got the all-star crew of like, you know, people who can certainly sell things well, might have benefits to their own companies. And then just, it's, what is it, 14, 15 months later, it's just kind of fizzling. It's unclear what's happening. There's certainly groundbreaking and things being built, but there's still an ongoing discussion around compute shortage, which this theoretically should have kind of really solved and put us in a position even within 18 months to actually be very strongly positioned for. So I think that one, that's kind of what I see happening with this announcement. But this is already built. That wasn't built. Goliathis one is built. Yeah, no, no, I know, but I don't know, like, I don't know how it will happen. Anja has been burned too many times, he's like. I'm going to wait. Fair enough. Until my cloud rate limit is quadrupled or quintupled, then maybe. But even, hold on, I don't know, like you included this tweet in our prep talk. To me, on the Elon side, where we reserved the, so just as SpaceX launches hundreds of satellites for competitors with fair terms and pricing, we will provide compute to AI companies that are taking the right steps to ensure it is good for humanity. We've reserved the right to reclaim the compute if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity. First of all, I love like, clearly the entire industry got the memo and went after, what's Sam saying now? Magic at hyperscale is what OpenAI is about. Elon is talking about achieve a great future with amazing abundance for all. But do you think this is going to be his out in like two weeks over Anthropic? I mean, it's possible, but I think, aren't you missing the forest for the trees here, which is, and I noted this down also, I mean, you could have not found someone that disliked someone more than Elon Musk disliking Dario. He's constantly tweeting how it's misanthropic and way too woke, right? And he's on that whole bandwagon. And Anthropic has performed so well and become such a successful market company going after the same market as SpaceX. SpaceX has now become an enabling technology for Anthropic. Doesn't matter how long it lasts, that in and of itself is remarkable. It's the ultimate revenge for Dario. It is, but do you know what I've been thinking about is, I really believe a lot of Anthropic's power has also come from X. And like, I mean, even within the industry, everyone you talk to, like everyone talks about like seeing the power of Claude and Claude code and the use case on X. It's LinkedIn? Nah, it's, it's X. X is, well, that's the platform of, that's the AI platform of Anthropic. That's the AI platform, yeah. And Elon has his finger on the dial and can control that in whatever direction he wants. And like, I still imagine kind of leads Dario in, reels him in, and then actually shuts off. You're not engaging in actions that are good for humanity. And then, I mean, honestly, 4-7, the backlash again. We've used it. It's a little wonky. So we all feel it. It's not just being made up, all the complaining around it. But like, it is kind of crazy to think about the power that still remains now and that's amplified by now being your provider of compute. Okay, yes, but now actually I'm going to revise a statement I made just a couple of minutes ago, which is when I said you couldn't find someone that dislikes someone more than Elon dislikes Dario. Yeah, you could. It's Elon disliking Sam. He dislikes Sam more than he dislikes Dario. And I wouldn't discount the IPO math here because let's say you're Elon Musk and you want to kill OpenAI. So you bring them to trial over their conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit. Okay, so he's doing that. Now, what else do you do? You think about the IPO calendar. And there have been reports that Anthropic is trying to go IPO this year. So now think about it this way. SpaceX will be the one that IPOs first out of this. I think we can both agree there. Then if Anthropic goes ahead of OpenAI and uses this compute to support that ADX demand growth and can show exceptional demand, you know, an exponential curve of demand before it hits the public markets, and then leaving OpenAI to sheepishly walk in third and with its reputation damaged after the trial and with its compute advantage not erased, but minimized because of this deal, you potentially, and it needing to raise more capital to continue to serve its use case, that to me is potentially the way that you go about trying to kill OpenAI. And maybe that's what Elon's doing. Okay, okay. I like this theory. I like this theory. See, this makes more sense to me than actually the numbers around demand and whether it's meeting supply and the shortage compute. What you just explained actually makes way more sense to me of how this would have come about and how this is playing out. Actually, one question. I'm curious your thoughts. Because we've been talking about this. I now view everything these companies do in the lens of everyone racing to IPO as fast as possible. Why do these companies need to IPO? Oh, that's a great question. My suggestion here is that they were actually not planning to IPO this fast. In fact, the news of the SpaceX IPO, I guess that might've been planned, but the news of the Anthropic IPO and the OpenAI IPO is rather new. My theory is that they were actually going to try to raise one more round of private capital, and they might still do it, from the final boss of private capital, and that is the Gulf states. And this Eradawar made the Gulf states more hesitant to put all this money into US companies, and hence, they have to go IPO. Okay, that I agree with 100% in a whole argumently. It took us a half hour, but finally a harmony moment here. That makes all the sense. No, I mean, because I really was wondering, money in private markets remains, it's feeling infinite. And again, is mass public market investor exposure really going to be that different? It's just felt like, it's made me wonder why everything feels so urgent all of a sudden when they've just been, again, what was OpenAI's last round? $122 billion. $122 billion. That is bigger than vast, vast majority of most IPOs in terms of money raised. No, no, sorry. That's bigger than any IPO. No IPO has raised that amount of money. Wait, not even the financial one. The largest, I think, was Saudi Aramco, and that was $29 or $39 billion. So this is at least 3x to 4x larger than the biggest IPO ever. Okay, okay. So that's why it has been odd to me how intense this pressure of everyone chasing towards IPO has felt very recently. You made it all make sense, though. So I'm going to give you credit on that one. I will note Anthropic is likely going to raise at least one more round. It looks like they're going to raise $50 billion at a $900 billion free money valuation. Here's an investor. They told the Financial Times people are ready to throw any dollar amount at Anthropic. It's just about when they want to pop their heads up and say, we're ready. I still can't believe. Do you know what? I think it didn't, you're on a roll right now. It did not hit me until that the largest fundraise in history at the Aramco was only $30 billion in terms of actual funds raised. This is making even less sense to me right now All right, let me see if I can just build on my winning streak here for one more, one more little fun thing here. And that is, was Mythos marketing or was Mythos real? This is from TechCrunch. Anthropic's Mythos has written Firefox's approach to cybersecurity. In a post published on Thursday, Mozilla said Mythos has unearthed a wealth of high security bugs, including some that had lain dormant in the code for more than a decade. That is a significant improvement from what AI security tools were capable of even six months ago. Until now, AI bug-finding tools have come with severe drawbacks, but Mozilla's researchers say the latest generation of tools have turned a corner, particularly now that agentic systems can assess their own work and filter out bad results. The results are striking. In April 2026, Firefox shipped 423 bug fixes compared to just 31 a year earlier. This is from a distinguished engineer at Mozilla. Things are actually suddenly very good. We see that our own internal scanning, we see that on external bug reports, and we see that in all sorts of signals across the industry. They jumped from teens of bug finds to 423. No, sorry, 31 to 423 year over year. Still not coming around. You had a streak, but I'm still not coming around on this one. Okay, now I'm going to go back to one, a 15-year-old error in how the browser parses an HTML element was one of those 12 bugs that they published details on. Is that a vulnerability that is kind of like, what of these bugs were just true vulnerabilities that could kind of like cause catastrophe and take down a system? I think that like finding bugs and bringing more attention to software bugs and are these things that like, it's cool. I mean, that is the promise of AI. And I think, is it Mythos specifically, or did Anthropic invest and use the previous models to do the same kind of work? Or did it just bring attention to it now? I don't know. Sandwich in a park. Mythos, until we hear more about it, see something concrete. And again, we can say this is concrete, but do you believe this firmly confirms Mythos is not marketing? I'm going to just go with Ethan Mollick, the AI expert and Wharton professor. He says, I realized that Mythos as hype means two different things to different groups. For insiders, it means Mythos was not a magical step change in AI ability. For outsiders, it means Mythos couldn't really find zero-day exploits. The latter was wrong. The former was likely right. Right. So the second one, so Mythos can find zero-day. And it wasn't a magical step up to change the AI ability. That's what I'm saying. So now I agree with you. Now I agree with you. That's what I'm saying. It's not a magical step change in AI ability. But it can find zero-day exploits. Okay, let's just agree there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We agree. Cool. All right. So before we go to break, we have to go to break because we're going to need to spend at least a good chunk of our time now reading from the OpenAI and Elon trial and some of the evidence there. But before we go to break, I want to talk a little bit about our AI summit that we have in San Francisco on June 18th. Look, folks, I attempted to post a short episode Wednesday morning talking about what was going on with this event. Somehow, for some of you, there were some ads that were playing in front of that. It was supposed to be an ad-free episode. I tried to take those ads down. It didn't work. Let me tell you about the AI summit right now. We're going to have this thing called the Big Technology AI Summit. It is in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club on June 18th. It is a day of conversations. Starts, doors open at like 12 or 12:30. Conversations start at 1:00. They run till 5:00. We'll have a wine reception on the roof. Very small. It's going to be 200, 250 people. It's properly priced. I believe it's under $100 right now, though the tickets will rise as demand goes up. And we have a great lineup. We have Greg Brockman from OpenAI who's coming, the president of OpenAI. Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity. Aaron Levy, the CEO of Box. Lauren Good, the senior correspondent from Wired is going to be there. And we just confirmed that Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis is going to be there. It's all-star lineup. It's going to be a really great day. So if you check out summit.bigtechnology.com, you can grab a ticket while they still are out there. We're on our way to being sold out, so you should definitely do that while you still can. San Francisco, June 18th, Commonwealth Club. Be part of the first one of these things. Summit.bigtechnology.com. Now we go to break. We'll see you on the other side with a dramatic reading of Sam Altman and Mira Murati's texts. Back right after this. Look, if you have a kid in school right now, you know the drill. What should take 20 minutes of homework ends up taking two hours and usually ends in tears. And every good tutor, well, they're fully booked for months. This episode is brought to you by Brainly. Brainly is an AI-powered personal tutor built by educators, not a general purpose chatbot. It doesn't just give your kid the answer. It walks them through step-by-step explanations so they actually understand the material. 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Ranjan, when these text messages between Sam Altman and Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI came out, these are the text messages that they were sending to each other during what's called the blip or when Sam Altman was fired over a weekend and then eventually reinstated. I texted you that we must read them as a dialogue here. So Ranjan replied back, I'd like to be Mira, which is fine. We've divvied up the parts. Shall we read? I think so. Where should we start? From the beginning on this? Let's start from the beginning. It won't take too long. Let's start from the beginning. Okay. All right. November 19th, 2023. Can you indicate directionally good or bad? Satya and others anxious. Directionally, very bad. Okay. Can you wrap up soon? Lots of pressure from Microsoft for an update. Sam, this is very bad. Can I come in? They don't want you to. What do you want to make it better? I'm still willing to walk away if that helps. If they have ramped up for crazy lawsuits against me, then I'm not sure what. Can you please tell them I just want to resolve this however and would like to join? They're convinced about their decision. For me to be fired or some new thing? Yes, for you to be gone. Okay. Then can I come in and talk about a path forward with them? They're saying no and need more time. More time for what? They've walked me Sure, that the structure still lent itself to exploitation and, not exploitation, to instability. And clearly, we're like seeing that now. Oh yeah, I mean, I think we've said this, yeah. It is crazy that that was two and a half years ago, maybe. I mean that certainly the internal drama has gotten, you know, has not gotten any less. I mean, remember, all those departures were just two to three weeks ago, right? But it is amazing to know that Sam, knowing how intense and stressful that was, it appears to be firmly in control right now. Oh, absolutely. I mean, they did eventually, you know, they brought him back. And yeah, he's definitely in control. But the question is, like, can Elon still use this sort of, I mean, it's interesting that this drama is coming out now. I guess my initial reaction was like, well, what does that have to do with Elon's, you know, control of the, or argument against the nonprofit side of things? But I guess it's all related because of the, it's all about the structure, basically, and the structure is still not settled. No, not only, and it's also about the IPO of everyone's respective company-invested interest in this, as we were just talking about. But yeah, I think, do you think Elon is doing this for the good of humanity and making sure that nonprofit structures forever remain intact and respectable? No, we know that he's doing it because he invested $30 plus billion and feels betrayed in that nonprofit. $30 million. $30 billion. Did I say billion? Million. Yeah, and nowadays, what's the difference? I think it's quite significant, but I won't debate you on that. For us normies, but we're talking about fundraising. Well, I mean, yeah, that's why I don't think $30 million is significant to him, like at all. I think it's strategic. I think it's related to, I mean, I don't even think it's XAI. I think also, I agree. Actually, yeah, going back to your earlier point, I think he dislikes Sam significantly more than he dislikes Dario. Yeah, exactly. Who is the dark horse that kind of somehow appears and comes? Is it Masa-san or who would be the most unlikely character that somehow becomes directly involved in the Elon-Sam-Dario triangle? Satya Nadella. I mean, Satya is going to testify on Monday and Elon is blaming Microsoft for giving OpenAI the money and sort of pushing this for-profit move because it sort of had to pay back Microsoft. What do you think Satya is going to say or do? I think Satya is going to fully throw OpenAI under the bus. 100%. Thousand percent. Yeah. And we already have this like very interesting email chain between Microsoft executives in 2018 trying to like decide whether they should invest in OpenAI. And I mean, they eventually did make $13 billion of investments in OpenAI. And not after like some real hesitancy among the executives. So there's this great, the email chain is actually out there. There's a great Wired article out there talking about it. This is what Satya Nadella's email was to like a whole group of senior leaders about whether they should help funding them. He goes, overall, I can't tell what research they are doing and how if shared with us could help us get ahead. From what Elon is telling everyone, he feels OpenAI is at the verge of some big AGI breakthroughs. They clearly are pushing AI at a level none of our first party or third parties are. Microsoft CTO, Kevin Scott, said there could be some PR downsides associated with not funding them and having them storm off to Amazon in a huff and shit talk us and Azure on the way out. He goes, I'm highly skeptical of imminent breakthroughs in AGI. In my opinion, they're treating us like a bucket of undifferentiated GPUs, which isn't interesting for us at all. They are not out there saying there's a critical piece of research that we can do only in Azure because of its technical differentiation. If they were, then it could be interesting marketing. Another executive, my worst case scenario is that having them ditch Azure for AWS and bad mouth us on the way over. I mean, it's amazing that this was what they were thinking in Microsoft, but they eventually did it. And maybe credit to them for doing it, but they eventually got so sort of exasperated with OpenAI that we've seen that they've just been pushing further and further away from the company. Do you know what I love about this? What do you love about this? Everything is comms in the end. Everything. Yes. Yes. This validates when I get nervous that I look at everything in the guise of like that it's communications, but like this is a multi-billion dollar investment. They're talking about Azure's technical differentiation from AWS and all like in the end, they're just worried about how they look and what it's going to look like. I love it. I love it. This is the secret we are giving to our listeners. We did get, we did get a listener right in and say, you guys are talking about comms too much. And like, fair enough, you know, we take that to heart, but also maybe we're not. Look behind the curtain. Look behind the curtain. Okay. So look, I think that, that we will continue to review the evidence in this case as it comes out. Obviously it's a jury trial. So as much as like what we see in terms of the facts of this case, you know, matters and it does, and I'm not going to shortchange the jury, the emotional appeals to the jury matter a lot. And I think that's what you see both of these camps trying to, you know, sort of push out in public. So we will continue to talk about the case which should resolve relatively soon, but we'll have another week of explosive testimony, I'm sure this week. So Ranjan, I want to finish this week talking a little bit about the layoffs that we're seeing out there. I mean, of course you have the block cutting, I think, what was it? 40 or 50% of the company. This week you have Coinbase saying that 14% of its workforce is going to be gone. And of course, what is the rationale? The rationale is one, and I think Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase gets credit for this. He says, first, we're currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth. And then ring the bell. What's the other reason? It's AI. AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I've watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take teams weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small focused team has changed dramatically and it's accelerating every day. So we have to basically saying we have to restructure Coinbase to do it. The question I asked at the top of the show is the question I bring to you, which kind of maybe will bring us full circle from our whole discussion today. You know, is this AI like actually being able to do the work of many people or is it just cope? Both. This one, I have to go both. This one, I, like, again, all of these companies just looking, Coinbase's compound annual growth rate of employees over the last five years. Actually, it's only, it's like 10%, which isn't as bad as some of these others. These companies got very big and especially in big tech and the metas and the Googles of the world. So I do believe just having kind of like, and also Brian Armstrong is an entrepreneur. And I mean, I get this firsthand. Like if your company starts to feel more bureaucratic in general, you would love to be able to kind of flatten it, clean it up, which is what they said they were doing. I do like the ideas around, I think everyone has to be an individual contributor and can't be only in manager. I think that there can't be more than five levels of hierarchy from the CEO. I think these are really interesting ideas. And I do think like they also like, and it's not just AI too. A lot of these companies just got fat and got bloated and it's that as well. And using AI as kind of the excuse there. But of course, like, I mean, I do see this more and more. And I do think it's right that like the whole, if you're not getting on board the AI train, I do think it's, there's a reality to it that if people are just being completely resistant to changing the way they're working, companies are going to get more and more and more aggressive. Very interesting. So there was a post from a meta engineer named Arnav Gupta that is sort of the counter here. And maybe, maybe it is the same side of the coin or the other side of the same coin. Here at this, the layoffs will continue till we learn to use AI. Sergei from the Pragmatic Engineer framed this really well. He wrote, he writes that his point is that a lot of these layoffs could be backwards. They are probably happening because more AI spend doesn't correlate with better business results, at least yet. Here's this directly from the post. These layoffs, even if they are not because AI is replacing you and even if they are some form of AI washing, these layoffs are still because of AI. And these layoffs will continue till we learn to use AI. Till we figure out how the GDP of the world actually grows because of AI, we have to offset the $70 billion of combined OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise revenue of annual token spend by cutting some salaries. Until we figure out how to unblock Shifts, like, I've been thinking about this a lot, and, like, the way a corporation is structured as of today, it's not that old. I mean, it's the last 30 to 50 years, but even in the last 15 to 20 years, like, IT departments were more kind of like a small part of organizations, and it was the internet and then cloud and these things that really, like, blew up how big IT organizations were. So the idea that companies aren't going to have to completely change the way they're structured in the next few years, I think is nonsensical. So people are going to start figuring out, and also, I mean, again, going back to incentives and comms, not to bring everything back there. When you're at a moment that the market will reward you for just saying layoffs and AI, I mean, why not? It's bound to happen, right? Yeah, I mean, I like what this guy, Rohit Krishnan, had to say also. One bear sign of all the AI layoffs is that companies couldn't figure out how to produce even more by keeping the people and adding AI. I'm not entirely sure how to think about this. I mean, ultimately, it is, I think this is sort of what you're getting at. It's a change management and a company type of problem, right? As opposed to a technology problem, maybe? I don't know. Or maybe there's a point here. Maybe AI hasn't really increased productivity at all, and we're just deluding ourselves. And Elon Musk and Dario can partner all day long, but it's a bunch of hooey. See, I think in aggregate, it has not yet, because it's still, again, and at the enterprise level especially, it's still other than coding, it's still not widely adopted at any kind of scale, especially on the agentic side. And that's something like, it's picking up, but it's not just massively adopted. But I don't know. I think, to me, it's kind of, if 15, I remember, like, in the early days of Microsoft Word and word processing, imagine someone's like, no, I'm just going to write this on a notepad for you, and I don't want to use a computer. I don't know. Do you think this is fundamentally different than past technological shifts? Or, I'm not going to do this on email. I'm going to just send a letter. Is it comparable? I do think that it's different than past technological shifts, I would argue. I just think that the tools are more powerful this time around. To me, I guess, yeah, to me, it's still not significantly different than manufacturing automation in the 2000s and what that did to blue-collar work in the U.S. And also, outsourcing within China. And this is a whole other discussion. I know we only got two minutes left. But to me, it's still, it's just happening in knowledge work right now. So it's a much louder story. Okay, bottom line then, before we go. So you say both. What is it more? Is it more sort of posturing, more AI washing, or is it actually more productivity with AI? It's more preparing for an AI future. It's not that it's already happened yet, but everyone gets, they got to figure it out now, otherwise they will have issues later on. I will 50, I will mostly agree with that. Let's just say that. I just said it wasn't comms. I just said it wasn't comms. But I will say this is what I'll nuance, I'll caveat with. Two of the biggest companies that have done this, crypto companies. And we know crypto is on the outs. So it leads me to believe it might be business, business realities versus AI improvement. Funny that Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey have both seen the light about AI as crypto hits its downturn. Let's end on that just so we get some angry comments on the way out. God, all right, there goes the show's ratings. Ronjon, thank you so much. Great to see you. All right, see you next week. See you next week. Thanks everybody for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcasts. Hi, I'm Emily, your friend and jeweler at Shane Company, where fine jewelry is always crafted with care, no matter the price. Mother's Day, birthdays and graduations, weddings and anniversaries, the new job you got, and even the one you didn't. Give a birthstone necklace, a heart-shaped locket made in Italy, or high quality diamond studs you can trade up every year. At Shane Company, we have something for everyone, because a friend wants you to win the gifting game. 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