Anthropic’s $380B round, Paramount vs. WB, Higgsfield ragebait drama | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  So, something big happened yesterday. There was a massive viral article. And do you know how big the something big is happening? How much that grew?

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  It went big. I was getting texts about it.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  It has over 100,000 likes now. It's quickly becoming the most read thing in the world. I don't know. It's crazy.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  75 million.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  75 million views?

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Views.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  And 100,000. They're saying that only 200 people actually read it. But everyone has an opinion.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Everyone has an opinion. I had an opinion. I wrote a piece about it yesterday comparing, saying AI is not like COVID. I kind of got one shot by the COVID analogy just from a mathematical perspective. But the best reaction to something big is happening. It's got to be John Palmer. Something small is happening. I was reading this this morning, actually laughing out loud. So we'll read through it. John Palmer says.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were, you were reading it to yourself.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  And then you just started belly laughing.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  And so then I started filming. Then I asked you what you were reading. I was filming you. Then I sent that to John.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  I missed that.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  To get his reaction. You reacting to his.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Think back to 2014, a little over a decade ago. If you wanted a burrito, you had to get in your car and drive to the restaurant. You had to stand in line. You had to talk to a person. If someone told you that one day, a stranger would bring you a burrito to your front door because you pressed a button on your phone, you would have said, that sounds dystopian and also incredible. Then, over the course of about three years, it just became normal. And this was before Chipotle started skimping out on the portions too. I think we're at that same inflection point right now, except if instead of burritos, it's your entire job. I've spent the last two weeks reading about AI and watching clips of people building things with it.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  I live in this world now. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people. A few hundred researchers at a handful of companies. I'm not one of these people, says John Palmer. I work in crypto. But I am close enough to feel the ground shake. I follow several AI researchers on X, and I also recently purchased a Mac Mini. I haven't set it up yet, but I think you can understand what I'm saying. I know this is real because it happened to other people first. Here's the thing nobody outside of tech understands yet. The people sounding the alarm aren't making predictions. They're telling you what already happened to them. I am relaying this information to you secondhand with conviction. For years, AI had been improving steadily. I absorbed these improvements fine because I wasn't really paying attention, to be honest.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Then, apparently in 2025, everything got much faster and then faster again. I know this because I watched a three-hour podcast about it last Wednesday. The host was visibly shaken. I could tell because he wasn't even able to finish a single pint of Guinness. Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day and something clicked. Not for me personally. I was at a birthday dinner for my wife's coworker. But for the people who tried the models that day, it was apparently a huge deal. One guy said, "He tells his AI what to build, walks away for a few hours and comes back to find the work done. This will very likely be what my life is like as well. Once I set up my mag mini, AI will be doing things while I'm in the other room." That's potentially huge.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Let me give you an example so you can understand what this looks like in practice. A guy on Twitter built an entire app just by describing it. The AI wrote the code, opened the app, tested the buttons, decided it didn't like the layout, fixed it, and only then said, "It's ready." I'm gonna do something.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  I'm gonna do something like my mag mini. Some type of cool app or something. I'm still figuring it out, but I have all the hardware. And I'm definitely gonna optimize my setup with all types of skills and plugins. I'm not exaggerating. That's what my Tuesday could look like, potentially. But I tried AI and it wasn't that good. People will say this. They say this, "I tried AI, it wasn't that good." Here's John Palmer's response. He says, "I hear this constantly. I understand it because I also thought this. But the models today are apparently unrecognizable from what existed six months ago." Some of the people who are saying this have hundreds of thousands of followers and make sure you're not on the free plan. You have to get on the paid plan.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  That's key.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  How fast is this actually moving? Let's answer that question. In 2022, AI couldn't do basic math. By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software. And by 2025, some of the best engineers in the world had handed over most of their coding work to AI. In February 2026, you can make AI send you a morning summary of the top posts on Reddit from your Mac Mini. What should you actually do? "I'm not writing this to scare you," says John Palmer. "I'm writing this because the single biggest advantage you can have right now is being early. Early to understand it. Early to buy the hardware. Early to subscribe to the paid tier and ask it to make a meal." You can start using it for real work. If you're an engineer, give it a GitHub-

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Not a meal, a meal plan.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  A meal plan. Oh, a meal plan, yeah. Actually, make a meal. That would be cool. If you're an engineer, give it a GitHub repo. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet. If you're in other industries, definitely figure out what you can give it. Then give it that. But give it something for sure. I just need to think about it more. Mention it to your coworkers. Right now, there's a brief window where most people are still ignoring this. You can be the person ignoring it less, which puts you ahead. Be the person who walks into a meeting and says, "I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days." It's fine if it actually took you three days. The point is, people will respect you. Get a Mac Mini. This is point number three.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  And by the way, you can actually get a Mac Mini on DoorDash.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  You can, just like a burrito.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  It's important.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Every single account I've seen posting this stuff has a Mac Mini. It's the ultimate tool for this stuff. You gotta get your financial house in order. "I'm not a financial advisor," says John Palmer. That said, I did just spend $599 on a Mac Mini, plus Apple Care, and $50 on Claude tokens. But if it gets too expensive, have a backup plan to switch to an open-source Chinese model. Fourth, watch the podcasts. Actually, don't just watch. Study, TBPN, Door Cash, et cetera. The good thing is that these shows are several hours long, so you can basically fill up your entire day just watching them.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Or making them.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Or making them, in our case. Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook? Good grades, good college, stable job? It's over. Tell them it's likely not looking good for them.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Go to your four-year-old and tell him it's not looking-

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  It's not looking good, buddy.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  It's not looking good.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  It's not looking good.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  What I know? I know this isn't a fad. The technology works, and the richest institutions in history are pouring trillions into it. I know this because I've seen it mentioned pretty frequently over the last few months. I know, I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now. Not with fear, but with curiosity, a sense of urgency.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  A Mac mini.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to, and when it does, I will be ready. My Mac mini will be unboxed. My agent will be configured. I will describe what I want in plain English and it will appear. I just have to optimize everything first to make sure my setup is super legit. Most people won't want to hear about it until it's too late. You can be the reason someone you care about buys a Mac mini. Oh, so funny.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Such a banger. So, so good. I went and I described in plain English to Codex 5.3. Build me an app, an amazing app, the best app ever, one that will win awards and make me a legend in Silicon Valley.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  An award-winning app.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  An award-winning app, and it appears to be working.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  More seriously, John Palmer's post feels like a response to Will's essay Tool-Shaped Objects, which is fantastic.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Anthropic.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than 20 billion in a funding round, led by investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, D E Shaw, and Dragon Ear. Let's dig in. Being a little bit silly with the pronunciation, Sydney over on X said British AI researcher be like Anthropic. Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than 20 billion in a funding round, led by the group I just mentioned. The deal is set to value Anthropic at about 350 billion, nearly doubling its prior value. The funding round includes a range of investors, including Co2, Singapore's GIC, Microsoft, Nvidia, and has become a who's who of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  So, Founders Fund is known for the monopoly thesis. Like, there's a power law. You want to be in the best company in the category. You want the best ownership.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Put all your money in that one.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll go all in famously. They did some other social networking deals, but obviously like Facebook was the big one at seed and that was enough to return that fund many times over. And so the whole thesis of the fund for a long time has been like this concentrated bets, concentrated bets. AI has been an interesting one. They're now in. Three major labs because they have a huge position in SpaceX, which now owns XAI. And so they're in that lab, sort of coincidentally. Peter Thiel, I believe, is listed on Wikipedia as a co-founder of OpenAI. Or at least he was like an initial donor and got like a co-founder title. And so has been involved in OpenAI for a long time.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  And then they invested, I believe, in like the $60 billion round right after, right, right when ChatGPT was launching. And it was an odd deal because the company had not yet converted. It was very unclear what Microsoft would get, what the employees would get, what the investors would get, what the nonprofit would get, because the nonprofit was going to keep a stake. And so it was this like wild bet. And I know a lot of investors.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  It was a leap of faith.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  It was a leap of faith. A lot of investors were scared off because there was, you know, what am I investing in? Like, I'm not getting shares, I'm getting units. And it was like a very odd structure. And I know many investors that were scared off by that.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm an absolute unit, but I'm used to buying shares.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So you had to do a lot of sort of leaps of faith. The thesis at the time, how big can this be? What is the market? What are the opportunities for really, really huge categories? A lot of founders' funds investments like SpaceX. It's like this massive category that's very, very hard. But if you crack it, it's going to be an entirely new market. Social media was certainly that as well. That made a lot of sense. Obviously, they're in X, now they're in Anthropic. Sequoia is also in all three. And the interesting thing is like, PT has given a number of talks where he's sort of been anti-AI. You've seen this whole thing about like crypto is libertarian, AI is communist, and that AI is like a consolidating force.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Oh, he's never been one to say like, oh, wow, the tools are so amazing. It's been a lot of like, is this just doing your homework for you?

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  He's not putting out threads about using his Mac Mini.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  I don't even know, I don't even know if he has a Mac.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  You should send, you should send John Palmer's piece. To PT.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, reading into this, does this say that the Founders Fund team thinks that there's like a divergence in the market, that there's actually two, there are actually two markets going on here, one in consumer AI, advertising, knowledge retrieval, the other in code and developer tooling and code gen, and that Anthropic has actually carved out a separate space, so they're less competitive than people think. Maybe they're just more competitive and it just makes sense to get into both.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  And we have some breaking news.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  What's the breaking news?

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic has formally announced the round.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  They said, "We've raised 30 billion," so they upsized it. 20 was...

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  They are now at a $14 billion run rate.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  With this figure growing over 10% annually in each of those past three years. We'll see if they got another 10x in them.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  The biggest update for me is that the Forward Deployed Engineer thing is like very real. Even if the tools can build themselves, there's still so many blockers to actually rolling these out, that you're going to need a lot of people inside these organizations who are actually playing with Mac minis on the weekend and getting obsessed with these tools and then bringing them into the enterprise, because it's very easy for a lot of people in Fortune 500 companies to just show up and do their job the way they always do it, because no one gets fired for switching things up. But if you roll out some tool and it doesn't work the way you intended, or it sucks about a bunch of your time, even if you're just, "I have eight hours of work to do in my traditional system," where do you get the extra hours to automate your work? It takes time and that's where the Forward

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Deployed Engineers come in. So, great gig for anyone who wants to go implement enterprise agentic workflows, because that will be the theme.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  We can see Anthropic's run rate revenue growth.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  You can see here. Quite the pop from $0 in 2023 to 100 million in Jan of 2024 to a clean 1 billion in January 2025 and now sitting at 14 billion.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  This is acceleration. This is true acceleration. Dario sort of underplayed 2027, I guess, or I guess he said that he was like, I don't think we have another 10x. If they go to 100 billion.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Well, he said like, we've been tenexing.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  You know, we'll see if we do it again.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Like wink wink.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  If they hit 140 billion run rate by the end of the year, that would be insane. But strange times, strange times. You love this effect.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Tyler's been saying stuff along these lines for some time. So more in Anthropic. Nathan Lambert was quoting their announcement from yesterday, saying, we're committing to covering electricity price increases from our data centers. This is Anthropic.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  To ensure ratepayers aren't picking up the tab. We'll pay 100% of grid upgrade costs. Work to bring new power online and invest in systems to reduce grid strain.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Makes so much sense.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  Maybe this should have been their Super Bowl ad. When you kind of look at clearly how much energy the industry put into the Super Bowl.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  And what the net effect was for the average American. I don't think the average American came away from that, like having more positive feelings towards AI. If anything, they were like, I'm sick of this stuff.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The meme was like, oh, beer ads like refreshing. It's pretty easy to say, hey, my, my, my electricity bill is going up. I don't want a data center in my county, in my city. And you call your city county representative and they say, I don't like the slop either. I see, I see a bunch of junk that doesn't seem that valuable. Why do we need it here? It's not going to create that many jobs. It's not going to be that good for taxes, blah, blah, blah. And other companies that do this too, Google had their clean transition tariff and Amazon also pays a surplus above electricity costs already. The anti-AI issue is remarkably bipartisan. Data Center Watch claims that 55% of Republicans and 45% Democrat in affected districts.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  So 55, 45, so it's not really like a red, a right issue or a left issue, like there's pushback on both sides. So Anthropic is putting $20 million into a super PAC operation that is meant as a direct counter to the OpenAI super PAC operation. The midterms are a battleground between these two rival AI labs, says Teddy Schleifer at the New York Times. And so we're going to see some attack ads. It's like Sam and Dario are running for election and we're going to see some-

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  Be the president of AI.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, we just said that like overwhelmingly on both sides, there's like a lot of pushback, right? So it's like, what are the actual differences between their, their approaches?

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Maybe, I guess, maybe Anthropic will be more like about the China chip issue.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's, they should be more in alliance than against each other.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like crypto, there's a crypto super PAC.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  It's like the big one.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  There's no like big AI one right now.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it would, it would be weird if there was like a USDC super PAC and then a USDT super PAC and they were like fighting each other and just constantly surfacing bodies that are buried in the closets or skeletons in the closet. Because every time there's a successful tack on OpenAI, yes, people might be like, oh, okay, I like Anthropic a little bit more, but most, most people will just come away being like, I don't like AI.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  If you were falsely accused of a crime and it went to trial, who would you prefer to listen to the arguments and give the verdict? And the options are a jury of your peers or Claude Opus 4.6? 63% of people prefer Claude.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yes. Might be the audience here.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, a little biased.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  I think the jury of your peers will be around for a very, very long time. I mean, they still have courtroom scenographers and we have-

• 16:33Speaker 02

  I think Claude's going to be around a long time, too.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, if you're thinking in centuries maybe, but I mean, the courtroom sketch artist. We've had cameras for 100 years, like the juries are gonna-

• 16:43Speaker 02

  I'm not saying that I think this will ever happen.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, but you'd prefer it. You would ideally, I mean, how many jurors will be sitting there being like, okay, Claude, how should I vote? I haven't really been paying attention. I've been playing Candy Crush.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  What's up with Warner Brothers? The situation intensified this week as Paramount CEO David Ellison and a vocal investor made new moves to thwart rival Netflix's planned takeover.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  The storied Hollywood asset and the home of Batman, Harry Potter, and the White Lotus.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Paramount, a long rebuffed suitor for Warner Brothers Discovery, enhanced its $77.9 billion all cash offer for the entire company Tuesday in an effort to bring Warner to the negotiating table and ultimately abandon its deal with Netflix, also an all cash transaction valued at $75 billion. Cleveland investor Ankorah Holdings entered the fray by acquiring a small stake in Warner with an eye toward increasing its holdings and pressuring the company to negotiate with Paramount. I wonder if they're friends with the Ellisons.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Paramount's gamble. Paramount is hoping its latest pitch can persuade Warner to ditch its agreement and sell its movie and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix. Unlike Netflix, Paramount also intends to buy Warner Discovery's cable networks, which includes CNN, TBS, and Food Network. Warner has so far shown little interest in engaging with Paramount, telling investors that Ellison's previous offer was not even comparable to the Netflix agreement. On Tuesday, Warner said its board will review Paramount's new offer, but it but isn't modifying its recommendation regarding its agreement with Netflix. The company advised shareholders to not take any action now regarding Paramount's amended tender offer. The bar for Warner to reopen talks with Paramount is very high, given its contract with Netflix.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Massive termination fee.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Paramount said it would pay the $2.8 billion. Let's give it up for the multi-billion dollar termination fees.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Love those.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Warner would owe Netflix should the agreed to deal collapse and pay a ticking fee of 25 cents a share to Warner shareholders for each quarter its deal hasn't closed.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  We got ticking fees.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Ticking time bomb.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Some stakeholders are holding out for Paramount to further boost its bid. I'm not surprised, given that they've repeatedly said with their offers, this is not our best and final offer. So everyone is waiting around saying, let's get those numbers up.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Remind me of how Paramount is doing right now. They have UFC and the experience watching UFC was a downgrade from pay-per-view, but cheaper? What was the takeaway?

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, I don't think we can like give a analysis of Paramount as an entire business.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Everything looks like.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  The experience was not as good as paying for the pay-per-view.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  And was that because you had to, you had to go through all the, you had to jump through all the hoops to sign up for Paramount Plus and you weren't already a member?

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Like the viewing experience was different because it's now subscription and ad-supported. Whereas previously, pay-per-views had ads, but not nearly as much.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  So the thing you're missing now watching is like in-round commentary, walkouts, things that like hardcore fans really like.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Is there less Joe Rogan commentary?

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Well, the markets are reacting. Paramount's down 7% today.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Paramount needs to test Netflix's pain threshold without having to bid too high. The revised offer does exactly that, without further constraining its balance sheet. For now, the ball is now with Netflix. Warner and Netflix are focusing on getting their deal approved by the Justice Department as well as regulatory authorities in Europe. As part of its investigation, the DOJ is looking into whether Netflix has engaged in anti-competitive practices. Last week, President Trump reversed course and said in an interview with NBC News that he didn't think he should weigh in on the deal and would instead leave it to the Justice Department. "I've decided I shouldn't be involved," Trump said in the interview. He previously expressed concerns about the size and scale of a Netflix-Warner combination, saying the combined company would command significant market share, but he's clearly been watching YouTube.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  And he just says YouTube's too dominant, too many watch hours on YouTube. It's fine, let it rip.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Erica over on X posted that Eileen Gu to join Benchmark as a senior associate when she returns from the Olympics. She photoshopped this. Of course, we did not put this out, but it's a good bit. Eileen competes for China in the Olympics, even though she's a US.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Citizen.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Citizen.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  And an American student.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  And an American student. Bill Gurley responded.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  I know a lot of, I know a lot of Americans do this. I have a buddy who was able to go play ping pong in the Olympics because he had dual citizenship, or he wasn't even like a dual citizen. He just like, his parents were from another country, so he was able to go be on that team. Cause a lot of the other teams are like way less competitive. So it's like, you wouldn't make the US team, but you want to play anyway, so you go to the other country, but.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think with Eileen, it's because the sponsorship dollars she can make by being a Chinese star.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  There's all these Chinese brands.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  I thought you couldn't.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  She's a global star.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  You can just get paid?

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  You can get a bunch of it, not, not to compete in the Olympics, but broader endorsement deals.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're on the Wheaties box.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Getting a gold medal is like UBI.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Because you'll be able to do.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  You'll be turned into a Labu potentially.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, in this case, in this case, yeah. But Bill Gurley actually responded.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  And said, I can't believe you actually found out about this. We were planning to keep it a secret, but he wrote it in Chinese.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  He's leaning in. He's leaning into the meme. Interesting.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Influencer marketing has helped. The AI company Higgsfield hit 300 million in annual revenue run rate in just 11 months, but misleading marketing tactics and a social media strategy based on shock has led to backlash among creators. In late January, Tim Sorrett, a London-based video game director, received a message on a social media site from the marketing team at Higgsfield, a fast-growing AI generation startup. This is the biggest moment in Higgsfield history, and we want you to be a part of it, Red. The 1.3 billion dollar startup, whose tools are used by some 15 million creators and ad agencies to churn out four and a half million video clips every day, was about to launch a new tool called Vibe Motion, which uses AI models to convert text prompts into motion graphics.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  You like good vibes? You have motion? Use vibe motion.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  The offer of Sorrett shared the startup's social media post along with a video clip from pre-assembled marketing materials. The company would pay him $200. But Sorrett, who has spent years designing graphics, both manually and with AI tools, could tell something was off. Videos Higgsfield had shared with him lacked the visual quirks of AI. He's like, this is simply too good.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  And he quickly realized that some clips in the media kit weren't generated with AI at all.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  I said this was a huge alpha in just taking a cinema camera, filming yourself and being like, this is AI-generated and I'm raising. It's fraud, but alpha. Uh, this happens a lot with OpenAI stuff where people will see a video and they'll be like, wow, they definitely have a new model. And it's like, they also have a production budget. Like, they can just hire actors.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, so with, when, when Sam launched Monaco yesterday, was his video AI? Cause it looked, it, I, it was 50/50 for me. And it's kind of a funny thing. If you're launching an AI company to show, like, I made this with AI. It's that good.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  It's good enough.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so this guy gets Media Kit, says, hey, can you share some of these AI outputs? But he found out and said they were video templates that appeared to have been lifted from a stock site in Vato, in which the startup had pasted its own logos. While Sora didn't share the videos, others did, circulating the stock video templates on X to promote Higgsfield.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  "All this hype is fake and it's bot," Sora told Forbes. Higgsfield's co-founder, with its library of 400 presets of camera motions and visual effects, SF-based Higgsfield offers an easy way for creators and advertisers to produce cinematic short videos through text-based prompts. You guys already know this. Last month, the startup claimed it doubled its annualized revenue to 200 million in just two weeks, driven largely by subscriptions from its 300,000 paying users. By early February, its annual run rate crossed 300 million. CEO Alex told Forbes that he hopes to reach 1 billion by the end of the year. After raising 80 million from firms like Excel and Menlo in mid-January, the startup is now in talks to raise funding again. But that rapid growth appears to be driven by aggressive, shocking, and sometimes misleading

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  marketing tactics. Anyways, they're moving very quickly. It was interesting when we asked Alex about his margins, he gave kind of a concerning response. He immediately was like...

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, when you're reselling a model, you are, you know, at risk there. At the same time, like, with a different business model, with a different customer acquisition flow, it's possible to have good margins on top of models if it's deeply embedded.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Here's maybe where Higgsfield, uh, kind of crossed the line. Apparently, they shared, they were sharing a Google Drive folder with creators that had, uh, popular children's characters like Shrek, Moana, and Mickey Mouse saying, saying things that are...

• 25:23John Coogan?

  You're on the show, but...

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  ...sound a little, uh, a little racist. And then, non-consensual deepfakes of public figures like Sydney Sweeney and Zendaya and President Trump. So, the challenge here is like... Companies like Higgsfield are competing with these Chinese open source models that have no rules. They'll generate whatever you want.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  And clearly, there's an insane amount of demand for video models that have no rules.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  And so this isn't surprising, even though it's wrong.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the BitTorrent Napster analogy where like the demand for things that just can't be done legally is really, really high. You can't view that as a business opportunity because of course you'll see really, really high demand for completely free music. If you're not paying anything, right?

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  You'll see really high demand for generate a Mickey Mouse character. The question is, the business question is, can you actually do the deal? License it, make sure every, all the stakeholders and all the legal parties are represented and happy with the deal and everyone's paying.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they did launch a program called Higgsfield Earn, which was basically like a clipping thing. You could make stuff, share it.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Depending on how much engagement it got, you'd earn some money.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  That led to them getting banned from X or their account shut down.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Whoa, I didn't realize that.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, we'll, we'll see how this nets out.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  I do think that there's an interesting opportunity right now for a little bit of what CapCut's doing, plus Nano Banana Sora stuff, where you have a lot of video generation, but then you also have the ability to lay over just actual text, actual motion graphics. And if you pair up some of the more deterministic tools, like basically tool use, like how ChatGPT can also do a math problem in Python and be a hundred percent accurate. You could imagine if you, if you want to just draw a rectangle on top of the video that you've generated or make it black and white. That's something that doesn't require a generative AI model. You can just call a tool that has the same functionality as Premiere Pro and then it'll just do that.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  But you have to actually wire all that up, make it all work together. And maybe that's where this goes and then I don't really know how defensible that is, but we'll see.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say like, I mean, you're, you're kind of just describing like a rapper, right?

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  At least in, in, in the, in the text field, seems like rappers, at least of late, like have not been.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, people are much less bullish on rappers now than they were like a year and a half ago.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, SD Kid, pretty good.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I like that.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  We got one more post.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  People are reacting to the men's luge doubles. They're saying, "It's one of the most baffling things I've ever watched."

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  National champion speaker says, "How do you find out you're good at this? What's the conversation look like?" I guess I may have seen this before. I remember as a kid watching singles.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  But this is baffling.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  There's also something called skeleton.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Like, what are you?

• 28:18John Coogan?

  I think it's an evolution. I think it starts with like a toboggan and you have like a bunch of people essentially in like a rowboat. And then you're just like, "Let's do one less. Let's do one less. Let's optimize and reduce weight." And then they're finally down to just two people and they're basically just on this like sled together. And yeah, I guess you get here. Very, very funny. Personal injury attorney in his 50s is on the cusp of becoming the oldest American Winter Olympian in history? All he needs is for one of his teammates to slip and fall? This guy is elite.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  I feel like being a personal injury attorney is probably a great gig if you're in one of these kind of fringe Olympic sports. You know, you want to have some flexibility in your schedule. You want to be able to make enough to reinvest into the sport.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  This guy's clearly locked in. It's been an honor.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  It has.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Have the best evening of your entire life.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Yes, and we'll see you tomorrow. Friday. Goodbye.