NVIDIA Takes The Crown, Return of Ilya, Vision Pro Stalls

Reed Albergotti is the tech editor at Semafor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to break down the week's news. We cover: 1) NVIDIA temporarily becoming the most valuable publicly traded company 2) Is NVIDIA a bubble? 3) What might disrupt NVIDIA? 4) Ilya Sustkever founds Safe Superintelligence Inc. 5) Who's funding Ilya? 6) Will SSI amount to anything? 6) OpenAI might become a public benefit company 7) The state of DeepMind's merger with Google Brain 8) Mustafa Suleyman's entry to Microsoft and how it impacts the relationship with OpenAI 9) Apple Vision Pro hits a speed bump 10) Vision Pro & Apple Intelligence similarities and differences ---- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nvidia passes Microsoft momentarily to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company. Ex OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has a new AI company focused on superintelligence. Apple is managing its ambitions, shall we say, on the Vision Pro, and plenty more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our

• 1:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Big week of news to looking at the rundown. We have so much AI to talk about. Also, an update on the Vision Pro with a great guest for you. Returning to the show is Reid Albergati, the technology editor at Semaphore. Reid, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be back. It's great to have you back. Another historic week, shall we say, here on the show, because for a minute, really, on Tuesday, and right now, the market is not helping it sustain this moment, but who knows, by the time this goes to air, it could be back in pole position. But Nvidia became the most valuable publicly traded company. In the world, we had talked about like when this might happen, whether it was going to happen this year, somewhere down the road, whether it was even possible. And now we have it, right?

• 2:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  So a, a company whose product effectively is the chips, the software and the networking requiring to, required to train and run AI models became the world's most valuable, most valuable publicly traded company for a moment. It's significant. Looking at it, this is not a company that people had on their bingo card, you know, so to speak, to take the pole position on the public markets two years ago, a year ago even, in January. And yet here it is. What do you think this all means? And do you think that it's a bubble? Because that's obviously the question that comes up.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think AI is a bubble. I think, you know, they, Nvidia has been now for like a decade, they've been an AI company and they're, they've timed this perfectly and they are now kind of the infrastructure layer, both in hardware and software for AI today. And I think the question for investors is just, you know, can they be disrupted? Every single company, it seems, that's in this, in this field is trying to disrupt Nvidia, even, even as they are also trying to sort of kiss up to Nvidia and get, you know, get as many of their chips as they possibly can today. They're trying to figure out how to build their own silicon and they're, and they want to replace the software layer, the, you know, CUDA. So I think Nvidia has everybody gunning for them.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, the, I think for a while now, the smart money has been saying, okay, this is, Nvidia is a great company, but it's not, it's not quite sustainable. And it's, I think at some point they'll be right, but who knows how far, how far this can go.

• 3:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  I saw a great meme this week where it was like, you know, one of those people said that Nvidia buyers will eventually become fatigued. And then it was like Nvidia buyers, and it's just like a thousand pictures of David Goggins, just like, it will not be fatigued. But I think that what you, what you brought up is interesting, that there are companies gunning for it. And to me, it's like, I don't think anytime soon, we're going to see a company like AMD, which is also making chips and software, I believe, to run this stuff. I don't think that they are going to be the ones that are going to potentially cut into Nvidia sales or even slow them down. But what you mentioned, when you said everyone's trying to do this, my head immediately, immediately

• 4:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  went to like, are the big tech giants going to be able to make this work on their own? They're the ones that are the biggest buyers, I believe, 45%. Of Nvidia's data center revenue, which includes the chips and the software and the networking for AI is coming from the big cloud providers and probably Facebook as well, talking about Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, you know, if you want to do a Google, if you want to work on AI today, you need to use Nvidia, but they're all working, I think, to a T on their own chips. And if they're not, if they haven't announced yet, there's probably interest inside the buildings to do it because these chips are expensive, goes like, what, 30,000 to 40,000 each? There's a new generation coming out.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  It's not just the chips, though, right? It's, yeah, they're working on their chips.

• 5:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Software, networking.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  But they're trying, they're all trying to figure out ways to essentially make AI development hardware agnostic. And that's a software problem, right? They, right now, everything around, you know, building these AI, it all works better on these, on these Nvidia hardware, on Nvidia chips. There's so much work going on now that, you know, is, is honestly beyond my, you know, I mean, it's super, super complex stuff and like, you know, would, would bore your listeners, I think, to, not to, not to make that, that, that mistake. I probably shouldn't use that term, but like, we're not going to get into all the details,

• 5:43Speaker 01

  but basically, if you can, if you can figure out how to, to allow AI models to, to be trained and run on basically any piece of hardware, then you don't necessarily need the most powerful chips. You could just buy more of, of less powerful chips, right? And right now, you can't. Right now, it makes economic sense to buy the absolute most powerful chip that you can possibly buy, and Nvidia makes that. But that may not be true a year, two, five years from now. It may be that you could take, you know, it may be that you could take 10 billion Raspberry

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Pis and put them together, string them together and, and, and train.

• 6:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Up to a nuclear plant.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  And train AI models because you, if you solve the sort of this interconnect problem, right? The, the problem of like the loss between connections of chips. Right now, you want as few, you want as few chips as possible right now because you lose so much by connecting them all together. And so then you want the most powerful chip. Does that make sense? I mean, and that's just one example.

• 6:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's so interesting talking about how this is a software problem. One of the most interesting tidbits I had after spending a full day at Nvidia on Thursday of last week at the headquarters, which was very interesting, was that they have, I think, they definitely have more software engineers than they do have hardware engineers at the company, which I think would sort of boggle people's mind. Like, people think the surprising thing about them is that they designed the chips, they don't manufacture them. I think the real surprising thing is that the true edge they have is, I mean, of course, their chips are better, but the software and the networking as well, talking about that loss problem is world-class, and that's why it's been so difficult for companies to come up and grab that lead from them.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the other, that's the other point. Yeah, for sure. They were smart. I mean, they started working on that and building essentially that moat because they knew that the hardware, you know, could become commoditized, and they started building that, you know, years and years ago.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So I have a lot of respect for them. I think it's a, it's a great company.

• 7:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  They are a very, very impressive company. And here's like a few stats talking about like, people have talked about this Nvidia FOMO, right? Where it's like, obviously, it has elements of being a meme stock, and the rewards that some investors have gotten for sticking with it are just unbelievable. So this is from a Bloomberg report. By the way, the stock today is, or the stock right now, I'm looking at it, is $3.29 trillion. Not bad. It's up 170-something percent this year. Its data center business rose 427% this year from year earlier, which is nuts, to $2.26 billion. And that's 86% of its sales. That's all the AI stuff. So it really is, I mean, it does a lot. Like, you see that there's a real breadth that the company does,

• 8:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  but AI is really pushing it forward and has 80% of the AI chip market. But here's what I want to talk about with the investors that have stuck with it since the beginning. This is from Bloomberg. If you bought Nvidia at the IPO, your return is 591,078%.

• 8:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Including reinvested dividend. That's nuts. And this is how difficult it's been to stick with them. So this is from the Bloomberg story. Longtime investors in Nvidia have had to stomach three annual collapses of 50% or more in the stock. Sustaining the current rally will require customers to keep spending billions. A quarter on AI equipment whose returns on investment are so far relatively small. So first of all, if you bought Nvidia at the IPO and stuck with it, kudos to you. You are a steel stomached investor. But it also is interesting because who says, you know, it's sort of almost like the past is prologue or whatever they say.

• 9:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  And maybe this is the case again where, you know, we don't have huge ROI's on AI spending right now. And that could eventually, I mean, I'm not thinking, I don't think it will happen this year or next year or the year after that. But that might eventually be what cools this off and not competition. What do you think?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be. I mean, the chip market is just always cyclical. There's, it's just always a boom and bust. So you know, there will be a bust. I mean, it's just, there's no, there's no way around it. I mean, I think the question is, the smart question is more like then what happens after that? Is there another, you know, do they just keep soaring after, you know, these inevitable dips, right? And one of the things P, I thought was smart just to look back and compare it to like when Cisco was at one point the most valuable company.

• 10:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Big comparison.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's, that's sort of an interesting one because they're more on like the infrastructure layer. And when, when the internet was relatively new, you know, they were, they were building all this networking equipment and it was the hot, you know, the hot commodity. And then eventually this stuff becomes commoditized, right? I mean, it's just, it's the way it goes.

• 10:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. But I think that kind of building off what you're saying, it seems like a pretty good bet that what we're seeing in AI is not going to slow down in the next decade at least. And so if you're Nvidia, you're really sitting pretty right now.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Totally. And Cisco's still around doing fine.

• 11:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we love Webex. No, I'm just kidding. I hate that thing, but, but yes, Cisco's still alive.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  They, so they are an advertiser with some of our, so, you know, I guess I'm.

• 11:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we're gonna, yeah, shout out Webex.

• 11:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I won't make you shit talk your advertisers.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  No, I'm just, I'm totally joking. I, I, there's a, there's a, there's a wall there just for your listeners to be totally clear.

• 11:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. But before we move on to what Ilya Sutskever, the former OpenAI chief scientist is doing, for listeners, this is obviously a huge story, like the Nvidia story. There's almost like so much more to talk about. And we will be doing that next Wednesday when Michael Batnick from Ritholtz Wealth, who's been a long time holder of Nvidia, the second half of the Compound and Friends podcast, along with Josh Brown. Batnick and I are going to get on the line Tuesday to talk about what underpins and what the Nvidia trade and the risks there. And we're going to have an entire Nvidia stock themed show for you on Wednesday. So stay tuned for that. I know there's a good chunk of you that are going to like it and a bunch of you that are going to really want the hardcore technology episode.

• 12:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So don't worry. I'm also interviewing Nick Bostrom, who's the AI doomsday philosopher who now believes we might see AI utopia just an hour later, and that will be on the feed within the next couple of weeks as well. So a little bit for everyone. Okay. Speaking of a little bit for everyone, the guy who basically helped build OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, is launching one of the weirdest, and I'm sure this means he's never going to come on the show, but I have to say what I believe, and that is that it's one of the weirdest companies I've seen launched in a long time. So it's called Safe Superintelligence, Inc. It's a startup. This is from The Verge. It's a startup with one product, and that is creating a safe and powerful AI system.

• 12:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that The Verge is really underselling it. They're the only product they will, they will ever release, according to Ilya, is superintelligence, which, you know, for just to give the definition, it's AI that's smarter than humans and not just smarter, but way smarter, because it just multiplies its intelligence once it hits human level intelligence. I'm just going to say it straight off. Here's why I think it's weird. This is from an interview that he gave in Bloomberg. Sutskever declines to name Safe Superintelligence, if Superintelligence is financial backers or disclose how much he's raised. I gotta say, I gotta be strong here. I think that's total bullshit. You cannot come out to the public and say you're creating a company that is, has one product, safe superintelligence,

• 13:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  and not tell us who's giving the money. I think it's a completely unacceptable way to roll a company out. It undermines credibility in the project itself. This notion of dark money is, is, I think, terrible. We should know who stands to make money from the building of super, safe superintelligence, or superintelligence itself. And if you're not gonna say that, sorry, I can't take your project seriously. What do you think, Reid?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  So you're not an investor? I take it.

• 14:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, no, definitely not. No. We obviously passed on the deal. I'm kidding.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  I think you're, no, it's an interesting point that it's, it's not the direction I thought you were gonna go with it. I, you know, think you're making kind of a moral argument here, which is, this is such important technology that the public deserves to know, right?

• 14:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  And more than that. I think that if you're promising that you're gonna create safe superintelligence, and you're going out there being high-minded, talking about how like, you're not gonna have the pressure to ship products because you only have one product, then you'll release it when it's ready, and you won't when you won't. And by the way, like, this is the thing that you have to be safe about, that you have to make sure that there are guardrails, that it doesn't turn us all into paperclips, you know, wink, wink. You cannot get out there and not tell us who's funding this. I just think that's, that's unacceptable.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  No, it's an interesting, I think it's an interesting point. I mean, I was sort of, I read that and was kind of like, well, why? Like, why are you not, is it because you don't actually have any investors? Is it because it's Dustin Moskovitz? And, you know, you know, it's not, people are trying to avoid, there's controversy around OpenAI, maybe, you know, maybe investors don't want to seem like they're, you know, taking on OpenAI or something like that. I mean, there's probably some interesting reasons around that. I think the market will probably take care of this problem, right? Like, I think his- I think the other thing he said to Bloomberg, or maybe it was in his statement, was he doesn't want to get into this competitive rat race.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I think that was the quote. I mean, I just, I don't, I don't see what investors like.

• 15:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, this is the quote. He says, "It will be fully insulated from outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race." Sorry, go ahead.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Right, right. So it's like, yeah, let me invest in this one, you know, super genius AI researcher with maybe not a lot of business experience. And let me, you know, he doesn't want to be competitive. It's only probably the most competitive industry in the world right now. I just, the idea of making a return on this investment seems very low to me. And I think if he wants to develop superintelligence, he's going to need to recruit the very smartest researchers in the world and take them away from companies that are guaranteed to make them very, very rich. And then join this company that doesn't want to be part of a competitive rat race. I think, I think it's a tall order.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So I think you, your moral point is a good one, but it does, it's sort of, it sort of will be taken care of by the market here.

• 16:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, hold on. No, I really, let's dig into this. What do you mean the market is going to take care of?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  I think, no, no, he's not going to be able to recruit the talent or the investors and the whole thing is going to fizzle. Or it will just be a forever passion project of his and he'll get some enough funding to kind of just like get by and from people like, you know, maybe it's, I'm just totally guessing. I haven't done the reporting on this, but like Dustin Moskovitz, Yon Talan, the Skype founder, maybe Eric Schmitz, one of his foundations are just going to give him a little bit of money and, and he can sort of work on superintelligence for the next 25 years, you know? And meanwhile, so is OpenAI and Anthropic and, you know,

• 17:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  every other big Google, every other big tech company.

• 17:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or he builds the AIs that help him do the, you know, do the research and he just disintermediates the need to recruit. I mean, I think that's unlikely. I think you're probably right. But I guess where I'm going, I basically, it's so interesting, like you're starting from the beginning and sort of charting like the path and I'm starting from the end, which is like, all right, let's say they do it. Who stands to benefit from that financially? Because if you do develop superintelligence and you have investors, right? It's not self-funded. It's like, okay, so like now we're going to learn who's gonna like, who's gonna make money

• 18:02Speaker 01

  What exactly are you worried about? Who's gonna have priority? It's like North Korea or something, or I mean?

• 18:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, I just, I guess I question the veracity of the claim that you're gonna create safe superintelligence if you're also doing it on behalf of investors. And you can tell us that it's safe, but it's also like, it's not, it's not, I think we gotta deal with this, like, I'm saving humanities rhetoric. And to me, the rhetoric is more honest if you're like, I'm doing this on behalf of some people who are trying to make a financial return.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then we can start to have a discussion about what your aims are in the real world versus this make-believe world that it seems like he's in.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Well, now you're getting into this other issue, which is like, you know, what's this safe? I mean, every company wants, is saying they want to build safe superintelligence, you know, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, who else? I mean, they're, those are the big three probably right now. I mean, they're all, they're all saying we're going to build safe superintelligence, right? And, and ultimately, they all have commercial motives, right? And I think it's, at some point, you know, safety becomes very subjective. We don't really even know what safety means at this point. I mean, I think you basically said that. So I think all, I think I would just, I just sort of put them in the same bucket as everyone else. That's just sort of.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  You know, saying, yeah, we want to build, we want to build this stuff safe. But at the same time, we're going to go as fast as possible and try to make everybody rich. It's just, you know.

• 19:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  I trust you.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  It just doesn't, you know, it doesn't seem plausible to me. I think at some point, like I was talking with someone the other day about this. They were saying they were at this, this, it wasn't public. There's a meeting recently with a bunch of people from all the big foundation model companies. And they're all talking about AI safety and these employees are sort of, you know, like, like talking about how even criticizing the companies that they work for, you know, saying, well, I don't think they should have done this and that. It's like, yeah, but ultimately like those types of people are not going to be the ones with power at these companies. And not, you know, not to like pick on any one company, but they're all kind of the same.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Like ultimately, those companies are meant to make a profit. And when, if they develop something that is incredibly valuable, like quote unquote, super intelligence, it's coming out, whether it's safe or not. I mean, they'll try to make it safe, I'm sure, because that's not good for business either. But like, that stuff is, you know, it's, we're, we're going to see it, right?

• 20:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And there's like a whole slew of news effectively along this line this week. So here's another story. So this is from the information. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says company could become benefit corporation akin to rival's Anthropic XAI. So basically, the story says Sam Altman recently told some shareholders that the AI developer is considering changing its governance structure to a for-profit business that the nonprofit board doesn't control. And this is interesting about benefit corporations. I think this is like a pretty good structure. So benefit corporations are legally protected from minority shareholders who might otherwise sue the company for making decisions that don't prioritize shareholder returns.

• 21:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know, that seems like a more healthy way to do a company, but maybe that's a question for another day. But it does seem like, like on the theme of like going from the world of make believe to the world of real life, like actually this move from OpenAI would be a more of an acknowledgement of reality. We have billions of dollars for Microsoft. We are product focused, even though we have research. We do want to grow and maybe this is the beginning of an acknowledgement of that.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. Um, you know, I think, I think it's still

• 21:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Strong maybe.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Still profit motive. I mean, even Anthropic, you know, I mean, the Anthropic's, by the way, their sales pitch right now, when they're going out and, you know, selling to companies, right? They're all competing to, to sell their API, you know, API access to like corporations. Their pitch is like, we're the safe option. We're the, we're the safe version of this. But also like, it's a for-profit company as well. I mean, yeah, it's a benefit corporation, but you know, they're raising billions of dollars and they're racing just as fast as anyone else. And I think, you know, yeah, it protects you from like the minority shareholders, but I, I sort of, I don't see that as like

• 22:33Speaker 01

  changing your overall motive to make money. Like you're, you've got a lot of employees there who were there because they know they're going to get rich. And, you know, that's kind of like, I think that's the major thrust still, even, even with those.

• 22:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I agree. I think that like, it's an admission that, that effectively, even though it's like this benefit, public benefit company, it moves, might move, if OpenAI moves from this like, kind of weird nonprofit where like the CEO can get tossed if the board members don't like, you know, the way that he speaks to them to, you know, effectively like a more mainstream corporate structure. I think that's good for OpenAI and probably good for everybody else because it's like, all right, we're sort of dealing with an entity that knows what it is versus diluting itself into what it should be.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Right. I also don't think, when, when we talk about superintelligence, I mean, it's really kind of this sci-fi concept right now. And I don't think it's going to look the way people think, you know, it's not like one thing that becomes this all-knowing, super intelligent, you know, AI. I think there's going to be lots, AI is just going to infiltrate everything we own. It's going to be lots of different types of AI models that are specific for different use cases and. You know, it's not, I don't think, I don't think it's like a winner takes all like I came up with superintelligence first and therefore, you know, I rule the world kind of thing. I don't, I don't see it going that direction.

• 23:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, probably not, but this is the way that a lot of people are building is that they want to build, I mean, this is sort of the line of thinking, right? They want to build AI that builds more AI and accelerates the progress. So, I mean, there's amazing stuff coming out. I'm not sure if you're seeing this. I mean, it's mostly like secondhand that I'm hearing it, but just the ability of this technology to code itself is getting way better. And are we going to get to the point where like most code is going to be written by, by, by machines versus humans seems likely. And if not, if not imminent, but you're right, that's not superintelligence. Like, superintelligence, you're right, is, is more sci-fi, kind of. I mean, if we live in a world with superintelligence, that

• 24:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  will be a little bit insane.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't even, I just, I still don't think people like really, I mean, they use terms superintelligence, they use term AGI, everybody kind of defines this stuff in different ways, you know, I think, I think it's going to get a lot better and a lot smarter, but I don't think it's like this, I don't view it as this like imminent threat to humanity.

• 25:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, same here.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Existential way. I mean, I think it's in that good for humanity. I think, I think we should be excited about the way this technology is developing generally, and we should pay attention to safety and all that stuff. I mean, it should be important, but I wouldn't expect any for-profit company, whether it's a benefit corporation or not, to be the one to sort of decide what's safe or not. It's, that's.

• 25:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Like, the more companies talk about, are aware of what they actually are, the better. And here's another one, where, actually, this is, this is less, it's an interesting story. It's less coming in terms of what it does and more just like this pragmatic move that's happening within Google and how it's being registered. So, this is from Bloomberg, "Google Deep Mind Shifts From A Research Lab To An AI Product Factory." And this is from the story, "According to people familiar with the lab, some researchers are frustrated with having to follow roadmaps that they feel have been imposed from above." Some of its biggest advances before the change, when they actually brought DeepMind and Google Brain together, came from small teams that banded together informally.

• 26:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there's a feeling that this effort leaves less room for experimentation and the pressure is already leading to a sense of fatigue. It hasn't helped that Gemini has suffered one snafu after the other. So do you think this is a wise, let's say, let's take this story at face value. Do you think this is a wise strategic move from Google to sort of take its like world-class AI research house and make it more focused on product? Because, I mean, it seems like there are some rumblings from inside that like, if we're not like, kind of wasting time and experimenting, I mean, I'm putting wasting time in quotes, right? But if we're not wasting time and experimenting, then there's a less of a chance that we'll be able to develop the next breakthroughs that will put Google the next leap ahead. So where do you stand on this one?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, to take the story at face value, I think is,

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I'm not saying, not criticizing the story. I mean, John Victor wrote this story for The Information a few months ago as well. It makes sense and I think there's, there's probably a bit of, a bit of confirmation bias when you go out to report a story like this. I mean, you and I have both done this, like we, you know, you want to do that story about how the company feels. And it's like, well, there, you have no way of surveying every employee at, at, at DeepMind. And I think you could, you could probably write this story,

• 27:30Speaker 01

  you know, based on whatever, maybe six, 12, 20 employees and, and still not really capture like every, how everybody thinks. I've met people at DeepMind who were working on things like, you know, AlphaFold, and AlphaGo, and those, those wastes, wasting time sort of projects that you talked about that turned out to be amazing. And they're working on product roadmaps now and they're super excited about it. And I think there's a, is it wise to do that? I mean, A, does, you know, does Sundar even have a choice, right? I mean, this is now like, he's going to get fired if he doesn't go full steam ahead. And like, you obviously have to take your smartest people and put them on,

• 28:12Speaker 01

  your smartest people in AI and make them work on these AI products now. But there's, there's something interesting about like, You have all these people who probably would would otherwise be in academia, working for this deep mine company within Google and it's kind of this like ivory tower within Google and it's great. They're doing great stuff. And now you're like, actually, now I want you to make products. Some of them are probably going to be really good at it and you're gonna you're gonna end up with some really interesting stuff by basically like letting these people loose on something that they've they've never really done before. And some of them are probably going to be annoyed about it. And maybe they should go back to academia, you know, and

• 28:55Speaker 01

  make less money. That's a hard that's that's a hard thing to tell your your your family, right? Like, I'm gonna go make less money back in academia to pursue my passion. But, you know, I mean, academia is traditionally where that kind of research happens and has happened and probably, you know, probably should happen. So in a way, it's kind of like, to me, it's kind of like restoring the order in the universe where these companies are like, okay, we've been just like vacuuming up all this academic talent and having them work on these projects. And, you know, now we're going to actually be companies and develop this stuff. Was that even coherent at all? I don't know.

• 29:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. But I have a counterpoint for you. Okay, so it's so I think that it sounds logical to say, go to academia to do this work. But academia is so far behind in terms of bringing our conversation full circle in terms of having the hardware, software and networking to be able to do this.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  This was a stat that kind of astounded me a while back, but I feel kind of cruel doing this, but I'm going to make you guess. How many GPUs do you think Stanford has? Stanford University?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  How many do they actually have?

• 30:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. Oh, the Stanford NLP group.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  The NLP group.

• 30:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, they're they're they're natural language, machine learning group.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I know they they probably get a lot of help from. From the private sector there, like I know Stanford has access to some of these clusters. So I guess it's probably like, how do you really define it? But I don't know, they probably don't own that many. I mean, I, I don't even know if they have their own cluster, to be totally honest.

• 30:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so they, they have 64.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  64, so it's like nothing.

• 30:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Compared to 650,000 that Meta's gonna have by the end of the year.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, which makes sense. And that's why, you know, you've, you know, the, the, I'm sure you're, well, you've probably talked about it on the podcast, that this, you know, research cloud, the national research cloud, right?

• 30:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, talk about it a little bit, actually, it'd be good for listeners to hear.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Well, there's a pilot, there's a pilot program to, to build essentially resources for academia and startups. Essentially like a gigantic cluster, supercomputer that you can, you know, and, and it's nowhere near what it needs to be. It needs to be funded by Congress, it needs to be much, much bigger than it is. And these, this is happening in the UK, it's happening in Europe. There are these, there are these national, you know, labs, and hopefully we'll get there, right? I mean, I think it should be, like, government should be on par with, with the private sector, or even surpassing it when it comes to building these things, right?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  If you look at, like, how all technology has been developed, going back to, like, you know, nuclear weapons, it's just, it's been massive government projects. And so that's, I mean, it is, that is an absolute real issue that you're talking about and a problem that I think people are working on and hopefully will be solved.

• 31:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, if the government goes on par with Meta in terms of Nvidia GPUs, man, we're gonna hit 4 trillion pretty quickly.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good argument for, for Nvidia. I mean, I think it should. I mean, if you look at, like, if you think of this as like, a really important... Advancement in our, you know, in our society, our understanding of the universe. Like, I mean, the space program at one point, I think the Apollo mission was like taking up like over a percent of GDP alone. If you go back and look at the, the numbers. And I think that turned into a good ROI.

• 32:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, That was worth it.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, we didn't make a bunch of money on the moon landing, but we made a bunch of money on the, the technology that was developed around that. And America became the leader and, you know, developed the internet and, you know, basically like the modern computing industry, right? Came out of, out of those space missions. So I think, you know, it would make sense. Like, I think we, we should, you know, every country should want to be a leader and it makes sense for the US to be that leader.

• 32:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Okay. I, yeah. And so just to wrap up the DeepMind piece.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry. I took it off course.

• 33:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, that was a great, no, it was good. We, we allowed that to breathe and I think it was the right decision. Just like going to space. But, um, but I do think that, that, uh, yeah, it might take some time for researchers to be able to do this in the, in the academic setting. But in the meantime, I think there is some credence to like what the argument that Demis makes, the head of DeepMind, Google DeepMind, which is that like the cutting edge of research is also the cutting edge of product at this point in some areas, right? If, if Google throws, takes the sort of GPUs that it was going to give to DeepMind and the GPUs it was going to give to Google Brain and combine all that computing power and the best researchers and says, go develop a cutting edge model and they do it, that does push the status quo forward.

• 33:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe not in like the strange and like, you know, ways that might pay off in 10 years, but in the, in the moment, it's still very advanced research that's going to have a serious impact, probably most likely bigger than any of the other side product, side projects.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. We've, we've definitely hit a point in the development of this technology where the private sector is, is pushing things forward very, very quickly and developing amazing products, amazing technology. That was built on the back of decades of academic research. And so I think if you think that like the private sector will develop superintelligence and that's the end, like that's the net, that's like the last, the last thing that we ever need to develop because then the superintelligence can do it all for us. Okay, well then that makes sense, but. If you think like I think that there's probably a lot of, a lot of things that need to be developed, you know, technologically to get us to superintelligence still, it's

• 34:50Speaker 01

  gonna take longer than, than people think, then yeah, you still need to be investing in government-funded academic research for things that will come down, that will be products 10, 20, 30 years from now. That's kind of how I view it.

• 35:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Okay. So, speaking of DeepMind, you also have a very interesting story in Semaphore about how Mustafa, Mustafa Soliman, who used, who was a DeepMind founder, is now the head of consumer AI products in Microsoft and getting a chance to look at the OpenAI code. So, let's dig into that right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been

• 35:48Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 36:31Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 37:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Reid Albrigati, the technology editor at Semaphore. You can find it is the URL semaphore.com/tech?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Is it Semaphore? Yeah, I think it is Semaphore. I should know this.

• 37:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Semaphore.com.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Hold on, let me double check that.

• 37:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just Google Semaphore tech and you can find. No, it's not. It's slash vertical slash.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yes, slash. I just looked.

• 37:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Get on the line with the Semaphore webmaster, man.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  How do we not? How do we not have that sorted out? Yes. Just Google, just Google Semaphore tech. It will be the first result.

• 38:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's the good stuff. And so you tell us a little bit about this recent story that you had talking about this really interesting moment where Mustafa Suleyman, who used to be a DeepMind founder, who's now inside Microsoft and is basically getting to peek into the OpenAI code and that's making people get the willies. Like, what's going on there?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and this is another story where let's like, you know, like similar to the other, the DeepMind story you were talking about. I mean, this is not everybody, right? And I think, I think people at the top of Microsoft and top of OpenAI, I mean, they'll tell you they've got a great working relationship and all this stuff. But I think there's something sort of, I think there's an irony in this, right? OpenAI was created literally to compete with DeepMind. And now the co-founder of DeepMind is, is like, hey, sending his, his people in there to go, hey, let's see, see what you guys are working on.

• 38:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's going on in there?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  And it's just, there's a, there's an irony there that's sort of worth pointing out. And yeah, it makes some people a little bit uncomfortable who, who see it happening. But what's, what's going on really is, is Microsoft is developing, you know, co-pilot products and their, this stuff is going through all of their products now. And Suleyman is being brought on to kind of give, give those products like his. His kind of put his spin on it, which is if you followed his inflection AI pie chatbot. It's all about sort of empathy and relating to people. And his vision is we're going to have this empathetic chatbot and it's essentially going to become your operating system for, you know, for everything you do.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  It's going to do, it's going to do all your computing, all your, you know, internet shopping and reservations for you eventually. And so that's probably what Microsoft sees. There's like a value there and, and looking at that in that way.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  That stuff is a long way off. Another thing that's probably a long way off is that Microsoft, you know, they're not, contrary to sort of how this gets reported, they don't own OpenAI. And that relationship, you know, may have an expiration date at some point. They need to keep those muscles working, the, the AI development muscles working. Now they have Suleiman and I think he'll be probably good at helping to recruit researchers and people like that. And one day, not today, but one day I think Microsoft will want to probably be able to, if they need to, develop their own huge foundation models that would compete with a, you know, a cutting edge company like OpenAI. And OpenAI would want to do the same thing.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  They want to one day not have to rely on Microsoft's data centers to train and run their, their AI. So they're kind of like frenemies in that sense. And, you know, people have pointed that out, but I think my take on it is like they're not, they're not like at odds right now, but there's this, there's this part of their brain, if you think of these companies as like a big brain, like part of the company is like, has to be thinking ahead down the road when they might have to compete with one another, if that makes sense.

• 41:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  But yeah, and working together is, is really working out for them.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is, you guys have in your stories, like your own, you know, you write the news and you write what you think about it. And I love scrolling down to that. So this was kind of an interesting perspective that you shared in your Reed's viewpoint. So you said, if the relationship does start to The cool OpenAI could hold back on cutting edge research. Microsoft has the right to OpenAI, rights to OpenAI products, but only when they're officially launched as products. And it can't look at experimental research, far from commercialization. Uh, that's interesting. I didn't realize that that was the case. And then, and you knew I was going to talk about this because there's a connection here. With the Tour de France coming up, here's a bike analogy. OpenAI and Microsoft are in a two-person breakaway. Far ahead of the peloton, by working together, they might be able to keep the lead. If either goes solo, they may, uh, both fall behind.

• 42:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I think it's a perfect description of the way that the companies work together. And I'm not only saying that because I was watching the 30 for 30, uh, documentary on Netflix about Lance Armstrong, uh, this week. And, um, and up pops a, pops a Wall Street Journal article and first byline is, is yours, Reid. And I was just like, I was watching with friends and I was like, holy shit, he's coming on the podcast this week. So anyway, that was pretty cool. So obviously you reported a lot on Lance in a, in a previous life and, um, lots of, uh, Tour de France stuff, but it was a good description. But it's interesting that the two are, the two are, um, they, they can keep this lead if they work together. But if they do go it alone, there's weakness on both ends that will not necessarily translate to strength.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be too early for them to, to say, screw you. I'm, I'm going for the win. Um, that would not be, that would be not good for either of them. So I think, um, yeah, I mean, I think for now it works. And I think there will be just like an awkwardness there. Um, and there's certainly tension like on a micro level. Like if you, if you talk to employees at both these companies and Microsoft, like lower level employees at Microsoft and OpenAI, like they'll bitch about each other. I mean, you know, it's like the, the Microsoft people, some of them think the OpenAI people are pushing them around. The engineers have disagreements. I mean, but it's like, it's not, I mean, you could, you could play that up and you could try to say, well, these companies are at odds with each other.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  But I think that's just only natural, right? Like that's, you know, that would happen even internally between different product teams or different parts of the company. And so I don't think that necessarily is a sign of anything. I think it's just more, the Suliman thing is more interesting to me because it's like this, I think a long-term strategic question for both of these companies. If that makes sense.

• 43:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. And so definitely. And so is super intelligence, one of these models like hanging out in the back of the bus with enriched blood being injected into its veins so it can finish first or?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Okay, just for the record, I'm not the one who took the cycling analogy too far.

• 44:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, I knew I was gonna kill the joke and it was probably one of the worst ones I was gonna make on the show ever, but I had to go with it.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  No, I appreciate it. Um, I think that-

• 44:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have no regrets, listeners.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  I think that, um, yeah, I mean, at some point, like, yeah, super intelligence is looming there, is looming there is the, uh, like, I don't, I don't think doping is the right analogy for it, but-

• 44:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's no way to fit doping in here, but I still, I still try.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Maybe part of Microsoft thinks, maybe we'll develop the super intelligence. Maybe, you know, maybe someday it's us, not OpenAI.

• 44:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  As long as it's right, super safe, right? Wink, wink.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  It'll be, it'll be safe, just like blood transfusions. Safe.

• 44:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah. No one ever was harmed. Um, this is not a medical advice podcast. Okay, so before we move on, um, we have one more story to cover this week, which is interesting. So this may have been something that like, I, I don't even know how to title this, the Vision Pro stalling, because it's something that has been reported and then kind of mulled over. And there's obviously been a lot of buzz about how the Vision Pro hasn't met expectations in the short run, or at least hasn't, you know, flown off the shelves. You can go into the Apple store and get an appointment to demo it like at any time and don't have to wait. At least that's been my experience. This is what I do on the weekends, folks. But this is from the information. It says, "Apple suspends work on the next Vision Pro,

• 45:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  focused on releasing cheaper models in late 2025." And so the story, "Apple has told at least one supplier that suspended, it has suspended work on its next high-end vision headset. Um, the pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device, and the company is still working on releasing a more affordable vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025." What do you, what do you think this, the implications are here? I mean, this was launched, you know, a little more- Than a year ago with great fanfare and is this a scale back of ambition or is the bigger picture? Just that this stuff is hard?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  I just, I feel very vindicated because I think I said on another podcast or show or something that I think Apple should probably just not release this thing at all.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  You know, maybe like a year before it came out because it's just like, you know, why? I mean, it's not, if you, okay, if Apple had some breakthrough technology, sure. Okay, come out with this thing, but the tech is not there yet. What they really want to build is AR glasses, right? Like glasses that look like normal glasses. You can't tell that there's anything going on there, but actually it's projecting images onto the real world. And it's very sci fi. The only problem with it is it's impossible. You can't build it. So they kind of like, they're like, yeah, we're good. Let's just do like a VR headset and, but we'll make it the nicest VR headset out there. It'll be $3,500 and it will be maybe marginally better than other headsets out there. It's like a little bit, I mean, I don't know if you tried this thing.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  It's like, it's there.

• 47:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh yeah, multiple times.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the problem with it is like the field of view. They spent all this money and all these features and the field of view is smaller than the meta thing. And field of view to me is like, that's like the only metric that really matters. It's like, at this point, it's like, just make the thing wider. And so there's so many, so many things that are not perfect and great about this product in, in a, in an industry where it's like crowded. I mean, there's lots of VR headsets out there on the market already. And like, people are not that into them. They buy these things and they use them for a couple of weeks and then they sit in the desk drawer because they're just not all that useful right now until the technology gets better. And so I think the problem with Apple is they have this like giant ship.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  It's really hard for them to turn, you know, on short notice. They've been working on this thing for a decade and all of a sudden it becomes very clear, you know, in November of 2022, that this is not the technology they should be working on. They should have been working on AI the whole time and they need to reverse course, but they came out with this product anyway. And I think they're probably just hoping everybody forgets that it exists, honestly. But I, you know, but who knows? I mean, maybe they'll just plod on with the cheaper version and or maybe people will buy the cheaper version or whatever. And then eventually the technology gets there and catches up. But right now, and this is another area where like academic research

• 48:36Speaker 01

  needs to kick in, like the optics technology is just not there yet to make this stuff good.

• 48:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we really have to wait till this stuff can be beamed into glasses and then it has a chance to work. I mean, I'm I have the Ray-Ban Meadows, the sort of voice slash camera glasses from Meta and they're pretty cool. But, you know, I don't think I think they're just much more applicable because the form factor is normal versus like this the headset. Let me ask you one last question about, you know, to build off of this. Obviously, you watched the WWDC presentation last week from Apple and I've talked about this on the show a couple of times, but I'm curious to get your take. Last year, like, obviously we knew it was going to be tough and it was going to take a long time, but people were people were enthralled with the Vision Pro presentation and guys were wearing them on

• 49:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  the street and we were talking about spatial computing. Is there a chance that the enthusiasm over the AI announcement has the same sort of life cycle as the Vision Pro?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  I think Apple's presentation on its AI products was like too good. Like, everybody loved it.

• 49:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Basically that the demos, the demos won't, won't work or?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't even know if they won't work, but I mean, I think they should have set expectations a lot lower because I think even if it does work, it's going to take a while. And everybody, everyone loved it. I mean, I heard very few people say. Eh, I'm not that excited about Apple's, you know, AI presentation. It was just universally hailed as amazing. And I think consumers are now going to expect amazing from them. And if you look at this kind of stuff that Apple's tried to do, you know, the problem with Apple is their ecosystem has become so complicated now. It's just, it's sprawling. It's this huge thing. It's not quite at Microsoft Windows Office level, but it's getting there.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  And it's starting to not like work all that well. You know, there's, there's cool features that they have that work sometimes. And then sometimes don't work for some odd reason. And that's the kind of stuff that people got annoyed about with Microsoft, you know, back in the day. So I'm just, I think that like this is going to be really hard for them to do, to get like all of these AI products to work across all these different apps that they have. And I think it's also a little bit too focused on inside their walled garden. Whereas I don't think that's how most people operate. Like they're not just using Apple products. They're using like a combination of products. So they're going to need to allow the APIs to work really well with other developers,

• 51:14Speaker 01

  which they don't always do very well at either. So I think there's a lot of challenges that they have to overcome with this. And I don't think it's impossible. I just would have set expectations lower if I, if I were Apple.

• 51:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So not to put words in your mouth, but you're basically saying that, yeah, there could be a Vision Pro lifecycle, maybe not as sluggish, but the, the sale might've been better than the outcome.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Well, the difference is that this isn't a product people will have to buy. They've already bought the product.

• 51:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  It'll just be on their phone.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  So everyone will have it and everyone will, will either use it or not. And so it's, the question is like, I think the big question is like, does it actually give them a competitive advantage over, over people? At the same time, they're facing all this antitrust scrutiny. That's the Europe and others are probably forcing them to kind of like, open up their ecosystems a little bit. So right now, I think Apple's walled garden really gives it the ability to like lock in customers, right? The green bubble situation is like probably the biggest one. And They, I think, will have less ability. They're gonna have to compete on the merits more in the

• 52:28Speaker 01

  future, like on the merits of the, how well the product works. And then I think you're talking about like, okay, well, are consumers actually gonna start like looking at, you know, Android devices, right? Because they have better AI. And so Apple's gonna have to, I think of it more in that way. Like, is this gonna get people to buy more iPhones?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Or, and, and as the ecosystems open up, will they have to compete, right? Will they, will their, will iOS AI have to be better than Google's Android AI, if that makes sense?

• 53:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, for sure. And one thing I'll note, I mean, we have Meta AI at the top of every Instagram and WhatsApp app. We have AI overviews at the top of many Google searches right now. We're gonna have ChatGPT in the iPhone, and we're gonna have some of these AI features in the iPhone. I don't think any of those AI features yet, those AI consumer features, has people running to the experience for them. They're there, and in some cases, they're annoying.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  When they're not telling you to put glue on your pizza. You know, the outlier, those are the outlier examples. But there's also like, when it's working as usual, sometimes you just wanna scroll right past and use, and maybe this is because you're just like muscle memory, or maybe because I'm old, but like, it's like, you just wanna use the product the way that you've been using it for the past 15 years or whatever.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. Well, it's not there yet. I mean, it's, this stuff is really in its infancy. So the question is, does it get, does it get good enough? I think it will. I think it's gonna get, I think it's gonna get pretty good over the next couple of years, and it will start being really useful. But that, that only happens when like, you can basically tell your AI what you wanna do with your computer, and it just does it reliably.

• 54:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  But it's not, we're not there yet.

• 54:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, not even, we're not even at basic intelligence, let alone superintelligence.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. Maybe we're at basic intelligence, but we're not much past that, so.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, basic, it's, it's like a, it's like AI is like this intelligent person, but like, every like, every 10th interaction you have with them, they just do something completely unexpected. And you're like, this, this person is really weird, and I cannot trust them with anything important.

• 54:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very well put.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Which is kind of how my wife describes me sometimes, but still.

• 54:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was about to say, yeah, that's my reputation in life. So that makes sense why we're here and talking about this stuff. Reed, great having you on. Thanks so much for coming on. People can find your stuff at semaphore.com and click the technology, sign up for the newsletter, all that stuff.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the newsletter is free, too.

• 55:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Well, we hope to have you back again soon. And thanks so much for being here. Thanks, everybody, for listening again. Michael Batnick is here from The Compound and Friends and from Ritholtz Wealth, talking about the Nvidia trade on Wednesday. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 55:25Speaker 02

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