China Blocks Meta’s $2B Manus Deal, Meta Bets on Space-Based Solar | 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. 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?

  We'll take you through some quick headlines of what's going on in the news today. Of course, the Elon Musk.

• 0:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's take a moment for the production team.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Background update.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  We have a new screen in the background, much better contrast, much brighter. We're excited to explore this. The production team is stoked. There's four key stories going on in the news today. The first is Elon Musk's $134 billion lawsuit against Sam Altman goes to court today in Oakland. Musk is alleging that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission and became a for-profit entity focused on maximizing profit for Microsoft. Jury selection is going on today. There are a number of reporters on the ground and we'll be checking in on the progress there.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, already there was some reporting that said, certain people were saying it would be difficult for me to be unbiased here because of my general dislike for basically everything going on.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Sam and Greg were spotted on scene. Elon has not been spotted yet. There's also other Microsoft OpenAI news. They changed their partnership. OpenAI can now serve all of its products to customers across any cloud provider. Andy Jassy had some, had a post about it, saying it was a very interesting update. Obviously, he's excited to vend OpenAI technology through AWS, which they also have a partnership. And so, in other words, OpenAI can potentially use Google TPUs, Amazon Tranium. Other chips are on the table now. There's a lot more flexibility that comes from that. Over in Meta world, China has blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Manus after regulators reviewed whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules. This was something that went back and forth.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Did they get enough of the company to Singapore in order to clear the hurdles that require the acquisition to go through? Then, some members of the Manus team were detained briefly in China on business. There were some issues there.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  And one of the challenges is going to be, clearly, the Manus team wanted to do this deal. They wouldn't have signed up for it. It was a great outcome for the team. They were excited to build with Meta. But one of the challenges is you have all these different team members, many of which, you know, were born and raised in China.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  And they still have family members and people back in China that they care a lot about. So that's going to be, I would assume that's going to be a leverage point.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  From the CCP.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  And the last story also from Meta is that they are planning to use solar power from space at night, beamed from space. They're partnering with Overview Energy, a different company than the other solar space.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  The other talked about. Space.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  They've been in stealth for about four years. They're planning to beam up to 1 gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to Earth for around-the-clock power production. They're also deploying 1 gigawatt of ultra-long-duration storage batteries with noon energy. So some exciting deals coming out of Menlo Park. We got to start with these Diet Coke videos because I fell down a rabbit hole of Diet Coke Instagram reels.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised you weren't in this.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Yeah. It took them a long time to figure out that I drink three Diet Cokes a day and I love Diet Coke, but these, these videos have brought me a lot of joy. So we can play one. There's been a new study about Diet Coke versus Coke Zero, and we can pull it up in just a minute.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  It just came out with this new study that compared people that drink Diet Coke versus people that drink Coke Zero. And what it actually found was that people that drink Coke Zero are idiots and then people that drink Diet Coke are actually sigma chads that are way better than everyone else.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. We needed that. Wait, play the Restock video. There's a Restock video that is, it claims to be $4,000 of Diet Coke stored all over this person's massive house.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  I think it's about 200.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Let's count it up. Let's count it up. Let's pull up the Restock video. And you tell me, is this $4,000 worth of Diet Coke? Okay, that's maybe $20 of Diet Coke. This is maybe $10 of Diet Coke. Here's another 10. We're what, under $100 still of Diet Coke, I would imagine?

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm just so curious, when do they opt for the plastic bottle versus the can?

• 4:09John Coogan?

  It is odd. Some people have preferences. I saw, again, on Instagram in my Diet Coke deep dive, someone who insists that the 16 ounce aluminum can of Diet Coke tastes better than the 12 ounce aluminum can. That's the level of Diet Coke.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Also check out the organizational inefficiency here in this fridge.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  What's going on here? She's not-

• 4:32Speaker 03

  You're just putting up in the front.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Brodding.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Brodding. Yeah, because you could stack the Diet Coke much deeper, but once you're that far in the reel, you call it quits.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Instagram is just the Diet Coke app for you now.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yes, well, I'm getting, I'm so deep that I'm getting Diet Coke vibe reels. Let's pull this one up because this one is electric. This is like peak content. There we go. This one.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  This is like-

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  John just watching this?

• 5:05John Coogan?

  The fact that somebody took so long to edit this together is-

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  That looks like something you could one-shot?

• 5:11John Coogan?

  I mean, it's like in CapCut and you'd need to like choose the words and place them and add the features. Like, you should be able to puppeteer that with an agent, but I don't know of any agents that are really there on the video editing front. Certainly like the next, the next chip to fall, the next opportunity. Anyway.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Rise says, "A Chad might mog, but when the jester performs, even the king sits to listen."

• 5:37John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  And this is incredibly true. We have a friend of the show that is 100% a jester, and the closest thing we have to kings in this industry will pick up his call and listen to whatever he has to say, even if he's jester-maxing.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Based 16T, gotta be honest, bro. Uh, oh.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  I think it got deleted.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  But, said, gotta be honest, bro, I have no idea what a semiconductor is. Do you know why they call them semiconductors?

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  That made me laugh so hard.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Uh, do you, do you know why they call them semiconductors?

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Semi, I do not.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  So, full-on conductors, like copper. Electricity flows through it constantly. A semiconductor is like geranium or silicon. The current is, can be turned on and off, so it's semiconductive. And that started the computing boom.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  Because you can effectively store ones and zeros in it. A little more complicated than that, but that's like the very high-level version for why they are semiconductors. That's not why they call it semi-analysis. It's because Dylan just says he doesn't want to do full-on analysis. He only wants to do semi-analysis. I think his analysis is totally full-on analysis, but he decided to go with semi-analysis. Anyway, imagine genuinely believing that the entire human race was going to be wiped out in the next year, and then you just kind of aimlessly argue about it on Twitter. That is a weird, weird phenomenon that's going on. Oh, Phil is looking for a large gong in the Bay Area. If you are in possession of a gong that is over 30 inches, give him a call. He's in the market.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Is that even a large, is a 30-inch gong a large gong, though?

• 7:09John Coogan?

  How big is our gong?

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  I think it's 42.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  42? We're, we're around there. We're around there. Anyway, do you know where we got this gong?

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Gong's unlimited dot com.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Gong's unlimited dot com, Phil. You have your answer.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but here's, here's the thing.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  I could have replied to this on X, but I chose to save it to Monday.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, here's the thing, though.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  And tell it to you in person, yeah.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Why did we get the biggest gong?

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Why did we?

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, why is there a limit on gong size?

• 7:35John Coogan?

  I have, we, we've seen bigger gongs online.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, should you not be able to?

• 7:39John Coogan?

  They do exist, but they get very expensive. Uh, sort of a, uh, sort of an exponential relationship between gong size and price, unfortunately.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we have to talk about this study that went viral over the weekend.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  It is, uh, placebo sleep effects cognitive functioning.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  And the takeaway is that literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes in physiology. Sleep badly, convince yourself you're well rested. Stressful day, convince yourself it's fuel. Failed, convince yourself it's useful data. So in this study, it says, "The placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment, but rather to an individual's mindset. This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In two studies examining whether perceived sleep quality affects cognitive functioning, 164 participants reported their previous night's sleep quality. They were then randomly assigned one of two sleep quality conditions or two control conditions.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Those in the above-average sleep quality condition were informed that they had spent 28% of their total sleep time in REM, whereas those in the below-average sleep quality condition were informed that they had only spent 16.2% of their time in REM sleep. Assigned sleep quality but not self-reported sleep quality significantly predicted participants' scores on the paced auditory serial addition test and controlled oral word association task. Assigned sleep quality did not predict participants' scores on the digit span test as expected, nor did it predict scores on the symbol-digit modalities test when it was unexpected. The control conditions show that the findings were not due to demand characteristics from the experimental protocol.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Those findings supported the hypothesis that mindset can influence cognitive states in both positive and negative directions, suggesting a means of controlling one's health and cognition." Takeaway: golden retriever mode. Golden retriever mindset.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  They made a movie about the golden retriever mindset years ago. I know you haven't seen it. Have you seen it? It's called Yes Man.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking Air Bud.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Everybody is a great answer to that. No, that's about a literal golden retriever. Yes Man with Jim Carrey is effectively about the golden retriever mindset. Basically, he's a bank loan officer, he's become withdrawn, he's going through a divorce, he's having an increasingly negative look, outlook on life. He then goes to this seminar with an inspirational guru who has him enter a covenant with the universe and say yes to everything asked of him. And so he just has to say yes to everything and high drinks ensue, but he has a fantastic time and it's a very interesting silver lining story. Bradley Cooper's in it, Zooey Deschanel and Jim Carrey star.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Highly recommended if you're looking for a good uplifting movie this week.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Should we talk more about Meta's Space Solar Project?

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Absolutely, what's going on there?

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  So they announced this morning two new partnerships to bring innovative energy generation and storage to our data centers. We mentioned this earlier. Space Solar partnering with Overview Energy to beam up to 1 gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to earth for around the clock power production. What is the company? I think they're in El Segundo.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Reflex Orbital, we talked about that. I think Sean Maguire did the deal.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  And then they're also doing...

• 11:12John Coogan?

  And also, who is it? Co-founder of Robinhood, Baju, is that his name?

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I thought that was more of a compute play.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  He has done more compute, but at least at one point, a piece of the business was collect energy on solar panels in space and beam it down via laser. And so that was, all of these projects are incredibly difficult to math out and require a lot of different things to go well. They're very exciting, but this company, we've clearly been working for a long time. But if it's working for... Them and it winds up working for Meta, you can imagine that there are going to be lots and lots of buyers because energy, of course, is in is in short supply. The mirror in space is such an interesting solution to what I'd heard before, which was collected on a solar panel and then beam it down on a laser.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  A mirror is such a simple solution to that, so we'll have to see. It feels like the step one is just getting more solar panels down on the ground. You know, you see these data center projects and a lot of natural gas turbines, not a lot of nuclear.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, the question is like, if you have this capability, this this ability to bring basically 24/7 sun. Can you bring a lot more solar projects online because the economics just make more sense because you can power things like data centers, especially if you have batteries. The batteries that they they are doing in tandem with this apparently have 100 hours of capacity. So presumably even if you had, you know, a few days of cloudy weather, you could still keep energy coming through the system.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it feels tough because the data center wants to run 24/7, needs to run 24/7. The math on depreciation and the cost of the chips completely changes if you have intermittent electricity. And in some cases, if you lose power, you can actually damage the data center. And so there's a whole bunch of other things that you need to to work through. Did you see this post from Benjamin Todd? This was a very interesting post. We were, we we found this a little bit.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  You, I mean, you were the first person that like, kind of brought this up.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  I I had looked at.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  That I'm aware of.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  So so the question is, you know, AI's impact on on on jobs, on jobs and and employment broadly. I I'd looked at overall employment in India, overall employment in the Philippines and how it was tracking this year. Because of course, there's a lot of outsourcing, there's a lot of, you know, lower skilled, white collar style work, call centers, BPOs, outsourced processing centers, like small, you know, atomic tasks that get done abroad. And so I expected that if there was going to be an uptick in unemployment, it would show up in potentially India and the Philippines first. Of course, we heard that somewhat hilarious quote that that 90% of the Philippines.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Economy is call centers. Of course, it's not. It's closer to 5% or something, maybe 6%. But everyone sort of agrees, at least on the on the surface level, that that it's, as Benjamin Todd put it, it's hard to think of a more AI exposed job than Filipino call centers. But oddly, in 2025, employment was up 4%. And so, of course, people will say, well, maybe it's earlier, the technology is getting better, you know, you know, all these different things. But there has been a process of of automation around call centers. I mean, I was trying to get on the phone with the company just earlier. I had to go through a whole phone tree. It was even hard to find the phone number. There's a whole bunch of steps that companies take to try and reduce the amount of call center operators that are in the in the flow.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  And so this was not necessarily a new trend. US call center worker employment is in decline, but that started before ChatGPT and is probably main mainly about outsourcing. So the outsourcing boom, you would think it would have started with like the dawn of the internet. I would have expected the trend to start in 2005, you know, like Yeah. internationalization, globalization was well underway. In fact, US call center business support services, all employees for the United States, the peak happened in 2016 and then declined sort of during COVID and then has been declining ever since, probably as things move offshore. So there so there is a world where, you know, these technologies,

• 15:36John Coogan?

  they take time to diffuse. And so AI might play the similar role in the sense that like there is some sort of onboarding cost to moving from a US-based to a Filipino call center. That's taken a decade to to actually decline by, you know, not even half. It went from 900,000 people to 650,000 people over the past decade. Certainly not good if you're in that if you're in that industry in America. But interesting, interesting nonetheless. Also, Poland is having a breakout year. Income in Poland is on track to overtake income in the United Kingdom.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  This is based on a forecast for advanced economies. UK is growing now slower than Poland. So everyone who's a fan of Poland will be excited to hear the news that Poland really is going through a fast takeoff over there in Poland. They are doing some great stuff. Poland was once a communist third world country. Now it's overtaking Britain. This is in The Telegraph. European superpowers luring a record number of UK immigrants with its restored economy and robust patriotism. Interesting. Three months ago, the British businessman Johnny Mercer advertised a marketing role in his construction firm Polstrad, based in Poland. Not long ago, people weren't interested in moving here, as he sits down with at a trendy French bistro. This time, however, Mercer was

• 16:58John Coogan?

  inundated with Britons eager to work in Poland. Thirty-five applicants for the job were British and happy to relocate permanently, including one without any British links who got the job. People are excited. Noam Brown shared some interesting details about the differing constraints on AI progress. He says, Noam Brown suggesting that model weights become relatively less important as inference becomes more important, which means securing weight still matters, but securing inference capacity becomes a strategic advantage. This is from a slide for a talk he gave, which is very, very interesting just from an AI safety perspective.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  The idea of sneaking the weights out on a hard drive that you've smuggled in your suitcase and that being equivalent to a suitcase bomb is...

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Or refined uranium.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's not quite the same. Maybe the chips are the refined uranium more than the actual weights and the weights are merely one piece of the puzzle. Do you have any?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's interesting because I think recently, the past few months, we've seen this big fuss over distillation. But maybe there's an angle where distillation actually gets less important because even if the Chinese can distill our models, they can't serve them. It's like... You know, is that even important?

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And even if the models are exactly the same, if I'm able to put 10 agents securing my bank account against your one agent trying to break into it, I will have 10 times the amount of solutions. And so I should win that battle almost all the time. And you, you, it does, it does seem like we're shifting towards this, the incredible value of inference and capacity, which of course makes the whole data center slowdown ban so much more complicated because uh, you want, once you get into like the geopolitical considerations and what, what happens when large inference clusters start coming online elsewhere. And you go back to the Dorkesh, uh, the Dorkesh, uh, what was it probability density curve where he, uh, he

• 19:01John Coogan?

  says like if AGI comes soon, America wins. If it comes over a long term, China wins because he's worried about China ramping up their capacity over time, but they're behind currently.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Semaphore posted an article that said, meet the man who's outsourcing almost everything in his life to his AI assistant. It listens to every conversation, reads every message, emails and schedules meetings for him, all while pretending to be him. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me. And Taylor says, I think this will be normal in five years. She has an excerpt here. Uh, so he's made a small fortune selling multiple companies to Apple, multiple companies to Apple. That's always, that's all I love. I love stories like that.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Another one.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  And recently launched a voice recognition startup called Olive, said his personal AI has all but taken over his life. Now, when he wakes up most mornings, he consults the agenda his AI assistant has crafted for him and then spends his days following its directions. The AI has permission to email people on his behalf and sometimes sets up in-person meetings with people he has never met. It listens to conversations he has with his three kids and then suggests parenting advice, which he says has improved his relationship with them. Uh, it's a portrait of an emerging class of token maxers, power users who are plunging tens of thousands of dollars in MacGyver level AI assistants, not by waiting. For the next big model release, but by orchestrating today's models in loops with more computing power, more passes and more automated checking and a massive dose of

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  risk tolerance. The idea is to give the system an unlimited amount of tokens and access to every conceivable piece of relevant data. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  So some of this is extremely weird. Some of this is maybe very normal. I'm trying to think of like, how many of my interactions in my daily life are like mediated by technology already? Like, my alarm clock comes from my phone. It decides when I wake up more than anything else. In fact, I have the eight sleep will decide like the optimal time that I wake up within a few minutes, right? Because it's like an adaptive alarm. And then I get in the car, I select maps. It sort of tells me what streets to go on. I'm merely like the embodiment of the AI to get where I need to go. And then I have a calendar that tells me what I'm doing when. There are, there are some, there's some level of like

• 21:15John Coogan?

  intermediation. But I don't know. There's, there's still incredible value in touching grass. And I think that

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  We could see a bull mark.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  I just, I just think we're going to be in this, in this barbell world for so, for potentially forever, where you have Larry Ellison is, is, you know, buying Oracle data centers and going super long on AGI and also CBS and Foghorn Leghorn and you gotta own Bugs Bunny and you gotta own Superman and Batman, right? And then on the flip side, you have Josh Kushner, investor in OpenAI, ton of different artificial intelligence companies. And then on the other side, SF Giants. And it's like, are these diametrically opposed? Or are they actually, are they actually both true visions of the future of the world?

• 22:07John Coogan?

  It seems like something that is going to continue. We should go back to Manus. Do you want to read through the Financial Times with Tyler? And I'm going to take a quick break.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Can we do it two up with Tyler in place of me? And you can read through the Financial Times and sort of some of the reactions because

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so regulators Review the deal, reviewed whether deal violated Beijing's investment rules. China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of AI app Manus as Washington and Beijing vie for dominance over the emerging technology. The decision marks an extraordinary late-stage intervention by Beijing involving two non-Chinese companies. Meta had already begun to integrate software from Manus, which was founded in China but relocated to Singapore last year. It was unclear how the acquisition could be unwound at such a late stage. A person briefed on Beijing's decision said the announcement could be intended primarily as a warning for similar deals in the future. The person said the gesture was pretty harsh and it carries a strong intention to stop

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  follow-on deals like Manus. In reality, it's hard to unwind a done deal. Manus has been live, I believe, in the Facebook Ads Manager. It is, you know, obviously been heavily branded as a Meta Platforms company for some time now. The Meta team has been investing in scaling it. And so, yeah, very much feels like a done, it had been a done deal. I don't, I don't, I don't think there's been any reporting on it, but I would assume that full cap table had been paid out in large part already. So it's very unclear how you undo something like this.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, it's not super surprising, given that we obviously forced the sale of TikTok and this feels like somewhat of a response.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is interesting, is this the moment when like China wakes up, right? People, they're super like AGI pill, they're like, okay, at some point China's gonna like wake up. This seems like directionally towards that. But it is interesting because like you have this and then you have, you know, China approving the sale of Nvidia chips there. So it's like, okay, how much do they really want to disentangle from the US regarding AI?

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, AI 2027 had China wakes up in mid 2026.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like, I don't know, Manus is, I mean, it's not like a cash flow acquisition. Like, it's not a highly profitable thing that you're trading on earnings. It's a team.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's a rapper.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  And it's a technology, but the technology is somewhat commoditized. There's been code leaks from Cloud Code.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  It's a super talented product team with a demonstrated track record of like getting real paying users.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  And so the question was always, you know, how much does Zach care about keeping this as a standalone product?

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  An AI assistant for business that can...

• 25:00John Coogan?

  But why even buy the whole company then? Why not do one of those zombie acquisitions where you get the talent and then you get a license? And then there's a go ship and you leave the ship there?

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would assume...

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Because that's got to be harder to approve.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming that that's kind of what happens. I don't know. I mean...

• 25:15John Coogan?

  It seems like it's too late. They already bought the company, right? Like, they already did like the proper acquisition, like, you know, as you said, like paid out the cap table. I don't know. I don't know the exact terms of the deal, but it would have been, it probably would have been easier to do something like what Grok and Nvidia did, or like the Windsurf Google thing where like you're bringing people over with this contract and then like, yes, China blocks it, but it's like, what are they even blocking? It's just people getting a new job and a licensing deal that the money flows through and then maybe they try and claw that back. I don't know. It is a tricky, tricky situation.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not familiar with an acquisition that actually closed in venture that was then later fully unwound.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. Delian's taken a victory lap. He says, wow, so weird that they can do this since it's not a Chinese company. According to Gurley, there's always been back and forth about whether or not China would have any power over the Manus team. And it seems like they have some, some, some sort of power. Says, after China's cancellation of Meta's purchase of Manus, why would any founder start an AI company in China if they had a choice? Well, you can make money in cash flow in China. Like, you don't necessarily need to sell to an American hyperscaler to have a wonderful life as a founder of an AI company in China. But he makes the argument, in China, you have access to less compute, less capital, and salaries are lower than in the West.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  And if you are so successful that a non-Chinese firm tries to acquire you for billions of dollars, the Chinese government will lure you back to Beijing, ban you from leaving the country, and take your profits by canceling the acquisition. Manus did everything right. They even moved their entire business to Singapore to comply with US outbound investment restrictions. Their only mistake was that they originally founded the company in China. It's not even clear what this means for China to force Meta to unwind the transaction. Is it going to force Manus researchers to return to China and place X events on them too? Is it going to force Manus's founders and shareholders to pay back $2 billion to Meta? This is what happens when you regulate by fiat rather than by rule of law. Ultimately, this is a much larger defeat for the Chinese AI ecosystem than for the United States. Interesting.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Meta will be fine without Manus, but Chinese nationals looking to found AI companies will increasingly start them overseas. Hmm, that's interesting. The message from the Chinese government here is that every AI company founded in China will forever remain subject to the Chinese government regulatory pressure and manipulation, regardless of its legal status. So, he goes on, but you can read that there. What's Bill Bishop up to these days? He says, he's quoting from the Financial Times. Do we already read this? "A person familiar with the matter said Beijing had told the two companies that the deal must be unwound completely, including returning funds, re-registering the company's ownership, and halting Meta's use of the Manus algorithm." The person said that if the parties failed to fully undo the acquisition, Beijing could

• 28:08John Coogan?

  impose penalties on Meta, limit its China-related business, and possibly pursue criminal charges for individuals involved. That is a wild...

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  China does have a good amount of leverage, given that, like, tens of billions of Meta ad spend originates from Chinese companies. And so, they could put pressure on Chinese companies to pull back spend, which would hurt Meta. So, yeah, very, very unclear how this will all sort itself out, but...

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, unfortunate, unfortunate for everyone involved.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Hold this post from Michael Chang is showing sort of a glimpse of like the future of generative UI. So the prompt here, hey, chat GPT, what's the weather like today? Might have been a little bit more complicated than that, but using the new images 2.0, it is rendering sort of a video game style map. I don't even know. This feels like the type of map that you'd see at the front of like the Lord of the Rings book or like a Game of Thrones book, but it's giving you the actual information, like accurately telling you for each neighborhood, what the weather is like. Of course, you didn't need that much information because every single town is 56 degrees, maybe 57, maybe 55. There's very slight, there's very, very slight differences.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  It is an interesting world where you're getting closer and closer to this generative on the fly UI. Ben Thompson wrote a big bull case for the the Meta Augmented Reality Headsets, not just Orion, but also the Meta Ray-Ban Displays today, talking about as as AI models get better, on the fly UI generation with less chrome, which is like the top bar and the bottom bar and less, less permanent UI functionality is what actually feels magical. Like when you go to, you know, look at something and you get something that that perfectly sums up exactly what you're looking for on the fly. And previously, was it possible to build something like this?

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Absolutely, you, but you would have to hang out in Blender and create the 3D map and render it and then, and then build some webpage that would go and pull in the, the data from APIs and place it on the.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says one tower Golden Gate is a crime.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  So more work to be done, jobs not finished. Goodbye.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.