OpenAI Ends Side Quests, SF Housing Market is Back, Kalshi’s $1B Prize | Diet TBPN

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

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

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  Happy Saint Patrick's Day. We are not drinking Guinness currently, but we hope that you are.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, enjoy it. It seems like Tyler is in the Saint Patrick's Day mood and is wearing a fantastic Saint Patrick's Day hat.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm taking my hat.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  How did you wind up here?

• 0:21John Coogan?

  That's a nice hat. Where did that come from? Did we just have that?

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I had this.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Oh, you just had it?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  You had it handy.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  You just daily drive that?

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. It wasn't in your car?

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he wore it to the gym this morning.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Okay. In the news, The Wall Street Journal has an article about, this is a scoop from Berber Gin. We didn't have to break down the paywall, but Berber Gin has a scoop. It says, "OpenAI's Fidji Simo told staff last week that the company could not afford to be distracted by side quests, main quest only." Main quest only. What is the main quest? Probably just scaling compute, but we'll get into that. And then there's a whole bunch of takes back and forth, said the company execs are actively looking at areas to deprioritize. Of course, throughout last year, OpenAI launched a ton of different initiatives across consumer hardware. And I think a lot of people were starting to say like, okay, like, do you want to be fighting a battle on all these different fronts? Or do you want to just really nail consumer, nail enterprise?

• 1:18John Coogan?

  And now that is what they are signaling internally. So, from the Wall Street Journal article, "OpenAI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a do everything all at once strategy has put them on the defensive. Fidji Simo, OpenAI CEO of Applications, previewed the changes to employees at an all-hands meeting, telling them that top leaders, including Sam Altman and Mark Chen, were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks." We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests. Side quests is the key term there. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front. Last year, OpenAI announced an array of new products, including the video generator Sora.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  A web browser called Atlas, a new hardware device and e-commerce features for ChatGPT. Some of those are wildly different timelines for these things.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember during this time, that's when I started talking about viewing OpenAI's activities like they were a hyperscaler, right? When Google launches a new product, you don't have to assume that, hey, it's going to work every single time. And in fact, it's the exact opposite. A lot of these experiments don't end up going anywhere. It's fine. Like, again, you have this massively scaling core business. You start to say like, hey, let's experiment in a bunch of these different areas. Some of them are going to work, some aren't. It's okay. But then ultimately, that creates a scenario where you're sort of like opening up maybe too many fronts, right, to the competition, right? You're competing with Meta in social, with Sora, you're competing with Google in some

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  ways, you're competing with even like the Microsofts of the world in other ways. And ultimately, this just feels like, hey, let's narrow the fronts. And I think a lot of people expected something like this for the last few months.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  OTP in the chat is surfacing a very interesting old take from Ben Thompson about OpenAI should not be in the API business. And now, based on the way things look, originally, that was like, oh, well, maybe Microsoft will be able to handle and scale the API demand. But API demand has been so huge, and it's allowed Anthropic to develop such a solid business there, that it's undeniable that OpenAI should also be in the API business.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other side of that is like, they clearly need to be in the harness business too, which is why Codex is accelerating.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and so the hyperscaler, like your take of think about OpenAI as the new hyperscaler, I think that takes aged extremely well, especially with recent interviews with Dylan Patel and Dorakech, Jensen just went on Surtakri. There's a whole bunch of new data points that show how compute constrained we are, how tricky it will be, how chips will be the key bottleneck. There's that interesting story that Tyler was recounting from. Dylan Patel about how the TPU was developed by the TPU team. DeepMind didn't realize how important it was going to be, how compute constrained they were going to be. So the TPU went and sold it to Anthropic. And then DeepMind went back to them and was like, wait, wait, wait, we want those chips, like, we need the chips.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  It's particularly about the ability to Marshall compute at hyperscale. I was interested to look at like the history of side quests among Mag7 companies, among trillion dollar tech companies. Because it's all over the place. And so it's very hard to paint with a broad brush. I think right now, there's a huge narrative around like OpenAI was doing way too many side quests. They need to do zero side quests. And the reality is probably like, you know, we've seen this with Riley Walls joining the Labs team. Like, there will be small projects, there will be acquisitions, there will be a continuum of bets. There's just a level of refocusing that's going on right now.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  And reorganization, and this has happened at many, many.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think the bet with the OpenAI Labs team is you have a really small group of people that are focused on creating or being quick to new products.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  Like approaches.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  But that can be, again, like a two pizza team.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  And that type of experimentation is going to make more sense if the rest of the company needs to refocus on enterprise and the core business.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  History of side quests in tech, can we paint with a broad brush here? You know, spoiler alert, I think the answer is no, but there are some fascinating stories. So, Google has a balloon internet play that's a serious company called Project Loon, where they inflate balloons that go into the stratosphere, I believe. They go high up and then they deliver internet, sort of competitive Starlink. They also have.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  They have the fiber play too.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Fiber play, oh yeah, they just sold that. That's not even close to the weirdest thing. The weirdest Google side project that I found is they make a contact lens that will tell you how drunk you are. I'm not kidding about this. Google, they have a project, it does more than that. It's supposed to do biometrics, and it can do a lot of different things. But one of the things that it can measure, it can measure glucose in your tears. It can measure any sort of like biomarker that's in your tears, which apparently is like a rich source of data. But one of them is blood alcohol level. So you can put in this contact lens from Google, and it will tell you how drunk.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Jarvis.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Am I drunk?

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Am I good?

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Am I good? Am I good to drive?

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  You're absolutely not.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  He's like, sir, you should take a Waymo tonight. Would you like me to connect you? See, this is all part of the plan. They also briefly own Boston Dynamics, but most importantly, they bought DeepMind, which was completely seen as like this wildcard side project. How does that fit in? You know, it's a bunch of researchers and then it became like the most critical thing.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  Amazon has taken tons of shots at drone-related delivery and home security stuff. They also own Twitch, but they never really linked the site to live shopping and closed that loop.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Have you thought that that's weird?

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  And Jassy doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  He doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Apple.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Tried to build a car, then pulled out. Who knows where the Apple Vision Pro goes? Although, of course, I hope it continues. I'm hoping for another Apple Vision Pro. Apple Vision Air, just make it lighter, same screen. That's the trick. Make it like a thousand bucks. I think it'll sell. And they have a bunch of health moon shots. They've been working on non-invasive glucose monitoring, which is, there's some book about it called like The White Whale of biotech or something. It's something that people have been working on for so long and they've never been able to crack it. The best thing I think they have is that you can get a continuous glucose monitor. Thank you for the W's in the chat, by the way. There's a lot of W's in the chat. You can get a continuous glucose monitor that is invasive, meaning it is pricking you, it is measuring your blood and then calculating the amount of glucose in that. And you can wirelessly connect that now to your Apple

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Watch, but they can't do it in the Apple Watch. There's always been the question about like, could you just shine a light through your skin and detect the blood, the glucose in the blood? Very, very difficult to do. Lots of money spent with little to show for it, at least so far. Meta is probably the most egregious side quester.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  They don't do side quests. They do full quests.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  They create side quests in VR. There's actually one of the popular games. It's all about doing side quests.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, they bought Oculus, they bought a bunch of VR studios, they rolled everything up, they renamed the company, spent tens of billions of dollars on what is starting to feel like less of a side quest, but still is so early. You know, the Meta Raybands are like a success, but to the tune of millions of units, not, you know, billions of units or anything like that, or hundreds of millions of units. I think the iPhone has an install base over a billion now. And the ramp from here to there on Meta Raybands is going to be long. Tesla launched a premium Tequila, you know, lightning bolt shaped bottle. So, you know, it comes from all different Mag7 companies. But it truly like side quests come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just good for morale, like it's just fun. We do

• 8:57John Coogan?

  side quests here all day long. TBPN simulator, that's a side quest. What was the other simulator? Jeremy Gaffon simulator, that was a side quest. You know, they're just fun. Some of them are good for marketing, good for attention, good for fun. Some are complete dumpster fires where you just pour money in and it just sucks all resources and you get nothing out. And then some reshape businesses entirely. DeepMind's a great example. And there's certainly others in the Mag7 that have really, really changed the business.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  It seems like the entire boring company is a side quest.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's technically a separate company, but Elon's, yeah, king of side quests. Although I think

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like the company that gets the least amount of attention that's not like on the critical path for many of the other projects.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Totally. Some of OpenAI's teams come from very small teams with relatively tiny compute budgets, but they get a lot of attention, sometimes because of the particular product category. So, Sora is a great example, where small team, not huge resource investment, probably a lot of inference and training cost, but relative to Codex 5.4, SPAR, I don't know, I don't actually know like how we're looking on the order of magnitude there.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a big part of it is like

• 10:08John Coogan?

  But super viral, right?

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And what percentage of the team, the overall team's energy is going towards a specific product, right?

• 10:16John Coogan?

  So the idea of experimenting quickly and then consolidating efforts even faster makes a ton of sense. Nano Banana was a big deal for Gemini, bringing image, video and audio generation together in a single ChatGPT flow is clearly the next step. And so some of this is not, it's probably not going to take the form of like, stop doing the side quests. It's like, let's fold that into the main quest because clearly the interaction pattern of ChatGPT is, is where people want to go. And so, once we've done the experiment, it works, put it all together. Dylan Patel and Dorkesh said the TAM for GPT 5.4 was north of a hundred billion dollars, which is crazy for a bunch of reasons. I mean, it's a huge market that was created in just a few years. The enterprise opportunity in general is crystal clear for anyone involved.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  At the same time, you still do need to experiment to make sure you are early to create the next breakout product experience. And so with that backdrop, OpenAI Labs and being more efficient with the shots on goal makes a lot of sense. I still think that the, the overall narrative around AI, just in AI broadly this year, will be about the main quest, which I see as like compute scaling, raise the money, do the deals, grow the capacity. I was thinking back to Travis on the show, saying, if you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. The key is, if money matters, which I think we say, we would say it does, especially in certain categories. He was probably thinking of ride sharing, where there was a capital war in AI compute, where there's also a capital war. You need to be the best in the world at it.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think overall, there's real competition now.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  It's intense, right? You have, you have OpenAI, Anthropic.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  At the frontier, pushing very, very hard. But the other side of this for OpenAI is like, yes, there was a ton of stuff that was announced last year. There was, there was hardware, Sora, et cetera. But Sam was running around doing all these different mega deals for the compute side.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  That now serve the main quest. And so the positioning is actually great.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Uh, Google Capital bloke, the longtime Google bull, uh, says, so Anthropic and OpenAI are going to just give the consumer market to Google? And I don't know how, how, I mean, yes, they're like, like OpenAI reportedly planning to shift the strategy to refocus around business users and vibe coders. There's a lot of stuff going on there. Listening to some of the data around the retention curve of the various products, like, I don't think that they're giving up on consumer.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  At all.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  All that seems like sort of a, an odd read.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we can pull up this chart that Sam showed of Codex usage. This is like, again, this is like what I think is informing the battle with Anthropic, as well as like this chart is going to inform the strategy shift, which is like, hey, we can run, we can take revenue into the hundreds of billions of dollars with the current products that we have. Let's focus on them and make the best possible products. In other news, OpenAI is forming a joint venture with TPG Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  This is great news.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  To form a joint venture that would distribute its enterprise products across the firm's portfolio companies and beyond. The proposed deal is a free money valuation.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Bain Capital owns Fogo de Chao, the Brazilian steakhouse.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe now they can take Apple Pay.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, we got cooked on that. Maybe they deliberately don't. I wonder if Apple Pay is expensive for them, and this is actually a cost consideration. Fiji Themo said, "This news came out a little bit earlier than we planned. We're excited to be building a deployment arm and will share more details soon. Companies have a ton of urgency to deploy AI in their organizations, and we're sprinting to meet that demand. More than 1 million businesses run on OpenAI products. Codex is now at 2 million weekly active users, up nearly 4x since the start of the year. API usage jumped 20% in the week after GPT-5.4 Watch, launched in Frontier, which launched last month to help enterprises build, deploy and manage AI coworkers that can do real work. Has way more demand than we can handle. That's why we launched Frontier Alliances, so we leverage our ecosystem of partners in scale

• 14:01John Coogan?

  and to scale, and that is also why we're launching a dedicated deployment arm tasked with embedding forward deployed engineers deeply inside enterprises. This project has been in the works with our investors and alliance partners since last December, and we are grateful for them and their partnership. We're still early, but the speed of adoption is a clear signal of where this is headed. We're excited to not just be building these technologies, but also building many ways for companies to deploy them and get impact." There was a big, there was a big talk for a long time about like, the next gen private equity firm will buy businesses and like deploy AI inside them? And this feels like, well, maybe that works at the mid-market private equity? Level, but you don't necessarily need a new AI native private equity firm because Bain Capital.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I've always said, like traditional private equity is not, it's not gonna just be like, oh, we'll, we'll figure out AI in like 2030. It's not really on a roadmap right now. They're working as hard as they can to implement it. Question is like, will, will traditional private equity be able to basically like roll out and unlock the value of AI better than uh some of these like AI native more like venture oriented rollups?

• 15:09John Coogan?

  What is the pitch for a mini or a nano model?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Someone ran some emails and the mini models are like equivalent to GPT five when that first came out, but it's just way cheaper, right? So if you're like consensitive, if you're running a ton, a ton of queries, uh but they don't need to be like the max intelligence, then you just use this.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  So cheaper, but also faster?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yes, probably, yes.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  And potentially runs on older hardware?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  I think that's unclear.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  This is bullish for our vintage Neo cloud, the oldest GPUs ever made.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was Trey's idea yesterday.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna run this on 1080 Ti's.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, doesn't, like, how small the model is doesn't actually like matter on what hardware.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine running your vintage Neo cloud with, with a wood-fired heart powering it all.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that, what's after Blackwell? What's the one that announced today?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Vera Rubin?

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Rubin, Rubin. Like, you have to imagine that there will be models that only run on Rubin and need to be sort of re-architected to run on Hopper, I would imagine.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Uh, sure. I mean, I, I think there, there's like small performance boost that you can get.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Or it might just be slower.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  But, but you can always, you can run any model on like any hardware. It's just like, it could be like way, way slower.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Way, way slower, if you're on like a fleet of A100s, when you could just be on like, like a smaller rack of Rubens. Uh, interesting. What did Kalshi launch?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Kalshi launched the $1 billion, uh, Perfect Bracket Challenge, $1 billion for a perfect March Madness bracket.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  So you can win $1 billion for entering this competition?

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  I haven't read the fine print, but it's seen, it is positioned that way. Vinny says it would be hilarious if Citadel built out a team to attempt to financially impair their competitors through this, so. Sig Parametrics.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  From Susquehanna.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is, is basically like the financial backer for this promotion. So if Citadel can figure this out, they could leave their competitor with a $1 billion bill.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, trying to, trying to nail the perfect bracket.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Is functionally impossible, but.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  So, so there are nine quintillion possible brackets. So the odds of a perfect bracket are one in nine quintillion. And I believe that they are capping entries.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  I like my odds.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  I like my odds. Uh, and I believe that they are capping, uh, entries at 10 million entries. So if you math that out and then you take some insurance out, like you should be able to, you know, uh, hedge, hedge, hedge out any of the risk. Uh, if you are good and you don't suffer from any, uh, skill issues, you can basically, with strong basketball knowledge, if you have ball knowledge, apparently you can get the odds down to like one in 10 billion. And at that, you know, not from nine quintillion to 10 billion.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Well, if you have nine quintillion, you can sort them by how likely they are. Take the top 10 million, that's, you know, maybe there's some kind of power law thing here where we actually.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  You're getting, your odds are good.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  We get close, we get close. But I think, I think if there's 10 million, if there's 10 million, if it, like, assume that there's 10 billion reasonable brackets, uh, and out of the nine quintillion, so you're, you're discarding like all the craziest upsets to get to that 10 billion. You already ranked it and narrowed it down by like, what, six orders of magnitude or something? And then you're submitting the top 10 million of those 10 billion, like your odds of winning are still one in a thousand.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  You can make it a thousand accounts.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  And that's a, no, no, no, no. I think that they are capping the entire campaign to 10, the first 10 million entries. So you have to be on Kalshi and you have.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  My open call already submitted. The SEC prepares proposal to eliminate quarterly reporting. If you liked earnings days.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  I was thinking like, is this bad for us? We, we like earnings days, but it's not like our whole shtick. So I think we'll be okay. We will continue soldiering on.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  Good Alexander says, finally, less transparency around financial results.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know, I don't know if this is going to be enough to, to make it easier to be a public company. It's certainly a burden, but the kind of shareholder lawsuit risk and all that other stuff feels like a much bigger burden. What this is just going to do is create more volatility, right? If you're only getting

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Updates, you know, twice a year, you can just see these like massive swings because it's like, hey, we haven't heard from this management team in, in a, in a formal capacity for six months. The, the business could have, you know, changed wildly, you know, growth rates fluctuating, et cetera. And so again, if you, if you, if you love volatility, you're probably going to love this.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  So it's good for the VIX. That's bullish for VIX investors out there. There is a world where, I mean, the, the typical like public versus private debate is that when you're private, you can think in multiple years, depending on who your investors are, maybe think in decades even. Whereas when you're in the public markets, you need to think in quarters. And so advancing that from quarterly to six months and you start putting management teams in, okay, what can we deliver that will show up in six months as opposed to what can we deliver that shows up in three months? That's twice as long. It feels like you could wind up with better run companies doing more ambitious things. I don't know. There is a bull

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, no, I mean, the other side of it is you just get more complacency. There's less of that. There's less of that. You're, you're not like on the daily, the daily march. You know, you finish earnings and you're like, okay, 90 days, we got to do this again. Like there's no days off kind of thing.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  So are you, are you an advocate for monthly reporting?

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Daily.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Daily earnings calls?

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Potentially hourly.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Just put, I mean, this is the, this is the crypto folks. They're like, put it on the blockchain. I want to be able to see in real time, the revenues of this asset stream and how things are moving around. I want full transparency at all times as an investor. I don't know.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Nvidia.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Announcing Nvidia DLSS 5 and AI powered breakthrough and visual fidelity for games coming this fall.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Video games are gonna get more realistic. Prepare. Over the next couple of decades, this is going to be, this is, it's entirely possible this happens. Continue.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, it's, it's funny because when I, when I see the video.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  I want to see it big.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  When I see the video, I, my, my thought was, weren't video games already this realistic? But I haven't played video games besides Tetris on the dramatic.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  They, oh yeah.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  Long time.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  So let's play GeForce RTX DLSS 5. DLSS of course stands for deep learning, super shading, something like that. DLSS. It uses deep learning. It's used AI for a long time. The whole pitch for DLSS. Super sampling. Has, has always been go from a 720p render to 4K. Upres. Just interpolate the pixels. This is different. You can see that the, it's not just becoming higher resolution. It is becoming gen AI. Like there is a world where you render that at higher res. The lighting is changing. The shading is changing. The makeup, the structure of that person's face is changing, but it's still driven by the underlying. Why are you posting the bubbles? Cause I'm ranting.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  I want to see.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  You're not happy.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  DLSS 5 do this.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Uh, but, but this is what we were talking about yesterday. We were like, what will it take to get TBPN simulator photo real? I think we should try and pipe it through DLSS 5. Although who knows what this is going to run on because Nvidia is not shipping new graphics cards to gamers or something like that. They're delaying the next, uh, the next gaming graphics card. People are upset. There's a community note that has yet to be accepted, but, uh, the community notes are not happy. Like one of the community notes is just AI slop. And it's like, yeah, like that's in the name. It's deep learning. Like what do you think the DL stands for? And also why are we on DLSS 5? Oh, because this is like a decade old technology. Uh, I don't know. Uh, people are, people are very upset. Well, one of the community notes.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think the issue is.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Disasters in the environment. The majority of gamers did not ask for this.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is, is that the, are those the most photo realistic video games that we have today? And then they're showing how they're even getting more realistic.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Because they don't look, they don't look, they look like games that. Are kind of like animated characters that aren't trying to be photoreal.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  So, there's a range of games there that some of them have pretty outdated engines, pretty outdated outdated rendering pipelines. Some of them are on the latest and greatest and look very high fidelity. There's also a whole bunch of trade offs in game development around the scale of what you're building and how how many, you know, poker chips you want to put into great graphics. If you're making some moody first person shooter that's going to be dark and and there's going to be lots of, you know, like blood splattering and aliens and stuff like you could potentially make it ultra photoreal. But if you're trying to build like something like Minecraft, it's like this massive world that's interactive with a ton of different people like

• 24:06John Coogan?

  by narrowing down the scope, like the beauty of Minecraft was that the whole thing's voxel based, which is like these little blocks. And so the so the computer can store like an entire world very efficiently. Because all it needs to say is just there's a cube there and it's green. There's a cube there and it's black. There's a cube there and it's gray. Uh, what do you think?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  I was gonna say Minecraft is a good example of what this can improve, right? Go to the next post.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  This is what Minecraft could look like.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  This is what Minecraft could look like. Uh, there are, uh, there are drawbacks, obviously, because you're driving the the style transfer from the particular images from the shape. You're not reconstructing the entire image. You're just applying this like re-rendering on top of the underlying structure. And so you can get really weird outcomes like this.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  Take us to space, Jensen.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Let's listen to Jensen talking about data centers in space.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Courtesy of Nick.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  I'll spend very little time on this this time. However, we're going to space. We've already been out in space. Uh, Thor is radiation approved and, uh, we're in satellites. We do imaging from the from satellites. In the future, we'll also build data centers in this in the in the in space. Uh, obviously, very complicated to do so. We have, we're working with our partners on a new computer called Vera Rubin Space One. And it's going to go out to space and start data centers out out in space. Now, of course, in space, there's no conduction, there's no convection, there's just radiation. And so we have to figure out how to, um, uh, cool these systems, uh, out in space. But we've got lots of great. I'll spend very little time on this.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Got lots of great engineers working on it. It was very funny listening to Dylan Patel talk about space data centers and saying that like, yeah, even if you solve everything, like, it's still hard to make chips. It's just like, it still comes back down to the chip bottleneck, uh, above, above all else.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is why you see Elon doing the TerraFab thing, right?

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I really want to know what his plan is for that because has he put in an order for a tool or is he gonna do Terra ASML? Like, because there's like, the supply chain is 10,000 companies.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  I mean, historically, they've done, they've gone super, super early in the supply chain, right? They've done like mining stuff and...

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of Dylan Patel, Semi Analysis was featured at Nvidia GTC. The inference king has been crowned. Nvidia won a massive belt and it looks like Jensen's holding it up. He is in fact standing in front of a LED wall or projector, um, but a beautiful thing to see the Semi Analysis logo.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  It's all WWE. The entire world is WWE.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Nvidia Extreme co-designed, revolutionized token cost. The GB NBL 72 is the inference king with 50x higher performance per watt on inference X by Semi Analysis. 35x lower cost. Very, very exciting and congrats to Jensen for becoming the inference king and winning the inference max award or inference X as it's now known. Jensen is also confirming what we see in our GPU availability data. There is an epic scramble for compute. B200 basically unavailable, uh, availability for GH, Grace Hopper, 200, H200, and A100 also collapsing. Low availability means high demand.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Uh, and people, people were kind of going back joking about like, he said like 1 trillion of demand or something over some period of time and, and, uh, and people were like, oh, so he's guiding down. It's like... I guess that's where we're at.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hard when you're doing cumulative revenue.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Let's move over to a much smaller deal for Netflix and Warner Brothers and the final deal, which went to Paramount, of course, and David Zaslove is in the Wall Street Journal. David Zaslove deal could, uh, deal pay could top $800 million after last minute tax benefit. So Warner Brothers' chief executive, David Zaslove, could collect more than $800 million in severance and other payments after rival Paramount acquires the company. The sum of cash includes, uh, sum includes cash and payments for options and restricted stock holdings as well as a newly adopted tax reimbursement for Zaslove in a securities disclosure filed late Monday. The total doesn't include the more than 20 million he's likely to get for shares he owns outright, so he's been, he's been investing as well.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  About 504 million is due to Zaslove if the deal closes, the company said, while 47 million would be triggered if he is fired or leaves under circumstances within a year of the close. 116 million in equity has already vested, some 335 million would only kick in if other payments trigger a 20% federal excise tax on Golden Parachute severance payments he receives. The ultimate value of the payout is based on tax code rules that are expected to cause it to significantly decline with the passage of time, the company said in a filing. Without the tax payment, the total would be about 667 million. Companies typically try to keep severance at or below three times salary and target

• 29:15John Coogan?

  annual bonus to avoid or minimize the tax, and investors often criticize companies for reimbursing or grossing up executives for the tax. The company said Zaslove wouldn't have to pay the excise tax if the deal closes in 2027, which would save the company costs of the tax gross up.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people are, are absolutely.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Did he earn that?

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely pissed. And the reason that I think it is warranted from a business standpoint is when we were sitting here last year, talking with someone who won't be named in the, in the, in the media space, who has done, he was sitting here telling us at this very table that he didn't think there would be any bidding process at all.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  And it was just going to land with the Ellison's for a pretty predictable price.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  And Zaslove did his job as CEO to get the best possible price for. Shareholders.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  And it's remarkable.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  And that is why, you know, he was able to have outsized impact.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  He's getting, he's getting outsized compensation. He increased the enterprise value through his deal making by tens of billions of dollars. And he's getting a significant, but I think warranted, uh, payment. And if you, you don't like this, then you probably don't like the game of business very much either.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN today. We will see you tomorrow.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Go have.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  The best day.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Maybe have a Guinness.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Why don't you throw that flashbang?

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  Boing flashbang.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye.