Happy Monday.
The current thing in tech and business is China blocking Meta’s Manus acquisition.
Today’s lineupMcLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown at 11:00 AM
ICON President Will Hurd at 11:30 AM
AMD VP of AI Software Anush Elangovan at 12:00 PM
Rainmaker Founder & CEO Augustus Doricko at 12:15 PM
Caruso Founder & Executive Chairman Rick Caruso at 1:00 PM
by Brandon Gorrell
Not really a tech / business piece per se, but The New Yorker: The Car Crash Conspiracy is a fascinating look into a scam that’s been going on down in Louisiana. There seemed to be a particularly dangerous stretch of Interstate 10 in the New Orleans area, where there were hundreds of collisions with 18-wheelers over the past decade. But when authorities started digging into it, they determined the wrecks were part of an industrial-scale fraud, where drivers would slam into tractor-trailers with their cars filled with people, all of whom would sue the 18-wheeler companies, some going so far as to get unnecessary surgeries to increase the value of their claims.
The New York Times put some of the data center/ energy prices FUD to bed this morning in a piece called Why Is Your Electric Bill Going Up? Blame the Broken Grid. The article describes in detail the difficulties of moving power across the American electricity grid, and the fact that there’s no single authority in the US that can push through national-scale upgrades efficiently. Basically, while we definitely need more energy, we also need a much bigger, faster, and more coordinated grid.
Yesterday, Jacobin, a far-left publication, posted some surprisingly sensible observations and recommendations around the AI capex buildout in an article called Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution. Most notable (again because this is Jacobin) is that the author Holly Buck calls a moratorium on AI data centers a “terrible idea,” and essentially blames NIMBYism for such proposals:
What if the picture that emerges of “data center resistance” is one of educated middle-class people — including exurban and rural residents but also professionals who work in knowledge jobs — mobilizing, consciously or not, to protect their class position from the threats AI poses? How many of these people will block data centers but end up paying for a subscription to a frontier model once it is clear how useful it is to navigate daily work and life? It’s not fair for affluent environmentalists and property owners to try to stop development of this infrastructure before most people in the world have even had a chance to work with and learn from these models.
Kind of a spicy article. But it’s always interesting when a piece like this breaks through to the other side of the political spectrum and results in bipartisan agreement.
In This Time is Different (for VCs), Benchmark GP and friend of the pod Everett Randle showed how pre-IPO VC investments might be set to go absolutely vertical in the AI sector. The article is anchored to two astounding charts. Here’s his relevant commentary and the visualizations:
Here's a chart showcasing a few of the best Pre-IPO venture/growth rounds of the past decade. The x-axis on the chart below represents the total dollar amount raised by each company in their Pre-IPO round, and the y-axis represents what that total investment was worth 4 years later when the companies were publicly traded.
[…]
Now... if we were to add Anthropic to the visualization, using their $30B on $380B Post-money Series G as the “Pre-IPO round” and assuming the company will reach a $1.5T valuation over the next 4 years², the updated chart looks like this:
“The LLM-era also represents a potentially once-in-a-lifetime return/wealth generation event for venture/growth as an asset class, the impacts of which will be felt by the ecosystem for decades to come,” Ev writes. Pretty crazy stuff.
Finally, Dwarkesh Patel was profiled in the New York Times this weekend. The piece doesn’t have much in the way of new-to-the-record info for people who are super plugged into the AI discourse, but it’s cool to see Dwarkesh get well-deserved credit at the level of the NYT.
HeadlinesWSJ: OpenAI and Microsoft Reach Deal to Give Startup New Freedom
FT: China blocks Meta’s $2bn purchase of AI group Manus
Reuters: Google to invest up to $40 billion in AI rival Anthropic
Bloomberg: Musk Drops Fraud Claims Against OpenAI, Altman Ahead of Trial
NYT: The Podcast Where You Can Eavesdrop on the A.I. Elite
The Atlantic: What Happens If Trump Seizes AI Companies
The Economist: Apple’s new boss needs to restore its magic for the AI era
NYT: Maine Governor Vetoes Bill That Would Have Paused New Data Centers
Riley Walz releases “time machine” for Wikipedia
WSJ: College Graduates Are Finally Catching a Break in This Job Market
Reuters: Meta partners with space startup Overview Energy to secure solar power for data centers
Everett Randle article: This Time is Different (for VCs)
Forbes: The ‘Creator Of Clipping’ Who Powers Crypto Gambling’s Viral Machine
Bloomberg: Why China’s Affordable AI Is a Worry for Silicon Valley
The New Yorker: Inside the World-Conquering Rise of the Micro-Drama
The Economist: How Europe regulated itself into American vassalage
Jacobin: Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution
Semafor: The man who is paying to see the future
The Times of London: Yes, binge drinking helped my career
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