Happy Friday.
The current thing in tech and business is the rumor that David Sacks had a personal hand in spiking the AI EO that Trump declined to release at the last minute.
Today’s lineupAnduril cofounder Matt Grimm at 11:15 AM
Abundance Institute CEO Chris Koopman at 12:00 PM
Every CEO Dan Shipper at 12:15 PM
Apeel CEO James Rogers at 12:30
Yesterday Politico reported that David Sacks made an eleventh-hour appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases. For his part, Trump explained the last-minute cancellation by telling reporters: “I didn’t like certain aspects of it. I think it gets in the way of — we’re leading China. We’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that.” The presumed text of the EO was leaked today. Read it here.
An anon account posted yesterday that Microsoft has cancelled its internal Claude Code licenses “after token-based billing made the cost untenable.” This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse on 𝕏; Box CEO Aaron Levie, for example, used the post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend inside companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting, though, that there’s a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue, but instead was just trying to shift its developers to its own Copilot CLI.
The American semiconductor manufacturer Micron announced that they’ve begun manufacturing 1α (1-alpha) DRAM, “the most advanced memory ever produced in the United States, at its Manassas, Virginia.” This move comes in the middle of the agent boom in AI, which requires longer context windows (and thus memory) than back-and-forth LLMs, and which has led to an industry-wide memory shortage.
Yesterday, Marginal Revolution co-creator Alex Tabarrok said if we could get just one Erdős-level-problem breakthrough in medicine out of AI, it would be an enormous deal — and it’s well within the realm of possibility.
“We just saw yesterday that AI had proved a new mathematical theorem. So AI is making these inroads into the highest levels of mathematics.”
“If we could do that for drug discovery — if we could have a 5% reduction in cancer mortality, that would be worth trillions.”
“The opportunities for AI to make tremendous leaps in human welfare by improving medical care are really exciting. And well within the realm of possibility.”
HeadlinesPolitico: Trump yanked AI order after David Sacks raised industry concerns
Canadian regulator to tax streaming services 15% to subsidize Canadian content
Tae Kim says Google exec was fired for not getting ahead of the memory shortage
Bloomberg: Samsung Chip Workers to Get Average $340,000 Bonus in AI Boom
Micron Advances Made-in-America Memory With Manufacturing Expansion in Virginia
AOC holds up brown water in Congress, blames it on data centers
Bloomberg: Goldman CEO Slides Into Musk’s DMs During Bid to Lead SpaceX IPO
Starlink posts moon connectivity renders
Bloomberg: Cursor Hits $3 Billion Annual Sales Rate Ahead of SpaceX Deal
IREN CEO Daniel Roberts posts “The IREN Thesis”
AI skeptic Gary Marcus beefs with roon
FBI indicts Chinese executives for price fixing shipping containers
GTA VI still on track for November 19 release date
WSJ: Weight-Loss Drugs May Have Surprising Side Effect: Stalling Cancer
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