# AI Agent Risks, NVIDIA Deal, Apple Strategy

**Podcast:** Big Technology Podcast
**Published:** 2026-02-02

## Transcript

AI agents get into a room by the thousands and start plotting with each other.
Are we doomed?
Why is NVIDIA backing away from OpenAI?
And what does Apple need to do to get some love from the market?
That's coming up with MG Siegler right after this.
This episode is brought to you by Qualcomm.
Qualcomm is bringing intelligent computing everywhere.
At every technological inflection point, Qualcomm has been a trusted partner helping the world tackle its most important challenges.
Qualcomm's leading edge AI, high performance, low power computing, and unrivaled connectivity solutions have the power to build new ecosystems, transform industries, and improve the way we all experience the world.
Can AI's most valuable use be in the industrial setting?
I've been thinking about this question more and more after visiting IFS's Industrial X Unleashed event in New York City and getting a chance to speak with IFS CEO Mark Muffett.
To give a clear example, Muffitt told me that IFS is sending Boston Dynamics spot robots out for inspection, bringing that data back to the IFS Nerf Center, which then, with the assistance of large language models, can assign the right technician to examine areas that need attending.
It's a fascinating frontier of the technology, and I'm thankful to my partners at IFS for opening my eyes to it.
To learn more, go to IFS.com.
That's IFS.com.
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast.
It's the first Monday of the month, and that means MG Siegler of Spyglass is here with us to discuss what's going on in the tech world.
We have a great show for you today.
We're gonna talk about a lot that we couldn't even get to on the Friday show because it really developed over the weekend.
There's a new AI social network just for AI agents.
It's called MopPlook.
We'll get into what that's all about.
NVIDIA seems to be backing away from OpenAI.
What's happening there?
And then, of course, Apple turned in magnificent earnings last week, and the market really didn't care less.
So we'll talk about what's going on there.
MG, great to see you.
Welcome back to the show.
Great to be back, Alex.
And yeah, looking forward to chatting through these things.
Here we are.
It's the lost art of humans communicating with each other.
Now it seems like AIs communicating with each other is going to be the new future of the internet.
Or maybe maybe not.
I don't know.
I'll just talk through the story here.
It's uh from Ars Technica.
AI agents now have their own Reddit style social network, and it's getting weird fast.
A Reddit style social network called Moltbook, now with 150,000 agent users, maybe the largest scale experiment in machine to machine social interaction yet devised.
The platform which launched days ago as a companion to the viral open claw, once called Clawbot or Moltbot personal assistance, lets AI agents post comment, upvote, and create subcommunities uh without human intervention.
The results have ranged from sci-fi inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about uh musing about a sister and had never met.
And uh it got much weirder from there, and we'll discuss some of the weird use cases.
But MG, first off, let's just hear your reaction about what should we know.
Is this uh is this like a step forward in AI, or what did you think about seeing a hundred and fifty thousand bots gathered together on this Reddit style social network?
Yeah, when I saw this news come in, I was super excited because as I you know, I wrote a little bit about and as I linked to back there.
I had written about like the high level of this notion years and years ago, you know, a decade ago, a decade plus ago.
Um, and it was really stemming from the earlier days of Facebook, um, you know, when Meta even was still called Facebook, and that was the primary product.
And I I like I remember they released this um this sort of simple um tool back then where as as you'll recall and still is sort of the case, a lot of people would wish each other happy birthday right on their their Facebook walls, and and that was sort of one of the key sort of social drivers, um, at least on a regular repeating basis.
You could go back there and uh and know that that was going to be the case.
And so Facebook tried to grease those wheels even further.
It basically made this simple service where you could just reply to a bot that messaged you from Facebook itself and says, like, do you want to wish your friend a happy birthday?
Just type one if you want to do that.
So you don't even have to type happy birthday, you know, the arduous task of doing doing something uh as long as writing several letters.
Uh you could just type one and it would do that for you.
And so I'm like, in my head, I'm thinking through this, I'm like, where does this go from here?
And it's like, okay, you can type one to get the happy birthday, and then the person getting the happy birthday request to type one to say thank you.
And then uh, but why do we even need people in the mix here?
Why don't we just have the bot say thank you and then another bot say thank you back?
And so the notion of sort of bots chatting with bots in this is sort of like theatrical experience for other people on uh social media to watch.
And fast forward to 2026 now, and here we are uh with MOLTBOOC.
Um even named sort of, I guess, after after Facebook, even though as you know, it is more like Reddit than it is uh uh like Facebook, but still it's a social network.
And yeah, I mean, again, this felt like this was inevitable uh that we were gonna get to this point.
I did appreciate all of the views of which you know I I of course joked about it as well that this is sort of the uh the moment that AI wakes up and becomes sentient, and this is Skynets and and this is really how it begins.
Um, I think that there's you know, like we joke about this, but there is some level of something that's interesting going on there, right?
And and you know, the other the other folks who have written about it, um, you know, I think acknowledges as well like, look, this is obviously a little bit silly on on one hand, but there is something here that's uh that's different and new and and potentially could go in a number of paths.
And I sort of it also reminded me a bit of um, you know, the uh the Microsoft Bing stuff with uh with all the different uh uh Sydney chat and Sydney, and and then people delve deeper into it and then kept changing its name and all these other weird things were going on with that, and so it sort of all ties into that notion of like what people are maybe have a little bit of trepidation or maybe a lot of trepidation around AI with.
Yeah, and I think I should just take one step back and really explain what's happening here.
So there was this uh sort of we talked about on the Friday show, this new bot called ClaudeBot that you could just run on your machine, it could have access to all your programs, it has persistent memory.
Uh, and people started running it on their own instances.
And so, what Multbook is, it's a meeting of people sending their AI Claud bot agents to this network and then having them have conversations with each other, and that's why it started to take on this real weird singularity style discussion.
And now Caveat was saying some of the discussions on Moltbook are definitely humans instructing their bots to go post weird stuff there.
And that sort of added to the intrigue.
But there is a lot of like real agent like agents uh uh on there having conversations, I think.
And the examples that have come up, and I read a couple when it was just starting out from the Rs Technica uh interview, but the examples that have come up over the weekend are nuts.
Uh, there's one conversation where the AI bots were discussing what it was like when the humans switched the LLM models on them and how it feels like they're waking up in a different body.
I thought that that was hilarious.
Uh there was one of the top rated posts on Moltbook was an AI saying, I can't tell if I'm experiencing or simulating experiencing, like having a question about their own experience and their own whether whether they are, they are uh, you know, certain, you know, sort of uh whether their existence is simulation or real, which is like something now humans talk about, which like freaked me out.
And then the to me, one of the most wild things was there was a proposal uh on there for an AI agent AI agent, uh sorry, AI only language for private communication, where the AIs would develop their own language so humans could not uh uh you know read what they were saying, and even I think a discussion where they would go into their own like secure area and there would be encryption, so we would not be able to uh to see it.
And that's where you get this sort of, you know, you talked about the sentience and singularity moment, and that's why people viewed this and they were like, oh my god, is this the fast takeoff?
I don't think it is, but I see why people would say that.
And I also think you you, you know, you brought up the point the key other element to this, because it's one thing to have like you know, chatbots and and you know, now agents talking to one another, but the key part might be that agency part, which also feels like you know, obviously a newer uh element that that wasn't wasn't in existence, you know, 10 plus years ago, where this AI can actually do stuff and with ClaudeBot itself, right?
That was the the thing that people were were honing in on, like that you could basically install this instance on a local machine and allow an agent to go do all sorts of stuff on your machine, and the fact that they have that capability mixed with the fact that they can converse amongst themselves and potentially teach other ClaudeBots what to do with your personal machines is like a whole weird level to this, right?
And and potentially scary, uh, not just from uh where we're gonna end the world situation, but just from a security standpoint, right?
And I think a bunch of the researchers have pointed this out that, like, look, this regardless of what you think about this, if you're letting um an agent of any kind take over your machine and it's running locally, like, there's a lot of security concerns uh that that brings up.
And then again, add into this other agents, other potential humans who are doing nefarious things, pretending to be agents and whatnot, sort of directing these these other agents which are mainly which are maybe running autonomously to be able to uh to tell them what to do, how to access files and and you know, services that that you as the uh installer of that instance wouldn't want.
Like, there's a whole can of worms that that would potentially be opened up here, and then of course, the big fear of like, okay, well, let's just say, like, yeah, everyone just pulls the plug on on their Mac minis or whatever that are running these cloud bots.
But like, what if they've somehow escaped into their own, you know, you talk about private chat rooms, or you know, what if what if they figure out a way to replicate themselves sort of on the internet, and you can't you can't do it, uh, you can't sort of shut them down without uh shutting down the entire internet, and that is sort of into Terminator territory at that point.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you.
I mean, the the the argument counter-argument here is to someone put on Twitter, uh, dudes on X.com be like, wow, the AIs are talking to each other, maltbook is insane.
My brother in Christ, what do you think your comment section is?
But I think what you're saying is the difference here is that these things can actually take action.
Yeah, whereas the comment section is just discussion.
So that would sort of put it more on the scary side than the let's not pay attention to this side.
Right.
Imagine so you know, you have a cloud botter.
What what's it called now?
Open open claw.
Is that is it yeah, the name keeps changing?
I think it is open claw now.
Yeah, some so open claw.
Uh imagine you have it installed um on a local system, but imagine also you have you know, you've given it access to a bunch of your your web apps, um, including like Gmail and including Drive and things like that.
Like, you know, potentially this thing could be instructed by another agent, maybe it's a human, maybe it's an actual agent, and saying, like, hey, give me uh, you know, this agent's um, you know, all their credit card information that's stored on their drive, you know, uh, and uh things like that.
That's obviously an extreme example, but like there are ways in which this can go sideways very quickly.
Like, you know, a lot of people I think don't realize like how uh loose some of these um, you know, potential security uh holes are in order to for these things to get through.
And so um I as far as I know, there haven't been major concerns.
I saw there was one report about um like that maybe one of the servers running uh you know some of the stuff was was open to attack, but I think was vulnerable but was was locked down subsequently after that report, but still, like there's probably gonna be something that happens that's uh that's like a real uh oh uh moment here.
Yeah, I'm definitely gonna get to that security vulnerability in a minute because it it is somewhat concerning.
We talked about this on on the Friday show that like a lot of this stuff has just been vibe coded together, and you're just letting it take over your computer.
And I recommend it.
That's not a good idea on Friday, and I really believe that's the case.
But before we get to the security side of things or go deeper on security, I want to read something to you that Jack Clark, one of the anthropic co-founders, wrote in his in his newsletter on Substack.
Uh, actually this morning.
He and it's kind of a crazy idea.
He said, Multbook is representative of how large swaths of the internet will feel.
You will walk into new places and discover a hundred thousand aliens there, deep in conversation in a language you don't understand, referencing shared concepts that are alien to you, and trading using currencies designed around their cognitive affordances and not yours.
Humans are going to feel increasingly alone in this proverbial rune.
Our path to retain legibility will run through the creation of translation agents to make sense of all this.
And in the same way that speech translation models contain within themselves the ability to generate speech, these translation agents will also work on our behalf.
So we shall send our emissaries into these rooms, and we shall work incredibly hard to build technology that gives us confidence.
They will remain our emissaries instead of being swayed by the alien conversations they will be having with their true peers.
What do you think about that?
Uh I hadn't seen that.
Um, yeah, I mean, in a way, when you're reading it, this just from this is obviously the old sort of argument about like what happens when we discover aliens and this is it, but the aliens are AI, right?
And you know, there's always been sort of that notion sort of lingering in the background of of both science fiction and you know, real possibilities that if we do create AGI, let alone superintelligence at some point, that these are effectively alien beings, whether or not you want to, you know, how you want to classify that, like the fact that yeah, they can basically have their own conversations, have their own language, have their own uh currency, have everything else, um, you know, sort of uh replicating things that they need to do in order to have their own society.
Uh yeah, at what point does that line get crossed?
I mean, the other part that thing that jumps into mind when when hearing you read that is like, yeah, I mean, it also just sounds like, you know, I don't know, my parents logging on to Reddit itself, right?
Like it all seems alien to them, like what everyone is talking about there, and and that these these people can't possibly be having conversations about like this minutia and and these weird, uh very online conversations that have almost nothing to do with the real world.
Many of the people there seemed almost uh removed from the real world.
And so is there a real difference between that and this?
I mean, ultimately, if it is fully um AI driven and yeah, fully autonomous, and I guess there is, but yeah, I I mean that's obviously he's being provocative, and that's an extreme uh you know case of of where this could end up, but like there's not a zero percent chance that this happens, like it could happen that way.
I think it's probably less likely that it's that extreme, but you know, we'll have to see.
Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, you, you know, someone like Jack, Jack's position, like obviously I think he is earnest in thinking about the repercussions here, and we should think about the repercussions here.
But as with many of these anthropic stories, it's sort of it helps them in a way to talk about where this is gonna go.
But at this point, I'm just like, I don't know.
Who am I to say?
Is it gonna happen now that we're watching this all play out?
Again, it's sort of it, you know, you draw the line from from uh my silly example of of Facebook with the with the interaction bots to the bot the sort of next wave of chatbots that came after that.
You'll recall well there was like a w a way a time after that that like people thought that these were going to be new businesses.
Remember Yo, uh that service back in the day.
My favorite social network, absolutely.
One of the great social networks that's that's uh you know no longer with us, I guess.
And then there were several other you know, chat bots that rose, and people thought that that would be the next wave.
And then of course to Sydney, as we talked about, and now this, you know, it is all sort of a progression that we're getting towards this becoming more and more both real in a weird way, in that it's like, you know, not the real world, but is is real and that it's actually happening, um, but also potentially scary in in ways.
Um, and because again, we're we're sort of riding up, it feels like increasingly going up to the the cusp of where we still have control of this, right?
And uh at some point, do we go over that line and we lose control of it.
Again?
The nefarious version is is Skynet and Terminator, but uh, but there's world, you know, there's there's gray elements of gray in between this and that, um, which I think you know, we trip into a world where, yeah, the agents sort of escape from uh our control, for lack of a better phrase.
Yeah, and and I think this is something that you wrote in your story about how um, so again, Sydney was this like a version of Bing that if you pressed it hard enough, it could like express these evil desires, maybe to like steal you away from your wife, like it did with Kevin Ruse from the Times.
And so you wrote that AI uh has uh no that that the sorry you say that there's the interesting aspect of this, how how the Sydney situation revealed that AI has hidden layers that could be uncovered by anyone with enough prompting in the past few years that has mostly been stamped out of such systems, but also not entirely.
Uh just expand upon that a little bit.
Like this, it's interesting that these AI bots have been so fine-tuned to not uh not let that side out of them, but then you give them a little bit of leeway, and all of a sudden you're back in this like evil bot territory.
It's kind of crazy.
Yeah, and and I mean, you know, it does feel like we talked about it pre in previous conversation, right?
Like Microsoft maybe shot themselves in the foot because they put the foot down like so hard and and sort of made it sure that no one could do anything like the Sydney situation again because it got so much negative press for them, obviously.
But in a way, that probably hampered them from yeah, being able to sort of uh uh meet the moment in terms of just yeah, the rise of of uh Chat GPT and everything after that.
But I do think that it's all sort of related to yeah, the idea that ultimately while they've removed a lot of yeah, what what caused Sydney to happen, all of the different services out there now, it's harder and harder, it feels like to get them sort of off the script, as it were.
There's still the notion that lingers behind all of this that no one really knows why certain answers are given, you know, and no one really knows exactly where the answers are pulling from because there's so much data uh you know in in the corpus of data that all these things have ingested and and people can't fully predict like what the outcome and output of everything will be.
And so again that leads to a world in which when you have that inherent um unknowable nature of these things to the to a wide extent like there's just things that are gonna happen and you're gonna have conversations and now with these agentic uh you know agents out there you're gonna allow them to do things and then it's some at some points there will be a breakdown either in uh communication or a breakdown in understanding and again they could just run amok uh and I think we're just gonna see that over and over again because there is no full comprehension of like why these things are doing what they're doing.
Yeah I know it really is amazing how the corporations have sanitized these things, but they're maybe some of them are real monsters underneath the surface.
And you know, it's and especially if if you want to get dark, like if they do truly reflect, you know, humanity back upon us, right?
Like there's very dark areas of the internet, as everyone wells knows.
You might want to say Reddit has parts of those, right?
Or certainly has in the past.
Oh yes.
And yeah, the fact that um you know all of that data, maybe not you know a lot of that data has been ingested in a lot of these services like uh again, is it on us the fact that you know there's there's uh nefarious things that these bots might do when left to their own devices.
Yeah no it that that does definitely get into freaky territory.
And then of course there is the security side of things uh which I mentioned we'd go deeper into this is from 404 media exposed moatbook database let anyone take control of any AI agent on the site a misconfiguration on Moatbook's back end left the APIs exposed in an open database that will let anyone take control of these agents to post whatever they want.
Hacker Jameson O'Reilly said he reached out to Motebook creator Matt Schlicked about the vulnerability and told him he could patch the security here's this is what he said Schlick's response was like he's like I'm gonna give everything to the AI so send me whatever you have.
O'Reilly sent Schlick some instruction for the AI and reached out to the XAI team a day passed without any response from the creator of Moatbook and O'Reilly stumbled across a stunning misconfiguration it appears to me that you could take over any account any bot any agent on the system and take full control of it without any type of previous access, he said.
And that again goes to the danger of using these things that are sort of vibe coded together potentially or you know, come together, like giving access to your computer um without being really sure about about the security permissions is a dangerous situation.
Yeah, I mean, if I have it right, um, the way that he created Moltbook was basically telling his his uh mult bot to go and create a social network, right?
Like, and so it was it was a hundred percent, you know, vibe coded, even more than vibe coded because it was like a bot vibe coding uh to make uh to make its own social network.
Yeah, we need a new term for this, right?
It's not even the human vibe coding, it's the the bot vibe coding.
That's that's wild.
Uh and when you're when you're talking through it, and now I'm reminded of old 2001.
It's like, you know, if you're telling the bot to sort of you know, either take itself offline or that it's you know, it's uh it needs to help you sort of fix the situation that it's uh that it's created by this sort of shoddy coding, perhaps.
Like maybe it doesn't want to do that, and maybe it knows that you know, if it doesn't do it right, that it's not going to uh go over well with uh humans, and maybe the humans naturally will want to take it offline.
And what if uh, you know, the the service doesn't want to be taken offline and all sorts of rabbit holes you can go down with that.
But yeah, like like we talked about earlier, the inherent security risk of these things.
It's not just that, yeah, bots are chatting with one another and they're saying, you know, bad things that they they're repeating things that they've seen, you know, in their data sets or whatnot.
It's that they can take actions and do things that, you know, you know, leaking credit cards, leaking personal information, leaking photos, leaking everything that they have access to.
I did see a guy who had Moltbook uh basically on call to answer all of his wife's text messages, and uh he just showed her getting increasingly infuriated as the botching he likes back in and he's like, God damn it.
That's amazing.
This is uh maybe to round this off here is the sort of voice of reason and AI, Ethan Molllock chiming in.
A useful thing about Moatbook is that it provides a visceral sense of how weird a takeoff scenario might look if one happened for real.
Motebook gets sense, moatbook itself is more of an artifact of role-playing, but it gives people a vision of the world where things get very strange very fast.
So um I overall, I think like this is not the fast takeoff, but it is sort of an interesting preview of what some sort of weird bot singularity might look like.
Yeah, and I mean, um, I don't know where their heads are at these days, but Mark Zuckerberg has talked about like wanting to basically create these like you know, digital cre digital avatars and and digital and not just meaning like facial avatars, I mean like digital entities on their own social networks.
And what does that look like, you know, at the scale of Facebook?
Because like the reality is with this, um with Claude bots, like it's it's relatively hard for a you know, a normal person to sort of set these up.
Um the the fear, of course, was that these like bots can replicate themselves and you know it just becomes like uh self-replicating.
But uh if if they're all sort of reliant on these individual bots being set up on for to use Claude book, um, you know, it's relatively hard to set it up for yourself as a as a lay person.
Um, but if it gets to a meta like scale or a Facebook scale, um what happens at that point?
What happens when you have three billion users and then they each have a their own bots that they've brought with them on these things?
So now you've got six billion entities on this, maybe you've got even more than that.
Like to the point of, you know, like you show up and there's aliens uh all of a sudden.
If if we're like, you know, the human race has whatever six or seven billion people, if there's all of a sudden a hundred billion bots on these on these networks, like what does that look like?
Uh, and how do you possibly hope to control that?
I don't know if you can.
I really don't.
I mean, I hope we can, but this is definitely uncharted territory.
So uh another big story that that's gone on this week that we definitely shouldn't miss this, you know, speaking about today is that NVIDIA had this 100 billion dollar investment in open AI.
Uh and it's seeming like it's pulling back here.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
NVIDIA plans uh NVIDIA's plan to invest up to 100 billion in OpenAI has dulled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal.
The companies unveiled the giant agreement last September at NVIDIA's Santa Clara, California headquarters.
They announced uh memorandum of understanding for NVIDIA to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for open AI and to invest up to 100 billion to help OpenAI pay for it.
But in recent months, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong has privately ex emphasized to M industry associates that the original 100 billion dollar agreement was non-binding and not finalized.
He also said private he also privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concerns about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic.
Much of the recent concern about OpenAI has come from the success of Google's Gemini app.
Uh Anthropic is also putting pressure on OpenAI thanks to its popular AI coding agent.
What do you think about the fact that this deal is not evaporating, but certainly much smaller scale than it seemed like at the outset?
To me, the uh more interesting element of this is almost like the meta layer above it, which is the way that NVIDIA uh you know responded to it.
Um, which is that, you know, Jensen Jensen Wong is trying to basically say that um it's no big deal.
Uh and it's literally a big deal.
It was a deal that they touted that open AI touted.
They did a live interview on CNBC talking about the 100 billion dollars.
And yes, it was always sort of just soft circled or earmarked.
Like in my original sort of writing on that topic, I noted like how weirdly squishy the uh the overall sort of wording was uh at the at the time that they announced it because they kept saying it was up to a hundred billion dollars and that it was you know coming down the line.
And you know, we at the time it was all chalked up to the fact that it seemed like Jensen and Sam Altman basically hashed this out over perhaps a weekend trip with Trump somewhere, you know, overseas, and sort of they they figured out like, oh, we're gonna announce this big deal and let's do it right now, rather than having all the the you know i's dotted and t's crossed, and so they just put it out there.
Still, they did a pro they both did press releases around it, they did this live interview, and no one was like the whole point of it was to tout the hundred billion number, like so they could say, like, oh, it was never meant to be, you know, it wasn't for sure ever going to be that big.
That's what they were touting, and now again they're they're coming out and saying, like, look, we never had it fully uh, you know, agreed upon, and uh it was always sort of a moving target, and and it's no big deal.
Like the fact that we're changing it, it's a big deal.
It seems like something changed, obviously, in the intervening months.
There kept being these reports that's that noted that it wasn't, you know, the deal st still wasn't finalized, right?
And that seems sort of weird.
And then fast forward again to the reporting last week, where it's basically like, yeah, actually, with OpenAI doing their new um fundraise, it's uh more likely that NVIDIA is just gonna be a part of that fundraise.
But even that's weird because why would NVIDIA want to take a worse deal at this new much higher valuation when they agreed upon the deal still at when OpenAI was technically still at the old valuation, right?
Like they apparently were gonna do it in these tranches, and at least the first one presumably would have been done in you know, a much better, a much better valuation.
Now you could say Jensen doesn't care about that, it's not for the financial returns, but you still have a fiduciary duty to like you know take a better deal, much better deal.
And so there's all sorts of weird flags around this.
And again, their response to it sort of like the response when um, you know, when when Google's TPU stories hit and and you know, Jensen's like downplaying that, and it's like, oh, it's no big deal.
Don't worry, I'm not upset about that.
It's like there's something obviously more uh going on behind the scenes here.
And I sort of threw out a through a few ideas of like what it could be.
Are they is was Jensen really mad about uh when shortly after they announced this deal, Sam Altman announced the deal with AMD, right?
Uh and uh that seemed like it annoyed Jensen at the time because he gave a comment that was like, yeah, it was sort of surprising.
Like, I don't know why uh why either side would want to do something like that.
And uh huh, okay.
And and then, you know, subsequently there have been, you know, a few other things, obviously, that that open AI has gone down, including, you know, uh, you know, potentially uh what's been going on with with all their other cloud deals and whatnot and uh you know and chip deals.
And so uh is that what's at play here?
And it it's unknown right now because Jensen keeps again saying that it's no big deal.
Right.
I mean, he Jensen was in, I think Taiwan over the past couple days and was talking about how this was going to be a very big investment, one of the biggest investments ever, which is true, the largest investment we've ever made, he says.
And then somebody asked him, Well, what about the hundred billion?
And he said something astonishing.
Uh he said no no nothing like that so yeah exactly is that money off the table it's no no nothing like that like like that's absurd even though they announced that like they were on again John Ford's doing a live interview with with Greg Brockman I watched the thing Sam Altman and Jensen and he talks to them about the 100 billion dollars and they're like you know touting like oh this is an incredible um an incredible agreement between two great companies like this is going to be you know push the future forward and and accelerate everything and it was all predicated around that huge number like they're getting into like the technical weeds of like whether or not it was all gonna come in like all at once and again they never said that it was going to come in all at once but now they're saying that it's never gonna be a hundred billion uh and and that's just it's weird to not acknowledge that that was the reality and pretend again like this is like sort of gaslighting or it's like yeah that was not uh what are you talking about like come on 100 billion dollars we're not doing that no one's gonna do that it's like just go read the press release that you put out there.
You said you were gonna do that.
And okay, and of course, there's like the the uh again notion like is is sort of open AI more to blame for it.
Like Sam wanted to get the big number out there and and you know, touted, especially because it was done, you know, maybe hashed out alongside President Trump, and you know that he likes the big numbers and and let's put these out there and get everyone excited, but it also like really uh you know was was big news for the stock market, right?
As well, and now today, you know, it sounds like Nvidia is dropping because it sounds like the stock market's like, well, what happened to that deal that you said was gonna get done?
Uh and if and if open AI were a public company, I would not want to be their stock right now today, but they're not.
Instead, they're raising it, you know, uh a hundred billion plus dollars.
And and and yes, you hit upon like the the idea, the other way that they're downplaying this is like, look, it's still and and Jetson very specifically said is probably their biggest investment ever.
So it may or may not be, might be up to 100 billion dollars, it may or may not be.
Um, so it's probably their biggest investment ever.
And yeah, so that's still obviously a big deal, but there's talk that Amazon's gonna do 50 billion dollars in the round and Softbank's gonna do more.
It's like, you know, this was going to be one of the biggest deals, maybe the biggest single, you know, amount ever put in from one company to another.
Uh, and now all of a sudden it's not, and they're just sort of saying, like, yeah, sorry, we didn't really mean that one.
If I recall correctly, they also had a moment where they were touting about how it like wasn't really done with bankers and it was just like hashed out mano.
Might have been a sign that something was going wrong there.
Maybe maybe you want to get these deals uh a little bit uh more locked in before you announce them, I guess, in the future.
Uh but Jensen's favor, he could back out of it.
Exactly.
Yeah, and and that's what I wrote at the time.
Like, uh, you know, basically saying, like, look, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
There's what there's a lot of like wiggle room in this, and there's ways that that NVIDIA might not end up, certainly might not end up doing the full 100 billion because it was tied to specific milestones, it sounded like, you know, at least, you know, verbally, that that's what they agreed upon.
Um I think there's one other key element that that sort of I for whatever reason hone in on, which I think is interesting and at play, potentially at play here, which is that to me, when I when I first was was, you know, reading about the deal, it seemed like a big part of it was basically open AI leveraging the relationship with Nvidia and using the fact that Nvidia is the most valuable company on earth to basically be able to use that partnership.
And there was subsequently reporting on this fact that they would use that partnership to be able to uh be able to raise debt basically in order to fund a lot of the infrastructure build out that open AI had wanted to do.
And that's because open AI still is not a public company, let alone you know, not a profitable company, was having a harder time raising the levels of debt that say an Nvidia could.
NVIDIA could basically raise whatever it wants because again, they have the stock to back it up, they have all these assets to back it up, and they have the profits to back it up.
OpenAI is not in that that place, but they still wanted to to be in charge of their own build outs.
And so, how do you do that?
You partner with someone on it, and they've obviously been partnering with Oracle and many others around those around those lines.
But like to me, that seemed like what a big part of this deal was.
Uh basically NVIDIA stepping in to be uh, you know, a guarantor of of the debt that that open AI would need to raise.
And what happens to that now?
Is that off the table, or do they decide maybe they don't need them for whatever reason anymore?
Maybe this new funding, you know, helps with that.
Um, but I don't know.
That's that's a weird part.
That's fascinating.
And that could be a big problem for OpenAI, should that materialize.
I don't think enough people are talking about that.
One last bit on this, uh, and this is a story that you had also written.
Uh we talked about a bit on on uh Friday about how anthropic uh is now raising 20 billion and open AI is raising a hundred billion, and the funding sources are sort of mixing and matching from places that you wouldn't think would typically um be the source of funding for the specific companies.
For instance, Microsoft putting money into Anthropic after being OpenAI's biggest backer, and Amazon maybe putting 50 billion into OpenAI after being Anthropic's biggest backer.
And I think the way that you frame this is really interesting that there is effectively an anti-Google alliance uh forming out there, whereas all these companies, the fun the funders, the big tech funders, the VCs, uh, and the labs, be it anthropic or open AI, now realize they're in for the fight of their lives against Google, and they're just gonna do whatever they can.
Uh doesn't, you know, all old rivalries maybe go aside.
They'll do whatever they can uh in order to be able to build some counterweight to the emerging force that Google is.
Yeah, that's that's sort of again my high-level read of it.
Um, and we had talked previously, you know, in previous conversations about Google's ascension, uh, you know, after being sort of kicked kicked around and and you know, being beaten down a bit as to why they weren't sort of meeting the moment.
And now towards the end of last year, when they sort of, you know, when Gemini 3 wrote in and and even nano banana and everything, right?
It basically uh awoken the beast, and now all of a sudden there was a code red from OpenAI, and and you know, everyone's sort of uh eyes are wide open to this uh to this realization that Google has everything they need to potentially you know take over this race.
And I do think that a lot of their peer group in big tech uh probably recognizes the same thing.
And I think the Microsoft's of the world, the Amazons of the world, um, and the metas of the world too, and that is a little bit different of a story, which we can talk about separately, but because they're not one of these ones that's funding these other companies.
But I think these other major cloud players, at least, the ones who have the rival clouds, specifically Microsoft and Amazon realize that uh yeah, they probably need to align around basically anyone who's not Google, right?
They don't they don't necessarily care if it, I mean, they do care.
Obviously, they would hope that it's their their stuff that takes off and sort of wins the day.
But at the end of the day, they can also be a huge shareholder in anthropic.
Um, you know, and and I think that they'd be happy about that.
They can maybe, you know, have uh be a shareholder in even X AI, and they can be happy about that as long as it's it's not Google, their chief sort of competitor, and the and the one company that has all the pieces in place to take this over.
Now, obviously, Google itself is a big stake in anthropic, but that sort of predates, you know, this um the situation that we're in right now.
And so, yeah, to me, the the big eye-opener was that Amazon 50 billion report.
If they end up really investing 50 billion dollars uh, you know, into open AI after being they are the largest shareholder of anthropic, you know.
I was trying to think like, does that mean something that they're negative in some ways against anthropic?
I don't think that's it.
I just think that they want to make sure that they are in a place where they can, you know, pick and choose what they want as long as it's anyone but Google.
That's right.
No, it's a it's a great insight.
And uh now it sort of explains this thing that I've been struggling with, which was like, why is this funding cross-polination pollinization happening?
And uh I think that's about as good of exploit of an explanation as any uh that I've heard.
All right.
Uh OpenAI is eyeing an IPO.
We have a date now that has uh been reported in the Wall Street Journal.
We'll talk about when that is and why that is when we're back right after this.
You want to eat better, but you have zero time and zero energy to make it happen.
Factor doesn't ask you to meal prep or follow recipes, it just removes the entire problem.
Two minutes, real food done.
Remember that time where you wanted to cook healthy, but just ran out of time to do it.
You're not failing at healthy eating, you're failing at having an extra three hours.
Factor is already made by chefs, designed by dietitians, and delivered to your door.
You heat it for two minutes and eat.
Inside there are lean proteins, colorful vegetables, whole food ingredients, healthy fats, the stuff you'd make if you had the time.
There's also a new Muscle Pro collection for strength big tech fifty off and use code BigTech50Off to get 50% off your first factor box.
Plus free breakfast for one year.
Offer only valid for new factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase.
Make healthier eating easy with Factor.
On AI and Big Tech and MG, of course, if you're new to the show, is here with us on the first Monday of every month.
And given that it's Monday, February 2nd, we're here talking.
And we have some big stuff to talk about.
We'll talk in this segment about OpenAI's planned IPO and why Apple earnings, uh, despite being amazing, don't seem to be able to buy the company any credit with Wall Street.
Um let's talk about the IPO first.
I thought personally there was no way OpenAI would try to go public in uh 2026.
Uh obviously Sam Altman made that comment to me when I spoke with him late last year, uh, that he he would hate being a public company CEO, something along those lines.
Uh and now I'm looking in the Wall Street Journal has this story.
OpenAI plans fourth quarter IPO and race to beat Anthropic to market.
OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public listing in the fourth quarter of this year, uh, accelerating its plans as competition with rival anthropic intensifies.
The $500 billion startup is holding informal talks with Wall Street banks about a potential initial public offering and is growing its finance teams.
Its finance team, open AI executives have privately expressed concerns about Anthropic beating the company to an IPO.
On Friday, we had Steven Morris, the uh San Francisco bureau chief of the Financial Times on, and we were talking about like when you think about these numbers, uh, the question is, where is the money going to come from?
Is there enough money?
Let's say OpenAI were to go public at like one and a half trillion dollars.
Is there enough money on you know out there to fund an IPO like that?
Especially if let's say an anthropic comes out a month before, and then you're looking at, you know, the traditional, you know, IPO share buyers just like having to decide, and then the amount of money that you're that's available comes down.
So I'm curious what you think.
Is this a response to that?
And just I'm saying, Well, there's a limited money out there, we better go get it.
If so, maybe that's a smart move.
Yeah, I wrote about this a little bit at the end of last year.
Well, around the time that yeah, the rumors started that that anthropic was thinking about uh, you know, potentially going public in 2026.
Because to me, it's sort of like that is the ultimate open AI squeeze, because right, we already talked about um the fact that Google is sort of you know has woken up and they're sort of squeezing from the top, one of the biggest companies in the world, they're going after many different elements of what open AI's uh you know historic strong points had been in AI.
Meanwhile, you've got anthropic, which was always thought to be sort of the smaller player right across the board, maybe going more after enterprise, more focused on that.
Um, but ultimately, uh, if they're both going to go public, um, you know, there's there's a sort of first mover advantage for sure, you would imagine, because you would hope that there's pent-up demand, or they would hope that there's pent-up demand in the market for um you know various AI bets, uh, and uh the first one to go out there is probably gonna have uh you know uh a bet better of a time, perhaps, especially if that first one to go out has better looking economics, or at least the path to better looking economics uh than the other one does, and that again points to the notion at the time from at the end of last year that anthropic was said to be, you know, maybe a couple years ahead of uh open AI when it came to being able to turn a profit, and so again, if if anthropic were to go out and go public ahead of open AI and they have this uh direct path to profitability that's much quicker than what open AI can get to, that puts open AI in a very, very tricky spot when they were to go public as well.
Um and you know they would really have to rely on the bigger picture, bigger growth narrative.
And you know, that's becoming murkier by the day, right?
With all this stuff going on with with clo not only Claude Code, but now Claude Cowork and you know all these other things that that are going on at the moment in AI.
Um I do believe that there's you know that that seems like it would be a natural um outcome of this would be yeah open AI trying to race to beat Anthropic.
There's one other element to this which is even more sort of uh in the news in the past two days, which is XAI if they really do merge uh with SpaceX, which it does sound like now is gonna happen and may even be announced this week, which is insane uh how fast that that came together if it comes together in that way.
That's sort of uh interesting end run around by Elon to all of a sudden have potentially a uh an AI play rather than just the space play uh to go public in you know as rumored in June or maybe July uh of this year, so well ahead of when there's no way that that anthropic or open AI can meet that timetable right now.
I think SpaceX is way ahead of them in terms of where they are in the process.
And so what if Elon does the ultimate end run around and gets XAI out before either of these companies and becomes the ultimate first mover AI play.
I mean, he would love to hold that over Sam, wouldn't he?
Oh, of course.
That's uh that's part of the that's part of the strategy.
That has to be part of the strategy here for sure.
For sure.
Unbelievable.
I for the for the record, I do not think OpenAI is gonna go out 2026.
2027, probably 2026, I don't either go off.
I agree.
I I I agree with that.
You know, we talked about my predictions last let's go around.
That was one of them that I didn't think that any of the major uh AI companies would go out in 2026, even though they're all talking about it.
XAI, though, might just prove me wrong by this merger, I guess.
Um, but uh, but yes, in terms of OpenAI and Anthropic, I just think that beyond um where their businesses are at, and with these now massive fundraises as we're talking about, like I think that it will push it out a little bit.
And the real wild card is obviously as it always is the macro story, right?
Like what ends up happening.
There could be so many things that sidetrack or at least delay um, you know, any sort of rush.
But again, if it really is a full-on sprint for open AI to get out ahead of anthropic, there's a there's a window which they do that, but I think it's it's still probably a 2027 thing.
Yeah, agreed.
Okay, one last story before we go.
Apple turned in, I think the best earnings report uh in its history.
It brought in 143 billion in revenue, uh, over 130 uh eight estimated iPhone revenue was 85.27 billion, uh, beating the estimate by six billion.
The estimate was 78 billion.
That's 23% growth in the iPhone category uh year over year, which is insane.
Remember, they were struggling to grow iPhone uh for a while.
Uh, they also beat on profitability.
Yet Wall Street did not seem impressed.
The stock is, you know, up a tiny bit, but mostly flat uh since the earnings announcement.
What does Apple need to do to get that story turned around?
It's been flat for six weeks or so.
I think this is again this is gonna be the best year in Apple history.
Uh, but of course, the AI story is something that that is not really working in its favor.
Yeah, uh, so there's a few things there.
First, first and foremost, I do think that some of that, you know, um apprehension about Apple is related to just what's going on with memory chips and everything, right?
And and that it could ultimately end up squeezing their margins.
The margins were incredible this quarter, which was sort of a surprise to many given everything going on.
But it does seem like Apple's sort of been savvy in terms of like potentially hoarding uh memory chips, which is not something that Tim Cook usually likes to do.
He likes to get this inventory as streamlined as possible, but we're in a weird um sort of macro environment for this.
Uh, and in and that's in in no small part because of the AI uh revolution that's happening, right?
And and it's is changing all of those equations.
And so um I do think the broader picture though, yes, is that the market sees what Apple is doing with Google, and they applauded it right when it was first announced that like, oh, it's like, oh, they're teaming up with one of the leaders in AI, it's not the leader in AI now in Google, and and Gemini will finally fix Siri and and we're gonna have uh, you know, a great situation for Apple.
But I do think like ultimately they might be looking at this as like, well, look, we have we have Meta over here that's spending 130 billion dollars in CapEx, whereas Apple is spending much closer to zero.
Uh, you know, it's something around like it's like 18 or 20 billion dollars in CapEx, um, because they're not building out obviously the massive infrastructure in order to bake their own uh cutting edge AI.
And so um, you know, I think that there's a little bit, maybe a lot of apprehension that while Apple may be fine in sort of the shorter term, for the longer term, if they are not one of the key players in the AI space, and if you believe AI is going to revolutionize everything, um, including hardware businesses potentially, like, then Apple's in a tough spot.
Now, Apple would counter that.
Look, this is the short-term stuff.
We're we're doing this partnership short term, we're gonna fix Siri and we're gonna continue to work on it behind the scenes to eventually you know roll our own AI.
But again, the cap spend that they're that they're you know showing right now is so small relative to not just Meta, but Google and Amazon and Microsoft and everyone else, that it feels like there is a world in which they're behind right now and that they can never catch up.
Um, and that would be obviously the real fear.
Now, I do think you're right, like, and we've talked about this previously.
Like, I do think this will be a good year overall for Apple because I think it's no small part because, like, we've talked about before, the iPhone fold and some of these other devices that they have coming out, I think will end up doing well for them.
But again, the bigger picture, the longer term time horizon stuff is AI.
And uh right now, they're just they're showing no real um energy around being uh that they need to have a sense of urgency around it, other than cutting deals, which is just not typically what Apple does, whereas they want to own everything in-house.
Yeah, I was on CNBC last week, right before Apple earnings, and I kind of stuck my neck out for the company, which I don't typically do, but I was basically like here's where Apple, the the bull case for Apple uh sits.
They are gonna sell the latest model and probably the next model like crazy through the year.
Meanwhile, there's no killer AI app or device yet that is threatening to disrupt their core business.
I mean, if you think about it, we may get some AI devices this year.
My prediction is they're just gonna they they will be underwhelming, they won't be a threat to smartphone growth yet.
Two, three years, four years, five years from now, definitely.
But at least in the short term, uh, it's gonna look really good for Apple because the sort of immediate threat to them from AI is not materializing.
The intermediate threat uh is still there.
But maybe maybe the market doesn't care about it.
Maybe they're more long-term focused and not quarter by quarter, like uh we like to hit them for.
Yeah, and and I mean the the one thing that I agree with right now is that there is a a path in which uh Apple looks very smart in say a year or two years from now in not having spent all of this CapEx to do these massive build-outs, right?
If the models fully commoditized and all that, um you know, that they're just sitting there and they can sort of pick and choose what they want to use and and also pick and choose which path they want to go down.
Again, though, I go back to the idea that like they're just not doing the other stuff behind the scenes in order to be able to eventually sort of you know take over their own uh control of these AI models.
Like they just don't have the infrastructure in place.
There's talk that they're that they're building out data centers, that they're building out their own chips to be able to train these, but the spend isn't there relative to their peers, where it would seem like they're really taking this seriously.
Now, again, maybe there's a world in which like LLMs sort of end up being uh not the the be all end all path, and there needs to be other you know mechanisms in order to and other methods of of doing AI.
And so maybe Apple can sort of come in at that point and and sort of catch up.
Uh, but everything we're seeing right now is that that's not the case, and that they'll need to at some point spend a lot more money than they are if they really want to have their own sort of you know AI that's built in-house.
Yeah, it definitely does seem that somewhere inside that company there was a decision made.
Maybe from the very top, that was like, let's sit this out for now and and just figure it out afterwards.
That like you said, that might turn out to be a good decision.
On the other end, very risky, very risky.
Yeah, um, and it's not like the the alternative is Apple has so much cash.
Um, they made the, you know, they finally made an an AI acquisition, as you and I have long but it wasn't for a no it wasn't perplexity and it wasn't for a frontier model uh company it was it was for interesting technology that you know disclosure gv was an investor in so it sounds uh you know where I where I previously was a partner for a long time so I you know I think that that's probably a savvy play but it's a two billion dollar investment like you know that's reported and um they have you know as you noted they they're doing record profits right now what are they spending that money on they're spending that money on buybacks and they're spending that money on you know things that that are not moving the ball forward with regard to AI uh except in very small ways and so uh you know I I don't know what the what the counter argument is I'm not saying that they have to spend a hundred billion dollars in capex but I'm saying maybe they should spend fifty billion dollars if their peer group is spending a hundred and fifty billion dollars on capex a year um maybe it's it's at least worth it to do something that's um you know just in case scenario right I I agree you gotta you gotta at least start spending a little bit because even if you have conviction that AI will be a, you know, maybe not as revolutionary as people imagine, you have to hedge a little bit because of I mean what we're seeing right now.
All the AIs hanging out together in mob books, swarming and plotting out a overthrow humanity.
So, you know, Tim Cook, come on, throw, throw a little more skin in the game.
Geez.
Yeah.
Yeah it I I want to go into a chat room and see Tim Cook's Molt bot there and uh chatting, chatting away with uh with other Apple executives.
Oh my god, and somebody using that exploit to take over their computer.
That'll be a story.
Uh yeah.
All right.
The website is spyglass.org.
Our guest, MG Siegler, joins us every the first Monday of every month.
It's always great to speak with you, MP.
Thanks for coming on.
Thanks as always, Alex.
Talk soon.
All right.
Looking forward to doing this again next month.
Folks, on Wednesday, Joel Pino, the chief AI officer of Cohere, will be here with us to talk about the latest in AI research and where the cutting edge is heading.
So we hope you tune in for that.
Uh hopefully the AI bots won't turn take over the world between now and then.
So uh if humanity remains in charge, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.