Muse Wonder, Anjney Sizes Up, Neal Stephenson Joins, Social Reckoning Review, Eli Manning Live

Summary · 6 min read instead of 2 h 52 m

Anjney Midha and his partner Negin Oliver are at AMP, headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco, which hosts its compute grid at nationalcompute.com; Oliver spent over eight years at AMD helping build its GPU business, and William Chu heads private equity at Zurich Alternative Asset Management, part of Zurich Insurance Group. Neal Stephenson, the science-fiction author known for Snow Crash, cofounded a startup that lets fans tell stories in fictional worlds; Ravi Gupta and John Hegeman cofounded Ithaca Holdings, Jack Goldberg cofounded Yes Chef Group, Oege de Moor is CEO of XBOW and Nick Talken cofounded Albert Invent. Jeff Holden was engineer number 10 at Amazon and built Amazon Prime before founding Atomic Machines, and Eli Manning and Michael Waldron are executive producers of Chad Powers.

Anjney Midha announces the Grid Trust, a $100 billion program anchored by Zurich to bring compute to startups and public-sector users, and Zurich's William Chu argues that compute infrastructure behaves more like a utility than a startup, with pooling to spread the risk. John Coogan and Jordi Hays weigh Mark Zuckerberg's claim that Muse Wonder puts Meta at the AI frontier: Hays doubts it, and Coogan says a strong second place spares Meta the hardest questions about AI's dangers. Neal Stephenson argues that believable science fiction must carry real-world complexity, keeps AI out of his research, and names carbon and people living in their own realities as the two big problems. Oege de Moor says XBOW found a full-chain Chrome exploit in six days for $40,000, Ravi Gupta and John Hegeman take Bumble private on the bet that human relationships matter more as AI spreads, and Jeff Holden says Atomic Machines compiles code into working micro machines.

Minute by minute

1. 1:02

   The Social Reckoning feels out of date. John Coogan, who saw The Social Reckoning on its opening weekend, says it follows Frances Haugen and reporter Jeff Horwitz, keeps Jeremy Strong's Zuckerberg on the periphery and feels out of date in the scaling era; it opened to 9 million worldwide on a 40 million budget. He jokes that Aaron Sorkin "refused to ask the hard questions" about Muse margins and benchmarks. Jordi Hays says nobody cares about the premise anymore and would rather see a film about the AI race.

2. 14:06

   Hays doubts Meta is at the frontier. Mark Zuckerberg told the Financial Times that Muse Wonder puts Meta at the AI frontier, and Meta says it beats comparable Anthropic and OpenAI models on some tasks. Hays, replaying Zuckerberg's words on Cheeky Pint, doesn't think Meta is really there but credits MSL with being more exciting than Google or SpaceX. Coogan reads Andrew Curran's post that pacing is "out the window" and says a strong second place gives Meta cover from hard questions about AI's dangers.

3. 30:05

   Hays sees stagnation in Apple's HomeView. Apple announced HomeView, a $299 smart home hub that swivels and can follow you around the room; Coogan expected something more like the Pixar lamp. Hays says it "screams stagnation" and would excite him only if it controlled everything in his house, from gates to HVAC. Coogan says Astra or Fable can already reverse engineer a garage door clicker's API, suggests jailbreaking may be the end state, and notes Apple still lacks pieces such as a thermostat.

4. 45:04

   Zurich anchors AMP's $100 billion Grid Trust. Anjney Midha says startups not as rich as hyperscalers kept being refused compute, so AMP is launching the Grid Trust, a $100 billion program anchored by Zurich, which William Chu says manages 440 billion in assets. Chu argues compute infrastructure behaves more like a utility than a startup, and pooling diversifies risk. Negin Oliver, who helped assemble AMD's two-gigawatt deals with OpenAI and Anthropic, says AMP has clear line of sight on capacity due within twelve months.

5. 54:13

   Public users get subsidized GPU rates. Midha says the grid at nationalcompute.com started with public sector access: government and military users get subsidized rates, such as an AMD chip for $3 an hour or an NVIDIA chip for about $4, while more than 60 commercial labs pay more, about $12 an hour for that AMD chip. Oliver says members share their "napkin math" with AMP, and Midha says an agent called Marshall forecasts demand, a job that takes 100-plus people at the largest labs.

6. 1:01:30

   Good science fiction needs real complexity. Asked whether science fiction writers carry responsibility, Neal Stephenson says a story intelligent readers enjoy must include the real world's complexity and ambiguity; Termination Shock, about geoengineering, has characters ambivalent or hostile to it, which he hopes readers starting companies notice. He adds that believable future technologies answer to culture, as electric guitars did, and need a plausible business plan.

7. 1:14:18

   Stephenson keeps AI out of his research. Stephenson says he is not big on atrophying his skills: flipping through disorganized handwritten notes for the Baroque Cycle surfaced forgotten material and new connections, so a research assistant, human or AI, would be counterproductive. He names carbon and people living in their own online realities as the two big problems, calling the second harder because "people like it", and says bot replies are more insidious than fake images.

8. 1:26:05

   Ithaca takes Bumble private as first deal. Ravi Gupta says Ithaca Holdings, a technology company rather than a fund, signed a deal to take Bumble private with its founder, betting that human relationships grow more important as AI advances. John Hegeman plans better matching aimed at great conversations and dates, plus high-quality profiles, and Gupta says monetization will follow, citing Hegeman's role in $200 billion of Meta revenue. With the pair set to be co-CEOs, Gupta's rule is "if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no".

9. 1:38:42

   Yes Chef grew from videos to festivals. Jack Goldberg says the first restaurant video he made with cofounder Liam drew a quarter million views, and after the CEO of Sports Illustrated sat next to them at dinner, his company offered to match their consulting salaries plus a revenue split. Their first food festival sold out on two posts; he argues it is "harder to get 10 people in a room" than 10 million views. The focus now is Yes Chef Studios, a long-form deal with the team behind Yellowstone, with no rush to monetize.

10. 1:59:51

    XBOW finds Chrome exploit in six days. Oege de Moor says XBOW automates offensive security research and announces a full-chain Chrome vulnerability that let one malicious website take over a Windows PC, affecting a billion users; Google paid its maximum bounty. One skilled researcher with a swarm of agents found it in six days with a publicly available model, at a cost of $40,000, work his contacts say takes agency teams about six months. He puts open-weight models three to four months behind the frontier in cyber.

11. 2:09:56

    Albert Invent trains its own chemistry models. Nick Talken announces a $55 million Series B led by TCV for Albert Invent, whose chemistry-native AI replaces paper lab notebooks. He says internet-trained models can't tell fine chemistry apart, so Albert trained a retrieval model he puts at 45x better than OpenAI's and Voyage's; public data holds only successes, while some customers have more chemistry tokens than the whole public corpus. Unlike math or code, he notes, chemistry must close the loop with real lab experiments.

12. 2:16:34

    Atomic Machines compiles code into micro machines. Jeff Holden, Amazon's engineer number 10 and the builder of Amazon Prime, says Atomic Machines left stealth after six years, having raised 250 million. Its Matter Compiler turns digital code into working micro machines, starting with PrimeSwitch, a 9.5 millimeter power relay that carries 150 amps. He says chip fabs were built for transistors, leaving micro machines unserved, and plans to open the compiler as a foundry, with AI turning plain requests into physical devices.

13. 2:28:54

    A tryout prank became Chad Powers. Eli Manning says his 2022 Chad Powers bit grew from Penn State's open tryouts, two hours of prosthetics and making each lie more outrageous. Michael Waldron says Glenn Powell suggested the Mrs. Doubtfire angle of a man doing it for real, and season two leans further into thriller and drama. Manning tells young athletes to be themselves, and Waldron says audiences still show up for original stories and great performances, praising Powell for daring to play an idiot.

14. 2:46:14

    OpenAI catches an insider planting a recorder. Hays reads OpenAI's statement that it found a hidden recording device in one of its offices, used its models to trace it to an employee who planted it days earlier, and referred the case to the FBI, which made an arrest. OpenAI says it has no indication that model weights, source code or customer data were accessed or exfiltrated, and the employee was fired. Coogan says the case underscores the stakes in the AI race, with nation states and spies potentially involved.