Down Round

Meta this week released the latest update to their LLM, Llama 3.1. It is ostensibly a "frontier model" on par with its OpenAI, Anthropic and Google rivals. 

The difference i: anyone can download the model and the weights and run it, and build on it wherever and however they want, without paying Meta a cent.

Why? 

Glowed up Mark Zuckerberg wrote an article to explain his reasoning; the boys dissect: what the hell is going on?

Links

• Open Source AI Is the Path Forward – Mark Zuckerberg

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Recently, the eponymous founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz went public in announcing their support for Trump in order to protect what they called "little tech" – as opposed to "big tech"

To them, little tech basically means startups, which they believe are under threat from "bad government policies". While big tech is trying to entrench it's advantage with regulatory capture, little tech just wants to party.

We discuss the new battlelines, and – crucially – tell you which team to support.

Links

• The Little Tech Agenda – Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

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You are no doubt aware that the world suffered a fairly significant IT outage at the end of last week, affecting everything from TV broadcasts to supermarkets and airports. Turns out it was because of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike releasing a thoroughly bung update to Windows machines.

In this ep, we talk about the incident, how susceptible the world is to single points of IT failure, and other assorted and sundry topics.

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A recent political incident involving the former president provide a stress test of X under Elon Musk. It also provides us with an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison of how it was reported on the various post-twitter clones: Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. 

Additionally, the several loud noises at the Trump rally led to a cascade of Silicon Valley stalwarts to endorse the Republican nominee for president – we examine the profound political shift that has occurred over the past 8 years in our usual cool-headed and analytical manner. 

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Real estate tech is an underrated part of the broader tech ecosystem. From listing and buying platforms to property management apps and everything in-between, there's a suite of tech solutions for selling, buying, renting, investing and just having a squiz at property.

In this ep, we take a little tour through real estate tech, which mostly ends up as a struggle session.

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While the northern hemisphere is on summer holiday, we grind. Given there's not much tech news floating around as a result, we continued the discussion of AI from last episode – this time getting wildly philosophical about legal rights and the art of creation. With a few diversions along the way ;).

Links

• I Made This – Hypercritical

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Over the past few weeks, several equity reports – from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Barclays – have sounded the alarm on the amount of capital expenditure currently being spent by the tech industry on building out AI capacity. Analysts and investors are asking: how are you going to pay for all this? And how long do we have to wait for that?

In this ep, we talk about the current discourse, connect it to the dot com bubble, and arrive at a 100% correct take no one could possibly dispute.

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Australia's experiment with forcing big tech to pay media companies like Nine and News Corp for content is running into choppy waters, as Meta refuses to play ball and Google seems less keen on news than it once was. 

In this episode, we catch up with the media and how it's handling today's dynamics of the internet and – especially – the new era of AI deals.

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Nuclear is in the air. (Not literally.) In Australia, politicians are debating it, while a huge range of nuclear startups are ruling it out for funding and attention. In this episode, we chat about nuclear power and how the tech industry is talking about it.

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Nvidia is the engine room of the AI moment, but they are struggling a little right now. The stock underwent a massive correction this week, and founder Jensen Huang is reportedly worried that the gravy train is about to end.

We used that as an excuse to dive into a few interesting trends going on in AI, Apple's moves, whether the hype is matching the product, and what it all means.

Note: we said in this episode that Apple was striking an AI deal with Meta, but now Bloomberg is saying it ain't so. Still, broader point holds.

Links

• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Is on Top of the World. So Why Is He Worried? – The Information

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