Raph has returned from the land of the free, and we're back in the regular studio for some more Down Round.

Nvidia has just been slapped with a new restriction on exporting its slightly less than cutting edge H20 chip, which cost it a $5.5 billion charge. We talk about chips and continue our chat from last week's premium episode about how Trump's trade war is affecting tech.

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We talked about the new OpenAI image generation platform last week briefly, but we recorded on the day it released and therefore missed the massive amounts of discourse it generated. We're sorry. We'll never miss the discourse again.

But it was a great opportunity to take stock of the AI art conversation, which has only become more heated and baroque over the past three to six months. Over this episode and the premium, we dive into the current state of computer pictures and the politics around them.

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The chickens have come home to roost for 23andme, the consumer genetic testing company which has gone from making people feel nice about being 4% Italian to languishing in bankruptcy. With the vultures circling the carcass, we reflect on its very weird business model and why it should never have gone public.

Then we talk about Google, which has been cooking on the AI front recently, and how it looks like their overall strategy in that space is coming into focus. 

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HR SaaS is probably the least sexy topic in the world, but fortunately two of the bigger players have made it interesting through bizarre corporate warfare. Rippling has launched a lawsuit against competitor Deel alleging that they placed a spy deep within.

The saga contains a honey-pot Slack channel, a mole in the top ranks, and trying to flush a phone down a toilet.

It’s good stuff folks. We get into it.

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We're back with podcast content after a regrettable interruption last week.

This ep we've got a stacked deck. First, we are forced by fate to talk about Trump, Elon and Tesla briefly. Then we get into the lawsuit against creator economy platform and OnlyFans lite platform Passes. This gives us an excuse to go on a whirlwind tour of a few things:

• Scale AI, the AI infrastructure company co-founded by Passes founder Lucy Guo
• The creator economy, and how that's all going
• OnlyFans! Yeah, you want to hear all about that, don't you.

Good to be back on the tools.

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Unfortunately due to circumstances within our control we are unable to record an episode this week.

We promise we'll record a really really extra good one next week.

Thank you for your patience. Enjoy this AI generated James reading a text message from James.

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Tech stocks have been having a rough time since December. The Magnificent Seven, the undisputed kings of the market, have slipped 10% since then — even before the DeepSeek moment. 

But not all are made equal. Meta, for example, is doing basically fine. Apple isn't too terrible. Tesla, on the other hand, has lost 37% of its value since then. In this ep, we discuss the market correction, including a long chat on Tesla and whether its reality distortion field is looking a little shaky.

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Plenty of tech industry nonsense to chat about this week, folks. Elon Musk is fathering his 13th child (and a new Grok model) and trying to destroy OpenAI. Everyone is trying to match OpenAI's Deep Research with similar products of their own. The markets are back.

As always, Down Round is here to guide you.

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We got a few requests last week to talk more about OpenAI's Deep Research feature that everyone's been going wild about. We thought it was a good opportunity to return to a topic that we've touched a few times over the past couple of years — what sort of work is being threatened with change by new systems like this?

In this two parter, we look at Deep Research and the current prospects for automating white collar work with AI.

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Apple is worth $3.5 trillion. Trillion with a T.

But all is not necessarily well in Tim Cook's kingdom. iPhone sales are slowing and the Apple Intelligence rollout was unimpressive and underwhelming. Now rumours abound that they are abandoning their rescue mission for their VR and AR ambitions.

Are Apple floundering? Or just doing things The Apple Way? Who better to discuss than the Down Round boys?

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