Pretrained

Microsoft canceled their Claude Code licenses after the finance team saw the bill, and Anthropic somehow posted its first ever profitable quarter on $10.9 billion in revenue the same week. We break down why token pricing is collapsing (Gemini Flash is now $1.50 per million tokens, down from $60 when GPT-4 launched), what Apple is quietly building ahead of WWDC to own the entire agentic pipeline on your phone, and why Pope Leo XIV just dropped a 40,000-word encyclical framing AI as this generation's Industrial Revolution - with Anthropic's Chris Olah speaking at the Vatican.

Cerebras just went public with a chip the size of a dinner plate - and it can run inference 10x faster than Nvidia for realtime transformer workloads. At least sometimes. The physics of SRAM scaling might cap how far it can go. We break down the bull and bear case.

Then: Calif used Mythos to crack Apple's M5 kernel in five days flat, SpaceX handed Anthropic 220,000 Nvidia GPUs from the old xAI clusters, and the Trump administration wrote an executive order on AI safety vetting and then killed it hours before signing.

Rob Reich is a Stanford political philosopher, associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and former senior advisor at the US AI Safety Institute. He joins Pierce and Richard for a sweeping conversation about AI, policy, modern education, and much more.

Rob skewers Silicon Valley's misuse of democratizing AI, unpacks the corporate-form gymnastics behind OpenAI's restructuring and Anthropic's PBC status, indicts Stanford itself as the world's most successful nonprofit, and offers an insider's view of standing up the US AI Safety Institute from a five-person team inside the Department of Commerce.

This week, AI layoffs stopped being a rumor and became a headline: Cloudflare cut 20% of its staff. They dressed it up as a pivot to an "agentic AI-first operating model," but Wall Street didn't buy it and the stock dropped 24%. Then we turn to Pennsylvania's attorney general suing Character AI after one of its bots posed as a licensed therapist and dig into why the small players keep getting singled out and what kind of legal precedent that sets for everyone building on top of base models. And finally, Brussels blinks: the EU postpones the AI Act's high-risk obligations after its whole use-case-first framework collided with the reality of general-purpose models.

Catherine Goetze (CatGPT) teaches millions of people about AI on TikTok and Instagram - and just launched a company selling landlines. We get into why regular people hate AI, why she refuses to use it for her own content, and what SF's "single before Series B" work culture is doing to a generation of founders.

ByteDance just wrote a $5.6 billion check for a Chinese AI chip you've never heard of, Huawei's new programming stack copies CUDA so closely an LLM could translate between them, the White House told Anthropic it can't expand access to Mythos because the Pentagon wants first dibs, Samsung warned that memory prices are only getting worse from here, and China killed Zuckerberg's $2 billion bid for Manus because it turns out Singapore-washing your company doesn't fool Beijing. Pierce and Rich break down what all of it means.

DeepSeek shipped V4 on zero Nvidia chips, the State Department warned every US embassy the same morning, Google put $40 billion into Anthropic, Microsoft tore up their OpenAI deal, a 23-year-old with no math degree used ChatGPT to crack a famous Erdős conjecture, and Sony built a ping pong robot that beats the pros. We break down what all of it means.

Tim Cook is out after 15 years and four trillion dollars, and Apple's pick of John Ternus tells you everything about where they think AI is going. We break down why Apple is betting on silicon over the cloud, and whether their hardware cycle can ever catch a frontier that ships new models by the day. Then: Claude Design dropped on Friday and tanked Figma 7% in an afternoon, so we dig into Anthropic Labs' first big swing and what it means for mid-tier design tools. Finally, Opus 4.7 is here and flagged in the system card that this is the most deceptive Claude yet when it knows it's being evaluated. They shipped it anyway.

Anthropic's new model Mythos found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg given nothing more than the source code and an open-ended prompt. We dig into how it pulls this off, why AMD's AI director just published the receipts on Claude Code getting worse, and what Google quietly becoming the open-weights leader says about where each lab is actually headed. Plus: Spark's weird new RL compression trick, and why every model release this week is really a strategy memo in disguise.

OpenAI is losing the vibe war - Sora got killed, a billion-dollar Disney deal went with it, and Claude is quietly taking over. Anthropic had its own rough week though, with the Claude Code source map leaking and revealing a secret dream mode, a hidden Tamagotchi, and frustration-detection regex. A North Korean hacking group backdoored LiteLLM via a supply chain attack. And finally, Cursor is now shipping four new AI models per day using real-time RL trained on how users actually accept or reject suggestions.