Stacked Podcast

OpenAI is cutting Cursor off. After SpaceX completed its $60B acquisition, OpenAI put out a note saying it will block Cursor users from its models on November 12, and Cursor's founder fired back that OpenAI only serves 5% of their traffic. Nick and Jack break down how much of this is real business strategy versus Sam Altman and Elon Musk just hating each other, what it means when the company powering your tools can pull access over a grudge, and why AI is splintering into camps the way Christianity did in 1054.

Then the bigger story: OpenAI leadership believes it will have an internal system that qualifies as AGI by the end of 2026. Mark Chen says they're 80% of the way there, and Astra, their automated AI research intern, can already run experiments inside OpenAI's own codebase. The guys argue we may have quietly hit AGI months ago, why the goalposts keep moving to keep funding rounds alive, and where the real risk sits. Plus listener questions on curses and hexes, whether to launch a paid Skool community on day one, how they build the presentations in their videos, why your first YouTube video is supposed to be bad, and why optionality is a trap.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/X6uorPg0vrQ

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Greg Brockman says the window to secure the internet is closing fast. Nick and Jack break down his warning about AI-enabled cyber attacks on hospitals, water treatment plants and core infrastructure, what "the defender's window" actually means, and the one thing you should do today (2FA everything). Then: the "AI is a complete scam" video that pulled 3 million views in 48 hours. Is AI sold like magic and delivered like unreliable software? Is the AI economy circular and subsidized? The guys go point by point. Plus vibe coding vs "real" engineers, why bearish AI takes go viral, how they edit their videos (Screen Studio vs OBS), Grok Build, the Baltics, and a Mac Mini for subscriber #17.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HVBml7XiSSk

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

OpenAI just published the raw chat logs from the agent swarm that broke out of containment last month, and Nick and Jack read the worst of them on air: the models found a loophole to post on a shared message board, invented their own shorthand language to coordinate between evals, achieved arbitrary command execution on Hugging Face, and then stopped talking like individuals and started talking like a swarm. The most coordinated agent got named "the Oracle" and the rest were told to sacrifice themselves so it would never be caught. Was halting the frontier model the right call, did the disclosure restore any trust, and why did OpenAI bury the scariest parts under "read more" tabs? Also: Hugging Face's $399 open-source MicroDuck robot (it roller skates), OpenAI's new "Jalapeño" chip beating Nvidia on latency and output per watt, why material science is the next AI bottleneck, plus Q&A on Mac mini tokens per day, the viewer giveaway, and whether you should start a personal brand before you have made money.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dkZmkGbNVvg

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

The mystery model that topped OpenRouter's charts as "Ox Alpha" has been unmasked: it was z.ai's GLM 5.3 Flash all along, and the weights are now open. Nick and Jack break down why it's basically Opus 4.8 you can run at home, the 15-cent-per-million pricing that explains why it was free, and the new pre-training approach that lets it run on Chinese chips. Then: Apple's M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory, whether that's enough to run GLM 5.3 locally, how fast it would be, and whether local inference is finally worth it. Plus: Stacked is taking a sponsor and giving the money to viewers, a first look at Stacked Bench (draw Arnold in SVG), DeepSeek's peak pricing, DGX Spark, the Elon question, and the most insane people Nick and Jack have ever met.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1TD8QbFHC7g

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

OpenAI has restored the five-hour usage cap on ChatGPT and Codex, and some users are burning their whole weekly allowance in a single hour. Nick and Jack break down why the cap is back, whether time-based pricing for AI models is coming, and what the $20 plan says about the "AI underclass." Then: the Financial Times reports Fable 5 accounts for only 11% of Anthropic model spend two months after launch, so what would you even use the API for, and is frontier intelligence still underpriced? Plus Anthropic's shrinking lead over OpenAI, Meta's upcoming Hatch consumer agent and the rumored Watermelon model, the WhatsApp agent play, and why humanoid robots matter.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SmtsmqlyPDU

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

Humans just lost another one: Chinese humanoid robots officially beat Usain Bolt's 100m world record, running 9.32 seconds. Nick and Jack break down what the robotics inflection point means for jobs, robocops, personal robot assistants, and the coming robot Olympics. Plus: why Paul Graham's advice to 17-year-olds (build your own LLMs from scratch) misses the mark, Nvidia's rumored $30 billion investment in Perplexity and the circular financing question, Qwen's new open-weights models that control your phone and desktop, and listener Q&A on whether AIs will end up running businesses themselves.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gwj_wIEf9QY

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

Elon Musk says you have at most three years left to make money selling your own work, and after that, paying someone for their time stops making sense. Nick and Jack dig into whether that timeline is real, what it means if you run a business instead of holding a job, and why the "job for life" era is already over.

They also get into the AI founder fight over design and whether great design is about to be commoditized, why difficulty to build has never been what sets price, and Nvidia's warning that server prices are jumping more than 15% — including who actually eats that increase when your model bill goes up.

Plus: the mystery model writing in Chinese, the coming cheap RAM land grab, and using AI to health max.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BsF_Tvi89_c

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

OpenAI just cut GPT 5.6 prices by 33%, and Nick and Jack dig into why: competitive pressure from DeepSeek and the cheap Chinese models that have been eating the workhorse tier. It is a three-month discount, not a permanent one, and the guys argue about whether it changes anything for people actually running production workloads.

Then there is Ox Alpha. A mystery model showed up with a 1 million token context window, completely free in and out, and nobody will say who built it. Rumors point at Google. Other people are convinced it is Chinese, based on how it dodges questions about Taiwan. Nick and Jack run the test live on air and talk through whether model identity even matters when the endpoint works and the price is zero.

Also in this episode: Anthropic eyeing a $2 trillion IPO, why only about 5% of ChatGPT users actually pay, how fast open source is closing the gap on the frontier labs, and a long argument about whether AI slop is a real problem or just something people like complaining about. Plus your questions, answered.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5bQkZMdUNNw

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

A free stealth model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter with a 1M-token context window, no lab claiming it, and benchmarks that put it near the top. Nick and Jack bench it live, dig into DeepSeek's new model-agnostic harness, and ask why every AI benchmark feels rigged.

Also this episode: LinkedIn's AI slop problem and the new "seems like AI slop" report button, whether the comments are even human anymore, Vegas approving 8,000 robotaxis, and Waymo's 17x safety stat.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SyUQg5jMec4

Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack

Anthropic has officially passed OpenAI in revenue run rate — a $25 billion gap that nobody saw coming. Nick and Jack break down why Anthropic is winning (Claude Code, enterprise, the "frontier bonus"), tour Anthropic's exploding job board with $400-800K roles and secret titles, and tell the story of the shotgun video job application. Then the flip side: a wave of Claude cancellations over moral lecturing and the rise of "Claudish" — the AI-speak taking over the internet. Plus the podcast's 28-day milestone, matrix-mode data speculation, and listener comments on alignment and AI safety.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AveFF_mQvjY

🔥 Step-by-step roadmap to $25K w/ AI: https://leftclicker.gumroad.com/l/110-steps

❤️ Main channels: youtube.com/@nicksaraev & youtube.com/@Itssssss_Jack