This week on the show, the hosts kick off with a look at the staggering wealth concentration in Silicon Valley, as the AI boom adds over $500 billion to the fortunes of tech elite like Elon Musk. They pivot to the surprising market winner of 2025, Alphabet, which outpaces Nvidia with a 61% gain thanks to its full-stack AI strategy. The conversation turns to the "Inference War," analyzing Nvidia’s $20 billion talent and tech grab from Groq as the industry shifts from training models to running them in real-time.
The hosts then dive into the financial engineering powering this growth, discussing how hyperscalers move $120 billion in "shadow debt" off their books to fund massive data centers. This leads to a discussion on Oracle, which becomes the "poster child" for bubble anxieties as its infrastructure costs mount. On the geopolitical front, they cover Shanghai’s new open-source roadmap aimed at breaking the US semiconductor monopoly. The episode explores the human impact of these shifts, from Stanford graduates facing a devalued job market to researchers using AlphaFold for the ambitious goal of whole-cell simulation. Finally, the hosts wrap up with a reality check on AI behavior, noting that models fail to predict human irrationality, and warning developers about the technical limitations of autonomous coding agents.
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