Latest / In the Loop AI / This Week in AI: Nvidia "Acquires" Groq, Meta Buys Manus, Gemini is the Biggest App
Transcript
- 0:00Ejaaz: Nvidia just spent $20 billion to acquire a company no one's ever heard of,
- 0:04Ejaaz: and it's their biggest acquisition to date.
- 0:06Ejaaz: Grok specializes in a very unique type of GPU, which will help Nvidia gain an
- 0:12Ejaaz: even larger monopoly on the GPU stack.
- 0:15Ejaaz: But they're not the only ones making acquisitions over the last week.
- 0:18Ejaaz: Meta announced their 20th acquisition of 2025, Manus AI, which specializes in
- 0:24Ejaaz: their very own unique AI agent.
- 0:26Ejaaz: But I'm feeling pretty bearish about this. I think that this is one of many
- 0:31Ejaaz: pitfalls that Meta is going to face over the course of 2025 and 2026.
- 0:36Ejaaz: And in other news, Google has finally dethroned OpenAI at the number one spot for AI app being used.
- 0:44Ejaaz: It is top of the charts for Apple. We're going to be getting into all of these
- 0:47Ejaaz: and much more in this episode.
- 0:49Josh: Yeah, so let's get into Grok, which is not to be confused with Grok, the other Grok.
- 0:53Josh: One is with a K, which is the one that we frequently talk about, which
- 0:56Josh: is made by xai this grok that we're talking about today is
- 0:59Josh: g-r-o-q which is a totally different
- 1:02Josh: company that was just recently acquired by nvidia but
- 1:04Josh: we need to make an important clarification about the acquisition it wasn't actually
- 1:08Josh: an acquisition of the company nvidia does not own grok what it was is a non-exclusive
- 1:13Josh: licensing deal for grok's inference technology and a big acqui-hire of grok's
- 1:18Josh: top leadership and engineers including the founder and ceo jonathan ross who
- 1:22Josh: we're going to get into why he is so important in a little while.
- 1:25Josh: Basically, it's this non-exclusive license for the technology,
- 1:28Josh: the inference technology. And I think that's what we're going to focus on a lot this episode is that
- 1:32Josh: NVIDIA has the GPU, which we all know is the powerhouse of AI.
- 1:37Josh: But one of the weak points that we're missing is this inference time,
- 1:41Josh: this test time, this thing that needs to be quick and very cheap.
- 1:45Josh: And what we've seen with Google and other companies is as they've started to
- 1:48Josh: introduce TPUs onto the scene, well, things get a little complicated for NVIDIA's bulky GPUs.
- 1:54Josh: They're not as efficient. They're not as effective. They're not as cost effective.
- 1:57Josh: And it left them with this blind spot, which seemingly they filled with this Grok acquisition.
- 2:02Ejaaz: Let's get into what that blind spot actually is, right?
- 2:05Ejaaz: So to your point, Josh, NVIDIA makes these GPUs that are really good at helping
- 2:10Ejaaz: AI models train, and it requires a different type of architecture to be able to do that.
- 2:15Ejaaz: But when it comes to AI applications, what you really want to rely on is how
- 2:19Ejaaz: quick the AI responds to you.
- 2:21Ejaaz: I don't know if you've come across this, Josh, but when you write a prompt to
- 2:24Ejaaz: your AI model, I sometimes get really impatient when it hasn't responded over like 20 seconds.
- 2:30Ejaaz: I'm like, come on, like, can you think a little quicker and just give me the answer now?
- 2:34Ejaaz: And this comes down to like that test time compute that you mentioned.
- 2:37Ejaaz: And the way that you enable a quicker response is if you reduce the latency.
- 2:41Ejaaz: And there's many different architectural choices that you can make to do that.
- 2:45Ejaaz: The point is, NVIDIA didn't specialize in that, but this company Grok has.
- 2:49Ejaaz: And so NVIDIA had a few options to make about this, Josh, which is highlighted in this tweet here.
- 2:55Ejaaz: Option A, they just kind of continue using NVIDIA GPUs. It costs a lot more
- 3:00Ejaaz: and it's just inefficient.
- 3:02Ejaaz: Or option B, they acquire or partner with Grok, which is the leader in these
- 3:07Ejaaz: specialized chips that allow for lower latency.
- 3:10Ejaaz: Or option C, they start creating their own specialized
- 3:14Ejaaz: chips from scratch but it'll cost them a lot of time a lot
- 3:17Ejaaz: of money at which point grok will already be the number
- 3:19Ejaaz: one leader so i think this is a strategic position they spent 20 billion dollars
- 3:24Ejaaz: which is a lot of money for them but um they're able to acquire the number one
- 3:29Ejaaz: leader in that case and own that monopoly for them and not be afraid of grok
- 3:34Ejaaz: kind of taking over nvidia or providing an alternative to nvidia in the future yeah.
- 3:39Josh: And if you remember like google recently we made so many episodes about the
- 3:42Josh: TPU and how it's becoming a legitimate threat to NVIDIA. Why?
- 3:45Josh: Well, it's because the TPU is good, really good at something that NVIDIA is
- 3:49Josh: not, which is this very deterministic computation that happens locally and rapidly
- 3:53Josh: when it's actually delivering AI to the user.
- 3:56Josh: So this won't interfere with the core business of NVIDIA, which is largely the
- 4:00Josh: GPUs and this pre-training part of the world.
- 4:02Josh: And we have a post that breaks this down really well, Ejas, that you shared
- 4:05Josh: with me earlier that I kind of want to take a second to go through if you don't on sharing
- 4:08Ejaaz: Yeah so it's this post right here um and it
- 4:10Ejaaz: describes something called lpu so
- 4:13Ejaaz: we've heard of gpu graphics processing unit lpu stands for language processing
- 4:17Ejaaz: unit and as it as its name implies it's specialized for llm specifically and
- 4:23Ejaaz: efficiently processing tokens into whatever output you would like from your
- 4:28Ejaaz: ai model right and there's a few things that make this specifically unique,
- 4:33Ejaaz: architecturally. One, it uses this thing called static random access memory.
- 4:39Ejaaz: So we've all heard of RAM.
- 4:41Ejaaz: We've all heard of DRAM, dynamic random access memory.
- 4:45Ejaaz: SRAM is an alternative to DRAM. So for context here, DRAM is like the most sought
- 4:51Ejaaz: after type of memory that people want to put into their AI chips to train their models.
- 4:55Ejaaz: And Josh, you and I have been discussing this a lot.
- 4:57Ejaaz: The price of DRAM has like 5X'd over the last couple of months.
- 5:03Josh: It's kind of outrageous.
- 5:04Ejaaz: Because we just don't have enough. In fact, like the cost of a, what was this?
- 5:08Ejaaz: The cost of like a PC memory card now, Josh, is the equivalent of like the latest MacBook.
- 5:14Ejaaz: It is just insane out there, right?
- 5:17Ejaaz: And so Grok has this alternative memory board called SRAM, which they integrate
- 5:21Ejaaz: into this LPU chip, which is what makes it so unique.
- 5:24Ejaaz: Well, what's so unique about it? In a typical GPU, so take, for example,
- 5:28Ejaaz: NVIDIA's GPU, in order to process an LLM request, you need to take information
- 5:34Ejaaz: from the memory and take it to the processing unit, the processing part of the chip.
- 5:40Ejaaz: With SRAM, you don't have to do that as much. You can just store the entire
- 5:43Ejaaz: model weight on that part of the memory component, and it's able to process
- 5:48Ejaaz: way more efficiently. How much more efficiently?
- 5:51Ejaaz: 10 times more. So for a singular chip, you can store 10 times more data, or more memory rather,
- 5:59Ejaaz: and it'll require one-tenth of the energy cost, which makes it an extremely
- 6:03Ejaaz: efficient chip to get fast inference between your AI model and the person that's using the AI model.
- 6:09Ejaaz: That's the unique unlock here, and it's just super cool to see.
- 6:12Josh: Yeah. So in conclusion, it's not that NVIDIA bought Grok.
- 6:16Josh: It's closer to NVIDIA bought the parts of Grok that actually matter the most.
- 6:19Josh: And a big part of that equation is the talent, the people that were involved
- 6:23Josh: in Grok. And where did I find out about the people?
- 6:25Josh: Well, on Chamath's memo from 2016, nine years ago. So for people who don't know
- 6:32Josh: Chamath Paliapati, I mean, you probably do.
- 6:34Josh: He's a very, just very influential person in the world of technology.
- 6:38Josh: And he published his memo from 2016 very early on about this guy named Jonathan
- 6:43Josh: and about his decision to be the lead investor in the Series A of this small
- 6:48Josh: little company called Grok.
- 6:50Josh: And nine years later, fast forward, this tiny little company worth $10 million sold for
- 6:56Josh: got a license acquisition for $20 billion. And it was fascinating to read this
- 7:00Josh: memo and kind of see what the world looked like in 2016. It's this funny snapshot.
- 7:05Josh: It's a very forward-looking and accurate representation of where we would have
- 7:09Josh: ended up at a time when this wasn't clear.
- 7:11Josh: So if you remember in 2016, the transformer paper hadn't even come out yet.
- 7:16Josh: There was no such thing as a transformer.
- 7:18Ejaaz: Josh, I was at university in 2016. I had no idea that was happening either.
- 7:23Josh: No one did. And yet this memo signaled like, hey, this thing called a TPU is
- 7:28Josh: going to be very important towards machine learning, which is also going to
- 7:31Josh: be this very important thing.
- 7:32Josh: And what's really funny about the memo is the header. It includes a subsection,
- 7:37Josh: fundamental human need, which says understanding and creation.
- 7:40Josh: Then it says, is this going to affect 25% of the population?
- 7:43Josh: Yes, but indirectly. $100 billion by 2045?
- 7:46Josh: Possibly. A special person? Yes. And then as you read more through the memo,
- 7:50Josh: you start to understand that he invested in this company because the founder
- 7:53Josh: and CEO was, or the founder and CTO at the time, who later became the CEO,
- 7:58Josh: he was the founder and the creator of the TPU, which Google now has.
- 8:03Josh: This is the dude, the dude running rock is the dude who created the TPU,
- 8:06Josh: which is now the biggest thing in the world.
- 8:07Josh: So clearly they saw something early.
- 8:10Josh: Clearly it was the correct bet. And I mean, good for them. They deserve it.
- 8:14Josh: I mean, we certainly were not thinking about these things nine years ago when really mattered
- 8:17Ejaaz: Isn't it crazy that he had the foresight to identify both the trend of machine
- 8:24Ejaaz: learning becoming the most popular form of computation,
- 8:28Ejaaz: and coupling that with like, we need a new chip.
- 8:32Ejaaz: So at the time, GPUs were super popular. You and I were discussing this before
- 8:35Ejaaz: we started recording, Josh.
- 8:37Ejaaz: You know, we were using GPUs for gaming. We were then using it for like crypto
- 8:40Ejaaz: mining around that time. It was becoming more popular.
- 8:42Ejaaz: But he had the foresight to be like, this is probably going to be used for some
- 8:46Ejaaz: kind of AI ML inference in the future.
- 8:49Ejaaz: And he saw it a decade ago and he waited it out. So if you look here,
- 8:52Ejaaz: it says it would allow them to own around 28.57% of the company.
- 8:58Ejaaz: Which is just a massive bet.
- 9:00Ejaaz: I mean, yeah, great. His 10 million is now worth a hell of a lot more.
- 9:04Ejaaz: I think there's rumors that he made over a billion dollars on this.
- 9:07Ejaaz: It's just insane to kind of see at that time.
- 9:10Ejaaz: I just want to like kind of put into context what this NVIDIA acquisition looks like, right?
- 9:15Ejaaz: So there are specific types of chips or kind of like hardware that you need
- 9:20Ejaaz: to make a successful AI model or an AI product in general.
- 9:24Ejaaz: You need GPUs, which everyone's heard of. Now we We have these LPUs,
- 9:27Ejaaz: which now, I'm here on this tweet, NVIDIA now also owns Viagroc,
- 9:33Ejaaz: the number one leader of this.
- 9:34Ejaaz: And then there's CPUs. And we
- 9:36Ejaaz: know that companies that are specializing in CPUs include Intel and AMD.
- 9:40Ejaaz: Earlier on in this year, NVIDIA made very big investments in both of the leading
- 9:46Ejaaz: companies, AMD and Intel.
- 9:47Ejaaz: So I just see this kind of like this Thanos grip that tightens with every single
- 9:53Ejaaz: acquisition that Jensen makes. And the craziest part about this,
- 9:57Ejaaz: Josh, is that it's all pretty much free.
- 9:59Ejaaz: When the news broke that NVIDIA had acquired Grok, their market cap pumped $35
- 10:05Ejaaz: billion, which paid for the acquisition of more. That's so nuts.
- 10:09Ejaaz: It's just crazy. It's just crazy.
- 10:11Josh: So that's the big news on NVIDIA this week in an acquisition that feels very
- 10:16Josh: powerful and meaningful, like it will actually move the needle.
- 10:18Josh: And now here's another acquisition where I'm not sure the same thing can be said.
- 10:22Josh: Just this week, Meta announced another acquisition after the seemingly hundred
- 10:27Josh: that they've done in terms of personnel and companies this year in a company named Manus.
- 10:33Josh: Now, Manus is a Singapore-based, Chinese-founded company, and the price hasn't
- 10:37Josh: been disclosed yet, although it's rumored to be somewhere between $2 and $5 billion.
- 10:41Josh: Manus is less than a year old, EJS, I believe, and it was valued at half a billion
- 10:48Josh: dollars just earlier this year, and they raised $75 million. dollars.
- 10:52Josh: And then in nine months, they went from zero to a hundred million dollars.
- 10:55Josh: Oh yeah, here's the post. In eight months, they went from zero to a hundred
- 10:58Josh: million annual recurring income, which is just this unbelievable hockey stick growth.
- 11:04Josh: So why would Meta want to acquire that?
- 11:06Josh: Manus is different than other companies. Manus is more of an agent than a chatbot.
- 11:11Josh: And if you'll remember, Meta's had a tough time building a chatbot,
- 11:15Josh: but has a lot more use for an actual agent. So Ijaz, maybe you want to explain
- 11:19Josh: kind of what this acquisition was,
- 11:21Josh: why Meta made it, and what their hopes are in terms of what type of value this
- 11:26Josh: can add to a company that's kind of having a pretty tough time deploying AI
- 11:30Josh: in an effective and meaningful way.
- 11:32Ejaaz: So I'm reminded of something specific that Zuckerberg said in his interview
- 11:37Ejaaz: with Dwarkesh earlier this year.
- 11:39Ejaaz: Dwarkesh was like, why are you investing tens of billions of dollars into AI?
- 11:43Ejaaz: You guys are a consumer app product. And he goes, yeah, I don't want to build the best AI model.
- 11:48Ejaaz: I want to build the best consumer AI app.
- 11:52Ejaaz: Meta specializes in consumer apps. We think we're the best at it.
- 11:55Ejaaz: And we think we can be pioneers in this new AI world.
- 11:58Ejaaz: We're not trying to get the best model. We just want to build the best consumer experience.
- 12:01Ejaaz: I think this is another step towards that. So if we kind of like track back
- 12:06Ejaaz: to like the age of the internet, which we currently kind of live in right now, right?
- 12:10Ejaaz: We use websites. We download apps. It's a very kind of archaic thing when you
- 12:16Ejaaz: consider that AI is probably going to automate a lot of this.
- 12:18Ejaaz: How is that going to be automated? It's probably going to be in the form of
- 12:21Ejaaz: agents, agents that can automate a bunch of work for you, but also make your
- 12:26Ejaaz: entertainment and lived experience way, way cooler, right?
- 12:30Ejaaz: So it can help you with research, but it can also help you kind of discover
- 12:33Ejaaz: new things, new shopping experiences, stuff like that.
- 12:36Ejaaz: And Manus AI is one of the top agent producers out there.
- 12:40Ejaaz: And like you said, Josh, this hockey stick growth to 100 million AIR,
- 12:43Ejaaz: even though I think that's a pretty vague metric and I think a lot of that can
- 12:48Ejaaz: be gamed it's still very very impressive and I know a bunch of my friends that
- 12:51Ejaaz: use Manus in many different ways can I just put my bear hat on for a second
- 12:56Ejaaz: Josh I know we don't like the bears on the show but my skin is tingling for this one particularly,
- 13:01Ejaaz: why can't like a Claude code or a Claude in general just kind of.
- 13:06Ejaaz: Recreate this entire product. I don't understand the unique capacity for here.
- 13:11Ejaaz: And maybe it's because Meta didn't have the props or the talent to create this
- 13:16Ejaaz: themselves. So they just saw this as an easy acquisition for a cheap $2 to $5 billion.
- 13:21Ejaaz: And now they can kind of just put this ready-made product out to their millions of billions of users.
- 13:27Ejaaz: That's also still bearish for me because they've spent $35 billion this year
- 13:31Ejaaz: alone to acquire like a hundred different people and they've got nothing to
- 13:35Ejaaz: show for it. I'm just honestly confused, dude.
- 13:38Josh: Yeah, it's aside from the actual strategic thing, you could kind of look at
- 13:42Josh: what Manus does and then I guess back yourself into the conclusion from there.
- 13:46Josh: And you mentioned Cloud Code. I would say Manus is kind of similar to Cloud
- 13:49Josh: Code in the sense that it's kind of a harness for a base model.
- 13:53Josh: There are these base models that are interchangeable that Manus accepts because
- 13:56Josh: Manus does not actually have a base model.
- 13:59Josh: But it creates this harness around the model that allows the AI to do more interesting
- 14:04Josh: things than it would if you were to just go to ChatGPT or Gemini.
- 14:08Josh: A few of those things include tool use and orchestration. So a big thing when
- 14:12Josh: you're using AI agents is tool use.
- 14:15Josh: What types of tools are they able to use in order to do things for you?
- 14:19Josh: And if you think of CloudCode as the agent for building code,
- 14:23Josh: you could think of Manus as the agent for controlling your computer,
- 14:27Josh: for doing deep research, for managing files.
- 14:29Josh: It's more of the consumer-facing version of CloudCode, where it's really great
- 14:34Josh: at tool use. It's really great at running virtual computers.
- 14:36Josh: It's really good at analyzing real-world competitiveness through deep research
- 14:40Josh: of many, many different variables. It's really good at UX and design.
- 14:44Josh: And it has this unique skill set that doesn't require a core base model in order to use.
- 14:50Josh: And I think that's important because Meta does not have this core base model yet.
- 14:53Josh: In fact, I suspect if they're going to continue using Manus,
- 14:55Josh: they're going to have to use some third-party application until they could deploy
- 14:59Josh: their new supposed model named Avocado, which is their first closed-source model
- 15:04Josh: that will hopefully release sometime soon.
- 15:07Ejaaz: The way you describe that, like, you know, it doesn't use a base model.
- 15:10Ejaaz: It kind of sounds like a rapper, right? And, you know, there are a bunch of
- 15:14Ejaaz: critics against rappers. I actually think rappers are great and fine.
- 15:17Ejaaz: But isn't that just cursor? I guess it's the same as what cursor is for coding.
- 15:23Ejaaz: Manus is for agents in a way, and it doesn't matter what model it uses.
- 15:27Ejaaz: I don't know if that convinces me enough behind this acquisition.
- 15:32Ejaaz: And I'm purely coming at that from the fact that they have acquired so much
- 15:36Ejaaz: supposedly good talent and teams over the last six months, and they've had nothing to show for it.
- 15:42Ejaaz: And I'm kind of confused at meta strategy in general. They say that they want
- 15:46Ejaaz: to go into consumer AI, but the Vibes app, which is basically AI TikTok that
- 15:51Ejaaz: they released, got completely swept under the rug. No one cares about it.
- 15:54Ejaaz: No one uses their AI chatbot. In fact, their kind of gaming metrics by allowing
- 15:59Ejaaz: any Instagram search is now an AI model search.
- 16:03Ejaaz: I don't know if you've seen that, Josh, but like it comes up with this really
- 16:05Ejaaz: annoying kind of summary when you're on Instagram.
- 16:07Ejaaz: I'm just like, why are you doing this? I don't really care about this.
- 16:09Ejaaz: So I'm not convinced, but let's see in Q1 whether they release this new avocado
- 16:15Ejaaz: model and whether it's actually something that people want to use.
- 16:18Ejaaz: I'm going to remain kind of like uncertain on this for now, I think.
- 16:21Josh: Yeah, I guess in terms of the agentic use case, it does make sense because like
- 16:25Josh: Meta has, they have billions of people generating real world data all the time
- 16:28Josh: to improve this. Then they have the glasses and the Quest headsets that they want agents for.
- 16:33Josh: They have, like you mentioned, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger as places to use.
- 16:38Ejaaz: They have the distribution.
- 16:39Josh: They have the distribution. So if you can apply this agent, this agentic force
- 16:43Josh: on top of it, you can generate a lot of value for the user.
- 16:46Josh: So maybe, I mean, again, we'll see. And then one last point is there's this
- 16:50Josh: funny little chart that I like to reference, which is Yahoo.
- 16:52Josh: It shows their acquisitions by year up until 2014 because, well,
- 16:56Josh: if you remember after that, they didn't do so well and then had to get acquired.
- 16:59Josh: But there's an interesting chart that follows this. And this is kind of reflective
- 17:02Josh: of Meta, which shows their market cap over time. And you could see that,
- 17:07Josh: Their market cap exploded and was at the highest it's ever, or just about the
- 17:11Josh: highest it's ever been as they were making all these acquisitions.
- 17:13Josh: They were desperately trying to acquire the talent needed in order to be competitive in this new world.
- 17:18Josh: Unfortunately, that didn't work.
- 17:19Josh: And just two years later, they were acquired by Verizon for 90% less.
- 17:24Ejaaz: They acquired Tumblr? That's crazy.
- 17:26Josh: They acquired everybody. They made so many acquisitions two years and one year
- 17:30Josh: prior to them going under.
- 17:31Josh: And what we're seeing with Meta, not to draw a direct tie, but there's this
- 17:36Josh: kind of almost irrational acquisition spree where they're spending tens of billions
- 17:41Josh: of dollars on individual people.
- 17:43Josh: They're spending billions of dollars on companies and they're just trying to
- 17:46Josh: get talent in-house, but they still have nothing to show for it.
- 17:49Josh: They're not able to generate revenue. They're not able to make the products better.
- 17:51Josh: So I don't want to directly compare it to, because I don't see them going down
- 17:55Josh: 90% like Yahoo did, but it's just a testament to show that normally when people
- 17:59Josh: start, or companies start acquiring at this rate.
- 18:02Josh: It's just something to be aware of is all. But we should probably move on to
- 18:06Josh: the next bit of news for this week because there's a lot going on and that is
- 18:09Josh: the Google Gemini app back in the news, right?
- 18:12Ejaaz: Josh, my favorite company is
- 18:14Ejaaz: officially number one. And it's a massive release being able to say that.
- 18:18Ejaaz: So what are we talking about? So Google Gemini is obviously Google's leading AI model,
- 18:25Ejaaz: but it's also the name of their AI app, which is a dedicated app like the ChatGPT
- 18:29Ejaaz: app that you can go on and you can speak to Gemini 3 Pro and all the latest models.
- 18:34Ejaaz: And for a while now, it's been creeping up the rankings.
- 18:39Ejaaz: And it was in the top 10 for a while. and then Gemini 3 Pro released and they
- 18:43Ejaaz: shot to number two and it's been at number two for a while. They are finally number one, Josh.
- 18:48Ejaaz: And this comes after learning a few weeks ago that more people.
- 18:54Ejaaz: Or rather people are spending more time using Gemini models than the average
- 18:59Ejaaz: ChatGPT user, which is just crazy.
- 19:02Ejaaz: And the number of daily, weekly, and monthly active users have been creeping
- 19:05Ejaaz: up to the point where it's almost, not quite yet, but almost at parity with
- 19:10Ejaaz: OpenAI's ChatGPT users as well.
- 19:13Ejaaz: This is a major milestone, in my opinion, because for a while,
- 19:16Ejaaz: I mean, you and I know this very well, Google's just been on a rollercoaster of a ride through AI.
- 19:21Ejaaz: They created the Transformer paper, so they were supposedly in the lead,
- 19:25Ejaaz: but then they didn't do anything with that.
- 19:27Ejaaz: ChatGPT and OpenAI ate their lunch, and then they made this massive 180-degree
- 19:31Ejaaz: turn. Sergey Brin came back, and they've made this crazy comeback. And it's just
- 19:35Ejaaz: Kind of cool to see them take the crown of this position, both at the consumer
- 19:39Ejaaz: level and at the chip layer with their TPUs.
- 19:43Ejaaz: And now everyone's using Google Search in AI mode. It's just crazy to see this
- 19:46Ejaaz: type of comeback from Google.
- 19:49Josh: And they forced the $20 billion acquisition for NVIDIA and Grok.
- 19:52Josh: I mean, I assume if GPUs didn't become big, that would not have been a pressing issue.
- 19:56Josh: But this is not the only time that Google was in the news this week.
- 19:59Josh: There's already more news coming out of Google, which is as it relates to energy
- 20:02Josh: and infrastructure, EJS, what's going on with this? I didn't get a chance to read it.
- 20:05Ejaaz: So the headline here is Alphabet's acquired this company called Intersect.
- 20:10Ejaaz: And I think they acquired it for $5 billion.
- 20:13Ejaaz: So what does this company do? Intersect is an energy supplier and producer.
- 20:19Ejaaz: And so you might be like, well, why is this important? Well,
- 20:22Ejaaz: Google's building out all these crazy AI data centers to help house their TPUs
- 20:28Ejaaz: and train and inference their Gemini models.
- 20:31Ejaaz: But there's one big issue, Josh. there's not enough power to power these GPUs
- 20:36Ejaaz: and TPUs up in the first place. There's never enough power. There's not enough power.
- 20:39Ejaaz: America's electric grid is constrained at the moment.
- 20:43Ejaaz: And it is a big, big worry going into 2026 because everyone's spending...
- 20:48Ejaaz: Tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars to create these GPUs.
- 20:52Ejaaz: But if we don't have any power to supply them in the first place,
- 20:55Ejaaz: then these become kind of defunct pieces of metal that just collect dust.
- 21:00Ejaaz: And Satya Nadella earlier this year actually spoke about that,
- 21:02Ejaaz: saying he has a warehouse that has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
- 21:05Ejaaz: NVIDIA GPUs, and he can't do anything with that because he can't get the electrical supply to it.
- 21:10Ejaaz: So I see this as a very strategic move. What sounds boring on the surface is
- 21:14Ejaaz: actually a really important move.
- 21:16Ejaaz: And And Google obviously sees meaning here, and it's kind of making its next
- 21:20Ejaaz: steps towards solving that crisis.
- 21:21Josh: Yeah, part of being an AI behemoth now requires owning the entire stack from
- 21:26Josh: electron generation through token output.
- 21:29Josh: And it's becoming increasingly clear that if you want to be a serious competitor,
- 21:32Josh: you must compete across every facet of the spectrum, including actual energy
- 21:37Josh: generation, which is what we're seeing from Google.
- 21:39Josh: And it's a signal that what we predicted is kind of coming true,
- 21:43Josh: where you can't really compete unless you are one of these giant behemoths.
- 21:46Josh: And the race is now getting shrunken down, it's tighter and tighter and tighter
- 21:50Josh: by the people who could actually afford to compete at this level.
- 21:53Josh: Google has won, OpenAI has won, Microsoft's XAI, but there's not that many left.
- 21:58Josh: So it seems to me that if you really want to be a big player, you need the money.
- 22:03Josh: Google's doing it and they are making big strides in this.
- 22:06Ejaaz: And the final topic of this episode, Josh,
- 22:10Ejaaz: Daddy has officially spoken. Andre Carpathy has given us his 2025 LLM year in review.
- 22:17Ejaaz: We also did a year in review. That episode is out. You should definitely go check it out.
- 22:21Ejaaz: But I was really keen to see what Andre would talk about because his history
- 22:25Ejaaz: has been across all the major AI model providers.
- 22:29Ejaaz: He's worked at Google before. He was actually one of the founding engineers there.
- 22:33Ejaaz: When it comes to the AI world, he was involved in the research side of things
- 22:36Ejaaz: and OpenAI as well, right?
- 22:39Ejaaz: And so I was curious, like, you know, where does his allegiance lie?
- 22:42Ejaaz: And some of his takeaways were super fun. One of my favorite takeaways,
- 22:45Ejaaz: Josh, I think you would agree with this. I'm scrolling right to the bottom here. One second.
- 22:49Ejaaz: Is Nano Banana. He loved Google's text to image and image editing generation
- 22:58Ejaaz: model because he sees it as the future of graphic user interface.
- 23:03Ejaaz: So if you have to navigate to a website or look at a screen to interact with
- 23:07Ejaaz: the internet today, the future of AI will be generative.
- 23:10Ejaaz: And he believes you don't have to go to a website. The website will just be
- 23:13Ejaaz: custom made and created for you.
- 23:15Ejaaz: And he thinks NanoBanana is the first step to it. Do you agree with that,
- 23:18Ejaaz: Josh? I know you're super excited with this.
- 23:20Josh: Oh, dude, I love NanoBanana. It's one of my favorite models.
- 23:22Josh: I think it won my favorite model of the year in 2025.
- 23:25Josh: It is a miracle that that thing works. And I love Andre's framing of how he
- 23:29Josh: thinks it is most impactful when applied to building user interfaces.
- 23:34Josh: And that seems really cool because as we go to this dynamic world where everything
- 23:38Josh: is generated in real time, being able to generate really powerful interfaces
- 23:42Josh: or just visual elements in general is so important.
- 23:45Josh: And Google, again, is leading the charge. So it's cool to see Andre...
- 23:48Josh: On board with that and agreeing in a way that is very thoughtful.
- 23:53Josh: This is a really good post. I would encourage everyone to go and read the full
- 23:56Josh: thing if you get a chance, because I really enjoyed it.
- 23:58Ejaaz: And that is it, folks. A crazy week for a week where supposedly not much is
- 24:02Ejaaz: meant to be happening. You know, we've got a quiet Christmas week.
- 24:06Ejaaz: New Year's is around the corner. And we have a casual $20 billion acquisition
- 24:10Ejaaz: or licensing acquisition, if you want to be technical about it before the year's end.
- 24:14Ejaaz: I'm excited for 2026. We have an episode releasing soon, which is going to be
- 24:18Ejaaz: our predictions for 2026.
- 24:19Ejaaz: Josh and I have thought long and hard about that to the extent where Josh brought out his glasses.
- 24:24Ejaaz: So please stay tuned for that episode. It's going to be a very good one.
- 24:27Ejaaz: And we have some really, really good takes.
- 24:29Ejaaz: But aside from that, if you're not subscribed, if you haven't turned on notifications,
- 24:33Ejaaz: if you haven't subscribed to our newsletter where we drop alpha twice a week,
- 24:38Ejaaz: please do all of those things and we will see you in the next episode.
- 24:41Josh: Yeah, it's the guys, it's the holiday season. If you do anything for us for
- 24:44Josh: Christmas, just hit the subscribe button. That'd be pretty cool.
- 24:47Josh: We got a great episode that came out earlier this week. We have the predictions coming out on Friday.