Monday, May 18, 2026

Jordi: Dario says you're a moron if you believe OpenAI's story around the DoW contract, but less than a month ago he was running Super Bowl ads that were intentionally designed to mislead hundreds of millions of Americans about OpenAI. I just don't think Dario is in that strong https://t.co/AjxgfRhtYz

Now that the OpenAI-Nvidia deal has stalled, Jordi says that critics of 2025’s 'press release economy' deserve a victory lap: https://t.co/nl8Ohcudj4 https://t.co/HhAImTggPe

Microsoft CEO @satyanadella on their 2019 $1B investment in OpenAI: "Bill Gates said, 'You're going to burn this billion dollars.'" "I didn't put in that billion dollars saying, 'Oh yeah, this is going to be a hundred bagger.' That's not what was going through our heads." https://t.co/bnW6pEIIwJ

BREAKING: @johncoogan is exploring the possibility of suing the lawyer who successfully argued Meta is designed to be addictive for making him addicted to reading about the case. He claims that learning about fines against tech companies is "ruining his mood entirely." https://t.co/4c7h4Exvv8

Now that the OpenAI-Nvidia deal has stalled, Jordi says that critics of 2025’s 'press release economy' deserve a victory lap: https://t.co/nl8Ohcudj4 https://t.co/HhAImTggPe

BREAKING: @johncoogan is exploring the possibility of suing the lawyer who successfully argued Meta is designed to be addictive for making him addicted to reading about the case. He claims that learning about fines against tech companies is "ruining his mood entirely." https://t.co/4c7h4Exvv8

Ben Thompson (@benthompson) says the fact that OpenAI hasn't already put ads in GPT is a poor decision that "risks the entire company." "They could have launched the world's crappiest ads in 2023. By today, in 2026, the ads would be good. They'd be making money, and people https://t.co/vmXRp8JYfM

Ridge CEO @Seanfrank says he'd be willing to give OpenAI a 40% cut of his revenue for ad placement in GPT, because he's already giving 50% to Meta to sell his products. "The beauty of the Facebook ad product is that they figured out a way to take half of everybody's revenue." https://t.co/1ZNw3XIXyt

Jordi: "[The Anthropic ad] is incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. I think they're trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout." "The ads that are coming to ChatGPT are effectively display ads. Everybody in the industry by now should know this. Yet this campaign https://t.co/P1Skpuq2gt

FULL INTERVIEW: @sama joins TBPN to discuss GPT-5.3-Codex, AI agents, Anthropic's Super Bowl ads, and more. 00:00 GPT-5.3-Codex 02:27 AI agents and the future of work 03:20 The role of forward-deployed engineers in AI 05:42 AI benchmarks 07:29 Emotional attachment to chatbots https://t.co/Z2OujEruPi

Y Combinator's @lutherlowe says Apple's culture is "one of absolute control": "I think that we have reached this inflection point where — if I've got my MacBook in my lap, I can open it up, download any app I want, open Terminal, and do all kinds of crazy mods." "But the https://t.co/NZDvhP6sns

Y Combinator's @lutherlowe says the App Store is "basically like the worst DMV in the world": "25 years ago, you saw the rise of WYSIWYG browser-based HTML editors. And that kind of democratized the process so anybody could create a website." "Now we have tools that allow https://t.co/XeX8qaq9UQ

Now that the OpenAI-Nvidia deal has stalled, Jordi says that critics of 2025’s 'press release economy' deserve a victory lap: https://t.co/nl8Ohcudj4 https://t.co/HhAImTggPe

The reaction to the OpenAI Greg Brockman video shows why the superintelligence narrative is bad for the AI industry. Compare AI to a rocket company that wants to go to Mars, like SpaceX. They're not saying, "We're racing toward this definitive moment, boots on the ground on https://t.co/WSSeBm97fH https://t.co/ueIWV85luE

Dario Amodei has repeatedly pushed for a ban on chip exports to China. Stratechery's @benthompson says Dario is missing the bigger geopolitical picture by advocating policies that reduce China’s reliance on Taiwan. "I think it is a safer equilibrium to have China dependent on https://t.co/SKt3ugCIg1 https://t.co/GvKoi4GxsH

Breaking Points' @esaagar says AI companies are "fighting against a very, very big force" in the US. "There's this rising populist tide against the data center movement. And against Abundance-style assurances from politicians and companies." "Something is happening. The tide https://t.co/pe3ocJbDuP

Republican consultants are shopping for an anti-AI candidate to run against Vance, says @semaforben "The attack on him will be: he's a tool of the tech industry, of AI guys who want to take your jobs, poison your children's brains, and build weird boxes in your neighborhoods." https://t.co/7VrZDR7Qa2

Jordi argues that AI seems to threaten every level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in his essay "AI Needs a (Steve) Jobs," which is partly why AI has such a bad reputation. "Starting at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Americans have heard that data centers use a lot https://t.co/WKpaJEtPqh https://t.co/ayoxR99uNz

Stripe's @collision thinks people who think AI means the death of software engineering are "all high, honestly." "All these people calling the death of software engineering are smoking something." "You're able to work with AI so much better if you understand the underlying https://t.co/GOymqtZhSu

.@mcuban says he's not worried about AI doom scenarios related to robotics because AI "doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations": "Right now, LLMs are basically bimodal: it’s almost all text and pictures, with some video. You can’t model the world with that." https://t.co/iUC5RgMIhC

Jordi says Paramount+'s first UFC stream was "materially worse" than the pay-per-view model: Not only were the fighter walkouts replaced by 200 seconds of straight ads, but I don't think Paramount was ready for the influx of new live viewers. We were trying to watch the fights https://t.co/Y5xiE1sWTd https://t.co/B8Sbwmkmwg

SemiAnalysis CEO @dylan522p: There's a bet between the Heads of Compute at xAI and Anthropic over what percentage of worldwide datacenter capacity is in space by the end of 2028. “The bar is 1%. So, the xAI guy is really bullish." “I take the under on 1% by ’28, because that’s https://t.co/fYyY4RHFfa

SemiAnalysis' @fabknowledge thinks something weird and existential is going on with Microsoft and AI. "Microsoft's not in the race. Where are they? They're getting owned." "It's a skill issue. Clearly something is going on. Honestly, the thing that makes me most bearish is the https://t.co/SGNmoaLDi3

OpenAI has declared 'Code Red' multiple times, according recent Bloomberg reporting. Investors are alarmed. But the concern is purely the result of a comms issue. Because there's a phrase for when you want an entire team focusing on one particular project that isn't 'Code https://t.co/L2lqpgSZ26 https://t.co/pOssXUf9x6

.@a16z's @bhorowitz explains why @a16z just raised $15 billion: "Our first fund was $300 million... We thought $300 million was a lot, and people thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009. But now we've looked at the markets and said, 'How big is this market? And what kind https://t.co/VS3kYYhBte

Investor @bgurley: "If I were using cynical words, I'd say [venture capital] hijacked the growth years of early IPO companies." "Amazon went public below a billion in market cap. It's hard to fathom that today, with what we have going on here." https://t.co/EZB3A2pE6v

.@MartinShkreli explains why he's both bearish on prediction markets and runs a bot that makes a market in the Bitcoin 15-minute Polymarket markets: "How much are you just financializing for financializing's sake, and is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons https://t.co/AkXcTOVJF4 https://t.co/V8dBRbc7n8

Hims CEO @AndrewDudum says the future of the GLP-1 market is shaping up to be "incredibly competitive", driven by new entrants and expiring patents: "When we first started putting these treatments out, the prices were $1,500/mo, now they're down to $150. I would guess three https://t.co/ME2Wh3eKR0 https://t.co/yM5sTEtv2q

"It wouldn't be crazy if someone was trying to tank the Uber or DoorDash marketcap to make a few bucks." After @caseynewton's reporting on the viral Reddit post about food delivery that proved it was a hoax, we asked him what he thinks the motivation was. His full response: https://t.co/KDp1bWEYhO https://t.co/qRJii5HW54

.@MartinShkreli explains why he's both bearish on prediction markets and runs a bot that makes a market in the Bitcoin 15-minute Polymarket markets: "How much are you just financializing for financializing's sake, and is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons https://t.co/AkXcTOVJF4 https://t.co/V8dBRbc7n8

.@johncoogan says the recent reporting on Meta's 'tokenmaxxing' is less of a sign of bad incentives at the company, and more of a tell about its potential strategy for more vertical integration: "I think it makes clearer the strategy with MSL. Because it's clear that they're https://t.co/mjh46Diwei https://t.co/osZD8c6JT3

.@a16z's @bhorowitz explains why @a16z just raised $15 billion: "Our first fund was $300 million... We thought $300 million was a lot, and people thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009. But now we've looked at the markets and said, 'How big is this market? And what kind https://t.co/VS3kYYhBte

Semafor's @lizrhoffman says prediction markets will replace "huge portions" of investing: "If I'm an investor, and I think that Coca-Cola is going to beat earnings — right now my options are like, 'I can go buy a call on Coca-Cola, short Pepsi, and hope that there's not a weird https://t.co/CBrnNtS0Yf

John: @Avischiffmann might have unlocked an entirely new strategy for billboard campaigns by buying non-premium ad space up at extreme discounts. "I wouldn't be surprised if next year, this becomes the go-to copy-paste strategy for companies with ~$1M marketing budgets." https://t.co/5ie58623sN https://t.co/tEAkjmf8DB

Jordi: "[The Anthropic ad] is incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. I think they're trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout." "The ads that are coming to ChatGPT are effectively display ads. Everybody in the industry by now should know this. Yet this campaign https://t.co/P1Skpuq2gt

.@pmarca on why internet ads aren’t going anywhere: “If you really want to get to a billion and then five billion people, you can’t do that with a paid offering… you need an indirect business model. Ads are the obvious one.” “If you take a principle stand against ads, you’re https://t.co/kLf1CfxCEa

Breaking Points' @esaagar says AI companies are "fighting against a very, very big force" in the US. "There's this rising populist tide against the data center movement. And against Abundance-style assurances from politicians and companies." "Something is happening. The tide https://t.co/kLMywQGbK7 https://t.co/JrsIzQBoDS

Breaking Points' @esaagar says AI companies are "fighting against a very, very big force" in the US. "There's this rising populist tide against the data center movement. And against Abundance-style assurances from politicians and companies." "Something is happening. The tide https://t.co/pe3ocJbDuP

Today, John put the Financial Times in the Truth Zone about a viral OpenAI chart they published. "What are we doing with this chart? This is a crazy chart... I'm so confused by this." His detailed breakdown of why he says it's a chart crime: https://t.co/nBNPL8hFNF https://t.co/o8wiwFcqiX

Y Combinator co-founder @paulg says he's constantly telling founders that all that matters is growth rate, not the absolute numbers. His rationale is straightforward: mathematically, if your growth rate is high enough, it simply doesn't matter what the absolute numbers are. https://t.co/1tCMU3m7aw

John and Jordi share tips and react to @jmrphy's viral post on parenting: "You have to use what I call the 'Dan Bilzerian method of parenting.' Just assume you're Dan Bilzerian, but instead of entertaining an Instagram girl, you're entertaining a four-year-old." "Get them a red https://t.co/M2m693UIEB https://t.co/shpxRULIS4

The guys discuss @AviSchiffmann's "buy every billboard" campaign: Jordi: Many people criticized it and the product, but the results from an awareness standpoint are undeniable. Avi spent $1-2M on this strategy and Friend became a household name on the coasts. Other brands have https://t.co/CoW5HIQ4g6

"I can't believe we're still viewed as crazy." Alex Karp on people misunderstanding @PalantirTech: "It's like - everything we're doing is the only thing that's working." "I don't want to spend a lot of time on our baller numbers from last year, but it's like... clearly nothing https://t.co/g9fz1Vj9aG

Semafor's @lizrhoffman says prediction markets will replace "huge portions" of investing: "If I'm an investor, and I think that Coca-Cola is going to beat earnings — right now my options are like, 'I can go buy a call on Coca-Cola, short Pepsi, and hope that there's not a weird https://t.co/CBrnNtS0Yf

.@zebulgar on why fewer deals are getting done: "On a deal count basis, we're basically on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021, in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe, north of $5 million." "By default, you basically have fewer logos that you can https://t.co/tFTdnRGFLb

"There are people reporting 3-month pilots as ARR, and they're free pilots." "I was talking to an investor yesterday who sees that all the time from early-stage companies. Coming out of accelerators, saying they have a million ARR, and they look under the hood and it's just all https://t.co/8SrsrqT52x https://t.co/BkWUPFz0nZ

BREAKING: After purchasing https://t.co/52aDd0GCeE for $70M, @kris says he was immediately offered $500M for the domain https://t.co/fqHydjRx9N

Grüns founder & CEO @chadjanis, who just sold his company to Unilever for $1.2B, describes the 3 biggest factors that contributed to Grüns' billion-dollar outcome: "The first is novel innovation. Each of the products you see us launching does not exist in the market. So when https://t.co/5WDSLZBjCA

SemiAnalysis CEO @dylan522p: There's a bet between the Heads of Compute at xAI and Anthropic over what percentage of worldwide datacenter capacity is in space by the end of 2028. “The bar is 1%. So, the xAI guy is really bullish." “I take the under on 1% by ’28, because that’s https://t.co/fYyY4RHFfa

.@bubbleboi says we're still at the very beginning of the AI cycle and have at least three years of "capex going crazy": "At the beginning of the year, hyperscalers basically said they're going to spend $680 billion. I mean, we're just at the start." "I think we have at least https://t.co/AYId8hqxfQ

After several years of declining search traffic, Condé Nast CEO @rogerlynch has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. And https://t.co/wMto7V7wVf

Stripe CEO @patrickc says @stripepress has sold 1.1 million books to date. https://t.co/R2vgDFYD6f

.@zebulgar on why fewer deals are getting done: "On a deal count basis, we're basically on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021, in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe, north of $5 million." "By default, you basically have fewer logos that you can https://t.co/tFTdnRGFLb

.@CathieDWood says that GDP growth will go north of 7%, inflation will go negative, and that the biggest entrepreneurial explosion in history is coming. "Between 1500 and 1900, @wintonARK learned that real GDP growth was 0.6%. Then we had railroads, internal combustion engines, https://t.co/I4zgSf73qB

.@Collision is bullish on two types of people: high-agency individuals and double majors. "There are two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now and I think will do incredibly well over the next 10-20 years. First, high-agency people. The people at Stripe who https://t.co/bYOjLBp2pi

.@travisk says AI will make human labor even more valuable and in-demand than ever before: "Let's say the entire world - everything in our world - was automated, except for plumbers. You had machines making buildings - you would basically have like a thousand buildings a day." https://t.co/wiuJYkxGJl

John does a deep dive into why every podcast has fake wood panels in the background now — a setup popularized by @hubermanlab — and shares a behind-the-scenes look at TBPN’s soundproofing in the Ultradome: "When you’re recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don’t https://t.co/2t49fYVtRO https://t.co/82rYNqaIMG

"I can't believe we're still viewed as crazy." Alex Karp on people misunderstanding @PalantirTech: "It's like - everything we're doing is the only thing that's working." "I don't want to spend a lot of time on our baller numbers from last year, but it's like... clearly nothing https://t.co/g9fz1Vj9aG

The size of the Cheeky Pint pint glass is very suspicious. Especially when Elon is holding one. We did an analysis comparing it to an image of Timothée Chalamet drinking Guinness to get to the bottom of this scandal. https://t.co/ailxAGj96Y

.@mcuban says he's not worried about AI doom scenarios related to robotics because AI "doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations": "Right now, LLMs are basically bimodal: it’s almost all text and pictures, with some video. You can’t model the world with that." https://t.co/iUC5RgMIhC

John: "I think some people do need to have their multiple Claude Max accounts banned. They're not building anything useful. They're wasting tokens... I'm with Claude on this." John jokes about Claude banning users from having multiple Max accounts, but points out that AI has https://t.co/dnwtLQGP5z https://t.co/gjVjfBceby

.@bchesky says AI is the biggest opportunity for creative people in his lifetime. "I'm really worried that an entire generation of designers, artists, and creative people are going to decide to sit out AI." "The photo and video generation models allow you to design incredibly https://t.co/56SmQnkqrX

.@mcuban says he's not worried about AI doom scenarios related to robotics because AI "doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations": "Right now, LLMs are basically bimodal: it’s almost all text and pictures, with some video. You can’t model the world with that." https://t.co/iUC5RgMIhC

SemiAnalysis founder @dylan522p says that despite their "terrible comms," Oracle is likely in a stable financial position: "I told my Oracle contacts, 'Who the hell is in charge of the Twitter account?' Nvidia did something similar last year when the whole TPU mania was going https://t.co/U76duB0GTk https://t.co/1yygTN0jAm

BREAKING: Brex CEO @pedroh96 joined the show and broke down the $5.15B Capital One acquisition. Here's the conversation: https://t.co/qhZzyuGceT

BREAKING: After purchasing https://t.co/52aDd0GCeE for $70M, @kris says he was immediately offered $500M for the domain https://t.co/fqHydjRx9N

.@a16z's @bhorowitz explains why @a16z just raised $15 billion: "Our first fund was $300 million... We thought $300 million was a lot, and people thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009. But now we've looked at the markets and said, 'How big is this market? And what kind https://t.co/VS3kYYhBte

We tried to decipher roon's elves vaguepost. Three ways to interpret: He's referencing a 2025 gwern post speculating about a talent drain from OpenAI. The elves are OpenAI employees. He's referring to billionaires as elves, who are leaving California in response to the https://t.co/kHaWOu7Tm3 https://t.co/gS4KaWDvrk

BREAKING: @Benioff: "We've all been reading about the SaaSpocalypse. But our SaaSquatch is eating our SaaSpocalypse!" "Agentforce is now an $800M business, up 170% YoY. Agentforce and our data business together, that is now a $2.9B business, up 200% YoY." https://t.co/QtVmMdlNRy

Today, John put the Financial Times in the Truth Zone about a viral OpenAI chart they published. "What are we doing with this chart? This is a crazy chart... I'm so confused by this." His detailed breakdown of why he says it's a chart crime: https://t.co/nBNPL8hFNF https://t.co/o8wiwFcqiX

John proposes a 97% income tax in Greenland if the US acquires it. A few reasons this makes sense: - It would provide the ultimate flex opportunity. "I make so much money, that I only have 3% left, and I can still afford Chrome." - Some people in the US seem to want 100% https://t.co/g5LBW47i8e

Gradient GP @darian314 is bullish on solo GPs, but only ones that raise sub-$50M funds. "I think that the sub-$50M solo GP is a great business. If you can raise the money, you can get allocation in rounds. You don't have to compete. It's when you get above $50M that it becomes https://t.co/EUVyqqFO3I

.@a16z's @bhorowitz explains why @a16z just raised $15 billion: "Our first fund was $300 million... We thought $300 million was a lot, and people thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009. But now we've looked at the markets and said, 'How big is this market? And what kind https://t.co/VS3kYYhBte

Today, OpenAI released GPT 5.2. And whenever there's a major LLM release, we measure it with the Shrimp Fried Rice Bench. Here's how 5.2 performed: https://t.co/2b4vJtgfo5 https://t.co/W6wfDDuXM5

Anthropic's @_sholtodouglas says Dario Amodei is chronicling the path to AGI through a series of essays he writes in the company's Slack channels: "He has a really, really cool communication style. He quite frequently puts out very well-reasoned essays. And throughout Slack, https://t.co/z8LYetNjck

Anthropic's @_sholtodouglas says Dario Amodei's internal communication style is producing a compendium of essays in the company's Slack that will have effectively charted the history of AGI once we get there. "He has a really, really cool communication style. He quite frequently https://t.co/zelIljKWXt

Anthropic's @_sholtodouglas says Dario Amodei's internal communication style is producing a compendium of essays in the company's Slack that will have effectively charted the history of AGI once we get there. "He has a really, really cool communication style. He quite frequently https://t.co/vxSQXlrkbV

Anthropic's @_sholtodouglas says Dario Amodei's internal communication style is producing a compendium of essays in the company's Slack that will have effectively charted the history of AGI once we get there. "He has a really, really cool communication style. He quite frequently https://t.co/X1hchnwsTr

A video surfaced in January by @boneGPT shows a Beijing-based entrepreneur opening a box of Nvidia GPUs with a clearly visible Supermicro logo on it: https://t.co/pnnvO12PNX https://t.co/UZ5uoG3JLQ

Hunter Weiss' viral clip of @tryramp's rise is based off the browser game Line Rider from 2006. Extremely novel, cool way to tell a story. https://t.co/jSmfZllH5N https://t.co/qLvJ1MSOhB

Tyler explains to John and Jordi how Japanese Twitter flooded American Twitter over the weekend, spreading international goodwill and cheer: https://t.co/4dM2xpz46M

.@zebulgar on the Manus acquisition: "I'm like a disappointed father. I just can't believe this is what the world has come to. How has this happened?" "My favorite meme about it was there was somebody that had a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and Alex Wang, and Zuckerberg https://t.co/IXMmxJDypT https://t.co/77g3qtPzTV