Transcript
SPEAKER_1: Let's get into the personnel quick hits from this week. LinkedIn has a new CEO. What happened there? SPEAKER_2: Right, so Daniel Shapero is taking over as CEO. He was previously the COO. He's succeeding Ryan Roslansky, who isn't going anywhere entirely. Roslansky stays on as EVP at Microsoft. SPEAKER_1: And speaking of Microsoft, they did something pretty historic this week too. SPEAKER_2: Yeah, Microsoft launched its first ever voluntary retirement program. It's open to US staffers whose combined years of service plus their age totals seventy or more. And this is the first time in the company's fifty year history they've done something like this. SPEAKER_1: Wow, fifty years and this is the first. Okay, what about Trump Media? There's a new interim CEO there. SPEAKER_2: That's right. Kevin McGurn has been named interim CEO, succeeding Devin Nunes. McGurn has a background at Hulu, Vevo, and T-Mobile. SPEAKER_1: There's also a new AI lab that launched this week. Tell me about Core Automation. SPEAKER_2: Core Automation was co-founded by Jerry Tworek, who was previously a VP at OpenAI. The goal is to build what they're calling the world's most automated AI lab. They've pulled talent from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. SPEAKER_1: That's a serious pedigree. Now, there was a pretty striking legal story this week involving a major law firm and AI. SPEAKER_2: Sullivan and Cromwell, which is a top law firm, admitted to a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing contained multiple AI-generated fabrications. So they essentially admitted AI hallucinations in court. SPEAKER_1: That's a big deal. And there's also an update on Sam Bankman-Fried. SPEAKER_2: SBF has withdrawn his retrial request. He says he doubts he'd receive a fair hearing. His broader appeal, though, is still pending. SPEAKER_1: Let's talk about Meta. There's something going on with how they're monitoring employees. SPEAKER_2: Meta is installing software on US employee computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes in work-related apps. And this is being done for AI training purposes. SPEAKER_1: That's pretty invasive. There's also a cybersecurity nomination that fell apart this week. SPEAKER_2: Sean Plankey, who was nominated to lead CISA, withdrew after resistance from Senator Rick Scott stalled his nomination for over a year. SPEAKER_1: And there was a major semiconductor espionage case that wrapped up. SPEAKER_2: A former Samsung researcher was jailed for seven years. He was convicted of leaking semiconductor technology to China's CXMT, and that helped CXMT develop HBM, high bandwidth memory. SPEAKER_1: There are also some legal battles in the crypto space. The New York AG is suing two major exchanges. SPEAKER_2: The New York Attorney General is suing both Coinbase and Gemini, claiming their prediction markets violate state laws against illegal gambling. SPEAKER_1: And Justin Sun is also in a legal dispute, this time with Trump's World Liberty Financial. SPEAKER_2: Justin Sun is suing World Liberty Financial, alleging that it unfairly locked up his WLFI holdings and also threatened and defamed him. SPEAKER_1: Okay, let's shift to the parting thoughts section. There's a lot to unpack. What are some of the headline numbers from this week? SPEAKER_2: There are some wild ones. Anthropic hit one trillion dollars on secondary markets. Google writes seventy-five percent of its code with AI. SK Hynix revenue surged one hundred ninety-eight percent. And AI-generated child sexual abuse material reports went from four thousand seven hundred to one point five million in just two years. SPEAKER_1: That last one is deeply alarming. There's also news about SpaceX and Cursor, and a model launch that didn't go well. SPEAKER_2: SpaceX is reportedly looking to acquire Cursor for sixty billion dollars. Opus four point seven launched this week to what are being described as legendarily bad reviews. And a twenty-seven billion parameter Chinese model beat a three hundred ninety-seven billion parameter model on coding tasks. SPEAKER_1: And there's something about Florida and OpenAI, and also Mars apparently being deprioritized. SPEAKER_2: Florida is criminally investigating OpenAI over a shooting. And Mars, quietly, has been deprioritized. That's just kind of slipped into the background. SPEAKER_1: So what's the big theme tying all of this together this week? SPEAKER_2: The thread connecting everything is the gap between valuation and execution. Anthropic is worth one trillion dollars but shipped a model developers are calling a regression. SpaceX is filing for an IPO on a twenty-eight point five trillion dollar TAM but warning investors its space data centers might not work. SPEAKER_1: And Google fits into that pattern too. SPEAKER_2: Exactly. Google writes most of its own code with AI but can't sell a coding tool that developers actually want. The numbers have never been bigger. But the gap between what's being priced and what's being delivered has never been wider. The takeaway is: build accordingly. SPEAKER_1: Before we wrap, there's a community note worth mentioning. SPEAKER_2: Startup Intros is an official Community Partner for the Startup Grind Conference on April twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. It's five thousand plus founders, investors, and operators. You can get one hundred dollars off with the code STARTUPINTROSGC. SPEAKER_1: Great stuff. So to recap this week: LinkedIn has a new CEO in Daniel Shapero, Microsoft launched its first ever voluntary retirement program, Core Automation is building a new AI lab, Sullivan and Cromwell admitted AI hallucinations in federal court, and the big theme is the widening gap between sky-high valuations and actual product delivery. A lot to watch. That's a wrap on lecture two of two for Dev Chandra's Thursday Newsletter.