Max and AI expert Mira Solberg unpack Ilya Sutskever’s claim that the “age of scaling” is ending and why research breakthroughs—not just more chips—may drive the next leap. They examine HSBC’s estimate that OpenAI needs $207B of new financing by 2030, with ripple effects for Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, and SoftBank. They break down Meta’s interest in Google TPUs and Nvidia’s response, discuss a New York court order requiring OpenAI to disclose internal legal communications related to deleted book datasets, and cover WhatsApp’s new policy shutting out general-purpose AI chatbots like Copilot. The episode explores Huawei’s Mate 80 series and on-device AI imaging, Kovant’s agentic SLM swarms for enterprises, and the booming market for “screen-free” AI toys including Bondu, Roybi, and Stickerbox. They explain the viral trend of making Stranger Things-style portraits with Google’s Nano Banana via Gemini, share a practical workflow using AI in Cursor to tame LaTeX documents, and dissect the EPA’s plan to prioritize data-center-related chemicals amid concerns about PFAS in immersion cooling. Finally, they look at “AI slop” as 2025’s word of the year and what it means for trust and quality online. Key takeaways: expect research-driven progress, infrastructure choices and policies will shape winners, and users should demand privacy and provenance—especially for kids’ tech.
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