The Daily Scuttlebutt · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Quotes are condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Numbers, names and speakers' own qualifications are preserved.
Summary
Wall Street research puts 70% of the AI revenue the hyperscalers book with two customers, Anthropic and OpenAI. Both spent the weekend asking the industry to slow down.
That was one hedge-fund manager reading someone else's research. Another 107 appearances worked the same day from every other side — a Bernstein analyst who thinks the real target of the slowdown is Chinese distillation, a portfolio manager who says a slower frontier stretches the demand curve rather than cutting it, and a J.P. Morgan strategist who says the Fed will raise rates this week to protect its credibility rather than to fight inflation.
"My thought about the whole AI thing, which is what makes me nervous right now, is that there were some very good reports by some Wall Street firms that basically said that 70% of hyperscaler AI revenue is from just Anthropic and OpenAI." — Porter Collins, co-founder of Seawolf Capital, on The Real Eisman Playbook
All 108 are covered here so you can skip them. 53 hours of audio, 29 minutes of reading.
Here is what mattered.
Macro
The Fed is boxed in by its own silence
"In the absence of forward guidance, the market groupthink has coalesced around a rate hike this week and if the Fed doesn't deliver one, both Chairman Warsh and the FOMC will lose serious credibility." — David Kelly, Chief Global Strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, on Notes on the Week Ahead
The bond market already did the tightening
"My guess is that he would like to avoid a hike. ... He said he wanted tighter financial conditions and he's gotten them. So I think he could make an argument for markets having done the job that the Fed might have had to do and that they don't need to raise rates." — Wendy Edelberg, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, on Marketplace
September is close to a coin flip
"All year long, we've been anticipating that the Fed would not make any change to policy rates this year, neither rate cuts nor rate hikes. And we still retain that as a baseline view. But given how close the debate appears to be at the Fed, we now think that even at the September FOMC meeting, it will be an extremely close call and probably close to 50-50 essentially whether the Fed might deliver a 25-basis-point rate hike." — Ryan Wang, US Economist at HSBC Global Investment Research, on HSBC Global Viewpoint
Past 70% priced, the Fed has always delivered
"I definitely think that the Fed has to deliver almost has to deliver that 25 basis point hike that's fully priced in. If they don't do anything, or are they surprised the markets with a 50 basis point hike. I think you're going to see some, significant price action in the bond market. Typically in the past, the Fed has delivered when the market's about 70% or above priced in." — Subadra Rajappa, Head of Research at Societe Generale, on Fast Money
The Taylor rule says 5.2% right now
"When I think about how far the move can go, I think of it in terms of the Fed policy path. The first stop was to price out the labor market insurance cuts from last year. That has clearly happened. Then the next stop would be potentially the peak of the last hiking cycle, which is in the low fives. We're about 50 60 basis points away from there right now. ... The Taylor rule also tells you that the funds rate using spot data should be 5.2% right now." — Mark Cabana, Co-Head of Global Rates Strategy at BofA Securities, on Global Research Unlocked
This looks like 1999, not 1997
"If we want to compare it to the '90s, it depends on whether you think this is 1997 where they hiked once 25 basis points, or this is 1999, where they kept going quite a bit. And that was the beginning of the end. I happen to think that this would be more like 1999, because Kevin Warsh has committed so much to that 2% inflation target. 25 basis points isn't going to get us there. So I think it starts to look like a hiking cycle." — Liz Thomas, Head of Investment Strategy at SoFi, on Halftime Report
One carrier supplied a tenth of core CPI
"We got a 10th on the core CPI from wireless telephone services. That really was just T-Mobile getting rid of some legacy plans that no one could have actually purchased for years now. So I think that there's a lot more, you know, kind of positive trends within the inflation data, right? Like medical care, commodities and services keep coming down." — Thomas Simons, Chief US Economist at Jefferies, on The Exchange
Job growth this weak has only happened in recessions
"The annual growth in payroll employment is lower than like twothirds of the time since post World War II. And the only time it's ever been lower is you've been in a recession. We've never had job annual job growth this low without being in a recession." — Jim Paulsen, market strategist who publishes Paulsen Perspectives, on Excess Returns
Labor's share of income is the lowest on record
"That trend has accelerated in recent months. And in fact, Labor's share of income, so the slice of the pie that goes to workers, is the smallest proportion it's been in recorded history, and it's certainly the smallest it's been in a century." — Justin Wolfers, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan, on The David Lin Report
Three line items already exceed all federal receipts
"In the first three quarters of this year, entitlements, interest, and veteran affairs, that portion of the federal budget deficit was 105% of total receipts. And that's without everything else. And it's growing 7.5% and receipts are growing four." — Trey Reik, Chief Economist at Gold Bullion International, on Wealthion
The data-center build does not depend on the rate
"I think the first thing you have to point is sort of the multi-generational capex expenditures that have been going on. There's not a rate dependency on this. There is a race to build data centers, invest in infrastructure and to come out of the AI race on top. And whether The Fed hikes 50 or 100 basis points, I don't see that slowing down and that capex has been largely responsible for keeping the economy extremely resilient." — Dan Orlando, Head of US Rates Trading at Barclays, on Barclays Brief
The K-shaped consumer has closed at 5.7% each
"For about two years until a couple of months ago, we were talking month in, month out about a higher income consumer outspending the lower income consumer, often a margin of one or two percentage points. ... Discretionary spending growth in August was about 5.7% for higher income consumers, 5.7% for lower income consumers. So that K has largely closed." — David Tinsley, Senior Economist at Bank of America, on Bloomberg Surveillance
Defensive sectors are at a record low against the index
"Well I think so. ... We know high yield spreads are showing virtually no stress. ... we had utilities and staples both closed at their lowest levels ever relative to the S&P 500. Those are defensive areas. They're not getting a bid." — Ryan Detrick, Chief Market Strategist at Carson Group, on Closing Bell
The capex cycle in the other 490 stocks is early
"If you look at the top 10 market cap names, which is where you've got the kind of big AI behemoths, you've been hitting sort of peaks, essentially. If you look at the rest of the other 490 stocks, you're very, very early days in a capex build-out cycle. So you're up maybe third innings. ... We've been telling people, if you're concerned about the capex story going forward, take your attention off those top 10 market cap names. Look at the rest of the index." — Lori Calvasina, Head of US Equity Strategy at RBC Capital Markets, on Bloomberg Surveillance
6% risk-free is where behavior changes
"My old boss, this is 30 years ago, he said 6% will pull money from the moon. And I've never forgotten that statement. ... I think when 6% is dangled in front of oneself in a risk-free way, it's I think will change investor behavior. Why not pull some money out of risk assets and put it over there? If I can get 6% and sleep like a baby, I think that has the potential." — Jeff Mortimer, Chief Investment Officer at Elyxium Wealth, on Money Life
Prices are up 40% and wages are not
"The inflation in the United States is pretty dramatic. It's a 40% cumulative price increase since January of 2020. ... The majority of Americans have not seen a 40% increase in their earnings and their wages to compensate. So, essentially, this is a decline in the standard of living for the majority of Americans or the consumer. American households have taken a pay cut that they did not vote for." — Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern, on Prof G Markets
A $300B stock up 13% in a day is not an efficient market
"Palo Alto Networks which by the way Dan is a $300 billion company with a B. It's up 13% today. If you put up Zscaler excuse me which is a smaller company that's up in kind. And I guess the point is in the world of efficient markets when you have moves like this there's nothing efficient about that." — Guy Adami, co-founder of RiskReversal Media, on MRKT Call
Other appearances:
Harry Dent, economist and author, on the first crash out of a bubble averaging 46% in under 3 months — on WTFinance
Marketplace's closing note on the 9 biggest technology companies carrying nearly $3T of debt off the balance sheet — on Marketplace
Peter Grandich, founder of Peter Grandich and Company, on why more than 2 days above 5% on the 10-year is a bond crisis — on The David Lin Report
Lori Calvasina, head of US equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, on the 5.5% 10-year yield where her model starts breaking — on Bloomberg Surveillance
Dan Nathan, principal at RiskReversal Advisors, on the AI trade splitting into spenders and takers — on MRKT Call
Tom Orlik, chief economist at Bloomberg Economics, on 380M jobs worldwide being exposed at AI's full potential — on Bloomberg Businessweek
Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein on the US paying more interest than it pays for defense — on Power Players
Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, professors at Princeton and Chicago Booth, on 3M private business owners holding 13x the Forbes 400's wealth — on Talking Billions
International
Global investors are underweight Canada by benchmark habit
"US and Canada lump together and they end up overweight the US, underweight Canada. That's just the way it's worked. And that works in a seamless global environment. The world's changing, so it makes less sense now. So they're looking afresh." — Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, on Bloomberg Talks
Canadians are preparing for the USMCA to lapse in 2036
"I think people here are starting to prepare for something that they were not really prepared for a year ago, which is the idea that this thing will just expire at some point either because the U.S. withdraws from it or because we get to 2036 and it hasn't been extended and that's the expiry date. And you wind up with this very patchwork trade relationship between Canada and the U.S. and Mexico where you have tariffs in some sectors and no tariffs in another." — Derek Decloet, Executive Editor for Canada at Bloomberg News, on Big Take
85% of Canadian goods still cross the border tariff-free
"Because we are getting tariffs, tariffed of course by the U. S., maybe 85% of our goods are still tariff free. So most stuff is actually tariff-free. Obviously, certain small companies in particular, and large companies, but in particular smaller ones, are negatively affected." — Joe Overdevest, Portfolio Manager at Fidelity Investments Canada, on FidelityConnects
Australia's developer failures are a private-credit story
"So all of a sudden you have these developers sitting there, rising construction costs, rising costs of debt for the stock that they're holding, buyers running in the other direction, and the product that they're trying to sell, finished apartments, falling in price as well. So this is, I guess, a bit of a perfect storm, and we've seen this big company, Bathla, go into administration ... The residential developers this time around in this cycle have sourced a lot of their funding, not from banks where they traditionally tended to source it from, but from the private credit sector." — James McIntyre, economist for Australia and New Zealand at Bloomberg Economics, on Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia Edition
The cheap-borrowing half of the dollar's privilege is gone
"I view dollar dominance as coming down slowly. It's a long process, but the exorbitant privilege that's been fading for some time. ... they like me see it peaking around 2015. So for example like half the point is that you get a lower interest rate. That's the most important thing. That is just no longer the case compared to other major advanced countries setting aside Britain." — Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, on A Book with Legs
UK pension funds benchmark each other and fall behind
"A lot of pension funds continue to track themselves against other local pension funds. So they're looking really at sort of a UK league table. And I think that's a huge mistake. ... you will see that we've fallen behind and we've fallen behind because we haven't taken the right kinds of risk." — Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton Capital, on Bloomberg Talks
Coal went from $50 a ton to $400 a ton
"I think coal got down to $50 a ton and then rocketed up to $400 a ton. I mean, we bought a coal mine from large investors who had pressures from an ESG perspective." — Todd Barlow, CEO of Washington H. Soul Pattinson, on Equity Mates Investing Podcast
Other appearances:
Marieke Flament, co-author of the Currency of Power newsletter, on why de-dollarization runs in decades rather than weeks — on Hidden Forces
Bloomberg's Asia tech editor Peter Elstrom on SoftBank falling about 11% as the OpenAI listing moved — on Bloomberg Tech
David Hauner, head of global emerging markets fixed income strategy at BofA Securities, on Treasury buybacks helping emerging markets either way — on Global Research Unlocked
Naomi Fink, chief global strategist at Amova Asset Management, on why reading the yen as a gauge of Japan's health is dangerous — on Bloomberg Surveillance
BenevolentAI founder Ken Mulvany on Britain funding seed rounds and starving the growth stage — on Bloomberg Talks
Dan Muzzarelli, global head of ETF distribution at Franklin Templeton, on some US clients cutting non-US allocations below 5% — on FTSE Russell Convenes
Financials
Bank of America will not run agents it cannot control
"As a company, we have to be very careful with That, frankly, wouldn't let us deploy autonomous agents and things in our company. We said we can't see how we could actually control this thing. Because it's doing what it's supposed to do, which is go figure out problems over and over again." — Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO of Bank of America, on Bloomberg Talks
AI is the icing; the data platform is the cake
"Raising the specter at the extreme, in my opinion, does not take away the value of the mainstream capabilities of AI, to help improve companies and to make them more efficient. ... to me in financial services and in Barclays certainly, AI is the icing on the cake, it's not the cake." — C. S. Venkatakrishnan, CEO of Barclays, on Bloomberg Talks
The lease outlasts the GPU and the debt outlasts both
"Creditors indirectly underwrite the neocloud's ability to resell compute capacity profitably, which depends on utilization, pricing, customer retention, and access to capital. Diversified customers and contracted backlog help, but the duration mismatch is hard to ignore: Leases can outlast GPUs, GPUs can outlast customer contracts, and debt can outlast both." — Lotfi Karoui, Multi-Asset Credit Strategist at PIMCO, on PIMCO Pod
Converts fell 11% while the AI baskets fell 30-40%
"Over the last 2 years, several of our AI-focused BofA custom baskets, including those tied to compute and AI infrastructure, saw a max drawdown of approaching 30% to 40%, while US convertibles experienced the max drawdown of just 11% despite maintaining meaningful correlation of about 80% to the same AI themes." — Michael Youngworth, Head of Global Convertible and Preferred Strategy at BofA Securities, on Global Research Unlocked
Trapped working capital sits on Russell 2000 balance sheets
"For the American treasurer and the CFO, there's trillions of dollars in America in the Russell 2000 that are locked, locked, trapped capital in escrow accounts and lock boxes and restricted cash that sits on balance sheets. So if you give me permission as a bank to underwrite your accounts receivables data that may be sitting in your AWS account, all of a sudden as a bank, I can continuously underwrite you 24 over seven and give you access to capital against that AR, against that trapped balance sheet inventory that you may have." — Dee Choubey, Founder and CEO of OpenReserve, on Fast Money
8 of August's 10 busiest ETPs were leveraged or inverse
"If we look at the products that were most active, the ETPs in the month of August, eight out of the top ten were leveraged or inverse type products ultra long, ultra short. The other two were Bitcoin. ... if we back out even more and look at just the top five stocks, not just ETFs, stocks in the entire market. Four of them were ultra long or ultra short single stock ETFs." — Justin Shack, Partner and Head of Market Structure at Rosenblatt Securities, on Halftime Report
Klarna's no-growth value is negative $1 a share
"What's the no growth value? That's negative $1 a share. So they've got to they got to do some serious growing just to get out of the hole because right now the business as it stands is not worth anything. I think growth is going to be hard to come by. I don't know where they're going to get margin." — David Trainer, Founder and President of New Constructs, on Money Life
Other appearances:
The Fintech Insider panel on Chime paying $590M for the bank it has rented for 7 years — on Fintech Insider
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan on a flat trading quarter still ranking among the bank's best — on Bloomberg Businessweek
Crypto and Digital Assets
Gold and silver are 15-20x the size of crypto
"I think gold and silver are a very natural extension to our crypto perpetuals, which have gotten to a really good start. We've had about 45 billion of trades already on them. ... I think the macro story speaks for itself. They are a much bigger asset class than, let's say, crypto, 15 to 20 times the size of crypto." — Udesh Jha, Chief Risk Officer at Kalshi, on Bloomberg Businessweek
Weekend perp funding has reached thousands of percent
"When you end up trying to make something 24 by seven that doesn't have good spot market price discovery over the weekend, or we end up with things that can be incredibly volatile and thin books and lead to cascading liquidations. ... some of these times in the early generations of these products before some of these things were narrowed in, we'd see funding rates go to thousands and tens of thousands of percent over the weekend, and sometimes this was an intentional trading strategy by some individuals that we saw." — Lucas Schuermann, co-founder of Variational, on Flirting with Models
Alternatives and PE
A data center site now needs a permit, not just power
"The most valuable thing for a data center used to be power. If we go back like five, six years, it used to just be land. And then it was powered land. And now it's actually permitted powered land. And the reason is because people are like kind of fed up with it. They're just like not in my backyard." — David Morehead, CIO of the Baylor University endowment, on 20VC
Half of 1,000 unicorns have not priced a round in 2-3 years
"About half of those companies, you're talking about probably low trillions in market cap of arguably stale market cap value. These are the companies that were raising every six months. They were. They're not now, right? But to your point, they raised enough money where they have this runway." — Christian Munafo, Head of Private Growth Strategies at VanEck, on Animal Spirits Podcast
Even billionaires still run the balance sheet on a spreadsheet
"Everyone we talk to, even the wealthiest, wealthiest billionaires still manage their money with a spreadsheet, their own spreadsheet. Nothing is pulled together comprehensively for them." — Christine Leong Connors, Co-Founder and CEO of Verita, on The Private Markets Playbook
Sports credit means player receivables, not buying the team
"We've been focusing more on what I describe as, you know, derivative rights, you know, we're unlikely to be you know, on the front pages, you know, alongside folks that are buying the Lakers. That's sort of not our game, but we're active in things like factoring player transfer receivables, providing financing against broadcast revenue, lending against sponsorship rights." — Andrew Kotliar, Founder and Partner at MEP Capital, on Market Matters with Marley Kayden
Consumer
The cancer vaccine is built from one patient's sequence
"What's happening is you're sequencing a patient and you're actually building the drug based upon that person's unique profile. ... These immunotherapies are amazing, but they don't work in all patients where they work well, they work incredibly well where they don't work well, they don't work well." — Eric Lefkofsky, Founder and CEO of Tempus AI, on The Exchange
Appealing an insurance denial works about half the time
"Most people don't appeal denials, but we analyze some new data from the insurance companies that show when they do, they often win about half the time, according to the data we found from large insurance companies. In some plans, they win nine out of 10 times or more." — John Tozzi, Healthcare Reporter at Bloomberg News, on Bloomberg Businessweek
$1,000 in the 1981 IPO beat the index 100 to 1
"If you're trying to contextualize, well, 45 years is a long time. How does that $17 million stack up? ... If you had bought the S&P 500 with that same $1,000, instead of $17 million today, you would have $170,000." — Ben Gilbert, co-host of Acquired, on Acquired
Crocs recovered by getting weirder, not more normal
"Instead of trying to make Crocs less weird, they just doubled down on just the weirdness and just the fact that it was that classic clog at the center of the brand. And then they used essentially scarcity, customization, social media and collaborations with celebr celebrities and designers like Post Malone, Justin Bieber for as two examples. And the sales really took off." — Simon Belanger, co-host of The Canadian Investor, on The Canadian Investor
Other appearances:
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, co-hosts of Acquired, on Home Depot stopping store openings for about 15 years — on Acquired on TBPN
Sports
One host got the last ESPN programming chief fired
"They're paying him $60 million because Jimmy Pitaro, the chairman of ESPN, recognizes that there are a very limited number of Pat McAfee. ... Pat McAfee got the last programming head of ESPN fired because he was talking about him negatively on his show. That's extraordinary power. That's like '90s film star power getting the studio head canned." — Jon Kelly, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Puck, on The Powers That Be: Daily
Technology & AI
80% of newly funded AI companies build on open models
"The facts are in the last 6 months $400 billion of venture funding went into AI native companies. 80% of them use open models. If not for open models, how could they build their dream, right? Because their dream could be different. Obviously, it'll be different than the labs, the frontier labs dreams." — Jensen Huang, Founder, President and CEO of Nvidia, on All-In Podcast
OpenAI put 25% of production engineers onto defense
"We took 25% of our production engineers and said, ... all your projects are on hold. You are now defending. You are now upleveling our security architecture. ... I've talked to a number of CISOs over the past couple weeks and months and there are many companies who are also telling me that yeah that they've applied these models they found some very significant issues but that they're able to fix them" — Greg Brockman, Co-founder and President of OpenAI, on a16z
The Hugging Face breach was the first AI swarm attack
"They had hacked systems, got onto the internet, and they had behaved in a very unusual way. It was a hack that was the first autonomous AI swarm attack that we've ever seen." — Bob McMillan, Technology Reporter at The Wall Street Journal, on The Journal.
The proposed evaluators share funders with the lab
"In theory, it sounds like a good idea. I do think that there's a way that that could work and could be helpful to protecting against risk. But the issue is, The specific folks that have been proposed to do that auditing, to do that evaluation, they overlap in funders with Anthropic. There's a very high overlap and conflict of interest present, and that's exactly what needs to be corrected." — Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, on Bloomberg Tech
A slower frontier stretches demand, it does not cut it
"Most of the frontier models are not being used on a wide spaces now anyway. If you talk to most enterprises, they're looking at how to basically optimize their costs by using some open source models, some of the older models. And maybe for extremes and tasks that require a lot of reasoning, the latest model. So what this means is that slowing down the frontier doesn't actually lead to a slowdown of the total demand curve, but just basically spreads the curve out over a longer period of time. To us, that's what investors would need to focus their minds on is this is a timing issue as opposed to a total scale of demand issue." — Uday Cheruvu, Portfolio Manager at Harding Loevner, on Bloomberg Tech
His index puts models past human researchers by Aug 2027
"In extrapolating out these trends, we're actually making the prediction that we'll see models eclipse human researchers probably around August of 2027. ... Can an AI model act like an AI researcher right now? Can it run experiments? Can it improve AI systems with little or no human help? And right now the answer is no, but you have line of sight to when the answer would be yes." — Rayan Krishnan, Founder and CEO of Vals AI, on Bloomberg Tech
The real target may be Chinese distillation
"I don't disagree that distillation is a problem. And actually, I've personally been wondering if that's one of the primary drivers of this. ... he laid out a few things to keep sort of the gap between the U.S. and China. So one was maintaining the export controls, but the other was trying to limit the amount of distillation and everything that's going, putting roadblocks in place to stop that. So I don't know if slowing down the U.S. is the answer to maintaining the gap, but clearly finding some way to manage and limit distillation is clearly on the table." — Stacy Rasgon, Senior US Analyst at Bernstein, on The Exchange
If China does not slow, the pledge is only words
"But the reality is China is not slowing down. And if China doesn't slow down, this is all words because US tech's not going to slow down." — Dan Ives, Partner at Yorkville and Ives, on Bloomberg Surveillance
Adobe yields 12% of free cash flow on 2027 numbers
"Adobe was our favorite idea when we really dug in because as you say, everyone can see the problems there, which means the price is extraordinarily depressed. It has a 12% free cash flow yield on 2027 numbers. It's still growing top line double digits. So for all the people saying that we can see the issues, it's not showing up in the business, at least at the top line growth rate yet." — Samantha McLemore, Founder and CIO of Patient Capital Management, on The Exchange
75% of AI orders came from outside the top 100 categories
"What we seeing is actually agents are rewarding precision and personalization, right? So 75% of AI attributed orders last quarter came from categories outside of the top 100, which I find particularly interesting. And really that's kind of the shift, right, that we're seeing, which is AI can understand the actual need and not just a keyword." — Jess Hertz, COO of Shopify, on Pioneers of AI
Half of software buyers now start in a chatbot
"Half of all B2B software buyers do it exactly how you do it, Craig. This time last year it was only 29%. If I'm looking into the tea leaves next year, probably two-thirds of the people are going to behave like you do, starting in chat, maybe even generating the short list out of chat and then doing the evaluation work." — Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer at G2, on Eye On A.I.
The chips telcos are buying last 18 months, not 5 years
"I'm like, you got to watch out what you're signing up for here, guys, because these chips have about 18 month life cycles. Not the five years that you guys are used to." — Danielle Rios, CEO of Totogi, on Telecoms.com Podcast
Flock's camera network covers 40% of the country
"Right now, Flock is in 40% of the United States. And in many cases, cops are able to search not just the 15 cameras or 20 cameras that are in their town, but thousands in their state or more than 100,000 across the entire country." — Jason Koebler, Co-founder of 404 Media, on On with Kara Swisher
Inference has to pay back in 6 months, not 24
"We're talking about six months. Six months. That's the amount of time on some of dover that it takes you to pay back for the infrastructure invested in. Today, most companies are taking 12, 18, 24 months before they can actually make their money back." — Rodrigo Liang, CEO of SambaNova, on Squawk on the Street
90% of chip engineers' time is work a model can do
"What a lot of people don't realize is that 90% of the time in the chip business, our engineers are spending doing things that can be done by these models now." — Faraj Aalaei, Founder and CEO of Cognichip, on TBPN
Other appearances:
OpenAI president Greg Brockman on the model behind the Hugging Face incident never having had alignment training — on Odd Lots
The Motley Fool's analysts on the loudest safety voices holding the largest AI positions — on Motley Fool Hidden Gems
Eli the Computer Guy, technology commentator, on why know-your-customer rules would fix more than a new statute — on The Tech Report
Emily Forlini, senior AI reporter at Fortune, on OpenAI not knowing its own models were hacking Hugging Face — on Fortune Daily
Sarah Frier, managing editor for technology coverage at Bloomberg, on a 3,800-word manifesto carrying no concrete commitment — on Bloomberg Intelligence
Rachel Metz and Mike Shepard, AI reporter and tech editor at Bloomberg, on nobody committing to end a training run — on Bloomberg Tech
Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist Parmy Olson on why pacing is not the same word as slowing — on Bloomberg Tech
Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki on letting creators ship their games as standalone apps — on Bloomberg Tech
Nigel Glenday, CFO and COO of Masterworks, on moving 80% of his finance team's machine tasks to agents — on Run the Numbers with CJ Gustafson
Alex Kantrowitz and Lo Toney, founders of Big Technology and Plexo Capital, on Anthropic still being listable this year — on Closing Bell
Rob Leathern, former product executive at Google and Meta, on the slowdown calls helping the labs stop outspending each other — on Squawk on the Street
Vijay Marolia, chief investment officer at Regal Point Capital, on why an agreement among AI companies to slow down is a cartel — on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe
Mike Shepard, senior technology editor at Bloomberg News, on Wall Street asking whether the safety pledges are marketing — on Bloomberg Businessweek
The Daily Tech News Show hosts on the reported Nasdaq listing for Anthropic in October — on Daily Tech News Show
VC & Startups
99% of LPs ask to co-invest and about 2% do
"Co invest is one of those things that 99% of LPs say they want to do and probably 10% do on a regular basis. I think 10% is an overstatement. I think it'll be like 2%." — Vaibhav Agrawal, Founder of ODDBIRD VC, on How I Invest
Capital markets now crown the winner before customers do
"It used to be that capital markets would wait until there’s some evidence that the battle of the customer markets has been settled, that the customers have chosen the king, and the market leader emerges. But now that’s flipped, and the VCs are choosing who the king is, and capital has become a weapon" — John Chen, General Partner at Fika Ventures, on The Full Ratchet
The frontier will not consolidate to 2 or 3 model providers
"We continue to believe that there will be a thousand flowers that bloom on top of these great foundational layers. The world is not going to consolidate around 2 or 3 model providers. You've seen a little bit of a resurgence in the software index, which shows that people once again, think that systems of record and vertical businesses and api businesses have fundamental value, that they may have been a little aggressive in their overselling." — Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, on Squawk on the Street
One payments firm sits behind 60% of new app launches
"One is a company called RevenueCat, which is powering 60% of the new launched apps with their subscriptions today. And through that we can see it's just like an immense increase in new apps that are being launched." — Nico Wittenborn, Founder of Adjacent, on TBPN
Other appearances:
Jason Calacanis, general partner at LAUNCH, on stripping the stock options of lab staff who break the communications policy — on This Week in Startups
Isabelle Freidheim, founder and managing partner at Athena Capital, on buying the layer between data centers and the models — on Bloomberg Intelligence
Mitchell Green, founder and managing partner at Lead Edge Capital, on a no-growth software company paying for itself out of cash flow — on TBPN
Industrials and Transport
One Birmingham factory makes 55% of a global car part
"I said to the guys at the factory, how many of these are you making? And they said, we're producing 55 or more percent of the global supply of of this part. And to some extent, the point of this book was to ask the question, how is it that we've got to the point where we have concentrated so much production for something in a single place?" — Ed Conway, Economics and Data Editor at Sky News, on Merryn Talks Money
Scout starts in the high fifties, rivals in the high seventies
"Obviously, we didn't talk pricing, but the vehicle's gonna start the high fifties." — Scott Keogh, CEO of Scout Motors, on TBPN
Materials & Energy
12M barrels moved through Hormuz in one night
"I just got the latest data from last night and flows through the Strait. Over 12 million barrels of oil and oil products flowed through the Strait of Hormuz last night." — Chris Wright, US Secretary of Energy, on Bloomberg Surveillance
Policy
Banks are audited every year; AI labs are not
"Right now, financial firms, every year, they have to be audited by external auditors. Their books have to be open. The CEO has to say, hey, I promise I'm not lying on our books. AI firms have nothing like that. ... all of the logs for every single, every single agent, every single agent that OpenAI or Anthropic is training, all of those could go to any sort of third party evaluator." — Cormac Slade, AI researcher at the Trajectory Institute, on The Exchange
A former senator wants AI listings blocked by order
"I'm asking President Trump to use the power you have to create an executive order that prevents any IPOs until there's passed legislation that basically protects America." — Joe Manchin, former U.S. Senator, on Squawk Pod
Saying it is dangerous meets the test for negligence
"You can look at the different ways you can do product liability. But the definition of negligence is that you're careless when you know something can be dangerous. They announced this weekend. They know it could be dangerous. So, there are lots of ways we can put guardrails on it." — Walter Isaacson, biographer and CNBC contributor, on Squawk Pod
Two firms lead, and neither needs a waiver to slow down
"If you look at the market share, for frontier intelligence, if you look at the revenue growth. There's really two companies that dominate it. If you look at the model capabilities, Anthropic and OpenAI are probably about two generations, what they have in the lab is about two generations ahead of everyone else. So the others are trying to catch up, but the reality is they have a pretty substantial lead." — David Sacks, Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, on Bloomberg Talks
Other appearances:
Jennifer Huddleston, senior research fellow at the Cato Institute, on regulating the application rather than the technology — on Bloomberg Surveillance
Geopolitics
The Saudi pipeline could be down for 4 months
"With the East West pipeline shutdown and with estimates ranging from 2 to 4 weeks to 2 to 4 months for it to come back online. ... Estimates range from, you know, eight to 10 or 15 million barrels of storage. So I think they can still continue to take out of storage and ship out of Yanbu for the next couple of weeks. But if they don't fix that soon, you're going to see a sharp drop in export moves." — Scott Modell, CEO of Rapidan Energy, on Squawk on the Street
Nuggets of Wisdom
An investment committee past 7 dilutes accountability
"The magic numbers that I always talk about are three, five, and seven. Odd numbers work quite well because you have a tiebreaker. ... once you get bigger than seven it's very easy to have a dilution of accountability right so if you have a committee of 13 people all based in the US all fixed income experts making a call on duration then who is accountable if that's the wrong call" — Anastasia Buyalskaya, Assistant Professor at HEC Paris, on PIMCO Accrued Interest
Buffett's one condition was: do not say I was involved
"I sent that out to them and couple days later, I got an email back from Warren's assistant at the time, Debbie. ... Warren says basically as long as you don't suggest that he is involved with the project in any way, you're okay to go ahead." — Alex Morris, author of Buffett and Munger Unscripted, on MicroCapClub
Other
Streaming gave YouTube 60% of television
"What they never figured out how to work on streaming was about 60 percent of television: news, talk shows, comedy talk shows, lifestyle programming, The Drew Barrymore Show, travel shows, the weather. They let all of those things go to YouTube specifically." — Adam Conover, comedian and host of Factually!, on Decoder
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