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I think this one is very interesting because Google has been criticized for falling behind on the agent race. And so I think this is basically their very clear response to that. We also have news from Meta. They're doing layoffs of about 18,000 people, which is about 10% of their workforce. Zuckerberg has pretty openly pointed out that AI is the reason for this. Microsoft, on the exact same day, also announced its first ever voluntary buyout program. This is targeted at about 8,700 employees. So I don't think this is just a meta story. I think this is a story about how AI is starting to really reshape payroll at the biggest companies on the planet. And then we're going to do a little bit of a deep dive on OpenAI shipping GPT 5.5 yesterday. This is just six weeks after GPT 5.4 came out. The benchmarks are wild. The pricing story is very interesting. I think this is going to set a noose bar for a lot of agentic AI. So I'm going to unpack all of that on the show today. Really quick, before we get into the stories, I wanted to tell you about AI Box. This is the tool that I personally use pretty much every day now. And it's honestly one of the easiest ways to actually get value out of AI without having to figure out a dozen different subscriptions. AI Box gives you access to over 80 different models of AI all in one place. So you get ChatGPT, Cloud, Gemini, image models, video tools. All of it is in the same place. And the part that is really useful for me personally is that I can build my own automations by just describing what I want. So I'm not a coder. I don't have to, you know, use some weird flowchart. you basically can type in something like, you know, create a newsletter generator that, you know, spits out different images and different content, and it goes and researches the web to gather information, and it can create that for you. It's all $8.99 a month to get access to all of these tools, and it's less than a subscription to something like Chai Chimchi. So if you're interested, go check it out. There is a link in the description to AIbox.ai. So the biggest story that I wanted to kick off with is SpaceX. There's reports that came out this week that SpaceX is telling their investors they're planning what they're calling a quote substantial capital expenditure. And one of the things that they floated is manufacturing their own GPUs. Now, they're not saying that they're going to start this tomorrow. But I do think the fact that they're even putting this on a pitch deck tells you something really interesting. Right now we have this massive compute bottleneck. It's very real. Every serious AI company right now is fighting for NVIDIA chips. And the you know, the wait times and the prices are super, super brutal. SpaceX has a ton of in-house AI workloads. They have Starlink, they have Starship Avionics, they have Autonomy, they have the entire Grok project over at XAI that shares their infrastructure. So they have a ton of demand. And honestly, I think this is what this is telling us right now, is that we've basically reached the point where the biggest tech companies in the world no longer trust the GPU supply chain enough to just be customers. Meta is already doing custom silicon, Google has TPUs, Amazon has Tranium, Apple is building their own inference chips, and I think SpaceX is basically joining that list because they see the need. This makes a lot of sense to me. Whether they pull it off or not is definitely a different question. Chip fabs are very hard Elon plate is already very full but I think the direction pretty clear The compute side of AI is becoming just as competitive as the model side Microsoft has just announced that they are integrating advanced models, including, by the way, what they're calling Anthropics Cloud Mythos Preview. So Mythos from Cloud is kind of this huge cybersecurity AI model that can find bugs in anything, and it's got like all of these different issues, and they're concerned that it could be used by hackers, all of that, right? Well, Microsoft is actually integrating that, but it's just a preview. It's directly inside of their secure coding framework. And the idea is that Claude gets used for threat detection, vulnerability scanning, and incident response inside of Microsoft's dev tooling. And at the same time, OpenAI has been briefing US federal agencies, state governments, and also the Five Eyes intelligence partners on a version of their model called GPT 5.5 Cyber. Now, I don't want to be skeptical, but it just feels so much like opening eyes trying to tag on to what anthropic did with the kind of the mythos hype where there was like oh my gosh the model's so crazy they had to go like debrief the government and like the government had all this beef with anthropic but now they're like talking to anthropic because they have this super hardcore model that could like you know wreck all the code bases in the world so anyways huge pr for anthropic their stock rose their credibility everyone's view of them uh definitely got a massive boost and it feels like opening eyes trying to just like tack on to that like, oh, look, we got a really good cyber model too. And so anyways, whatever. I'm not saying it's probably not just as capable, but it does feel like a lot of this is marketing kind of ploy vibes. But anyways, OpenAI held a Washington event for about 50 cyber defense practitioners. So they're obviously putting a lot of energy into this. Okay, Google just had their big cloud event in Las Vegas this week. They rolled out the Gemini Enterprise agent platform. I think this is basically their attempt to take a swing at OpenAI and Anthropic in the enterprise for the AI agent race. I think first access to over 200 models through model garden is something that they're going to be rolling out. So enterprises aren't going to be locked into just Gemini. The second thing is that they launched Gemini 3.1 pro Gemini 3.1 flash image, a brand new music model called Lyria three, they launched Gemini four on the opens or Gemma four on the open source side. And they also built a whole management layer. So a shared inbox where AI agents post progress updates, hand off tasks, coordinate with humans. This is interesting because they're building a lot of this infrastructure for the agents to actually go and accomplish tasks and do it well. In my opinion, Google has had the research and infrastructure forever. But what they've looked kind of not so not so good at on the agent side is actually pulling it off in a meaningful way for enterprises. And so because of that, we have this, you know, OpenAI had their huge release. And then we've had Anthropics Claude Cowork in the past that has swept up a lot of enterprise customers and Fortune 500 buyers. It looks like we're going to have more competition in that space now. Next up, Meta has just sent a memo to all of their employees announcing that they're cutting about 10% of their workforce. This represents about 8,000 people. Their cuts are going to all roll out on May 20th. They're also scrapping a bunch of plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. So total, the reduction in headcount is closer to about 1400 positions if you're looking at kind of the unfilled ones. And the reason that they're giving for this over at Meta is AI. Zuckerberg basically told everyone this at the start of the year when he said 2026 would be, quote, the year AI starts to dramatically change the way we work. Now, you know, that could be a really positive thing. A lot of people view this as sort of an ominous thing. But here we are, regardless. Meta's 2026 CapEx guidance is 115 to 135 billion. This is up massively from 72 billion last year. So they're spending way more on AI infrastructure, and they're going to be cutting back on people. So spending more for the AI models and less on the actual people running it. I think on the exact same day, we also have Microsoft that has announced that they also are doing not really layoffs, they're trying to avoid I think the word layoffs, but it is the it's what they're calling the first quote, voluntary retirement buyout program. This is the first time that the company has ever done this in their 51 year history. According to CNBC and Bloomberg, this offer applies to any employees whose age plus the years that they've been there total 70 or more. So for example, if there's like a 52 year old who been working at Microsoft for 18 years they would qualify for this And the company has about 120 employees With this the buyout could reach potentially 7 of that which is about 8 people That on top of the 9 layoffs that they did last summer. So with all of this, Microsoft is obviously trying to cut down their headcount. They're trying to do it right now in a bit of a less abrasive way than kind of mass layoffs, but the direction is basically the same way. And if you also add into that Snapchat, just cut a thousand jobs, which was 16% of their workforce. And a week ago, for the exact same reason, and their CEO said AI now generates over 65% of their code. So with all of that, I know it sounds like, I don't know, it could be like scary, it could be bad news. What I do think that is interesting here is that we're kind of watching the first real wave of AI driven white collar restructuring in a lot of the biggest tech companies. You know, this isn't kind of like that AI is going to take your job someday. I think today we're seeing a lot of these shifts happen. But I do think an important story here is that people that are deeply embedded and skilled with AI and using it to leverage their roles better are the ones that are actually being held onto. And I think this is an important part. Companies are able to do more with less people due to AI. So if you are someone inside of your organization that is, you know, taking full advantage and becoming the most productive as possible. I don't think you have anything to fear truly, not just because maybe you wouldn't get laid off. Because even if you did, it will be easy for you to find something else. If you are really an expert using your tools, these AI tools for your expertise. So that is that's kind of I mean, this is just the world. So I'm trying to say, you know, I'm trying to tell it like it is, this is kind of the world we live in. But I think that the people that are really taking advantage of these AI tools are the ones that are going to be successful going forward. And if you're, you know, newsflash, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably in that top bubble, that top tier that's taking all of this very seriously. Okay, let's get into the big story today, which is that GPT-5 just got released yesterday. And this is a big moment for a bunch of different reasons. First, I think speed GPT-5.4 dropped just six weeks ago. So six weeks later, we have an absolutely new model. The cadence is really fast on how they're pushing this out. And I think this tells you a lot about the pressure that OpenAI is under right now. They have pressure both from Anthropic and Google. Those are the two people I think that are pushing them the hardest. Anthropic just hit a $30 billion, you know, annualized revenue run rate and Google just shipped their enterprise agent platform. OpenAI doesn't really get to take any quarters off anymore. Right now they have to be shipping aggressively if they're going to keep up with Anthropic. And one like, I guess, story that I think is really important on why this is so critical for them. This is kind of interesting. I actually don't see a lot of people reporting on this, but there is the secondaries market where employees are able to sell their shares in an organization on like a secondary market. And there's a bunch of like regulation and tricky stuff with that, but that's kind of the basis of what happens there. On the secondaries, OpenAI's valuation, what people are buying the shares for right now, it's kind of interesting because it's like an indicator of kind of where the stock will go sometimes. But anyways, what OpenAI's shares are selling for right now is $850 billion. That's the valuation if you want to go buy OpenAI shares. Anthropics shares 1 trillion. So Anthropics is being priced and valued at higher possible, you know, possible part of that is maybe not even where they are, where they are today, but where people can see them going in the future. All of that, I think is giving open AI, who's about to IPO and Anthropics is probably about to IPO. They're giving them kind of a really big moment where they need to make a massive push because they don't want, you know, they don't want to IPO and Anthropics. This company has raised way less money. That's, you know, has way less users all of a sudden is valued higher and their stock rips more. OpenAI really wants to avoid that. So that is what they're trying to fight here with GPT 5.5. So the model itself, basically OpenAI's positioning on this is that it is quote unquote fully agentic model, meaning that it's designed to complete all these multi-step computer tasks with minimal human direction. They specifically highlighted five different categories, analyzing data, writing and debugging code, operating software directly, researching online, creating documents and spreadsheets autonomously. So this is like, they're giving us all a pitch on how to use this inside of work, which is what's interesting to me because their audience of 900 million weekly active users is, I mean, it's just kind of everyday people, but they're really putting a big push here into enterprise because Anthropic has just crushed it in that area so much So as far as the benchmarks go it got 88 on the SWE bench It got 92 on the MMLU It's got 82% on the terminal bench. It's doing really good. They also claim that it has a 60% drop in hallucinations versus GPT 5.4, which it kind of holds up as what used to be the greatest. And now they're saying, look, it's getting better at this. The pricing, I think, is also where this gets very interesting. the standard GPT 5.5 is $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. That doubles GPT 5.4 on paper, but OpenAI is claiming that the model uses tokens more efficiently, so the real world cost per task should be roughly flat or better, right? So this is interesting. They're saying, look, it's, you know, for the output, for the tokens, for the words that it gives you, it's twice as expensive, but because it's so efficient with its tokens, technically it can get a lot more done for a lot less. So it's about the same cost. That's really, really interesting. GPT 5.5 pro is $30 in and $180 out, which is very expensive. It's more than Claude Opus. So OpenAI is, you know, obviously saying if you want the premium tier, you have to pay the premium prices. They're also betting on enterprise customers doing this. Rollout is they have pro plus and business and enterprise users inside of chat GPT that are all getting it. I've been playing around with it and generating some reports with it. And it's pretty good if I'm being honest, but I will say I also noticed that right at the bottom of my response, it's like, hey, do you want an even better response to this? Try upgrading to GBT 5.5 Pro. And I click that and it's like $100 a month subscription that it's trying to get me to. So I think just like Anthropic, they're realizing that they need to, for power users, they need to try to push them towards paying more for getting better results. Now, it's kind of tricky because with Anthropic, it's kind of like token based, right? It's like, look, you want more tokens, like you ran out of tokens for your hour allotment upgrade to get more. And that's something that I pay for when I pay the $200 a month, uh, Anthropic thing. But for the open AI, when it's just like get better responses, uh, it feels like I'm like, well, I, so you're just like paywalling the best responses. I don't like that as much as like, look, we're giving you the best, but it just burns your tokens really fast. So if you want more tokens, that that's a pitch I actually like better. So I'll, I'm curious to see where that goes. The API is quote unquote coming very soon, but it's not out yet because they have to put more safeguards on it, which I'm bummed about. I always love the APIs coming out, obviously, because I'm also adding those to my platform AI box. So anyways, I think there is so much going on right now as far as infrastructure, the labor market, the capability curve, all of this are moving very quickly. GPT 5.5 is, I think, kind of the most visible piece we're seeing this week, but all of the stuff is working together that we've talked about on the show. And it's going to be interesting to see some of the shifts in the industry. Okay, that's it for the show today. If you've been enjoying the podcast, it would be a huge favor to me if you could leave a rating and review over on Apple or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. It helps the algorithm out if you haven't done it before, but you've listened to more than one episode. Oh my gosh, I would be so thrilled and grateful if you could do that. And also make sure to go check out AIbox.ai. There is a link in the description. I appreciate you listening and I'll catch you in the next one. Starting a business means wearing many hats, designer, marketer, manager, while chasing your vision. Shopify powers millions of businesses with tools to build beautiful stores, create content, and market with ease. From inventory to shipping, everything runs smoothly. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your one-euro trial today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. 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