Leah Feiger: It means it’s a time for another emergency pod. We’re just going to keep this going all day.
Brian Barrett: We’re going to have to do another emergency pod. Exactly. All day. Get ready, folks.
Zoë Schiffer: We have been talking a lot though about how interconnected, not just the AI industry is, but the entire US economy, how tied up it is with just a few companies. And Nvidia really is, it’s kind of Nvidia and Anthropic that so much of this is riding on. And so I think we have yet to see what the ramifications of this will be if Nvidia is able, like we said, to weather the storm, continue growing and leading the AI boom. It has been, perhaps it won’t be dire, but so much of what has happened already has been completely unexpected for everyone involved so that I think there’s a lot of uncertainty and instability that we still have yet to account for.
Leah Feiger: So from the politics side, I can see this very much impacting the White House’s relationship with AI-related firms. I can just see this becoming a thing and we’re going to continue reporting this out, but WIRED is keeping a very close eye on what this means for these relationships. Talk to me from the Silicon Valley side, what is going to get impacted here? Is it crazy to say that Anthropic’s IPO could get tossed up in the storm? What are we really looking at?
Brian Barrett: No, so here’s my thing. I’m not sure about the Anthropic IPO. I think, again, everything’s priced in and I think they’re going to do just fine. It’ll still be worth whether it’s $1.2 trillion or $1.4 trillion, whatever. It’s going to be a huge IPO, one of the biggest history regardless of this. What I’m interested in is right now, people don’t have many alternatives. Even if you wanted to separate yourself from Nvidia because of this scandal for some reason, you’re not going to find something better out there for the most part. Some other companies have had some gains lately. So in the short term, I don’t know. I don’t think that this maybe changes that much. This will be one of the takes, much like Zoë writes her takes, I’m going to regret saying this. I think short term it doesn’t do that much. I think longer term though, we’ve already seen a lot of companies investing in making their own silicon and making their own chips and finding ways to optimize their own sort of hardware stack against their software. I think of it the way that after everyone saw Apple making its own processors and having huge efficiency gains on the iPhone, companies started doing that within smartphone world. Everyone has their own sort of processor in the smartphone world. I think that’s happening increasingly in the AI world, and I think that’s long-term a threat, not to the industry, but to Nvidia itself. It comes at a time when other companies are really trying to find a path to do this without relying so much on Nvidia, and this is only going to accelerate that process.
