Four Tech Debates

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Happy Friday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the stacked guest list at the Trump-Xi White House dinner.

Today’s Lineup

Arnold Ventures Founder & Co-Chair John Arnold at 12:00 PM
Enveda Co-Founder & CEO Viswa Colluru at 12:40 PM
Pilgrim Labs Founder Jake Adler at 12:45 PM
FreeBean Co-Founder & CEO Adam Korsunsky at 12:50 PM

Run of Show

Four Tech Debates

Is Microsoft about to have a Muse moment?

Microsoft launched a new version of Copilot, which consolidates chat, coding, agentic work, and Cowork into one workspace. Will it be more successful than the old Copilot? The models have clearly advanced to the point of being useful in an entirely different way, that requires different harnesses, different integrations, and a lot of new user education. Will this be a breakout product for knowledge workers on Microsoft stacks?

Should Dario have been at the White House AI dinner?

Dario has sparred with the administration before, but he’s also attended plenty of meetings in DC, and Tom Brown has engaged heavily, even going so far as to praise Trump’s “let data reign” post on Truth Social, saying “I really loved President Trump’s post from earlier this week,” while speaking to Sec. Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill. It stands to reason that if Dario wasn’t at the dinner, he wasn’t invited. Should he have been?

Has the AI slop gone too far this time?
People really don’t like the latest Kalshi direct response AI slop video. It’s Pixar style 3d animation, made with AI video generation, and accompanied by an AI song that doesn’t really rhyme and sort of rambles through a very dramatic soap opera style narrative that ends with the realization that a woman isn’t having an affair, but instead hedging her grocery buying through prediction market contracts for egg prices on Kalshi. Is this bad?

To what degree is the AI buildout driving interest rates upward?

Interest rates are spiking upwards, specifically, the 10 year yield has jumped ~12% in the past 30 days. The question in tech is how much of this is due to the AI buildout sucking capital from other markets. The obvious answer is the Iran War causing an energy crisis, followed by higher inflation, leading to rate hikes. But within tech there is a view that data center debt is simply too good to resist. Which is it?

Clip Spotlight: SemiAnalysis’ Jordan Nanos on the neocloud talent wars:

"It's across the entire supply chain. We see this in electricians, data center technicians, and operators. Salaries for electricians in Louisiana and Abilene, Texas, are up 3x to 5x."

"Crusoe just came in and paid these guys so much more money. But they're out of people. They need to train. No matter what job we're talking about, people just need to be trained."

"The most successful neoclouds that we're seeing have this pipeline to take talent from other related areas and get them contributing to neocloud management and day-2 operations where a software engineer can start to work as an SRE on one of these teams."