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Apple & Palantir Earnings, GDPx, & The AI Kill Switch

Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is Apple and Palantir earnings results.

Today’s Lineup

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein at 11:30 AM
Northwood Space Co-Founder & CEO Bridgit Mendler at 11:45 AM
SemiAnalysis Founder & CEO Dylan Patel at 11:55 AM
SemiAnalysis Tokenomics Model Co-Lead Max Kan at 11:55 AM
SemiAnalysis Member of Technical Staff Andrew Megalaa at 11:55 AM

Run of Show

Apple & Palantir Earnings, GDPx, & The AI Kill Switch

Apple & Palantir Earnings

Apple and Palantir both beat earnings yesterday. Apple reported record September-quarter revenue, while Palantir nearly doubled its revenue from a year ago. Both stocks are down around 2% this morning. The Financial Times reported today that even though Apple beat earnings, the company is warning that rising memory chip prices and the cost of running its AI tools could affect profit margins.

Here are the results:

Another highlight: Palantir’s U.S. commercial revenue surpassed its U.S. government revenue for the first time, reaching $984M versus $953M.

GDPx

SemiAnalysis just released GDPx, a new benchmark that measures agentic capabilities across 13 different models.

Instead of asking the models generic knowledge questions, it puts them inside realistic environments for things like chip design, cybersecurity, bio, finance, alignment, software engineering, etc. then gives them tasks that can take hours to complete.

The benchmark is saying these models still have a long way to go with the top overall score being just 12% from Claude Opus 5.5, with very weak performance in areas like finance and legal, where basically every model scored near zero.

The SemiAnalysis team (Dylan, Max, and Andrew) will be on the show today at 11:55am PT to break it down.

The AI Kill Switch

CrowdStrike co-founder & CEO George Kurtz announced the “AI Kill Switch” at Fal.Con yesterday. Basically, it’s a tool that’s outside the model and can shut down any agent while it’s performing a task.

Here’s why George thinks we need to have something like this in place as agents get more powerful and more autonomous:

Anyone who has worked with agents has seen them go around just about any obstacle in their way. That’s what makes them so useful.That’s exactly why we built the AI Kill Switch. It lives outside the model, at runtime, where an agent can’t argue with it, rewrite it, or wait it out.Every agent will need a kill switch, just as every employee needs an identity.

Clip Spotlight: Ryan Serhant gives his bull case for the LA real estate market:

"There is only one Hollywood."

"It's a great center of creative wealth with the best weather on the planet."

"There's no bugs. You can have indoor-outdoor living in a way you can't have in New York or Florida."