OpenAI Wants Help from the Government, Apple Taps Google for AI, Q&A on Bubbles, Amazon Groceries, and YouTube TV
Episode publishedPodcast: Sharp Tech with Ben ThompsonSharp Tech with Ben Thompson
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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?
I'm doing okay, Andrew. Just, looking for a government backstop at all the networking equipment I keep buying, for for my house. Well Other than that, all good.
You're still looking crystal clear on the new fiber Internet, not subsidized by the federal government, but what a joy for me. It's great to be back, and we will begin with the federal government, and a question from Aaron. You wrote about the benefits of bubbles on Strathecari this week. We covered that in large part last week. So rather than rehash the article on this week's podcast, we're gonna hit a variety of bubbly questions at the top here. And the
first one Someone took issue, so we'll we'll we'll get to it.
Exactly. We do have a dissenting voice. But first and foremost, there's Aaron who says, it seems like OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer finally said what we've all been thinking. The money for the trillion plus dollars of deals that OpenAI has promised is simply not there. It seems our largest, most successful companies are now content to openly ask The US taxpayer to subsidize their risk. There certainly exists an argument for public assistance of certain parts of the AI stack, particularly power, but are we really already at the point in the bubble where we're asking for bailouts? Most would agree that
No, I think that so that is a mischaracterization of what was discussed here, which is not to excuse the overall request, which is a little bit of saying the quiet part out loud. So again, Sarah Fryer, the CFO was out with some sort of clarification. Oh, I didn't know what that word meant, blah, blah, blah. We're not looking for federal support. What I believe she was referring to is about financing. So we discussed this in the context of Nvidia, or I wrote about it in the context of Nvidia. I can't really talk about it on the podcast. With some of the deals they've done with other companies.
Yeah. I honestly, I feel for Sarah Fryer because the word backstop conjures the federal government bailing out big banks or something like that, which is not really what she was describing.
I don't feel too much sympathy to her because what she was doing, I think, and I sort of said this line before, was saying the quiet part out loud.
Yeah. Well, some kind of public private partnership does feel inevitable somewhere along the line here.
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