Nora: Another seventy percent growth next year? On top of this year's seventy percent?
Dex: I'm Dex.
Nora: And I'm Nora.
Dex: It's Friday, September 11th, and we are right in the thick of it today—three massive stories from the heart of the AI boom.
Nora: And its fallout.
Dex: We're starting with Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, who just made a projection that is either genius... or completely insane.
Nora: And OpenAI is suffering from success so hard they're literally turning away money.
Dex: Plus, Anthropic just put its rivals on blast, publicly accusing them of stealing its model's secret sauce.
Dex: Alright, let's start there. Jensen Huang went on the record yesterday with a number that just... kinda breaks your brain.
Nora: Let me guess, more record profits?
Dex: Better. He's projecting another 70 percent growth for Nvidia next year. Seventy.
Nora: Wait—seventy percent on top of the absolutely stratospheric growth they've already had? That's... arithmetically insane.
Dex: That's one word for it. His logic is that the market for AI is expanding from just data centers to... well, everything. Cars, robots, medicine. A multi-trillion dollar market.
Nora: Okay, but the whispers around the valley are about Nvidia's venture arm investing in all these startups who then... immediately turn around and spend that cash on Nvidia chips. How much of this growth is just circular?
Dex: He was asked about that. Said the deals aren't connected, and that it's just what happens when you have a dominant platform. If you want to build cutting-edge AI, you have to buy their chips.
Nora: 'We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.' Shocker.
Dex: Look, is it a self-feeding ecosystem? Yes. But it's not a house of cards. The demand is real. It's a monopoly on shovels in a global gold rush.
Nora: A gold rush that could get very cold, very fast. So what's the takeaway for founders?
Dex: Don't expect your compute bill to go down anytime soon. The landlord is raising the rent because he knows you have nowhere else to go.
Nora: Speaking of landlords... let's talk about Nvidia's biggest tenant: OpenAI. They seem to have a new kind of problem.
Dex: A good problem to have, maybe? They've paused all new sign-ups for ChatGPT Pro subscriptions. Effective immediately.
Nora: Why? Did they finally run out of money?
Dex: The opposite. They've run out of computers. The company says demand for their new Astra model is so overwhelming, their systems just can't keep up. Pro users are the most demanding, so they're hitting pause to add more capacity.
Nora: So they're... turning away people who want to give them money? For a company with a legendary burn rate, that sounds less like a flex and more like a five-alarm fire in the server room.
Dex: But it's the ultimate 'suffering from success' story, Nora! It's a signal to the market that Astra is so good, it's breaking their infrastructure. That's a marketing beat you cannot buy.
Nora: I see it as a sign of the fundamental fragility of the whole AI stack. If the undisputed market leader can't keep the lights on for its $20-a-month subscribers, what does that say about their ability to serve massive enterprise clients?
Dex: They'll get it sorted. This is a temporary bottleneck. The real story is that the demand curve for cutting-edge AI is basically vertical.
Nora: So what does this mean for the average developer or startup?
Dex: It means your competitors who want to build on OpenAI just got locked out for a bit. And if you're already a customer, brace for rate limits. The house is full.
Dex: Okay, let's shift gears. Things are getting spicy in the foundation model space. Anthropic just released a report, and they are naming names.
Nora: Oh, this is the distillation story, right? The great AI heist.
Dex: Exactly. Anthropic is alleging that several China-based AI companies are running persistent distillation attacks, and they're specifically calling out Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek.
Nora: Okay, break down 'distillation' for us. This isn't about whiskey.
Dex: Right. It's basically using a smart AI to train a dumber one. You bombard a powerful model like Claude 3.5 Sonnet with millions of questions, record all the great answers, and then use that data to train your own cheap model. You're literally stealing its brain.
Nora: So it's corporate espionage for the AI age. And it's explicitly against every company's terms of service.
Dex: Totally. And look, this has been an open secret for a while. But for a major lab like Anthropic to publicly name a giant like Alibaba... that's a huge escalation.
Nora: They must have some serious proof. You don't make an accusation like that lightly.
Dex: The report points to weird, robotic patterns in how their API was being used—clear signs of this kind of attack. They say they've been tracking it for months, and it's getting worse.
Nora: So what's the end game here? A lawsuit? It feels like trying to sue the ocean.
Dex: The bigger takeaway for everyone building in AI is that your most valuable asset can be siphoned right out from under you. The moat you thought you had might just be a puddle. Model security just became priority number one.
Nora: Alright, let's wrap this up.
Dex: Nvidia is planning for another year of complete and total domination.
Nora: OpenAI is so popular it has to turn business away, which might be a good sign... or a very, very bad one.
Dex: And the AI cold war just got a little hotter, with Anthropic accusing its rivals of straight-up theft.
Nora: Before we go... Dex, you're not going to believe the latest AI hardware startup to get funded.
Dex: Oh no. What is it?
Nora: An AI-powered coffee machine that just raised ten million dollars to create the 'platonic ideal of a latte'. It's a Nespresso with an LLM attached.
Dex: Ten million! You could buy a lot of very nice, non-sentient coffee machines with that.
Dex: And that's our show for this week! Thanks for listening.
Nora: We'll be back on Monday. Until then, remember: distilling models is against the TOS.
This show is made with AI: the hosts’ voices are synthetic and the scripts are AI-assisted. Every story links to its original source.