Elon Musk Podcast

News broke earlier this week that artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Anthropic has reportedly committed to spend roughly $200 billion with Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Cloud over five years -- a staggering figure that, if accurate, could meaningfully shift the balance in AI infrastructure spending. The Information first reported the number on Tuesday. Shares of the search giant climbed about 2% in extended trading following the report.

While Breslow reports his company is better off without HR, I’d argue the art and science of managing humans is more important than ever—and it’s also evolving fast. I recently spoke to Himanshu Palsule, the CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a learning and talent software company. With 140 million users and 7,000 enterprise customers who are taking a hard look at their own HR spend, Palsule has a vested interest in the conversation. But I’m impressed by the agentic platform it launched yesterday that leverages AI to help assess, train, and mobilize employees. “People will enable agents to take over the enterprise,” he told me at a customer event in New York. “If you lose your people, those agents aren’t doing anything in your company—they’re just creating chaos.” Other thoughts:

SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.
Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

During a Y Combinator event on Tuesday night, Sam Altman had what YC partner Tyler Bosmeny called a “mic drop moment.” Altman offered $2 million worth of OpenAI tokens to every startup in the current class in exchange for equity in the startup.
In other words, he promised that OpenAI would invest in the whole class, not with cash but with an allotment of AI tokens that startups can use to build their products.

An OpenAI co-founder has joined the competition. Andrej Karpathy, who helped start the high-profile artificial intelligence outfit in 2015, has now joined Anthropic, he announced Tuesday. Karpathy was instrumental in the development of Tesla's Autopilot system, working for the automaker for about five years in between two separate stints at OpenAI. In his new role at rival Anthropic, Karpathy will "get back to R&D," he wrote in a social media post, adding, "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative."