Apple vs. Google: Who Ya Got?!

Top News

• Apple sucker punches Google: Testifying during a government lawsuit against Alphabet, Apple said that it expects to add AI search engines to Safari in time, adding that they won’t be the default option — at least not to start. The mere idea that Apple might move on from its lucrative deal with Google sent shares of the search giant’s parent company down 7.5% today. For a company valued in the trillions, that’s a painful haircut. The story is bullish for TWiST500 companies like OpenAI and Perplexity, however; those companies are hungry to absorb some of the advertising spend that Mountain View has sponged up for decades now.

• Tech investing for all more? A new fund from Coatue that intends to invest in both private and public tech companies is accepting checks as small as $50,000, potentially expanding the pool of investors putting capital into high-growth startups. The gang discussed the nuances of the legal technicalities on the show, but safe to say with both the Bezos and Dell families backing the fund, it will have interest. Anyone know Coatue’s current DPI for its last tech fund?

• Everyone in college is cheating: A viral piece from NYMag lays bare a somewhat bleak landscape in higher education, one in which students are spending their free time on TikTok, and using ChatGPT and similar tools to handle their coursework for them. Many are calling for a return of in-class essays as a fix, but no matter what solutions eventually come forward it’s safe to say that education — higher and lower — will be fundamentally changed by AI tools that can do much of what students have traditionally been asked to spit up.

TWiST500

Today, TWiST500 company Mistral is in our sights. While we burn miles of column inches on the latest from OpenAI and Anthropic on these pages, there are other foundation model companies out there. Some are even TWiST500 companies, including France’s own AI champion Mistral.

The latest from the Le Chat developer is a new model, Mistral Medium 3. It’s not aiming to be the new state-of-the-art LLM, but instead wants to offer high-end coding performance at a low price point. (OpenAI’s o3 and o4 models are on the other end of the price spectrum, for reference.)

TechCrunch writes that hosted Medium 3 queries will cost “$0.40 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens,” which seems mighty cheap. Still costly enough to meter of course, but very affordable for a great many use cases.

Not only is it welcome to see Mistral kick up dust — we want as many horses in the AI model race as possible, keeping one another sharp with steel against steel — we also appreciate seeing a different take on the AI race.

Finally, file the Mistral news under the larger topic of EU technology independence. Recent geopolitical and trade shifts are underway, leaving old ties frayed and countries and blocs alike scrambling for internal sufficiency. That means chips. It means drugs. And, yes, it means data centers and AI models, too. Onward Mistral, keep up the good fight. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2121: On a Monday TWiST, Jason, Lon and Alex welcome Magical Toys chief Fateen Anam Raffid to talk about building next-generation AI toys and his company’s mega-growth ahead of the holiday season. PLUS the latest on Cursor’s explosive growth and massive $9B valuation, Uber’s latest autonomous vehicle partnerships, and Jason shares some anecdotes from F1 in Miami.

E2120: It’s a brand new This Week in Startups, featuring Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk’s thoughts on building in public, rapid product iteration, and the perils of innovating TOO FAST. Plus Jason, Lon, and Alex break down all the week’s biggest news, including a judge striking down Apple’s 27% link-out fee, and the controversy striking Reddit’s r/ChangeMyView community.

E2119: Jason, Alex, and Lon are joined for today’s full episode by crypto insider and “Hash Rate” host (and long-time friend of the pod) Mark Jeffrey. He’s here to walk us through Bittensor and TAO, which some are calling the third “great coin” after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Plus the latest from Meta’s first-ever LlamaCon for developers, Alexis Ohanian’s advice for cold email marketing, AND a chat with LayerNext CEO Buddhika Madduma about the secret to onboarding new customers.

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