Not much, what's up with TPU?

Top News

• Google debuts two new AI chips: At its Google Cloud Next event, the company unveiled two new incarnations of its home-grown high-end AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (or TPUs). The TPU 8t is optimized for training (hence the T), while the TPU 8i is intended for running… wait for it… inference. Both are alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs, which have largely dominated the industry to date but are fast becoming just one of a number of viable options on the market. (Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel this week that he’s not sweating the competition, though.) For their part, Nvidia’s also working on chips designed specifically for faster inference, as part of their “whirlwind” collaboration with Groq (with a Q, not a K).

• Anthropic’s Mythos model leaked: Anthropic’s latest and greatest model has been shared with only a handful of government agencies and collaborators, as the company feared that it could enable “dangerous cyberattacks.” This was the concept behind Project Glasswing, as you’ll recall… Giving known players a chance to experiment with Mythos, to design potential defenses before it’s released into the wild. But that may all have been for naught, as Bloomberg reports that “a handful of users” collaborating in Discord have been testing Mythos essentially since it was first announced. The group claims they’re not specifically using Mythos for “cybersecurity purposes,” and that they mean us no specific harm. Notably, they claim to have gained access to Mythos not through some innovative, cutting-edge, AI-powered protocol, but the same basic investigative strategies employed by internet hackers for decades. Coming less than a month after reports that Anthropic accidentally leaked the Claude Code source code, one has to wonder if the company has plans to upgrade their OpSec procedures any time soon, in addition to their powerful AI models.

• Core Automation launches: The fresh new startup, billed as “the world’s most automated AI lab,” was created by former OpenAI VP Jerry Tworek. The company announced itself on X this week and declared an objective: to create “systems that optimize and automate work, starting with research itself.” In addition to OAI, the core team also includes former Anthropic and Google DeepMind researchers. On X, Anthropic vet Rohan Anil said he’d been “nerdsniped” by Tworek to join the new project. Former DeepMind scientist Anmol Gulati wrote that “scaling models, data, and static deployment won’t get us all the way,” and that the industry needs to explore “new learning algorithms” and “systems that automate the process of building itself.”

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SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company that also owns the satellite internet project Starlink and Grok (with a K) maker xAI, may soon have to fit even more brands within its increasingly large tent. The company announced a new collaboration with AI coding breakouts Cursor; together, they’re planning to develop “the world’s most useful” AI models.

But this is no mere team-up. SpaceX posted that they have reached an agreement to either pay $10 billion to Cursor in exchange for the model work OR potentially spend $60 billion by the end of the year to purchase the company outright. It’s not immediately clear if SpaceX plans to pick up Cursor before or after its IPO, which could theoretically happen as early as June.

What’s more readily apparent is why Musk is so excited about a shot at getting his hands on Cursor. While Grok remains popular as a tweet-explainer and image/video generator, the company’s coding tools rank well below leaderboard-toppers like OpenAI’s Codex and Claude Code. Musk has essentially conceded this himself, posting in March to xAI’s in-house social network, X, that the company “was not built right first time around” and “is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

As SpaceX builds out its AI infrastructure beyond the Earth — including orbital data centers, lunar bases, and so on — they will apparently work in tandem to develop the cutting-edge models to power all the robots, servers, vehicles, and space stations that this grand scale vision will entail. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2278: Jason and Lon greet Eragon CEO Josh Sirota, who argues that companies are giving away too much proprietary data to model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Instead, his company trains custom models for companies based on all of their documents, which they own and control. Plus we’ve got IONA Drones founder Etienne Louvet discussing why his company is licensing their aviation delivery tech to logistics operators rather than going direct to customers (like rival Zipline).

E2277: Jason Ballard of ICON joins the show to talk about how 3D printing homes can not just help us solve the housing crisis, and help humanity colonize the cosmos, but could also lead the way to a more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing future. Plus Jason and Lon chat with Seby Rubino of Resi Labs about designing the “oracle,” which can guess the price of any home with 98% accuracy. Is this a potential Zillow Killer?

E2276: Jason and Lon kick off the show with Albert and Boris for Nanogram, an app that’s essentially TikTok for mobile games. People create casual mini-games with AI and then share them on an endlessly scrolling feed. It’s pretty addictive! Then, Alex chats with 1X Technologies CEO Bernt Børnich about building NEO, a safety-first 66-lb humanoid robot designed specifically for the home. Find out why Bernt says households are an even trickier workspace for robots than a factory floor or warehouse.

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