We don't want to Erebor you...

Author

Lon Harris
October 15, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Top News

  • Erebor is approved: The neo-bank aims to work with tech startups and companies in emerging sectors like crypto and AI, which have sometimes struggled to secure financial partners. This week, the US government — via the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — gave conditional approval to Erebor; in a statement, Comptroller Jonathan Gould asserts that “permissible digital asset activities… have a place in the federal banking system if conducted in a safe and sound manner.” That’s good news for Team Erebor, which includes fellow Tolkien reference-lovers Palmer Luckey of “Anduril” and Joe Lonsdate (of “Palantir.” (The bank’s is, of course, a reference to Middle-earth’s gold-filled Dwarven “Kingdom Under the Mountain.”)

  • ANOTHER Nvidia datacenter: The chip giant and world’s most valuable company announced plans for “Horizon,” a massive new datacenter, in partnership with AI cloud computing experts CoreWeave and frontier model makers Poolside. The complex will sit atop 500 acres of land in West Texas, utilizing the natural gas that’s already hiding underneath the ground there for power. That site is around 2/3rds the size of New York’s Central Park, and the Nvidia-CoreWeave-Poolside collective plan to channel 2 gigawatts of computing power through the facility. For trivia fans, that’s roughly the same amount of power generated by Nevada’s Hoover Dam.

  • X wants to earn your trust: According to a post by head of product Nikita Bier, the xAI-owned social network will start adding additional info to everyone’s user profiles, including the date the account was created, its location, the number of times that user has changed their name, and even where in the world they initially downloaded the X app. The goal is apparently to inspire more trust among users, and help them more effectively spot bad actors. (For example, if a user claims to be from the US but their profile says they signed up in Malaysia… maybe approach those posts with added skepticism...) According to Bier, X will test the feature on employee accounts first before rolling it out to civilians.

TWiST 500

With so much Anthropic news on TechMeme, it’s kinda hard to write a TWiST 500 piece. But I, somehow, some way, keep coming up with columns for you to read like every single day.

The Claude makers released a new, tiny model this week — Claude Haiku 4.5 — which they claim offers similar performance to the much larger Sonnet 4 but at twice the speed, not to mention one-third of the cost. In benchmark tests, Haiku 4.5 doesn’t perform quite on the level of Anthropic’s frontier Sonnet 4.5 model, but its performance is apparently on par with Sonnet 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 in terms of tool use, computer use, and visual reasoning.

This suggests the model could be a boon to Anthropic fans trying to minimize their compute usage, particularly those still relying on the company’s less-expensive or even free tiers. (It’s also far more efficient to deploy multiple Haiku agents in parallel than its Sonnet brethern.) While we love consulting Producer Claude, with its increased speed, Haiku’s primarily going to be helpful for software developers working with Claude Code. Zencoder CEO Andrew Filev, in a quote provided to press by Anthropic, claims the more efficient lil model unlocks “an entirely new set of use cases.”

In more Anthropic news, Bloomberg reports that CEO Dario Amodei is on a Middle Eastern tour in search of new funding, and had early talks with Abu Dhabi-based investors MGX, though some sources suggest the meetings are centered on BOTH funding AND more general discussion of future partnerships. To that end, Amodei also met with officials from Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42, which has previously partnered with OpenAI on a datacenter in the UAE.

Finally, Jason’s “All-In” co-host David Sacks — who just happens to be President Trump’s in-house AI expert — was also focused on Anthropic this week in a viral X thread, but not cause he’s so pumped for Haiku 4.5. Sacks criticized the company’s very public stance toward AI safety, accusing them of spreading paranoia about the technology as part of a “sophisticated regulatory capture strategy.” Sacks argues that Anthropic hopes to stem the progress of rivals by fear-mongering over AI safety, and blames the company in large part for the wave of state legislators passing new regulations. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2192: Jason is joined by his favorite new guest, Eric Glyman of Ramp, who has out for the whole show. Together with co-host Alex, they discuss Ramp’s mission to help startups spend LESS money, and delve into the payment company’s treasure trove of insightful business data. PLUS some pressing questions from founders, Jason’s favorite startup accelerators, why unemployment has spiked among male college grads, and much more.

E2191: No Alex today, so Jason and Lon are checking out the Figure 03 demo, and debating whether or not you’ll ever have a full-sized humanoid robot taking care of your day-to-day chores. PLUS President Trump’s latest trade war triggers panic in the markets, a look at ChatGPT’s new integrations, and why Mark Cuban and Jake Paul are in every other Sora app video.

E2190: Zach Dell joins Jason and Alex LIVE from the floor of Nasdaq, to talk about Base Power’s new $1 billion investment, and the challenges of making their batteries deep in the heart of Texas. Plus, it turns out Tesla is not releasing an upside-down fan car… We’re checking out what they actually announced. Also, is Tim Cook LEAVING Apple? And who might replace him? We consider the possibilities.

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