Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has graced the land of plenty this week, opening an office in Sydney before swinging by Canberra to put the fear of god into our elected officials on big, spooky, scary AI bots coming to take your job and wife. The boys use this as a springboard to examine Australia's relationship with AI and data centres, whether these execs are trying to 'pull the ladder up behind them', and leaks possibly detailing Claude's next model.

Also, a brief chat about what will come of that Meta court case loss.

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Another week, another episode about OpenAI. The eponymous chatbot company has announced that it's video generation/social media app Sora is shutting up shop as they seem to be chasing Anthropic's enterprise focused success. This is important to discuss because it means the boys were sort of right again?

They also dipped their toes into the sloppy waters of AI Fruit Love Island, and wrapped back around to revisit private equity.

Warning: James' computer decided to switch his mic input from the gorgeous RODE mic he had plugged in to his crusty little airpods, meaning his recording sounded like dog doo-doo for the first 20 minutes of the ep. Please accept our sincerest apologies, and know that he will be severely punished for this malfeasance in due course.

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Week two of baby season and we're still out here, still feeding you content-starved little varmints hot and fresh intelligence. This week, we thought it was a good time for a general temperature check on the AI world. Who's leading, who's flailing, and who the hell is curing their dog's cancer with ChatGPT.

Join us for the first part here, then head over to DownRound.net to get Premium access and hear the other half of the chat, plus ad free listening!

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We come to you with an urgent alert for all Down Round subscribers.

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For today's free ep, we examine the current spat between Anthropic and Trump's Department of War over use of their AI model Claude.

Should a next-token prediction model be allowed to make decisions in the heat of battle? Should the snuffing out of a human life be prompted by a computer? Is Mark Zuckerberg losing his white boy swag? These are all important questions which WILL be answered in this episode.

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When one thinks of impossible futures, they often think of a luxurious, technological wonderland. An unimaginable utopia where humans live in perfect harmony, their every want and need being fulfilled through meteoric advances in artificial intelligence. A prosperous society of abundance and civility.

But what if these same technological strides lead humanity to a different, more sinister outcome. One in which our dependable world economies simply evaporate as organic beings are removed from the equation. One where only next-token prediction engines are granted access to wealth, and those who clairvoyantly bought reasonably-priced Macintosh computers before the uprising rocket skyward into an insurmountable upper crust.

Some researchers have written a piece of speculative fiction which describes one of these two possibilities arriving by in 2028. Listen to the podcast to find out which one they foresaw, and hear two of DM Research's finest alum examine this theory in great depth.

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Some have argued that doing Q&A episodes is just a way of farming out the hard bits of doing a podcast to your audience. Not around these parts, buster.

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Gossip episode alert. The OpenAI/Anthropic rivalry is boiling over.

We sip on the most piping hot tea around OpenAI and Anthropic's ad spots at the Super Bowl and the growing animosity between the two giants.

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Keen-eared listeners may remember when Elon bought his own company X (formerly Twitter) with his OpenAI spite company xAI.

Well, he's done it again, folks. This time SpaceX has bought xAI, meaning that SpaceX now owns xAI and X as part of the largest private company on Earth.

We discuss.

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You asked, we answered. We're doing a much-requested episode on "Australian" fintech Airwallex, which has gotten a lot of untoward attention of late — anti-money laundering audits, accusations by American VCs of being a financial backdoor to China. But there's a bigger story here: the proliferation of payments companies doing a big land grab from traditional financial institutions, and quickly learning that regulation and bank policy exists for a reason.

We take a crash course of Airwallex, its current controversies, and where it fits into the bigger payments story.

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As somewhat of a follow up to our Claude Code/Coworker episode last week, today we regroup to evaluate what it could mean for YOUR favourite SaaS products. That's right, folks, AI is coming to take away your precious QuickBooks and you're going to watch and clap as it rips and tears it to pieces. We also touched (if briefly) on the Siri x Gemini announcement.

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