Mon. 07/28 – Tea Has Been Spilt

Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Monday, July 28th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Samsung's foundry business gets a shot in the arm from Tesla. Zuck's hiring spree nabs a chat GPT creator. Anthropic is raising and leveling. traveling up in a big way. And no sooner did the hot new dating app Tea get hot than it got hacked. Tea was spilt, if you will. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Samsung overnight unveiled a $16.5 billion chip deal with Tesla that runs through the end of 2033. Elon Musk says the deal is to make Tesla's next generation AI6 chips in Taylor, Texas. Quoting Bloomberg, the strategic importance of this is hard to overstate, Musk wrote on X. He described the value of the deal announced by Samsung as, quote, just the bare minimum. Actual output is likely to be several times higher.

The Tesla chief executive officer and ex-owner will walk the chip fabrication line himself and has been authorized by Samsung to assist in optimizing production, he said. will form the foundation of Tesla's driving hardware suite for cars in coming years. Samsung produces the current AI4 system, according to Musk.

The contract win, the first after Samsung executive chairman J.Y. Lee was cleared of all outstanding legal charges, comes as Samsung has been steadily losing ground in chip manufacturing. The company, which makes its own memory chips and also fabricates semiconductors on behalf of clients, has had difficulty bringing in enough orders to fully utilize its foundry capacity. It has postponed completion of construction and operational ramp-up of its new Texas fab to 2026.

Their foundry business has been loss-making and struggling with underutilization, so this will help a lot. said Wei Cern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privé in Singapore. Tesla's business may also help them to attract other customers. That's in contrast to leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which still cannot meet all demand. TSMC held a dominant share of 67.6% of the global foundry market.

in the first quarter of this year, according to Taipei-based TrendForce. Samsung and TSMC are both on pace to deliver the next generation of semiconductor advancement, moving to 2nm fabrication, and the new deal... is seen as a signal of confidence for the company's upcoming fabrication technology.

While the contract may represent a small share of foundry revenue annually, it holds greater value as a catalyst for technological refinement and innovation over the long run, according to Ryu Young-ho, an analyst at... NH Investment Securities Company. It also helps burnish Samsung's reputation as the strongest TSMC alternative at a time when Intel is struggling to win over investors skeptical about its long-term strategy and roadmap.

At Tesla, Musk has said the company's future will depend on delivering the long, elusive goal of true self-driving technology. Last week, after a disappointing earnings report, he said the automaker will face a few rough quarters until it can deliver autonomous vehicles at scale, which he predicted for the second half of 2026 or by the end of the year.

Yet there is still skepticism about that target. Musk's ex-posts following the Samsung deal imply that Tesla will adopt two different next-generation chips in short order that are crucial to its automated driving systems. He wrote that the carmaker will go from currently sourcing AI4 chips from Samsung to using AI5 chips from TSMC that have just been designed, to then using AI6 chips again from Samsung. The rapid-fire changes risk opening Tesla up to more blowback from car owners.

who were told back in 2016 that all the vehicles the company was making from then on had the hardware necessary to eventually drive autonomously. In early 2023, Musk said on an earnings call that Tesla was going to stop offering retrofits to customers whose cars were equipped. with older generation chips citing the cost and difficulty of offering upgrades, end quote.

Today in Schrodinger's trade war, sources are telling the FT that the U.S. is freezing tech export curbs on China to avoid disrupting trade talks and help President Trump secure a 2025 meeting. with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which runs export controls, has been told in recent months to avoid tough moves on China, according to eight people, including current and former U.S. officials.

US and Chinese officials will meet in Stockholm on Monday for a third round of trade talks following previous meetings in Geneva and London. While Trump wants to avoid actions that could hurt efforts to meet Xi, some officials have argued that the US is hamstrung on export controls because of of the risk that China retaliates by restricting the export to the US of critical rare earths and magnets, as it did in May for the first time.

Earlier this year, Trump was poised to restrict technology exports to China. In April, his team told NVIDIA it would block the export of its H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market after the Biden administration restricted more advanced chips. Trump reverse course following direct lobbying from NVIDIA Chief Executive Jensen Huang.

The H-20 has become the focus of a battle between security officials who say the chip will help the Chinese military and NVIDIA, which says blocking US technology exports forces Chinese groups to accelerate innovation. 20 security experts and former officials, including Matt Pottinger, who was Deputy National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration, will on Monday write to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to voice concern.

This move represents a strategic misstep that endangers the United States' economic and military edge in artificial intelligence, they write in the letter, which was seen by the Financial Times. The experts said the H20 was a, quote, potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities that was more powerful than the H100, an advanced NVIDIA chip blocked for export to China in one key respect.

They said it outperformed the H-100 in inference, the execution of AI functions as opposed to the training of AI models, and would help produce autonomous weapon systems. intelligence, surveillance platforms, and other military advancements, end quote.

Today in, has Mark Zuckerberg hired you yet? Over the weekend, Zuckerberg named Shengjia Zhao, the former OpenAI researcher who co-created ChatGPT, as chief scientist at Meta's new superintelligence lab. Meta's previous chief AI scientist, Jan LeCun, will reportedly continue to work at Meta as chief scientist of the AI research group FAIR. A source says he will report to Alexander Wang. But back to Zhao quoting TechCrunch.

Wang, who does not have a research background, was viewed as a somewhat controversial choice to lead Meta's AI lab. So the addition of Zhao, who is a reputable research leader known for developing frontier AI models, rounds out the leadership.

team. To further fill out the unit, Meta has hired several high-level researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, SafeSuperintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic, as well as pulling researchers from Meta's existing Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR, Lab and Generative AI Unit.

Zuckerberg notes in a post that Zhao has pioneered several breakthroughs, including a new scaling paradigm. The meta-CEO is likely referencing Zhao's work on OpenAI's reasoning model, O1, in which he is listed as a foundational contributor alongside OpenAI. co-founder Ilya Suskever. Meta currently doesn't offer a competitor to O1, so AI reasoning models are a key area of focus for MSL.

The information reported in June that Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs alongside three other influential OpenAI researchers. Meta has also recruited Trapet Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Zhao, as well as... three employees from OpenAI's Zurich office who worked on multimodality. By 2026, Zhao and MSL's researchers should have access to Meta's one gigawatt cloud computing cluster Prometheus located in Ohio.

Once online, Meta will be one of the first technology companies with an AI training cluster of Prometheus' size. One gigawatt is enough energy to power more than 750,000 homes. That should help Meta conduct the massive training runs required. to create frontier AI models. With the addition of Zhao, Meta now has two chief AI scientists, including Jan LeCun, the leader of Meta's FAIR lab. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research.

techniques that may be used five to ten years from now. How exactly Meta's three AI units will work together remains to be seen, end quote.

PayPal has debuted Pay With Crypto for merchants to accept Bitcoin, Ether, USDT, and more via Coinbase, OKEx, and other wallets rolling out in the coming weeks, quoting Bloomberg. When a consumer pays with crypto, the funds are automatically converted into fiat or PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin for deposit in the merchant's account. Actually, that might be PYUSD.

You have globally 650 million users that participate in the $3 trillion market for cryptocurrencies, said Frank Keller, general manager of large enterprise and merchant platform at PayPal in an interview with Bloomberg. We wanted to give small businesses access to this customer base that is growing.

For small businesses currently accepting payments from buyers abroad, the associated fees can exceed 10%, Keller said. It can also take several days for the transactions to settle, he added. Meanwhile, the pay with crypto transactions settle instantly and will initially costs 0.99% per transaction, according to PayPal.

Businesses that choose to convert their funds to PYUSD can earn about 4% on those balances. It's still nascent, but it's surprising how quickly it's picking up, Keller said, referring to consumer demand to pay with cryptocurrencies. When PayPal turns it on,

it creates trust. We want to show that we're long-term invested in the crypto space, Keller said. We want to play a bigger role, and for that to be successful, we need to really scale it to the next level. We want to really embed it into the core of our payment rails, end quote.

Well, this would be why, then. Sources are telling the FT that... Anthropic is in talks to raise $3 to $5 billion, including from Middle Eastern investors, in a round that could more than double its valuation to $150 billion or so. Quote, That would be a massive jump from Anthropik's current $61.5 billion price tag, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The startup had spoken to a number of large Middle Eastern investors and received interest from MGX, Abu Dhabi's vast AI investment fund, about joining the new round, according to two of the people. Anthropic has resisted raising money directly from... the Middle East, although another Abu Dhabi state fund linked to MGX purchased almost $500 million of Anthropic shares from bankrupt crypto exchange FTX last year.

In a note to staff this week, Chief Executive Dario Amadai warned that taking investment from the Middle East could enrich dictators, but he said, quote, unfortunately, I think no bad person should ever benefit from our success is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on. The note was first reported by Wired. Anthropic and MGX declined to comment.

The group is changing tack amid a fierce battle for funding with OpenAI and others that has seen startups look beyond Silicon Valley to sovereign wealth funds. Anthropic is backed by Google and Amazon. The FT previously reported that Amazon has discussed plans for further

their investment beyond its current $8 billion commitment. The investment would ensure that it remains one of Anthropik's largest shareholders. OpenAI was valued at $300 billion earlier this year and is in the process of raising tens of billions of dollars from investors led by SoftBank.

MGX also invested in OpenAI last year and has partnered with the company on its Stargate Data Center project. Anthropix Claude has emerged as a significant player in coding, an increasingly important use for the nascent technology. but the startup and its rivals are still jostling for a durable lead. OpenAI was expected to release its latest model, GPT-5, in the next month, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. OpenAI declined to comment, end quote.

Over the weekend, I learned about Tea, a women-only safety dating app. with 4 million users that lets users anonymously assign red or green flags to local men they find on the dating app. Quoting CNBC,

Upon opening tea, users are presented with local men whose photos have been uploaded along with their first names. For each of the men, other women on the app can report whether they deem him a red flag or a green flag and leave comments about him, such as those recounting negative date experiences or vouching for him as a friend.

App users can look up individual names in the search bar or create custom alerts for specific men. The app also offers functions that let users run background checks, search for criminal histories, and reverse search photos to check whether a man is catfishing. by using someone else's photo on his dating profile. Signing up for tea requires users to take selfies,

which the app says are deleted after review to prove they are women. All users who get accepted are promised anonymity outside of the usernames they choose. Screenshots are also blocked. It picked up viral traction in the last month after some people began talking about it online on Reddit and TikTok.

The app gained more than 900,000 new signups in the last few days, T said on social media. Getting off the waitlist can now take days and inconvenience many new users complained about in comments on the app's Instagram posts. I've seen so many people I know on the app, it's crazy, said a Cleveland-area user who joined the app last week after having seen multiple viral posts about it. Like, oh my god, I would never think all this stuff about them, end quote.

So no sooner did T rocket to the top of the App Store's free app list than 4chan users claimed they had reached T. Indeed, T was forced to reveal that hackers accessed a database from more than two years ago. leaking 72,000 images, including 13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs. Quoting NBC News again.

The hacker accessed a database from more than two years ago, the Tee spokesperson said, adding that, quote, this data was originally stored in compliance with law enforcement requirements related to cyberbullying prevention.

The Tee spokesperson said that the company has hired third-party cybersecurity experts and it's, quote, working around the clock to secure our systems. Protecting our users' privacy and data is our highest priority. Tee is taking every necessary step to ensure the security of our platform and...

further exposure, the spokesperson said. The app has angered some men and prompted a thread Thursday evening on the right-wing troll message board 4chan in which users call for a hack and leak campaign. The company became aware

of the incident which was first reported by 404 Media early Friday, the spokesperson said. A 4chan user posted a link Friday morning, allegedly allowing people to download the database of stolen images and trove of alleged victims' identification photos have been posted on 4chan and X.

NBC News has not verified the authenticity of the photos or their provenance. On Google Maps, a user has created a map that purports to show the locations of T users that were affected by the hack, though there are no names attached to the coordinates posted.

The T-app's creator, Sean Cook, said on its website that he was inspired to create the app after he watched his mother's terrifying experience with online dating, including being catfished and unknowingly dating men with criminal records. Some men online have expressed in online posts In a few online forums, men have floated the idea of creating their own

men-only version of the app as payback for women's use of tea. One such app called TeaBorn quickly ignited backlash after its creator called users out for posting revenge porn. The app is now removed from the app store. The app said in an Instagram

story that new signups have surpassed 2 million in the past few days. Many who have posted on the app's Instagram page said they remain on the app's waitlist. By Friday, several commenters had also started expressing concerns about their data privacy in the wake of the hacking news. end quote. By the way, the Blank Check podcast did come correct on Sunday.

The guest for the Miller's Crossing episode was Ari Aster, director of movies like Hereditary and Midsommar. So well done. By the way, to get that quote that I used for Friday, I found a website with like 50 Miller's Crossing quotes. Here's another one that could almost become the motto for this podcast. I was just speculating about a hypothesis. I know I don't know nothing. Talk to you tomorrow.

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