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Chapter 1: What does the IPO race of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI signify?
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I have to say, technology is not my friend this week.
What's going on?
Well, first of all, I now have a new piece of technology in my bedroom called a CPAP machine. You heard of these things? So listen, if you're out there, you think you want a boyfriend, like you do, but here's what's going to happen. He's going to notice during the night that it appears that you briefly stopped breathing, and that's going to terrify him.
And next thing you know, you're going to be at the doctor. Now I sleep with a mask on, and when I breathe, I sound like Darth Vader. So that's thing one that's happening to me. I accidentally bricked my laptop with a bottle of water in my bag. Yeah. And then today I'm trying to get to the office for the podcast and my debit card that is attached to my public transit card expired. No big deal.
For two days, I've been trying to navigate the city bureaucracy to just replace the credit card that is attached to my transit card. It won't work. So I have to order an Uber to the office and it says it's going to be six minutes. It was more like a casual 12 and I get in and it's one of these cars where the driver appears to have been smoking in it continuously since 1976.
So that is sort of my tech stack over the past seven days. That sounds horrible. I'm frustrated, Kevin.
That sounds horrible. I'm so sorry for your loss. I need you to carry the show.
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Chapter 2: What concerns do mathematicians have about AI's role in their field?
Yeah. OpenAI, we don't know anything about their upcoming IPO except that they have said that they plan to do it. They may file as soon as this week their paperwork with the SEC to start that process. People also expect this to be a big, gigantic IPO. And so all of this taken together, I think there are a few threads to pull on here, one of which is, what is this going to do to San Francisco?
Right. Here we have to call it two and a half companies because SpaceX has some headquarters and offices in other Texas and Southern California and other places. So two and a half companies going public in the same year based in San Francisco, minting, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of new millionaires, Deca millionaires and sent to millionaires.
And what that will do to the city's tech scene, to the local real estate market, et cetera, et cetera. What are your thoughts on that?
I mean, my fear, Kevin, is that we are about to see a massive increase in inequality in a town that already had really significant inequality, right? And I just worry that it's going to sort of feel even worse.
And where I'm already starting to notice it is when I talk to my friends who have, like, really good jobs, paying, like, maybe even mid-six figures, they're looking at what they're reading about the folks who got in early at an OpenAI or an Anthropic, And man, the comparison is not feeling good. And they're starting to wonder, what does this mean for me?
Am I going to be able to lead the life that I wanted? And it's just had me thinking a lot about how when I got to San Francisco in 2010, there was a sense of abundance here.
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Chapter 3: How is the Leiden Declaration impacting the conversation on AI in mathematics?
There was a sense of anyone can do a startup and anyone can sort of have the life that they want. And it was true for many, many tens of thousands of people. And I feel like we're almost swinging back to this sort of scarcity mentality here, which is like, well, if you didn't make it in at one of these two companies, you know, your future is in doubt.
So I don't know how true that is, but I can tell you that that is the anxiety that I'm hearing.
Totally. And it's obviously there's some, you know, It's hard to feel much sympathy for these people who are very well-paid engineers and tech workers who are looking at their slightly richer peers and thinking, I got to get some of that.
But I think this is a real like status anxiety moment in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where even the people who sort of thought they had sort of made it in the world of tech are now looking at these people who have joined these like, you know, insanely fast-growing companies that are wanting to get in on that somehow, but also thinking it might be too late.
People who I don't think were feeling precarious a year or two ago are now, and I think that's just a really interesting social marker.
Yeah, and like, you know, just to say again, like, I think what you want in a society is for opportunity to be spread broadly and for everyone to feel like they have a chance to lead the life that they want.
And so when you move into a world where there is what essentially amounts to a handful of lottery winners, and those are the only people that truly get to live the lives that they want, like, that just causes massive, you know, social instability and all sorts of other problems. So yeah, I have like a knot in the pit of my stomach about this.
I do too. And one thing that is making it slightly better is that I did see this coming.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of AI advancements for traditional mathematics?
And I do get to crow about my correct prediction I made on our prediction episode back at the end of last year, which was that 2026, I predicted was the last year to buy a house in San Francisco. which now appears to be true. The real estate market is going nuts. Houses are going for many multiples of their asking price. There was a story this week.
Did you see this one about the San Francisco homes that are on sale asking for anthropic or open AI stock instead of cash?
I mean, look, I think those people are smart. Like, there's a very real chance that that stock will appreciate in value even faster than your house. So I say shoot or shoot.
Yes. So there are two other things about these IPOs that I want to discuss with you. One of them is the effect it's going to have on philanthropy.
Because one of the strange characteristics of these particular companies is that many of their employees, and I would say this especially applies to Anthropic, but there's also a piece of this at OpenAI, are committed to effective altruism and other similar philanthropic movements that basically teach you that if you want to make a maximum impact on the world, you should make a bunch of money and then give it away.
And so nonprofits, philanthropies, donor advisory networks in and around San Francisco are now starting to ask, like, what if we just have this insurgence of new philanthropic capital coming from these IPOs? Our mutual friend Nan Rantzhoff wrote a great post about this the other day calling it the third wave of philanthropy, basically, where you have...
tens of billions or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars sort of flooding into these charitable movements and causes um how does that affect like what gets funded are there going to be new institutions that need to be built to sort of absorb all of this philanthropic capital i think this is something that people outside san francisco don't quite understand is like how much money is going to be flowing into these philanthropies over the next couple of years
Yeah, I also really love Nan's post and had a chance to talk with her about it in person recently. And it was just so fascinating to hear about the sheer volume of philanthropic capital that we're expecting to emerge as a result of these IPOs and how little infrastructure there is to absorb it.
Something that I think some people might not know about Anthropic is that from their start, they have told people as they come on board, if you pledge a percentage of your equity to philanthropy, we will actually match it. And so this is just a program that is dramatically amplifying the amount of philanthropic capital that is about to become available.
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Chapter 5: What are the potential consequences of AI on the job market for mathematicians?
Yeah. How do you think this will impact the average person who's not an investor or a shareholder in these companies who may just want this stuff to be developed well and safely?
Um, hmm. I mean, I think on balance, you're right that like, because these are corporations, we do have to worry that like capitalist pressures will lead them to cutting corners and doing things that are unsafe. So that is, I think, the right concern to have and to keep your eye on it.
On the other hand, I could also see an argument that when your company goes public, you are introducing more democratic oversight and governance into it, right? These folks will now have to report their earnings. They will have to give us information about their financials. They will have to make certain disclosures as their products come out and as their company changes.
And shareholders will be able to maybe vote on certain things. So I think these are all good things because right now we have almost no levers whatsoever that people can pull other than trying to prevent a data center from being built in their backyard. So maybe these give folks some new ones.
Yeah, and I think there's been a lot of hand-wringing over these features And these exchanges that have changed the rules like the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P have already or are considering loosening their rules around these so-called seasoning periods. Basically, it used to be if you were a brand new public company that had just IPO'd.
You could not be included on these major stock indexes because they sort of wanted to see whether you were stable enough to become part of the basket of blue chips that people invest in when they buy an index fund.
Now, partially because of these looming IPOs, those rules have been relaxed so that these companies are not going to have to wait three months or six months or a year anymore to be included on these exchanges. Some people have said, well, that sounds bad. And we're exposing retail investors to these like volatile and risky stocks. I'm not that worried about it.
I think like investors want exposure to these companies. I know several people in San Francisco who have been sort of like devising these crazy like harebrained schemes to get pre-IPO stock in one of these companies. And I think that letting the public benefit from the upside of the AI boom, I think is going to do more, Help than harm.
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Chapter 6: How do AI models compare to human mathematicians in problem-solving?
But I could be wrong if all this goes up in a conflagration and people lose their shirts.
I mean, yes, absolutely. You know, Kevin and I are not financial advisors. I am actually a certified financial advisor. I am not a financial advisor, but I do think that if, you know, you're a retail investor and you believe in this stuff, you should have the ability to like make that bet because we live in a country where you can bet on Bitcoin in an exchange traded fund.
You can go on a prediction market as a member of the military and bet on an operation that you're a part of. So in a world where those are our restrictions on, you know, sort of financial gambling, if you want to buy a share of OpenAI, I say Godspeed.
Yeah, I think that part of the icky feeling that people are having about the AI industry now is that so much wealth is being concentrated in so few private companies and so few hands.
And so in an optimistic scenario where these IPOs go off without a hitch and these companies keep growing at hyperscale, I think maybe having the benefits shared a little more broadly through things like index funds could be good for people's feelings like, oh, there's something for me in this.
I'm going to go further and saying it's not just good. I'm going to say it is necessary. We cannot have a very small handful of companies that are growing this quickly, that are concentrating wealth and power that much into so few hands. It has to be shared more broadly than that. And while an IPO is a very small step in that direction, I do think it is a necessary one.
Okay, well, that is enough about the IPOs for this week. We will continue to cover these IPOs and everything that comes out of them, including possible space data centers. I don't know. I'm excited to learn more about those. I will say, when it comes to Starlink, I was not a believer. And then I went on my first Starlink equipped airplane last week.
And Casey, this is going to be the biggest company in the world. It's very good. When people get a taste of 200 plus megabits in the air on a plane... You're never going back. Yeah, you can actually watch YouTube if you have Starlink on your plane. You can watch so many YouTube videos.
Yeah, and the deal that they struck, I'm told, is they struck a deal where, at least with United, they're like, we'll put Starlink on your plane and we will charge United for that, but you can't charge your passengers. So everyone's experience of Starlink is it is a free miracle that's being delivered to me in my airplane seat, which is not a bad marketing strategy.
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Chapter 7: What are the main takeaways from the discussion on AI's impact on math?
When we come back, author Kevin Hart tells us what the heck is going on with AI and math.
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Chapter 8: What are the latest headlines in tech related to AI and prediction markets?
I mean, so Paul Erdos, um, is a really colorful mathematician. He was essentially the Bob Dylan of math in that he like spent his life on the road. He died, I think at age 83, actually at a math conference. He slept on mathematicians' couches his whole life. And as he went around, he compiled lists of problems that he thought were interesting,
Either he would find them in the wild or he invented many of them. And he created this Erdos list. He endowed them with these like tiny little rewards, like $20 for solving this problem, $500 for solving this problem. And that fund still exists after his death. And these things are paid out. I actually don't know if the LLMs have received the money or who gets the money when they do it.
But anyway.
Don't give them the money. They don't need the money.
Yeah.
When a human solves them, they get the money. So Paul Erdős collected over 1,000 problems, 1,200 problems that he thought were interesting, and he just kind of left them out there. The AI labs and these startups have looked for kind of benchmarks, kind of mountains they can climb, things they can do to prove that their models work well. The IMO was one of the most prominent ones.
They got the gold medal there. They needed to move on. They moved on to the Putnam exam, which is the premier college math competition, and started to do quite well there. And then they just started looking for kind of like new targets. And these Erdos problems are sitting out there, 1,200 or so problems.
And so they essentially set their models to work on all of them, like see what you can do on them. And it would cook up answers to them. And through the beginning part of this year, we would see like on Twitter, one announcement after another, solved Erdos problem 737, solved Erdos problem 63. And
And I think mathematicians viewed those very kind of like hypey announcements differently than the energy behind the announcements themselves.
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