Topics: Technology
**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
This is the biggest story of the year.
**Lon Harris** (0:01)
Nvidia taking over all of open source. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
**Jason Calacanis** (0:07)
US open source equals Nvidia, Chinese open source equals Kimi. Now we have our US champion. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting $50 billion, if you want to know how OpenAI is hitting whatever it is, $30, $40 billion, customers like Uber. Unmetered is the word we're going to be talking about in 2027 That means that you could see Nvidia add a third of the market cap of the top two frontier models. One third of their revenue moving over to Nvidia. If it works, this is the biggest news ever.
**SPEAKER_3** (0:37)
This Week in Startups is brought to you by PayPal. Pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal.launch.co. Every, for all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io, DigitalOcean. Want to see what building on a true AI native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.
**Jason Calacanis** (1:07)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to TWiST. It's Friday, August 28th. Summer's over. Lots on the docket. Sam Waltman talking about cyber threats again, scaring the big Jesus out of everybody saying, hey, we're going to need to have a coordinated effort here. Nvidia bought Hugging Face and we got some great guests. We want to start with a story or go right to a guest? What's the ladies' choice Lon? What do you want to do here?
**Lon Harris** (1:29)
Misgendering me again. How dare you? No, I think we should start with this. I think we've got a top story.
**Jason Calacanis** (1:33)
It was the beard that made me misgender you.
**Lon Harris** (1:36)
That's right. Bearded lady. It's my old circus career. We might be in AI's Oppenheimer moment, Jason. OpenAI, Anthropic, some of the other companies have issued a warning about coming cyber threats. Yesterday, over 100 companies signed an open letter warning that we only have months to prepare for AI-enabled cyber attacks. It includes OpenAI, it includes Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, all the usual suspects. They're warning hospitals, water systems, critical infrastructure, all under threat. They want security standards raised, including shared threat Intel, and they want this defense funded at every level. All that said, the letter doesn't have any actual commitments. There's no deadlines. There's no mandated funding. It's just sort of floating the suggestion. So, you know, I mean, in your perspective, what do you think the best way for us to actually, I think everybody would agree we should do this. What do you think the best way to organize this effort might be?
**Jason Calacanis** (2:32)
Okay, we did an open letter. This is an open letter written by people like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, et cetera. They passed around and said, hey, we're entering dangerous territory and we need a coordinated effort.
**Lon Harris** (2:52)
Essentially, yeah, 100 companies signed on to this open letter. The hyperscalers obviously sort of leading the pack.
**Jason Calacanis** (2:57)
Why now is always the question. Why now?
And you have to deconstruct people's behavior. So let's pause for a second and say, why would the top 100 folks take this time now to write a coordinated letter and the letter is addressed to who? Who is the letter addressed to? And let's pull the letter up here on the screen. These are important things when an open letter happens.
**Lon Harris** (3:20)
It's called a call for collective action on cyber defense. It's not directed at any one person, but I think it's the public, it's PR on one level, and it's aimed at sort of politicians.
**Jason Calacanis** (3:32)
Well, it exists on the OpenAI website as we're showing it. It says an open letter for a global surge in cyber defense. So it's very important to first principles, anytime there's an open letter or somebody makes a statement to slow down and say, why now? First question, why is this happening now? And then, who's driving this? So who's driving this is pretty obvious. There's a bunch of signatories on the left. We assume that they're driving it.
It was released on all of their websites or it was released on OpenAI websites. OpenAI is the leader of this pack. Is it like every single person releases at the same time?
Or do we not know?
**Lon Harris** (4:12)
I don't know. I'm looking it up. I mean, when you Google this title, it does come up on several different...
100 more minutes of transcript below
Thousands of transcripts fetched by people building searchable podcast archives
Try it now — copy, paste, done:
curl -H "x-api-key: pt_demo" \
https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000651996090
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any agent that makes HTTP calls.
From $0.10 per transcript. No subscription. Credits never expire. Prices exclude VAT, added at checkout for EU customers. Not what you expected? Email us within 14 days with 20 or fewer credits used and we refund the pack in full.
Using your own key:
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
https://spoken.md/transcripts/YOUR_EPISODE_ID