OpenAI and SpaceX are Racing to IPO First

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
We know that OpenAI is targeting a roughly September IPO, but according to some reports from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they could be filing as soon as next week for this IPO. In addition, Google AI mode has just hit one billion monthly users. Their usage has doubled every quarter, which is insane. And Stability AI has just released Stable Audio 3.0. It has six minute long song generation as a new capability, which is really impressive. I love all of the competition in the music space as someone that has been putting music on Spotify for almost 10 years. Iris Go has just raised $2.8 million in a seed round to build a proactive AI desktop automation agent. That sounds like a lot of words, but it's actually a very useful tool. As we're getting more and more of these kind of like Claude Cowork and other computer use things, I want to break down exactly what Iris Go is doing. In addition, more Google News, and to be fair, they just did Google IO yesterday, so we have a ton of Google News that came out. But they are embedding AI generated product descriptions inside of search ads. They're doing a ton of other stuff, so we'll have kind of a Google News roundup as well at the end. I want to kick this episode off with a bit of the job markets. We have some reports that Intuit is cutting their global workforce by 17%.
A lot of this is due to what they're calling AI restructuring. 17% of their global workforce is about 3,000 people, and that's a bunch of office closures in Reno, Nevada and Woodland Hills, California. Their CEO, who is Susan Gudarzi, told all of the staff that the strategic reset and streamlined structure is going to help the TurboTax parent deliver better products. What a lot of people are pointing out, and I have been saying for my last two weeks of podcast episodes because I seem to cover job closures every single day almost, or layoffs, what people are kind of pointing out here is that Intuit actually just had a stronger than expected third quarter earnings. They had 10% year over year growth, which lifted their forecast for the fiscal year. So financially, the company is actually doing really well.
The reason why they're doing all this apparently is to focus on simplifying their operations and focus on AI integration. Now, to be fair, I've actually used a bunch of tools. I actually run tools directly on to my, like Claude Cowork. I will tell it to do things inside of my QuickBooks account. And even inside of TurboTax, I had Claude Cowork do a ton of work helping me with TurboTax. I actually spoke with my accountant recently and told him not to bother doing all of the classification of all of our expenses for a few of my businesses because I'll just run Claude Cowork on that. It does a great job of going and deciding what category different expenses go into. If it doesn't know what a company does, it can go and research the company and then it will be able to figure it out. It does it really quickly and I, you know, don't have to pay a person to manually do that. Now, the reason I bring that up is because I do think that there's so much happening with a company like Intuit where there are shifts going on, right? Like we're able to do a lot of stuff with AI that used to have to be manual. I think a lot of companies are going through a moment right now where they are doing layoffs, they are reprioritizing, they are perhaps making their companies more streamlined. I would predict in two or three years we're going to see moments where most of these companies are much larger than they are today. It's not like the workforce keeps getting laid off or cut down. I think we're going to see a lot of growth even in headcount, but I do think we're just at this weird moment where people have to make shifts to make a lot of these investments. Another big one that's in the news right now is that Mark Zuckerberg has actually come out and he kind of put out a memo and talked to employees over at Meta about what he said about our consequential AI moves that they're making right now because they're also doing a bunch of layoffs. Meta is laying off 8,000 people. It's about 10% of their workforce. I've already covered this on the podcast, but this new memo came out.
I think most of the staff in Asian Europe got this a little bit earlier, but there's going to be about 8,000 employees that are cut or laid off. What I do appreciate from Meta is that there's an additional 7,000 employees that are going to be reallocated to AI related roles. This is what I would love to see from most startups that are saying, hey, look, we're doing layoffs to invest in AI or focus on AI. We've even seen companies like General Motors that is laying off 800 people in IT or 600 people in IT, but simultaneously they have open job roles for IT people that are quote unquote AI native or something like that, right? So it's like they're hiring people that are AI skilled, where at the end of the day, I love what Meta is doing here and they're just reallocating workers, like 7,000 workers to AI related roles. Like there's no such thing as a person that, I mean, there is such thing as a person that, you know, their job is all about AI. But I think anyone can learn how to use AI in their role and can learn how to use AI to accentuate their role. So I like this direction a lot more, where we're just moving, if you really are having kind of a realignment of priorities and what you think is important to AI related roles, move some of your workers over there, because I think that anyone can learn it. And this is, you know, a phenomenal time to do that. You also save yourself a lot of, you know, a company would save itself a lot of money, if it's not just laying off workers to save, you know, a literal dollar amount, which I feel like is basically what a lot of these companies are doing. They just don't want to say it out loud.