GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, Coatue Bets Big on Blue Origin, Cheaper Vision Pro Delayed | Vincent Weisser, Ben Thompson, Rodrigo Liang, Alana Palmedo, Byron Boots, Will Mayer, Tucker Brown · podgraph
GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, Coatue Bets Big on Blue Origin, Cheaper Vision Pro Delayed | Vincent Weisser, Ben Thompson, Rodrigo Liang, Alana Palmedo, Byron Boots, Will Mayer, Tucker Brown
Blue Origin is raising roughly $10bn in its first outside capital at an expected valuation of about $130bn, with Jeff Bezos investing $2bn directly.
Getty Images terminated its $3.7bn Shutterstock merger after UK regulators required the sale of Shutterstock's editorial business, a block the hosts say could hurt both firms facing AI image pressure.
Ben Thompson says Microsoft's Xbox was built on a failed plan to own the living room, with Game Pass reaching about 30m subscribers instead of the 75m Microsoft expected.
Blue Origin Seeks $10 Billion at $130 Billion Valuation
Funding and deals
Blue Origin. Space company raising outside capital for the first time, about $10bn at roughly a $130bn valuation, with Bezos putting in $2bn.
SambaNova. AI chip and systems maker raised $1bn at an $11bn valuation, and JPMorgan Chase picked it for secure on-premises inference.
Prime Intellect. Builder of an open superintelligence stack raised $130m with NVIDIA joining the round and runs about 15,000 GPUs, scaling past 30,000.
Getty Images and Shutterstock. Getty ended its $3.7bn merger with Shutterstock after UK regulators required the sale of Shutterstock's editorial business.
Guest interviews
Ben Thompson, technology analyst and founder of Stratechery. Thompson argues Xbox was built on a failed plan to own the living room. Game Pass did not expand the market, since Microsoft expected 75m subscribers by now and has about 30m. He reads a layoff of 1,600 people as a sign of more cuts.
Byron Boots, CEO of Overland AI. Overland AI builds autonomous ground vehicles for defense and holds a $20m production contract with the US military. Its vehicles drive about 100 miles and have carried 30 different payloads.
Tucker Brown, managing partner of Compound Creative Holdings. Brown says creator businesses commonly run margins of 50% or more. Dude Perfect grew at about a 50% compound annual rate for sixteen years before its private equity deal. His team works with about 308 creator clients.
Will Mayer, co-founder of Cold Holdings. Two thirds of Cold Holdings clients pay in equity and one third pay in cash. Its January campaign cost less than 1% of a normal January budget. He says hiring from outside a category brings new ideas.
Alana Palmedo, managing partner at Paradigm. Paradigm is backed by a $1.2bn fourth fund. The firm began in crypto in 2018 and now invests from pre-seed through growth markets.
News
Apple scraps cheaper Vision Pro display project. MacRumors reports Samsung Display will end the project by September. The hosts call it a reasonable path to a lighter headset, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple paused a cheaper Vision Air for smart glasses.
OpenAI readies GPT 5.6 Sol launch Thursday. Terra and Luna launch alongside it. OpenAI also rolled out GPT Live, a new generation of voice models, to ChatGPT.
Perplexity quietly builds an AI coding tool. Code-named teammate, the tool is used only inside the company for now. The hosts also note that Grok 4.5 is out.
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