Apple and Palantir beat earnings but both stocks fall about 2% as Apple warns AI and memory costs could squeeze margins.
Palantir's US commercial revenue tops its US government revenue for the first time, $984m to $953m.
Shopify's Q3 revenue rises 32% to $33.7bn as orders from agentic traffic surge 3.3x.
Musk says serving Grok bot outruns its revenue
Funding and deals
Northwood Space. Space communications company that builds satellite antennas, raised a $375m Series C to scale production.
CrowdStrike. Cybersecurity company buying Fiddler AI and Dreadnode for $495m.
Guest interviews
Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify. Shopify's third quarter delivered $33.7bn of revenue, up 32%, on $119bn of GMV, up 29.5%. Agentic traffic rose 2.6 times and orders 3.3 times, with conversion through the Shopify catalog twice that of AI search scraping. He expects agents to monetize through agentic ads and says merchants must merchandise product attributes for agents.
Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis. SemiAnalysis launched a benchmark for frontier capabilities in chip design, biology, cybersecurity and RSI, arguing benchmarks that pick domains by GDP share are misguided. Patel says replacing white collar work will happen but will not drive the first trillion dollars of AI spend, because companies have inertia over jobs and pay. He cites Intel wafers generating 100 terabytes of data with most unused, and substrate yields of 40% to 60%.
Bridgit Mendler, CEO and co-founder of Northwood Space. Northwood has built 29 units of hardware across two production runs and opened a 185,000 square foot facility ready to produce hundreds of antennas. She says no hard tech company escapes supply chain pressure, so Northwood is deepening vendor ties and bringing more of its stack in house. She is sceptical of fixed ratios of senior to new grad hires and says Northwood tries to 10x everything year over year.
Max Kan, AI researcher on model evaluation and economics. Kan says Grok bot may be too expensive to serve today given CPU and sandboxing costs per user, but cost to serve could fall more than 100x within a year as most users stop needing a frontier model.
Andrew Megalaa, software engineer and AI researcher. Megalaa says SemiAnalysis's PhD collaborators found the models much better than expected, and that on their finance benchmark no model could do an analyst's job, with the best near 50% credit.
News
Musk calls Grok bot spending unsustainable. Musk said on November 1 that serving Grok bot was unsustainably expensive relative to revenue, puzzling the hosts given its roughly one million weekly actives and his claim it will one day consume most of xAI's compute.
Palantir's US commercial revenue tops government. Palantir reported $2.3bn of quarterly revenue, an annualized $9.25bn, and for the first time earned more from US commercial customers ($984m) than US government ($953m). The stock fell about 2% anyway.
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On this episode 8
Show 1
Apple beats but warns on memory and AI costs. Apple reported record September quarter revenue but the stock fell about 2% after it warned that rising memory chip prices and AI running costs could squeeze margins. John Coogan says holding prices for a year leaves Apple exposed.
Google's AI mode starves referral traffic. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said people still want Reddit but Google no longer sends them. A breakdown credited to Bucco Capital Bloke says AI mode is becoming Google's default and collapsing referral traffic is crushing non-destination media firms.
SpaceX opens microgravity manufacturing. SpaceX says Starfall will support biomedical research and manufacturing of materials and semiconductors in microgravity. Jordi Hays says the move validates Varda, which now faces real competition.