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EquityAuthor: TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Max Zeff, Theresa Loconsolo
The intersection of technology, startups, and venture capital touches everything now. Thats why Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast, digs into the business of startups for entrepreneurs and enthusiasts alike. Every Wednesday and Friday, TechCrunch reporters keep you up-to-date on the world of business, technology, and venture capital. Equity is ranked the No.2 podcast in the Top 100 Venture Capital All time leaderboard on GoodpodsAs well as No.17 for the Top 100 Finance All time chart and No.32 for the Top 100 Business News All time chart. Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI's shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap
Friday, 17 April, 2026
The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly ...but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what's actually being built in AI infrastructure, who's winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week's headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve, and what Uber's $300M milestone bid says about who's winning the AV race How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agreement with Anthropic What Claude Code's moment at the HumanX conference reveals about where the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry is actually playing out Why tokenmaxxing, and Meta's leaked internal leaderboard, might say more about optics than actual productivity Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:25 Allbirds is now an AI company, apparently 04:48 Why chipmakers are betting on Wayve 12:01 Fluidstack wants $1B to build AI data centers 16:24 OpenAI buys a finance app and a talk show 21:27 Anthropic vs. OpenAI in enterprise 24:15 The Anthropic model they won't release to the public 26:47 Why AI feels so distant to everyone else 30:47 What even is tokenmaxxing? 34:49 Parasail's $32M bet on cheaper AI inference 36:39 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
