# With AI IPOs On the Way, Should the Public Own AI Companies? — Transcript (2026-06-02)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-06-02 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

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[00:00:00] Today on the AI Daily Brief As OpenAI and Anthropic race towards IPO, should AI be a public good? Before that in the headlines

A new Nvidia chip means the Mac M series has some competition [00:00:15] The The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI

All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Scrunch, Section, and [00:00:30] Outsystems. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai.

And honestly, if you wanna find out anything else about the show, you can [00:00:45] probably find it at aidailybrief.ai as well Welcome Today we kick off some news from NVIDIA

And honestly, it's another reminder of just how much the company is doing Even though the context in which we talk about them is mostly just their core product of [00:01:00] chips

On Monday, the company held their GTC Taipei event, with the headline reveal being a new chip called the RTX Spark While NVIDIA billed it as a super chip, the the RTX Spark is the first of their standalone prosumer-grade CPUs.

The chip will feature twenty CPU cores married to [00:01:15] over six thousand integrated GPU cores, supporting up to one hundred and twenty-eight gigabytes of unified memory. The The chip is capable of delivering one petaflop of AI compute, which which by comparison, an H100 outputs around four petaflops. NVIDIA said that the chip will be available in Windows PCs [00:01:30] and laptops by the fall, with models available from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft at launch.

Pricing Pricing was not announced, but these will be premium devices designed to compete with high-end Mac products and gaming computers that pull double duty as inference workhorses

I saw a lot of [00:01:45] people basically saying that this was their competition to the M5 series of Mac computers

Now, in Now, in some ways, this is part of a trend

And a shift in the compute workload as we prioritize inference. GPUs, of course, have been the core piece of AI hardware for almost a decade, but the CPU isnow having a resurgence [00:02:00] GPUs are increasingly seen as hardware for AI training, while powerful CPUs are better for executing agentic tool calls.



Kara Brisky, NVIDIA's VP for Gen AI software, said of GPU-powered chatbots, " That era is ending. Agents are the new workload. They will run everywhere from the data center to the [00:02:15] edge."



now now in addition to those new machines, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also announced that Vera Rubin had entered full production. OpenAI and Anthropic have already taken delivery of their first units with plans to scale up into full data center build-outs this The Vera The Vera Rubin nomenclature refers to the [00:02:30] CPU GPU pairing in the Vera is the CPU, while Rubin is the GPU architecture For For the first time for an NVIDIA data center chip

The focus is on the CPU and its ability to supercharge agentic AI.

Said Huang, " "AI AI agents will be the largest users [00:02:45] of Vera is the first CPU designed for that future, built to run agentic AI at hyperscale with extraordinary performance, efficiency, and programmability."

Making that comparison that I just mentioned, The Verge argued that the RTX Spark could be the M1 moment for Windows. I.e., until now, [00:03:00] Apple's M-series chips have been the go-to for running AI models locally. And now in its fifth generation, the M-series architecture has been utterly dominant. Apple has been the only choice for local inference, and many of us have the Mac Minis to prove it

Nvidia is looking to replicate that breakout moment and capture a new slice of the [00:03:15] market, going head-to-head with Apple for what Huang is calling the personal AI computer

Now, this idea of personal AI computing feels to me like it's very likely to be on display throughout the week as Microsoft Build kicks off. Microsoft Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella



used the [00:03:30] RTX Spark announcement as a kickoff, tweeting that their goal at Microsoft was to deliver, quote, " unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows."

Now Now staying on hardware for a minute, Meta is apparently joining the AI hardware competition with a new pendant. The The Information reports that Meta [00:03:45] plans to begin testing the pendant over the next year as part of a broader AI hardware strategy. A leaked memo described a push into business-focused devices, which they are calling wearables for work.

The core strategy, however, is to use wearables as the hook to increase use of Meta's AI models and drive consumer agent [00:04:00] subscriptions

Now it is Now it is worth noting that Meta is coming at this competition from a slightly different place, considering that the Meta Ray-Bans are the most popular AI device on the market

At this At this point, obviously AI pendants are not a going concern for most people

But it appears that Meta wants to ensure that they have a product available [00:04:15] just in case, preempting new devices from Google and, OpenAI, and forming something of a natural conclusion of Meta acquiring AI pendant startup Limitless at the end of last year this also could just mark a shift in revenue strategy for Meta's beleaguered Reality Labs division The division behind their metaverse efforts continues to [00:04:30] bleed money even with the success of the Meta Ray-Bans.



last quarter, the division produced four billion in operating losses on revenue of four hundred and two million. But Meta hopes the combination of useful consumer agents and new devices will drive new AI subscription revenue



in the memo, VP of wearables Alex Himmel wrote, "[00:04:45] To build a sustainable business beyond hardware margins, we need to monetize the software experiences that differentiate our devices. It has It has actually been some time since we talked about AI wearables



And one of the things that I'm watching most closely for on that front is whether all those efforts fall for OpenAI specifically in the [00:05:00] category of side quests that they are now trying to or whether that's still an area that they really plan on competing



now now one more story on the Meta front. The company also just suffered a massive exploit which many are blaming on AI

On Monday, On Monday, numerous Instagram accounts were hijacked, including the Obama White House and [00:05:15] Sephora. Users who had their accounts stolen said that they were unable to reach ahuman tech support worker



Back in March, Meta announced that they would be rolling out AI support to all accounts across Facebook and Instagram to carry out routine tasks like password requests

However, the system appears to have some pretty significant flaws, and [00:05:30] over recent days, videos have been circulating on Telegram exploiting the exploit. An attacker An attacker can simply ask Meta's AI to link any arbitrary account to a new email address when requesting a password reset. For For verified accounts, the AI bot will ask for a video of the person to prove liveness.

But hackers found that an [00:05:45] AI-generated video of the account owner would pass the checks. Hackers also needed to use a VPN to spoof the correct location, which became trivial when Meta added location data to Instagram profiles. Two-factor authentication was completely bypassed, and many didn't notice anything was amiss until their account was gone



commentators are [00:06:00] fairly baffled by the misstep. In a series of tweets, Gurglioros writes, " "It's It's wild how Meta, a company going all in on AI somehow missed the memo on how AI can generate images and videos that renders take a selfie verifications utterly useless."

He

seemingly confirming everyone's fears about [00:06:15] over-reliance on AI and under-reliance on real humans, he later added, " I'm hearing Instagram's trust and safety was absolutely gutted over the last few weeks, with 60% of the org gone between layoffs and forced reassignments to data labeling, all while AI maxing pushed a bunch of bugs to production."

Apparently [00:06:30] this was not a sophisticated hack, but engineers at Instagram going overboard to use AI for everything and having no incentives for stuff like security. You get what you incentivize, a warning for any company wanting to copy Meta

Added Jeffrey Emanuel, "IfIf Meta can't manage agents in an acceptable way in [00:06:45] their own infrastructure, how could they possibly expect anyone else to want to use any of their stuff?"



Next up, we have the latest story in our Summer Slowdown series

Management consulting firm Bain & Company has warned that a lack of AI ROI should be making executives nervous. that's their framing, by the way

[00:07:00] In a new survey of large companies conducted in April, Bain found that cost savings from AI automation are falling short of projections. Almost forty percent of companies reported that measured AI cost savings were below ten percent, despite targeting between eleven and twenty percent



the survey found a big disconnect between the use cases management [00:07:15] were targeting and the realities on the ground

And one of the interesting wrinkles Bain found is that 44% of companies were cash flowing the next leg of AI investment on thebasis of assumed cost savings, meaning that if those cost savings weren't materializing, that was going to create problems downstream

They They wrote, " [00:07:30] Self-funding the next wave from past returns sounds like discipline. In reality, it's a circular bet with a structural leak."



Now, some of the big issues that Bain found in terms of what was going wrong for AI deployments included 41% of companies saying that there were issues around data access or data integration, with more than 25% of respondents [00:07:45] also flagging concerns including compliance issues, competing business priorities and skills gaps

Meanwhile, over at Walmart, the company is limiting their employees' use of AI tools after a surge in demand



in the latest story showing the shift to the token shortage era Excess demand from employees has [00:08:00] caused Walmart to end their unlimited token policy for their core agentic tool called Code Puppy.

Code Puppy is a co-work 

style agent useful for tasks beyond coding, including preparing presentations and working with spreadsheets? Workers now have a token budget, although sources didn't indicate what the new token limit is

[00:08:15] Now, a Walmart spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company still wants its employees to use AI, but is now providing additional training to help people be more efficient in the way they use AI



but expect to see a lot more of this end of unlimited token policy

As agentic style use cases come online

[00:08:30] 

that's a story that we will continue to watch. however, for now, that's gonna do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode 

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. [00:12:00] The question The question we're exploring today

is in the right way to cut the public into the spoils of AI Now the broader theme going is the market stakes and implications of AI going up and up and up



and the resulting jockeying for opinion when it comes to [00:12:15] the right policy and discussions of how people can participate



now, of course, AI's role in the markets is not a new theme. In fact, basically since the launch of ChatGPT, AI has been the recurring theme that has kept markets afloat throughout every other [00:12:30] chaotic thing that has happened And now, with a raft of very high-profile IPOs coming up, the discussion of AI in markets is reaching its loudest point ever

To To kick off this week, we got an announcement that Anthropichad officially joined the IPO race, filing their paperwork with [00:12:45] the SEC on Monday

Like Like SpaceX before them, Anthropic filed their draft prospectus confidentially, meaning we won't get a look at the company's auditedfinancials until much later in the process Now, much was made about the choice to keep the filing confidential, but this has at this point been the standard playbook for IPOs for over [00:13:00] a decade



at this stage, we don't know things like how the company will be valued, how much stock they plan to sell

And in terms of timeline, the SpaceX IPO is the only real comparison for a company of this size. SpaceX is expecting to list next Friday, which is a little over 10 weeks from their initial filing, and is [00:13:15] quite fast for an IPO to go off

Reports suggest that Anthropic is seeking a similarly speedy launch, With some even speculating that the company might try to go out this summer. Axios Axios business editor Dan Primack writes, " Anthropic filing confidentially now seems to put it on a path to go [00:13:30] public well before Labor Day, or at least gives it the optionality. Big companies rarely price into summer vacations, but this is already an outlier for so many reasons."

Now Now for market commentators, the specific date is less of a question than whether Anthropic gets out ahead of OpenAI, or [00:13:45] whether Altman can go public first. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that OpenAI's filing was expected within days, but that was two weeks ago, and we haven't heard anything since.

During an interview on Monday, Sam Altman didn't seem to be in any particular rush. Asked if there was a race to go public, he responded, " "I [00:14:00] don't I don't think, no, not for that. I think there is a race to deliver the best technology and build the best business. Going public is a financing event, and I don't think that's one we're focused on the timing of.

We'll do it when we think it makes sense." Now, that has not stopped the financial press from painting this as a high-stakes race between the two [00:14:15] companies.

Senior IPO strategist at Renaissance Capital, Matthew Kennedy said, " The bankers are telling them that the time is right. Whoever goes first will be able to set the tone, and whoever goes second could look like an also-ran and be ultimately forced to compare itself with the other one in the marketing discussions."

Others had a different view, [00:14:30] however, with Harrison Rohlfs of PitchBook commenting

For OpenAI, the conventional read is that Anthropic just seized the narrative advantage by filing first. The unconventional read is that OpenAI got the better end of this. Anthropic just volunteered to absorb all the disclosure risk first, and OpenAI now has a free option to watch how [00:14:45] institutional investors react to audited frontier AI financials before committing to its own price

Look, I've said this before and I will continue to beat this drum. I think that the IPO raceness of all of this



is largely for the sake of financial headline writers

In pretty much the same way that I think that every [00:15:00] token that either of these companies makes available is going to be bought for the foreseeable future, I also think that every stock share that either of these companies gives people access to will be bought in just as short order.

And And while there may be nominal narrative advantages or disadvantages to going first or second

I [00:15:15] do not think that the market is going to pick a winner here



I think both of these companies are going to see just absolutely staggering demand



Dan Ives of Wedbush, by the way, had a similar take, writing in his Monday note, " We believe this represents an opening of the floodgate for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few [00:15:30] years." 

Now, also in the AI markets, Google has announced plans to raise $80 billion in equity to fund their continued AI This will be the first time that Google has issued new stock in more than two decades

Meaning that they will be one of the first hyperscalers to force investors to [00:15:45] stomach stock dilution in order to continue their CapEx spend. In the press release, Google confirmed that they plan to spend a hundred and ninety billion this year and anticipate a significant increase for twenty twenty-seven.

Now, over the past year, we've seen a transition as hyperscalers move from spending cash on hand

i.e., [00:16:00] ending buybacks and diverting profits into the infrastructure build-out, to start to begin to tap the debt markets, with both Google and Meta issuing corporate bonds in record numbers last year

To now moving into this equity phase

Now at this point, Google still has plenty of borrowing capacity, but they presumably want to take advantage ofrecent increases in [00:16:15] their stock price. Their stock is up eighteen percent year to date, with most of the gains coming in the past two months. Sources said that executives see a protracted period of AI investment and want to diversify funding sources while keeping balance sheet flexibility

The market, The market, for their part, seemed pretty ambivalent about the news, with Google [00:16:30] falling then recovering to basically flatten overnight markets

One market participant that was enthusiastic about the plans was Berkshire Hathaway, who signed up for a ten billion dollar allocation from the new issuance. Warren Buffett has been notoriously slow on tech, failing to make any meaningful allocation until purchasing Apple stock in twenty [00:16:45] sixteen.

But this tranche of Google stock would take Berkshire's holdings to thirty-two billion. That would make Google a top five holding, representing around a tenth of their portfolio. Sources said that the deal was hashed out over a twenty-four-hour period and will be the largest bet so far from new CEO Greg Abel after he took over from [00:17:00] Buffett in January

Now, while most of the market may so far be in wait and see mode when it comes to this Google deal, the AI trade overall is heading into overdrive

According to The Wall Street Journal, the S&P 500 has just delivered one of the strongest two-month stretches in modern history. The [00:17:15] index the index is up 16% since the beginning of April, which is the fifth strongest two-month run since the 1950s

Now, Now, this moment of strength is not like many of the previous recoveries coming out of a market crash, but instead is almost entirely about semiconductors going on an absolute [00:17:30] tear. The The US Semiconductor Index is on pace for its strongest quarter in history, gaining 69% over the first two months of the quarter.



Unsurprisingly, Unsurprisingly, this has resurfaced the bubble question Skeptics point out that semiconductors are notoriously cyclical



but others like Zatreini Research

Point to [00:17:45] structural shortages in the entire AI supply chain as reasons for people to be less skeptical of this rally than they might otherwise be

What's clear from all of this is that the financial stakes of AI are extremely high



And that realization [00:18:00] seems to be finding its way into the policy discourse as well



Last week, we discussed Elizabeth Warren's op-ed in Time Magazine about taxing AI, and I specifically drew a contrast



between the data center moratorium shut it all down type of policy and the cut everyone in through [00:18:15] taxation type of policy



Well, apparently data center moratorium leader Be- Bernie Sanders

has decided that if we can't shut it down

He wants a stake, or more specifically, he wants the federal government to have a stake

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Sanders has basically begun advocating for [00:18:30] partial nationalization of the AI industry



in the piece he writes, " "The The question is not whether AI will change the world. The question is who will own and control that future? Who Who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it? Will AI be used to make life better for working families, or will the future of humanity [00:18:45] be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?

That is the choice before us."



now in advocating that the government take a 50% stake in the foundation labs



Sanders is basically [00:19:00] arguing that AI models are built on data theft He wrote The The creative work of millions of people has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It's time for us to reclaim it. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity

Sanders said that he will soon introduce the [00:19:15] policy in Congress through the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act Which according to Sanders will give the public a direct ownership stake in major US companies

In fact, he wrote, " It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50% tax, not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and other companies, but paid [00:19:30] with something far more valuable than that, the the stock." Sanders argues the bill would achieve two crucial things. one, giving the public a direct role in determining the future of AI via the government's voting shares and 50% control of the board

And also two, quote, " Guaranteeing that the trillions of dollars [00:19:45] potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us, not simply make the richest people in the world even richer." Referencing the Alaska Oil Fund, Sanders suggested that the fund should begin by making direct dividend payments to US citizens and then later be used to fund a, quote, "decent and dignified standard of living, [00:20:00] including healthcare, education, and housing."



Now, I think when it comes to Now, I think when it comes to this type of policy, you have to look at it in a few ways First of all, I don't think that Bernie Sanders is particularly in the business

of the Trumpian art of the deal where he's just trying to start the negotiations really high so that he can get a compromise at [00:20:15] a lower part in other words, I think that this 50% number is the number that he thinks is fair



I also think that while the government expropriating 50% of the stock of a set of extremely important private companies might have been anathema in previous periods right now in our times With discontent where it is all [00:20:30] bets are off on what the public will tolerate



still, I think that practically

The idea of AI as a public good is one that might find some political resonance



For one thing, this is part of the discourse coming out of the labs

OpenAI's April white paper on [00:20:45] industrial policy Called for a, quote, "public wealth fund that provides every citizen with a stake in AI-driven economic growth

Last October, Anthropic wrote, " Sovereign wealth funds could enable states to acquire positions in AI-related assets. In scenarios where the AI sector captures an [00:21:00] outsized share of economic wealth, government investment could both shape the sector's behavior and AI-derived wealth more equitably."



I I think there's also an emerging strand of the discourse that's gonna be a lot more politically palatable for folks

that's still exploring some similar themes



that idea, as captured in a [00:21:15] recent Ezra Klein op-ed

is about how to distribute AI itself, not just the financial benefits from AI, but AI itself as a public good Klein writes, Klein writes, " "AI's AI's benefits will not emerge automatically or inevitably. It will take work to identify the problems AI can help the public solve [00:21:30] and create the data financing and compute needed to actually solve them.

A public agenda for AI needs to be more than a vague intention to toss AI at public problems. It starts with access, but it does not end there."

He He concludes, " If we want an AI that serves the public good, we need to define the [00:21:45] public goods that AI can serve and create the conditions under which AI can be useful We know we fear what AI will do to us, but what do we hope it will do for us?

I I don't think it's an accident that the market discourse and IPO questions are happening at the same time

as this growing public [00:22:00] policy discourse

And And frankly



while I'm not particularly keen on the specifics of any of these policies that have been put forward so far



I like the trajectory, at least, of the questions that Ezra is asking here about what type of positive benefits we want from AI and what's the best way to achieve that



I'm even seeing Bernie's [00:22:15] extremely socialistic proposal generating some interesting counter responses



that retain the principle of a broader cross-section of society having a financial upside in the success of AI without all of a sudden the government being in the business 

Of administrating the most important companies in the world



look, ultimately we [00:22:30] are in uncharted territory

And the discussion is gonna do nothing but get weirder before it lands For now, however, that is gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

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