AI Summary
5 min readEric Schmidt’s $80 Billion Anthropic Bet
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns 1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A round in 2021, when the startup was valued at $461 million. Investors now peg Anthropic at $1.8 to $2 trillion ahead of its highly anticipated IPO. At the high end, Schmidt’s stake would be worth roughly $80 billion—boosting his net worth by about a third. Even at Anthropic’s most recent $965 billion valuation, his stake adds nearly $1 billion to his existing $57.5 billion fortune. The seven co-founders are already worth $8 billion each. Schmidt’s early portfolio focused on consumer internet and fintech, but AI has become a major focus with bets on Mistral AI, Reflection AI, and World Labs alongside Anthropic. If Anthropic debuts at $2 trillion, his return would surpass Innovation Endeavors’ own early Uber bet, which multiplied about 1,400-fold by its 2019 IPO.
DeepSeek Open Sources Its Inference Stack
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:04) **Episode Open & Headlines** - Brian McCullough previews the day's top stories: DeepSeek open-sourcing DeepInfer, Inception's diffusion LLM Mercury 3, Spotify paid podcast memberships, and Eric Schmidt's Anthropic windfall.
- 2 (01:27) **DeepSeek Open Sources DeepInfer Inference Stack** - DeepSeek releases its internal production stack for inference, offering a rare look at its cost-cutting techniques.
- 3 (04:32) **Inception's Mercury 3: A Diffusion LLM Challenging the Status Quo** - Inception debuts Mercury 3, a diffusion-based language model claiming 4-8x speed over Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna on agentic benchmarks.
- 4 (10:46) **Cloudflare Debuts Cleric: A System-1 Extraction Model** - Cloudflare releases Cleric, an AI model for fast, cheap, and accurate data extraction from unstructured documents.
- 5 (14:03) **Spotify Launches Paid Podcast Memberships** - Spotify rolls out paid memberships in 34 markets, allowing creators to offer perks and keep 90% of revenue.
- 6 (16:20) **Apple Commits $100M to US Titanium Supplier for iPhone Duo** - Apple invests in Perryman Company for titanium production, amid severe supply constraints for its foldable phone.
- 7 (18:01) **Eric Schmidt's Anthropic Stake Set for Massive IPO Windfall** - Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's 1% stake in Anthropic could be worth billions at the AI company's expected IPO valuation.
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Show Notes
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its internal inference stack. Inception’s diffusion LLM Mercury 3 claimed 4x to 8x speed over Haiku 5.5. Spotify launched paid podcast memberships, and Eric Schmidt’s 1% Anthropic stake looked set for a massive IPO windfall.
- DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, its internal production stack designed to accelerate inference, optimize chip performance, and reduce energy and compute costs (Bloomberg)
- Inception debuts Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM that it says tops GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, and GLM-5.3 Flash on agentic benchmarks while being 4x to 8x faster (The Deep View)
- Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs (Cloudflare)
- Cloudflare releases Clairic in preview on Workers AI, a model that returns every requested field with a confidence score in a single pass, with open weights to follow (The Decoder)
- Cloudflare’s Clairic costs $0.10 per million input tokens with a 65,536-token context window, but its speed, accuracy, and cost claims are company claims, not a published head-to-head benchmark (RunTimeWire)
- Spotify launches paid podcast memberships in 34 markets, including the US; creators can offer perks like bonus content or fewer ads and keep 90% of revenue (TechCrunch)
- Apple commits up to $100M over three years to Pennsylvania-based Perryman Company, a titanium supplier for the iPhone Duo, and expands its Qnity partnership (CNBC)
- Sources: Eric Schmidt, who owns ~1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A, is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from its IPO (Bloomberg)
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