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Podcast: Equity
Episode:

Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI's shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap

Category: Business
Duration: 00:38:45
Publish Date: 2026-04-17 15:02:00
Description:

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 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 

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