Anthropic Builds Out Formidable Talent Bench

The number of ex-builders at Anthropic is increasing. These folks are working on models and the chips for training.  Names include:

Andrej Karpathy (of course, founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI lead)

Rahul Patil (ex Stripe CTO)

Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram and former CTO)

Peter Bailis (former CTO, Workday)

Clive Chan (Ex OpenAI hardware lead)

In Silicon Valley lingo - talent density is on the up.

First Brands Collapse Rattles Debt Investors

The auto parts supplier First Brands, known through its brands like STP oil (whose name stands for Scientifically Treated Petroleum), Prestone antifreeze and Simoniz car waxes, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, disclosing liabilities on 29 Sept 2025 exceeding $10 billion.  

This has come in the wake of creditors concern on the use of opaque off-balance-sheet financing (by keeping certain assets and liabilities off balance sheet, healthier financial metrics can be obtained).

First Brands are likely to disclose an issue with its factoring arrangements, factoring being a financing method tied to the future revenue of the company. The companies Board and creditors are investigating the issue.

Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO), an asset-rich American asset management firm, due to publish Q3 results on November 4th, had a 1 year CDS on the debt of First Brands, paying out in the event of failure to make payments. This is a credit play, not an equity short per se, and only pays if First Brands suffers on its debt payments. The fact APO has maintained that position has been a signal to the market.

Greek-American investment manager Jim Chanos (short-seller of Enron - made money, short seller of Tesla - lost money) has slammed the "magical machine" of private credit in response.

Tesla in Talks to Invest in India

The EV market in India boasts three major players, Tata Motors, with its Nexon EV Model (whose engine is developed by Tata and Austrian firm AVL), MG Motors (Chinese-owned brand since 2005) and BYD. Tesla has strong growth ambitions aiming to sell 20 million cars globally by 2030 and building cars in India for the local market and export would go some way to achieving these goals. It has faced challenges expanding its Shanghai base where it operates a Gigafactory (its first overseas Gigafactory) due to Musk's adjacent involvement in SpaceX and potential military implications of its Starlink satellite network which currently has 4,000 satellites in low earth orbit.

Bitcoin Blow as Tesla States Non Acceptance

The environmental impact of bitcoin mining has been cited as the reason for Tesla going up against the cryptocurrency. Elon remains committed to crypto, though.

Nvidia Q2 2018 Profits Up 40% But Competitors Crank up the Heat with Custom Silicon

Stellar Performance

Nvidia announced Q2 revenues of $3.12 billion a rise of 40% from 2017. Performance gains came from the gaming segment comprising graphics chips bundled with personal computers. Data center business grew 83% with demand from Google and Amazon for running computations in the cloud. Disappointing was the fall in demand for digital currency chips, leading to revenue decline of 54% from last year.

Competition from "Custom Silicon"

Competition may come from a number of areas. Google and Baidu are investing in custom silicon, with Google's hardware projects run by former Motorola president, Rick Osterloh. For machine learning specifically, Google has a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) to run neural networks at scale. In the automotive client space, Nvidia's autonomous driving chipset, Xavier, is under threat as Tesla aims to adopt its own machine learning silicon.

Traditional Competitors

Advanced Micro Devices is planning to release graphics chips for machine learning based on 7nm technology next year. Intel is also wanting to up its game, hiring AMD chief architect, Raja Koduri, to head up its graphics card business set to deliver product in two years.  Nvidia will likely respond by upping the stakes in research and development. Expenses could run to $870m in Q3.

Keeping it Real

Nvidia's Jensen Huang presents at the SIGGRAPH Graphics Technology Conference (GTC). This builds real-time awareness of the company's latest product innovations and drives fan following.

Cheapest Tesla Yet - Elon Musk Rolls out the Model 3

The Model 3, Tesla's cheapest car yet, starts off at $35K, still higher than the Nissan Leaf, at just over $30K. The electric battery will run for 354 km before needing a recharge.