Episode Details

Good day, humans. Nobody in this industry agrees on what intelligence should cost. DeepSeek will run a job for three cents that Anthropic charges three dollars for, while Dwarkesh Patel makes the case that compute is about to get fifteen times more expensive. Meanwhile Apple is in court over what its ex-employees carried to OpenAI, and paying Google for the models that finally fixed Siri.

Apple Says Eleven More Ex-Employees May Be Involved

Source: TechCrunch

What happened: Apple asked a federal court for a preliminary injunction to stop OpenAI from building an AI device based on its technology, and said its investigation has now turned up eleven more former Apple employees who may have been involved beyond the two it originally named. One allegedly took screenshots of confidential documents about an unannounced product before interviewing at OpenAI.

Why it matters: This stopped being a dispute about two people. Apple is arguing a pattern exists, and asking a judge to freeze a rival’s hardware roadmap while it digs. An injunction is not a fine you pay and move on from. It is a stop sign on a product line.

What everyone’s saying: OpenAI answered in public rather than only in court, posting that Apple’s request is based on false information and that it does not have, nor want, Apple’s trade secrets. It also pointed at Apple’s own stumbles, including emailing the wrong person after confusing two similar surnames, as NBC News reported, and argued that the residual access those employees kept was an Apple security failure rather than theft.

My read between the lines: The detail Apple put in its own filing is that multiple former employees still had Apple work devices after they left, and only reached out about returning them once the lawsuit was filed. Apple is describing its offboarding process as a crime scene. The trade-secret argument may well be strong. The asset inventory is not helping it.

📖 Further reading: Block Can Read Your Team’s Buzz Messages. Unless You Host It Yourself. — the cheapest way to protect confidential information is deciding who holds it before anyone starts leaving.

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China Built a Death Zone Around Everyone Else

Source: Bloomberg, via Business Standard

What happened: Five significant Chinese model releases landed in eight weeks: Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max, Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5, and DeepSeek’s V4 Flash. In testing by independent evaluator Artificial Analysis, running one complex real-world workload costs $0.03 on DeepSeek V4 Flash against $3.15 on Claude Fable 5.

Why it matters: A hundredfold price gap changes what is worth automating at all. Work that