AI burnout, billion-dollar bets, and Silicon Valley's Epstein problem

Hello, and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, February 13. I'm Kirsten Koroszek, transportation editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined by weekend editor Anthony and senior reporter Sean O'Kane. So I know it's been a few days, but I think I need to ask about Super Bowl ads. A theme? Yes. There were ads at the Super Bowl. That is true. At the yeah. Scoop. Scoop. Well, there's a a relevant theme, I think. I was just teeing you up. Of course. Of course. No. I think a big theme, and this will not shock anyone who watched the Super Bowl or saw any commentary about it, was in the ads, not in the game itself, not in the amazing halftime show, was was AI. It just seemed like both in, like, consumer, in terms of, like, office software, it just seemed like a lot of companies were really trying to sell the message of AI that they were the leaders in AI, that AI was exciting. I mean, one of the really striking ones for me was an Alexa ad starring Chris Hemsworth. And it was basically just Chris Hemsworth freaking out about how Alexa was, you know, gonna take over the world. And then he's kind of calmed down about it, but it was an ad that really spelled like it kind of manifested all these different fears that people have about AI. I know it's meant to be a parody, but I did find it kind of telling and sort of, like, is this hinting at I don't know if it did the job of what it was supposed to do. It definitely didn't. For me, that was one that, like, I get why they put that down on paper. But in practice, I don't think it worked the way they wanted it to other than I know Amazon is probably desperate for for Alexa to move into the world of, like, Frontier AI in a way that it has not despite the company having, like, a pretty big lead in voice assistance for a long time. So, yeah, I I tend to agree there. Another one that I would also put in the didn't come off as intended column was the Ring ad, which was, like, basically about this idea that if you lose a pet, you know, this whole network of Ring cameras can track down your lost dog for you. And it was something that, at least to me, felt kind of surveillance and, like, dystopian, which I think a lot of security, folks, online also, like, pointed out that, like, this does not see I mean, obviously, it's great if you can if you can get help, like, locating a pet, but it sort of underlines a lot of things that are maybe not so exciting about it. There was also this sort of, like, class as everything is about, you know, AI …