Elon Says: IPO NOW!

Welcome to the Tech Brew ride home for Wednesday, 01/21/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Anthropic continues to project strength in the AI race, How OpenAI is rolling out ads on chat GPT, Netflix wants to become TikTok faster than TikTok can become them, YouTube wants to have it both ways when it comes to AI, and Elon wants SpaceX to win the great IPO race of twenty twenty six. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. There's a ton of chatter about using AI agents right now, but no one seems to be talking about how these agents aren't always perfect. Sometimes they delete the wrong files or make changes you didn't authorize and when that happens, you're left to clean up the mess. That is unless you're using Rubrik Agent Cloud. It's the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern, and rewind AI agent actions. And if your business relies on AI agents, you need those abilities. On a singular platform, it helps you unleash more agents faster while mitigating risk. Risk. If you're running AI agents and wanna sleep better at night, Rubrik is worth checking out. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to the platform. Head to rubrik.com. That's rubrik.com. Over at the old the Davos, Demas Hassabis says there aren't any plans to put ads in Gemini and in response to OpenAI testing ads in chat GPT saying, quote, maybe they feel they need to make more revenue. But also, there was this, an interesting sort of power play by anthropic, quoting TechCrunch. Last week, after reversing an earlier ban, the US administration officially approved the sale of NVIDIA's h 200 chips along with a chip line by AMD to approved Chinese customers. Maybe they aren't these chip makers' shiniest, most advanced chips, but they're high performance processors used for AI making the export controversial. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodai unloaded on both the administration and the chip companies over the decision. The criticism was particularly notable because one of those chipmakers, Nvidia, is a major partner and investor in Anthropic. Quote, the CEOs of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back, Amadei said, incredulous, in response to a question about the new rules. The decision is going to come back to bite The US, he warned. We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips, he told Bloomberg's editor in chief who was interviewing him. So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips. Amodai then painted an alarming picture of what's at stake. He talked about the, quote, incredible national security implications of AI models that represent essentially cognition that are essentially intelligence. He likened future AI to a country of geniuses in a data center saying to imagine a 100,000,000 people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner all under the control of one …