Is there an AI coding bubble? Plus Meta’s new SlopTok product, Neon’s divisive app shuts down, and more | E2184

When founders see a big time and competition this rapid, should that push them away from building in that space, or should it draw them towards building in that space? You should be drawn to going into that space. If a lot of people find a great beach to surf, you probably wanna surf that beach. Right? Because it could get better and better, and people could be underestimating the TAM. So if I told you when Sidecar and Lyft were battling it out for ride sharing, should Uber join the race? Yeah. They should. If I told you before Xi had released an LLM and Chat GPT and Claude had and Gemini had run away with it, should XAI jump into the race? You might say no. It's too late. It's never too late. Somebody could start an LLM right now. I know that sounds crazy, but, you know, if all of a sudden Apple decided this is strategic for us, let's put a $100,000,000,000 into it, and let's double the offers everybody else have. And let's find a way to put this on every iPhone, And we'll design the entire iPhone around the idea of it being an h 100. Like and the idea of building an h 100 competitor and competing with NVIDIA. Okay. Sounds crazy. But if there's a big market, there's always gonna be room for innovation. This Week in Startups is brought to you by AlphaSense. Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at alpha-sense.com/twist. Public. You take investing seriously. Public does too. Build a multi asset portfolio and earn an industry leading 4.1 APY on your cash with no fees or minimums. Learn more at public.com/twist. And .tech, say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. Alright, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Friday, and there's a ton of news. Alex, let's get to work here. What's our first story? First story today, Jason, is all about an application that reached the top, the pinnacle of the App Store before being taken offline by the founder because there was an enormous security problem. The app in question is called Neon, and its model was interesting. It paid people to upload their phone calls, then it would then sell the phone data to AI companies for training. In theory, you could get up to 30 a minute if both people in the phone call were Neon users or up to $30 a day max if it was just a one side of a phone call. The problem is TechCrunch took a look at the application, did some, I would say, reasonable testing on it because they have an excellent cybersecurity team over there with Zach Whitaker, and they found that, quoting here loosely, the back end servers were capable of spitting out reams of other people's …