Everything Is Computer
Our dispatches from HumanX and SXSW
The Newcomer Podcast hits the road!
We’re recording this episode on the ground from two different tech conferences, the flashy new HumanX summit in Las Vegas and the now-veteran status South By Southwest in Austin.
We cover how the attendees diverge, with more consumer-tech making a showing at SXSW and the new guard of AI business leaders heading over to HumanX (with a few exceptions).
At both summits, though, coding assistants are far and beyond the breakout use case of generative AI applications.
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We dig into the tricky politics of Trump-sympathetic tech leaders who are getting privately more and more frustrated about Trump’s tariffs. Crypto booster Balaji Srinivasan wrote an extensive newsletter on X about how tariffs were bad for US businesses. Business leaders and CEOs grumbled at the Yale CEO Caucus that they were losing patience with the president’s chaos. Pavel Asparouhov, the brother of Founders Fund’s Delian Asparouhov, joked on X about becoming “woke” again to stop the downturn, summing up everyone’s frustrations.
Next up, we talk about Anthropic’s major revenue growth and how Claude itself is one of the strongest coding assistants on the market, notching it up in the model maker race. We close with, yes — another coding assistant — Anysphere, the makers of Cursor, and its rumored funding round at a $10 billion valuation.
Timestamps
01:02 - HumanX vs. South By Southwest
04:55 - AI is Overhyped
09:49 - Founder Response to the Trump Tariffs
14:24 - New Media and AI
20:18 - Anthropic’s Rise and Revenue Growth
22:06 - Anysphere’s Rumored $10 Billion Valuation