Hello and welcome to Money Talks.

I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Rivlin, who has a book out.

It's called AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the trillion

dollar raise to cash in an artificial intelligence. So Gary, introduce yourself and tell us about

the book. Great to be here. I just had crazy timing. Right at the end of 2022, I had this idea like,

hey, I'm hearing AI starting to get hot. or just before chat chitpT, before the whole

world was talking about chatchipt, I started contacting people in Silicon Valley looking for those

trying to get rich, you know, the mad dash to cash in on AI. So that was that was my angle from the

star. Let others kind of talk about the bigger issues. What does it mean that we're talking to a machine, whatever? I just love the stakes. They don't even really use the word billion anymore. It's now the trillion dollar raised because that really is the stakes here. It's many trillions of dollars. Funny enough, I was paying attention at first to startups. And I thought, like, hey, who's going to be the next Google?

Who's going to be the next Facebook meta? And it turns out this is rather depressing to me. I think the next

Google is going to be Google and the next meta. Facebook is going to be meta for Facebook. But we could get

into that. I mean, that makes sense because they're all, you know, investing heavily and doing acquisitions. In some cases,

incredibly high dollar aqua hires in order to, I think, vacuum up all of the AI talent in the

valley. Yeah, I mean, the aqua hire, for those who don't know, is like it's buying a company

largely just for the talent. And there have been like multi-billion dollar acquires. So spending multiple

billions of dollars just to get the two or three top AI researchers you want. But, you know,

across the board, this is so expensive. It's like it costs hundreds of millions, nowadays

billions to train and operate these models. It's really hard for a startup to get access to that kind of money.

You need data.

I mean, Google has all this search data.

How is two people in a dorm room going to have access to the data that you need for training and stuff?

And, of course, these days, there was a news story a couple weeks ago in the Times, New York Times,

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