Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI's shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2026

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly ...but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what's actually being built in AI infrastructure, who's winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week's headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve, and what Uber's $300M milestone bid says about who's winning the AV race How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agreement with Anthropic What Claude Code's moment at the HumanX conference reveals about where the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry is actually playing out Why tokenmaxxing, and Meta's leaked internal leaderboard, might say more about optics than actual productivity Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:25 Allbirds is now an AI company, apparently 04:48 Why chipmakers are betting on Wayve 12:01 Fluidstack wants $1B to build AI data centers 16:24 OpenAI buys a finance app and a talk show 21:27 Anthropic vs. OpenAI in enterprise 24:15 The Anthropic model they won't release to the public 26:47 Why AI feels so distant to everyone else 30:47 What even is tokenmaxxing? 34:49 Parasail's $32M bet on cheaper AI inference 36:39 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	presented by Dot Tech Domains, where tech founders find sharp, memorable names for their tech startups.
0:05.7	Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups.
0:10.6	Today is Friday, April 17th. I'm Kirsten Korsak, transportation editor over here at TechCrunch,
0:15.5	and I'm joined, as always, by senior reporter Sean O'Kane and Anthony Haugh, our weekend editor.
0:21.8	And we have an important update about the Albert saga.
0:27.2	That's right.
0:29.2	Very important.
0:31.2	I think a few weeks ago we talked about how Albers had sold its shoe business for $39 million,
0:37.2	which, you know, is not nothing, but for a business
0:40.1	and a startup that was once that hot is not a very impressive sum. But all birds to the
0:45.6	company. So not the shoe business is not dead yet. Instead, it is pivoting to AI. It's rebranded
0:51.7	as new bird AI and is basically trying to become a computing infrastructure
0:58.1	business. So I'm going to say that I don't think this is the most important story of 2026,
1:03.4	but I do think it's actually the most emblematic story of 2026. I cannot imagine anything that
1:09.0	more perfectly encapsulates what we've been talking about
1:11.3	on this podcast.
1:12.4	I mean, the question here is like, is this, is this it?
1:14.9	Is this the top?
1:16.1	Like, what do you guys think?
1:17.5	Like, this is, you know, pretty craven and pretty obvious.
1:22.1	So what do we think?
1:23.6	It's not the top.
	...

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