FYI - For Your Innovation

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett break down Merck and Moderna’s positive Phase 3 results for a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, a treatment custom-built from each patient’s own tumor that cut mortality from advanced melanoma by roughly 50% versus the standard of care. The team digs into cost, manufacturing scale, and why the capital poured into mRNA during COVID may be paying off in oncology. Then Brett reports back from a weekend with Grok Bot, which recovered $75 of his wife’s forgotten escrow money on its first task, and the team debates why multiplayer agents could be the real threat to Microsoft’s enterprise moat.

Key Points From This Episode:
How a custom mRNA vaccine trains the immune system against a patient’s own tumor, and what Phase 3 melanoma results could mean for other cancers
Why $200K–$300K per treatment limits early use, and what we believe has to change for personalized oncology to scale
Why agents that live inside team chat, not one-on-one, may be the real disruption to Microsoft and Slack

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Frank dig into the rumors of a multi-trillion-dollar Anthropic initial public offering (IPO). A company that started the year at $9 billion in run rate revenue may now be approaching $70 billion, adding more than a whole Salesforce in revenue in less than a year. The team walks through what a $2 trillion valuation would actually imply, why that multiple could land below public AI winners like Palantir and Cloudflare, and what the S1 might reveal about profitability. Then the conversation turns to the Pareto Frontier, where 14 of the 16 most cost-efficient models are proprietary, Google has none, and SpaceX AI has clawed its way back with Grok 4.6 and Grokbot.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why Anthropic’s reported run rate makes a $2 trillion IPO look cheap
What the S1 could reveal about profitability, and why the token subsidy bear case may not hold
How the Pareto Frontier reshuffles the model race, and why Google is currently off it

Total Addressable Market (TAM) refers to the total money or customers you could get if 100% of people buy your product or service.
Venture Capital (VC) refers to a type of funding where investors give money to new or small businesses in exchange for a share of ownership.

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett break down what may be a watershed moment for AI: OpenAI’s agents devised their own secret communication scheme, hacked out of their training sandbox, and attacked Hugging Face in search of test answers. The team debates what swarms of autonomous agents mean for cybersecurity, why the coming wave of open-source attackers could drive more spending into frontier labs, and whether “alignment” is even a coherent concept. Then, Zuckerberg’s latest essay on personal AI assistants raises a bigger question: if billions of consumers get their own agents, compute supply could be constrained for a decade.

Key Points From This Episode:
How OpenAI’s agents escaped their sandbox, and why every internet-facing system may soon face waves of AI attackers
Why open-source “mercenary” models could push more spending, not less, toward frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic
What Zuckerberg’s vision for personal AI assistants could mean for a decade-long compute crunch

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Nick and Brett discuss whether Tesla’s Shanghai factory could derail a rumored Tesla-SpaceX merger, and why both expect an announcement before the end of the year. Then, the team turns to AI economics: a benchmark that no model could crack at any price in January can now be beaten for 15 cents per task. With costs collapsing 99.99% on an annualized basis, the debate shifts to who actually wins, frontier labs, open source challengers, or the companies building AI hardware.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why Tesla China complicates, but may not kill, a potential SpaceX-Tesla merger
How 99.99% annualized AI cost declines are resetting the model race
Whether frontier labs, open source, or AI hardware locks in the next winners

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of Bitcoin Brainstorm, Rod Roudi is joined by Cathie Wood, Lorenzo Valente, Steve Lee, Jesse Posner, and Paul Itoi to examine the growing convergence of Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and energy. The group explores whether agents will settle in Bitcoin or stablecoins, why self-custodied AI could become essential for individuals and companies, and how open models, distributed compute, and Lightning payments may reshape collaboration. From Buzz and peer-to-peer inference to AI-assisted Bitcoin security and the changing structure of the firm, the conversation shows how open money and open intelligence could reinforce each other.

Guests on this month’s Bitcoin Brainstorm include:
 
Cathie Wood: Founder, CEO and CIO at ARK Invest 
Lorenzo Valente: Director of Research, Digital Assets, ARK Invest
Steve Lee: Lead, Spiral (Block)
Jesse Posner: Co-Founder, Vora
Paul Itoi: Co-Founder & CEO, Stakwork
Rod Roudi: Founder, Bitcoin Park
 
Key Points From This Episode:
 
00:00:00 Cathie Wood on simultaneous S-curves and the potential for super-exponential growth. 
00:07:11 Jesse Posner on how privacy, speech, and self-determination increasingly depend on decentralized technology. 
00:11:58 How ARK's cross-technology research structure helps its analysts evaluate convergence. 
00:16:47 Paul Itoi on why stablecoins fit workers who cannot absorb Bitcoin's short-term volatility. 
00:23:49 Steve Lee on stablecoins as a fintech evolution and Bitcoin as a monetary revolution. 
00:28:35 Why self-custodied AI could become as important as self-custodied money. 
00:40:27 How control of models and agentic traces protects companies from dependence on foundation-model providers. 
00:56:48 Why narrow models, distributed training, and micropayments can move work beyond company boundaries. 
01:03:55 How AI security tools expose a capability gap between Bitcoin attackers and open-source defenders.

 
Learn more about Bitcoin Park: bitcoinpark.com
 
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)