Hello there.

Happy Friday! Big Tech is spending like there’s no tomorrow, and sooner or later, that bill is coming due.

In this issue:

From the boomer social revival to Nvidia giving away AI to protect its empire, the future is arriving fast…just not exactly as advertised. Let’s get into it.

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Remember when Facebook was cool? Neither do we. But Meta is doing what they do best: throwing money at the problem, and seeing what sticks.

The company just launched something called Creator Fast Track, which is basically a signing bonus for influencers. If you've got 100,000+ followers on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, Meta will pay you $1,000 a month just to post on Facebook. Got a million followers? That's $3,000 a month. The guaranteed cash only lasts three months, but Meta promises to boost your reach forever after that.

Why should you care? Because Meta paid creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, up 35% from the year before. That's big money flowing out of the company, and the bet is simple: more creators means more content, more content means more eyeballs, more eyeballs means more ads, and ads are still how Meta makes basically all of its money. If this works, Facebook stops being just the app your parents doom-scroll and becomes a place people actually want to hang out again.

For us in the trenches, this is a classic "watch the engagement numbers" situation. Meta reports monthly active users and time spent on platform. If Creator Fast Track actually brings younger users back to Facebook, you'll see it in those metrics before it shows up in revenue. If those numbers stay flat while creator payouts keep climbing, that's money going out the door with nothing to show for it. The results will determine if this was a "smart growth investment" or "desperate flailing." Keep an eye on Meta’s Q2 earnings.

Here's something wild that flew under the radar: Nvidia, the company that makes basically every chip powering AI right now, just committed $26 billion over the next five years to build open-source AI models. Those are models anyone can download and use. For free.

Wait, why would they give stuff away? Because Nvidia isn't really in the AI model business. They're in the "sell you the chips to run AI models" business. Think of it like a printer company giving away printers but charging for ink. Nvidia wants every AI model optimized for their hardware, so when companies need to run those models at scale, they buy Nvidia chips. It's a tech mogul’s dream.

The first model just dropped: Nemotron 3 Super, a 120-billion-parameter beast designed specifically for AI agents (those are the bots that can actually do tasks for you, not just chat). Companies like Palantir, Perplexity, and Siemens are already using it. And because it's open-source, developers everywhere will build on it, which means more demand for Nvidia's hardware.

From a market perspective, this is Nvidia playing defense and offense at the same time. AMD is catching up on the chip side, and all the big cloud companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta) are building their own chips to stop depending on Nvidia so much. By making the best open-source models that run best on Nvidia hardware, they're trying to lock in developers for another decade the way they did with their CUDA software.

If you own NVDA or are thinking about it, this is the moat-building you want to see. The risk is, if those big cloud customers decide Nvidia is now a competitor (not just a supplier), they might speed up their own chip development even faster. But Nvidia's betting their hardware lead is too big to catch. At $26 billion, they're putting serious money where their mouth is.

In this episode of This Week in Tech, the panel dives into the messy reality behind AI hype. Meanwhile, social media platforms battle bots, governments clash over data control, and the energy demands of AI start reshaping infrastructure decisions.

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That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake