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tldv Meeting-Notes App Breached by 'Bob the Hacker'
The hosts detail 'Bob the Hacker's' disclosure that German meeting-notes app tldv left a Firestore database with no tenant isolation, exposing 181,874 meeting records across 84,312 users, including government meetings from 23 countries. He reported it in January, was ignored for six months, and demonstrated it by joining live calls such as Malaysia's Ministry of Education; the team wonders why the story hasn't gone viral on X.
Guest: Alex Stephany, CEO of Beam — AI for Frontline Social Services
The hosts preview the agenda (Beam's CEO, Silicon Data's Steve Hu, and Robinhood's Johan Kerbrat) before welcoming Alex Stephany, founder and CEO of Beam, the AI toolkit for frontline social workers whose Beam Notes produces around 50,000 documents a day for government agencies in six countries. He traces Beam's origin to his JustPark days and SF's Tenderloin inequality, describes frontline teams ~40% under capacity, and weighs data sovereignty, the NHS–Palantir values debate, and building UK sovereign AI champions like Faculty. Afterward the hosts reflect on whether UK-built companies can stay independent instead of being acquired offshore.
Silicon Data's Steve Hou: Compute Futures, GPU Rentals & AI Capex
Steve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, explains the startup's compute futures and GPU rental indices, framing AI compute as an emerging asset class with $750B–$1T of annual capex and a coming shift from the training era to a much larger inference era. He discusses hyperscalers like Meta and Google weighing whether to rent out or sell compute capacity, rising rental income lifting estimated fair values of A100, H100, and B200 chips, and the market's ROI question. The conversation closes with DeepMind tensions at Google, China accelerating its own AI capex and funding, and sovereign AI for mid-sized countries.