GPT 5.6's exclusive rollout, Chinese models are mogging, and Baseten's $1.5B raise

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod talks about everyone panicking over the market, Bumble going private for roughly a tenth of its peak valuation, and Modal hitting a $15.75B valuation. A really fun lineup, assuming you haven’t checked your portfolio… They start with the rumored “Black Monday” that thankfully didn’t pan out, but the underlying concerns go deeper than AI companies signing contracts with each other. The pod breaks down how higher energy prices feed into inflation and Treasury yields, making future borrowing more expensive for companies like CoreWeave. Its data center buildout depends on debt, so higher financing costs eat into margins, which makes the business riskier to lend to, which can push borrowing costs even higher (not the kind of flywheel you want). CoreWeave’s CEO points to $100B+ in contracted revenue, but delivering on those commitments requires more GPUs, more data centers, and more financing. Maya, Anika, and Priya get into what hedge funds buying insurance on CoreWeave’s debt are betting on, and whether another big model drop could turn the mood around. Next, the pod gets into Bumble’s $1.3B take-private deal by Ithaca Holdings and whether new ownership can make people excited about downloading Bumble again. The conversation covers Ithaca co-CEOs, former Meta executive John Hegeman and former Instacart COO and CFO Ravi Gupta, plus why Conviction backing this deal is an interesting departure from its usual AI bets. With paying users down 16%, the question is whether an AI concierge can fix the experience or whether the brand itself is the problem. The pod debates the advantage of an existing user base, whether ads could improve dating-app incentives, and a $10K success fee for finding love. Naturally, this comes with a few personal case studies because apparently SF has about seven single people (and two are on the podcast…). Finally, they cover Modal going from $60M in annualized revenue to over $1B as its valuation climbed from $1B to $15.75B. The pod explains why coding agents need sandboxes, why running 20 agents on small tasks can beat giving one agent 20 tasks, and why labs don’t want to pay for idle compute between reinforcement learning runs. They also get into Modal’s cold-start optimizations and why paying only for the compute you use can make more sense than reserving GPUs around the clock. Modal gets the pod’s check, and GTC helps recruit for them if you’re interested in joining. 00:00 Maya and Priya hang out with Anika’s ex 00:57 OpenAI’s spy drama 03:39 101 episodes in and still scheming 07:27 Why everyone’s portfolio is down 09:31 CoreWeave’s debt is making everyone nervous 17:36 Anthropic’s growth, neo clouds, and the private credit boom 21:58 Bumble’s $1.3B reset 37:01 Why Modal gets our check even at $15B If reading the CoreWeave news makes you want to track compute markets you can on Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code. Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

Nadya Okamoto has built an audience of more than 6 million followers, founded the period care company August, and spent over a decade turning social media audiences into real communities. Now she’s co-founder and CMO of Pie, the social app bringing online communities into real life. We sat down only 30 minutes after a bird pooped on her but in typical Nadya fashion she still made the podcast and filmed the whole experience, which you can find on her socials (@nadyaokamoto). Nadya originally joined Pie as a user. She started a run club in New York, wanted one place to manage its events and members, and became one of the app’s early power users. That eventually turned into a co-founder gig alongside Bonobos founder Andy Dunn…we wish our app addictions turned into co-founder offers! She tells the pod about starting the role weeks before her wedding, leading her to work from her honeymoon in Switzerland (TikTok was NOT happy about this). She also learned that employees need to tell someone before leaving the country. In her defense, it’s her first time ever having a boss. Nadya also explains why creators can bring early-stage companies both capital and distribution. She began writing $10K to $25K angel checks after raising for August. She talks about why equity, SAFEs, stock options, and advisor grants remain unnecessarily gatekept. She also shares what she’s building at Cherub to help more creators become investors. Finally, the pod talks hustle culture and capitalism. Nadya responds to criticism over working until 1 AM, explains why ambition often overrides her anxiety, and shares how she handles feedback from millions of people. She also discusses losing 8,000 followers after a Meta partnership, whether creators can authentically use AI while criticizing the industry, and why opting out of imperfect systems rarely changes them.

The first time Vivek ever flew internationally, he asked the flight attendant before takeoff, "This is going to San Francisco, right?" He was on his way to a 10-minute Y Combinator interview with PG, Sam, Jessica, Paul Buchheit, and Harj. His co-founder Hari couldn't come because his visa was denied. They got into YC, and started HackerRank which later became the template of how to hire engineering talent efficiently. Vivek started the company in 2010 as Interview Street, a mock interview service. The idea came from his time interviewing engineers at Amazon, where he saw that resumes didn't say much about skill. HackerRank went on to create the online assessment which every engineer has grown to know and well, hate. Now, in what Vivek calls a "refounding moment," they're tearing it down and rebuilding it to match how the job of an engineer has changed in the era of AI. Vivek walks through how tech interviews have always copied whoever the hottest company was. First it was Microsoft's "how many golf balls fit in a 747." Then Google's data structures and algorithms. Then Stripe's API integration rounds, which Maya had to grind through as a new grad in 2022. Now the job is orchestrating agents, so how do you tell a vibe coder from a real production engineer? Vivek's answer is Chakra, HackerRank's agentic interviewer. Candidates work on real-world problems with whatever frontier model and harness they want, and Chakra watches the process. Vivek's take is that anyone can produce an output with AI, so the signal is in how you got there. Chakra is now live and you can try it free at hackerrank.com/chakra. This episode is brought to you by Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code GETTHECHECK. Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

One of Sam Kececi's investors never got pitched by Sam. They found a link to his Sentience, talked to his digital twin over several days, and by the end the investor asked to write a check. Sam (the real version) just had to send the SAFE. Sam is the founder of Sentience, which builds digital twins of founders, operators, and execs that write, think, and communicate like them. Get the Check co-host Anika tried it over the last couple of weeks, and it actually writes exactly like her. Sam’s hot take is that AI does have taste. It's just one taste, and it's Claude's. Sam's mission comes from a Naval one-liner: no one can compete with you at being you. He can't out-dunk LeBron, but nobody can out-Sam Sam at building his company. They get into what converging on the mean has meant practically. Sam shares the YC startup idea that he’s pretty sure was just Claude slop. Anika also asks about their moat against Anthropic (as any good podcaster or investor does). Sam explains why writing likely isn’t key to unlocking RSI. In fact, if you’re “dumb” your Sentience would be too. They also discuss the technical evolution of agent memory and how to build a harness that remembers relevant context vs. all context. Sentience compresses older memories the way the brain does. And if you ask Sam’s Sentience to write you a poem, it should say "I'm good" instead of generating a haiku about digital twins. Anika also asks if down the line everyone will have their own model. Sam runs his company on his product: nearly every email goes one shot through Sentience, engineering standup is just Sentiences talking to each other, and candidates chat with his twin late into the night after interviews. He also floats a future where you pay to talk to someone's twin, Cameo style. Finally, a speed round where Anika asks about his favorite investor, what a post-AI high school should look like, and where he'd work if he weren't a founder. Sentience is hiring across engineering and growth and you can try it here: https://sentience.com/. This episode is brought to you by Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code GETTHECHECK. Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod. 00:00 What’s the difference between a personal assistant and a digital twin 03:25 Wildest Sentience use case: it made someone invest in his company 06:54 Is taste actually a moat, or will AI catch up 08:36 The reason there are so many AI dentistry companies 12:39 Would Sam follow an AI-generated Anika on X 13:48 The answer to people who are anti-AI 14:39 Is AI replacing human relationships 17:31 Why is Anthropic bad at creative writing 18:24 Will Sentience be a dumb product if you’re dumb 20:42 Memory from a technical POV for AI assistants and digital twins 23:05 AI’s emergent behavior is anthropological 25:15 Why Sam doesn’t believe in engineering standups 26:30 How to monetize consumer AI agents 29:01 Sam’s favorite investor 30:16 Are we all going to have our own models, or will agent harnesses be durable? 33:12 Is the biggest business bottleneck compute 34:14 If you could talk to one digital twin, who would you pick? 36:00 What should a post-AI high school look like? 37:50 Where would you work if you weren’t a founder 39:37 What roles are they hiring for? DM us if you’re interested!

This week the pod covers one of the fastest companies ever to $1B ARR, the real reason Anthropic and OpenAI are delaying IPOs, and the data center company that started out mining Bitcoin. They start with Cognition. Devin the “first AI software engineer” launched in March 2024 and was a meme. Now there are ads around SF that say "Remember Devin. It's good now". Turns out the target audience just wasn’t in SF it was huge enterprises like Nvidia, Mercedes, the Army, the Navy, and Citi, which has 40,000 developers on the platform. One mystery customer is 10% of revenue and the pod has theories on who it is. Comeback of the century! Next, token economics. Anthropic dropped Opus 5.5, OpenAI dropped GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and both cut prices in half because nobody's paying for the fancy models anymore. Vercel's data shows Fable 5 lost two-thirds of its spend share in one month, and open source went from 7% to 56%. OpenAI pushed its IPO to 2027, Anthropic is rumored to follow, and the pod gets into what the labs will do now (hint: there’s a reason Anthropic just opened a wet lab). Maya predicts that in the future frontier coding spend is just talent spend — so lower growth rate companies will spend less. Then comes Crusoe, the story the pod had the most fun researching. Two high school best friends started it in 2018 by sticking data centers on oil wells to turn flared gas into Bitcoin, with a seed deck that said basically "we're a Bitcoin business, but we believe in this AI thing" before ChatGPT existed. They chase energy nobody else wants. In Abilene, Texas, there was so much wind power that prices went negative, so they said "we'll take free energy" and that's now OpenAI's 1.2 gigawatt Stargate campus. They sold the crypto business, raised a $3.9B Series F at $30.9B, and are now building data centers in factories and shipping them on trucks. The hosts also go into the data center backlash and why Americans hate data centers. 00:00 Weekend recap 02:40 Cognition hits $1B ARR faster than anyone 06:38 The four eras of AI coding 14:30 Anthropic and OpenAI cut token prices 50% and push their IPOs 21:20 Why frontier coding spend is going to become talent spend 23:27 Crusoe: from Bitcoin mining to a $30.9B Series F 31:10 Why data center backlash is the one bipartisan issue 33:33 The Boom Supersonic deal that fell apart, and does Crusoe get the check This episode is brought to you by Kalshi, where the pod is watching the odds on whether Anthropic IPOs this year or gets pushed to 2027. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.