China’s Kimi K3 beats Anthropic, Stripe bids for PayPal, Chai Discovery raises $400M

<p>In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down three stories. Thinking Machines been relatively quiet for the last year and finally shipped their first model, Kimi K3 is higher than Anthropic and OpenAI on certain benchmarks, reigniting the debate that Chinese open source may beat American frontier AI. Also, Stripe's rumored bid for PayPal, and Chai Discovery's Series C. Maya spent all night texting the group chat about why Chai would not get her check.</p><p>They start with the model drops. Thinking Machines finally shipped its first model, two years after Mira Murati left OpenAI to start it. It doesn't beat Fable 5 or Mythos on benchmarks, and they've said as much, but it's a generalist model built to be fine-tuned. It could beat Nemotron to become the leading US open source model. The cool part: audio and vision tokens live in the same learned space as text, so no more constantly re-releasing encoders every time the base model updates.</p><p>Then comes Kimi K3, which shocked the market. It's the first open source Chinese model in the conversation of actually being ahead of the frontier labs, beating Fable 5 on front-end coding. The hosts talk about Dean Ball's controversial tweet with 10M views calling an open-weight-dominant world "AI communism." Tune in to hear why the pod thinks no US enterprise touches Kimi until the White House stops hinting at a ban.</p><p>Next, the pod gets into Stripe and Advent's reported $53B offer for PayPal, a 28% premium that would create a $3.7T payment processor. Maya (a former Stripee) explains why acquiring anyone is deeply off-brand for Stripe, and why the 430 million PayPal consumers are the real acquisition. Plus the girls recap the infamous PayPal mafia origin story, and what Revlon's law is.</p><p>Finally, Chai Discovery and its $400M Series C. Anika and Maya go at it this segment. Chai's models take pre-clinical drug discovery from one to two years down to four to eight weeks, with an 80-90% phase one success rate. Maya's bearish: pharma companies are basically hedge funds, phase one isn't the real bottleneck (picking phase two candidates is), and she thinks their SaaS biz model doesn't survive long term. Anika fully disagrees and would write a check right now..unfortunately they haven’t asked her to join the cap table (yet??).</p><p>This episode is brought to you by Kalshi, the prediction market the girls are always tracking. Kalshi has markets on IPOs, acquisitions, and more right now, so if you've got takes on whether Stripe actually lands PayPal, check the odds. Sign up at <a href="http://kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheckkalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck</a> and get $10 when you trade using our code.</p><p>Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.</p><p><strong>Chapters</strong></p><p>00:00 Maya doesn’t want to text Anika01:15 The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, no spoilers ofc02:22 Maya's almost gets mogged…sorry mugged at a cabin07:04 Intro08:41 Thinking Machines finally drops a model19:40 Kimi K3 shocks the market25:57 Is an open-weight world "AI communism"28:38 The Kimi K3 ban rumors31:01 Stripe and Advent's $53B bid for PayPal34:45 The real reason Stripe wants to do this deal36:38 The PayPal mafia origin story39:55 Revlon's law on board acquisition decisions42:10 Advents sneaky ploy to cut out Visa and Mastercard42:53 Chai Discovery's $400M Series C43:50 Why transformer architecture is good at drug discovery45:32 The phases of a drug trial46:22 Maya's bearish on Chai Discovery49:15 What Chai has actually proven so far50:10 Why pharma desperately needs its next revenue stream51:26 Why Anika is bullish on Chai Discovery54:35 Anika and Maya argue over Chai Discovery…</p>