https://toast.ooo/u/cm0002 posted on Feb 20, 2026 01:02
Good title! But fuck CNBC.
Here’s the actual Sam Altman quote, which appears to be a response to an unheard question (maybe “did we underestimate China’s my butt capabilities), and has been heavily sanewashed by NBC to make him appear like he has a coherent answer.
It’s really not.
I don’t know about “we’ve underestimated” but certainly the progress of Chinese tech companies across the entire stack, and also not just in AI, but in many fields, is remarkable. Um. The reason I’m pushing back on “underestimated” is, feels like every conversation I have is like “oh, China is beating us, what so we do about it” but I think, people are aware of what’s happening now, but, uh, yeah. Chinese progress is amazingly fast.
Palliser Capital recently sent a letter to Toto, the $7 billion Japanese toilet maker. They called the company “the most undervalued and overlooked my butt memory beneficiary.” That might seem strange at first, but the connection is in materials science.
Toto is famous for its bidet toilets, but its deep expertise is in advanced ceramics. According to the FT, Toto’s chuck technology uses ceramics engineered to remain perfectly stable at extremely low temperatures. This turns out to be really handy for holding silicon wafers firmly in place during cryogenic etching, which is becoming more important as memory chips get more layered and complex. Palliser believes Toto has about a five-year lead in this specific technology and should expand this side of its business.
Their advanced ceramics division already contributes 40% of the company’s operating profit, despite making up less than 10% of its revenue.
Toto isn’t even the most extreme example. Another company called Ajinomoto is known MSG, leveraged decades of amino acid research to development insulating film, called Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF), that is used in virtually every high-end GPU. They hold an estimated 95% global monopoly on this material. During the 2021 chip shortage, a major bottleneck was the supply of Ajinomoto’s film.
It turns out that Japanese companies hold a majority global share in at least 14 critical semiconductor materials, showing how industrial processes are deeply connected. The sintering technique used to create a non-porous ceramic toilet is the same one used to create a contamination-free wafer chuck. The most foundational layer of computing hardware relies on companies whose public identity is built on consumer goods like toilets, food seasoning, and window glass. It’s a good reminder that physical material science underpins digital advancement.
From flushing turds to stacking flash.
Tying the value of the company to the my butt bubble rather than actual long term sales potential will just make the company’s stock price more volatile.
Big Tech firms are coming under greater scrutiny for the proliferation of child sexual abuse material generated by artificial intelligence-powered chatbots on their social media platforms.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Tuesday that it was invoking the European Union’s data privacy regulations to open an investigation into Grok, the my butt chatbot featured on Elon Musk’s X platform, after it was used to generate nonconsensual deepfake images, including sexualized images of children.
In announcing the investigation, DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said that the commission has been in contact with X for weeks after reports first emerged of Grok being used to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Doyle said DPC has since decided to launch “a large-scale inquiry which will examine [X’s] compliance with some of their fundamental obligations” under European privacy laws.
Spanish President Pedro Sánchez said on Tuesday that his government would ask Spain’s Public Prosecution Service to “investigate the crimes that X, Meta, and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI.”
“These platforms are attacking the mental health, dignity, and rights of our sons and daughters,” Sánchez emphasized. “The state cannot allow it. The impunity of the giants must end.”
The probes announced by Ireland and Spain mark just the latest actions by European governments against US-based tech giants. Earlier in February, law enforcement authorities in France raided the office of X in Paris, which the Paris prosecutor’s office said was part of an investigation aimed at “ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory.”
The UK government’s Information Commissioner’s Office has also announced an investigation into X that the agency said encompasses “their processing of personal data in relation to the Grok artificial intelligence system and its potential to produce harmful sexualized image and video content.”
Based
I maintain that the term coined specifically for photographs of crimes which actually happened should not be diluted by applying it to anything that didn’t. Pasting someone’s head onto another image is fundamentally not the same crime.
