ES Evangelos Simoudis On The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

“The way I put it is that the public shareholders buy economics, whereas they do not buy control. And that is very different from what we've seen in the past.”

The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

Context

The host raised a point from Anthropic's S-1: the co-founders together control a majority of the vote. The guest agrees this is unusual for public-market investors.

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Transcript

The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica Around 22:11 into the episode

Evangelos Simoudis

Yeah. So, again, I think we need to keep monitoring what's happening in the broader community as opposed to just in one of the new labs. Go ahead.

Ben Lorica

…control through a class of shares. So, in this case, the seven co-founders control 50.1% of the vote, which I thought their brand was to, I guess, their brand is, you know, we're going to shepherd AI to safety. So, we're the right seven people to do that. So, we should have control, right? So,

Evangelos Simoudis

I agree with your concern. I mean, the way I put it is that the public shareholders buy economics, whereas they do not buy control. And that is very different from what we've seen in the past. Exactly. Yeah,

Ben Lorica

yeah, yeah, yeah. What about so? I brought this up earlier, but partners who are also rivals, right? Exactly. I agree.

Evangelos Simoudis

I agree. Particularly.

Ben Lorica

Amazon, Microsoft.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

“Those companies will come to their next round of funding and need to show they have been meeting the claims they were making before. I think a lot of investors, both existing and prospective, are going to be disappointed at what will be posted. And I think we will have a crisis around that. Whether NVIDIA will be able to backstop everything, I do not know.” — Evangelos Simoudis, The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

“People always say the open weights models are just distilling the proprietary models. But as long as the proprietary models keep improving, the open weights models are going to improve. The analogy I've come to like is water skiing. A water skier is being pulled by a speedboat. The skier can go as fast as the speedboat, or maybe even faster, but can never get ahead of the speedboat.” — Ben Lorica, The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica