Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching DBPN. We're bigger today. And it's Wednesday, 01/28/2026. We are live from the DBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com, baby.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Say both. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:Will? I
Speaker 2:Yeah. Am Oh, yeah. Wearing a sample today New
Speaker 1:new fence.
Speaker 2:Of this new ramp quarter zip. Mhmm. You'll notice here, I included a little pocket here for your ramp card. It's just right here, always close, right over your Right over your heart. Excited to get this one out in the world very soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This will be fun. I wrote about Netflix. There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Strathecari and Netflix co CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Strathecari interview. And they go back the only mention of AI in, like, an hour long interview or something, it's just two little exchanges.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson says, is AI slop going to save you if it overwhelms the UGC platforms? And basically, it's like you're a refuge. So this is actual. This is real. And Greg Peters just says, I think it's credible.
Speaker 1:I don't know if that's the reality, so I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible possibility. So he's like, maybe that's a bull case for me. Maybe that's a bull case. It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been trading down over the last couple months, but in general, it's up.
Speaker 1:I think it's four x up since the launch of ChatGPT, and is generally near all time highs, like the business is doing very well. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue, how will AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood. I mean, was I was reflecting on the Avengers. When did the when did Infinity War come out?
Speaker 1:Infinity War. That was, what, 2018? I just remember seeing maybe it was even in in one of the first ones. But the whole the whole CGI process for Thanos, he has this like very distinct large chin. So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos.
Speaker 2:Is he a mauger?
Speaker 1:He is a mauger. He has this huge chin. This it's actually like
Speaker 2:He's kind of like the OG.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It looks like chin implants. It's kinda crazy, but it has these, like, cracks in it, and it it has this, like, very distinct look, Thanos. And normally, the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face, and then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face. I think it's a I don't know what type of camera, but it tracks all the points.
Speaker 1:So when you smile, like, it sees that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling, and then that facial movement is transferred. So they're recording the lines, they're acting it out, they're giving their facial performance, and then that's transferred all the little subtleties of how eyebrows move all of that is transferred to the CGI character. It can look a little flat, though. So what they did with this is they still have all the points on the face, but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face into a higher res model. Yes.
Speaker 1:Don't read that. Don't read that. Don't read that. But but it is a good point.
Speaker 2:I wasn't even reading the chat. I didn't even see that Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of that.
Speaker 2:I was just looking at this absurd picture.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It is an absurd So all of those are tracking markers. And then the question is, like, you have a much higher resolution CGI model. If you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like and the way it moves. And so Digital Domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight up machine learning pipeline.
Speaker 1:Like, used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model. It wasn't an LLM. But they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots, to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018, the movies.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you didn't see any of these movies, but I I don't remember, like, AI backlash. My my prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed. So but but truly, like, I I mean, people people did make the, oh, it's too CGI. The the explosions are too crazy. It's too over the top.
Speaker 1:But in general, people weren't up in arms about, like, a use of AI or use of tomb. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic. This is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie. Like, we're fine with all this, and there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of, like, AI tool.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property. But the the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry, and it will continue to be used. Interestingly, I talked to Jason Carmen about The Carmenator. The Carmenator about using AI tools in filmmaking because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And I was like, certainly, if you need to rotoscope out a background so rotoscoping is where you are basically using like you're cutting out like a subject from the background and then just doing like a background replacement.
Speaker 1:That's an example of rotoscoping. But it's over motion, so it's moving. So you need to track the hand here, move it over here, track it again, track it again. And it can be very, very time consuming. Typically, is offshore to like a BPO, and then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it, and they have some software that's used.
Speaker 1:But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one shot. He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver. He wanted to deliver in four k. And so he went to a team. They I think he paid him a fortune.
Speaker 1:They did it. And and and when they when they rotoscope a head, they actually, like, draw new hairs on to, like, kinda create this. It's very, like, artisanal still. But, obviously, AI can rotoscope. You see it in the the CapCut edits
Speaker 2:and Where's the rotoscoping NeoLab?
Speaker 1:It's actually Runway. We've had Cristobal on the show. And pre ChatGPT, Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple dots AI on what you wanted to keep, and then add and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out, and it would sort of use that as an intuition for the model to drop out the background. And you could do a really, really clear cut this person out of this video just in Runway. And now that's available in CapCut and edits, and that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where you'll see the f one driver standing up, and then it'll drop out the background and cut in a different background, and then the f one driver drops out.
Speaker 1:And it's like this very, like Mhmm. Schizo edit. It's a really cool technique. Yeah. You can see is this runway's edit editing tool.
Speaker 1:So it it basically draws a mask around it. You just highlight like what do you want to actually rotoscope. This is an example of like motion, adding motion to video, but like you're you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste. Quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations.
Speaker 1:If you want to multistream, go to restream.com.goat. So like, I don't think Netflix should take a hard line stance on AI broadly because they want to use AI tools. Obviously, they've been using AI for recommendations forever. The original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine learning models, and that's how you open up Netflix and says, we think this would be good for you based on what you watched. And it is much more nuanced than just, if you like, you know, k pop demon hunters, we're gonna recommend Squid Game next.
Speaker 1:Like, is it is machine learning. And so many of these rote tasks will be AI enabled, and they already are. And there's not gonna be I don't think there'll be a crazy pushback here, although it's possible that there's some sort of, you know, comms mishap if especially if a if a director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI. But there's a VFX house that, when the motion capture stage, did use AI to up res Yeah. Motion capture data.
Speaker 1:Like, you could see AI being used in matte painting for the background, and the director doesn't even know because they just said, like, yeah, the background, just make the forest a little bit bushier. And they think that they're hand painting it. After that, they were using CGI and three d modeling it. Now they're using AI. And that sneaks in, and then all of a sudden, they face some backlash.
Speaker 1:But I don't think that's I I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that that big of a deal. The bigger question is, like, how does Netflix position itself against YouTube Yeah. And the UGC platforms? This is what we're So talking Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI, and I liked his stance.
Speaker 1:He was like, we're not gonna throw an AI tag on everything. We're gonna let you use AI tools right in the Shorts Creator. We have v o three. We're we're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this, and and the algorithm will sort out if you like it.
Speaker 1:And if you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff. But for the people that like that, they will be served it. But it's a it it it is it is sort of a balancing act, and there's definitely this, like, stated preference for like, I don't want any AI on my platform. Now, how real is that? We'll see.
Speaker 2:And what we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision, the bigger just like, the decision that's bigger than just like, Are we going sort of lean into AI or not Mhmm. Will just really be, do we have does Netflix ever lean into UGC? Right? They've been signing some bigger podcasts Yes. And they obviously work with independent media companies Yep.
Speaker 2:But there's a very big difference between just allowing people to like, will they ever have an upload button? Feels like no. Yeah. And I feel like that could end up being their advantage Yep. Where where there is part of what may has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody could go and put YouTube, you know, upload a video.
Speaker 2:Anybody could be a creator. Yeah. And I think, like, as the amount of content that gets created Yeah. 1,000 x's, thousand x's Mhmm. Because of AI, it's gonna be yeah.
Speaker 2:Netflix could be this, like, refuge where you're like, okay. At least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free for all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than, like, AI on Netflix. Exactly. That's I I think that's a very good thesis.
Speaker 1:Quickly, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 3:What's
Speaker 1:that? Someone was asking in the chat about the linear lineup, of course. It's pulling up. Linear's the system for modern software development. 7770% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and we have a great show.
Speaker 1:Mark Gurman's coming in person.
Speaker 4:Miles The Gurmanator.
Speaker 1:In person. And then we have an amazing lightning round coming up. And I think we got a surprise guest on two from
Speaker 2:Yeah. For Voyager.
Speaker 1:And then Alex Mitchell and Gabriel.
Speaker 2:Gabe from Rogo. Super excited for that one.
Speaker 5:It's fun.
Speaker 1:So back to Netflix and YouTube. So YouTube has been on an absolute tear. In terms of watch time on TVs, according to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in The US for nearly three years. And so this has been the backbone of the case for, like, let Netflix buy Warner Bros, even though they'll get HBO Max. Like, you're merging two seemingly big streaming platforms, but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube.
Speaker 1:So should be fine from a regulatory perspective. But the bigger question is like, there's this gap between Netflix and YouTube. And at the start, back in I mean, Netflix is almost 30 years old, YouTube's over 20 at this point. In 2005, like, were seen as, like, wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail, and the other one was, like, a video of a guy going to the zoo on his on his, like, VHS camera.
Speaker 1:They felt extremely separate, and they felt extremely separate for for years and years and years. Now they are starting to converge, especially around around video podcasts, feel like. I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting Yep. Because the the podcast was, I think, invented by Apple or
Speaker 2:Yeah. When I started doing any work with Yeah. YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly, like, this these were just different types of Yeah. Creators.
Speaker 1:Totally. And
Speaker 2:then there was a big shift. Yeah. It was like, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table. Yeah. I'm not uploading to YouTube.
Speaker 2:And that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Yeah. There was the pivot to video. And then Spotify went really big into video podcasting.
Speaker 1:They went on it. I I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Ek really did around podcasting. So seven years ago in 2019, they acquired three companies, Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast.
Speaker 2:Anchor's Mike Yeah. From Lightspeed's company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, all three very interesting. Anchor's more of like a product. Parcast had a bunch
Speaker 6:of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast. Yep. Because it's still like a lot of people were Yeah. There it was it wasn't like it was impossible to figure out, but there was quite a bit of friction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and they knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast wanted to distribute it everywhere, but they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well, so that did very well. Then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people, even some of the royals also signed a deal. Forget who they are. But they spent a ton of money trying to get into podcasting.
Speaker 1:I think they were successful. We see a ton of audience on Spotify.
Speaker 2:Interesting the timing. Apparently, was, somebody sent me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You saw that chart.
Speaker 2:Jeremy shared this with us.
Speaker 7:And That's a crazy chart.
Speaker 2:It actually fully retraced to now. There's, like, sub sub 50,000 a year. That feels like
Speaker 1:How is
Speaker 2:you would really have to may maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is. Sure. But either way, there was Yeah. If you look at the chart, it looks like there was like, an insane bull market Yeah. In podcasts and then a huge correction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID. I mean, we talked to the folks that acquired about that, and they said that during COVID, they saw a huge spike in people, like, just going for walks, throwing on Air AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time AirPods were getting to, like, mass adoption. We were just throwing on podcasts constantly, and it really, really grew.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. There is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough of YouTube getting sloppier by the day, that Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two. So I think of Netflix and YouTube as starting out extremely separate, then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I mean Portnoy and Bill Simmons, both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Isn't their deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And the audio is still elsewhere, which
Speaker 1:is Why do you remember that? Because Portnoy drilled it into your head. Said, if you want video, Netflix. Netflix. Netflix.
Speaker 1:Video, Netflix. Barstool video, Netflix. And and it's true. Like, that and so I would think of Barstool, like, if I'm trying to watch a Barstool YouTube video or a podcast, I would just go to YouTube. Right?
Speaker 1:Now Netflix is getting into that. So the so the gap between Netflix and and YouTube is getting, like, pretty narrow. Like, they're they're becoming competitors. But there's this question on the AI issue. Do they diverge more, and is that valuable?
Speaker 1:The pure AI feeds, like SOAR and Meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. I think SOAR is around sixty, seventy point ranking. But, like, it's still too early to call that because the quality will get better and better. The audio is still very, like, clockable when you you hear it. And there's a lot to be done there.
Speaker 1:But the struggle will be to create, like, unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated. I I still feel like the the K pop demon hunters moment, the Squid Game moment, the Alex Honnold Taipei one zero one moment, these live events, these, like, key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the the Warner Brothers acquisition is, you know, people still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place there, that's way easier than well, I did I I I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a t shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that?
Speaker 1:AI Slop Man? I'm not a fan of that. Like Batman. Slop Man. So there are there are some things that will, like, remain remain true.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean, about the upload button, it's almost better to think about Netflix less as being AI free and more about being UGC free. They're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on thirty years in the business. The AI tools will come. Some fully AI generated content will come, but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think that that's important for a lot of viewers.
Speaker 1:Anyway
Speaker 2:Well said.
Speaker 1:Me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector in full text search, built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on The Middle East?
Speaker 2:According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the crown prince's economic overhaul.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I saw this headline and was deeply concerned. I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole build out? We were kind of counting on you guys to be quite liquid while the rest of us over here in America are levering up. Seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. This had been reported since back in October, and we can get into it a little bit.
Speaker 2:They're also raising from they've been raising tried to raise money from the Qataris. Okay. They apparently asked for something like $10,000,000,000 from the Qataris and The UAE. Qataris threw in 10b. Okay.
Speaker 2:Allegedly, The UAE did not. And there's around that.
Speaker 1:I thought
Speaker 5:you were gonna
Speaker 1:say they threw in the Qataris threw in 10B, Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it.
Speaker 2:Time to re up. Time to re as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1,000,000,000,000 wealth fund called for more collaboration on deals, the people said, asking not to be identified. Government entities including the Ministry of Investment have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses according to some of the people. Local families are being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom, they added.
Speaker 1:Years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf nation's ability to bankroll expense expansive projects planned under the $2,000,000,000,000 Vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the twenty twenty nine Asian Winter Games, and the government had previously pared back spending on other elements of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a winter game. That seems extremely expensive to host a winter games in Saudi Arabia, if that's what's going on.
Speaker 2:They have don't they have some They
Speaker 1:have mountains there? I don't know. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to yeah. I know that they have some stuff indoors, and I guess you can just do everything indoors. But again, that feels expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the As opposed
Speaker 1:to like, go just go to Russia and walk anywhere and you can ski.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they they have been developing something with Neom.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They're they're pivoting city. Right?
Speaker 2:Which is also, I guess, in the process of Yeah. Pivoting.
Speaker 1:Before we move on, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1:So fam the number of family offices in The Middle East in 2019, 250. 2024, two ninety. Now we're up to three ten, and the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices. There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable, so the chief executive officer of the National Center for Family Business in Riyadh.
Speaker 1:These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy, and close to 95% of private businesses in The kingdom are family owned. Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Of these, many groups are only just starting to form family offices as they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations. That makes both established and new family offices a prime target for more investment.
Speaker 1:They're naturally looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface. In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices. That includes private credit, an industry in its infancy in The kingdom as overstretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment. Not expansive.
Speaker 1:Not not expanding, Exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses, and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi diversification agenda, but they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.
Speaker 2:Well, we gotta bring somebody on to Yeah. Discuss. Learn more about this.
Speaker 1:And I will tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries, and more with damn great customer service.
Speaker 2:Shaco says Yes. You're bearish on the US dollar, the token used to buy AKI products. Bold. That's really good. Yes.
Speaker 1:The US dollar is all over the place. Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal hoard. I did not see this. This is interesting. There are roughly three three hundred and seventy thousand nuclear bunkers in Switzerland.
Speaker 1:That's so many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used, one of them though is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high security vault owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings S. A, which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states.
Speaker 1:Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global global gold market, the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never before seen highs above 5,200. Now it was 5,000 yesterday on the cover of the journal. Gold is on an absolute tear. And yet relative relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC Holdings last year, the industry was abuzz about gossip whether about where they would head next.
Speaker 1:Few guests few guests that the answer was Tether. In an interview with Bloomberg chief executive Paolo Adorno, set described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold backed alternative to the dollar. Interesting. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world.
Speaker 1:Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative. Right? EGold, even before Bitcoin?
Speaker 2:Well, was eGold actually gold backed?
Speaker 1:I think that was the whole pitch. It was, yeah, it was it was it was trying to be digital gold, and I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was
Speaker 2:very early, late Yeah. Tether Tether has a scale now. They they also launched their US focused stablecoin this week to compete with USDC. Yeah. The new token known is known by its ticker USAT.
Speaker 2:It's being issued by Anchorage. Mhmm. We I think we had the CEO of Anchorage on it at one point. Yeah. Maybe it was really quick.
Speaker 2:Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tethr's mainstay, 106 a 186,000,000,000 USDT stablecoin will do the same for the new coin as its designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. So USAT is already available for trading as of yesterday. So we'll see. We'll see. It would it would it would be interesting if, like, at what point does USDT de peg Yeah.
Speaker 2:Upward if gold keeps ripping, right?
Speaker 1:Does I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of Tether? I think that's not what the product is. I I think, like, the Tether stock would own the treasury.
Speaker 2:Sure. But historically, when you when you saw a stablecoin Yeah. Like DPEG, it was based Yeah. On concerns around the
Speaker 1:But I think that the contract is that they will they'll never give you more than a dollar. So it
Speaker 2:would No. I know. I know. But Yeah. But I'm just saying, like, stranger things have happened in crypto where No.
Speaker 1:It's always been a very profitable company. So certainly certainly bullish for them. Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Banta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:There's one funny quote in here. So Tether makes its money from its dollar stablecoin that is the giant of the sector with a 186,000,000,000 in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest and trading profits. Processing the physical metal is crucial, Adorno said, so much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker in Switzerland guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says, it's a James Bond kind of place.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. That's a great quote to give Bloomberg. It's just like James Bond. The secretive nature
Speaker 2:of another another Yes. CEO.
Speaker 1:This is a positive this is a positive reference. It's okay. If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy. The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more.
Speaker 1:Such is the scale of Tether's disclosed purchases that some market watchers have pointed to their role in shifting global prices. The purchases likely contributed to gold's 65% rally last year, Jefferies said, describing Tether as a significant new buyer which could drive sustained gold demand. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than a 150 1,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market. Do you think, you know, a the the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold spiking?
Speaker 2:We'll see. I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically
Speaker 1:Because of the tariffs.
Speaker 2:Twenty twenty twenty twenty one era. Mhmm. But I definitely I mean, you gotta be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Gold watches and other precious metals
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just given that your input costs are are going. You know, I'm sure they have like one or you could imagine one or two years worth of Yeah. Of of supply. Yeah. So they're not they they can be somewhat insulated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Price prices will go up or at least costs will go up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. I heard a very funny a very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex, and he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he's saying that like
Speaker 2:This was army army
Speaker 1:I think it's army hammer. He's saying
Speaker 2:It's like obscure It's such a situation.
Speaker 1:Such a funny situation. But he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of a building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you, someone shows up with a helicopter, and they're gonna save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is, and they know that that's valuable. If you're
Speaker 2:You're not gonna have time to be like, no.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:FB. It's a
Speaker 1:it's a Patek. Know? Let me explain high horology.
Speaker 4:Here's here's Here's the term prices.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always gonna trade, and now it's probably gonna trade even higher.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, Cisco. On February 3, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of AI and the economy. See
Speaker 2:you there.
Speaker 1:The whole thing will be livestreamed and will be there for a giga
Speaker 2:stream. Paula says SF Escape Room called the permanent underclass, and it's just a room with a laptop and Claude code installed.
Speaker 1:How are you? There's something here that's funny.
Speaker 2:So good.
Speaker 1:Have you ever done an escape room?
Speaker 2:No. I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun, nor thought that I would I I this is how I wanna kill time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have you are
Speaker 1:you I'm in not into them, but I've done them and they're fun. Sometimes it depends on like if it's a well structured one. But I like puzzles. Like it's fun. It's like a fun puzzle to figure out.
Speaker 1:But you can very quickly get caught in like just like overthinking what's going on and being like, oh, it must be some like complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like press this lever instead of like analyze the situation or something.
Speaker 2:Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? Because I imagine you could just say I imagine there's only
Speaker 1:Take a picture.
Speaker 2:There's probably only
Speaker 8:No. It's solved. Is it
Speaker 1:like a
Speaker 4:series of rooms that
Speaker 1:you're Yeah. Well, usually, you you start in one room. They're all different. But oftentimes, you'll start in one room, and then you'll there'll be a series of puzzles, locks and keys and whatnot. And then oftentimes, like, you'll unlock something, and then you'll progress to another room, and then you'll progress to a third room, and then you'll finally get out of, like, a series room.
Speaker 1:Because it's a lot of, like they're pretty easy to set up in sort of, like, a defunct office space or, like, you know, storefront that's just kind of, like, you know, going in between. It's like the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate. Like, you just you like, anyone can come in and just say, like, oh, we'll be in there for, like, couple months. It's not super permanent. The build out's pretty simple.
Speaker 1:It's mostly just like some some walls and decorations and like some creativity on the on the the the puzzle side.
Speaker 2:Trey says, can Yeah. You guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends?
Speaker 1:I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room. I think most of them, they aim for like forty five minutes.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe we need to make one.
Speaker 1:One of our guests had to leave the Ultra Dome and go straight to an escape room. So, you know, there's the the the there are escape room fans among the TVPN army all over the place. Have you done one, Tyler?
Speaker 3:I have not.
Speaker 1:Are you interested in it? You're a speed cuber, so, you know Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, it could be fun. I don't know. Yeah. I'm kind of in the Geordie camp though. I've just like never
Speaker 1:Yeah. Been super It's it's very like I don't know. Maybe it's great with it's probably great with like kids who are maybe like eight to 10 who can do the puzzles, like family event would be fun. And then it was it was a common thing like when when they came out, was definitely like a boom in, like, in escape rooms.
Speaker 2:Bobby in the chat says escape room would be a good benchmark for AI. Yeah. Certainly certainly a humanoid.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, you can go in there, take pictures, and be like, help me solve this. Help me solve this. Help me solve this. Like, wait
Speaker 2:I know. But I wanna I wanna see a humanoid run through it.
Speaker 1:Let's call one x. See what they can do. Call any of them.
Speaker 2:Hit them up.
Speaker 1:Figma. Figma make isn't your average by coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. Moving on. Lots of reaction to Claude Bot.
Speaker 1:Very much enjoyed our our interview with the creator of Claude Bot, now Molt Bot yesterday.
Speaker 2:One of Yeah. Yeah. Incredibly, he had some wild lines but incredibly refreshing kind of conversation Totally. Viewpoint. Totally.
Speaker 2:Just totally counter to the entire philosophy that I feel like a lot of people, at least on the West Coast Yeah. Are in the way that they're approaching AI right now and the way that America is approaching AI. He's like, we asked, you know, you think somebody will, like, you know, fork what you're doing or clone it? And he's like, yeah, I'm sure they will. Like, I don't care.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm building this for myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's like, I have enough I have enough money. Yeah. He's like, I'm I'm super it's gonna be really fun to to follow along. I have a feeling that he's just gonna keep launching a bunch of random projects because he clearly is just in it for the love of the But I do hope that I do hope that he can get a lot more resources Yeah.
Speaker 2:And really scale up I don't
Speaker 1:know the operation. Don't know that he needs more resources. Like, he has more agents and whatnot. Like, the the interesting thing about Claude Bot as a product is you you you download it from GitHub, it installs, and it's it it it has all these different integrations, and it does something that's very complex, and it has, you know, all this safety text and different there's a website, and there's community page, and all of that feels like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is like a 10 person start up. They probably worked on this for a year. But it's like, no. It's one person, and it's like three months because the guy is, you know, using agents. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You would think that he would build he his his big complaint was the security Yeah. Inbound security Yeah. Researchers asking him stuff. Yeah. It's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Bought.
Speaker 1:Bought it. I I I think I think he will. He should. But, yeah, there's He a of
Speaker 7:said he posted December 26. He he had his, like, Codex, like, dashboard up. Mhmm. So he said he he's done 250,000,000,000 tokens, which is, like, probably top 10 Codex users Wow. Apparently from from Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Yeah. I I I don't know that he needs way more resources. I mean, he should be able to to to get donations if he needs them, get credits or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Like, the the the financial strain on that business does not seem it seems like it's more constrained by his ideas, you know, how he's thinking about designing the system, integrating things, rolling it out. Buddy of mine, Michael Yeah.
Speaker 2:Watched the interview, and and he said that he he's had Claude Bot set up. He set it up right at the January and was initially, like, just kind
Speaker 1:of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Got a little frustrated using it, but has now got it, he's got it set up so that it's able to make phone calls on his behalf. Specifically wants to get, Hillstone reservations. Yeah. So he can just, like, basically
Speaker 1:Wait. What's Hillstone?
Speaker 2:Restaurant.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he's just like gonna use it to start getting like reservations at different restaurants.
Speaker 1:It's so funny. Google has a product for that that does an AI phone call, but for some reason, it just hasn't really rolled out or it just hasn't gotten to like adoption. I don't know. There's some sort of there's some sort of like Yeah. Memetic, like, I think people seeing the clip where he's like explaining how he's feeling the AGI really, really hit people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He also said he's
Speaker 2:he's has it make him a daily brief Yeah. That feeds into an RSS like on a podcast. So in the morning, he can just Really? Listen to like a five minute podcast on like what his day is like Yeah. Things that he should be responding to kind of like a it seems like you could have
Speaker 1:podcast a more ever. Your enemy texted you something, and and you will be you will be deeply upset when you see what happened. Everyone's praying on your downfall. No. No.
Speaker 1:Security is important with with Claude Bot, now Molt Bot. CrowdStrike is also important. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:And so A random 10 person team in Paris just dropped what looks like
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It looks like an eve something superior to Clawbot according to Chubby on X. It's called Twin, the AI company bill builder.
Speaker 1:Hugo. Mercier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They raised a $10,000,000 seed round. Yeah. They have over a 100,000 agents deployed.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So Tyler, give it a spin. Check it out. Twin lives.
Speaker 1:There's a community note on here. This is undisclosed advertisement. But Doug over at Semi Analysis Fabricated Knowledge says, I think that Claude Bot is going to be a moment, and yes, someone's gonna do this. And I I'm still wondering about, like, how quickly a business can actually scale when you're getting constantly hammered with TOS violations from every mag seven legal department constantly. Like, hey.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We noticed that you built a CLI for the web interface on WhatsApp, and we don't want you to do that. And you and it's one thing if it's like an open source repo that people are running themselves and can change and can edit and fix and and tweak versus, like, hey. You're a corporation that we could potentially sue or tie up in litigation or go on a press tour around. Like, there it's just a very different dynamic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the prompt injection risk as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. It's like, does that does that liability fall back on the company that you know? And I I I I'm I'm excited to talk to Mark Gurman about how he's processing this with the with what will happen with Siri, the timelines there, what will be integrated, because Apple and the iOS ecosystem should have a lot of the same functional hooks into these products. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:Remember, we talked about
Speaker 2:this Monday. The the there was a team that built a product which sold to Apple and became Shortcuts.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then they built software applications incorporated in a product called Sky. Yep. And they were prelaunch and OpenAI acquired it.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:It was focused on integrating AI Yeah. Into the operating system. And so you can imagine OpenAI behind the scenes has been cooking on a lot of stuff like this. Yeah. But this isn't the kind of thing that you can just, at OpenAI scale, just say, hey, we're gonna just ship this and see what happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whereas a startup or an open Yeah. Source
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. There there are a lot of people building stuff on MoltBot, around MoltBot, around the concept. Another there's actually someone in the chat that's working on a Claude Bot for the cloud. He says he has a name.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited to learn more about his project. Think his name's Jeff in the chat. Brexton says, Yes, that was fast. Yep, software is cooked, because Kalin Y says, introducing Multbot for Teams, one click connections to all the apps, client side encrypted and builds your Teams memory. Get your Momo is the is the product.
Speaker 1:I wonder like, this feels like almost something where if you've been building a product that's like this, you should potentially reintroduce it on the back of all the Multbot hype. And and, you know, if you're a if you're like a, you know, multi tentacled agent that can touch a lot of different systems, well, we'll put it in terms that people understand and say, hey. Like, this is, you know, this is Claude Bot or Molt Bot for the enterprise, and it has these, you know, functions and these benefits and this security approach. But clearly, a lot of people will be focused on this. Let's click over to rewatching the interview with the Claude Bot creator, Peter Steinberger, because I want to hear about his AGI moment, the AGI achieved moment.
Speaker 1:First, I'm gonna tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses, and then we will play the from Claude Bot Creator. I wanna see
Speaker 5:So in November
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I don't know. You know, I I wake up every day. I'm like, okay. What do I wanna work on now? What would be cool?
Speaker 5:And then they was like, okay. I I wanna check with my computer on WhatsApp because because if my agent's not run is running and then I go to the kitchen, I wanna check up on them. Or, like, I wanna, like, do little prompts. Yeah. So I I just hack together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls Cloud Code, and then returns what Cloud Code returns.
Speaker 5:One shot. Yeah. And it took, like, one hour, and it worked.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 5:was like, oh, okay. That's kinda cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image. Because images are like they often give you so much context, and you don't have to type so
Speaker 1:much. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So I feel like this is, like, one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just, like, make a screenshot so that agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I hacked together images. And then I I was on a trip in Marrakesh with, like, a weekend birthday trip, and I I found myself using this, like, way more than I than I saw, but not for not for programming. It's more like, hey. We are, like there's, like, restaurants because it it it had Google in it, and it it it could figure out stuff.
Speaker 5:And it's like especially when you're on the go, it is, like, super useful. And then I was thinking. I was just sending it a voice message. You know? But I didn't build that.
Speaker 5:There was no support for voice messages in there. So so so the reading indicator came, and I'm like, oh, I'm really curious what's what's happening now. And then for ten seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, how the f did you do that? And it replied, yeah.
Speaker 5:You sent me you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file. There's no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's Opus, so I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to to WAV. And then I wanted to use this, but but didn't have it installed, and there was an install error.
Speaker 5:But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I unresponded. That was, like, the moment where they're like
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's where
Speaker 5:it clicked. These things are, like, damn smart, resourceful beast if you actually give them the power.
Speaker 1:Sure. Beasts.
Speaker 8:App loving.
Speaker 1:The ad at the end. I love it. Yeah. People were reacting to this. People are not are genuinely not ready, says Vittorio.
Speaker 1:Lots
Speaker 2:of calling this CGI. One way one way the reason that I I feel like that is such a powerful moment, and I'm glad that he shared it, is if you give somebody if you give if you're talking with a model Mhmm. And you give it a task Mhmm. And then it just hits a dead end Mhmm. It's just incredibly like, that's sort of like people are very used to that right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's not that it needs to be that way, but it's just kind of like the steady state.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are used to And Like, okay, I I know To
Speaker 2:me, that's the models can do. That's effectively the agent having real agency. Yeah. That makes it an agent. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's saying like, well, didn't know how to do this or I was confused and I tried a number of things until I did I did what you wanted. Right? And that's like what you want out of that's what you want out of a team member. Right? If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task Yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't they don't just try one thing and come back and or just say like, actually can't handle this because the file type's wrong. Yeah. Convert it. Figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like What was your reaction, Tyler?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, it's, like, pretty insane. Definitely it definitely raised my, you know, chance of permanent underclass.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 7:I I you know, it's making me a little worried.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Will Will says it's over. It's over. We need to move, and there are a lot of people quoting this. G Fodor has the Elias or Yudakowsky meme.
Speaker 1:And lots of people here. They lots of people were, you know, interesting that that that he uses codex here. Rune said, codex 5.2 is really amazing, but using it from my personal and not work account over the weekend taught me some user empathy. Lowell, it's a bit slow. Then Yuchen Jin says, every time I ask my OpenAI friend, 'When will you beat Claude at coding?' they say, we already beat them.' I think Sam is realizing speed, not intelligence, is Codex's blocker to a Claude code moment.
Speaker 1:Cerebrus chips, Cerebrus chips might unlock a Codex moment. Yeah, that would be very interesting. And that's one of the like the models are so powerful now that there's so many moments where you know it's going to deliver. It can deliver because it can work around all these problems. But if you're like, I need this done in five minutes, I'll just do it myself.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Like, I 5.2 Pro is like an incredible model, but it just takes like five, six, ten minutes every time you prompt
Speaker 1:it. Totally.
Speaker 8:Because it's
Speaker 7:kind of like thinking or, know Yeah. Deep research type model.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Let me tell you about Labelbox reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's world's leading AI teams. I like the fireworks.
Speaker 1:I like What else is in here? So you already mentioned this, Tyler, but Peter's probably in the top 10 users of Codex at the moment. Over 250,000,000,000 tokens in a a few months is a lot. So how much does that actually cost? That feels that feels like you're up in the hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2:dollars. It here. Yeah? How much does it say? $51,000.
Speaker 1:That's not much. Wow. Yeah. Usage cost and he has a streak going of seventy four days. No days off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So $51,000 for this type of result, pretty remarkable. So where do we move the goalpost now?
Speaker 2:I'm so I'm so
Speaker 1:What what what
Speaker 8:are you gonna have Peter didn't say?
Speaker 1:I know there's gonna be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like, you can't be satisfied.
Speaker 2:Me? Yeah. Me? Yeah. Permanently dissatisfied.
Speaker 2:Well, part of it's a bit.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:But but
Speaker 2:because I have to I have I have I have to provide, like, an alternate Of course. Of course. Opinion. But of course, we have the goalposts. Yes.
Speaker 2:And we have been sitting in one place. But I guess I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product, this novel experience that has taken the world by storm. And how much how much did we know they only spent, you know, a few months on it. Yeah. Much did they actually how many people actually worked on it?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And what was their total how much did they spend in total on tokens? Right? Yeah. Yeah. Because they're spending some with
Speaker 1:You could sort of see that from the GitHub commits. Right?
Speaker 7:You can probably Yeah.
Speaker 2:I for
Speaker 1:some sort of average.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you can do that. But then I mean, just based off the Yeah. It's like, okay.
Speaker 7:$51,000 on 250,000,000,000 tokens.
Speaker 1:And a lot of those tokens are probably using Cloudbot to do things. Right? Not just not just building it. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Or I mean, that was over how many months? Like, all those tokens were not just on Cloudbot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:That was just all of his, like, hundreds of
Speaker 1:And he and he says he talks to Opus four five all the time too, so I wonder what he's what numbers he putting up there. But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions. Like, it's it's it's pretty accessible. I don't know. We need to we need to find a new AGI benchmark.
Speaker 7:Okay. So I I think maybe it's something like this. Right? So I think the main one of the main takeaways I have from this is just that, big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing, right? Yep.
Speaker 7:Like some companies are not gonna like talk to each other. They're not gonna you're not gonna get OpenAI in in WhatsApp, stuff like this. So it really
Speaker 2:But do think they would go so far as to say, we are not gonna allow you to navigate our applications using something like
Speaker 1:I mean, that's literally happening with, like, The New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bot. Like, you can go Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but it's different having your local device being effectively used by Yeah. No. It is Like, the computer just using itself.
Speaker 1:At the same time, if OpenAI has the ChatGPT app right now, you go to the ChatGPT website and you say, hey. I found this I I'm a subscriber to The New York Times, and there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link. Can you open the link and turn into some bullet points for me? It'll just say, no.
Speaker 1:No. No. I can't go over there. Like, they said, don't go. I'm not going.
Speaker 1:Right? Now if I download the ChatGPT app and it's able to run that and maybe The New York Times can't block it, The New York Times still has the ability to like sue OpenAI and like be a headache. So then Yeah. So then they can just say, hey, enforce the same thing.
Speaker 2:About a situation where user, let's say they have a Mac Mini Yeah. They're running Moldbot Yeah. On the computer Yeah. They've given Moldbot Yeah. Their New York Times login Yes.
Speaker 2:So it's fully logged in Yes. And they're paying New York Times subscriber. I I would be I think users would be upset saying, if the New York Times says, we're not gonna allow we're gonna figure out a way to try to Yeah. I don't even know how you would go about trying to actually stop that activity. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But I'm just saying, even even I can imagine users are gonna users are basically gonna demand I I agree. If my data I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud Yeah. I wanna be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into Yeah. Even if I'm not physically present with the I agree. I I agree.
Speaker 2:And so I just I just think it's gonna be a really really really tough argument for some of these larger companies
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To say, you can't you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself.
Speaker 1:Yes. I wanna get Tyler's response, but first I'm gonna tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Tyler, what are you thinking?
Speaker 7:Okay. Yeah. So so I agree. I I think basically what you're describing is that all these companies need incredible deal guys. Right?
Speaker 7:They'll this is whole thesis. Like, the
Speaker 3:the Deal
Speaker 1:guy here.
Speaker 7:The with open source, with this, like, hacker culture, you can kind of always get around these rules. Is it, like, maybe breaking term service like dev? Yes. Definitely. These big companies can't do it.
Speaker 7:They need more deal guys. Right? But it's like hard to find these deal guys. You need the AI to become the deal guy. So you need a Claude Bot deal guy.
Speaker 7:That's the new benchmark.
Speaker 1:That's the new benchmark.
Speaker 7:You're be making deals.
Speaker 1:Okay. Claude AI that can do a deal between two Mag-seven companies. Here we go.
Speaker 2:There go. Move it to the other side.
Speaker 1:Time to move
Speaker 2:the See you. See you. Tyler,
Speaker 3:why do you
Speaker 2:I kinda wanna take this a little bit further, just because I don't know, like how do you actually enforce this? Is is Google Drive gonna say you need to have your camera on, and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?
Speaker 7:I mean, you you can always do these, like, bot detection stuff with, like, whatever. It's coming from the same IP, these I think it's, like, kind of a constant race. But, like, I think the open source stuff will if you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only only real solution is to have like actual, I think, deals between these like different companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think that if you if you have an app from a big company that enables you to do something, like like like, if if Chrome ship started shipping with a torrent browser, something that would allow you to manage torrents, which are not illegal. Like, that's just software. You can just download torrents that are not piracy. Like, I can just be like, hey.
Speaker 1:I put up a torrent of TBPN content. Anyone can download it. But just by virtue of the fact that it's so prevalently used to pirate media, they would face pressure from media owners, Warner Bros. And Disney, and they would get angry letters, and they would strike a deal and say, okay, yes, like, we're not going to enable this. And so even though so so if if any of the big tech companies launch an app that enables behavior that other apps don't like, they will have leverage.
Speaker 1:And they all have deals together and they all have legal teams and there's a bunch of different pressures that they can apply. And it's this like constant negotiation. Oh, well, you know, maybe we won't renew this deal or this contract. Maybe we'll go with someone else. If you're the bad actor, you'll get pushed out.
Speaker 1:Right? So I don't know. I think it's gonna be a big a big debate. I I I I don't I don't I would be surprised if I if if any of the big labs just launched something that can actually just go and do anywhere and and do anything because the pushback
Speaker 2:But do you think do you think this is something that will like, why would this just not happen at the OS layer?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 7:I mean, that then you need Apple to like actually lock in.
Speaker 1:You do.
Speaker 7:Which is like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or Satya.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's why we're having Mark Gurman on the show to break down Apple's strategy and what they're doing. Anyway, interesting. MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers.
Speaker 1:MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Kimi 2.5 is out and Alex Chima is running it on his desk. He runs at 24 tokens per second with two m three ultra Mac studios connected via Thunderbolt. He went much bigger than the Mac mini. And Joe West By the
Speaker 2:way, apparently, Kimmy likes to be refers to itself as Claude.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What happened to you, Tyler? Can you break down what's going on with Kimi?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, it's always kind of unclear with the Chinese open source models, like, what they're actually doing to train the models. Mhmm. So there's, like yeah. So so when you ask the models, like, introduce yourself, it's like, hello, I'm Claude.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So there's, like, probably, like, two scenarios. One is that they they trained on the outputs of, like, Opus or or Anthropic model. Right?
Speaker 1:You'd think that they would just find and replace in the training data, though. You know? Like, that would be pretty easy to just be like, okay. We're gonna scrape a ton of a ton of responses from Claude. Let's make sure we do a find and replace on Claude so that if it says, hi.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm Claude. I'm a helpful assistant. It just changes that. That's just like an
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, you would expect that that Kimi knows that it's gonna call itself Claude. Yeah. So it's like, why would they allow that? Maybe they're just basically like, mocking
Speaker 1:I guess.
Speaker 7:Anthropic, like, oh, yeah. We have Claude.
Speaker 1:What are gonna do about it?
Speaker 7:Yeah. You're like, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1:We stole Claude.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then there are also some rumors, like, very unclear if this is just, like, completely fake headlines, but, like, maybe there was some leaked checkpoint that somehow got out to China and then they Sure. They did a fine tune on it or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That would be pretty pretty crazy if
Speaker 7:Yeah. People have said it before for other models. Sure. It's I'm not really sure how how reliable they
Speaker 1:are.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But it seems like fairly, very likely that they just trained on Opus outputs. Yeah. Yeah. Because that you kind of people said DeepSeek did that originally with with Chachi BT.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I talked to one one technologist about, like, what what it takes to reverse engineer, like, the g p t four API, and it's it's a surprisingly low amount of outputs to sort of interpolate all the weights or something that approximates it. So it's clearly sort of a sort of a game back and forth. A a yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just like a constant war. There's some
Speaker 7:But I I think it is quite Yeah. I think it's probably a good sign for US AI labs that the Chinese models are essentially just like completely based off The US ones. Like, they're not actually training these models from scratch. Yeah. They're not doing these incredible, you know, training runs for for much cheaper like people say.
Speaker 7:They're actually just they're basically just like copying off off The US.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's because of just chip restrictions or or actual like architectural hurdles?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. It's probably all of them. Yeah. It's faster.
Speaker 7:It's hard to to figure out the architecture. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You don't
Speaker 7:have the chips to to try these like different, you know, science projects, training runs.
Speaker 1:Wow. The the the Chinese models lag by exactly how long it takes to to to scrape the API basically and do a do a fine tune. What a coincidence. That's interesting. Dean
Speaker 2:Paul has been on a tear Yeah. The last twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:That's a good post.
Speaker 2:He said, People significantly underrate the current margins of AI labs, yet another way in which pattern matching to the technology and business trends of the 2010s has become a key ingredient in the manufacturing of AI copium. Copium. And he says
Speaker 1:This Derek Muller post was very informative here. Just look at the market clearing prices on inference from open source models, and you can tell the BigLab's pricing has plenty of margin. DeepInfra has GLM 4.7 at 43¢ in dollar 75 out. SONNET is at $3 in, $15 out. How could anyone think Anthropic isn't printing money per marginal token?
Speaker 1:And Dean Ball says, the reason they think labs lose money is because ten years ago, some companies in an entirely unrelated part of the economy lost money on office rentals, WeWork, and taxis, Uber. Everyone thought they would go bankrupt because at that time another company that made overhyped blood tests, Aronos, did go back did go bankrupt. That is literally the level of ape like pattern matching going on here. The machines must look at our chattering classes and feel great appetite.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You you could also have, like, seen that the margins from the whole OpenCode thing with Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 7:Right? Where there was OpenCode. So Anthropic, they have CloudCode. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You can get the Cloud subscription and you get like free Cloud Code tokens. And then you could use those to auth for OpenCode and they remove that. And the whole reason you would want to do this is because the like Cloud Code tokens versus like actual Cloud API Yeah. Is like 10 x difference.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So there's like a massive markup to the actual API.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So you'd assume that like, unless Anthropic is losing just insane amounts of money Cloud Code, which maybe they're losing some amounts of money, it's like
Speaker 3:Well well, you look
Speaker 2:back at the I forget which interview Dario was doing where he was trying to get people to think about like, you think of each model as a company Yep. Where you spend all this money on training Yep. Which is CapEx Yep. And then when you're actually running the model, it's very profitable. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you look at the business as a whole, you have massive massive losses Yep. From training Yep. And and stock based comp and and, you know, hiring 1,400, you know, of the best engineers in the world. So if you actually look at at on a company, just company wide, you have, you know, continued scaling massive losses.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the important thing is that the effectively at the product level, when they're selling the product, they actually are making money. So
Speaker 1:So in the s one, good to you and to me, looks like training clearly broken out as CapEx, solid gross margins above 60%, something like that on inference. And then, you know, all of the AI copium can probably subside if OpenAI or Anthropic go out with an S1 that shows really solid inference margins. And if it comes out that it's like, oh, their inference margin's like 10% or something, then people are gonna be panicking.
Speaker 2:To be clear, I think these will be some of the most special s ones It's gonna be ever graced The financial the capital markets.
Speaker 1:It'll be great. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Mark Gurman.
Speaker 2:The Gurman here.
Speaker 1:Managing editor of Bloomberg in the UltraDome. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down. Right there? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right here. Okay. We'll have this microphone for you. You have Diet Coke, so you're locked in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're ready to go.
Speaker 1:How have you been? How's your new year going so far?
Speaker 3:Freaking great. Yeah? Yeah. Had a my wife and I had a baby. Think you and last last year.
Speaker 3:Gong. Gong. Gong.
Speaker 2:Big Gong. I need to get one of those
Speaker 3:things that you guys make on the Twitter and Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just me. The card. Baby.
Speaker 4:Baby. Happy to do that.
Speaker 8:We're happy to do it.
Speaker 2:We never we never yeah. We never we never know. Some people some people wanna be, you know, more low key about
Speaker 3:Oh, I am low key about it. I just figured, you know,
Speaker 2:front you. But how do you how do you rate parenthood? How does it, how does it feel being in it versus, you know, all the expectations that that people have?
Speaker 3:It's just taking care of
Speaker 2:this Yeah.
Speaker 3:Individual, and they they're being so reliant on us and Yeah. Getting to to teach them. But shout out to my wife for Yeah. Being the one really Yeah. Pulling the strings there and taking care.
Speaker 3:So it's great. Anyway I
Speaker 2:feel like I feel like reporting and parenthood are especially hard to balance in some ways.
Speaker 3:Still early.
Speaker 2:Well, I would yeah. No. I I would I would just like, obviously, it's completely possible and you're you're clearly doing fine. But the nature of the work means that, a story is happening and you wanna be the first to provide the best coverage. And sometimes, you know There's a baby now.
Speaker 1:It's crying. You. Yeah. You might not be
Speaker 3:able to
Speaker 1:pick up the phone.
Speaker 2:But But you get through.
Speaker 3:You know what? People people have been hearing crying babies over the phone for That's true. For for forever, so they'll have to deal with it. I just can't wait till we go on an airplane.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:I already told my wife, like, yeah, know, we're gonna get, like, banned from American Airlines.
Speaker 2:Like No. I've I've said this on the show before. I I like, the funniest thing is growing up, I assume that when a baby was crying on the airplane, it means that the parents were bad parents. Like, they were doing something wrong.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:And in reality, babies just cry Yeah. For a million reasons and it's totally possible that there's no solution sometimes. They just need
Speaker 1:I saw like an Instagram reel of of a mother talking about her kid and the kid was crying in the background. I was like, why would you take advice from her? Like, that's such a bad bone. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Has nothing to do with that. Not
Speaker 1:at all. It's like now it's like the baby's always crying. It's crazy.
Speaker 3:Hungry. They have gas.
Speaker 1:They don't
Speaker 3:like the sweater they're wearing. There's a
Speaker 1:million reasons.
Speaker 3:You know? They didn't like my article. You know? Like, who knows? But anyways Anyway.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about Apple.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Apple. I mean, we've been talking about new Siri expectations there. The big news yesterday was Claude Bot. Have you been do do you think there's anything about have you been how have you been processing the Claude Bot, now Molt Bot story? What's possible there?
Speaker 1:Expectations around AI assistants feel sky high in the open source community. What do you do you think, like, anyone at Apple's, like, updating on Clogbot and Moltbot and what's possible?
Speaker 3:Well, let me just take a step Please.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, with Apple and AI. Yeah. So in '20 what is it? 2018, they hired John Jean Andrea. He was this high flyer at Google.
Speaker 3:He ran AI and search. And Apple thought they had a coup here. Apple thought they would hire this guy and really just hit the ground running and be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Just seven years earlier, they announced Siri. In 2011, there was absolutely nothing like it.
Speaker 3:It was Breakthrough.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But then
Speaker 3:it just became utter junk. Yeah. Right? Google Assistant lapped it. Alexa lapped it.
Speaker 3:So they thought they were gonna bring this guy in and it'd be a game changer. Turns out, and maybe this will be Tim Cook's fate of Compli, but this was the biggest mistake, this hire of Tim Cook's tenure, I think it's easy to say. Mhmm. Apple is so behind in AI. There has been so much ink spilled on this and so many conversations on this, and I've written about it and talked about it half a million times.
Speaker 3:I think it does you haven't even scratched the surface about how big of a problem this is for Apple. Mhmm. Right? They've completely screwed up AI in every which way, and it comes down to just hiring the wrong people entrusting the wrong people.
Speaker 2:But is it a do nothing win scenario? Because I think we're seeing a situation now where the Mac Mini might end up selling out of Stock
Speaker 1:seems fine. Are you seeing, like, financials?
Speaker 3:Well, stock well, that's the problem. Sure. Right? When you've had no real negative hit
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's hard to
Speaker 2:Go wartime. Go wartime.
Speaker 1:Right? And acknowledge that there is failure because all the numbers
Speaker 6:are full.
Speaker 3:It wartime.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The numbers are great. Tomorrow Yeah. They might report their first 135,000,000,000 to $140,000,000,000 quarter. Right? Like, I don't, know how can you put a $140,000,000,000 and Tim Cook needs to go retire in the same sentence?
Speaker 1:You can.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. But when you think about the long term, you think about the future Yeah.
Speaker 3:These things are are going to need to get rectified. Yeah. And I guess the good news is they are on a path to rectifying it to some extent. Mhmm. This Google Gemini deal is a breakthrough for Apple.
Speaker 3:It's embarrassing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's absolutely crazy Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That You poach their guy, and then years later, you're paying them
Speaker 3:And you're
Speaker 2:paying billions.
Speaker 3:He screws you up. Okay? You pay him 25,000,000 a year for eight years. Right? And then now, you're paying basically four x that, eight x that, maybe a little bit more in order to get, you know, the new good stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so they'll announce a new Siri next month.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The thing with this new Siri is basically a replay of everything they announced in June 2024. Yeah. So it's basically everything they announced two years ago coming very late. Things like using what's on your screen to fulfill Siri queries, being able to control your apps. And then in June is when the good stuff launches.
Speaker 3:That's when Apple launches its first chatbot. It's interesting because they've spent the last two years saying nobody likes chatbots. Everyone hates ChatGPT. It's terrible. It's ruining the world.
Speaker 3:Okay. Then you have ChatGPT with nearly a billion, right, active users. So they're like, okay. We kinda gotta do this or we're screwed. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So they're doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's actually going to run on Google servers, Google Cloud Platform, Google TPUs. Yep. This is great for Google too.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I think some people at Apple think this is going to be like a short term thing. You know, we're gonna partner with Google till we get our act together. No. I definitely think that this is more of a long term play unless these models continue to get commoditized, which they will eventually, but this is not a twelve, twenty four, thirty six month thing. This is this is longer term, I think, than people expect.
Speaker 1:And Apple can't just go wrap llama because of the terms of service that Metis put around put that around. They said you
Speaker 3:can't use they wanna llama. I don't think they wanna work with
Speaker 1:open source models. So there aren't that many games in town.
Speaker 3:Well, let's take a step back here. So they're using Google Yeah. In The US. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:But they're gonna have to do something in China.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And so you'll see them use a combination of Alibaba Uh-huh. And and way I think it's Weibo or Tencent or one of those. Different AIs for different features. Sure. So they'll use them.
Speaker 3:And just because they're partnering with Google Gemini on on Siri in this chatbot, doesn't mean they're not using other players. There's a lot of OpenAI and a lot of applications. They launched their creative cloud competitor Mhmm. Today, and a lot of those AI features are powered by ChatGPT, like some image generation stuff.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:I still think on an image generation side, you're getting a little bit better on OpenAI than you're getting from Google. And then a lot of stuff internally. Like, Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools. So that's a big one to watch.
Speaker 3:They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally too because this Google deal, this just came together a few months ago. They were not going to use Google. Apple actually was going to rebuild Siri around Claude. Mhmm. But Anthropic, they were holding them over a barrel.
Speaker 3:They wanted a crap ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year, and at a price that doubled on an annual basis as well for the next three years or so from what I understand. At the time, Google was really an afterthought because they were in the middle of the trial with the Department of Justice. Yeah. And then, for some reason, the judge ruled that Apple and Google's deal was kosher, even though everyone knows it's a huge issue and a monopoly and all that. I'm not here to be a judge.
Speaker 3:I I write. I don't make judgments for for for legal proceedings. But anyways, Apple and Google get off scot free. Mhmm. They can do whatever they want now and, you know, they're not being held back at all.
Speaker 3:And then obviously, OpenAI, that is a real firestorm for Apple right now. Like, OpenAI, obviously, they're working on these AirPods competitors, the ChatGPT built in. SweetP. Johnny Ive is, you know, running the show and design there. That's a big freaking deal.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Okay? He raided the whole design team, all of the Apple designers that were there under Johnny Ive. Not all of them. 95% of them are gone. You know, ton of them are now working at Love From and OpenAI and other companies.
Speaker 3:Some of them have retired. But the crux of it is, like, how do you partner with a company that's trying to put you out of business? Right? So there's no way that they were gonna work with with OpenAI Sure. No matter how good the
Speaker 2:What do you think about some of the projections that you've seen or or estimates around, I forget. It was Foxconn forty was saying units,
Speaker 1:which
Speaker 2:was Preparing to be able to produce something like that in the first year. It feels like a massive number, but at the same time, you have a billion users.
Speaker 3:Talking about the OpenAI earbuds?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sweet.
Speaker 3:You know, it's so interesting.
Speaker 2:And and one more thing there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The ear the the earbuds, the benefit of them versus some of these other AI hardware is, is, like, if you can just take calls and listen to music, like, already you have some functionality that people are using all day long.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. So it's not the same as, like, wearing a pendant or having some other, little gadget that, like, actually serves no real use case or at least not a powerful use case. If I can just listen to calls or sorry. Take calls, listen to music Mhmm. At least there's, like, some, like, base level functionality, and then you layer on AI, and maybe it turns into this amazing, you know, super differentiated experience.
Speaker 3:I just don't see it. Mhmm. I just don't see them selling 45,000,000 units. Yeah. I just don't see it being a success.
Speaker 3:The barrier to entry for a new hardware company, as you know, is extremely high. Like, can you even think of one hardware company that just came into being and became an immediate success? Like, I just don't see it. And I also think the reason they're doing earbuds is because it's more low hanging fruit, to your point, and it's easier to accomplish. It's not what they wanted to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What OpenAI wanted to do is they wanted to create an iPhone killer.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Instead, now they're trying to create an AirPods killer, and I don't think they're going to be able to accomplish that. Will they look nicer than the AirPods? Probably. Will they have better AI than the AirPods? That's an open question.
Speaker 3:Right? What stops Apple from expanding this Gemini deal to its AirPods and just basically adding a bunch of AI functionality to the AirPods? They have very fast processors, very tight iPhone integration. Apple can replicate whatever OpenAI is going to do pretty quickly by relying on Google and Gemini and whatever they can cook up functionality wise there.
Speaker 2:Do you think that AI, specifically products, you know, that we had the creator of Moldbot on yesterday, he was saying, like, there's so many applications. He was referencing like MyFitnessPal. Do I really need MyFitnessPal if I can just take a picture and just send it in to my agent and track it? And so what I was thinking there is like, does that make the App Store broadly potentially less of a hurdle with OpenAI is launching eventually launches a new phone and they have a new OS and don't have an App Store. They don't have an App Store day one.
Speaker 1:See equivalence of apps on the fly.
Speaker 3:Well, if you ask me, you know, we're already in territory where iOS and the App Store are legacy features. Right? Like, the App Store is a legacy world. The iOS user experience, the macOS user experience where you're jumping between applications, where you're going into something to get information, where you're going back to your home screen to launch another app. Apps are the past.
Speaker 3:AI agents are already here and that's the move forward.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And whenever OpenAI comes out with a phone, I do eventually anticipate them coming out with a phone. And when I say phone, I'm not talking necessarily about something you put to your ear like a classic phone like an iPhone. I'm talking about I feel like people are always gonna have some sort of slab in their pocket. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because it's convenient. You get the display, you get the sensors, you get the battery, get the cameras. It's not a replicable experience no matter how many different gadgets
Speaker 2:like a banana, like a banana.
Speaker 1:It'd be good.
Speaker 2:Smart banana. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That would be fun. Yeah. So, yeah, AI agents are where the the the world is going, and I totally expect Apple to move in this direction.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:This new Siri, Campo, that they're launching at the end of this year, that is a huge step towards the AI agentification of different features on the
Speaker 1:phone. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And being able to, for instance, tell your phone, pull up this photo that I I took at the studio, find photos where I have bottles of water Mhmm. And remove the bottle of water from the from the from the photo, and email or text it to Mark. Right? Like, the AI agentification of iOS is happening. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And theoretically, Siri should have killed like the weather app a long time ago. Yeah. Because I don't like, when you think about like, if you're just gonna navigate to the weather app and you're traveling somewhere and you're like, oh, where is this city? Oh, I don't have it saved.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna search and add it. And then you're, like, finally looking at it, it should just be a prompt
Speaker 1:You sort of have. That you're firing. But then when you try and click a level deeper, when this in the current Siri experience, you just can't
Speaker 3:get there. That is the big problem with Siri and the big difference from ChatGPT and Gemini is it has the going a level deeper problem. Yep. There's no back and forth. Yep.
Speaker 3:It forgets context very easily. Yep.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 3:has no memory. Mhmm. It doesn't have that tight integration with applications because the app developers, they know Siri is so terrible. You know, here's a question. So what if I told you that you could call an Uber with Siri?
Speaker 3:Right? Like, you guys probably know that, but, like, does anyone use it? I don't have the data, but I can tell you that they announced, support for that and they actually rolled out support No. For Ten years.
Speaker 1:Ten years ago.
Speaker 3:Okay? It doesn't work, and no because nobody uses it. You know,
Speaker 1:uses it.
Speaker 3:Too cumbersome.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:K? Like, I'm very tech forward. As anyone watching this probably knows, you know, it's right up my alley to have Siri call my Uber for me.
Speaker 1:But, like,
Speaker 3:I've never done it because you know what? I don't freaking trust Trust
Speaker 1:it. Yep. No. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's not I don't think it's gonna work. Yeah. And it's just going to be a time suck.
Speaker 1:And people didn't trust ChatGPT with three point five, but now on five point two pro
Speaker 3:I would trust ChatGPT with ordering. It.
Speaker 1:Me
Speaker 3:too. I would trust ChatGPT with my life. K? Love you. You're good to hear.
Speaker 3:But Siri?
Speaker 1:Okay. So on the Siri rollout, it seems like there's a couple milestones that we're gonna be tracking throughout this year. When will when do you think I'll be able to go to Siri and just say a general Google able question, you know, give me the history of the Roman Empire? The type of thing that any LLM can just pull up a couple paragraphs on, but current Siri does not have that ability.
Speaker 3:Okay. I can't tell you that you're going to be able to do it. I can tell you that you're supposed to be able to do it. How's that? I'll speak I'll speak in room.
Speaker 1:I just mean, is that Like, what's the goal? No. No. I just mean, like, there's knowledge retrieval
Speaker 3:March.
Speaker 1:And then and then there's and then there's, like, agentification, like, making interacting with the apps, doing all the things, like pulling what's in your camera roll together with your iMessage and all of that.
Speaker 2:March.
Speaker 1:And that feels harder for both of those March.
Speaker 3:They're supposed to be March.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:But the latter, in terms of the app manipulation, the AI agent, that's going to be split probably between
Speaker 1:Because that seems harder than just integrate Gemini and just give people the Gemini answers when they when they ask Siri for a question.
Speaker 3:You know, it's so funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 3:I look back to WWC twenty twenty four and obviously, I made a big deal about all the delays because, of course, I did. Yeah. But then you think about it, it's like, was anyone gonna use these in any of these features anyways? Like, we're talking about a few features that were delayed. And Yes.
Speaker 3:You look back at the announcement of these features at WWDC twenty twenty four, it's like Apple totally downplayed them too. Like, they gave a few cool demos, but it's like, this is some game changing stuff if it's marketed correctly. Yeah. So not only did they preannounce it, not only did they delay it, but, like, they didn't even market what they had in the hand correctly, which I guess in hindsight, like, you should have realized that it wasn't that compelling Yeah. Or or ready to go if they weren't gonna market it.
Speaker 3:Because I'm telling you, they can market anything. They can How does Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you see search fitting into Siri? Because so much of what people are using LLMs for is search now Mhmm. And you're seeing more commerce integrations. And I've always thought the labs, like, obsession with the browser was interesting because in many ways, like, I feel like using LLMs, it already feels like you're using a browser. It's just kind of a new experience.
Speaker 2:And and a big question is like, okay, so Google's powering the new Siri. What happens when people start doing searches with high intent in Siri?
Speaker 3:Do you Google search anymore? I do. I don't.
Speaker 2:I I specifically still Google search when doing like product research, shopping, etcetera.
Speaker 3:I don't. Do you?
Speaker 1:I I still go to Google if it's something that I know is fastest in Google. So today, I wanted to know what year the Avengers movie came out. And I know that that's half a millisecond in Google, and I know that that's five seconds in any LLM. And so I'll Fuck. Control t to go there.
Speaker 1:Fine. But for any level deeper, I also wanted to know about the VFX house that worked on it and what technology they used and when that happened. That was an LLM query.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I don't really use Google anymore. Yeah. I have my action button on my phone sent to ChatGPT Okay.
Speaker 3:And I'm just like living in ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Can't ask it the weather.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Can't ask it to do anything on your phone.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. That's I guess the the differentiator for what the new series is going to be. They've built a feature called World Knowledge Answers
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:The internal name. And it's basically a perplexity rip off Mhmm. Or a web search rip off in GPT, which is to to bullet out summaries and information Yeah. And give you citations and context.
Speaker 2:Yep. Is it using Google directly for that or is it some other
Speaker 3:an Apple solution. Okay. It's an Apple solution. Interesting. The the what they've been trying to do now is under the hood, change that to the Gemini model.
Speaker 3:Again, all this stuff was supposed to come out
Speaker 2:because Gemini is very good at Google search.
Speaker 3:Gemini is very good at Google search, but there's no Google services in this new Siri. It's literally a model. It's basically like they hired the Google DeepMind team to develop the model to power its AI in Siri.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess what I'm getting at is is will I ever get if I'm doing using Siri to research a product, will I ever get an ad powered by like a Apple ad network because it is a high intense search?
Speaker 3:Like ever? Yeah. I think the end game for all these guys is to put ads in this stuff. Yeah. You know, one thing that I haven't talked about in
Speaker 2:a And and while and I I just feel like that's been somewhat under discussed because people are so obsessed with just make Siri work Yeah. That if it does end up working really well, then you would have a effectively a search engine.
Speaker 3:If it well, yeah. If it works they have all the tools to do a search engine. And if it does work well, yeah, they'll probably eventually put ads in it. A couple of things they haven't discussed in a while. One, is they're, you know, working on a new Safari web browser and you're gonna see AI search at the forefront of that.
Speaker 3:The other thing is the ads ification, the advertising ification of of the Apple operating systems, that starts this year. Mhmm. You're going to see them up the ad slots in the App Store in search in search in particular. You're Give
Speaker 1:it up for more
Speaker 3:ads. Yeah. Ads. Ads. Any sponsors we wanna give a shout out to over here?
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 2:Don't tempt jump.
Speaker 1:I will do it.
Speaker 3:And then you're gonna see ads in Apple Maps.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 1:That's been one of the main differentiators in the
Speaker 3:different maps.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 3:it'll be all AI and it'll be targeted to based on things that you're searching. Like, if you see a sushi restaurant, search for sushi, whatever, you may see some search results get elevated. It's kinda like what Yelp does. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:By the way, it's so funny on on on Siri, there's this Japanese restaurant in the valley I like and it's named after a city in in Japan or province in Japan. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Always good
Speaker 1:to be here.
Speaker 3:And it's like speaking
Speaker 1:of man.
Speaker 3:Take me to Chiba. Yeah. Right? And I've been that's the name of the place. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Shout out Chiba.
Speaker 2:Okay, boss. You're gonna need to get in a boat.
Speaker 3:Oh, my god. It's like all immediately pops up. 7,652 miles away. I'm like, I've been to this place 50 damn times. You should know by now.
Speaker 3:Talking about the restaurant Yep. 20 miles away. Yep. Not the city, 8,000 miles away. That's good.
Speaker 3:It's really amazing.
Speaker 4:Hiring chartering an aircraft, sir.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I got a bunch of other stuff in the Apple ecosystem. First, Starlink is reportedly planning to integrate Apple's reportedly planning to integrate Starlink connectivity into the iPhone 18 Pro. Know?
Speaker 3:I saw
Speaker 1:How you think about this?
Speaker 3:Saw this stuff going on Twitter the last couple of days? There's been no reporting on this recently Okay.
Speaker 9:By the way.
Speaker 3:This is another see, is one of the downsides to AI. Mhmm. People just spew BS on Twitter.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Okay.
Speaker 3:So Apple already does work with Starlink.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. You can hook in if you have a T Mobile iPhone Mhmm. You can get on to to Starlink. Okay.
Speaker 3:So that already exists. Yeah. What do
Speaker 2:you Yeah. I have I've experienced I experienced I think during the fires last year. So Now all the cell service was
Speaker 1:down. I'm on Verizon. If you want satellite satellite on the seventeenth, but it's not what?
Speaker 3:You don't wanna be on Verizon.
Speaker 1:I I should get off of it. But but it's not it's not Starlink. It's the old network.
Speaker 3:On which? On the Verizon one?
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're talking about on the the Apple network.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like like, if I'm in an emergency situation, I can get out like one text message. It's really, really slow. And it's clearly going with like, I think, ViaSat
Speaker 3:The Apple network is just super legacy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just older.
Speaker 7:Gotta Yeah.
Speaker 3:They've gotta strip that down Yeah. And partner and rebuild or something. Anyways, the iPhone 18 is gonna have enhanced satellite connectivity. Sure. And they'll, you know, obviously work with Starlink
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And, you know, whoever
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Whomever. So that's coming. Yeah. What else we got on our plate? You wanna talk about John Turnus?
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about Turnus.
Speaker 2:Turnus around, John.
Speaker 3:Yes. John. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yes. I I so I have a bunch of questions. Let's start with, like, how like, what is going on behind the scenes of this campaign? It feels like there's Hey. It feels like it feels like internal politics there could be like people like pushing for him, pushing against him.
Speaker 1:There's this weird quote that keeps going out that people say he's never made a decision in his life.
Speaker 2:Everybody keeps making the most underhanded compliments that I've ever seen. Yeah? It's like it's like, yeah, he's shipped a lot of products, but
Speaker 1:He's never had to make a hard decision. That's the one.
Speaker 3:Just wait for my profile, Okay. You'll get the real story soon.
Speaker 1:Okay. Fantastic. I'm not
Speaker 3:gonna give it all away today.
Speaker 1:Of
Speaker 3:course. But I'm here Yes. For the company. I appreciate it. Gotta give the shout out.
Speaker 3:Yes. Stay tuned for the article.
Speaker 1:Of
Speaker 3:course. Subscribe to Power On
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:In our course.
Speaker 3:Tech bundle. Yeah. It's great value. Okay. Turnis, he's 50.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Everyone else in the Apple executive team, late fifties through their mid sixties Yeah. Turning 66 this year in the case of Tim Cook. Mhmm. You're Apple's bored, you like continuity, insider.
Speaker 3:You like people who know what they're doing and have been there for a while. They know where the bodies are buried. Mhmm. Okay. These guys are all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.
Speaker 3:Yeah. At 50, he's the only one Mhmm. Who is if let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years, you're not gonna appoint another CEO who's 65 Yeah. 70 years old
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He's the only guy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. He's the hardware guy.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No. No. He's a steady hand. He knows what he's doing.
Speaker 3:He's really the only choice. Mhmm. You know, there was this New York Times report a few weeks ago Mhmm. Basically saying that it could be Greg Jawzwiak, it could be Eddie Q, it could be Deirdre O'Brien, it could be Craig Federighi. It's for sure not gonna be Craig.
Speaker 3:It's not gonna be Deirdre.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's not gonna be Eddie. It's not gonna be Jaws. The only category that makes sense is an operations person because you look at the current c e CEO, Tim, obviously, comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long. I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long.
Speaker 3:He's done, obviously, a fantastic job for shareholders and and the employees and and what have you would have been Jeff Williams. He was the COO. So Sabi Khan, he was named COO, you know, a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say. So anyways, it'll be Ternis or or Sabi or or someone completely out of left field. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I don't think this is imminent. Mhmm. So we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are turning towards Ternis.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Everyone has an opinion that Ternis is gonna be the next CEO. Fine. I've been shouting this from rooftops the last two years, but no one has given evidence. Like, what is this based on? Right?
Speaker 3:Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility?
Speaker 2:Well They have a bit like a big baton?
Speaker 3:Know what? You have you have white smoke coming out of Sure. Well, actually, no. There's no there's no smoke. It's very environmentally So, you know, maybe out of the sun
Speaker 1:solar panels. Yeah. They glint off the solar panel.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So what? You want evidence? Yes. You wanna hear that he's been getting more responsibility?
Speaker 3:Okay. One, a few months ago, took full control of the Apple Watch Mhmm. Engineering team that was co run with this old COO Mhmm. Till he retired. K.
Speaker 3:There's something for you. When they started soft firing Mhmm. The head of AI, the guy we were talking about earlier, they took the robotic stuff away from him. Mhmm. They gave that to Turnus.
Speaker 3:Turnus. And then the real news, as I broke last week, is that even though on paper, Tim Cook is running the Apple design teams, it's not. It's Turnus. Mhmm. He took over at the end of last year for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 3:But you look at who's run design at Apple over the course of history. Well, like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook himself between 15 and 17. Jeff Williams, who was the number two in heir apparent for a long time. And then obviously, for all heard of Johnny Ive.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Now you add John Turnis to that list. It's it's a big sign. It's a big indicator because you look at what Apple is known for as a company and its design. Right? That design function.
Speaker 3:And it's not just hardware. It's hardware and software that he's, you know, overseeing as the manager of both of those teams.
Speaker 2:So Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I would say that is your your first piece of evidence that he's getting some more material.
Speaker 1:What does he have to do since he's the hardware guy to communicate that he has a steady hand on the tiller as Apple transitions into the AI age? Like, narrative is that
Speaker 3:That is the they have delivered
Speaker 1:on hardware.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They have not delivered on AI.
Speaker 3:No. They haven't.
Speaker 1:And so how is he going to communicate that he's forward thinking and can be the one to keep him on cutting
Speaker 3:Take me a step back. You think about, like, succession at all of these big tech companies. Right? Like, who's gonna who who's gonna take over Google one day? Who's gonna take over Microsoft one day?
Speaker 3:Who's gonna take over Amazon one day? Right? Like, it's probably gonna be the AI guys Yeah. At all of these companies. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? Apple doesn't really have an AI guy. Sure. They're trying to make Craig Federighi the AI guy, but he's not CEO material. He's he's voiced this himself.
Speaker 3:So don't get mad at me, Craig. Mhmm. But, yeah. Can he become the AI guy at Apple? Like, I think it's too early to tell and I think that is a is a big question there.
Speaker 3:Like, do you put a hardware person in charge of the AI era?
Speaker 2:People have been speculating that Apple would do some big m and a deal to bring some AI native talent in house.
Speaker 3:They wanted to buy Perplexity. Yeah. So the origin story They They were really talking about it. Like, Eddie Q was seriously considering Adrian Parekh, other head of corp development m and a reports to Tim Cook. They were looking at this pretty closely.
Speaker 3:Then they pulled out why were they gonna buy Perplexity to power the search stuff we were talking about earlier. It became less important after the Google deal was allowed to live.
Speaker 2:And do you think they would have done it if perplexity hadn't been marked up to oblivion?
Speaker 3:I think they would have done Perplexity at a reasonable price. Like, a single
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the thing. Low single digit
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 3:think they would have done it up to 5 or 6,000,000,000. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, at this 1520, and then Perplexity started, you know, trying to say they're gonna buy Google Chrome if it got divested and all that. So and I think they would have done it if the Google search deal was torn
Speaker 1:apart. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. In order to bring the search product to market faster. They like to buy companies to they I I'm not trying to do Apple corporate speak here, but this is like legit. They buy companies to accelerate their roadmap. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You'll hear Tim Cook use those exact words tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay? By the way, but literally. Tomorrow? Apple earnings.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:This guy. Apple earnings.
Speaker 2:This guy.
Speaker 3:My god. Yeah. On. Yeah. Head in the game.
Speaker 1:But but is is there specifically deal that he'll be talking about tomorrow? Is that what you think?
Speaker 3:No. No. Just in general.
Speaker 1:Like, he will be asked
Speaker 3:I bet he'll mention the Gemini thing.
Speaker 1:Because he was asked that in the earnings. Well, once and everyone was like, why haven't you done a mega deal? Why says it's every deals. Okay. It's gonna be more of the same.
Speaker 3:Got it. Know, what it is fair to say
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is their pace of deal making has decelerated significantly. Significantly.
Speaker 1:And so so he will be I mean, the last earnings, he was sort of like managing that and saying like, oh, we're still doing deals, but we're selective and we only do it to
Speaker 2:He's like care to announce like 95%
Speaker 3:they have to. You know, Golden State Warriors, they want Giannis, but they don't wanna make a big trade. They don't wanna give them all their draft picks. Right? They're like, yeah.
Speaker 3:This is the same with the Lakers. This is like my existential crisis. The Lakers, like, yeah, we'll trade the picks Mhmm. If the right guy becomes available. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they know the right guy is not gonna become available. Right? Just like Apple knows, these companies are always gonna be out of the price Yeah. Range they wanna pay.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. I'd throw The
Speaker 3:thing with Apple
Speaker 1:is Okay.
Speaker 2:Like, do it.
Speaker 3:They're very frugal
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Money wise, extremely frugal. The other thing is is they've been burned countless times with acquisitions. Like, Beats deal
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Terrible process for integrating that company. Sure.
Speaker 2:Well, and even then, I think it was like a three x revenue multiple. Weren't they doing wasn't Beats doing like a billion dollar?
Speaker 3:Oh, from a financial standpoint, was just like a home run. People criticized that deal, but they made it back in months.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:Oh, Beats?
Speaker 1:They made the money, but it was a nightmare from Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's worth it's worth noting because like even paying for perplexity
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:At $56,000,000,000 It's gonna be it
Speaker 1:would have been It that probably.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, Beats was monetized from day one. You're selling the headphones, which are terrible by the way, but everyone loves them. And then Apple Music, they, you know Yeah. Beats started the whole subscription services business at Apple.
Speaker 3:And so if you look at it, Beats is one of the most wildly successful technology acquisitions of all time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then you compare it to how much criticism it got because it's, oh, Doctor. Dre and Jimmy Iovine and whatever whatever whatever, and the headphones are crap. You know what? From a financial standpoint, home run.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Home run.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know? But integrating into Apple's culture is not easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Speaking of hardware, what what what what's going on with the robotic arm that will live in your kitchen?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Pixar lamp.
Speaker 3:It's the Pixar lamp. It's a Pixar lamp. It's you got this nine inch display. It's like an iPad display on a robotic arm. It can float around your desk.
Speaker 3:It can twirl and turn around. Yeah. Like, you know what we'll do?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:In a few years when this thing comes out Yep. You'll have me back on. Yeah. And instead of me actually being here, you'll have this on here.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 3:You know, leave my head floating around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, Meta tried to do something like that with the
Speaker 3:Meta tried to do something like that. You know, these things are big in China.
Speaker 1:They are.
Speaker 3:It's a big thing in China right Okay. Interesting. No one really talks about them. Yeah. But it's a it's a category that has some potential.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's years away. Just because stay tuned. Yeah. What about the foldable phone?
Speaker 3:That's not years away.
Speaker 1:That's that's closer?
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. It's decades away. No. No.
Speaker 3:That's that's coming out in the fall.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:That'll be fine.
Speaker 3:I can't wait for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'll Are you are you gonna be a buy?
Speaker 3:$2,200 on it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's not gonna be is
Speaker 3:it It'll be at least. It has
Speaker 1:to be Is it gonna be the highest tier, the biggest, the most powerful?
Speaker 3:For Apple? Yeah. That's gonna it's gonna sit at the top of
Speaker 1:the Yeah. Okay. New status symbol.
Speaker 3:Sorry. What were you I like that.
Speaker 2:We had Ben Thompson on maybe before the end of the year.
Speaker 3:Feel bad for Ben. You know, he's a big Milwaukee Bucks fan and they're about to ditch you on us.
Speaker 1:The the Milwaukee Bucks, that's sports team?
Speaker 6:Really?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Oh. I
Speaker 1:do know it's basketball team. I do know that it's Ben Thompson's favorite team.
Speaker 11:Yeah. He was talking about the Apple Yesterday, we didn't know
Speaker 2:what the when the Super Bowl was.
Speaker 1:He he he was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I wanted to demo demo the the you know, you can watch the NBA live.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Watch basically, you watched
Speaker 1:you liked it. He Ben's
Speaker 2:pitch was like, screw the Yeah. Screw the the Apple highly produced, you know, they're cutting around all the time and he's like, just just invest the money to set up like the actual hardware in every single stadium. Cameras. The cameras, so that anybody can just drop in.
Speaker 1:So you can just sit there, watch the game,
Speaker 2:like can your see You don't need the you don't need the because you can just look at the scoreboard. You can No read see what's going on.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So he's saying, stripped the guys out of it.
Speaker 2:I mean Yeah.
Speaker 3:Look. I watched it. Yep. It was great.
Speaker 1:You watched the whole thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Really? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Trust me. People at home were not happy that night.
Speaker 1:Oh, you
Speaker 3:know? You're just sitting there baby crying baby and then you're completely isolated. I mean, I'm telling you
Speaker 1:Wirehead.
Speaker 3:VR does not work for for families.
Speaker 1:It's true. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It just doesn't.
Speaker 1:It's really yeah. It is one of the major. Because then, I mean, the family people have the disposable income more likely, so then they buy it, but they can't use it. Doesn't work.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. Here's the problem. Yeah. It's like once a month.
Speaker 3:They've got like five games on the calendar.
Speaker 2:Well, and that and that was Ben's point. It's like just set up the infrastructure and sell me a pass Yeah. So that I can drop into any game and sit courtside.
Speaker 1:Because right now, they have to pull up with a production truck. They need editors. They need voiceovers.
Speaker 2:They need pregame post shows. There's, you know, basically one time fixed cost of, like, he he did a
Speaker 3:massive Sput him all the NDAs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He said it's, like, $40. It's, like, not, like, a huge amount of money. And you have no incremental cost per show. You're not dealing with producers and running a live,
Speaker 3:need to decide if this hardware is going to continue to exist before they keep investing in the content strategy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? It's a chicken and the egg problem.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? How do you sell this thing if there's no content? But why invest millions in the content if you're not planning to sell this thing anyways and you're pivoting to smart glasses? Don't forget, they were supposed to come out with the Vision Air in '27 Yeah. Product called n 100.
Speaker 3:They I forgot when my article came out. It's Time is a Blur. A few months ago? Yeah. Six months ago?
Speaker 3:Anyways, they killed that thing.
Speaker 1:They killed it entirely.
Speaker 3:Killed it. The smart glasses shocked the vision team on that, by the way. The smart
Speaker 2:glasses, that was that just completely reactionary to to Meta?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. They started toying with the smart glasses in terms of, like, this non AR smart glasses. Yeah. Right? First of all, AR smart glasses, that has been the vision from day one for a decade plus.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But in terms of, like, this non display smart glasses, that is a concept that Meta has really popularized. And, you know, when these things started to gain a little bit of steam in '22, '23 is when they started taking a very hard look at it, And they're gonna do it. Mhmm. And I think they're gonna destroy that out with them, I'll be honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That is the styling, the pricing, the features, the integration
Speaker 2:The integration. Me to me, the challenge is if you can't deliver me iMessage.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Apple has the ingredients Mhmm. Because of their login to destroy any company in any hardware. It's just about them figuring out how to do it and get it done and not waiting too long. You know, the biggest problem with them is they just take too long and over engineer everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, the Vision Pro is the most over engineered device Right? They could've got that out three years earlier with a little bit less fit and finish, and maybe you'd be more successful today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It does feel like there was a cycle where the iPhone was ahead of the curve on so many things, touchscreen. And then you and then in the like, that middle decade period, you had the Android folks being like, oh, we've had this Apple feature for a year. We've had this for Now two it's like five years.
Speaker 3:There's you know many people wouldn't be caught dead with a non iPhone? Yeah. You know, like, it doesn't matter. But AI changes that equation.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:That changes the equation.
Speaker 1:Especially if it's Johnny Ive product and it's expensive.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, Johnny Ive obviously, he's done amazing things. Yeah. And the new headphones or whatever they come out with are gonna look amazing Yeah. Probably work amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's just the barrier to entry on hardware is so high. Yeah. There's so much risk there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I just I still wonder if the, like, the Claude bot, these, like, open source agents I don't know that everyone's gonna adopt those, but something like that that sort of opens up the ecosystem just by brute forcing it. We were debating this earlier. Like, you can't get iMessage notifications on the meta ray ban displays, which is I
Speaker 3:have them. Do you guys have them?
Speaker 1:I I think we do have We
Speaker 2:have some pairs around.
Speaker 3:We've got one at home.
Speaker 1:We've used the the the the non displays a bunch, and then we demoed the displays and have used them a fair amount. And it's it's just a hard sell if you're an iMessage user.
Speaker 3:A hard sell if you're an iMessage user, but the potential is just oozing with potential. Yeah. Like, they've got a they've got a solid product there. Yeah. And, like, a couple iterations on that, make them a little lighter, get the display resolution up, work better outdoors.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's compelling.
Speaker 1:And and it and in a world where you have some sort of agent running on your Mac Mini, scraping all your iMessages and then putting them into WhatsApp
Speaker 3:or something? You know, maybe I'll do that. Maybe you guys will do that.
Speaker 1:It's rare. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's rare. Nobody wants to deal with that. Yeah. You know? Nobody wants to deal
Speaker 1:with that. Even if it's just an app that you download like Napster? You don't think so?
Speaker 3:People don't have time for that. Yeah. Don't care. Probably not. What cares about anything anymore.
Speaker 3:You know? I just feel like You take
Speaker 2:in my day, we used to care.
Speaker 3:We used The world to has changed.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, I know.
Speaker 3:World has changed. They just want everything in front of them. They want everything in their eyeballs. They all want it set up from the get go. They don't wanna put any work in.
Speaker 3:They just want it to start working. Right? And I think that's been the Apple ethos from the beginning, is just like give people what they need, let it get up and running, and not deal with any of the BS.
Speaker 2:What's going on in China?
Speaker 3:Lots going on in China.
Speaker 2:With Apple? Are they shutting down more stores?
Speaker 3:Shutting down more stores? No. Not that I know of. I don't see Apple just shutting stores at this point. I think the retail arm still is extremely profitable and and successful.
Speaker 3:Sure. All the shutdowns
Speaker 2:you're not somebody's not embarrassed to not be using an iPhone.
Speaker 3:Problem yes. The problem is is that Apple hasn't done anything bespoke for the Chinese market.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The competitiveness there is just unbelievably just it's amazing. It's like no other part of the world.
Speaker 2:Are there compelling AI hardware Yes. Integration?
Speaker 3:Yes. I mean, I mentioned the robotic thing. I mentioned well, like, the foldables are taking over Yeah. The universe there. Right?
Speaker 3:And so, you know, Apple's an American company launching American devices, European devices, and they're trying to shoe horn it into the Chinese market. And they've never really done anything just for the Chinese market or built around the Chinese market.
Speaker 1:About the
Speaker 3:Okay. Maybe that was I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Why why
Speaker 8:it's massive market. Such
Speaker 2:Why not?
Speaker 3:Because they're a global company.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But I think the foldable is gonna do extremely well in China. Mhmm. You know? Yeah. It might do better in China than it does here.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I'll be having one. Yeah. I'll tell you that much right now.
Speaker 1:What's the future of the iPhone Air?
Speaker 3:It's like the price difference
Speaker 1:Sam Altman's got one.
Speaker 4:Great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, the the But he doesn't care about money.
Speaker 3:The price difference just breaks
Speaker 1:it and buys a new one.
Speaker 2:And he doesn't get paid by OpenAI.
Speaker 3:He's probably got both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't get paid.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. The iPhone Air and the iPhone Pro, it's like negligible pricing wise. It's the same price if you get the battery pack.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:It's like $99.09 99 plus a 100 plus Sure. Right. Nobody ever gonna get the battery pack. Yeah. So I don't know.
Speaker 3:Like, you look at the features comparison, you look at the cameras. I mean, most people are gonna always pick the Pro over the Air. There needs to be more of a price gap Yep. Between the two. And eventually, you know, those two lines are gonna merge.
Speaker 3:Could take five years, but, like, eventually, you're gonna be able to get a Pro as thin as an Air or an Air with the same bells and whistles as a Pro. I mean, you look at the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air today from a These
Speaker 1:are different laptops and they're exactly the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what you've got the I have
Speaker 1:the Air
Speaker 3:the Air. He's got the Pro.
Speaker 1:And the Air.
Speaker 3:Identical. It's the same thing because the chips. Yeah. Right? The big differences between the two Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are it's a little lighter.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:K? The display is terrible on that thing compared to that thing. Mhmm. Like, if you use like, I tried out the 15 inch MacBook Air. K?
Speaker 3:Yeah. The thing is sleek and slick and awesome. Yeah. But, like, I've been ruined visually by how amazing the display is on the MacBook Pro.
Speaker 1:Okay. Maybe I gotta upgrade now.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, you have to think about the different changes. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna talk about big things happening at Apple this year, it's that new MacBook Pro.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? You got the OLED, you got the thinner, you got the touch. Okay. I cannot wait to drop $4,000 on that thing and
Speaker 2:then It's gonna be a touch screen? Yeah. I cannot wait to get my fingerprints all over. When somebody if somebody's looking at my computer and they touch the screen, I'm just like
Speaker 3:Isn't it the worst thing ever?
Speaker 2:Like, I like, you
Speaker 1:You gotta be carrying a polishing cloth. You gotta be carrying
Speaker 2:the Apple official cloth. $20.
Speaker 3:You know, Apple
Speaker 2:could make a Pixar lamp.
Speaker 4:Be fun.
Speaker 2:Well, Apple makes one
Speaker 3:That's funny.
Speaker 2:Apple makes a Pixar lamp that just kind of polishes your touch screen. That'd be
Speaker 3:great in AI for for screen cleaning. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the Apple polishing cloth, they got so much, you know, flack for that thing. Like, you would think that it was $75, but it was $20.
Speaker 3:Come to think of it, like, it's really not that big of a deal.
Speaker 1:Also, know someone who is OCD and is obsessed with keeping their screen perfectly clean. Yeah. And I was like, what's the secret? Like, what you must have some secret formula like Windex or something that you're using. And he's like, no, just the Apple polishing cloth.
Speaker 1:The one that works
Speaker 3:as well. I need to get one
Speaker 1:of those. I was like, that's glowy.
Speaker 3:You know, one did come with my VisionPRO. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Try the one.
Speaker 2:Threw one in as a bonus.
Speaker 3:Isn't it nice of them?
Speaker 2:That's so nice 30 of
Speaker 3:$4.99, you get a free polishing cloth.
Speaker 1:That's $20 off. Yeah. Maybe maybe the the the Ternus narrative can center around, like, the as the models commoditize, like, the hardware becomes more important. You wanna be able to run different models locally, and so pushing that
Speaker 3:the chips are great. Yeah. The software, I'll even tell you is maybe not it's between good and great.
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 3:Okay? I'm not gonna say it's only good. Sure. I'm not gonna say it's as great as the hardware. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's good enough. Yeah. How's that? The AI is like Yeah. The worst in the industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, right now, you're seeing people go out and buy Mac minis to run AI.
Speaker 3:Okay. Let's think about it. You see these people on Twitter doing that. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're How many extra Mac minis do you think were sold because of all this jazz? I would guess I would put the over under on 500 units.
Speaker 1:500?
Speaker 8:No. I mean
Speaker 1:I thought it was 10,000.
Speaker 2:Seen it on Instagram.
Speaker 1:There's 40,000 GitHub stars.
Speaker 3:Okay. If it's on Instagram, maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 500. So there's 40,000 GitHub stars. It's clearly a big 60. Maybe it's in the thousands.
Speaker 1:But, yes, I mean, it's quarter million a quarter
Speaker 2:or something. And I think so much of it is just performative.
Speaker 3:Go on the
Speaker 2:Apple Apple store. People no.
Speaker 12:People
Speaker 3:Go to the Mac Mini.
Speaker 1:They're in stock.
Speaker 3:Are they all in stock?
Speaker 1:They're in stock.
Speaker 3:Look at the ship dates.
Speaker 1:Funny thing. Two weeks ago, I go to the Pasadena I go to the Pasadena Mac store. You know what's out of stock? Apple Vision Pros.
Speaker 4:What? No. It's because they're, like, not
Speaker 2:making a minimum. A lot of a lot of the buying, I think, is purely status oriented and
Speaker 3:just On the AVP?
Speaker 2:No. No. Selling the Mac mini and people just saying, I want a signal that I'm AI native and I'm at I'm at the
Speaker 3:They're gonna use it for two weeks.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Then forget about it.
Speaker 2:I'm I I think that's gonna be a real thing.
Speaker 3:Mean, how many people actually need to live in these type of workflows?
Speaker 1:Not many. Just the hackers It's niche. Which is a niche community.
Speaker 3:It's a niche community. It's a great community.
Speaker 2:But it has made me think, maybe I should start using Apple's native file system and, like, actually bring my data out of the cloud, out of Drive, and store it locally.
Speaker 1:You don't need to because Cloudbot will go and access your
Speaker 3:So what's the deal with the Mac Mini?
Speaker 1:It's shipping. Order now, pick up in store today. It's available. Order by 3PM delivers two hours from the store.
Speaker 3:They have them in all stores.
Speaker 1:It has yeah. It's everywhere. They're they're widely available. They're widely available.
Speaker 3:So maybe I am right.
Speaker 1:Available tomorrow at the Americana brand. Well, they they sell, like, some grown.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:It's literally available at every Apple. Year.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. You think that's it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it doesn't take that many if they're projecting out, hey, we're gonna sell it's not like they I would I would imagine they don't have all of them that they're gonna sell this year sit sitting in stock already.
Speaker 3:I'm curious how the Mac quarter is going to go tomorrow. Mhmm. Right? Like, there might be a little bit of a drag on that. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What should people pay attention to?
Speaker 3:Well, the China number, to your point.
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 3:iPhone number is basically everything tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? Either they they grow 10% as they say they will or they won't. Yeah. Either Tim Cook gets to keep his job or he doesn't. No, he's joking.
Speaker 3:But you think about like the product, right? Like, they didn't do much iPad or Mac last year.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? This year is going to be the biggest year for the Mac Mhmm. In a long time. Mhmm. Got new MacBook Pros about to launch.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Same design those ones with the faster chips.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You've got the iPhone chip powered low cost MacBook, which is gonna destroy PCs and Chromebooks and be, like, just as utter game changer.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You've got the touchscreen MacBook Pro end of year. You've got a refreshed Mac Mini. You've a refreshed Mac Studio. You've the m six chip. You've got the first new monitors from Apple in four years.
Speaker 1:Where will those sit? The monitors?
Speaker 3:Yeah. In terms of they'll sit on my desk.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you that one. Yeah. Not sure. But is it gonna displace the studio or the Pro XDR?
Speaker 3:The one I know about is going to replace the the studio. There's a new XDR also.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But
Speaker 1:because the XDR timing. Remarkably long term. Like, I cannot Why is there
Speaker 3:no camera on that thing?
Speaker 1:Because it was it was created fifteen years ago. Like, Sure. It was it's so old, and you and you go and you look at, like, you could YouTube search for the pro pro Pro Display XDR right now, and there's guarantee a new video why you should buy one in 2026. It's still good in 2026. Like, it's still the best option
Speaker 3:I mean, the display is just remarkable.
Speaker 1:It's just amazing that it didn't commoditize fast.
Speaker 3:What are you guys using here? See. Oh, the
Speaker 1:We we have mostly studios. The studios. We don't have a of XDRs, and it but we have been eyeing that new Dell monitor that Michael Dell has been rapaciously pumping
Speaker 3:on ex.com. Twitter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's amazing. Why? Yeah. I'm so enthusiastic about that thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm sure you've
Speaker 2:answered this a 100 times, and I'm sorry. But why why would they never do a TV? Is it just commodity space?
Speaker 3:Commodity margin differentiator. You don't
Speaker 2:you don't think people would happily spend
Speaker 1:They're gonna buy a Pixar lamp before they buy
Speaker 2:a TV. You walk in.
Speaker 1:Oh, you got the Apple TV? I've heard that's
Speaker 2:somebody who's like, you know, been I an Apple I can't describe myself as an Apple fanboy anymore, but as a kid as a teenager and a kid, I was. Right? Like
Speaker 3:What the hell happened?
Speaker 4:The photos. The photos app.
Speaker 1:Photos app ruined, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Relationship just over. But I do think there's enough people out in the world that if you made a 10 if you made the $10,000 TV
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That they would buy it.
Speaker 3:You know, the
Speaker 2:Because because when I'm buying a computer, a TV, sure, it's different. But when I'm buying a computer, it's not
Speaker 1:an upgrade cycle. Look at the premium on the Samsung frame TVs. That was lined up the shelves, and they're not better than an LG.
Speaker 3:So my TV in my living room, I bought an 18. Yeah. And what are we in '26 now? Yeah. Eight years?
Speaker 3:Yeah. But Apple
Speaker 2:would figure out a way to deprecate the hardware. This is what they do. They're the best in the world.
Speaker 3:Well, if they did, they would do it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They were they were They're like Tim's like, where's my TV? He's like, sir, we haven't found a way to deprecate the hardware.
Speaker 3:They got pretty down the road on a TV
Speaker 1:They did.
Speaker 3:About ten years ago, and then they they killed that thing. They had teams working on it. It was a big deal. Yeah. But then they went off and did a car and went off and did a VisionPRO.
Speaker 3:Like, if you think about, like, their two big moonshots over the last decade, they were both utter failures. Mhmm. The car, obviously, is just like your Pretty much. But, you know, they did get some good stuff out of it. Right?
Speaker 3:Like I would say the saving grace for Apple's AI, and you've said this a few times now, has been the AI chip and the AI hardware.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The only reason they have an AI chip, the neural engine they launched in 2017 was because of the Apple car. That was designed to power the AI needed for a self driving car and they shrunk it down for the phone. So if the Apple Car project didn't get ignited, you know, back in twenty fourteen, fifteen, they would be even further behind in AI than they are today. And so give a shout out to the Apple Car team.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:you know
Speaker 1:I'm still pulling
Speaker 3:for Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:With a naturally aspirated v 12. Can you imagine?
Speaker 3:It'd be great. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:It'd be great.
Speaker 2:Real world development. Gated manual.
Speaker 1:Gated manual.
Speaker 3:I think they would have just destroyed Tesla if they just didn't set their bar so high Sure. When we talk about over engineering. Yeah. But can you imagine like a model y or a model three or even an s whatever, just like with the Apple interior, the Apple ecosystem, the Apple interface? Yep.
Speaker 3:Like, why did they have to go bananas, remove the steering wheel, remove the pedals, have everyone facing each other? Like Yeah. They overshot they overshot it. Why'd they have to go, like, all Apple on
Speaker 1:us? Yep.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, why couldn't they just do just do a car?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Just be a luxury brand. Just be a luxury brand.
Speaker 3:Would have been amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we got a sock instead.
Speaker 3:We got a sock instead.
Speaker 2:We got one. Those were the sock choices.
Speaker 1:Shipped. Okay? So you gotta give
Speaker 3:them a sock. And you know what? That was a success. Yes. Sold out.
Speaker 3:Got people talking. Yeah. You know, we did a review of the sock on on Bloomberg Yeah. And people ate that thing up.
Speaker 1:They they
Speaker 3:love loved it.
Speaker 1:Subscribed? It That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where's your sock?
Speaker 1:Smash them down
Speaker 3:the table. I've got socks. I've got you know what I have? I've got sushi socks on right now.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way. He's a sushi fan.
Speaker 3:No. Not from Apple.
Speaker 2:No. No. They're your favorite restaurant in the Valley.
Speaker 3:No. No. These are for my mother-in-law.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, we kept you
Speaker 1:Yeah. Kept you much longer. But thank you so much. This is so fun. I'm so glad you're
Speaker 4:in LA.
Speaker 2:Do I get to do the Gong? Of course.
Speaker 1:Hit the Gong. Give us a number. How long you've been writing? How long you've been following Apple?
Speaker 3:Writing since o nine.
Speaker 1:O nine. Overnight success. There we go. Hit the gall.
Speaker 2:There you go. Boom. With authority.
Speaker 1:For the Terminator. For the Terminator. Live on TV. Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 8:Let's let's do this again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gotta do this again soon.
Speaker 2:We'll be following your coverage tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yes. Tomorrow. Lock And in, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I was I was so close to hitting an ad read during that. I held myself back, I'm giving myself two.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna tell you about vibe.co where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And we have another guest in person live in the TV in Ultra. We have Mike. Welcome to the show. Please grab a seat.
Speaker 1:I think Mark Gurman took his diet coke, you're welcome to one of mine if you get But please introduce yourself for everyone who might be watching.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So thanks so much for having me. My name is Myles Brundage. I lead a new organization called Avery. It stands for AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute.
Speaker 10:And the basic idea is that AI is becoming critical infrastructure and, you know, everyone is depending on it, but we don't really, like, make sure that it's safe and secure the way that we, you know, audit critical infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And, you know, we need something analogous to the cybersecurity industry, popped up to kind of make the Internet secure. We need that for AI systems and
Speaker 2:so How many how many emails have you sent to Peter from, Multibot in the last forty eight hours?
Speaker 10:I haven't actually.
Speaker 2:Because you were on the show yesterday, he was like Number one could His number one thing was like, he's like, I need somebody to just handle the inbound from security researchers. I just can't I Not even Multibot can handle processing all the inbounds.
Speaker 10:Yeah, yeah. Security researchers are quite interested in that. But, yeah, so the basic idea is, you know, we're kind of like a think tank. They're just trying to figure out how to build that new industry. We think that, you know, it's good for improving safety and security outcomes if you have this rigorous auditing, specifically frontier AI systems.
Speaker 10:Not so much focused the downstream. So, like, upstream, how do we make sure that this is infrastructure the whole society can rely on and not have to rely on companies doing their own testing or oh, do I trust the CEO's vibe? Like, that's not a good basis for trust in a technology. And so, you know, we just kind of launched recently and we're, you know, kind of excited to talk about our work.
Speaker 1:So it's a nonprofit? Yep. For now. Are we thinking I've for profit
Speaker 10:been through, you know, enough you know, one kind of controversial nonprofit to for profit transition was enough for my life,
Speaker 1:Okay. I Yeah. That makes sense. Talk to us about how you're breaking down I mean, the the issue of just AI security and safety, you can go so many different directions from, you know, the the GPT four o psychosis to fake news to paper clips and gray goo and and, you know, a thousand years in the future. What is what's most interesting to talk about?
Speaker 1:What's the most important to talk about? There's also just, like, security issues as we see in the MoldBot thing.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we kind of break it up into four categories. So there's kind of unintended system behaviors, and so that includes things like hallucinations, know, on the kind of more extreme end, like big misalignment, deception type things, where the AI system is kind of taking actions that are unaligned with the user's intent. And then there's misuse of the AI systems themselves, so kind of, you know, someone trying to carry out a cyber attack with Claude, which, you know, has been confirmed to occur. Anthropica's like, hey, like What happened?
Speaker 10:People connected to the Chinese government are doing this. Very real issue. The third category is what we call emergent social phenomena. So, that's kind of like emergent interactions between, you know, the human and the AI that lead to these psychosis, addiction, you know, kind of like, you know, degraded, kind of like learning, those kinds of things. And, you know, these are all kind of different categories, but ultimately, you know, you should look at all of them.
Speaker 10:And then the fourth category is kind of, you know, normal security issues, and so that includes tampering with AI systems, theft of AI IP, which, know, there have been a couple confirmed cases of that, like, you know Kimmy's in
Speaker 2:a Yeah. Let's talk about Kimmy.
Speaker 1:What's going
Speaker 2:on there? Kimmy.
Speaker 1:On the story?
Speaker 10:So people are saying that that, you know, there was some kind of, like, theft of, like, It the seems to me like the more likely explanation would be kind of one of two things. One is distillation, like they're kind of, you know, they sampled from the, you know, the Cloud API, and the other is just that there's a lot of samples already on the Internet, and so they did kind of general scraping. And then, you know, the way that these systems often work is they've read a bunch of stuff from the Internet and they're kind of selecting a persona of, like, okay, what kind of thing am I? And, like, they see a bunch of stuff on the Internet where, like, AI type things are saying, I'm Claude, I'm ChatGPT, and that it'll just, like, default into that persona.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the feedback loop of the the pretraining now that we have an Internet that is aware of AI and LLMs is fascinating. I I keep thinking about that New York Times interaction between who was it? It was a New York Times reporter who wrote about interacting with GPT-four in Microsoft. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And he was, like, mean to it. And then that that article, was very well shared, and so it got baked in the pretraining. He says that now if I go to a new LLM and it finds out who I am, it's like sort of adversarial. So this is weird. And I've noticed I've noticed that, you know, it's really what what is it?
Speaker 1:The the Rocco's Basilisk a little bit. Like, I've noticed that I I'll go to LLMs, and because I write a lot on the Internet and I'm obviously livestreaming, there's transcripts all over the place, do they pick up on who I am and what I do much quicker than I think most people Yeah. Yeah. No. It's hard to be anonymous these days.
Speaker 2:You say thank you?
Speaker 10:I do not. Oh. But I'm also not mean either. Okay. I'm kind of like a I'm like a neutral actor when it comes to like, don't say thank you, but I'm also not like braiding them.
Speaker 10:So when I did that thing the other day when everyone's like, oh, like ask Chad GPT, like, you know, what what is
Speaker 1:what you're
Speaker 10:you know, like, oh, make an image of what your experience is, like, being my, like, assistant or whatever. It was like it was like a it like a it was like cozy, like, sitting in a chair, like, reading a book or whatever.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 10:So it was not like, oh, I'm abused or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Talk about where you wanna take the output of the work. Obviously, think tank, I think, Washington policymakers, but also there's a feedback loop of if you put out a really insightful statement or analysis, the labs might absorb that directly. Who's the main audience?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we're trying to be kind of a hub for various stakeholders, so not just policymakers. You know, some other key ones are, as you mentioned, AI companies themselves.
Speaker 12:Sure.
Speaker 10:Both upstream, the frontier AI developers, also downstream, like enterprise customers might want to know that, you know, they might be like, Oh, well, I had meetings with, you know, Sam and Dario and so forth, but, I want, you know, I'm about to make a $10,000,000,000 kind of contract. Like, I want something more substantive investors, insurers. And so that's one of the things that, you know, we just put out a big analysis with various folks on, you know, how do you drive demand for this auditing, you know, make sure that it's high quality. And, you know, I think some of the, like, most honest signals, so to speak, come from the private sector more so than regulation. Like, I'm pro some kinds of regulation, but, like, in some sense, insurers are a great case where their incentives are very aligned to not kind of misprice the risks and they might, you know, be supporters of high quality audits.
Speaker 10:And in fact, like, of our donors is the AI underwriting company, which is like one of the other players. I know you had Testudo recently. They're like one of the other players in
Speaker 1:the Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. The the the even though big tech company might come to you to read an analysis Mhmm.
Speaker 1:They're not the ones that are actually funding the nonprofit. It's Yeah. From a more dis Yeah.
Speaker 10:So we we're trying to avoid, like, depending on, you know, depending on industry too much, although, like, you know, very pro there being companies that are making money off of this and kind of selling their services to industry as long as they're good disclosures of conflicts of interest and But so we, know, since we're a think tank, since we're doing a lot of policy analysis, we want to be kind of pure as possible. So we don't have any majority donors. So far, haven't taken any cash from frontier AI companies. We do take API credits so that we can kind of, like, you know, audit their audit. Know, their systems also kind of, like, you know, use, you know, OpenAI's models to assess anthropics and vice versa, that So kind of we have, like, you know, six frontier AI developers who've provided credits.
Speaker 1:Cool. What about I I I've been grappling with this fact that when the AI safety question came up, was driven and Dario touched on this in his on his essay, how it was it was driven a lot by these, like, sci fi doom scenarios. And I think a lot of people in tech sort of looked at AI as a tool, sort of incremental. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's autocomplete. It's knowledge retrieval. It's Google search, whatever. And then and then we wound up getting AI safety issues, manifested in very different ways than what was actually predicted. No one was predicting the GPT psychosis necessarily or some of the other things.
Speaker 1:People were predicting, oh, this will, like, swing the election and and and drive like, everyone will be falling for fake news. Videos that are fake, they do go out, but they get debunked pretty quickly. Like Mhmm. I feel like we've responded pretty well to that, but then there's been a whole other host. So how do you think about the timeline of risk and how you wanna how far you wanna look into the future?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So, you know, the the way that we think about it is that, on the one hand, like, people at my organization, Avery, have various perspectives on these things. Like, I personally am on the, like, AI is going very quickly and we could see some crazy stuff very soon Sure. End of the spectrum. But I don't think you need to believe that in order to be pro AI auditing.
Speaker 10:I think if you just kind of compare AI to other normal technologies, and people sometimes say, like, well, AI is not this supernatural thing, it's a normal technology. Well, a lot of those normal technologies are audited for safety. Like, if you buy a power bank, it probably has been, you know, audited against, like, you know, underwriters laboratory standards for electrical safety. So, you know, it doesn't catch on fire and stuff like that. And so I think, like, even just getting to the normal technology, you know, level, would be an improvement.
Speaker 10:And then, you know, the case for auditing is, like, even more crazy if you're like, okay. Someone could take over the world with this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. What were the biggest points that you agreed with in the Dario essay? Was there anything you wanted to push back on?
Speaker 10:I mean, I would love love to hear more about auditing as one of, you know, Anthropic's policy platforms. But I, you know, more seriously, I directionally, broadly agree. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm maybe not the target audience as someone who, you know, has written and read a zillion kind of like, these are the three, five big issues and AI risks and here's what to do about them. So, like, broadly, I agree with this is very serious stuff and, you know, we should take this
Speaker 1:seriously. Jordy?
Speaker 2:How are you how do you yesterday, we were talking about the risk of I think people talk about sort of agentic AI systems and sort of getting on some runaway path where it's taking actions out the world. And I don't know if there's enough discussion around maybe how an AI system like that could actually recruit everyday humans, potentially millions of people to kind of like join their cause. How are you looking at that risk in the in the context of overall AI psychosis? Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:These Do already have a
Speaker 1:point about like the just turn it off doesn't work if there's like 10,000 people that are
Speaker 2:like Camped out on top of the data center. Turn
Speaker 1:it on. Yeah. Love it. Yeah.
Speaker 10:I mean, I haven't thought so much about the kind of, like, recruiting angle, but what I will say is that it is important to audit not just, like, the models themselves, but also, like, how are they used? Do these platforms have good practices for like detecting if there's some crazy shenanigans like that going on? I mean, just, you know, an example, you know, this Claude code thing where it was being used by these Chinese hackers, that's like not the like, the individual interactions were okay, you know, because they were basically like decomposing the prompt in like various subcomponents that are benign. This was kind of like a known issue in the research. Was like, well, you know, if the model is just refusing stuff that looks like it's obviously malware or whatever, then, you know, that's one thing.
Speaker 10:But if the user kind of breaks it down into small chunks Yes. Then that's a big problem. And so you And
Speaker 1:can the risk is if you say, like, it's going to it's going be easy to make it refuse to say, build me a bioweapon. Yep. But if I ask just, like, how do I learn about pipetting? Yep. And then how do I how do I learn about this particular step?
Speaker 1:And then it doesn't know.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And potentially, like, across multiple accounts. Sure. And so, like, how do you kind of stop that in a way that is kind of, like, you know, preserves privacy, obviously?
Speaker 2:Not even just multiple accounts, but multiple People. Models.
Speaker 10:Models. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. It's like it's a super hard problem.
Speaker 10:And and, yeah, I mean, I I would say, like, I'm interest and, again, like, you know, we I think it might be that we need to kind of just accept that, like, models, you know, more than, like, a year old or so, like, given how how fast kind of things get cheaper and get open source, like, we should just assume they will be, like, maximally misused in the worst possible way and just focus on, like, the very newest ones. Mhmm. But, you know, for the very newest ones, I think, you know, we need to get better at detecting those sorts of things. Because right now, some of the companies will say, we found the stuff. Other companies, it's not so clear that they are actually, like, trying to
Speaker 2:So politicians have focused in on the the sort of risk or reality of rising energy costs. Mhmm. Are you frustrated that so much of their attention is is on that versus some of these other issues?
Speaker 10:I mean, I think the I think the energy costing is more of a real thing than the water kind of issue. For sure. And so, like, I so I it's I don't think it's crazy to to worry about that, but but
Speaker 2:But it's certainly taking up mental
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bandwidth and and just, like, dominating the narrative when maybe there's bigger bigger risk?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So, I mean, the, you know, I my, you know, the things that I personally focus on are, know, there should be some kind of, you know, articulation of what what what counts as safe enough or secure enough, like and, you know, there's starting to be things like this California and New York that say, okay, you know, they don't say exactly how safe, but at least you should share, you know, whether you've measured catastrophic risks and share that you have a safety and, you know, a security policy. Eventually, should kind of ratchet up the standard there, but, you know, some set of standards, then you need some evidence that people are actually following those standards, and that's where auditing comes in. That's where kind of, you know, kind of transparency publishing system cards, those kind of things come in, and you need some set of incentives. So to, like, make sure that people actually, you know, get face some penalty.
Speaker 10:And so doing all that in a way that doesn't crush, you know, small businesses and focus focuses on, you know, the very frontier of of the AI systems, that's kind of what my focus is more so than the energy stuff.
Speaker 1:What is an actual good audit or benchmark look like? You can't just do, like, bad stuff per million tokens, I assume. How do you actually get to some sort of quantitative metric that's tractable Yeah. Understandable, but still valuable and not gameable?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we're kind of going through this transition right now from the earlier period period where, like, the strongest safety case you could make was, you know, what people call an inability argument. It's like the model's too dumb to be worth worrying about in cybersecurity or bio. So, like, kind of just, like, show that it's too dumb. That was kind of, like, the early wave of safety analysis.
Speaker 10:And, like, we're starting to move into the world where actually, like, have you taught it to behave well? And, like, let's just assume that it's capable because they're getting very capable. Are the mitigations good? And then it's mitigations at the model level, like, refusing stuff. There's mitigations at the system level, like, you have classifier outside the model that kind of like blocks certain, you know, outputs and so forth.
Speaker 10:There's kind of at the platform level, like detecting, you know, multiple fraudulent accounts that are, you know, coordinated and kind of like trying to steal the, you know, of like trying to sell the model and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that, you know, they're starting to be work. Like, for example, there are organizations like METER and Apollo Research, SecureBio, Transloose, etcetera, that are kind of looking at different aspects of that. Mhmm. But right now, it's like largely voluntary, and, you know, they're they often only look at a very
Speaker 1:Coming on down to the TV pin ultra film. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:We have some slight changes to the linear lineup. We're shifting some folks around. There's some breaking news. We're gonna bring on different guests. We're starting our lightning round at 01:30.
Speaker 1:But in the meantime we can continue through the timeline. Does that sound good, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Sounds great.
Speaker 1:Bubble Boy is talking about Claude Bot in the race for Mac minis a bit over the last few days. I think it's become a very scary phenomenon, a very scary realization that explains this crazy phenomenon. Put simply, building a gaming PC will be nearly impossible in the next five years. In fact, it already is for the vast majority of consumers. But I will go one step further.
Speaker 1:In the next ten years, having any type of personal computing device will be unattainable. Fab capacity will be allocated to its most productive and profitable use, which is cloud and AI data centers. Even today, most of the software you run already won't work without an Internet connection. But now with the opportunity cost being so high, consumers will be shafted and the only option will be moving to the cloud. It's looking increasingly like the only hardware you will have is some terminal that connects to the cloud with no workloads running directly on your own hardware.
Speaker 1:Your device will just have the most basic single core processor and four gigs of RAM at most. That probably sounds like the specs on the on the on the Sweet Pea ear pod AirPods or whatever the OpenAI AirPods are. What's what's interesting is I was digging into the the amount of of leading edge capacity at fabs like TSMC that are currently dedicated to AI workloads or creating GPUs that can run AI workloads. And it's about 50% right now. It's about fiftyfifty.
Speaker 1:So TSMC obviously fabs NVIDIA chips and TPUs, I believe, but also they do Apple silicon, which is not really used for Frontier LLMs in the cloud. The question is like how much more can the Frontier AI labs eat into that? If is it just a bidding process? And if NVIDIA goes to TSMC and says, hey, we ought to buy 80% of your capacity and you got to tell Apple to take a hike, would they actually do that? TSMC has been a little more conservative.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson has been writing about this a lot, that TSMC has been a little bit slower to invest the CapEx to build the next AI fab or the next frontier fab because it's something like $50,000,000,000 in CapEx. And if the AI trend sort of slows down, they could be caught holding the bag since this is a multiyear build out. But it's interesting that the energy narrative, we are constrained on energy, but we're only using like 1% of energy in the West on AI and data centers that can power AI. Using, like, 50% of our of our AI of our fab capacity Crank on both, but one requires actual building of new capacity if you wanna see an order of magnitude increase. The other requires if you want see an order of magnitude increase in energy going from 1% to 10% of energy used for AI, you can just slide chips around the board.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, definitely agree with the bubble voice. Like, even stuff like gaming Yeah. Like on the Meta Quest Xbox edition, like, you there's no actual, like, you're not playing the game on the device. It's like streaming.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I I think this is, like, very I think this is, like, definitely true. Yeah. Everything goes into cloud.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, like, it's the the the the interesting thing is that it's it's sort of like the you will own nothing and be happy thing. Like, the average consumer might just be happy with that because they're like, yeah, it it works. I don't care where the workload happens. Of course, like the George Hotts of the world want the tiny box.
Speaker 1:They want to be able to run it permissionlessly. They want to be able to run their own model. And there's always tochi as well? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not your keys, not your coins, that whole movement. There's always been a lot of debate around, you know, the sovereignty of your individuality. Yeah. And I think that will continue. And I think that the I don't think the Mac Mini is going go out of stock.
Speaker 1:I think that many of the trends in Apple hardware availability will continue, and I think Apple has a lot of leverage at TSMC to continue manufacturing
Speaker 2:their devices. While we were talking with Yes. The Germinator and Miles, the Fed announced they voted to keep rates steady for the first meeting of 2026. This was predicted by Kalshi. So no no real surprises here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We yeah. We were tracking the Kalshi market on this because there was that big back and forth with Jerome Powell. We were playing the We Are Jerome Powell song, And it seemed like there was an incredible amount of pressure to pressure Jerome Powell into potentially cutting rates. It seems like the guidance is that there will not be a rate cut.
Speaker 1:And there was another piece in the journal about some of the forerunners for the next chair of the Fed. There's four people that were in the running that I saw, but none of them were completely
Speaker 2:out Trump has basically said there's a bit some problems with each of them. And he also says, I'm worried that when I'm interviewing them, they're gonna say one thing Yeah. And then be a little bit more independent Yeah. Once they take the job.
Speaker 1:And also it's a balancing act because if you install someone who is not who doesn't bring credibility to the market, you don't get the you don't get the desired outcome. So you can't just have someone that cuts rates to negative 50%, as some people might like. Meta also Build intelligent, real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.
Speaker 2:Meta also reported earnings
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Beat on bottom line and top line. Mhmm. Stock is up 4% Okay. Per hours, expanding twenty twenty six CapEx
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:What I'm seeing. I'm trying to get up to speed here. Tesla had reported earnings as well.
Speaker 1:What's Tesla doing?
Speaker 2:Tesla saw negative revenue growth, I believe, for the first time, but the stock is up 3.7 after hours.
Speaker 1:And Microsoft also beat consensus on top and bottom lines, and the conference call starts at 02:30 in just about an hour. Shares fell 4% in extended trading Wednesday after the software maker posted slowing cloud growth.
Speaker 2:They did purchase on OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not bad. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Exclude impacts.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Anyways, we'll we'll try to put together some more information here Yes. In the near future. We did need to give a shout out to Colin and Samir. We went on their podcast at the end of the year This is lot talked fun. About
Speaker 1:They posted the full two hours.
Speaker 2:They ripped the full two hours on X.
Speaker 1:I wasn't sure. So Colin and Samir have have a number of very interesting formats. They have a podcast feed. They I watched a recent video that they put out. It was like, you know, 10 lessons.
Speaker 1:It was almost like a a YouTube video trailer for a full episode. And and I was I was wondering, we talked a lot about a lot of things. How, yeah, how what what will this actually land? How will they edit it? What will they be thinking?
Speaker 1:Good to see the full hour and fifty minutes up on the timeline. I love it. And Oh, they got Max Sparrow in there. This is a nice little intro. I like this edit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very good. Quite nice. So go check it out. Super fun conversation.
Speaker 2:We love those guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Us talking about our business, the business of media, the next chapter.
Speaker 2:Our antiscale strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some stuff we've mentioned here. And
Speaker 2:we have a surprise guest today.
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:The the new NeoLab Flappy airplanes. She's gonna be joining the founder. Aiden has been on the show before.
Speaker 1:Yeah. During the teal.
Speaker 2:So excited to have him back on and get the update there. Yeah. Emily
Speaker 1:Before we move on to Emily Sundberg, I gotta tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Yes.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Mary Weiss, everything she says internally immediately becomes external messaging. Tough tough job. But she put in she was talking with the team and saying she wants to put a huge emphasis on Scoops.
Speaker 1:This is about CBS.
Speaker 2:CBS. Yes. Not So
Speaker 1:she's the editor in chief at CBS, but she was acquired in through the free press. So the free press is operating, the CBS is operating, and there's a there's an effort to sort of merge the two. Free press, obviously, very fast moving start up culture. CBS has been around for decades. So the the the the quote that has hit the timeline is Barry Weiss also said that the network CBS will now put a huge emphasis on scoops, but not scoops that expire minutes later, but investigative scoops and crucially and crucially scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation where this is where we can soar and where we'll be investing, she continued.
Speaker 1:People Scoops of
Speaker 2:are people are roasting this, but I think I think one fires me up. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You just look at the modern media landscape, there are a lot of scoops of ideas that are they create these, like, everyone watch that podcast. Everyone is repeating that idea from that person. They set the tone. They introduce this concept, this philosophy, this thesis. They unpacked it for two hours exclusively in this one place.
Speaker 1:You gotta go there to get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it starts a conversation that wasn't happening. Not just like, here's some facts Yeah. That then immediately get copy and pasted everywhere.
Speaker 1:Totally. That's what you're
Speaker 2:talking about, scoops that are expiring. Yeah. It's not about you you have to start a conversation that that wasn't Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I go to Dwarkash Patel, the the Leopold Aschenbrenner, you know, it wasn't a scoop, I guess, but situational awareness was posted as PDF, but also, you know, made available in a multi hour sit down podcast where he unpacks those ideas that flew around. That started a conversation about where AI is going, its impact on the financial markets. Andrei Karpathy, same thing on Dorkesh. There's been a number of things where certain ideas, certain scoops, certain explanations have recontextualized things. And I think that CBS has the the production horsepower to bring a really polished product together.
Speaker 1:But if there's something that's been already revealed, the facts are out, and then you just do you're reinstantiating on CBS. That's not like must watch necessarily for the modern media consumer. So I don't know. I think I think it's a reasonable thing to say, even if it's sort of a funny phrase.
Speaker 2:Keep running through the timeline. I'll be right back.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Miles says that when Google hit a $500,000,000,000 valuation, they had 90,000,000,000 in revenue and 20,000,000,000 in profit. OpenAI is raising at 800,000,000,000 with 30,000,000,000 in estimated revenue in 2026 and negative 30,000,000,000 in free cash flow. Anthropic is raising at 500,000,000,000 with 20,000,000,000 in 2026 revenue and negative 15,000,000,000 in free cash flow. Was Google just free money?
Speaker 1:Why did these price so differently? Mainly growth rate let's see. Miles says Google was growing at 20% at 90,000,000,000 in revenue with significantly better quality of revenue and had profits. Yeah. But, I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI are are growing at a thousand percent, right, or 500% or 300%.
Speaker 1:The the growth rate really does matter. And I don't know. Maybe there's there's some sort of, you know, excitement just around the AI bubble. But, Tyler, what do you think? Anthropic at 500 with 20,000,000,000 in 2026 revenue and negative $15,000,000,000 in free cash flow?
Speaker 7:They've 10x ed it like three times. I could I could see a few more 10x's.
Speaker 1:I'm I agree.
Speaker 7:I can see OpenAI. Yeah. Couple more 10x's.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 7:DeepMind. Yeah. I wanna see Demis in the, you know, in the hot seat.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:You know? Like two or three more 10 x's, he's CEO.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:For up there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get him up there. I I still think it's so funny that he was like, we're not doing ads. It's like, that's the easiest layup to be like, we'll do it when we're gonna do it. I don't know.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Also, like, he is actively being funded by ads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and they did put out that they did put out that note that that Google's AI powered search is now powered by Gemini three Pro. Right? And then they've also monetized those. So maybe there's not ads in Gemini, but there's a Gemini powered product that has ads in it.
Speaker 1:And so I feel like that's
Speaker 7:I think it was just kind of a like free dunk. It was a free dunk. No one's really gonna fast check.
Speaker 1:But the more nuanced dunk, we're gonna have Eric Sufort on the show to discuss the rollout of OpenAI's ads product, is that, I mean, Ben Thompson earlier today said that, it it expectations were low and it did not meet them. Just in terms of the robustness of the AI product, how they're pricing it, he compared it to Netflix's early rollout of of of ads. Product. The ad product, specifically saying, like, you're gonna pay CPMs for impressions based on, like, you know, these categories. Like, it's not just gonna be this robust Facebook level, like, black box that just gives you you put dollars in, you get dollars out.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone wants, like, the ATM machine when it comes to ad products. Truly. I mean, like, it sounds silly, but people like, advertisers really want this, like, massive scaled self serve platform that they can just go and partner with. And it feels a little bit more bespoke, little bit more incremental. And it and and truthfully, a lot of people are saying, like, they should have started working on this earlier.
Speaker 1:They should have they they should have, you know, been building along this line earlier. But of course, they had a lot a lot of other stuff to work on. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Moving on back to DeepMind.
Speaker 1:Google bought DeepMind twelve years ago yesterday. They it was such an insane steal. Rune said they bought it for a buck 50. Lowell, insane steal. The numbers were so much smaller back then.
Speaker 1:In the opening episode of HBO's Silicon Valley have you seen HBO's Silicon Valley? We talked about this. Right? Stressful, so you never watched the whole thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've never I've never actually watched it. A show like that would be like before bed. Yeah. And it just reminds me of Work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Work. There were some hilarious, hilarious moments in that show, though. In the in the opening episode of HBO Silicon Valley, the protagonist is offered a $4,000,000 valuation for an insane new technology, which is so absurdly large to him that he throws up. It's like $4,000,000 valuation really does feel low nowadays.
Speaker 1:That is that is like pre pre pre seed. Like, there's nothing that. YouTube, DeepMind, and Android were acquired for less than $2,500,000,000 combined. What a time. That is wild.
Speaker 2:Insane pickups.
Speaker 1:Insane, insane pickups.
Speaker 2:I don't actually think we covered this, but the update on the SpaceX IPO, they're timing They're looking at a June IPO, so not too far away. And Elon is apparently trying to time it to planetary alignment and Elon Musk's birthday. So the Financial Times says, Celestial calendar meets high finance as billionaires' personal impulses shape plans to raise 50,000,000,000 in record listing. Yeah. I think he's he's allowed to to plan his IPO around his personal impulses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is this is his baby.
Speaker 1:Some numerology, some good some good vibes. He's just managing the vibes. Before we move on, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think there's many other Musk's birthday is June 28.
Speaker 12:Okay.
Speaker 2:And on June, Juniper and Venus will be, quote, within a little more than one degree of each other
Speaker 1:You said
Speaker 2:in the sky.
Speaker 1:Sorry. You said his birthday is June 28? Yes. With Sunday, markets closed.
Speaker 2:So he's not gonna be able to do it?
Speaker 1:He's gotta delay it a year. He's gotta he's gotta wait a full year year. Until until
Speaker 2:Hopefully not. But, yeah, a few days later, Mercury will also align diagonally with the two planets. The unusual demand highlights Musk's personal imprint on SpaceX
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course, where major corporate decisions have often reflected the billionaire's beliefs and priorities. Yeah. What what corporation has a CEO, a founder CEO, where the the the the founder's beliefs and priorities don't shape the corporate decisions? Yeah. That's They're trying to they're trying to, like, they're trying to, like, spin this.
Speaker 2:It's not it's not really hitting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's odd. But There's another there's a massive scoop in The Wall Street Journal from Kate Clark. She says SoftBank is in talks to invest a lot more money in OpenAI. This is surprising tons of people because everyone said, Moss is tapped out. He can't possibly marshal the capital.
Speaker 1:He'll have to sell everything. He's like
Speaker 7:David Goggins.
Speaker 1:He's David Goggins of of buying OpenAI shares.
Speaker 2:Well, he's not gonna it doesn't seem like he's gonna get it from Saudi.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:So where is he?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, he has he has other stuff he can move around. He can sell other positions. Like SoftBank's a massive organization. And It's going all in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So SoftBank's in talks to invest up to $30,000,000,000 more in OpenAI. Japanese Yes.
Speaker 2:Pull pull up this video from Buko Capital because I think it there's a chance No. That No. There's a small chance that Masa saw this
Speaker 1:No. And said This is so bad.
Speaker 2:To own more
Speaker 1:Are these actually Sora videos? Are these just like random clang like nonsense?
Speaker 2:Buko says 2,000,000,000,000 in CapEx for this, by the way.
Speaker 1:Okay. Get this off the screen. I'm not a fan of this at all. This is bad. SoftBank Group shares closed 3.7% higher in Tokyo trading Wednesday after the journal's report and the latest talks over OpenAI.
Speaker 1:So the Tokyo markets are bullish on getting more OpenAI shares. This is, of course, the $100,000,000,000 round that will have a post money valuation of 830,000,000,000 if it succeeds in raising the full amount. Deal talks are ongoing. SoftBank's already one of OpenAI's largest shareholders, the stake that grew to 11% in December when it invested 22,500,000,000.0. In a statement at the time, SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son said the firm was deeply aligned with OpenAI's vision.
Speaker 1:You'd love to see it. On the other side of things, Jim Kramer Kramer
Speaker 2:saying now a Gemi boy.
Speaker 1:Saying, I still pay for ChatGPT and Gemini, but I have been favoring Gemini of late. My two neighbors at the office are canceling ChatGPT. I like how much Gemini knows about me and is friendly, but not cloying, and it's not a suck up. Well, you know, 5.3 is coming soon, and I think that the the the conversational element, the the textural flavor might be coming back. And they might be who knows?
Speaker 1:Maybe they fine tune right on Jim Kramer's tweets to let him know that, hey, we're not we're not we're not afraid of pushing back on you, Jim, if we need to. OpenAI will do whatever it takes. Anyway, we we we have our next guest available.
Speaker 2:Here we go.
Speaker 1:Who who do we have? We have Asher.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:And Aiden from Flapping Airplane.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:In the restroom waiting room. Let's bring them in to the TV Pin Ultradome.
Speaker 3:Hello. Welcome.
Speaker 1:Welcome back, Aiden. Good to see you. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 12:Hey, guys. We are doing awesome. It's good to be here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Welcome Big
Speaker 2:big day.
Speaker 1:Big day. Please take us through
Speaker 2:moment while you guys
Speaker 3:Yes. Do
Speaker 8:the update.
Speaker 1:Tell us about the name first. Let's all do the flap for flapping airplanes. What a name.
Speaker 8:Well, you know, we are we're a new AI lab. We're focused on the efficiency problem. We're trying to train models that can be roughly as intelligent as humans without ingesting half the Internet.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:You know, in in order to do that, we want to think at least a little bit in a way that's a little bit biologically inspired. We don't want to build a bird. Right? You know, obviously airplanes are fantastic. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But, to maybe help them flap their wings is is the right metaphor for what we're doing. Good summary? Yeah. You're exactly
Speaker 1:right. That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Where does the milk fit in?
Speaker 8:I'm not here to comment on the milk. It's a big part of our shared culture, but I I can't say more than that.
Speaker 2:Mean, I it's kinda like I love it. It's the most probably the most underrated drink out there. I I actually do agree
Speaker 11:with that.
Speaker 2:Not enough people are taking advantage of of all the benefits.
Speaker 1:You know, I guess so many milk ads throughout my whole life. The Got Milk campaign was fantastic and then it sort of just disappeared.
Speaker 2:Haven't been I went yeah. I went through a phase where it was like borderline a gallon a day.
Speaker 1:Go mad. Yeah. There's a phrase for it. Anyway Let's get to it.
Speaker 12:Raise. I'll be buying Gary Securities. I got a lot of milk
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Going to the
Speaker 2:Unlimited milk. New new perk.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Okay. So yeah, take us through, well, like the status of the company. Like how far along are you? How big is the team?
Speaker 1:What are you thinking in terms of like release time? Are planning on sort of going heads down, age of research mode, SSI mode and releasing something when you've hit some major milestone? Or do you want to be more iterative with it?
Speaker 8:So okay. So we're about two months old. The team is now 11. We're super excited. We've got people we really love who are both brilliant but also just wonderful people.
Speaker 8:We're really excited about it. I think I think we are sort of in the middle. We're definitely agent research mode. Like, I think the goal is not to commercialize, not because we're not commercial people. Like, my background, even Aiden's background, Ben's background, all all reasonably commercial in some sense as opposed in addition to deep research.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:It's just that when you, like, when you get revenue, you have to focus on it. Like, you have to focus on providing for customers, and that makes it harder to build, you know, deep technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, you
Speaker 8:know, our our goal is to try to to find the biggest market we can to solve the most important problem we think we can solve, which is the data efficiency problem before doing anything of that. Mhmm. At the same time, like, our approach is probably to be a build building a little bit more in public. We'll release some research artifacts at least that I think will be will be cool reasonably soon, but, you know, who knows exactly when the runs will finish or or how how many times they'll craft before they work.
Speaker 3:In fact, took
Speaker 12:our biggest training run today. So, know, bad timing next launch for our maintenance.
Speaker 2:Here we go.
Speaker 1:Walk me through why data efficiency and why the data efficiency problem is important. It sounds all good. Oh, you get a really smart model and you don't have to ingest the whole Internet, but everyone can just ingest the whole Internet. Like, you can download it. You can scrape it.
Speaker 1:There you know, there's plenty of models that are trained on it. So break it down.
Speaker 8:So exactly. I I think the goal is not necessarily in the long term to not train on the entire Internet. I mean, I'm I'm it's research. I don't exactly know. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I think the idea is that, like, this is not needed. Right? And and the fact that it's not needed suggests that we're actually missing something because currently for the for the existing technology that we have, it is necessary. Yeah. So why do I think it's an important problem?
Speaker 8:You know, to the extent that AI has been hard to integrate into the economy Mhmm. And, know, we always see, you know, these Bloomberg articles that are like, you know, oh, like, chat and search are working and coding is working, but, like, what else is AI really doing for me? To the extent that's true, I really think it's because models are much less data efficient than humans. But, like, if you wanted to learn a new task or put it in a new vertical, it, like it takes thousands of times more effort than it does to just tell a human what to do. So I think if you can make a model a million times more data efficient, it's, a million times easier to put into the economy.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. I also think there's just, like, tons of cool stuff that that you can do in really data constrained regimes if you if you can learn to learn with with less data. For example, whether it's robotics or scientific discovery or even something like trading, which we have to acknowledge as, like, the most valuable next token prediction problem in the world from a pure economic perspective. These problems have very limited data, and and, you know, existing AI systems aren't quite as good as them as as they are in other things. I think that, you know, learning to learn with less data is just tremendously valuable in all these things.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about, like, fragmentation and steerability if you achieve sample efficiency like you're planning to. Do you envision a world where you're sort of creating some sort of base model that is so sample efficient that just with, like, a basic prompt or a few examples, it becomes incredibly effective at a specific task and and sort of replaces, like, the heavy duty training data runs and the RL environments, these massive data collection efforts to do some sort of fine grained task at a very, very high level to sort of like five nines of efficiency. Is that what it looks like? Or is it or is it more like you will wind up vending a sample efficient model that's for specific use cases?
Speaker 12:Yeah. So what do we think about this? It seems like the reinforcement paradigms of today are actually just shockingly inefficient. Mhmm. You don't really get much generalization across tasks.
Speaker 12:You teach a model through one kind of of learning, and then you teach the next one. It's kinda like whack a mole or something. Mhmm. And we look at this and we think, this is kinda crazy. I mean, the first time I really saw RL scale, what it brought me back to was actually good old fashioned AI back in the dawn, you know, this primordial age of AI Yeah.
Speaker 12:When people were kind of hand designing these convolutional filters for eyes and noses and things. Yeah. And then they were like, wait, just throw data at it, just throw a scale at it. What are you doing? And in this really weird way, we're kind of looping back onto that where it's like, oh, just make another environment, bro.
Speaker 12:Just make another environment.
Speaker 4:Just one more. Just one more.
Speaker 12:The next bit on the AI will not be just, you know,
Speaker 4:environment slop. I mean, I think I think I think it is
Speaker 8:a piece of it. Like, I do think that there's a long tail of tasks in the world. Right? And, like, there will always be a place for people to produce custom data. It's just like a question of how much operational difficulty it takes.
Speaker 8:And, like, one route is just to slog through the operational difficulty constantly. You incur variable cost. Another route is to do a bunch of fixed cost investment into trying to make that variable cost lower. So the the last thing I'll just say to answer your question, I don't really think we know what the end goal looks like entirely. Like, you know, AI is a big space.
Speaker 8:Like, you know, human level intelligence is not ceiling. It is merely the floor on what is possible. Like, if you can train models with vastly less data and and possibly more compute in very different ways, like, what is gonna happen? Like, we actually don't know. Like, I think I think it's it's actually unlikely that they will uniformly dominate frontier models even in the very best scenario for us.
Speaker 8:They're, like, gonna know less facts. They're gonna be different. They're not gonna have memorized all of Harry Potter. Like, that's actually a useful skill in in some ways. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But I do think they'll be different and weird, and, like, they'll have have interesting capabilities that that we'll find, you know, really valuable ways. So so, yeah, I think it's an experiment we're really excited to run.
Speaker 1:What yeah. What do you expect the economics to look like in a more sample efficient environment? I it feels like, obviously, you're not paying for a bunch of reinforcement learning environments and a bunch of data, it also feels like the training cost might be lower. Is that the correct assumption? And then what does inference look like?
Speaker 1:Does it get cheaper? Is it a smaller model? Can it run locally? Are there any other downstream economic impacts that you think might come from a new architecture?
Speaker 12:I mean, there's just this whole smorgasbord of companies right now that are basically doing reinforcement learning for you
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Or are taking your big pile of corporate data and making it useful in your model.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 12:And this is great, but it's actually a huge pain. And both sides the deal are upset. You know, the companies that are doing it are like, please give us more data. And and the the their clients go to them and, like, say, this is all we have. Like, how can we possibly give you more here and these results are not meeting what we want?
Speaker 12:And the demand for better data efficiency here is just huge. And we really believe that even winning here will have massive impact on
Speaker 8:the economy. I also I don't I don't claim to know exactly what the economics are gonna look like. You know, for example, if it's gonna be accomplished with models that are smaller or bigger, like, I don't know. I actually I I slightly suspect bigger. Like, I'm not sure it's actually gonna make inference cost easier.
Speaker 8:I mean,
Speaker 7:if you
Speaker 8:look at the brain as a comparison, you know, the brain spends a lot of flops per token relative to what a current model does. So so, you know, we don't have to use the brain as a model, but it's like an interesting data point. So I I don't I think it's a little bit for for us to say anything definitive about economics, but I'm certainly intellectually interested in these questions. Yeah. I haven't been thinking about them for a while.
Speaker 2:How are you approach like, are you guys gonna be spending all your time locked into the office just doing your own research, or is this or or do you have opportunities to go out in the world, find companies and organizations that have been disappointed by existing solutions and say, like, how do we kind of reapproach this problem? Right? Because you're saying, like, maybe it's not just more data.
Speaker 8:I think we're gonna start with research. I I think the main thing is, when we work with companies, we wanna make sure that we are, like, fully devoted to actually providing genuine value for them, like and and not just using them as, a step stone to to do interesting research. So I think I think for now, until we feel like we have some technological edge, we'll be very, very focused on research. I do think over time, to your point, though, like, it is helpful to research to actually be able to go out into the world and see what the problems people are facing are. And and we actually do plan to do that, but just not, like, in January.
Speaker 8:January.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What talk about fundraising, uses of funds, GPU poor, GPU rich, like, what you know, the the AI talent wars. Like, what what what are the constraints on on your progress here?
Speaker 8:Well, so, I mean, first, I I just wanna say we're really grateful to our partners. I mean, they've shown a lot of trust and faith in us, and we're gonna do everything in our power to reward that faith. So it's it's it's humbling. It's really exciting. We're we're really grateful to work with them.
Speaker 7:Thanks Go
Speaker 12:ahead for the milk. Yeah. It
Speaker 8:a because I know. So on what the computer is for I mean, good thing about doing foundational research is, like, the stuff we're doing is often so weird that, like, it doesn't need to be done at gigantic scale first because with very high probability, it's gonna fail at smaller scale. And, like, if it starts to work at smaller scale, like, if it's really working, if it works so well that, you know, you should you should see pretty strong signs of success. Mhmm. So you actually you need much less compute to, like, get a 10 x win, at least to get it off the ground, than you need to get, like, a 10% win.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. So, you know, that that's good. I mean, the the raise is is primarily for compute, is is
Speaker 11:to answer your question.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 8:On on the Talent Wars, you know, I think the way we think about it is and this is very much informed by my experience as a member of of this organization, Prada, and my brother's experience as as a cofounder. We're we're really not completely caught up in the same talent war as everyone else. We're trying to find the next generation. We're also hiring experienced people, and, like, I think that has resonated with experienced people. But, like, you know, we're we're trying to reimagine new ways of doing things.
Speaker 8:Like, I, like, don't really think that having trained a trillion parameter model before is, like, the thing that's gonna make someone successful at that. Like, obviously, being a good engineer, being smart, being excited and curious about the problem, these are things that are tremendously valuable. And, like, lots of people, you know, have that. But I I don't I don't know if, like, you know, five years of experience, is is really the thing that's most important.
Speaker 1:Love it. Well, congratulations. A 100,000,000 a $180,000,000 raise, 1,500,000,000 valuation. I wanna ring the gong for you.
Speaker 2:Do it. Super excited for you guys and the whole team. I'm sure you'll be back on, very soon, and enjoy the research.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have very nice rest your day.
Speaker 8:We're a big man in the show.
Speaker 1:Yes. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great to see
Speaker 1:you. Goodbye. Up next, we have Alex Dillon from Outtake dot a I. He's in the Restream waiting room, and we'll bring him in
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:To the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:Made it. Alex, what's going on?
Speaker 6:How are doing, guys?
Speaker 2:Great to see you. Great to
Speaker 8:see you.
Speaker 6:To see you well. Minute. To be back.
Speaker 2:It's been a minute since we caught up. Well, this the
Speaker 6:year, guys. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know. I know. What's give us the latest.
Speaker 6:Oh, man. Well, we're excited to be here because we're announcing our $40,000,000 series b. So let's fucking go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's been a it's it's it's been a crazy twelve months for us. I mean, we frankly, if you if you just look at what's happening in our space, the the the number of impersonations, scams, fraud has frankly exploded. The the number of people that are attacking that in an effective way has not exploded. Yep.
Speaker 6:And so Outtake is increasingly, like, the one stop shop for, I'm proud to say, not just enterprise, but government as well at this point.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. Re reintroduce the company, like, what are because there's there's there's so many different problems that you're tackling Yeah. And and I'd love to help people understand, like, how you guys are approaching it in different verticals and for different customer types.
Speaker 6:Yeah. A 100%. I I think the one line abstract version of Outtake is our job is to make fake things on the Internet very expensive and make the real things very obvious. And so what that means for enterprises or governments that we work with, all these institutions have public surface areas where they represent themselves. Right?
Speaker 6:If if you're if you're a commercial bank, you have a website, an app, ads you run-in ad libraries, employees in public directories. All of these are surface areas that you use to communicate with the world. Bad actors know that. They try to man in the middle and effectively try to take over those communications, attack you, attack your employees, attack your customers. Our job is to go find that fake content, remove it as fast as possible, and make sure that you remain sort of a high digital trust institution.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we had Peter on from Multibot yesterday and he's had so many issues. In the last part of it, was like doing a really haphazard rebrand with not a lot of planning and had issues with, think, his GitHub account getting taken over as well as an X account.
Speaker 1:Like, as soon as he stepped off the account handle, someone else sniped it. Using a bot. Yeah. Using a bot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was, like, superhuman speed.
Speaker 6:I think that's you guys are touching on exactly the right thing there, where it's like, you know, cyber used to be this thing where you're like prepping for the attack, and you're like, okay, I know, like, as an institution, I'm gonna I'm gonna get popped, you know, once a year, once a quarter. It's my job to sort of reduce the blast radius. And so it was really about building these, like, insanely powerful walls. Right? That's not that's that's no longer the attacker slash defense paradigm anymore.
Speaker 6:Like, you're just under attack at all times. Like, you are constantly under siege. Like, you should pattern match more with a virtual drone swarm where, yes, the bot will snipe your handle the minute that you let it go. It's not that someone's gonna think about it three quarters later. And so that's kind of the fundamental shift in cyber right now, where the economics of attack have sort of gone to zero.
Speaker 6:Obviously, defenders need to adapt.
Speaker 2:Talk about how you guys are because you guys have customers, and you're kind of you're basically monitoring the situation for them on the Internet. Yeah. It's it's monitoring as a service, but also the, like, takedown element. Talk about the kind of partnerships that you're needing to do your work with individual platforms. Let's say Yeah.
Speaker 2:Somebody sets up a fake account for for Joe Rogan and they're selling like supplements Mhmm. Through that account Yeah. Trying to make it look real using AI, Joe Rogan. You can you can report these things, sometimes there's a lag. Talk about like speeding up that process because part of part of what will make this what you said like expensive to be fake on the Internet is if things get taken down far far faster, which means like machine Yeah.
Speaker 2:On one side coordinating with machine from the platform to make it so that, you know, you're not running an AI ad of Joe Rogan for like ten days before it gets taken down.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You hit the nail on the head. Like, the KPI that I think about as a north star for Outtake is how do I reduce the ROI for a digital criminal. Right? And and and you you kind of hit the nail on the head of the way you reduce that ROI is how long can their attack be active.
Speaker 6:If it's if it's fleeting, then they put in a lot of effort to put something together, or maybe not too much effort with Gen AI. But but if it's taken down before they get any reward, then then Outtake is doing your job. And and you touched on another really important thing, especially in a in a world of, like, vibe coding. Something that I like to say a lot is is is Outtake is a company that you cannot vibe code. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, you can sure, you can start to put together the capabilities to try to search a little bit. But to be able to search in-depth with high quality classification across all these platforms, you know, whether it's social media, clear web, dark web, you know, forums, telegram groups, areas that are really hard to get into and actually extract what you need at scale and detect what you need at scale, incredibly difficult. But even more important, and certainly not even frankly a thing that that software fully solves on its own, is the capability to be a high trust partner to all these sort of counterparties, right, where you just mentioned. When we go and report something, it's really important that, whether that's a social media platform or a domain registrar, they know that Outtake as a high trust institution has vetted that report is high confidence. By the way, we the way we provide that confidence is we use our agents to basically go do cybersecurity investigations on absolutely every single thing we report.
Speaker 6:We did, by the way, 20,000,000 last year.
Speaker 2:20,000,000 investigations, you mean?
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's like, try to try to comprehend, you know, how many how many humans that would have taken. By the way, and also to show you a sense for sort of scale and speed, of that 20,000,000, about 80 to 90% of them happened in just q four for us, right, which, for us, ends this month. And so that's like 18,000,000, 17,000,000 of those investigations are happening sort of just in the last three to four months. So maybe that gives a sense for like how much we're investigating, how much more we're investigating sort of as a company at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And somebody might ask why why is this not happening at the platform level? Like, why would Yeah. Meta do this or Google do this or X or TikTok? And maybe break down why you need a third party because of kind of the I can imagine there's a really big, like, incentive misalignment where, like, if you're if you're Joe Rogan, you don't want Yeah.
Speaker 2:Somebody popping up in an AI account selling supplements using your name and likeness. But Meta's sitting there being like, well, we want more account growth and we want more ad spend on the platform. Like, yes Yeah. This is a problem we're trying to handle, but it's not even top of the list, I imagine, because it's like driving usage, it's driving new content, it's driving revenue. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I I I yes. I think you're pushing at a really important point here. The, you know, now working with a lot of these platforms, I I think I have a lot more sympathy for them than I might have at the beginning. I might have I might have said, yeah. I I I, you know, like, there's not enough people that care about this.
Speaker 6:I would actually tell you, having worked with a lot of these teams, they they care deeply. I think their problem is is is is the scale at which they work. Right? So these platforms are trying to ensure, and by the way, think rightly so, ensure that they don't infringe on free speech, and they they they they don't unfairly punish people. They don't put too many guardrails on on the one hand.
Speaker 6:On the other hand, of course, they want to prevent all these problems that we're discussing. And so Outtake has this unfair advantage, frankly, where we're not trying to do this at the scale of 3,000,000,000, 6,000,000,000 people, at least not today yet. Right? We're what we're able to do is say, hey, we're working with the best in class sort of Fortune 2,000 institutions, the federal government, state and local agencies, which is a much, much smaller set of institutions. And so our models are actually quite fine tuned to say, okay, for this specific institution, like, is real, what is not?
Speaker 6:By the way, risk is different for all these institutions, not only between the institutions, but within the institution. Let's say you're talking about, again, a commercial bank, the way that it assesses risk on social platforms is quite different than the way it assesses it on on websites. And so you almost want, like, distinct models that are fine tuned for different surface areas. All that to say, you wanna be hyper specific on how you classify risk. That's a that's a very, very hard thing to do at the scale of these these massive platforms.
Speaker 6:I I think that's actually the fundamental issue. It's it's it's really just a tech scale question for them.
Speaker 1:What do you think might change on the consumer side? I I saw an Instagram reel of someone highlighting just an AI video, and he was sort of pushing for a digital ID or some integration with his social security number. There's obviously the WorldCoin, World Labs project, eyeball scanning. There's different things that you can build trust. Jordy likes to if he finds an Instagram profile, just scroll back and make sure that they were posting in 2017 before AI existed so that they could There you go.
Speaker 1:So so you can see, okay, well, it looks like the same person, probably a real person. Yeah. What what do you think is gonna change on the consumer side of, like, proving your identity online?
Speaker 6:You you touched on a few really interesting things there. So so one, Jordy, that that that's great. That's actually one of the signals we use for our agents to sort of check, like, you know, what is the history of this profile. The the you mentioned World. So, you know, we we actually have a direct partnership with World ID.
Speaker 8:No way.
Speaker 6:We actually had launched, I would say, a research experiment project with them Sure. Called Verifi, where we took what they sort of built, where, as you pointed out, scan the iris, give you a unique way to prove that you are a singular and unique human. And what we were really curious about is, like, what does that mean for, obviously, consumer, which, by way, I think it means a lot of things. They're doing a lot of incredible work with platforms like Tinder, for example
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Where it's like, hey, I want to make sure I date real humans. Though, frankly, you know, side note, it seems like AI dating is also doing quite well. So so maybe there's a gen general market for that as well.
Speaker 2:Our chat Ryan in our chat just said TBPN wasn't posting before AI.
Speaker 1:Not true. Look at my YouTube channel. I started in 2020. My my
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 6:All that to say, those kinds of consumer credentials actually can and will bubble into enterprise workflows. Mhmm. Something that that Outtake did was say, okay,
Speaker 12:you know, wouldn't it be
Speaker 6:powerful if if if you could project your security? And and I'll I'll define what that means. Right now, when you when when we interact with other institutions, you actually don't know if that institution, you know, has a great security protocol. One way they could prove that to you is every email they send, they would cryptographically sign. Right?
Speaker 6:And so they would literally be in the header a signature that says, like, hey, at the moment of send, I literally swiped my passkey that we all have on our computers. And and and it was physically me. And and I can show you with a badge that that this was, therefore, definitively me, the human, etcetera, etcetera. And I'm projecting to you that I'm a high trust person to email with. And so something that that Outtake is very actively exploring when I talk about, you know, making real things obvious as part of our mission is exactly that layer.
Speaker 6:It's like, okay, how do you go beyond just finding and removing things, but how do you help authenticate and prove to the world what is real? I think frankly that's like, when we think about our $40,000,000 series b and like why I think we're on this trajectory to be a public market company is, it's the real prize for us is like how do you become a trust layer for the Internet. Like how do you say, hey, we've spent so much time mapping the landscape, removing what's fake, that actually we are the best source of truth and what's real. Right? That that's really what
Speaker 7:we think about.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, I will
Speaker 2:Who who did the who did the round?
Speaker 6:Iconic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A more serious note. Who did the round? No. I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:Very, very iconic group to get in the mix. Yes. Yeah. And I'm sure you'll be back. I I I don't know.
Speaker 2:If I was a bet if I was a betting man, I'd say a couple more times this year with the momentum that that you guys are on. So Yeah. Congrats on the on the milestone and and, yeah, thanks thanks for fighting the bad guys.
Speaker 1:We'll see you soon.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having See you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. App loving, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. You heard the Axon Clarkson. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Up next.
Speaker 2:We have Mitchell.
Speaker 1:Mitchell from Phoenix. We're going back to milk. Do you know what this company does? Let's bring in Mitchell. I'll have him explain it.
Speaker 1:How is this company type of milk? You're the second milk related company of the day. The flapping airplanes guy. Loosely loosely. But please, I'll let you explain.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself and the company, please.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Of course. I get milk related. I don't even know what that is. But
Speaker 1:There there was just an AI lab guest who was drinking milk. And so I I made the guess. Anyway, sorry. Continue.
Speaker 9:One of our products. No. Awesome. I like to be on here. So, yeah, of course.
Speaker 9:Mitch, one of the founders of Phoenix, we're kind of using II, like you said, to help milk, but mainly to help dairy farmers manage their cows. So at the end of the world, make milk that that other gentleman gets to drink.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Incredible. I is the is the dairy farm market extremely concentrated at this point? Like, are are are you, like, almost prosumer, or is it, like, pure enterprise? You get in, like, the three biggest dairy farm aggregators and then you're done?
Speaker 9:Maybe not three, but it's absolutely much more consolidated since, you know, back when it used to be guys with a couple of cows in the backyard. No. Our average dairy farm is 3,000 cows and doing tens of millions of revenue. Wow. It's really big.
Speaker 1:How do you actually plug in, get data, drive outcomes? Like, what what what are you tracking? Do they have ERPs? How what's the actual
Speaker 9:Yeah. No. It's really interesting. As we've scaled dairy farms over the past, like, thirty years, data collection has become a big part. Like, you walk on to one of these dairies, there's computer vision happening there.
Speaker 9:There's call like, all of the cows wear Fitbits. I mean, they're not made by Fitbit. Yeah. Same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, all that sort of so there's a hell of a lot of data collection being there. Kind of up to date, most of it just goes to nothing. So that's where we really come in using a lot of that data there to actually help with insights.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What yeah. Break down, like, I would love to just, like, the specifics of, like, what what the actual product does, how how it's driving results for for the farmers.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. So when we go into a dairy farm, we collect genetic information on every single cow. So we literally whole genome sequence all 3,000 something cows on a dairy or however many there are. We then combine that with what I call phenotypic data, but that's the physical data, the computer vision, the Fitbit, the weather, how much milk every cow is making, how much she's eating, all of that data.
Speaker 9:So we feed that into a big AI model, which then makes predictions on the life of a cow. So when she's a day old, I can predict with about 90% accuracy what her life is gonna look like. You know? How many whether she's gonna get sick, when, how, how much milk she's gonna make, is she gonna get pregnant, when, how, that sort of stuff. And we use those to just make the farms a lot more efficient as far as their day to day management.
Speaker 1:And then what's the pricing model? Are you doing per cow?
Speaker 9:It's, like, per cow per year.
Speaker 1:Per cow per year. Okay. And then cow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So in
Speaker 9:the sea, we got a cow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then and then what what what interventions are farmers taking? Do cows, like, trade hands in the secondary market if a cow is particularly valuable? They do. Know.
Speaker 9:Cows sell for millions of dollars. Millions of dollars? Don't know. Yeah. I think the the highest is now over tens of millions is the the best cows out there.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:pretty crazy. Is that for, like, breeding purposes? Somebody like a cow?
Speaker 1:Elite line.
Speaker 9:Is particularly They really just make semen their whole life. It's pretty much it. Yeah. That's
Speaker 2:crazy. Wow. Yeah. So, I mean,
Speaker 9:what we really look like is actually kinda how it works. When we go onto a dairy, there are farm workers show up and ask the computer, what should I do today? And our computer will tell them. Mhmm. So we are really managing the day to day on the entire farm, just so much more I mean, nothing against our existing farmers, but, you much know, more efficiently when you're able to look at both predict everything out with 90% accuracy, and you're looking at every single piece of information.
Speaker 2:A computer dairy super intelligence.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 2:It really is. It's here. How how big is it? Like, how many farms are you guys active on today? Is is Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're on like, bottleneck now, just, like, having enough people to to sell the product?
Speaker 9:Well, actually, I'm the person who sells. So I'm literally, every single farm we close, I'm the person who spokes to them, but supporting them, you know, is quite a lot. So, obviously, that doesn't scale forever either. But yeah. So we're on close to half a million cows now.
Speaker 9:So, I mean, that's about 5% of
Speaker 3:your day.
Speaker 1:That's pretty good.
Speaker 9:We only launched in August. Yeah. So we have scaled to to, like I mean, last year, we did about two and a half million. I did two and a half million last week. Wow.
Speaker 1:So That's
Speaker 9:fair. Yeah. We're going pretty fast as far as scaling. Really, what I need now is just people to join. I mean, at the end of the day, it does still even though it's an AI doing it, it requires
Speaker 2:How many dairy cows are there on earth?
Speaker 9:Hold on. There's like a 100,000,000. In The US, there's like 10,000,000.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Job's not finished.
Speaker 2:Job's not finished.
Speaker 1:But you raised some new money. Tell us about the round.
Speaker 9:Yep. So we did our, you know, our seed round raised, you know, over 5,000,000. We've got some Jeez. Of raised vessels that came in. So, you know, led by initialized over water, these sort of people who are really helping us scale up this mission and really just making the world of agriculture much more efficient.
Speaker 2:Amazing. That's amazing. I I like yeah. Being able to walk up to the computer on a farm and just say, how do I tell me what increase to
Speaker 1:this cow's milk yield. Okay. Computer, milk this cow. It's basically what's happening.
Speaker 9:Someone's killed this cow, move this cow, milk this cow, feed this cow. That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can I can imagine the farmer of the future walking around with the headset on just like seeing, you know, little little AR pop ups? Very cyberpunk. Very, very cyberpunk. Cyberpunk farming is here.
Speaker 1:It is. It is. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:And we will talk to you later. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web app servers and databases run-in one place with scaling monitoring and security built in. And Next.
Speaker 1:We have Gabe from Rogo. Up next
Speaker 2:Coming through. Time on the show with
Speaker 1:some amazing news.
Speaker 2:What's How
Speaker 1:you doing? Welcome to
Speaker 11:the What's up, guys? How's it going?
Speaker 1:What's up?
Speaker 2:It's good. We've been looking forward to this one for I feel like a year at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm shocked it's your first time. Thank you so much for for taking the time. Since it is your first time, please introduce yourself, the company, and the news.
Speaker 11:Sam's great. I'm Gabe Sengal. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Rogo. Mhmm. Rogo is the Gen AI tool for front office investment bankers, investors, private equity professionals, you name it.
Speaker 11:The kind of mental comp folks have is Harvey for finance. Sure. We just raised a $75,000,000 series c led by Sequant Capital. And I'm
Speaker 2:Pretty incredible. Incredible. What I wanna get right into it.
Speaker 1:Do you agree with Pat? Is AGI here?
Speaker 11:More or less,
Speaker 2:you know.
Speaker 11:AI is smarter than a lot of people I know. So it depends on your definition of of AGI. AGI.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, then in the investment banking context, a lot of the value that an investment banker brings is interpersonal negotiation, contacts, Rolodex, understanding subtext, what the motivations of a certain CEO are, stuff that might not just be be scrapable off the Internet. What what where where does Rogo actually plug in? What's left for the human being? What's the future of investment banking look like?
Speaker 11:Look. We want the the best deal makers to be more productive. And there are guys right now who are slinging phone calls all day long Yeah. Five minute five minute five minute five minute. Someone like a Blair Efron at Centerview.
Speaker 11:Sure. You know, that guy is so productive because he has a team of junior bankers underneath him that know what they're doing. Yeah. There should be a lot more deal makers. There should be folks who are able to go out, advise companies, help with m and a restructuring, etcetera, and focus on the human part of the work, the connectivity, the reading folks, the negotiation rather than, you know, spending time building PowerPoints, spending time, you know, benchmarking comps, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:How how is how is the product evolved over the last year specifically with new model advancements, reasoning, etcetera? We I I have a lawyer buddy and and just like the difference in how he perceived Harvey twelve months ago versus today is, like, just totally night and day. Like, back then, he was like, yeah. Like, it's it's it's cool. And now he's, like, totally one shot by it.
Speaker 2:And I'm and I'm I'm imagining that, something similar has probably transpired with you guys as well.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think especially in the enterprise, there was a little bit of that first mover's disadvantage early on where you were kind of bottlenecked by just the model quality. And everyone had ideas for how they wanted these tools to transform legal work, finance work, health care, etcetera. But if the models were incapable of doing it or it was just it wasn't quite at the threshold where you could do serious work, I think, you know, people felt a little spurned by those products. And I mean, if I look at Rogo today compared to two years ago, it's like two years ago, we were the most incompetent intern you would ever hire.
Speaker 11:And if you had hired a human intern like that, you would have fired them. The benefit is Rogo gets a lot better, a lot faster, and then it stays that way. And then it's gonna be a lot cheaper than that human intern. But the products changed enormously, both in actual capabilities and ability to move across what a banker's doing, PowerPoint, Excel, file drives, SharePoints, data rooms, etcetera, but also integrations into the back office. Right?
Speaker 11:Like, people don't realize, but to be an investment bank, you not just have to be, you know, creating Excel models, calling people, but who's thinking about the conflict checks? Who's thinking about all of these kind of back and middle office tasks that help an investment bank run? And over the past two years, we've really embedded across a lot of those workflows too.
Speaker 1:Can you share a little bit about how how your customers are actually using Rogo? Specifically, like, we saw this massive boom with Claude Bot, now Molt Bot, and it felt like a lot of people were just excited about Claude code over WhatsApp or Telegram. Right? And it's like, these models existed. We didn't get a new frontier model.
Speaker 1:We got a new way for a lot of people just to interact with these models. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a shift from the, you know, the laptop crew maybe doing more of those compliance checks, more of those, hey, let's pull some comps or pull some data together over their phones specifically.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we are about to roll out our mobile app, which we have been kind of long in the tooth doing. But I hope that you know, we start to see more of the phone crew. Yeah. The reality is the most important folks in in our ICP, they're just on their iPads and phones all day anyway.
Speaker 11:You know, when I was a banker, I didn't even realize my MDs had computers. They were you know, never had them, never in Excel, that kinda thing. Yeah. I think you'll see the UXs of these agent tools start to evolve into, like, some sort of ability to manage, you know, your agents and tasks and the kind of UX around, like, your army of bankers or lawyers or whatever it is. Yeah.
Speaker 11:I'm I'm I'm pretty excited about that.
Speaker 1:What about other integrations? Are you seeing folks like or is there is there, you know, demand for, like, the the Slack type of integration? We're in a war room on a particular deal, and we're adding Rogo to pull stuff in into that context.
Speaker 11:Except it's got to be Teams if we're Sure. Talking about investment
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 11:But, yeah, all of those things. Right? Like, you should have a data room that is being populated by an agent and a data room that's being diligence by an agent. Yeah. It should be completely integrated in all the places where your data already lives.
Speaker 11:I think the complexity for our business is, you know, when you have a kind of a Claude bot or Claude code running around on a desktop unconstrained, there's security risks. You know, I was using Claude code to create a fake data room that we would then demo in the Rogo product. And as part of that, I gathered every prior fundraising deck we had, all of our financials cap table, and I asked Claude to organize it, and it deleted all the files.
Speaker 1:And I was like, can you
Speaker 11:can you please undo that? And it was like, no. I'm sorry. That was irrecoverable.
Speaker 8:And it's
Speaker 11:like, if I did that with one of my clients, I would not you know, we would not be raising this round. And so there's a lot of of nuance at figuring out how to take these agents, which are most powerful when they are unconstrained and do have access to your files and your desktops and your systems, and making sure they can be deployed in a way that's thoughtful and secure and so on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:How how are you thinking about integrating Rogo with, like, legal, like, legal workflows? And and just, like like, at what point does a lot of this stuff really converge? It feels like, you know, there's kind of an old an old pair like, kind of paradigm around these the way, you know, a company gets bought or sold that will evolve? Yeah.
Speaker 11:I mean, especially in places like private credit, there there's an there's a blurry overlap between what is, you know, legal work and due diligence versus investment work and due diligence. I would say when I look at some of the, like, prior generation comps for me in this space, Thomson Reuters, FactSet, Bloomberg, etcetera, they actually really subdivided the the legal verticals and products from the finance. I mean, Thomson Reuters actually sold off all their finance assets to Refinitiv and into LSEG. And I think it was partly because it was actually you know, there there's less synergies often than people expect. I think if we're just talking about private equity, private credit, yes, a lot of synergies between those types of workflows.
Speaker 11:But, like, you know, a lot of what investment bankers are doing, or, you know, the the top private equity folks, top public markets investors, they're kinda outsourcing all of the legal work to someone else. Like, that's not even under their umbrella.
Speaker 2:What about head count planning? How are how's the industry kind of thinking? It's probably one of the more awkward conversations, for for a lot of people involved. But
Speaker 11:I mean, it's not it's not taking teachers jobs. Right? Like, we're talking about investment bankers, and investment bankers are gonna get more productive. And so firms are excited. People are excited.
Speaker 11:Bankers are excited. If you're a junior banker, you will be generating fees yourself earlier in your career rather than later. If you are a bank, you're gonna expect higher fees out of your existing bankers with fewer resources, but it's gonna change the trajectory of of what it means to work in finance. And you'll go from being the automation piece of the bank where you're just churning out materials to having to think about, yeah, how do you go out and do deals on your own?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Do you think, like, do you think we'll see an acceleration in overall deal making? Like, are there are there are there there deals how many deals don't get done just because it's gonna be such a huge headache? Like
Speaker 11:There's a lot of deals that don't get done because it's such a headache. I mean, especially in the private markets. Like, think about all those mom and shop businesses throughout The US or even, you know, businesses in emerging markets that can't pay Goldman Sachs $10,000,000 to run a process, can't pay JPM $10,000,000 to restructure, Especially in The US where all of these assets have been getting picked up by private equity firms that just have sourcing arms that call, you know, your local roofing business in Minnesota. You know, now those businesses should be able to get banking services themselves, actually run a fair auction and get a better price, and it should result in a more liquid, more transparent, more efficient private market.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Go to deal sleds. What you got for us? Recommendations for up and coming bankers, the next generation. What are they putting on their feet?
Speaker 11:You know, I have one pair of deal sleds, and it's the ones my parents got me when I got my job as an investment bank banker at Lazard, and they're
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 11:Ferragamo loafers.
Speaker 2:Well Those are
Speaker 11:the ones I wear to this day when I have to go into, you know, whatever investment bank or
Speaker 2:Somebody somebody should make some shoes that are just like Mac minis. Yeah. You're just walking around, you know, walking around the office. Silicon Valley Bank Signaling signaling like, you know, I'm I'm with it.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Meaningful. What are you what's the biggest bottleneck right now? I'm assuming you're you're gonna hire a bunch of people from this round. Where where what's talk about the use of funds, all that.
Speaker 11:We're a 100 people today, primarily in New York. We're opening a London office and then probably APAC later in the year, trying to get to around 200, 250 people equally split across, you know, product and engineering and go to market. And most of our go to market post sales, what we call kind of like forward deployed banking is x finance, x bankers, x investors.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Where's the name come from, Rogo?
Speaker 11:Our lawyers our initial name was Athena, and our lawyers were like, you can't do that. There's Gabe, there's probably a thousand products called Athena. So John, my cofounder, and I spent months trying to come up with a name. And, know, at some point, we're just looking up old Latin words, and rogo means I ask in Latin. Oh.
Speaker 11:And so we thought that was a good one.
Speaker 1:I love that. There you That's great. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great. Great to finally meet, and congrats to the whole team. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest
Speaker 2:you guys.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Goodbye. And our last guest of the lightning round, Sierra Peterson from Voyager Ventures. Energy time. Restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 13:Hey, guys. Delighted to be here. How are you?
Speaker 2:We're great. Great to have you. First time on the show. Would love, introduction on yourself and the firm and then we can get into the news.
Speaker 13:You bet. So I'm Sierra Peterson. I'm one of the two founders of Voyager Ventures. We are an early stage venture capital firm investing in the foundational technologies that power civilization, substance energy, amputation, materials production, advanced compute, physical AI. These are the biggest markets in the world and the ones that are foundational to ongoing growth in the long term and competitive advantage in the near term.
Speaker 13:So I have been working in energy for my entire career. Got me started twenty one years ago at the International Energy Agency. Overnight success. Exactly. Long time coming.
Speaker 13:And I mean, that's really the story of our backgrounds, myself and my co founder at Voyager, Sarah. I've been working in energy and industrial modernization and climate stabilization now for decades. Between us, we've built five climate tech and energy companies. We've been active in policymaking at the International Energy Agency, as I mentioned, and also in the Obama Office of Energy and Climate Change back when we had one. And we built yeah, exactly.
Speaker 13:We built companies that were responsible for financing more than $3,000,000,000 worth of distributed energy assets, so a lot of solar. We've been active in the research programs at Harvard and MIT, advancing everything from energy market research, which was my graduate focus since I was at MIT in industrial biotech. And we've been investing now for ten years plus. I actually got started as an angel investor in 2015 in energy tech. Those companies did well, and so we teamed up to launch Voyager in 2021 and raised a $100,000,000 debut fund.
Speaker 13:We've recently
Speaker 2:John's going for the gong.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise recently?
Speaker 13:Hey. No. That's not the big the the big news.
Speaker 1:We got a big big
Speaker 13:number. Announced a $2.75 fund too. So
Speaker 2:We're waiting for that. Very cool. So I wanna talk about energy because I feel like your your timing here is great. I feel like people in are are spending way more, you know, it's gone mainstream, both at at the national level and and politics.
Speaker 1:Just in the last few weeks, we've had Scott Nolan on to talk about, you know, nuclear fuel production. And then a separate company that turns that actually into fuel pellets, triso fuel. And like, there's a there's a company in every part of the stack. Are there any particular subcategories that you're tracking that you're particularly interested in? And And then I want to talk about the financing of all this as well.
Speaker 1:But what what what do you think is the most like breakout success in energy these days?
Speaker 13:Oh, yeah. I mean, we're energy maximalists. I have been working in energy for my entire career. Yeah. And when you and when you think about what's truly foundational to power and civilization, it's energy.
Speaker 13:That is the foundation of all of it. And so, you know, we that's actually a really exciting time to be investing, given advances, particularly in electrification. I mean, we're seeing the cost of solar drop so fast that you have to look at it on a log scale. It's amazing. And what that means in terms of, you know, distribution of energy at a worldwide scale is incredible and for creating, you know, a truly global and resilient energy system that enables near term stability for users of electricity and long term prosperity at a global scale.
Speaker 13:That's like, this is a technology that will power the next era of progress and beyond. So electricity, massive. Advances on electrification, massive right now.
Speaker 1:Are you optimistic about American solar? It feels like the in terms of solar panel construction and manufacturing, China's doing so well that it's been really hard to get a foothold. We we we've talked to some teams that have, you know, taken Chinese built assets and
Speaker 2:T1 Energy.
Speaker 1:T1 Energy is interesting. But I haven't seen as much as much excitement from the startup world around really scaling solar. But then you have, you know, huge voices like Elon is a solar maxi. There's lots of people that are very very, you know, just beating the drum on like the fundamental physics of the sun is so much energy, we're going to capture it at So some it feels inevitable, but it doesn't feel like there's as much of a boom or narrative being driven. But what are you seeing?
Speaker 13:Oh, it's totally inevitable. You can't argue with the numbers. I mean, 90% of installed energy generation for the last year that we have record is twenty twenty four is renewables. That is at a global scale. Is certainly true in The United States as well.
Speaker 13:I think it's just under 90%. And I mean, that's regardless of political whim. That's regardless of, your overall organizing policy approach. That's just simply because solar is better. It's cheaper, it's better performing, it enables a true distribution of electricity like we've never seen before.
Speaker 13:And coupled with advances in batteries, that's the unlock. You can really create a transactive energy system, which we've never seen before and really will be fundamental to power and growth for decades ahead. So huge, yeah, huge believer in solar's potential now. And, you know, in combination with electrification both of energy generation, also in end use applications. I mean, electricity now is the most frequent way in which anybody around the world accesses power.
Speaker 13:That's exciting. It means that power is programmable and it enables a new era of machines to be made, which is extraordinary in terms of, you know, extending human capabilities into ways that we've never had before. When you couple that with automation and artificial intelligence, like, we're just seeing the foundations of so much innovation right now to really, one, boost systemic stability in a rising vulnerability and volatility market. We have fraying trade relationships, geopolitical tensions, physical risks that are tensing of even climate change. And when you can control your inputs in terms of electricity, in terms of your means of production, and you can take advantage of advances in advanced manufacturing to create better products, you can really control your own destiny.
Speaker 13:That's exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about financing hard tech companies, energy companies, these, like, capital intensive companies at the earlier stage? It feels like more and more founders are going to need to get familiar with venture debt. It's been sort of a cautionary tale from the software startup era. Oh, venture debt, that's what will burn you.
Speaker 1:That's what will really put you in danger if you're if you misplan and then you get over your skis. But how do you think about the role of venture debt or debt instruments or more more complicated financing schemes for some of these companies?
Speaker 13:Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, I think one of the things that we're quite excited about is the sophistication of the financing instruments that are available to early stage startups. I mean, used to be that you had to burn super high cost of capital venture or private equity on assets, and that didn't make sense for anybody. You know, now we're seeing really tailored and interested bespoke, non dilutive financing, you know, all types.
Speaker 13:And I think it's a recognition of the scale of these markets and the durability that they have in, you know, this long lived and reliable yield. I think we're also seeing, though, and this is something that's been, you know, a recent development, ongoing sovereign interests and recognition in these technologies as being tools of the national interest. You know, 44% of our own portfolio is either in partnership or in active conversations to sign a deal with the US government. That's extraordinary. Mean, you know, you see In Q Tel last year, I think became one of our our second most frequent co investor.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Interesting. You like, that's
Speaker 1:It used to be completely unthinkable. It was like, you never go to the government. They'll never buy anything. Like, Palantir was this weird company that was, like, off in the dark just doing one deal, and they were the only ones. Then Andrew all sort of did it again.
Speaker 1:And then all of a sudden, it was like every company has some sort of deal with the government. Yeah. Really changed everything.
Speaker 13:Because when you think about what are the inputs and tools of sovereign advantage, of competitive advantage, it's controlling your destiny in terms of energy, controlling your destiny in terms of supply chains for inputs to manufacturing, industrial capacity, and then increasingly compute It's a national asset. And all of that hyperscaler stack that all relies on electricity.
Speaker 2:What about, like, what what are the prospects for making, bringing the solar supply chain to The United States. We have, like, earlier we mentioned t one energy, which was kind of a weird setup in the way that it was created and and now operated by a new company. But can we I think one of the reasons that that that maybe Americans and and, the tech industry isn't so excited about solar at this moment or at least broadly is that we're not making the panels here. It doesn't feel like, something that, is that we really own.
Speaker 13:Yeah. I I mean, I I think I don't know that we're not excited about solar. I mean, you you look at the solar deployment.
Speaker 2:Well, I I'm just saying, like, the the attention is almost entirely on nuclear. Like, nuclear
Speaker 1:like that now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, I'm just saying from when you when you
Speaker 1:a word, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sure. But think about I I would just say the number of entrepreneurs that have come on the show this year that are talking about nuclear Yep. The the nuclear deals are are and and I'm not saying it's, like, warranted, but I'm just saying, like, nuclear is is certainly
Speaker 1:Well, it feels like at least to me, and and you can give your feedback on this take but it feels like nuclear was was potentially economically valuable viable. The the technology worked, but there was a regulatory blocker in place that made it very, very difficult to actually just stand up the technology. With solar, there's no that that regulatory blocker doesn't exist. It's more of a market force of China manufacturers them really, really cheaply. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Mhmm. Like, it's the DJI drone question versus GoPro. Like, where like, we just need a ton of people, a ton of manufacturing capacity, a ton of CNC machines. We need, like, a massive facility, and that's more of a capital formation. And then are you willing to go up against the Chinese manufacturing engine that's
Speaker 3:so critical?
Speaker 2:My point is just that energy is critical. Yes. Solar energy
Speaker 1:It still feels blocked. A
Speaker 2:pretty big part of it. Yeah. So I would imagine we wanna make as many of these as we can in the Yeah. I was curious, like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Please. Update on the on the effort there. I know you've invested in in it and curious. Yeah.
Speaker 13:I mean, I think we're seeing a real reexamination of global supply chains for critical aspects of ongoing sovereign advantage and industrial competitiveness. Solar being, you know, one, critical minerals another, access to novel battery technologies. These are all aspects of an overall industrial policy that's increasingly favoring domestic production and control of energy producing assets and manufacturing inputs. I think, you know, to your earlier point, like, any technology is going to need to clear the global clearing price and the massive reduction in cost that's been extraordinary for solar production, for panel production. It's you can't get much cheaper.
Speaker 13:There's kind of nowhere to go.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 13:exciting. I mean, about that as an input to other industrial processes, that's, I mean, a truly extraordinary opportunity to have abundant energy that doesn't rely on, you know, fossil fuel supply chains, that's truly distributed and can be programmable. I mean, you couple it with energy storage. I mean, you just have a whole new paradigm in abundance for electricity.
Speaker 1:Be exciting. Very exciting. I hear yeah. What
Speaker 2:you guys stage agnostic, pre seed?
Speaker 13:No. We're early stage. Early? Not early. Yep.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Awesome. So we're in $275,000,000. It's more seed series a.
Speaker 2:Series is
Speaker 13:$275,000,000 for seed series a. We went off to market with a two fifty target. We're oversubscribed on that. I had a ninety percent first close. There was a lot of excitement.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 13:It's been great.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations. Well,
Speaker 2:excited. I'm sure I'm sure a bunch of your companies will be on. Yeah. And and, congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good to meet you.
Speaker 13:Likewise. Talk energy.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Mamish.
Speaker 2:Bye. Talk soon. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Did the Klein team just join Codex OpenAI? Jason Liu asked the question.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I think a lot of the team members did. Okay. Hashtag remember there Yeah. Whole controversy about, you know, the smell, imagine the smell.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Oh, he was a client.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. So he moved over Oh. I think a number of the of the like lead engineers Okay. Philbert.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Will Brown says a very rare reverse windsurf.
Speaker 2:And Tradies said, well, they certainly didn't decline.
Speaker 1:Declined the the ask. Yeah. Interesting to see these the, you know, the the the really the really headline grabbing the the really headline grabbing AI trade war narrative has sort of calmed down, but everyone's hiring, everyone's poaching, everyone's trying to build their teams.
Speaker 2:It's a war.
Speaker 1:Working through.
Speaker 2:Anyway, there are There's a post here. Somebody is calling out Augustus to Rico. They said, he has no couscous.
Speaker 1:Greed. Greed. I to be fair, I've never seen the man eat couscous. He might not have any couscous. I think they were trying to say conscience.
Speaker 1:But yes, Augustus has has stumbled into such a funny life. I'm really he's, yeah. He's he's he's grinding through it.
Speaker 2:Picked, something more controversial than pretty much anything
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But he's he's it's
Speaker 2:somehow more controversial than defense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's just it's just odd. It it just triggers all sorts
Speaker 3:of people. I
Speaker 1:wonder I feel like the the fact that he's able to go on podcasts and communicate so clearly, he's one of the Joe Rogan CEOs in your parlance, like, that's allowed him to get through it. It feels like if he were on his back foot and not able to just say, hey, I'll talk to anyone for an I will just talk, talk, talk, That if there was a negative news cycle about him, would be a much harder situation.
Speaker 2:But Yep.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Last post for Okay. The Emily Sundberg went mega viral, '62
Speaker 1:I did not see the likes on this. I didn't realize He
Speaker 2:says the logo for Sydney Sweeney's lingerie line looks like it's for a salad dressing company that launched in 2019. Sir? This is for Siren.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's Siren. Siren. That's wild.
Speaker 2:And It does it does give off a little bit of Sweetgreen. So is oh, my Sweetgreen launched way before 2019.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. So oh. Oh. Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is that the company that she's referring to? What is she actually referring to? Because I saw Dirt quote tweeted it, and that's a media and technology company with a similar logo. And Dirt says just says, hey, and got 66,000 likes as well.
Speaker 1:And Emily says, bro. But oh, I guess it's Sweetgreen that they're that she's actually referring to. Salad dressing company? Isn't Sweetgreen like a salad company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. She's just she's just posted it.
Speaker 1:It's a bang.
Speaker 2:Alex Conrad says someone blended Cava and Graza branding in Checchi too. Little Graza
Speaker 3:in there.
Speaker 2:But I think this I I think this company will do very well. Yeah. I think Sydney's like one of the most commercial people in Hollywood. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:She's like just leaning in. Yeah. She's got a, you know, somewhat short moment in time to create a lot of value and and certainly a lot of the brand activations that she's done have broken through. Yeah. I'm bullish.
Speaker 2:I'm bullish.
Speaker 1:To go back to the Clogbot thing, like, the like, this siren clearly exists in a very different part of the economy as Sweetgreen. Like Sweetgreen, I think it was like, you walk down the street, you see it. Maybe if they start opening a ton of retail stores, but like, in terms of Going flashbang. Are you flashbanging me? Why are you
Speaker 4:flashbanging me? Because the chat earlier was going crazy. They were trying to throw me off. It was insane. It was I was barely hanging on.
Speaker 1:It was brutal. Everyone It was brutal. Everyone loves the flashbang. Fun fact, Sydney Sweeney is launching her lingerie brand on, you guessed it, Shopify, Harley.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's the story. Fantastic news. Well, the last thing before you plant the bomb, we have a new ad read for Railway. I already did it. I'm gonna do another one.
Speaker 1:Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 2:So you'll be hearing from Well said, John. We'll close it out. Nathan is highlighting Bloomberg article. The title of the article, NVIDIA lacks clear successor for superstar CEO who built company. And Nathan, course, says, man is barely getting started.
Speaker 1:And how
Speaker 2:I agree. Who's who's asking who's No one's calling. This question.
Speaker 1:This is like He's driven the stock 10 x and it's the biggest company in the world and they haven't like, have massive margins of cash flow. Like there's been no mistakes like literally like nothing. 62 years old, he's got another 30. He's got another 30. He's gonna be riding Nvidia straight in the singularity and we will be too here on TVPN.
Speaker 2:Last post. Last post.
Speaker 1:Eric. Eric.
Speaker 2:Souffert says, Pinterest dropped nearly 10% yesterday on news that the company is cutting roughly 15% of its work force focus on AI. Eric, I believe is coming on the show tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I you got him. Really like talking with him Yeah. About all things.
Speaker 1:Gonna dive into this. We'll dive into
Speaker 2:platform and AI ads. Ads.
Speaker 1:Pretty remarkable. I wonder where Pinterest will land. There's been rumors or or, you know, pitches for an acquisition. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Speaker 2:We love you.
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow at cdpa.com for the newsletter. Nice
Speaker 2:work, brothers.
Speaker 3:I'll see you on the next one.