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.
Kling dot ai. Kling dot ai, the video generation video model, has been on a tear. There's an article in The Wall Street Journal showing some pretty staggering numbers. They hit 12,000,000 monthly active users, and they generated more than 20,000,000 in revenue just last year. I wanted to dig in and understand where this came from, the history of Kuaishou, the Chinese company behind it.
Speaker 1:There's a new farmer filling up the trough for everyone. Cling has hit 12,000,000 MAUs, 20,000,000 revenue in the last month. Now they seem to be on the up and to the right curve. It's a pretty massive ramp. The product launched eighteen months ago.
Speaker 1:But Cling is not its own startup. It is a new project from Kuaishou Technology. This is a Chinese company. And the founders, I couldn't find a single project.
Speaker 2:John, I'm going blow your mind right now. Please. Guess who worked at Kuaishou? Who? He's been on the show.
Speaker 2:Okay. I share a name with him. Wait. Connor Hayes? No.
Speaker 2:No? Jordan Schneider.
Speaker 1:Jordan Schneider worked at Quai Show?
Speaker 2:Yes. No Yes. Just just responded to the to the daily newsletter.
Speaker 1:Does he wanna hop in?
Speaker 2:And said, l o l, I worked at Quai Show. What a comeback.
Speaker 1:Tell Jordan.
Speaker 3:Tell all.
Speaker 2:Jordan, come get on the show.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Come hang out if you wanna if
Speaker 2:you wanna see. Send him a note.
Speaker 1:I it'd great to hear more of more of the story from him. He might be the only person that we can get to to to go on the record about Kwai Show because the founders, I don't think they've ever done a podcast appearance. They haven't been certainly on the VictoryLab podcast American Circuit, like many founders that get a company to this scale. Quacia was pretty old, especially for the AI boom. It launched in 2011 as a mobile app for creating and sharing GIFs.
Speaker 1:This was before Vine and before Musically. They were sort of like a precursor to all those, just by a year or two.
Speaker 2:So you could almost say that Jordan Schneider made his money in GIFs.
Speaker 1:I think so. I think he created TikTok, basically. So there's some similar threads. So Dom Hoffman, the founder of Vine, he worked at Yahoo before founding Vine. And Alex Zhu at Musically worked at eBay and Microsoft and I think SAP as well.
Speaker 1:And so both of those companies, they had like big tech experience, then they went and founded these companies. And the founders of Kuaishou, Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao also did the same. One of them worked at Google, of them worked at Hewlett Packard, and then they jumped into the social media boom that was going on in the early aughts, like in or the late I guess the late aughts, early 2010s. Is there a word for the period between 2010, the teens, the twenty tens? Tens?
Speaker 1:I don't know. But that era, like post Facebook, there was Foursquare, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap. There were just like a new one every year was popping up. And so they jump in on this. And the mobile internet was expanding really rapidly in China at that time.
Speaker 1:There was a big boom. There were a bunch of big winners that came out of that era. Kuaishou hit 100,000,000 DAU by 2013, so basically eighteen months after they launched. And they actually pivoted in that eighteen month timeline from GIFs to videos. And so once they had that new product dialed, they ramped pretty quickly.
Speaker 1:Now there was a little bit of a slowdown between 2013 and 2019 because they didn't hit 200,000,000 DAU until 2019, so they were sort of saturating then. But they were on a fundraising tear the whole time. Raised $350,000,000 from Tencent in 2017. They integrated with WeChat to accelerate distribution. And the company was worth around $18,000,000,000 by 2018, just seven years until the journey.
Speaker 1:So not bad. The Quietro IPO was a particularly crazy moment for the company. So they raised $5,400,000,000 at the IPO. They were massively oversubscribed for that. So they say, hey, we want to raise $5,000,000,000 and $165,000,000,000 of demand shows up from the market.
Speaker 1:So retail investors just went insane. Dollars 165,000,000,000 of demand, only $5,000,000,000 for sale. And so the stock trades up 192% at the open. And all of a sudden, the company is worth $180,000,000,000 and both of the founders are deca billionaires. Pretty sick.
Speaker 1:That didn't last, though. There was a massive sell off. And there were a of speed bumps that Kaishou seemingly hit shortly after going public. So China had a big crackdown in regulation on local tech companies. ByteDance became much more dominant as a competitor and had Kaishou in their sites.
Speaker 1:And then the Kaishou user growth just sort of slowed down, and so there were a couple misses on DAUMAU growth. The metrics weren't looking as good, and so the investors said, hey, we're rotating to other things. They were pulling out. And so the stock traded down 80% within six months, So not great. But today, the market cap's around $40,000,000,000 Like, it's still a very real business.
Speaker 1:20 this is all USD. I converted everything. So 40,000,000,000 market cap, 20,000,000,000 revenue, 11,000,000,000 gross profit, net profit $2,600,000,000 So that's like a lot of cash flow, a lot of net income to work with, certainly enough to do some training runs, start a NeoLab or a video lab or take some new bets. That's exactly what they did. 2024, they launched the first version of Cling, and they did this just three months after OpenAI demoed Sora.
Speaker 1:So it was kind of like the Chinese answer to Sora. Since then, they've updated Cling 30 times and carved out a nice little place in the grid of trade offs around model performance and cost. For cinematic footage, people often recommend Vio3 still, but for Cling, it has some really strong characteristics in motion control and physics simulations. There's a number of places where Cling's been outperforming there, and then there's a number of other sort of niche applications where Kling's really great. And at $0.10 per second, pricing has been very attractive relative to some of the other options in the market.
Speaker 1:They've certainly come out as a frontier quality model at a very affordable price. Interestingly, Kuaishou claims that Kling is gross margin positive. And so now it's unclear that doesn't include training And we don't really I mean, it's gross profit, so it doesn't include the 100 or so R and D people on the team. My question is like, what happens if they try and scale another order of magnitude? Will they be paying more for inference?
Speaker 1:Will they be able to get those chips? Because there's still this big debate over how many NVIDIA GPUs should be able to be sent over to China. It honestly gets me excited about MSL dropping a video model because a lot of the same sort of like precursor elements in terms of like the training data in the ecosystem when you think about just the raw data in reels, it could wind up being a model that's a little bit more opinionated. Maybe it has some mid journey sprinkled in there. Like I think that the MSL the pressure on MSL has been intense, and the initial Vibes launch was not loved.
Speaker 1:But they certainly have the compute. They have the team now. They have the data. Like they have all the key ingredients to a really successful video generation model launch.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to see Meta's next real launch here. They have so many advantages. They have the talent now. The pressure is immense, but they should be able to come out with something that's super competitive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Year to date, Quai Show's up 23%, so they've been on a run. And there's a lot of investor optimism about Quai Show's potential to monetize AI. The company's AI powered video and graphics generation capabilities will likely drive earnings over the next few years, S and P Global Ratings analysts wrote in a recent note. That could lower content creation, advertising costs, and boost content creation on Kuaishou's short form video platform.
Speaker 1:The company has the second largest independent short form video platform after ByteDance's Douyin, which is basically the Chinese version of TikTok. And so I is this going to be super important to the AI race in America? Probably not. Like we're still living in a world where you have OpenAI, Anthropic, Google really battling it out. And then XAI is doing interesting stuff.
Speaker 1:MSL has interesting stuff. And then there's a couple of neo labs that are maybe doing interesting stuff. The Chinese labs haven't been putting a ton of pressure. But I think this is interesting because we're actually getting firm data on how these products are monetizing. Of course, there is another interesting, just sort of like nuanced narrative that I hadn't really noticed while I was digging into Kuaishou.
Speaker 1:One is this China's aging tech workers issue, the Curse of 35. They're firing unks over there. That's what's happening.
Speaker 2:They're firing can't even be an unk.
Speaker 1:You truly can't. You truly can't. Discrimination against older employees, particularly apparent in sector where executives openly state a preference for youth. And
Speaker 2:so Different we approach.
Speaker 1:We've had back and forth on in VC Twitter about, oh, should your team be really young and cracked, or should you get the experts in there? What's obviously, in America, that you cannot discriminate based on age. But that hasn't stopped plenty of people from opining about what the correct mix is, whether or not you should follow those rules. But there's an article in the in the Financial Times that sort of has some charts here about how big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. We can go through that.
Speaker 1:But let's read through a little bit of this China's aging tech workforce.
Speaker 2:The first hint, Laobai, 34, received that his position at short video app Kuaishou might be at risk is when a 35 year old colleague was sacked. I was both shocked and anxious. I realized that our situations were very similar, the same thing could soon happen to me, said Laobai, using his nickname to avoid repercussions from his former employer. Just months from his 30 birthday, the developer was dismissed. Another victim of the group's reorganization known internally as Limestone.
Speaker 2:Wow. They're giving code names to age discrimination. That's insane. Weirdo. Kuai Shao is pushing out junior work junior workers in their mid thirties.
Speaker 2:Laobai was told his termination was part of the company's overall redundancy program. The so called curse of 35 has long plagued workers across white collar professions with older staff widely perceived as being less willing to put up with long working hours because of responsibilities at home. As China's tech sector reels from Beijing's crackdown, this article is from 2024, by the way. Yeah. And economic slowdown, tens of thousands of jobs have been cut over the past several months, and older workers are seen as particularly vulnerable.
Speaker 2:Technology companies have made no secret of favoring young and unmarried workers. Ageism in the tech sector is a big problem. There's a perception that older workers don't keep up with the latest technological developments. They don't have the energy to keep up the hard work and that they're too expensive. Thankfully, our very own John Coogan, who is very much keeping up with the latest technological Otherwise, wouldn't be talking about this.
Speaker 2:Because you didn't just read about cling. You studied, and you wrote about it. While China's labor law prohibits employers from discriminating on the grounds of attributes such as ethnicity, gender, and religion, it does not explicitly Woah. Refer to
Speaker 1:Between twenty and thirty, most people are full of energy. You're more willing to march forward and sacrifice yourself for the company. But once you become a parent, your body starts aging. How are you gonna keep up with the nine nine six schedule? ByteDance, which owns the video app TikTok and ecommerce giant Pinduoduo, have some of the youngest recruits among Chinese tech companies.
Speaker 1:Data suggest the average age of their workers is just 27 according to the latest figures. The average age of the worker in China is 80 is is eight according to the All China Federation of Trade Unions. This trend has become only more entrenched with progressive waves of layoffs, and this is the chart that I wanted to show you. So big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. So this is 2021, 2022 and 2023 for Alibaba, Baidu, Kuaishou and Tencent, and they're all downsizing across those three years.
Speaker 2:It's worth noting I pulled up MAG seven employee counts, and every single company in the MAG seven has increased headcount over that same period that we just showed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There have been like periods of layoffs. But even when Mark Zuckerberg comes out and says, hey, we're laying off 1,000 people in the metaverse team and the Reality Labs team, it's like, well, he's adding tons of people to the AI teams and tons of people to the Instagram teams and Threads teams and Facebook core and marketing and salespeople and events people. Like, the whole organization is just growing so fast that one niche layoff is not really going to cause a multiyear trend.
Speaker 1:Back to The the messy drama that dealt a blow to one of AI's hottest startups. This is an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal. After a relationship with a colleague, a Thinking Machines cofounder had his role changed. Months later, he was fired after after a contentious meeting. Mira Moradi's meeting with her co founder's going off the rails.
Speaker 1:Moradi, the chief executive of AI startup Thinking Machines' lab, had shown up for work on Monday last week expecting to have a one on one with Bharat Zof, her chief technology officer, according to people familiar with the matter. Last summer, she had learned that Zof was in a relationship with a colleague. In the months since, she had expressed repeated concerns about his lack of productivity according to the people. She was invited instead to an impromptu meeting with Zof, another co founder and a third employee. The three told her they agree they disagreed with the direction of the company and that they were considering leaving.
Speaker 1:They asked Zof to be given charge of all technical decision making according to people. Moradi responded that Zof was already CTO and asked why he hadn't been doing his job for months. So they're clearly beefing. It's a very funny it's a funny request. Like, what was he doing as CTO if he didn't have full control?
Speaker 1:But I mean, can override all sorts of stuff, and there's other people around the table. And titles only mean so much. There's soft power all over the place. So two two days later, Zof was fired. Within hours, all three had signed offers to rejoin OpenAI, the AI lab that they ditched a year ago to join Marathi's fledgling start up.
Speaker 1:The departures are a sign of how the heated AI race that is consuming hundreds of billions of dollars and transforming the economy is as much a battle for talent as technology. For all the high-tech advancements AI start ups are sprinting to develop, they are ultimately at the mercy of the human's power.
Speaker 2:So do you think this was a three hour talent acquisition process? Do you think OpenAI just just looked at checked the timeline and said, hey, we got three people that are on the market. Maybe we should hire them.
Speaker 1:Seemed like they were talking before.
Speaker 4:Entered the portal and then they immediately They entered got the
Speaker 1:The trade portal for sure. That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2:No. I think I think very obvious that the conversations had been ongoing. It's very likely, I would assume they had already agreed to to terms
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seemed like it.
Speaker 2:Prior Yeah. To the news going out.
Speaker 1:20 people from OpenAI left during the, Thinking Machines Foundation. Addressing Zof's departure to Thinking Machines employees, Maradi said there had been multiple issues with his performance, trust, and conduct according to an internal message viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Zof said she fired him after he exposed an intent to take a job elsewhere. Thinking Machines terminated my employment only after it learned I would be leaving the company, full stop. At no time did Thinking Machines Lab sight me on any performance reasons or
Speaker 2:John, I'm breaking up with you. No. You're fired.
Speaker 1:I'm breaking up It with does feel like a little bit of that going on. But yeah, there's a war for narrative here between Barrett and Meera, clearly. They didn't so he says thinking machines didn't cite any performance reasons unethical conduct as part of the reason for the termination, and any suggestion otherwise is false and defamatory, Zof said in a statement to the journal. The exits, coupled with fellow cofounder Andrew Tulloch's decampment to Meta last fall, leave Thinking Machines with just three of its original six founders. Maradi's issues with Zof started over the summer when she began to suspect he was having a relationship with a colleague who with whom he had lobbied to bring over from OpenAI according to people familiar with the situation.
Speaker 1:In responses to questions from the journal, Zof said that many people at sync Thinking Machines wanted to hire the woman, including Maradi. At the time, Maradi was in the process of raising one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history. The company ultimately raised 2,000,000,000 in a $12,000,000,000 valuation when she confronted Zof about the possibility of an undisclosed relationship with a female employee who was junior to him at the company but did not report to him. He initially denied it according to people familiar with the situation. By June, however, both Zof and the woman had told Maradi about the relationship which had begun when they were colleagues at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:The woman then left the company and returned to OpenAI, which is sort of a wrinkle in this. Zof told his boss that he had been manipulated by the woman into a relationship according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after that conversation, he took a break from work.
Speaker 2:Okay. I got to I generally think that the
Speaker 1:Mira, she told me it was cuffing season. I didn't know what it meant. So I just said, Okay. I got cuffed. Is that what happened?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think just saying, like, I was manipulated into becoming the significant other. You know, you've got to take a little responsibility.
Speaker 1:Everyone is assuming that this is a romantic relationship. They never reported that this is a romantic relationship. They just said that he had a relationship with someone else, and it was undisclosed. And I think that more companies need to be clear about the rules around disclosures of relationships. If you and Tyler start an e sports team, for example, like you would have a relationship, you would be teammates on playing Call of Duty.
Speaker 1:And if you didn't disclose that to me, would feel left out. I'd be like, why don't I why am I not on the team? If if I find out that that Tyler and Scott are going off and and drinking a bunch of athletic beers, athletic brews every night, you know, without me, that's a relationship to bros.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't disclosed.
Speaker 1:It wasn't disclosed. And you might be
Speaker 2:very angry
Speaker 1:I might be angry.
Speaker 2:That they didn't disclose.
Speaker 1:So I think relationship disclosures need to go beyond romantic relationship disclosures. If you're just broing down with people
Speaker 2:that actually is kind of a real thing. Sometimes catching up Monday after the weekend, somebody's like, oh yeah, I was hanging with so and so on Saturday. I'm like, wait.
Speaker 1:Where was my invite?
Speaker 2:You guys hang out on Saturday? What?
Speaker 1:You didn't disclose that relationship?
Speaker 2:Korean barbecue?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, so you have a relationship where you go to Korean barbecue together.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And you just didn't think to tell the rest of the company
Speaker 2:KBBQ. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I was going to say, I think there's I like to imagine there's some kind of like Shakespearean tragedy here, right? Where it's like the the Montagues and the Capulets, that's open AI and thinking machines.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 4:And it's these forbidden lovers.
Speaker 1:They can't be together. But now they are. They're you know they're united because everyone is an open AI. Even though I mean, if you go to the journal and you say, I've been manipulated by that woman, who's now my colleague because they both work at OpenAI now, right? So that's odd.
Speaker 1:Went back
Speaker 3:to OpenAI.
Speaker 1:The woman left the company, Thinking Machines, and returned to OpenAI. But they were both at OpenAI. They They both went to Thinking Machines, and then they both went back to OpenAI.
Speaker 2:I still think this is a company that would have a pretty meaningful valuation in an acquihire context, right? Like if Amazon were to come and buy them, how much would Amazon pay get John Schulman and Vera Marotti at Amazon?
Speaker 1:Should be able to clear the pref stack, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, by a long shot, you would imagine.
Speaker 1:I wanted to look at this photo of Davos. It's AI generated, but it captures a good vibe. A whole bunch of private planes parked there. That's not real. But I like the Kevin Kwok contextualize it anyway, saying this looks like Hoth echo bass.
Speaker 1:The Demes and Dario are apparently just broking out in Davos. I love it. Demes Moussalves is CEO of Google DeepMind at Davos. Quote, when told that Dario Amade was here earlier today, his face lit up. Two minutes later, he was talking about a CERN like collaboration for AI once the labs are close to AGI.
Speaker 1:They were just stoked on each other. I'm pretty I'm on pretty good terms with pretty much all of the other leaders at the leading labs. I love Ilia, and we're good friends. You love it. Just some positivity hanging out at Davos.
Speaker 1:Demis said that he thinks entry level jobs and internships might fall away due to AI. Sees consistency as the biggest problem with current agents. Advice for college graduates. Get incredibly proficient with these new tools, AI agents. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We were debating this earlier. The role of a junior engineer is going away, but is it possible that it just changes? What makes a senior engineer that much better with an AI tool that they don't need? Anyone else who can potentially use AI tools as well? How much of this is something where I mean, to go back to the Chinese young hiring boom, there's an element where I'm sure there's companies where you have older software engineers who are more resistant to adopt AI technology.
Speaker 1:You'd actually be better off with a young junior Here's a
Speaker 2:tough question for you, Tyler. What are you fantastic at that AI is bad at?
Speaker 4:Walking around being physically embodied.
Speaker 1:Embodied. Yeah. That's the last thing.
Speaker 3:So maybe that's like for China it's like
Speaker 4:maybe the Silicon Valley has kind of found like pederasty from first principles.
Speaker 1:Maybe
Speaker 4:it's just a similar thing over there, right? Sure. There's actually a lot of value. Mhmm. I think like so generally like I I'm kind of I've always gone between like is our jobs actually gonna go away from
Speaker 1:this? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or are they just gonna get like more fake? Are there just gonna be no junior jobs in like five years? Or are they just gonna be like, you know, you're in the office because like it's like people like having other people in the office and stuff like this? I think I'm probably more in the camp of like, you just don't need to hire new people. Yeah.
Speaker 5:First of all, it's a it's a pleasure to be on the gloom and doom panel.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're not we're not Nineteen twenties were an extraordinary period. As I said at the beginning, it's not preordained, but it has to be exactly.
Speaker 5:The end note of the nineteen twenties, which was, of course, the great depression, Andrew. So let's let's take a step back and and talk about where we are right here, right now. The the area of recklessness is the is the spending of governments around the world who are all, with with little exception, all spending well beyond their means. That's the recklessness of this moment in history. This is not a parallel to the nineteen twenties in terms of the recklessness of the of the private capital markets.
Speaker 5:It's a story of the recklessness of government spending. Within the private sector, there's a huge question as to where AI will take us. And I I was carefully taking notes and listening to what Larry has to say or to what Madame Lagarde has to say because this is one of the big issues of our moment. Will AI create the productivity acceleration that is honestly this hoped for in Washington and in the halls of government around the world as a ways to overcome the profligate spending that we're currently engaged in. Like, the world the world needs a savior.
Speaker 5:And the hope is that AI is the savior that we need for productivity. And the challenge with this is it is it may or may not be. We just don't know yet. Now, there's a tremendous amount of hype around AI and in some sense, the large AI companies need to create that hype to raise the tens or actually hundreds of billions of dollars
Speaker 2:Hear that, Tyler.
Speaker 5:That are going into the field. Like, you wouldn't be able to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll spend and and Larry could probably correct me on this, but roughly $600,000,000,000 this year in capex for data centers in The United States.
Speaker 2:I think it's bit larger.
Speaker 3:But does that mean that it's getting hyped up too much? Or it's just the hype is required as sales mechanism? Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Larry's backing you up, Tyler. All right. Let's play the next video, which was the one I was originally talking about, which is talking about job job loss.
Speaker 5:What AI has done is it has re empowered the head of technology in every business in The United States. And it has pushed budgetary resources into the hands of the Chief Technology Officer. So what you're seeing across American business is actually the impact of American businesses spending more on digitization writ large, of which AI is just one component.
Speaker 6:You know, as Dario Amadez says, you know, half of all entry level white collar jobs will, you know, be gone in the next five years. Is it that kind of change,
Speaker 3:or is it
Speaker 5:more important to Put yourself in his shoes. How how much money does the AI community need to raise over the next five years?
Speaker 1:He's wrong about this. Right? Demis doesn't need to raise.
Speaker 5:Spend The United States this year over half $1,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Doing this with cash flow.
Speaker 5:Over $500,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Like, that's true for every other lab lead except for Demicks. Like, you would expect Demicks to make a promise you're gonna profoundly change
Speaker 2:the world. About Daria.
Speaker 5:And the question is, where will productivity gains at the end of the day? In certain areas, we know it's going to be profound, whether it's call centers, whether it's helping to improve the productivity of software engineers. But in a number of white collar jobs, there was a recent Harvard paper on this. They called it AI work slob. That it looks good, but if you sort of peel back the onion, the substance isn't there.
Speaker 2:This is I mean, this was the probably the the story that got reported on the least out of Davos over the last twenty four hours, but is arguably the most important, the most expensive car in the world. Everyone wants to know. Of course, it is the car that Jensen bought his parents. So let's pull up this clip.
Speaker 3:Love it.
Speaker 7:My only regret was at the IPO after the IPO, I wanted to buy my parents something nice. And so I sold NVIDIA stock at a valuation of $300,000,000. The company was at a valuation of $300,000,000, and I bought them a Mercedes s class. It it is the most expensive car in the world.
Speaker 1:Maybe a billion dollar car? I don't know if I have the math right there, but it seems like
Speaker 2:Yeah, around 65 ks.
Speaker 1:It seems like the stock might be up to 15,000 x or something. I don't know. I mean, it's definitely up a thousand x, right? Because it's yeah, dollars 300,000,000, dollars 300,000,000,000. And then you get another zero, so 10000x.
Speaker 1:I bought a TV with a Bitcoin. Terrible. Not even 4 ks. Thing's in the trash now. It like $1,000 back then.
Speaker 1:OpenAI will reveal will unveil its first AI earbuds dubbed Sweet Pea in September, and shipments are expected to reach 40 to 50,000,000 units in 2027. Makes a ton of sense. You're chatting with OpenAI. You're chatting with ChatGPT. You got Johnny Ive on the team, former Apple.
Speaker 1:And you put something together that's your always on AI assistant that you're chatting with. But 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 The units, that's a Amazon Echo in year two sold 11,000,000 units. The Xbox Series XX, 16,000,000 units in year two. The iPhone, the iPhone in year two, seventeen million units. The Apple Watch did 20,000,000 units in year two.
Speaker 1:The PS5, massive success, hugely anticipated product. The PS5 shipped 30,000,000 units in year two. AirPods, now AirPods did do 50,000,000. If the ChatGPT, OpenAI, earbuds, dubbed SweetP, perform as well as AirPods. You could see 50,000,000 units.
Speaker 1:But it's a tall order.
Speaker 2:From the ghosts.
Speaker 1:It's a very, very From the tall consumer hardware. We didn't even talk about CIA. We are officially signed with CIA. We went Hollywood mode. That's very exciting.
Speaker 1:I think everyone's excited. Yeah. Very, very exciting. We're pleased to be partnered with them.
Speaker 2:We put
Speaker 1:up a trading card. We're very excited.
Speaker 2:CIA team.
Speaker 1:They're gonna
Speaker 2:be helping us navigate Yeah. The entertainment landscape.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very excited. Yeah. Yeah, we went down. We took some headshots at CAA HQ.
Speaker 1:I like to The we
Speaker 2:had to make them a little goofy.
Speaker 1:The Creative Artists Agency, sort of the anthropic of agencies. Creative Artists Agency was formed by five agents. They were at WME. They were at William Morris Agency in 1975. Who you got?
Speaker 1:There's a dinner. You got Michael Ovitz, Michael Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer, and Roland Perkins and William Haber. And they're at this dinner, and they decide to create their own agency. What happens? They they're like, okay.
Speaker 1:We need some financing. We're gonna start a rival agency. We're leaving WME. We're starting CIA. What happens?
Speaker 1:Before they can get financing, they all get fired. They all get fired, seriously. This is real. This is on the weekly Tell
Speaker 2:me it's like a thinking machines dynamic in the
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, it really is like AI lab talent wars all over again. Of course, CIA was incorporated in Delaware and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan. They rented a small office in Century City. And within a week, they sold a game show called Rhyme and Reason, The Little Rich Show, and The Jackson five. An early plan was to form a medium sized full service agency, share proceeds equally and do without nameplates on doors or formal titles or individual client lists with guidelines like be a team player and return phone calls promptly.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Is that the bomb? The bomb has been planted. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM sharp.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Goodbye.