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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVBN. Today is Thursday, 05/22/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology. The Fortress Of Finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:We're have a great show for you today. Folks, let's pull up what we're going through. We're talking about reactions to Google IO still. Joni Ive joining OpenAI. We're gonna break that down.
Speaker 1:Anthropic just dropped Claude four and is blowing out benchmarks. It's AI week on TVPN, and we got a bunch of great guests. Dan Shipper, TJ Parker, Reggie James, Keith Roy.
Speaker 2:You created the first entirely AI ad to promote a livestream.
Speaker 1:I did. Should we play it on the stream? It's on my profile. Did you already share it into the group so the boys can find it? Or should we, or should I send it in?
Speaker 1:I've been having a ton of fun with v o three. I upgraded to the super expensive plan. It's worth every dime even to just get a few funny eight second videos out of this thing. The fidelity is remarkable, and it just looks awesome. It looks awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's play it. I don't know if we have sound, but let's play it because I I added music. But maybe I don't know. The music might be covered.
Speaker 1:Let's see if it handles it. Okay. Play this. Play it from the beginning. There we go.
Speaker 1:That's us.
Speaker 2:Drink
Speaker 1:I guess that
Speaker 3:was a close one.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Too close.
Speaker 1:In the yellow Ferrari.
Speaker 2:CNBC is attacking us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't want us to podcast.
Speaker 2:They don't want us to podcast. They don't want us. Okay. We're we're bringing media to Hollywood. Helicopter.
Speaker 1:The CNBC. The conflict. Okay. Oh, now you're fighting gorillas.
Speaker 2:Versus a hundred gorillas. Successful. As expected.
Speaker 1:Oh, and
Speaker 2:then the ramp
Speaker 1:up. Nice.
Speaker 2:Oh, how how's Switch
Speaker 1:your business to rampup.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Get on ramp.com.
Speaker 1:Anyway, lots of fun with I'm
Speaker 2:having such
Speaker 1:a good time a good time in PO three.
Speaker 2:Is gonna be a fun guest lineup. You already covered it a little bit, we have a great group. Reboi coming on, the legend, the myth. Dan Shipper from Every who raised around earlier this week and has a lot of thoughts on Anthropix new release. Then TJ Parker is getting the band back together.
Speaker 1:Can't wait for The
Speaker 2:co pack band with a new company called General Medicine.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then Reggie James, Hip City Reg is gonna be coming on and talking about Johnny Ives. I can't wait for that. Think he's got a big announcement as well. Yep. And I am excited for all of it.
Speaker 2:So should we talk about should we Newsmax, John?
Speaker 1:Let's Newsmax. Let's go through Google IO. Obviously, this happened on Tuesday. It's now Thursday, but Ben Thompson's done some analysis breaking it down, thinking about what what what the implications are for the stock. I mean, the stock popped a ton.
Speaker 1:And it seems like, you know, Google's on this weird cadence where it takes them a full year to, like, really release a bunch of stuff altogether through these, like, big keynotes, and they're they're more on, a water funnel cycle than just dropping random stuff. But clearly, every serious AI company is thinking about how they're scheduling releases. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft build happened on Monday. Tuesday, we got Google IO. Wednesday, we got OpenAI's acquisition of IO, which is hilarious.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 2:Which is funny because if
Speaker 1:you search
Speaker 2:I think Lulu called this out, but if you search IO on x, you just get a bunch of stuff about Johnny and Sam.
Speaker 1:Sam is absolute dog on the s two.
Speaker 2:Absolute dog, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that's happened that that's happened a couple times where deep research, deep seek I believe it was wasn't it that deep seek came out and then Sam dropped deep research, and so the deep keyword kinda came back? But, again, this all comes from deep learning, and so, you know, you never know. Anyway, let let's just to re just to recap on what actually happened at Google IO. Because we talked to the Google folks, there was so much going on.
Speaker 1:It was hard to kind of boil it down into one thing. I was watching, The Verge does these YouTube recaps where they cut the entire Keynote down. And, typically, when they do Apple, it's like five minutes. Apple WWC in five minutes because it's just like new iPad, new iPhone, new Apple Watch, blah blah blah. Microsoft builds cut down was fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1:Google IO was, like, thirty minutes because there's so much stuff.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:really think just the volume of announcements was pretty high. So from Reuters, Google said on Tuesday, would put artificial intelligence in the hands of more web servers while teasing a $250 a month subscription for its AI powered users. That's me, baby. I'm on the $2.50 plan.
Speaker 2:Isn't it 500 and you can get it for $2.50?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This little this little misinformation here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're gonna be ramping that up. So they're charging me $2.50 for the first couple months, but I I opted into the 500 plan. So they're gonna ramp me up immediately as soon as it gets the end of the
Speaker 2:if in the future everybody's paying Google a thousand dollars a month and begging like, please bring back the ads, like we're sorry forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're complaining, oh, the internet was Oh, I just wanna pay. No. It
Speaker 2:can't was seeing him the
Speaker 1:other day,
Speaker 2:I got an email from Google Workspace saying like, we're raising prices. Yeah. And I was kind of laughing because they can, I think so many businesses are so dependent on Google Workspace that they could like, kind of overnight raise it to like a thousand dollars a month per person? Yeah. And like probably see a little churn, but not crazy No
Speaker 1:way. It's so hard to churn. I mean, is the one we were talking about with deal and rippling. It's like, deals in like the most dramatic spot possible. Do I really wanna rip out my payroll software right now?
Speaker 1:Like, that's a tall order. I'm not on deal. But if you're on
Speaker 2:deal The example is
Speaker 1:like you can just turn the other eye
Speaker 2:or You have you have, you know you know, Pirelli tires and Pirelli gets caught spying on Michelin. Yeah. Are you going to like take your car into the like shop and
Speaker 1:be like, okay, like, we gotta get the We pay bunch of money. No. You're just going be like, oh, weird. The Pirelli CEO is different than the Bridgestone CEO or Anyway, there was a flurry of demos, including smart glasses, which I'm excited to try, the Nreal smart glasses. And then they're also doing some audio only smart glasses, which have been very popular with Meta, the Ray Bans.
Speaker 1:They've adopted a tone of increased urgency since the rise of generative AI, challenged the tech company's longtime stronghold of organizing and retrieving information on the Internet. And this is like the AI moment should just be Google's moment. Right? Their mission is to organize all of the information in the world, and LLMs literally just do that. It just compress down all the information.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like the perfect Google product, but, of course, they have some business model positioning challenges. They can't just give up the golden goose on day one and go all in on generative AI. But they're they're they're taking it more and more seriously every day. A major update. The company said consumers across The United States can now switch Google search into AI mode showcased in March as an experiment open to test users.
Speaker 1:The feature dispenses with the web standard fare in favor of computer generated answers for complicated queries. And what's interesting is about that is that who are we talking to yesterday that was saying, like, the genius of Google is that there was just one button? I forget who we were talking to. But basically, this idea that, like, Google had just one button, you know, search, and then they had the I'm feeling lucky button. But it was such a simple interface.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't love the idea of adding a switch. Yeah. It feels like a half measure. It's like, is AI the future? If it's the future, then Google search should just be AI mode all the time.
Speaker 1:Or is AI mode not the future? In which case, maybe you shouldn't even do it. And I should just go to ChatGPT when I want AI mode, and I should go to Google, or I should go to the Gemini app for for that experience if they're distinct.
Speaker 2:I think one thing one thing is for sure, consumers have historically, you know, imagined products for one use case.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Like snaps people still use Snapchat for sending pictures to each Yeah, totally. Even though that functionality is super embedded in Instagram and other apps now. So, but yeah,
Speaker 1:I think It's always tough when you're saying AI is the future, but we don't want to get rid of the thing that's not the future. We like that thing too. So we're gonna
Speaker 2:have It's just scale. The scale that Google's at.
Speaker 1:They can't do could
Speaker 2:a really good LM They want
Speaker 1:to just run ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. They could have a really good LM ad product.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just if you were starting to introduce it to 1%, two % of your users, it could dramatically impact
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Revenue because they've spent decades, you know, optimizing
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Search results. Right? So
Speaker 1:So Google also announced an AI Ultra plan for February, provides users with higher limits on AI and early access as to experimental tools like Project Mariner, an Internet browser extension that can automate keystrokes and mouse clicks. Somehow I missed that entirely. There were so many there were so many launches. I completely missed Project Mariner. Excited to try that out because I guess I have access.
Speaker 1:And DeepThink, a version of its top shelf Gemini model that is more capable of reasoning through complicated tasks. I'm excited to to talk to to check out that. I've been using Deep Research a lot. Definitely wanna deep wanna test drive deep think. Pichai told reporters that the rise of generative AI was not at the full expense of online search.
Speaker 1:This feels very far from a zero sum moment, said Pichai. The kind of use cases we are serving in search is dramatically expanding because of AI. First off and, I mean, to be clear, like, this this is what happened with computers. Like, we went from the desktop to the laptop to the phone, and most people have a laptop and a phone. And it was not completely disruptive even though you can do everything that you can do on a laptop pretty much on a phone.
Speaker 1:People wound up dual using, and so it's totally it's not it's not as much of a dire issue that I I think I was making earlier. So Ben Thompson's dropping the analysis. He says, first off, my compliments to Reuters for this write up. The amount of things announced and preannounced or envisioned were pretty overwhelming. And I'd say my compliments to Ben Thompson for this write up about Reuters write up because we are now three layers of reaction deep.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 1:It's the best. This was, to be sure, terribly impressive. We all knew we all we already knew that Gemini 2.5 is awesome, and the company's Imagen four image model and v o three video model were significant leaps forward from from just a few months ago. Wrote in December when v o two
Speaker 2:came I called it off air too. V o three is feels significant because it Yep. Seems inevitable that v o four will be almost indistinguishable from reality. Right? You might have a hallucination here or there, but
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Some of the videos that we've been seeing, like, it just needs some slight tweaks and it just looks like
Speaker 1:Yeah. It has it still has a specific look to it. I haven't really played around too much with trying to really break it out of kind of its default AI vibe. Yeah. I'm sure you can, but it's really, really impressive.
Speaker 1:And I think I'm you know, the the the memes are cool. We're in kind of a Studio Ghibli moment for v o three videos, I think. We're seeing a lot of these on the timeline. I'm interested to see where it goes more practically. I mean, I noticed that when the Sam Altman and Joni Ive photo dropped, Didn't see a single Ghibli version of that in my feet.
Speaker 1:And that was like the most Ghibli ifiable photo ever of Johnny kind
Speaker 2:of Yeah.
Speaker 1:Leaning on his side. And
Speaker 2:I actually The place that I see Ghibli most now is in people's profile pictures.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People like that. And I actually I actually Ghibli'd the the photo myself, the Sam and and and Johnny Ive. Yeah. And I was I don't know if anyone can see that, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's a Ghibli of the photo. And I was just kinda like It doesn't isn't worth posting. Like, there's nothing special here. Like, we get it. You can do the cartoon filter.
Speaker 1:And so it's more about how do you use that tool. And and now I've been using it to design. I mean, I'm looking through my my recent my my recent although on day one of the Ghibli drop, it was a lot of just fun Ghiblis. Eventually, it became, you know, okay. Make a storybook for my son.
Speaker 1:Do the Gigachad meme on everyone who's been on invest like the best. Make a bunch of ramp ads, of course. Do
Speaker 3:a
Speaker 1:bunch of stuff with, like, testing. Make a bunch of people bodybuilders. Do some set design for us. It's like a like, my use of images in Chattypuppy has morphed from, oh, cool. The the the Studio Ghibli thing is the meme to how can I practically use this to do cool stuff, like making merch ideas for us and stuff like that?
Speaker 1:So I'm excited for for v o v o three to kinda get into that mode. It's very clear that the it is it is extremely technically impressive, but it is just a tool. And so we have yet to see the v o three Harry Potter Balenciaga moment, something that's truly viral, not just because it's an impressive that it's an AI image. Like, that joke that the stand up comedian, that doesn't go viral unless you are like, it's AI. Right?
Speaker 1:And you're like, wow, it's so impressive. It's AI. I can't believe that. That's why I'm liking it. I'm excited for when someone creates something that would go viral if you had shot it practically, and it's so good that, yeah, they used AI, it's just
Speaker 2:as The breakthrough moment for me was seeing a like man on the street style interview that was made with VO three.
Speaker 1:That great, yeah.
Speaker 2:And realizing that I could I could I could call it out as AI if I saw it independently if it wasn't being, you know, if if the creator wasn't stating
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:that it was made with VO three. But you can imagine a man on the street interview going viral Yes. And creating this like fifteen minutes of fame moment
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:For somebody that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's what happened with the pope. The the the the dripped out pope. Remember that? That actually went viral. People thought the pope had this puffy jacket and it was mid journey image.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember that. And so and so, yes, it's
Speaker 6:like I
Speaker 1:mean, people's defense,
Speaker 2:the pope had a white g wagon one on one He did. That he would drive around on. Yeah. Yeah. And so it wasn't that unbelievable that he would have a white, you know, puffer jacket coat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so let's go through v o two, v o three a little bit more. Ben Thompson has written about this before. He says the reason to focus on v o two, however, is not just that it strikes me as a seminal moment in generative AI history, but that it also is the most powerful manifestation of the advantages that Google has in this space. Think about the three pillars of generative AI, algorithms.
Speaker 1:Google, of course, invented the transformer, but it certainly seems that likely that the company figured out something important in terms of maintaining coherence, which I complained about with Sora. And we saw this with Sora when we when we ran the same test in v o three and Sora. The Sora generation was a lot there were way more hallucinations, and it was way trippier. Whereas you can see, you know, it's like it's a Ferrari. It's a yellow Ferrari in our little video, and it be it remains a yellow Ferrari the entire time.
Speaker 1:And it stays and and and the TPPN, text stays tracked onto the car the entire time. And so there's something algorithmically potentially that's happening there, and that's what Ben's highlighting. Then in terms of compute, Google is training and running inference on its own TPUs, which are increasingly developed in conjunction with the model. Jeff Dean said it Interesting.
Speaker 7:I didn't
Speaker 2:really know that they were had TPUs in production.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. These have been in production for years just on general parallelized computing. So you could do recommendation algorithms or, you know, any sort of just machine learning and deep learning on it before the transformer revolution. Yeah. They knew that TPUs would be valuable, and they've been investing in them for a lot.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting is that is that the v o three model is very clearly designed and and trained and inferenced all on TPUs. And so there may there might be some sort of compounding advantage there.
Speaker 2:The TPUs are so great. Why are you rate limiting somebody paying $500 a month?
Speaker 1:That's true. They haven't made enough of them. That's probably why. Yeah. Because you know, Apple's probably getting more line time at TSMC.
Speaker 1:And Jensen's probably getting a lot of line time on TSMC. And then also I
Speaker 2:can imagine Jensen gets a little bit of line time
Speaker 1:for TSMC. Yeah. And then also just the fact that, you know, Google has been investing a ton in CapEx, but they also have Google Cloud Platform. They also have to serve higher value apps and services. Have to serve that
Speaker 2:to get better serving me ads.
Speaker 1:I know, I know. Me, v o three models, that that should be their prior, that that should be their primary
Speaker 2:If you're a Google user, put a support ticket in and just say, hey, targeting's been lacking lately, just try to push it, try to get better.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's my only request. Yeah. Monetize me, you know, harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Jeff Dean, one of the top AI scientists at Google and one of the greatest programmers of of all time. Are you familiar with Jeff Dean? This guy? If you search Jeff Dean jokes, you get this consolidated list of Jeff Dean facts, and they're all Chuck Norris style jokes about Jeff Dean because he's such a legend.
Speaker 1:And so it says, compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean builds his code before committing it, but only to check for compiler and linker bugs. Jeff Dean once failed the Turing test when he correctly identified the two hundred and third Fibonacci number in less than a less than a second. There's a whole bunch of these that are just, like, ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Jeff Dean's keyboard has two keys, one and zero. He just programs in binary. Got it. When Jeff Dean listens to m p threes, he just cats them to dev dot TSP and does the decoding in his head, basically, just like matrix mode. There's a bunch of these funny thing.
Speaker 1:Jeff Dean knows the last digit of pi, and Jeff Dean mines Bitcoins in his head. There's a bunch of other good ones in here. He can lossly compress random data. All these things are, like, jokes about, like, computationally impossible things to do, but Jeff Dean can, of course, do them. So he's a legend.
Speaker 2:Anyway pretty good at leak care.
Speaker 1:Last one, we talked about this yesterday, but data data is shaping up to be the biggest obstacle for model development going forward. The single greatest untapped resource is likely video generally and YouTube in particular, which Google owns. I certainly imagine this was an important resource for the development of VO2.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's so It's wild. This this advantage is not been talked about enough. There's so many of these sort of video foundation model startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And yes, I'm sure they get access to YouTube data content in different ways.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But ultimately, it is nobody has nobody has the edge that you you could go do deals with every single major Hollywood studio and still not have anywhere near the edge as Google does just by having a constant net new stream of of video content. Yeah. Anyways
Speaker 1:We gotta we gotta look at the total data size of all YouTube videos compared to just the text on the Internet. I wanna I wanna really know, like, how much more data is there on YouTube, or is it roughly the same? We're gonna dig into that soon. But, anyway, Ben Thompson continues and says, Google IO is this on steroids, but at the same time, I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if this was because of the sheer quantity of announcements. I came away feeling less impressed than I should have.
Speaker 1:I decided I needed to take the dog for a for a walk. I wanted, by the way, to tie these videos together into something more coherent. They're both made you're using v o three and Google Flow, the new product Google announced to utilize VIO. Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to use and very buggy above and beyond the general challenges of linking together desperately generated videos while retaining coherence. This in the end makes the point I ultimately came out, I came to on my walk.
Speaker 1:Google Flow was arguably the most archetypal archetypal archetypal, product announcement at Google IO. But while v o three is jaw dropping, Flow was pretty disappointing. And this was my experience. I went to Flow on my phone and it basically told me no. It was like, you're on an iPhone.
Speaker 1:You're a second class citizen. Get out of here.
Speaker 2:Get out
Speaker 1:of here. We're optimized for desktop. And it's like, for a startup, I get, like, Instagram started on iPhone and then eventually launched on Android. I get that. But it's like, you're Google.
Speaker 1:Like, you can figure out how to serve your web app in Safari on iOS. Like, I I don't understand what's going on. It just makes you look bad. It doesn't it doesn't really make me like Google so much that I'm like, oh, yeah. I should get an Android phone now because, like, clearly, it would be a better experience.
Speaker 1:And then also this
Speaker 2:use Flow, this app that I've
Speaker 1:never tried. No. If that's the if that's the development paradigm, I'm out. If you're gonna try and twist my arm into using your software, I'm less likely to use it. That that that's my take on it.
Speaker 1:And then they also funnel you into this, like, hey. Do you just wanna watch a bunch of videos? Like, you definitely don't wanna set the GPUs on fire by training one of these things. You don't want a custom video. Why don't you just have one of these that we have off the shelf?
Speaker 2:I love that content or the the copy there too. It's it's flow is a tool built for and by creatives.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it's like, well, YouTube in many ways destroyed the film industry. Right? It? I would argue that it did just because it created an entirely new library of content that didn't require going to the movies. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean there's like, the videos would have come on demand but it introduced massive massive competition for people's attention that just hurts the movie industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder about that. That's probably right. That seems reasonable. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, I need to think about that more if YouTube is the is the the reason that
Speaker 2:I mean, YouTube in particular, but just just the Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Certainly, like like, easier technology. Like, obviously, there's gonna be demand for video in a theater if you can only watch a video in a theater. Totally. As soon as you can watch it on TV, that creates competitive pressure.
Speaker 1:As soon as you can watch it on your phone, that creates more competitive pressure. YouTube's a part of that. Probably, like, I'd make it like 10% of the reason. But, yeah, totally valuable, totally viable argument to make. So Ben Thompson was a little underwhelmed.
Speaker 1:He said more generally, the a the generative AI pillars that I wrote about last December, the areas that Google dominates notably don't include any generative AI products. And that more than anything was my my my Google IO takeaway. Google's technology is incredible, but I'm still not convinced this company can make compelling products. Indeed, my critique of the presentation as a whole was how unfocused and random it felt. Google's inability to prioritize and set a coherent narrative actually diminished just how incredible their advances are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it certainly was an opportunity to come out and and just focus on, yeah, we have a bunch of cool experiments running, but, like, here's how we're going to actually have a ultra coherent strategy around the search bar Yeah. And how that is gonna interact with AI. And what are our long term plans?
Speaker 1:They almost should do more keynotes less frequently and just say, it's NotebookLM day, and we're just going to take over the internet with And then it's VO3 day, and we're making VO3
Speaker 2:a fantastic Same advice we would give to founders that are like, I'm going to have a big announcement. I'm going to drop four things. We hired this executive. We had a new website. We have a new product release, and we have a fundraise.
Speaker 2:It's like, well, that's
Speaker 1:I am still so puzzled by the v o three launch just because, like, you're Google. You have to figure out how much it costs to generate one of these. It's an eight second video. I understand that you're setting the GPUs on fire. But what is the energy cost?
Speaker 1:What is the depreciation cost on these TPUs? They must know how much it costs to generate a single v o three eight second video. Is it $10? Is it a hundred dollars? Like, there should be an auction based model essentially, like what they do for ads, and then they should have a queue.
Speaker 1:And they should say, hey. Right now, the GPUs are fully utilized. We have no capacity. And so it's gonna be $10 for this next generation, and you're gonna have to wait one hour. If you pay a hundred dollars, you can get it in the next minute or five minutes.
Speaker 1:Like I think part of it such
Speaker 2:a part
Speaker 1:of it might actually actually meet the demand where it is instead of, like, you're on a $250 plan, but you can only use it a few times a a day. And then have to one more hour.
Speaker 2:Part of it is is it's basically a research I don't think a lot of v o three content right now is
Speaker 1:actually gonna be app that they're advertising on the iOS app store. Yeah. I I don't I don't I don't care that they called it a research preview at alpha, beta, gamma, delta, who cares?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's an they're selling an expensive toy right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like it's
Speaker 2:like a buggy toy that
Speaker 1:my money. And I I think the biggest thing is the is the ads. Like, the fact that if I go to the App Store and I search for for Gemini, like, it pops up and says, create videos with Gemini. Make and share videos with Gemini Advanced with v o two. And and, like, you click there, and it's like it's advertising.
Speaker 1:Like, if it's a research preview and you don't have the capacity, don't advertise it. Yeah. Say, hey. Like, we we're at capacity. We're we're we're we're we're out on demand.
Speaker 1:Anyway, going back to search, Ben Thompson continues and says, the one clear exception was a smack dab in the middle of the keynote, which focused on search. I don't think it's an accident that Google's best and most important product had the clearest presentation and vision. CEO Sundar Pichai started with a brief overview of AI, brief overview of AI overviews. He says so this is Sundar talking. It's another exciting example of how AI is advancing our timeless mission to organize the world's information.
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's hear it for organizing the world's information. We love that Google does that. To make it universally accessible and useful. No product embodies our mission more than Google Search.
Speaker 1:It's the reason we started inventing AI decades ago and how we can deliver its benefits to benefits scale.
Speaker 2:Just to be clear, we invented AI. Yeah. They did.
Speaker 1:There you go. Now make it proud of. It's just That shouldn't Our Gemini model It
Speaker 2:is funny, though, because because talking about these AI overviews Yeah. I just searched in Google. What did Google announce at IO? Mhmm. And it doesn't even have an AI overview of that.
Speaker 1:The self referential stuff is particularly bad, and I think it's because of, like, data and security, like Ouroboros'. Like, the fact that I can open up Gemini and I can ask, hey. Just I just wanna know. Like, am I paying for this on this account right now? And it's like, I have no idea.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't possibly look at your own account within Google. It's like, I understand privacy, but, like, this is actually important to me. I wanna know if I can access the latest model. You you can even ask a Google model, what model are you? And they never tell you because they're just like, I couldn't possibly do that.
Speaker 1:It it would be a violation of something or other. And you know it's just like some sort of security thing that got wrapped up in, like, 20 layers of lawyers and stuff. And they're like, don't leak the the don't leak the customer's information into the LLM to let them know that they are paying or they're not. Or like, the LLM should be selling me on upgrading, you know, if I if I'm not upgrading.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is interesting. I just searched for stuff about OpenAI and Anthropic. It would not give an AI overview.
Speaker 2:Oh. Then I searched about TBPN and it gives an AI overview. Yeah. And it misspells my name. Oh, weird. Which is interesting.
Speaker 1:It adds the e?
Speaker 2:Adds an e, never done that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Four letter name, tracking in the lineage of Apple CEOs. You got Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jordy Hayes, potential.
Speaker 2:I'm making I'm starting my run.
Speaker 1:Starting your run. One great example of progress is our AI overview since launching at IO last year. They've scaled to over 1,500,000,000 users every month. Let's hear it. In over 200 countries and territories.
Speaker 1:As people use AI overviews, we see they are happier with their results and they search more often. I completely agree. The AI Overviews have been very good. I know that there's some hallucinations, but in general, I've enjoyed them.
Speaker 2:The beautiful thing from an ad product standpoint is that Google still gets all their ad. They're still serving ads It just so happens that they're not, you know, especially on desktop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know. I know. I'm I'm I'm very, very satisfied with with with the iteration there. The question is just like
Speaker 2:It is funny to think about an OpenAI experience where you query chat GPT and you get just like exactly what you're looking for. And then there's just like display ads like everywhere. No, know it's not gonna happen, but that's effectively. What Google is showing is possible when you can just build ads around the result that the person actually wants.
Speaker 1:Yeah. AI overviews are also one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens. Lens grew 65% year over year with more than a hundred billion already this year. So people are asking more queries, and they're also asking more complex queries. With our latest Gemini models, our AI overviews are at the quality and accuracy you've come to expect from search and are the fastest in the industry.
Speaker 1:AI overviews are, as Ben Thompson pointed out, after Google's most recent earnings, the most the most used generative AI product in the world. Most of today's search segment, however, was focused on the new AI mode. AI mode was introduced by head of search Liz Reid. So Liz Reid says, today, you will see how you can ask anything, and more intelligent, agentic, and personalized search will take you, will take on your toughest questions and help you get stuff done. This is particularly funny because did you know that there's a maximum query length in Google search?
Speaker 1:It's like two fifty six characters or something. Like shorter than a tweet. So if you just try and benchmark, like, what was your latest ask for ChatGPT? Just like, hey, ChatGPT. Summarize the news for me.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in seeing what Ben Thompson's talking about, and I wanna know what Dylan Patel's up to. And can you also summarize what happened at Microsoft Build and then Google IO? And I wanna hear about the Johnny Ive acquisition. And then I also wanna hear some stuff about Claude four. If you take that if you take that query and put it into Google, you will literally just get an error message.
Speaker 1:That says, query too long. And it's because Google Search is set up not for that type of searching. So anyway, there's Gemini two point five at the core, and they give a tour of AI mode. And so AI mode is more like a chat of a chat like interface, and all the demos are very impressive. They are also real as in either available now or shipping soon and all seem clearly useful, says Ben Thompson.
Speaker 1:On demand data visualization, for example, seems like an obvious win for generative AI powered search. That makes a ton of Search for GDP per capita across a couple countries. It just generates a table or chart for you. Makes a ton of sense. The most interesting comment Reid made, however, is a paragraph in the middle.
Speaker 1:The real goal for AI mode is to refine these features so that they can graduate to the core search experience. Completely, very, very smart. In other words, Google has clearly has a clearly defined AI funnel, which actually brings the coherence to this keynote that I was looking for. At the foundation of everything are those pillars I referenced about Google's incredible models, unmatched infrastructure, and data advantage. Reid's discussion of personalizing AI mode using your personal data was compelling as well.
Speaker 1:Then you have a bunch of theoretical ideas that make for cool demo videos, but the actual productization that still functions in Google is on the search team. That team takes ideas that works and puts them in AI mode. So you can think of, like, every other product is just
Speaker 2:This is basically the only if you're if you're looking at Google's Alphabet stock and you're trying to understand how AI is going to impact it, you can ignore NotebookLM
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And the Digi knock off Yep. And all these other things Yep. And just focus on this. Yep. And it's like, do you believe they're gonna figure out a way to monetize these sort of chat GPT style queries that are happening in Gemini right And it probably looks something like AI overview over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And also if you're a startup and you're worried about, like, getting rolled by Google and becoming, like, a Google feature, well, the threat is not that Google launches a directly competitive app and outcompetes you. That hasn't played out. Like, they launched Google Circles, and they weren't able to crush Facebook or anything
Speaker 7:like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Google. Or yeah. The like, yeah. Any of these little these little, like, startup killers where they're Google products, that's not really the dangerous area. The dangerous area is will your customers and your users be able to solve the problem that they want just by Google Search two point o?
Speaker 1:Or like when Google Search gets better, is that a threat to your business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, or if you're building an agent that's like, we're helping people book travel.
Speaker 1:It's like, Flights is going to get better.
Speaker 2:Is going get better,
Speaker 1:yeah. And so that's the real risk, I think. It's less that if it may if it never makes sense to go to happen
Speaker 2:Twitter competitor, Google Buzz.
Speaker 1:Wait. No. That that was a chat thing, wasn't it? No? It was it was a Twitter competitor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So like all all all these all these one off things that don't make sense.
Speaker 2:Microblogging and messaging tool developed by Google.
Speaker 1:No
Speaker 2:way. It replaced Google Wave.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. So many of these things. Yeah. They've launched in Sunset so many products. Anyway, AI mode looks a bit like ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:The real race for Google is to make search compelling enough that people don't just switch to ChatGPT for everything. To that end, another metric that that likely matters is actual usage. Pichai's definition of the types of searches that are growing was very carefully delineated, but growth in general is a certainly a good thing. If an AI feature if a feature drives AI mode, it may be a good candidate for the main search page. So one of the common refrains that came out of yesterday's keynote was how Google had just killed half of Silicon Valley startups.
Speaker 1:I'm not so sure how and and, Ben, we've read enough, sir, Tekker at this point that we're we're predicting what he's gonna say. First, it's clear to it's clearer than ever to me that the only product that truly matters or functions at Google is search or functions. A lot of the demos we saw yesterday are likely to stay demos or at or at best be forgotten and eventually kill products that no one uses. Second, the degree to which so many of the demos yesterday depend on user user volition actually kind of dampened. What's that?
Speaker 1:Getting the phone call? Google's calling us. Sundar, let's just bring him in the studio.
Speaker 2:Let's bring
Speaker 1:him Let's just talk to Sundar. Bring him in. What's going on with the XR glasses? We don't have Sundar.
Speaker 2:Would be a fun surprise guest.
Speaker 1:We'll get them soon. We'll get them soon. Android is probably gonna be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities, and Google's XR glasses were pretty compelling. And in my opinion, in my opinion, had a UX much closer to what I envisioned for XR than Meta's Orion did. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Devices drive usage at scale, but that actually leaves a lot of room for startups to build software products that incorporate AI to solve problems that people didn't know they had. The challenge will be in reaching them, which is to say the startup problem is the same as ever. You gotta get distribution.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing to me. It's like, does Google Search and Gemini eventually merge? Or do they stand as independent products? And so Google's like, kind of like maintaining search for people that, basically boomers who are just perpetually gonna go to the search box and search and like I'm gonna be in that bucket to some degree. I think everybody will still have Yeah,
Speaker 1:for sure.
Speaker 2:It it's so built in, they have so much distribution that that it will continue to have usage. Meanwhile, though, ChatGPT is just getting better and better at searching the Internet. Yep. And it can be used for both things. And that will present a pretty interesting challenge if Google's like, okay, we're competing with OpenAI and ChatGPT, but we're doing it in this two pronged way.
Speaker 2:And OpenAI is like, we're just trying to make the best, like, you know, basically like single, you know, search, you know, box plus button on the internet Yep. That can do everything.
Speaker 1:Yep. I mean, I think a lot of the decision between those two will come down to speed. So right now, if I want let's see. Like Tom Cruise age. Tom Cruise age.
Speaker 1:I just hit control t, and I'm in the search bar in Google Chrome sixty two years. Now if I go to ChatGPT, have to go chat.com. I'm logged in. Tom Cruise age. And it's thinking, searching the web.
Speaker 1:It's searching the web. It searched three different websites. Tom Cruise was born on 07/03/1962. As of today, he's 62 years old. So do you see how much longer that took me to to use ChatGPDA for something, like, silly like that or simple?
Speaker 1:But there's a lot of things that you search for that where you're like, I know that Google will one shot this in five milliseconds. Yeah. And I know that ChatGPT will take too long. Also, for some reason, I wound up running that against GPT 4.5. I think four point zero is probably faster, but like when I went to chat.com, 4 point 5 was just the one that was defaulted, right?
Speaker 1:And so this is where we get into like the model router where if I land on, if I accidentally triggered that in o three, it would be doing, like, it would be writing a hundred lines of code. Yeah. You know? And so the model router needs to be, like, super fast and they need to figure out caching and they also need to figure out integration into, like, the search bar because even even on your phone, it's usually faster to just open up a open up a new Safari window and
Speaker 2:then Yeah. And then the question is, like, does OpenAI need its own browser? Yeah. Right? Even per we you know, Arvind from Perplexity is, like, very focused on the browser.
Speaker 1:Like, right now, even if I do this on my phone, if I open up Safari, the search bar is always down at the bottom, and I can just tap that and immediately start typing Tom Cruise's age. When I open up ChattyPT, I was looking at my image library. So now it's it's I'm in image library mode. I have to go back. I have to go back to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:I have a query that I didn't actually click finish on, so I have to delete all of that to go so all of a sudden, I'm, like, into five, ten seconds just to get a quick answer. And so I still route quest I I route queries personally to Google when I when I want something super fast. Yep. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Do you remember that Gemini started as Bard?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. There's been like seven
Speaker 2:Bard.
Speaker 1:Bard. But there were there were other ones before that. Palm?
Speaker 2:Bard. A poet traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular particular oral tradition. Yeah. Cool name. I have a few other
Speaker 1:Tough go for the Winklevai. Yeah. Zuck comes for them with the Facebook stuff. Now Google's coming for them with the Gemini branding. Because Gemini becomes synonymous with Google And people are like, wait, where do I go to trade crypto?
Speaker 2:Never thought of Same name.
Speaker 1:Is I don't know how you could do that because they're both in technology companies. Like, they're both tech companies. I get that they're in somewhat different areas. But like, we talked to Austin Allred. He had to rebrand Lambda School because of Lambda Labs, which is an AI data center company.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's because of Lambda Labs? Yeah. Who's coming on the show on Friday, actually. Nice.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:Trademark Wars.
Speaker 1:New site on TV. Think it's Lambda Labs. But I'm not sure. Let's go through a quick was different Lambda, which was a completely It was not a it was not an education, but it was a tech company. And they were both tech companies.
Speaker 1:And so they had to reboot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway. Let's go through a quick history. Have a history of Google cloning startups. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Way back in the day that in 02/2004, they launched something called Orchid. Orchid. Oh, Orchid. Orchid.
Speaker 1:It was a Brazilian acquisition.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they got traction in Brazil and India. Was never truly global.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Shut down in 2014. Yep. There was Lively, which was basically a second life like three d virtual world thing. Closed in less than six months. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then they had Buzz, which was trying to counter Twitter at the time. Had it had a bunch of backlash around privacy stuff. Google Weird. Plus was obviously the Facebook rival. Plus.
Speaker 2:And then they actually had tried they they tried to buy Groupon for 6,000,000,000, and it failed. And so they launched Google offers. This is like a whole other era.
Speaker 1:Fun story about Google plus. So I was one of, like, the best the biggest users on Google plus. I just went, like, full send into it. And he was like, I'm gonna figure out the social network, kind of, like, you know, figure out how to create circles, create that. And because of that Really
Speaker 2:I got really dating yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I got this is in college. I got verification. So I got a check mark.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:But that check mark translated they ported it. Even though they shut down that, my account was, like, check marked as like, oh, you're like a serious influencer even though I had that 500
Speaker 2:Did that transition into YouTube?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so when I started the YouTube channel, I had I got to a hundred followers on one on a new account, and I was like, wait. My other account has a checkmark. So I shut down the old account and moved it over to my personal account and had the checkmark, which I could have gotten in, like it didn't actually do anything for the growth of the channel, but it was just, like, kind of a funny funny anecdote. I was like, oh, I'm gonna try this.
Speaker 1:And it was just a funny story. Anyway, let's move on to OpenAI acquiring IO and Ben Thompson's analysis there. But first, let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger. Build faster.
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Speaker 1:Oh, I mean, the the the trademark's available now that Google's out of the Buzz game.
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Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 1:We already covered the Bloomberg article. We know the facts. $6,500,000,000 all stock deal. Johnny Ive and his team over at IO get roughly 2% of OpenAI as major incentive pay. And there was a lot of good commentary on the timeline about this, about how Apple's not really set up to comp someone a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:We we looked at this with Tim Cook. He's making, like, what, couple hundred million? And it's like, when you're talking about a trillion dollar company, executive compensation in the billions isn't actually that crazy, but OpenAI can offer that.
Speaker 2:John. Yes. You're gonna be devastated, but Tim only made 74,000,000. Oh my god.
Speaker 1:That's brutal.
Speaker 2:It's like he should have been a baseball player. I mean, he he's He should have been a half decent basketball player.
Speaker 1:What do you think would have happened to Apple's market cap had they not dodged the tariffs? That would have been hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap erosion. Nuked. It was already tumultuous for the company, but they were carved out the entire time. There was never any fear that it was gonna happen, and that's entirely because of Tim Cook's negotiation.
Speaker 2:2023 made 63,000,000. Stop. I gen genuinely feel like we need to take to the streets and start protesting in Cupertino.
Speaker 1:We
Speaker 2:should. Because we've seen this on public. Yeah. You can backtest. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The better that CEOs get paid Yeah. Typically, the better the companies do. And as an Apple shareholder, I want Tim Cook to be pulling down one b a year, and I think he'll be highly incentivized to grow the company.
Speaker 1:Okay. I have an idea. So Greg Abel, he's 62 years old. He just took over as CEO of of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Yep.
Speaker 1:Tim Cook's sixty four, only two years older. So what if Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple, starts a company, gets acquired by OpenAI? Boom. Goes in thirty year run.
Speaker 2:Thirty year run. Generational run.
Speaker 1:And he's like, look, it's just dollars and cents to me. I can make more money over there. I can 10 x my comp.
Speaker 2:He's so
Speaker 1:He could 10 x his comp by going to OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He really could. Easily. He really could. Easily.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, that that's the big question, right, with Johnny, you know, joining OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Six billion. It's like How long
Speaker 2:who's the supply chain lord who's gonna just really bring this thing into
Speaker 1:If Tim Cook works I mean, he's making what? 60 He's
Speaker 2:not even cracking 75 mil a year.
Speaker 1:So he would have to work for one hundred years to make what Johnny Ive just made. I don't think he has another hundred years in him. Thirty. I I would give him thirty solid years ahead of him in his career. That's not enough to get to 6,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:He could maybe pull 2,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Well, to be clear, I think Johnny had investors in in in
Speaker 1:It's all in Johnny's pocket in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He deserves it all. It it was funny. I was looking yesterday, Johnny's like celebrity net worth tracker or whatever. They updated it in real time and we're like, he's a billionaire now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And he wasn't just from working at Apple.
Speaker 1:It's brutal.
Speaker 2:He had barely had 700 according to
Speaker 1:It's a trastesty. It's terrible. Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson's analysis. He says they put out an OpenAI put out this nine minute and twenty one second video of them complimenting each other, expressing love for San Francisco, and announcing the new partnership. Ben Thompson says, it's a bit much, to be honest, although beautifully shot and produced.
Speaker 1:I assume it was put together by love from Ives not included in the deal, but not accepting new clients design agency. I think the key, the key segment from Ives' perspective is this. Sam Allman said, we both had a we both had a very strong shared vision. We maybe didn't know exactly where this was gonna go, but the direction of the force vector felt clear. Then this deeply shared sense of values about what what technology should be, when technology has been really good, when it's gone wrong.
Speaker 1:Johnny Ives says, I mean, that was in a way one of the bias, one of the basis, I think, of one of the reasons Sam and I clicked was despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same. In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't look at the technology. You should look at the people who are making the who are making the decisions, and you should look at what drives, motivates, and look at values. I like that. That's a good take.
Speaker 1:I've expressed what drives and motivates I've expressed what drives and motivates him earlier this month in this excellent interview with Patrick Collison. And it was interesting because Johnny Ive we haven't really heard from him in a few years, and then boom. Massive Yeah. Massive podcast
Speaker 2:What a coincidence.
Speaker 1:With Patrick Collison just What a coincidence. Before the acquisition. Yeah. On a media tour.
Speaker 2:I'll read read, Patrick's, question. Sure. We're talking a lot about the purpose of
Speaker 1:design. That's not how he sounds.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna do the accent, John. Even though we both have
Speaker 1:Irish blood Irish blood
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna I'm not gonna Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just just just do a vanilla reading.
Speaker 2:Fine. Now I'm now Do
Speaker 1:do do now it'll sound like you're doing Patrick Collison doing a Jordy Hayes impression, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. So I'm doing Patrick Collison impersonating a technology podcaster.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:great. You're talking a lot about the purpose of design and the effect that design has on the recipient, on the user, on the consumer, whatever the case is. There's widespread concern and speculation about the effects of smartphones and the internet doesn't necessarily accord with just the smartphone, but on some of these products on attention spans and whether it has some adverse effect on kids or teens or who knows, maybe all of us, maybe the adults as well. There's questions over with AI whether it changes how education works and cheating in school. All of these technologies that we create have this potential double sidedness to them.
Speaker 2:And so I guess as somebody who clearly takes seriously and thinks seriously about the full effects, how do you think about possible harms?
Speaker 1:And Johnny Ive says, yeah, I think there is
Speaker 2:Why don't you do Johnny Yes, it's
Speaker 1:in British accent. Yeah. No. This is, Johnny Ive doing a John Coogan impression.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. I'm excited for
Speaker 1:this. I think probably not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered than by what you just described. I think when you're innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences. You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that have that I've been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.
Speaker 1:My issue is that even though there was no
Speaker 2:intention is pleasant? Don't think candy crush whales are
Speaker 1:You don't think sports betting on your phone at the drop of a hat is
Speaker 2:That's twenty four seven?
Speaker 1:Think there still needs to be a responsibility, and that weighs on me as you know heavily. And, yeah, I mean, obviously, there are negative consequences, but I think overall technology
Speaker 2:I think he might be alluding to when I made it possible to angel invest on a mobile app.
Speaker 1:Yours is is literally
Speaker 2:I think he's sort of
Speaker 1:sub tweeting me BS was Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tardy Ron basically took all these people in San Francisco who were hopeful hopelessly addicted to angel investing and made it accessible to them at all hours of the day. You didn't even have to send a wire transfer. You just got an invite, and it was like Venmo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ridiculous. It seems pretty clear that Ive is talking about the iPhone, says Ben Thompson, which is to say it's it sure seems like he is motivated not to simply build an AI device, but to actually diminish the iPhone's dominance in the user's life or even in the long run, kill it completely with tracks with the with the Wall Street Journal's reporting on their plans. They've been working on a device that will move consumers beyond screens according to people familiar with the matter. I mean, it feels like her.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, Sam's posted about her. They're very all in on voice interfaces. This could be a Her device, right? Is that the most obvious thing that they would do?
Speaker 2:Such an interesting dynamic where it feels like sci fi is dictating the product roadmaps of so many companies.
Speaker 1:Always has been.
Speaker 2:Always has been.
Speaker 1:I mean, Steve Jobs was always looking at like the Star Trek tablet and being like, let's make an iPad. It was nothing new. Gotta get ideas from somewhere. Jason Yeah. Jason Carmen needs to make something.
Speaker 2:Save us. Understand that you're basically delivering defining the product road maps of the biggest companies in the world. It's true.
Speaker 1:That's admittedly pretty thin gruel, says Ben Thompson, but it's in line with other rumors and more importantly, from my perspective, tracks with Ives expressed state sentiment. And it should be noted that this sentiment is an is a sentiment that Altman has expressed as well. He's tweeted a couple times. People sacrifice actual happiness and actual accomplishment for for short term dopamine hits by posting and chasing likes slash RTs on FB slash Twitter back from 2013. Only 21 likes back then.
Speaker 1:Sam was struggling to post bangers. I think everything he posts now gets like 10,000 likes. Oh. Big. And then a year after OpenAI was founded, Sam Allman said, digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time.
Speaker 2:I like like my screen time, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like it too.
Speaker 2:I do email on my phone. Yeah. It's productive.
Speaker 1:In 2017, Altman No.
Speaker 2:It is funny because I do believe that the sort of AI companions have the potential to be some of the most addictive products in history. Totally. And I believe that in general, will continue to to interact with them through screens Yeah. Devices, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Same Almond in 2017, almost a decade ago now wrote, I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation. Oh, sugar underrated though, right?
Speaker 2:Sugar is
Speaker 1:potentially good.
Speaker 2:Potentially good. I think it's, I've called it, I said it's a super food.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:super food. It's this amazing substance that gives you clean energy almost immediately. Maybe that's actually The added seed oil.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's, maybe that's actually like a broader metaphor for attention hacking is that it feels good in the, it is bad at the extreme, but it is good in the right dosage. Yeah. Because pure sugar, when taken in athletic context, when you're working out at the right dosage with the right purities can be good. Yeah. And it's not something that should just be completely removed from the diet, much like attention technology.
Speaker 1:I can feel the changes in my own life. I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends, young children don't even know that's something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often instead chasing the dual dopamine hits like likes or and outrage. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like our generation's kids are doing fine. Like like, because we're aware of, like, don't do the iPad thing, I'll see my son spend hours building Legos and and like painting and drawing and spending like it seems like he has a long attention span.
Speaker 2:I think it helps that adults are generally hyper addicted to their devices Mhmm. And wanna prolong the time in which their children can live a life
Speaker 1:Totally. Of
Speaker 2:freedom from that addiction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, at some point, I'm sure my son will try a cigarette. But just because heaters are Lindy
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'm gonna try to delay that for a very, very long time. Right? He's just he's just
Speaker 1:65 being like my first cigarette.
Speaker 2:My first.
Speaker 1:It's always challenging with Altman to know whether when or if he is talking his book, says Ben Thompson, as it were. But there is a record of long running sentiments that might convince Ive that their motivations and values are completely the same. At the same time, there are certainly other motivations as well. Ive for his part just became a lot richer, at least on paper. Altman may or may not have diluted the nonprofit share of OpenAI by making a big purchase with stock.
Speaker 1:This is kind of a theory that was going around about Reddit and how Reddit kind of went into Conde Nast and then was pulled out through a bunch of different stock
Speaker 2:Sam and the original founders seemed like they realized like Reddit was never gonna be what it could be while Yeah. A part of this legacy media company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you read the story of Reddit, it reads as very like almost like conspiratorial. It's this like really like four d chess maneuver to get it out. And yet at the same time, I'm like, yeah, I'm glad Reddit's not owned by Conde Nast. Like you guys did everyone a service.
Speaker 1:Like, good job, Alexis Ohanian and Sam for pulling that company out, which was actually an innovative tech technology company from, like, a dying legacy media company. Anyway, Altman may or may not have diluted the share. He's also sliding into the role occupied by his childhood idol, one Steve Jobs. So what's the strategic positioning? We got four minutes until our first guest.
Speaker 1:The larger question is what this means for OpenAI. On one hand, the angle here is obvious and fortuitously articulated by me just yesterday, says Ben Thompson. We'll back that. It has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices, and that seems truer than ever. Android is probably the going to be the best import the most important canvas for shipping a lot of Google's new capabilities.
Speaker 1:What makes ChatGPT so remarkable and the and OpenAI, the accidental consumer tech company, is that like Google two and a half decades ago, they have reached nearly a billion users almost entirely through word-of-mouth. The only distribution deal Apple has done or OpenAI has done is with Apple. More on this in a moment. This is exceptionally rare, and my long standing opinion is that the obvious way to capitalize on this position is to roll out advertising. Let's hear it for advertising.
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Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They have a dedicated agents product now that they rolled out yesterday, and Scott talked about it. Scott Wu from Cognition talked about it on the show, and highly recommend going to check it out if you're wanting to actually unlock the power of agents in a Yeah. Systematic way.
Speaker 1:So Ben goes on to say, it is worth noting, however, that one challenge is trying to win in advertising is that you are in the end fighting on Google's turf. The same Google that demonstrated its incredible model and infrastructure prowess. Well, this is awkward and surely couldn't have been intentional, or was it, at at IO? Yes. There are questions about Google's product chops, and I already think that OpenAI is the best AI best in AI at product.
Speaker 1:And we talked to Kevin Weil at who's doing product at OpenAI. Clearly, incredible team over there, and the products are fantastic. And they just added Johnny Johnny Ive. And, yes, OpenAI has the advantage of building an advertising business from scratch, giving them more degrees of freedom than Google, which has to worry about cannibalization and disruption. But Google is also moving AI into search, and the infrastructure the company has built out around advertising will take years and years to match.
Speaker 1:You can say the same thing about Meta. And speaking about Meta speaking of Meta, think about how CEO Mark Zuckerberg has framed the company's approach to AR and VR. This is Zuckerberg in a 2022 Strathecari interview about their partnership with Microsoft. But stake but taking a step back, I think in addition to this strategic alignment, I also think there's a very deep philosophical
Speaker 2:This is Zuck.
Speaker 1:This is Zuck. Deep philosophical alignment on the direction that we want the next generation of computing to go. My brief take on the history here is that every major computing platform there has been an open ecosystem that's focused on partnership and a more closed and integrated ecosystem. So with PC, Windows was the leading open ecosystem, and, of course, Mac was the leading closed one. On phones, it was Android and iOS.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that's interesting about the in the history is that I don't think it's predetermined whether the open ecosystem or the closed one ends up being the primary ecosystem. And so he was pushing for an open metaverse. Implicit in Zuckerberg's answer is the assumption that the company they are competing with in the long run is Apple, the closed option. Another way to frame that contrast, however, is between modular Windows and Android and integrated Mac and iPhone. The integrated option, the Apple option, is monetized first and foremost through device sales.
Speaker 1:The modular option is modular in part because the underlying motivation of the operating system is to maximize reach in which which in the case of Google means increasing the number of services on which to control search and serve ads. These framings are, in reality, a bit too limiting to fully articulate the various strategic puts and takes. Google, for example, is deeply integrating Google Android with Google AI in the cloud while continuing to lean on third parties to actually build the hardware. Indeed, one of my chief critiques of Apple's approach to AI is that by trying to do AI themselves, are trying to compete with Google on Google's turf. Still, Google is as Google does focusing on being on as many devices as possible.
Speaker 1:We should we should close out here because we have our next guest joining us in just a minute. But he says, Zuckerberg assumes that Apple will be there in AR and VR. Should Altman assume they will be there in AI? To put it another way, if you're going to take on one tech giant directly and you're an AI company, isn't Apple a much more attractive target than Google? And if you think that that way, should your focus be on building a horizontal service that runs everywhere or on building a fully integrated offering that monetizes the high end through an experience that integrates hardware and software.
Speaker 1:And if you wanna build the best possible integrated hardware and software experience, the team, IO, is a veritable all star collection of Apple talent that extends far beyond Ive that built the last one is a reasonable place to start.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. Gets everybody thinking that he's trying to kill Google and then goes for the jugular on on Apple.
Speaker 1:It's very interesting. I think Sam's going after everyone. Yeah. I think he wants it all. And why not just everything in energy, in servers,
Speaker 2:in chips. Well, we have
Speaker 1:Dan Shipper. Welcome
Speaker 2:to the stream. How
Speaker 1:you doing, Dan?
Speaker 3:How's it going? Excited to be here. Big fan of you guys.
Speaker 2:Great to have you on. I've been wanting you to do this for a while, and you've had a busy week. You have some some personal news Yeah. At Every, you're also at, you're at Anthropix Event right now, is that correct?
Speaker 3:I'm at, Code with Claude. Yes. Anthropix event where they just dropped, Claude Opus four.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Amazing because we didn't get a chance to talk about Anthropic or Claude four on the show yet, and we have a perfect guest to talk about it.
Speaker 2:I am
Speaker 3:your correspondent. Ally reporting live.
Speaker 1:Can you kick us off with just a little bit of introduction on you for, any of the fans who are watching who might not be familiar, and then we'll go into what the events
Speaker 2:They'd have to be living under a cluster.
Speaker 1:They'd have to be living under a data center, but some people do.
Speaker 3:My name is Dan Shipper. I'm the co founder and CEO of every, at every published ideas and applications at the frontier of AI. So we have a daily newsletter. We write long form essays about what's going on in AI, and then we also integrate software products. We bundle all together and sell it to the audience.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it, Jordy was describing you as, a Claude stan. You've been a fan of Claude for a long time. We've talked to some people in AI, and they've said, like, you can just walk into a party and immediately clock like, oh, that's a ChatGPT user. Oh, that's a Claude user. Is that true?
Speaker 1:Are you beating the allegations?
Speaker 5:I would say, it's interesting.
Speaker 3:I would say I used to be. I think Claude, like, three five Sonnet was the first model where you're like, oh my god. This thing, like, actually gets me.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But, since o three came out, I would say 95% of my AI usage is in CheckMateP. Yeah. And also with their memory feature, like, CheckMateP's memory is just incredible. It's very sticky. I do
Speaker 2:think have a friend with no working memory. It's like
Speaker 3:you know?
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like, concretize this a little bit more for me. My experience with AI and LLMs is that I'm using them as as information retrieval, agentic reporting, deep research a ton. I never just sit there and have a conversation. So if it's if it's answering a little tersely, if it's dropping bullet points on me, I'm kinda fine with that.
Speaker 1:Right. But when I talk to some people about the differences between Claude and OpenAI, a lot of it is in the subtleties of the language. And I just feel like, as a consumer, maybe I care about that less. But do you think that's important? Does it matter to you?
Speaker 1:Am I missing out on something by not
Speaker 3:seeing like a very sensitive emotional guy, and so I want it to be nice to me. You know? But I also think, to some degree, even for, like, more business, like, straight up business use cases, it's gonna be really helpful for it to have this a little bit of that sensitivity. For example, something I use it for a lot is if I'm having a management problem Mhmm. We report almost everything that we do at every in granola, and it's really easy to take your transcript of the meeting and be like, what happened here?
Speaker 3:Like, why did why was there a fight here? Like, or, you know, an employee's having a having a problem. Like, how do I help? Know, that kind of thing. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:And it sort of has a little bit of that radar that can that can really, help you move through a lot of interpersonal situations that come up often.
Speaker 1:Okay. So
Speaker 2:you That's interesting. Well, before we just go and and just, into a much longer discussion and and talk about Anthropix news, why don't you talk about there's a couple of things this week. Had your own fundraise, and it was a unique structure. So why don't we kind of start there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We announced this week that, we raised a little bit more money. We've we've previously had raised about 700 k in 2020, and then we raised, just now we announced, a $2,000,000 raise, led by Reid Hoffman. Cool. But we did it in a weird structure that I'm, like, sort of tongue in cheek calling a sift seed round.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Basically, like, Reed and Starting Line DC, who's another one of the investors, they committed up to 2 to 2,000,000, but we can pull it down when we need it. So we have not pulled down all of it. Mhmm. And I think that's a really nice structure for us because we're a media company.
Speaker 3:We we also have a of software attached, but, I wanna maintain our ability to be weird and just, like, have a video. Let's create a playground where we make cool stuff. And, so this gives us enough money to experiment, but not so much that we're, like, locked into a particular growth path.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you thinking that I mean, like, we saw this with OpenAI. They were a nonprofit, and then they wound up creating, like, the most dominant consumer app of all time. They needed to spin that out. Like, the the parallel here is that you are building software tools, but you also are doing media.
Speaker 1:One of those software tools takes off, all of a sudden, does the media become a marketing engine for that tool? Does the tool spin out? Are you thinking about it like incubation where there's separate cap table, maybe investors ride along? Like, what were those discussions like, and how are you thinking about that?
Speaker 2:Well, didn't you guys already spin out?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Did.
Speaker 3:We we spun out Lex Oh, cool. Which my every cofounder Nathan, now runs as the CEO of that, and Cool. We raised a seed round from True Vectors for Lex.
Speaker 5:Oh, cool.
Speaker 3:Almost all of the incubations that we have are actually their own separate LLCs. Think, like, in general, I fucking love having a writing business. Yeah. And I wanna keep the main thing the main thing, and I think that we can build a really incredible universe of of apps and other offerings around the writing business. I do think sometimes, will, hopefully, like, run into opportunities that seem really massive and that can be, like, just really big independent businesses on their own.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, we have, if that happens, we have the ability to go and actually, like, further spin them out, you know, turn them into c corps, have them go raise money, all that kind of stuff. So we have the optionality to do both.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Alright. Well, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff to talk about. Why don't we why don't we as our official Anthropic correspondent Yep. Which which is the title that we're giving
Speaker 1:you, obviously, not not related to
Speaker 2:the company. I think we are gonna have some folks from Anthropic on, next week, which I'm excited about.
Speaker 1:So the the the headline in wired is Anthropic's new model excels at reasoning and planning and has Pokemon skills to prove it. Claude four Opus and Claude Sonnet four can remember over long periods of time a capability that's helpful at Pokemon and other tasks that require an ability to stay on track. So, what was most exciting? Where where should we start first with understanding the progress at Anthropic?
Speaker 3:So first of all, you've gotta read the every headline and the subhead. Every time one of these models drops, we do a pipe check. So, basically, we get access to these models hands on, before they come out, and then we use them hands on for the daily tasks that we're doing to build software and and make writing. And then we give you, basically, hands on review of, like, how every part of the model works. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:What I found is it's it's a piece of coding. It really runs autonomously for a long time on, like, complex that were not, like, not possible with three sevens on it and are probably a little bit beyond the reach of, like, gem nine two point five and o three. In particular, in Cloud Code, it's fucking awesome. And so I do think that that's a it's a sort of game changer if you're if you're doing any kind of development work. For writing and editing
Speaker 2:Wait. Real real quick.
Speaker 3:Go for it.
Speaker 2:How do you what do you look at the what what are the kind of, like, market implications of Claude code in terms of the broader developer tooling ecosystem? Right? You know, we've seen, you know, cursors developing their own models, Windsurf joining OpenAI. There's a lot happening. But, you know, do you think that Claude code is something that could have billions of of of ARR independently, or or or what's your your read on on how it's gonna evolve?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. I do think that the the landscape is starting to consolidate a little bit. And with each with each model advance, the extra intelligence matters less and less. So I think you'll see people, you know, instead of jumping every time there's a new model release, instead of jumping and and turning their entire stacks from from old models to the new one, think you'll see people can start to stick a little bit more in the ecosystems that they've chosen. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's we're entering a little bit of a different era of that of the race, and I think it'll be a little bit more difficult for Anthropic to be, like, a totally independent lab and go up against not only OpenAI, but also Google, assuming Apple at some point gets their shit together, Microsoft, whatever. Mhmm. But I I really think that they have a very, very strong play with developers here. They've three three five Sonnet and three seven Sonnet are, like, super coding models. Three seven Sonnet is a little bit overeager, so it's Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You know, probably not as good as Gemini 2.5 Pro, but it's still, like, really up there with the best coding models. And I think Cloud Code is is one of the best coding experiences, like AI first coding experiences. It's also just very different from, like, a cursor or a lens source where those are basically text editors with AI on the side. And Podcode is a command line interface that's like you're just directly interfacing with the with the AI. And that's it's it's just a different experience.
Speaker 3:It's intended to be an assistant, an agent rather than, like, chat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do we have any idea of where these new models, Clog four specifically sit relative to the OpenAI models? Is this because I remember four five came out, and they didn't give it the GPT five name, but it did seem like it was trained on an order of magnitude more compute. And so this is kind of where the the pretraining wall discussion came from. But is it fair to think about Claude four as a GPT 4.5 class model in terms of kind of the scope and and the size of the model, or do they give any do they give any indication as to the vectors that they're pulling on?
Speaker 1:We've seen, you know, Facebook with, Meta, Llama, Behemoth is going for this massive context window, these trillions of token parameters. There's a whole bunch of, there's a whole bunch of different threads that the different foundation model companies are pulling on. What seems to be their underlying motivation, or or what do they seem focused on in terms of optimizing towards?
Speaker 3:So it's a little hard to, to tell, at least for me, because I didn't get access to any kind of model card before launch, and I honestly just been running around, like, just at the event and stuff. So if there are actual
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Numbers and stuff, like, definitely go look them up. I I don't I don't know for sure.
Speaker 1:On the blog post, they mostly just focused on the, software engineering SWE bench and the different, the different benchmarks around graduate level reasoning, agentic tool use, multilingual Q and A, visual reasoning. And the stats are impressive, but not a huge jump here. There's a jump on agentic coding, but Claude three Claude Sonnet three point seven actually outperforms in visual reasoning by, like, a half a percent. Not much, but it's one of these interesting things where it feels like we're increasingly in the era of trade offs around models, and we might be seeing more fragmentation around a really great we talked to some founders who are building super specified LLMs just for JSON decoding or just for translation or just for profanity filtering. And then they run the inference on a con on a consumer grade GPU because it's so narrowly defined.
Speaker 1:Still using the transformer architecture, but just much more narrow. And so I'm wondering if if that's the future that we're gonna see at Anthropic is they're they're they're dominating in code. They're very popular with developers, and they're gonna go after a few other areas, but they're probably gonna stay out of a few other battles battlegrounds.
Speaker 3:I do think that's an astute point. Sometimes you do see, trade offs. And so, like, three seven Sonnet, for example, was a better programmer than three five Sonnet, but it was, like, way more artistic. Interesting. And but but to to answer your your previous question, like, going back to the difference between g g g 4.5 and Opus Opus four and Sonnet four, they're a lit it's a little bit apples to oranges because 4.5 is just a base model.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I mean, it's it's a it's an instruction tune, but it's it's not a reasoning model. And OPUS is is both. They can go back and forth between being a base model and and being a reasoning model. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And that is, like, this sort of hybrid thing that I think all of the models providers are starting to move into. But I think Sana has I I Anthropic has done it first, and it's really good. It it makes a big difference when it both can, like, do the kind of, you know, chain of thought reasoning that's, like, good for map groups and and coding, and it also has a little bit of a vibe. So, you know, like a GP four five, which is just really good at writing and really good at, like, creative thinking.
Speaker 2:Cool. How do you how do you kind of navigate and figure out what's real when everybody in AI is deeply conflicted in different ways, whether they're sort of like secretly an adviser to this lab or, you know, happen to invest in the series b of this one or, you know, everybody's sort of talking their book. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1:I just got advisory shares in OpenAI. It just got 1%. That's it. I'm not conflicted. Exactly.
Speaker 1:It's small, like, smaller
Speaker 2:It's just like a point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just what I think you got a point.
Speaker 2:Just Careful, John. People are gonna believe that. Every time we joke every time we joke I that's a broken AI. Time we joke around, somebody takes it a % as fact. No.
Speaker 2:But I I obviously, the the immediate, you know, way to figure out what's real and what's not is just to use the new products and models yourself. But I'm curious how you navigate it as somebody who's, like, trying to provide, you know, really, really, you know, precise coverage of of everything in real time.
Speaker 3:So first of all, if anyone wants to throw me some Anthropic or OpenAI stock, like, I'm open. The answer is open. But I think yeah. I think that's a really good question. I think I I honestly think most of the benchmarks are kinda bullshit, and you can train for benchmarks.
Speaker 3:And we see that with Lama where, like, it looks good on the benchmarks, but it's it's not a good model. That's why we do vibe checks. So when we launch new models, we're using them hands on for the tasks that we do every day. And I think that's why it's really valuable to have, to every the media company and every the incubator startup studio in the same organization because I'm literally just going and hanging out with Kieran who runs Cora, which is our AI email assistant, or Danny who runs Sparrow, which is our AI content automation product. And we're using it to ship features or to make better writing or to do all the things that we do every day.
Speaker 3:And so I can get a pretty good sense of just like the vibe or the flavor of a model from using it myself. And I think that's gonna be the best I think that's gonna be the best way to tell if it's any good.
Speaker 2:What was your reaction to Google IO? What was the single thing that that stood out to you from the
Speaker 3:So I I was I was at Build. I did a I had a I did a really fun interview with Microsoft CTO, Kevin Scott, and then flew right from Build to to Code with Claude. But Alex Duffy is another one of our writers that leads AI training for us, and he was at Google IO. And so he would have a better response as to, like, what is the one thing, but I do know he was, like, he was, like, kind of in tears in our Discord and was like, this is the future. And I was and so, you know, I think that they've got something cool going on.
Speaker 3:I think he's really excited about they're pushing forward on a lot of different parts of the ecosystem all at once and are moving super fast, and he seemed really psyched about it.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:What about the products that Anthropic hasn't launched? We talked about specification, the the specialization a little bit. And I remember so, the big the the big AI product that really grabbed me from Google IO was v o three. And, obviously, Google has an immense advantage with the YouTube dataset there, and the results have just been fantastic. And I've been fighting tooth and nail to get more v o three credits because it's so much fun.
Speaker 1:And Anthropic, it feels like they've been potentially behind the ball on image generation. Is that just not a focus for them? Is that a do do you think that's because of safety concerns since, obviously, that that runs very deep in the culture at Anthropic? Or do you think it's just, more of a business case that, the the coding market is much more lucrative than the image generation market. And so just focus more wood behind fewer eras.
Speaker 3:Good question. I honestly don't know the history of Anthropix relationship with coding model as with image models other than that they just don't have one, and I don't know why. I do think it seems like they're really going hard after the kind of agentic coding market, and I think it's a really valuable thing that they can win. I'll also say just generally, like, Mike Krueger is their chief product officer and, like, he he knows the shit. And so I think they'll probably have certain
Speaker 2:He knows the thing too about images. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I assume they'll have some really cool stuff on the more, like, consumer product side coming soon.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Think we're getting a Zoom air. I'm, I'm searching o three right now for Anthropix offering. I don't think that they have any, any
Speaker 2:Dan models. Dan down.
Speaker 1:I don't think they
Speaker 2:Dan down. Dan down.
Speaker 1:Bring it back.
Speaker 2:I think do you think there's a widespread cyber attack again? Probably. Because Axis really struggling.
Speaker 1:They know who we talked to earlier this morning. They know.
Speaker 2:They do. They know. They figured it out.
Speaker 1:We have a we have a secret guest that will be released later.
Speaker 2:They're onto us.
Speaker 1:O3 is cooking. I mean, it's I I don't know if it's writing code yet, but it's definitely it's it's written. Look at this. It's like I just asked it I just asked it, has Anthropic shelved any any models? And it's like searching the web everywhere.
Speaker 1:But it is it is a tougher it is a tougher question for o three because I'm asking for the absence of evidence, not not I'm asking for it to find the absence of a model, not the not the presence of a model. And so it's very easy to search. Does does Claude have a coding model? And it can just search anthropic code and find the first result and return that to me. But it's very difficult to to find a null and say, okay.
Speaker 1:I searched the entire web, and I couldn't find anything. Therefore, Anthropic does not have a video model. But, yes, I believe Anthropic scrapped, maybe it was a text to speech engine, something like an eleven Labs competitor
Speaker 2:This is so brutal.
Speaker 1:What you got.
Speaker 2:So I've been I went to try to ask Claude
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If if why doesn't Claude have an image generation model Mhmm. And the sign up flow is couldn't be more opposite of OpenAI. I I've just been I I created a new account with my TBPN email Mhmm. And it took me there was I mean, Nikita would probably have a heart attack.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was, like, 20 individual steps of approving this and and approving that. But it says Anthropic hasn't publicly released a dedicated image generation model,
Speaker 1:strategic
Speaker 2:focus, technical and safety considerations, resource allocation, market positioning. So kind of everything that Dan said. Just it's in you know, it does make sense in in a way to just say, hey, this isn't strategically critical for us. We're gonna try to, you know, focus on what we're really good at, which is coding.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, we have TJ coming in for the second time. I'm very excited for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did we fully lose Dan?
Speaker 1:I think we did. Let's just move on to some some some news. Let's talk about the I mean, there's plenty of timeline we can go
Speaker 2:Dan, if you're listening, thank you for coming on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Enjoy the conversation and always welcome to come zoo. Is the future.
Speaker 1:We have AI that can one shot build you
Speaker 2:Zoom But it
Speaker 1:but it
Speaker 7:won't work.
Speaker 2:But Zoom is still gonna go down.
Speaker 1:The Internet will still fail constantly. Anyway, I do think it's fun that that And says
Speaker 2:phone overheated. He was just going so hard on on on on, you know, corresponding.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's that's honestly, as a technologist, the only time you should put down your devices
Speaker 1:Is it really too
Speaker 2:hot? Is if they're overheating. Yeah. Like, you need to be going that hard
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You need to be going five different apps. Podcasting so hard. You need
Speaker 1:to be live streaming video, doing spreadsheets, coding on your phone,
Speaker 2:doing everything. You for leaving it all
Speaker 1:On the
Speaker 2:the field. On the field. On the You're an absolute dog. We will see you again soon.
Speaker 1:Let's just find they're doing, that Anthropix doing Pokemon because Pokemon's such this I iconic game, and it's so, and it and it lends itself to, like, you can watch the full stream of Claude play Pokemon, and it is this interesting challenge that it takes a long time. Then you need to think about the different reward functions and all the different steps that you need to take. I was playing Pokemon on the Chromatic, Palmer Lucky's new Game Boy, and it's actually really hard because at a certain point, you get to a place where you just kinda have to go farm XP and, like, level up your Pokemon evenly before you can go beat the boss. Like like, you can't just you can't just constantly be going forward. You actually have to have to plan out your your attack a little bit.
Speaker 1:It's it's not the simplest game. So impressive that they're able to play it for, what, twenty four hours at a time. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. We'll we'll get to Elon Musk later. There's a there's a there's a piece we gotta put in the truth truth zone, but it's gonna take more than seven minutes.
Speaker 1:So let's, talk about OpenAI. They committed to a giant UAE data center in global expansion. This is Stargate UAE. We'd love to see it. They're partnering with g forty two to build a one gigawatt AI data center in Abu Dhabi.
Speaker 1:It's the first large scale project outside of The US.
Speaker 2:Shake It's a new you. Oh, he's just cooking.
Speaker 1:He's on a tear.
Speaker 2:I cannot wait to have the opportunity to have
Speaker 1:I want him on the show.
Speaker 2:Him on the show.
Speaker 1:I want him on the show so badly. So The UAE is trying to become one of the biggest funders of AI companies infrastructure and build their own AI factory. The first two hundred megawatt chunk of the data center is due to be completed by the end of
Speaker 2:twenty '20 Yeah. Thing that's interesting here
Speaker 1:is they're like
Speaker 2:match the investment that they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was interesting. It's very interesting
Speaker 2:to money in structure.
Speaker 1:Companies. It seems like a good deal. I'm I'm I'm very bullish on it.
Speaker 2:They're doing deals.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Strava raised at a valuation north of 2,000,000,000. Let's give
Speaker 1:it up. Fascinating.
Speaker 2:I have to ask, what are they running What
Speaker 1:are they running
Speaker 7:from? What are
Speaker 2:they running from? Maybe they're running from they they could very well be running from Zach Pogrop
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 2:Who is, in some ways, coming for them.
Speaker 1:They're running from not having generational wealth by getting liquidity at a multibillion dollar valuation. So congrats to founders.
Speaker 2:Running from not having. Yeah. It took me
Speaker 1:a second. Sequoia.
Speaker 2:They raised
Speaker 6:some debt.
Speaker 2:Let's let's give it up for leverage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They also acquired the Breakaway Cycle Cycle training app, marking its second acquisition in two months. They have more than a 50,000,000 users, and it was approaching 500,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. That's good. Let's 4x
Speaker 2:give a moment of silence for the VCs that passed on the seed in the a because it seems, you know, yeah, like running. I I get a lot of
Speaker 1:people doing that.
Speaker 2:But how big can this thing be?
Speaker 1:Easy critique.
Speaker 2:Easy How big can this be? 500,000,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Speaker 1:They showed you.
Speaker 2:Got them.
Speaker 1:Showed them.
Speaker 2:Turns out a lot of people are running from
Speaker 1:Strava lets users whom it calls athletes record in quotes, Wall Street Journal, putting putting their term in the truth zone.
Speaker 2:Hey. Runners are athletes.
Speaker 1:In some context, yes. They're
Speaker 7:running
Speaker 1:down a gridiron maybe. Share activities with friends and across dozens of sports.
Speaker 2:By the way, I've been avoiding we had Rob Mower
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cofounder of Huberman Lab.
Speaker 1:It's just Moore.
Speaker 2:Moore. I always, he's texted I botch his name every time.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:terrible. Rob, I've been avoiding a run with Rob
Speaker 1:Oh yeah?
Speaker 2:For years now.
Speaker 1:For years.
Speaker 2:We live close
Speaker 1:by Is he good runner? Gonna smoke here.
Speaker 2:He's an absolutely insane athlete. Oh. Brutal. I just always end up busy.
Speaker 1:How's he how's he on the how's he on the bench press? Is he repping two plates? Because maybe you could give him a run for his money over there. Oh, big dog. Show him how it's done.
Speaker 1:Good.
Speaker 2:Potentially do that.
Speaker 1:We go back to back. Huberman bench three plates, and they're just gonna smash us.
Speaker 2:See Rob just secretly wrapping three plates.
Speaker 1:Just demolishing us. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Jenny says glasses won't win. Earpiece with a tiny camera will. I don't know about that.
Speaker 1:What do you think? I think
Speaker 2:I just would like a very cool. Would like a camera Nostril. I'd love to put a nostril camera in that just sort of mounts to my nose and just comes out right here.
Speaker 1:No one's talking about nasal computing.
Speaker 2:Nasal computing. Nasal computing interfaces could be For for for guys like us that don't wanna chip Yeah. The nasal passageway is a great place to put a computer.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's probably so many different applications. You can have little fans in there that accelerate the airflow in so you're getting more oxygen in your blood. Brian Johnson loves it. Hyperbaric chamber for your body.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whoop on the wrist, but we typically have watches on our wrist.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so Whoop on the nose. Whoop in the nose. Nasal Or a ring in the nose. Or what about an
Speaker 1:Or a ring. I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 2:What are those what are those those
Speaker 1:Septum piercings. An aura septum piercing? Oh my god. Oh, that's insane. AI.
Speaker 1:AI generated now the the nasal nasal aura ring. That's insane. Anna says, we're in the or Anna says, we're in the good old days in the beginning of the movie with overly saturated colors and the smiles and laughter, your future is being written by about six people competing to well their ideal civilization into existence. Record freeze frame, record scratch. Hi, Anna here.
Speaker 1:You're probably wondering how I got here. Yeah. It does feel like it's a it's a monumental time. It's a bet it's an amazing time to be a technology podcaster. Jensen,
Speaker 2:Elon, Satya, Zac.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Accelerate Harder says this blog post is styled like a cross between a wedding announcement and a memorial web page. Is a very funny photo. It is black and white. And the font choice is is something that we haven't seen from OpenAI or Apple before.
Speaker 1:They're boys, though. They're just
Speaker 2:They're boys.
Speaker 1:Guys being dudes. Anyway, we got a couple other posts, but I think TJ's here. So should we just bring in TJ and
Speaker 2:TJ.
Speaker 1:Start breaking down the news?
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream, TJ. How you doing?
Speaker 2:He's getting the band back together.
Speaker 1:He's getting the band back together. Let's go. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:They're back.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Keep it going. Keep it going.
Speaker 2:Two minutes
Speaker 1:of this.
Speaker 7:And I have a microphone. I've made a real real upgrade here.
Speaker 2:Oh, you guys love that. Love that
Speaker 7:you're Big podcast guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You went you went all in. I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Big podcast guy. We turned you.
Speaker 1:Great to have you You turned
Speaker 2:went from zero to to a hundred.
Speaker 7:I'm all good. It's great to be back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give us the news. What's the announcement? What does this company do? I saw the announcement.
Speaker 1:Bunch of mumbo jumbo. Break it down for me.
Speaker 7:So the company's called General Medicine. We launched today in all 50 states, so anyone in The US can sign up and use the service. And the way we think about it is a health care store where you can get anything you need in health care. Mhmm. We actually talked about some of these themes a bit a couple weeks back.
Speaker 7:But our general belief is that you should be able to shop health care like you shop everything else. And so that means, you know, if you have if you know exactly what you need, like, know you want a certain set of labs Mhmm. Or, you know, you need a colonoscopy or you're having kinda ongoing shoulder pain is like an issue I've had that I use the service for. You can literally search for that problem, fill out a relatively straightforward set of questions, and then consult with a clinician. And if what you need is an in person visit or in person care or you need to get imaging or any of that done, we make it super seamless to do that.
Speaker 7:I think the probably the most novel thing about the product experience is that you can see personalized insurance pricing for any provider prior to deciding where to get that service. So for my shoulder pain example, I needed to go get a follow-up x-ray and the difference in price between getting an x-ray done in Park City versus Salt Lake was a hundred dollars versus $500 with my insurance.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 7:Which before when you're making a decision Same
Speaker 2:insurance. Same
Speaker 7:same x-ray. Same actual kind of medical group, that's they're both kind of Intermountain facilities, but a pretty big variance in the actual out of pocket.
Speaker 1:And presumably even the same x-ray device Is there? Like the same technology. Yeah. All the information.
Speaker 7:Think people are making this decision every day, but they literally have no idea Yeah. Well, there's there's any sort of differential.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so the thing that stood out to me is when you land on generalmedicine.co, you see pricing without insurance. Yep. And that seems, you know, super intentional because you wanna just enable people to not, one, just like speed to care. Right?
Speaker 2:There's like certain instances where you're like, I need to solve this problem as fast as possible. I don't wanna deal with worrying about in network, out network, what all all that. And then there's also instances where like something can cost you more by going through insurance. That's Yep. Correct.
Speaker 2:Right? I remember something was going viral on X probably a month ago where somebody like their the the ambulance was like much more expensive because they had insurance where if they were just uninsured, it would just, you know, gonna cost less. So can you talk about kind of that, the way that kind of pricing dynamic works and and why you guys decided to to kind of lead with with, you know, showing people that, hey, you can just kind of immediately get these services regardless of of your current insurance situation.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think probably a useful anecdote is when we built a very similar experience in pharmacy. When you go to kinda Amazon Pharmacy now, you can see cash and insurance kinda head to head when you're making a purchase decision. We ended up with a significant amount of folks that were just using cash because either it was cheaper, which I'd say a quarter of the time, was literally cheaper to just not use their insurance just to pay cash. And then a quarter of the time, it was moderately more expensive.
Speaker 7:Instead of $15, it was 20 or 20, it was 30. But you didn't have to deal with all of the obnoxiousness of using your insurance. Right? There was no prior authorizations. And to deal with the fact that it was too soon to fill the prescription, like all these sort of sad past that exists as a byproduct of insurance, I think we'll see a similar dynamic here to your point where sometimes it'll literally be cheaper, and that will happen, I think, lot more than people would think.
Speaker 7:And then sometimes it's slightly more expensive to use cash, but it just is less annoying to deal with having to get it reimbursed and to deal with the up from prior auths and all those things. And we think that'll be a I don't know what the right proportion will be for this business, but I think it'll be a much higher percentage than than people would assume.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the continuum of medical services? Because I'm just I'm thinking about the the the shoulder injury. Obviously, there's sometimes when you need an X-ray and you need insurance to pay for that. Sometimes you just need to rest. Sometimes part of health is maybe going to the gym or Yep.
Speaker 1:Being on a diet. Or if you're having problems with sleep, you could need a prescription drug or you could just need some melatonin. And so what is the ideal front end to health? Is it I mean, I imagine people will go to ChatGPT. They go to WebMD.
Speaker 1:They ask their friends. Sometimes they go to their doctor prematurely, and the doctor just says, hey, just stop eating so much or or hit the gym or something like that. Yep. But what is the how will this change? And then how do you plan on on being a part of that front end to medicine?
Speaker 7:I mean, I think the single biggest change here is trying to move health care to a much more simple and straightforward transactional experience
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Where you can actually transact in the same ways that you transact in retail. Mhmm. I think the over if you think about just the overarching kind of journey for someone dealing with a condition or dealing with some symptoms they don't know what condition they have, I think the behavior will be similar to what it is today, which is today they're going to Google and constantly searching for things and trying to figure out what's going on. I think a bunch of that volume will move to ChatGPT and other foundation models where it's easy to go from symptom to a likely diagnosis. I think the problem we solve is post that diagnosis or post having a sense of
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:What your problem is and being able to quickly get what you need. Right? Like you like you might need an x-ray, you might need labs, you might need you might need an intervention in person. We make that really seamless. You can transact with us in normal way.
Speaker 7:And so I think that is the the sort of novel thing about what we're doing is turning healthcare into really a product catalog with with super crisp pricing upfront.
Speaker 1:What's the business model going to be?
Speaker 7:I think the right mental model is a combination of first party and third party marketplace. Right? So we do have our own medical group. We have our own doctors on staff. We will use them over time for things that are more and more complex, where it's not as easy to know kind of right away exactly what you need, and so you're helping someone navigate that ambiguity.
Speaker 7:And then we both have a set of third party providers that are deeply integrated, mostly specialists, where if you need an immediate specialist consult, we can provide that. And then you can literally request to see any provider. It doesn't matter if we have a relationship with them or not. We can still make that referral, make it we will literally book the appointment for you, and we'll show you the again, we'll show you, like, where the best option is for you based on price, quality, whatever things you you care about. And then the the third party sense, it obviously won't be as simple as a traditional marketplace from a monetization standpoint, but it will be of of that ilk, right, of that flavor of a kind of traditional first party, third party marketplace.
Speaker 2:Did you guys have an urge to slap an LLM on this thing? I know it's notably absent from the homepage. Think
Speaker 7:you
Speaker 2:We're
Speaker 7:throwing it back. You could like my just like my cars. We're like, yeah, we're throwing it back to
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious I'm curious if you've you you must have gotten a bunch of pitches from people being like, hey, a lot of people are using ChatGPT to diagnose conditions. We're gonna make a better version of that. To me, it doesn't feel super investable just because ChatGPT probably already has full access to PubMed and bunch of, you know, other resources.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, was that a pretty pretty intentional decision to kind of like leave off the site and and let people kind of figure out what they need wherever, whether it's Google or WebMD or family, friends, another doctor, etcetera, and then just be the place where they kinda take action?
Speaker 7:Yeah. That was definitely intentional and definitely something we constantly debate. Again, I think the place that ChatGPT and the other foundation models aren't gonna go is the stuff we're doing, right, to go from weekly diagnosis to actually transacting. And I think we'll see how it plays out. I'm a little skeptical that dedicated kind of doctor LLMs will win against the chat GPs of the world.
Speaker 7:We're probably effectively placing a bet here that the chat GPs of the world will kind of sweep up that use case for the most part. Cool. We could be wrong on that for sure. I mean, I think there's a bunch of
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can imagine a world where general medicine is like, hey, you you know, we we think you here's like our read of the situation based on the picture you uploaded or the symptoms you're having. Here's how you take action and actually talk to a specialist to like verify, you know, actually get a get a expert involved that's not just, you know, predicting the next token.
Speaker 7:Totally. I mean, I think that again the right frame here is retail. Right? You're already seeing that exact flow for categories that have this clear kind of product catalog and transactability and doesn't exist in healthcare. I think we'll have some version of that kind of chat with us and figure out what's going on to help you navigate our store over time.
Speaker 7:But that's not the bet we're placing. The bet we're placing is that it's the transaction that the customer ultimately needs and that we can create a a very novel experience.
Speaker 2:You guys launched in all 50 states. How different is that than the early PillPack days? I imagine that was it kind of a different go to market motion?
Speaker 7:Yeah. For better or worse, it's almost the same. Interesting. PillPack took us about twelve months to launch and we were in 32 states, I think, at launch, and then chipped away at the tail over, like, six to nine months, I think, if I recall. And this were now, I don't know, sixteen, eighteen months in, and we're launching in all 50 states.
Speaker 7:So on the kind of from a time and availability standpoint, actually super similar.
Speaker 1:Can you take me through some of the history of other attempts in this category? I remember using ZocDoc once to find a doctor. I used WellnessFX once to get some labs done. There's a few different approaches that have been tried in kind of creating the front end the front door to medicine. It still feels like one hasn't become dominant.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of point solutions. Like, if you want hair hair treatment, you go to hair.com or something, and, you want compounded erectile dysfunction medic medicine with GLP ones in it, you can go to a different website for that. But It
Speaker 7:probably won't be part of our selection. We debated it. I think we're gonna leave it leave it out for now.
Speaker 1:I want just the the the the cocktail. Cocktailmedicine.com.
Speaker 2:Can I get four
Speaker 1:in one? Testosterone Four in one. Creatine. I want some protein in there. So throw a twenty milligram Adderall XR in there and then mail that to me, compound it.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. Don't Future is in there. I'll pay in I'll pay in Cardano, actually.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:The BNPL. BNPL. With Cardano. Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's great.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, take me through some of the history. You don't need to speak specifically about specific companies, but just the different approaches that have been tried. What worked? What didn't? Why have you landed on?
Speaker 1:And what have you learned that led you to this particular approach?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of vectors there. Right? I think the initial thinking for folks trying to build similar stuff was that you'd start in one vertical and go horizontal over time. That's sort of the Amazon playbook starting in books and then adding categories kind of as there's demand and you have incremental customer demand.
Speaker 7:I think we observed that and have not seen evidence of that approach as successful. And I think one really different thing about health care is that oftentimes you actually don't know what you need, right, when you're showing up. And so if you only serve one specific thing and you only have one intervention for that thing, it actually doesn't really serve the customer need in the way that they they they ultimately want. I think if you compare it to kind of booking services with like 3P provider search and you can book an appointment on the site, The thing that we've observed there is that you end up
Speaker 3:with
Speaker 7:this selection bias towards providers that have a bunch of availability rather than the best provider for the customer. And so we're not requiring any level of integration to get you an appointment and get you pricing for any provider. So we don't suffer from that kind of same selection bias. We're effectively ambivalent who you wanna go see, and we can help you figure out who the right person is. So we've we've sort of learned from observing that as well.
Speaker 7:And then I think the last point I'd make is that it's novel to have both first party and third party integrated as a seamless thing. That's novel outside of certainly outside of health you know, in health care. It's not as novel outside of health care. Mhmm. But by doing that, it allows you to offer a comprehensive experience and ultimately make it super seamless for the for the customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have there been developments on the legislative side that have allowed this to exist now? I remember there were some telemedicine rule changes that happened in COVID and kinda stuck around that kinda created a boom there maybe. But could you have built this ten years ago?
Speaker 7:I think there's probably two main things that have made this the right time to build this business. The first is that patient data is much more accessible. So something novel about the customer experience is when you sign up and you give us very basic demographics, we can go pull your insurance information and pull your full med history and medical record and repopulate everything in your profile in these in these flows, that wouldn't have been possible a handful of years ago, and that was due to regulatory changes that required companies to open up this data. And the second is the pricing would not have been possible to do in the ways we're doing it without without LLMs because we're effectively reading your full coverage of benefits
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:And then mapping that to the service that you need and then figuring out where you are in your deductible. All of that would not have been buildable without the current version of LLMs. And so
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 7:We're not exposing that in like a AI sense, but it does power
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:How we're able to back into what your your pricing ultimately is.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. It does feel like there's huge opportunity for companies that are essentially driven by enterprise AI or AI internal behind the scenes, but they don't just need to surface that. You don't need to create another text box for someone to chat with. Totally.
Speaker 1:That seems like a very deliberate decision, but still, like, you know, uniquely enabled.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If somebody can create the AI doctor that allows you to have a telemedicine visit and you guys are kind of the front end for getting expert care, you could just plug that in. You don't even necessarily have to Yeah. Develop it.
Speaker 1:In terms of I I don't know how familiar you are with how the doctor's office is changing, but there was this drumbeat for years in the deep learning community about stop training radiologists. Deep learning neural networks focused on image recognition will be able to do it at a superhuman level very, very quickly. Now we're seeing Google v o three generate Hollywood level cinematography that's pretty
Speaker 2:Generate TJ Parker going on a thousand podcasts in one day.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's really, really good. And so when It's actually
Speaker 7:not real. I'm sorry, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I I mean, when I see the advances in image processing and and generative AI with regard to image, I feel like there has to be an, there has to be a similar progress happening in the image processing of self driving cars. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:When I see the the the the ChatGPT, Studio Ghibli moment happen, that advances my timeline to a self driving car. It also should advance my timeline to take a picture of this mole and tell me if it's cancerous. But is that happening, or are these separate these separate paths in the tech tree, or are there just barriers to actual adoption in the medical community, or are there, you know, job displacement fears? Like, what's actually going on over there in the doctor's office?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's for sure happening, and I think they're as effective as you would imagine they are. I think the probably the the biggest difference in health care, and I'm sure it's obvious, is that you still have to get the sign off of the doc, and there's still a bunch of regulatory overhang that is required to get fully to a diagnosis and certainly at this point to an intervention, whether that's a prescription or some other intervention. Mhmm. But I think the enablement and the efficiency is showing up and I think that'll continue to continue
Speaker 1:to You're now you're not a ChatGPT wrapper. You're leveraging LLMs though. Are you a fax machine wrapper?
Speaker 7:We are definitely. We will always be a fax machine wrapper.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I bet
Speaker 2:bet I
Speaker 7:bet that we spent like a third of our dev resources at POPAC for like three years on fax ish stuff. Wow. It's really So It's really quite stunning. I love to
Speaker 2:hear Let's give it up to the fax One of the greatest One
Speaker 1:of the greatest ever. But, I mean, I imagine that there has to have been, like, a a b to b SaaS company that created, like, a really great API around fax machines in the last decade. Has that happened? Are you just standing on the shoulders of giants, or are you writing fax machine interop code for
Speaker 7:We don't even do a build it or buy it. We just always build it. If it's fast, we're we're building.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I imagine you're hiring CUDA engineers to develop custom
Speaker 2:parallel Yeah. Part of the 30 plus million is going to, you know, up there's a JV with The UAE
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. You know,
Speaker 7:setting up the Yeah. Special vector of engineers that will only work on fax machines.
Speaker 1:Fax machine.
Speaker 7:We have a lock on that talent pool.
Speaker 1:That's great. I I wanna talk about go to market. Well Oh, sorry. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Please. One more question here, and then I I wanna Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's important to drive folks to this. Give us the plug. How can people get started? But then, what's the actual marketing rollout?
Speaker 1:Are there partnerships that drive adoption? Am I gonna be seeing flyers for your service when I walk into a doctor's office or seeing Google Ads? Like, how how do you actually plan on getting customers?
Speaker 7:Yep. I think this this article probably end up following the PillPack arc as well. We're very much a D2C business today, we intend to stay there for a while.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And so I think if you're searching for any of the things that we offer, we'll show up in those search results like any other retail experience. So we'll get a quite a bit of demand there. We'll do all the normal kind of D2C tactics to drive awareness and demand. I think if you kind of
Speaker 1:see that geriatrician influencer partnership.
Speaker 7:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really get all the all the key influencers. Yep. A lot of lot lot of stunts, lot of blimps, flyers.
Speaker 7:A lot of stunts, lot of TikToks. Skywriting. A lot
Speaker 2:of TikToks.
Speaker 7:Yep, exactly. But I think if you if you zoom out and look at the PillPack journey, by the time that I left that business, two thirds of our business was b to b partnerships and b to b driven. Sure. But we feel like to build a novel and great customer experience, you have to start by marketing to the end consumers. So we're doing that again here.
Speaker 7:But we would expect partners over time to help drive demand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I give it two years till Andy Jassy is calling you daily, trying to trying to get the band back together again in Amazon. I got I I wanted to go a different direction Please. And get an update on on the kind of the fallout from the drug pricing executive order. What what's your kind of updated thinking there?
Speaker 2:It was only last Monday. Feels like
Speaker 7:Yeah. It feels like a month ago. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It does.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I don't know if I've seen anything substantive over the last week. Yeah. I'd say my take is still roughly my take, but I've not seen any evidence that supports it any more than I had a week ago. So Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Hard to say.
Speaker 2:Should we SPAC Naito Engineering? SPACs are back Much Naito Engineering.
Speaker 7:Higher margin business for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Naito Engineering is is family owned. Just started in the fifties car restoration, you know, engine you know, engineering business that TJ is a big fan of. He's wearing a hat. Okay.
Speaker 2:Had to ask. Since SPACs are back, you know, potentially Yeah. Potentially an opportunity there.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit My
Speaker 7:plug is that I produced a documentary about Naito, and it's coming out in the fall. So keep an eye out. We'll have to hop back on TBPN to talk about my
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 7:Do it. Our documentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I saw maybe was there a trailer that already dropped? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I saw a trailer.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:cool. I love that you're mixing, you know, hyper capitalism and, you know, just like post exit, post economic, you know, documentary producing, you know. Very few can do both. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? And Naito is not related to the the car garage that you're involved in. Is that right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's separate. That is my car storage business which
Speaker 1:is the Car
Speaker 7:business. Yeah. Cool. That's called warehouse. That's my other plug.
Speaker 2:Parkside. Warehouse. There we
Speaker 7:go. Do it at We'll it the Meets like car storage. It's a cool cool concept.
Speaker 1:Is there a track or where do people take the cars once they're stored there?
Speaker 7:Just go like, we go on weekly drives. Okay. So there's a bunch of places to drive outside of Park City and then there's like a simulators, restaurant, bar, kind of social lounge, that kind of thing. So kind of half social, half car enthusiast stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, very quickly, just on the news because everyone's talking about it, the Johnny Ive going from Apple to OpenAI. Nikita was saying it's a % due to Apple's compensation structure. They can't pay Johnny ten billion dollars. But and you said it's a % the right take, but why can't they?
Speaker 1:Like like, it seems like at this point, like, maybe they should be paying Tim Cook more. We've been joking about it. He only makes 70,000,000, 60 million a year. And yet he was able to navigate the tariff, like, war pretty adroitly. It seemed like he probably saved Apple from a $300,000,000,000 market cap hit during that fiasco.
Speaker 1:He doesn't really get to take a slice of that. Is this something that companies should be, like, set up for going forward, or is this just a unique dynamic of the private markets? Like like, what's actually going on here?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think it's a fundamental flaw of these large companies is that they're they're designed to reward generalists for the most part. Yeah. And there's very little differentiation available on comp even if you're at a pretty senior level. You've sort of run into these natural comp barriers.
Speaker 7:I don't I I was less commenting on whether Apple should pay Tim ten bill should pay Johnny ten billion dollars, but more commenting, like, if you bump up against breaking any sort of compensation rule, making an exception, it's incredibly difficult. It's basically impossible. And I think it's especially odd when you're willing to like, there's there's a an incredible willingness to invest in a new thing, like, well beyond kind of ventures tolerance for capital investment. Totally. Like billions of dollars a year into the
Speaker 1:Like the metaverse. Like such as like spending $6,000,000,000
Speaker 7:in Alexa, like super speculative investment
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 7:With no disproportionate economics for the person deciding how to make that capital investment. Mhmm. And which I've always thought to be very odd. Like you could effectively swap out kind of 10 l sevens and dramatically change the comp of the VP running that group. And that's probably a great investment, but that's just not the sort of mentality at most of these large companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you you had the kind of canonical founder exited to big tech, moved on pretty quickly experience. Like, what was the one thing that you took away from Amazon that was like, this is great. I need to port this elsewhere. Was there anything that stuck out to you as, like, deeply underrated about those large organizations?
Speaker 1:Because it's easy to say, oh, they're slow. Oh, they're they, you know, they blah blah blah. But what what was what was actually interesting about Amazon in particular or just big tech broadly?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, Amazon's way of working, especially the kind of writing culture, we definitely have co opted and I would never kind of operationally do it a different way. Like, I think that is quite effective. There's like a reasonableness that probably is a little bit, you know, tilted at Amazon, like you're literally writing like your annual budget. Like that there might be things that there's other formats that make sense.
Speaker 7:But as a general rule, like I think a writing culture is much better than a traditional culture. Yeah. I think they're also incredibly good at scaling stuff that works, Right? Like they are a machine if they found product market fit, both because there's a deep willingness to invest and because there's an a bunch of established mechanisms to scale this stuff. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I think that can be inhibitive of building something novel and new. Right? There's like sort of over process and over litigate stuff early on. But the second you have something really working inside of Amazon, like they are just masters of of scaling it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is the same thing with Google. Ben Thompson was talking about with regard to latest Google IO launch. Like, Google launches a ton of demos, ton of products, but they never really go anywhere unless it's tied to search. If it's tied to search, they will die before they let that thing not work.
Speaker 1:And so, mean, you can talk all about, oh, they they sunset Google Buzz or Circles or Flight or this random thing. But, like, they haven't they haven't sunset shopping. Like, they haven't sunset display.
Speaker 7:One's still going.
Speaker 1:That one's still going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jordan, do you have anything else?
Speaker 1:Or
Speaker 2:I think that's it. I think we'll do The only thing I'll I'll share it with you now, I just got breaking news, and TJ will laugh at this. But John really wants the new z r one.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. Which which
Speaker 1:Yeah. What would
Speaker 2:we Which is like probably on the opposite end of like the the spectrum of like cars TJ likes and like doesn't like. But I just got a quote that basically you would have to pay a hundred k over MSRP to to get one. There's only been 12 delivered so far.
Speaker 7:TBPN is ripping.
Speaker 1:It's it's a small deal. To pay. It's leaning. For American made. May maybe maybe we could flip that around.
Speaker 1:I so I want an American made sports car. I want something interesting, but it has to be American made. What would you recommend for me? Can it be old? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It can be anything.
Speaker 7:Get a Cobra. Cobras are Okay. Yeah. That might be a Do not get a KitKart, but like get an OG unrestored Cobra. Those things are sick.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's good. I mean, last thing on the the writing culture. Do you think that Amazon is at risk of being kind of one shot by these LLMs because you don't actually have to go through the exercise anymore of writing a memo? You can just be like, get me 20,000,000 and I need to hire 25 people.
Speaker 1:Justify it like it's an Amazon memo. Boom. And then you just have it.
Speaker 7:You're just gonna drop in all your old memos and be like, update this for q two, please.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. I imagine that that kind of destroys the culture potentially.
Speaker 7:But Yeah. It does not have a real risk there that I hadn't contemplated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, we were recently posting a job posting for an editor and the and and the the job listing was very clearly ChatGPT generated. I was like, what prompt did you use?
Speaker 1:Maybe we should just post that prompt. And we wound up just posting the prompt and it's like way better because the prompt is way more succinct. It's like you had to give it anything. Just give me the bullet points. Don't don't don't flesh it out into two pages.
Speaker 7:I am I am pretty upset that Chad GPT is gonna single handle. They ruin em dashes for me. Oh, yeah. The record was like my favorite punctuation pre Chad GPT
Speaker 1:and it was ruined.
Speaker 7:Just totally ruined.
Speaker 1:Were you are you a Delv guy too? Were you using Delv a lot? Not really. Really. Really.
Speaker 7:Just dumb dashes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, great talking to you as always.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congratulations. Congratulations on the Ashwin and Elliot.
Speaker 1:It was great.
Speaker 2:This is I love I love that you guys are getting back together to fix a big big problem.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. You love to see it.
Speaker 2:Great having you on. Awesome. Good to see you guys. Enjoy the rest of the day. See you.
Speaker 1:Let's tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Send spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Benchmark series a.
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Speaker 1:What else we got here? Do we have any others? Oh, we have our next guest already. Easy. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:Who you got? There he is. Reggie. Reggie.
Speaker 1:How you doing? Chief. Welcome
Speaker 2:to this. We didn't we didn't have a title for you so I put the CRO, the chief Reggie officer.
Speaker 4:It's we're we're maximizing free agency boys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 4:Free free agencies and trade season.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't be surprised if you get a maxed out offer before this your inbox before this,
Speaker 3:you know.
Speaker 1:6.5 billion's on the table now.
Speaker 2:So anything's billion. I had a I had an idea shortly before you you may maybe you could build it. A septum piercing AI wearable health tracker. Anything there?
Speaker 5:Ship it.
Speaker 4:Is that
Speaker 5:Ship it.
Speaker 4:Ship it.
Speaker 2:Ship it.
Speaker 1:An aura ring for your nose.
Speaker 2:An aura ring for that.
Speaker 4:That can also doing it.
Speaker 2:That can also be a companion. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're talking to it all day long.
Speaker 2:It's like, you sure you wanna have that, you know, Diet Coke?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But scent is tied to memory. So imagine it just squirts scent up in your nose.
Speaker 4:Maybe not maybe not squirts.
Speaker 1:It remembers. Yeah. It emits it emits an aroma to remind you of your
Speaker 2:grandma's cooking. Aroma is better.
Speaker 1:An aroma. Yeah. This aroma is built in. This is a this is a trillion dollar idea here. What yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, device, they're making Apple or Johnny Ives over at OpenAI. We were kicking around what we think it might be. It feels like Sam Altman's been into her. So we're thinking single earpiece that you wear. Maybe it has a camera on it.
Speaker 1:That was kind of the best thing that I could come up with. Maybe glasses. It feels like they're probably not just gonna do a phone or an iPad or a watch, something with the rectangular screen on it. It's gonna be something a little bit different, take you off of your phone, maybe curing dopamine addiction. What are you expecting?
Speaker 1:And then we can go into all of the different aspects of the deal.
Speaker 4:Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think one thing that felt very clear is that they emphasized, like, a sort of, like, family of devices. Right? So I think already they're coming from a multiple objects approach, which which I think is cool.
Speaker 4:Mostly because I I think where a lot of hardware companies sort of get stuck is they launch one thing, and then everyone only knows them for that one thing, and then they get stuck in the loop of that one thing. Right? So, like, WHOOP is a big thing.
Speaker 2:17.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pebble Pebble be like, invented the smartwatch in many ways, and then Apple came out with the Apple Watch, and it integrated with the phone and the iPad and stuff. So, yeah, I mean, lack of ecosystem. I mean and it's only getting stronger. Like, now you can just, on your MacBook Pro, pull up iPhone mirroring and just use your phone on your computer and stuff.
Speaker 1:And so the integration between the ecosystem, Apple knows that that's a strength that it's like, oh, yeah. You the new the new Android phone might have a better camera, but are you willing to give up full integration with everything else you have? Like, ripping out one device now is a $20,000 proposition for many people. It's not just it's not just $1,000. So okay.
Speaker 1:Suite of devices. So you think there will be a rectangular a a black mirror?
Speaker 4:I I don't think there'll be a black mirror. I think they're I think they're smart enough not to go head to head with the phone. Yeah. I do think, you know, maybe it starts with a puck that's tied to, like, productivity. Right?
Speaker 4:So something that just tries to get you interacting with ChatGPT faster. So I can take it with me, and it also sits on my desk when I'm working. And it's just the fastest way to sort of like, that was easy, you know, a staple style thing that they Yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting that the workflow when you're in conversation with a friend
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Where I'm like, John, what was that company, like, a year ago that was doing this thing? And you're like, oh, I kind of query you and you bring it back.
Speaker 1:What do you think about foldables? It feels like I've seen some demos out of China where the tech is getting pretty solid. The hinges are getting smaller and smaller. And you could imagine we we I
Speaker 2:know where you're going with I know where you're going with this. You want a newspaper size We're we're joking. Foldable that you can just
Speaker 1:Let's make newspaper. But but, I mean, seriously, you could imagine a situation where it's like, really, what I want is if I'm gonna be on, I I I don't wanna carry a laptop because then I need a backpack. Can't put an I can't put an iPad in my pocket, but I can put something that folds up into the phone format, and then it's a bigger decision. It's like, am I just gonna do the earpiece for the little random chats with ChatGPT? But then if I wanna go full in and watch a movie, I have a device that can that can really, really superpower, and it's, like, kinda counterpositioned against Apple a little bit.
Speaker 1:We've heard rumors that Apple's maybe thinking about folding, but it seems like that's one of the technologies that you would be looking at. But what's your take on foldables generally?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I think foldables actually squarely land in, like, the Apple value system. Mhmm. You know, Apple really values the sort of, like, high definitionness of their rectangles. You know?
Speaker 4:And so I think if you're trying to compete on high definition of these rectangles, you're probably in a losing battle. Mhmm. I think, you know, something I talk about a lot when it comes to hardware is, like, your values have to zag away from Apple as much as possible. Right? So, like, I think the Avi Shiffman is a really good example of this.
Speaker 4:Like, Apple can't launch a puck that listens to you twenty four seven.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because the conspiracy about Apple already and a lot of the tech giants that they listen to you twenty four seven.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:But you can't do the literal thing. Right? At least not for some time. And so Avi has a little bit of, like, narrative runway because the value is so separate from, like, the Apple ecosystem. So I think similarly, like, OpenAI and and, you know, my assumption is that Johnny's aware of it.
Speaker 4:You know, they have to zag from a values perspective.
Speaker 2:What do you think their confidence level is? Right? Like, the most high profile example lately is Humane Mhmm. Which was a talented team. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Maybe not as talented, but they did have, you know, the full backing of the SV hype machine in many ways. A lot of Got a lot of investors were quick to point out that they weren't in it and that they thought it was silly, but it was like a moonshot new hardware attempt with a bunch of, you know, very talented people. Do you think that that is in the back of their mind at all in terms of
Speaker 1:With projection specifically?
Speaker 2:Or No. No. Just not even about not even about the form factor. Sure. But just like, hey, this is actually like, yeah, it's cool to have billions of dollars in the world's best team.
Speaker 2:But it's also
Speaker 3:It's really
Speaker 2:Apple was started in a garage. Right? Something closer to Avi's environment right now where he's like
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:You know, on a motorcycle, like, you know, just like hair in the wind, just like thinking about the next computing interface.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's also, I feel like the the pressure to deliver value beyond just companionship. Right? Like, Avi's edge is like, I just want it to be your friend. Mhmm. I don't need it to be and yeah, maybe it can do other stuff over time.
Speaker 2:But anyways.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I so I think on the humane thing, you know, I got to know a bunch of folks over there, and I I think my my main critique is that, you know, they were very, like, Catholic guilt ridden about the iPhone. Like, the entire animating spirit was like, we feel we kinda feel guilty about the iPhone, and now we have to present this alternative so that that's not the only road that we go down. I think, unfortunately, like, they made a few sort of, like, key errors. Like, I think the projection was sort of, like, a really key error.
Speaker 4:I think they, like, backpedaled away from replacing the phone, and then it was supposed to be just, like, part of, like, your broader ecosystem. So I think it's what's really clear already, right, is that they OpenAI and Johnny are saying, we don't wanna replace the phone. We wanna be this third thing, but we do wanna live in your pocket. Right? So it's, like, close close enough but far enough.
Speaker 4:And I think that you know, what's funny is Sam, you know, back to Humane early, and they had an OpenAI partnership. And I think that I don't know the full politics there, but I would assume at some point, you know, Sam sort of maybe lost faith and faith. Sorry. Not lost faith. Lost faith and then kind of turned to, okay.
Speaker 4:Well, who are the other superstars at Apple? Because, like, make no mistake. Like, Imran and folks out on that team were, like, the superstars at Apple. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 4:It's just two different sides. Like, Imran was the HCI team, and Johnny was the industrial design team. You know? So, yeah, I I think that's sort of I think they're aware of those lessons. But
Speaker 1:One thing we were talking about was in terms of building, like, a super high performing hardware device consumer electronics team
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Steve Jobs not only had Johnny Ive, but he also had Tim Cook
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To build the supply chain. And building robust supply chains was difficult in the nineties and February when Apple did it, and it didn't exist in China. And now because of geopolitical considerations, it's also very difficult. It doesn't feel turnkey. It feels like the turnkey era of consumer hardware was maybe the twenty tens, and now we are post that, and there are lots of different considerations around tariffs and trade policy and geopolitical dynamics.
Speaker 1:Do you think that we would see someone like a Tim Cook go into OpenAI to get this off the ground?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's a good question. So some things that I've been just sort of, like, watching is that OpenAI already has, like, an internal hardware team, and they've had for quite some time. They have someone that's, like, head of robotics. They have I think they hired a woman recently that's head of, like, all hardware.
Speaker 4:And so it's clear that they've been building up this capacity internally for quite some time. And so I think, you know, the joint venture is definitely some form of appeal to authority, right, with Johnny.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And the my personal hot take is I don't know how sensitive they are to actually shipping or at least shipping on the time that they, you know, stated. You know? Like, the hot take the extreme hot take would be, right, is, like, Sam needs another, you know, 200,000,000,000. Mhmm. And he, you know, he goes to, like, Saudi Arabia with Johnny, and Johnny puts on his, like, British accent.
Speaker 4:And, you know, they don't have to even talk about the next model or, like
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Numbers. Right? It's simply Yeah. When's the device shipping? And they could just say a number or, like, say a date, and they can get the money.
Speaker 4:Right? And so Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're building up the valuation, you're saying there's a 10% chance that we disrupt Google. That's a multitrillion dollar business, so you can value us at a multiple hundred millions. There's also a 10% chance that we disrupt Apple, and that's a multitrillion dollar business. So you discount the value, and that's a couple hundred billion. And so, yeah, you kind of add
Speaker 4:all that stuff. Doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 6:You know?
Speaker 2:Doesn't
Speaker 4:matter. That supply chain question doesn't matter when I have 200,000,000,000 in cash. It's like, what's supply chain? I don't know.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:It's just
Speaker 1:Buy Foxconn. Yeah. Yeah. Foxconn. I I think so.
Speaker 4:We manufacture Apple now. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Manufacture Apple now. I mean, what what
Speaker 2:we're gonna bake, you were gonna bake the new model into into
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've seen I've seen some hot takes back and forth. Johnny Yod was obviously deeply loved and admired, and I kinda took the Internet by storm with the conversation with Patrick Collison last week. At the same time, a lot of people, have said that, a lot of the work that he did was iterative, and not that revolutionary. What is your take on the legacy of Johnny Ive?
Speaker 1:You know, he's he's in his sixties. That's sometimes retirement age. I believe he's in his sixties. I actually don't know. But, I mean, at the same time, Berkshire Hathaway just hired a 62 year old CEO, and Yeah.
Speaker 1:Warren Buffett worked into his nineties. So what is your overall take on on on Johnny Ive's legacy and and where it goes from here?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the early part of his legacy or, like, the Apple part of his legacy is, like, undeniable. Right? Like, one interesting thing to, like, in Johnny history is, you know, the first place he was working, I believe, like, the design firm specialized in bathrooms. And so when you understand that, you can actually understand, like, his obsession with smoothness, his obsession with, like, sort of, like, knobs and dials and all of these things that we see that are kind of orthogonal to, like, computer hardware as well as just, like, things that are unobtrusive, right, and, like, brushed aluminum.
Speaker 4:Like, you kind of understand his design language when you know where he started. So then you get to Apple, and he's had
Speaker 2:very Started from the toilet.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But, know, in a in a lot of ways, like, these devices sort of they they blend in similar to, like, a a home object, and they don't really stand out, like, what we understood consumer electronics to be. Mhmm. So so then you start fast forwarding. You're saying, okay.
Speaker 4:Now he has, like, all the devices in play. What does he do? My hot one of my hot takes is that, like, he kinda gives technology a a type of, like, body dysmorphia. Right? Like, all he cares about is thinness.
Speaker 4:He even when he gets control of the whole design team, that's when we get the pivot to flat design. So he even takes, like, the interface level and makes it thin and flat and not too, like, fun.
Speaker 2:Wait. So was the was the camera
Speaker 1:Who's responsible for the camera bump?
Speaker 2:Was that just to sell more cases? What's up with that?
Speaker 4:I think the camera bump just became a trade off post Steve. Because, again, think we start to understand, like, Apple the machine. Right? When Steve was there, really, the only person you had to appeal to was Steve. So there's, like, a very known thing around, like, Apple demo culture where, like, it's Steve in a room with a couple other people.
Speaker 4:You go in, you show it to him, and he says yes or no. And if he says yes, it's in, and there's no one else you're convincing. Mhmm. My assumption is post Steve, you're you're going through stakeholder management. Right?
Speaker 4:So Johnny doesn't have, like, the number one authority anymore. So he starts having to, like, wrestle with, you know, the camera team, and he's wrestling with Tim, and he's wrestling with manufacturing. And he just doesn't get to win every battle anymore. That's my
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Seems like they're good.
Speaker 1:What do think is going on with Apple Vision Pro? Have you used it? It feels like it it's built on some of the design language that Johnny Ive, pioneered, aluminum, I suppose. But, at the same time, not the thinnest VR headset. Johnny left in 2019.
Speaker 1:They've obviously been working on Apple Vision Pro for longer than that, but it feels like maybe the first Apple product that doesn't have his mark on it. But overall, do you think that's gonna get any better? Is there any salvage they can do? Have you used it? What's your reaction to just VR broadly?
Speaker 1:Any of that stuff that you're thinking through?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I I have one. I used it. I was very curious. It is really heavy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think they had the wrong guiding metaphor at the end of the day. They didn't have, like, a true creative direction anchor. And so they landed on, we're gonna put a floating iPad on your face, and it's going to be somewhat antisocial. Right? So everything that they show is widgets in air and then you sitting alone on your couch watching something in extreme high definition.
Speaker 4:And that's fine. But as, like, a counter position, it's like, what if their anchor was, like, the iPod? Right? And maybe their, like, hero product was actually something around Apple Music, and it looked more like the dancing silhouettes that when you put this headset on, your entire apartment actually turns into this beautiful colorscape, and you are animated. Right?
Speaker 4:So they chose, like, a stagnant couch potato instead of you being animated. And we're seeing the same thing in Apple advertising when it comes to the way they talk about Apple intelligence. Right? It's like this kind of, like, slobby guy at his desk getting AI to write an email to his boss to Slack off further. So we have this company that used to champion, like, you are going to be your best self with these products, and now it's just turning
Speaker 2:into creativity. Put on Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Put on the headset and slob out. Don't do your work. Get AI to tell your boss why you're gonna be late. And it's just like it's like Steve's nightmare. You know?
Speaker 1:It's funny. Yeah. I mean What
Speaker 2:about what about glasses as a form factor?
Speaker 4:I I'm I'm bullish on glasses as a form factor. And I think it's gonna go a few different ways. I do think, like, the meta Ray Bans, like, that form factor will continue to get better. Eventually, like, what it takes to put projections, and those will be, you know, lightweight enough. You know, I think the Orion, I think, was the project on meta.
Speaker 4:You know, I think, obviously, that's, like, too bulky. Zuck Zuck looks silly. But I think they're gonna just get it thinner and get it thinner. And in, like, ten years, it'll be great. Maybe five.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, with the, with the XR stuff, and the AR stuff, like, Xreal and Nreal Air, this company does glasses that it it doesn't do all the crazy tracking, but it can pull up a visual in front of you just statically. And that solves, like, 90% of the use case for this. If I'm on a plane and I'm just going to watch a movie, I think that that's going to get there first. And then you have to figure out, can we actually make it fully holographic? If you just want a basic HUD, like a heads up display, that's a lot more achievable.
Speaker 1:None of the big tech companies have really said, we're gonna settle for that, but I think that that might be a path along the road, actually. But I haven't really played with it enough. Staying on Apple Vision Pro, I heard a rumor. I don't know how true this is that, the person one of the one of the key people at Apple in charge of it was an ex Dolby engineer who was all about the Dolby Cinema Theater. And I and and I thought that, like, that was the killer app.
Speaker 1:Dolby's great. I love the movies. It's the the the sound for it is so hard. But but, like,
Speaker 2:tried Wrong right? Wrong creative anchor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But I I tried the dinosaur experience. It was, like, two minutes. I'm like, I'm not gonna game on this thing.
Speaker 1:I'm not really gonna work on this thing. I'm not gonna work on this thing. But I did watch I watched all of Citizen Kane actually in in Vision Pro, and it was amazing. And it was like being in a theater, it was fantastic. And I almost think that they should have gone narrower.
Speaker 1:And maybe the iPod is the right thing. Like, the iPod, when you put in the headphones, it is isolating, but the campaign around that was you dancing around in silhouette is beautiful. And there is something about, like, restoring this idea of going to the movies, but I agree with you that the ads were super dystopian. There's that one where he the the the guy is clearly a dad. He's watching a video of his kids, it looks like he's divorced and, like, his kids are
Speaker 2:like
Speaker 1:super depressing. Yeah. Giving a lot on
Speaker 4:the track, Bob Dylan divorced dad.
Speaker 1:Was very rough. But but what is your take on this idea of, like, Apple narrowing the focus of of vision to we have one killer use case? Because they're they're kind of the everything company. The the the iPhone will call you an Uber, does your email, does phone, everything. The original iPhone keynote was it just does three things, and then it grew out from there.
Speaker 1:Do they even have the culture to refocus around one value prop? I always thought, like, they have Apple TV. They never made a real TV. They could have just positioned this as, like, this is the best way to watch Apple TV, and it's now a TV machine. Then it has some other stuff.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, we'll have an App Store, but really. But what what do you think about that culturally at Apple and just in terms of, like, if you were running the place, what would you do?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. It's a that's a that's a great question. You know, I think it's it's so hard to understand why certain things in your own history worked out the way that they did. Right?
Speaker 4:I think we are so anchored on, like you said, the iPhone being this giant enablement to not only Apple, but a lot of I mean, how much of the value is built on just, like, mobile apps that did a thing. Right? And that's because if you're Uber, you know, you have GPS, and now, like, you can actually do all these things. Right? So I I think Apple wanted to be hyper enablement ready again.
Speaker 4:You know, they wanted developers to really build things on this. And I just you know, I I think, unfortunately, at the premium price, unlike, like, the Quest, it's really hard to bootstrike bootstrap that and get consumer adoption. And because they they also have never done just, a developer only product before. So there were just so many conflicting narratives. Again, it just seemed like no one was at the actually gripping on to the to the reins.
Speaker 4:So I'm I'm very pro. Like, pick a singular use case that's going to be incredible at. You know? Like, I I think Steve's original thing was, like, iPod for the eyes. You know?
Speaker 4:It's like noise cancellation for the eyes.
Speaker 6:And Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So you have Apple TV. You have Apple Fitness. This is like, we're doing these two things. Make it super lightweight. Make it comfortable as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And maybe as a bonus, can, like, tie the laptop to it so you have, like, a keyboard in front of you. Right? But this is about being static and x y z.
Speaker 2:But did you ever have you ever thought of applying for a job at Apple? Maybe not CEO job. I don't think they have a listing, but trying to fix Apple, get it back to its roots.
Speaker 4:I I think I think you need a lot of political capital to do that there is my assumption. And so I'm I'm far more attracted to the things I see getting built from, like, my peers. And
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It is interesting. Let let's
Speaker 2:let's switch gears for a second.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's it's just fascinating because it is a it's like almost like a supply chain story in the sense that they were able to pull forward the highest resolution display that no one else had access to. Not even Mark Zuckerberg spending $10,000,000,000 a year on the metaverse could get that screen pulled forward by two years. I'm sure the next Quest will have a comparable screen, but Apple was able to do that. And but that's not enough.
Speaker 1:It's like Yeah. It's a fantastic execution on the supply chain side. Anyway, Jordy, where where do wanna go next?
Speaker 2:I wanted to ask what you're up to. I know you I'm sure you're cooking. I know you're cooking. Anything you can anything you can share right now?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So yeah. I mean, I'm coming out of, you know, sort of an acquisition of Eternal and just thinking about what's next. And one one thing that I've been working on with friends throughout the past year is actually speaking of hardware. This oh, no.
Speaker 4:The background. Look at what you do to yourself.
Speaker 2:See paper. I see paper. Hardware. Underrated form factor for hardware.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a Wall Street Journal competitor.
Speaker 4:It's a newspaper. How do you do the oh, there it is. Oh, that's not that either. How do you do these things? Oh, there
Speaker 6:it is. Okay.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Why would you wanna hide that why would you wanna hide that background?
Speaker 1:That's a way better background. It's like
Speaker 4:I love San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The best
Speaker 4:thing in the world. Yeah. That's inappropriate. Says the New Yorker.
Speaker 2:Stolen stolen valor on that Golden Gate Bridge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. Boom.
Speaker 2:Boom. Yeah. Brutal. Brutal. Show show show us
Speaker 1:Yeah. What you working on?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the big project I've been doing in launching Technology Brothers exclusive is this hardware book. So
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 4:Let's 24. I met my friend, Julian Davis and and Charlene Dang. And, you know, I I I saw sort of a few years ago that hardware was really going to become the new meta. Mhmm. It's sort of you know, we saw software shifting into these two very big ways.
Speaker 4:Like and we and we started to see the containers for software shifting as well. Mhmm. Those containers being sort of, like, spatial and and hardware. And so last year just started to feel like a really special time in hardware, Humane, Rabbit, all these things with Teenage Engineering, Daylight, USB club. And so we really wanted to give sort of, like, the art book treatment.
Speaker 4:This is my personal copy. The real copy is gonna be hardcover. But we really want to be able to sort of, like, art book treatment to what's happening in hardware.
Speaker 2:Daylight. Let's go.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Daylight is beautiful. You know, while writing the, like, humane sort of blurb, They got acquired by HP.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 4:wow. So these things were, you know, really shifting in real time, which was so crazy. One of the big, big sort of sells on this book is a exclusive interview with Jesper, the founder of Teenage Engineering, who
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 4:Maybe folks remember from his config talk last year. Oh, yeah. Awesome. And so it's 260 pages of giving, like, present day technology, that art book treatment. So really, really excited about that.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. Can we buy it?
Speaker 1:So,
Speaker 2:like we buy it?
Speaker 4:You can buy it right now. Hardware2024.com.
Speaker 1:Hardware book 20 20 4 Com. Let's go. Fantastic.
Speaker 4:Late night shopping.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm excited. And and what, and the site's beautiful, by the way. Very cool.
Speaker 4:Thank you. That was just a late night. One late night coffee sesh.
Speaker 1:Vibe coding.
Speaker 2:Alright.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Some might say.
Speaker 2:Alright. I just hit pay now.
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:That was easy.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:There we go. There we go. That's amazing. What what's next? Are you already working on the next book?
Speaker 2:You're already cooking?
Speaker 1:Hardware 2025. It's happening now. It's unfolding.
Speaker 4:Dude, it's it is unfolding. You know, I would I would love to sort of get sucked into the OpenAI hardware tentacles and, you know, maybe even, like, write some OpenAI checks to emergent hardware. I think that we're gonna see a lot of form factors emerge, you know, beyond just pendants, beyond just, like, pucks, what have you. I've been investing in, like, advising some new hardware companies and AI hardware companies. So, yeah, I'm just
Speaker 1:I'm Have you gotten a chance to play with the have you gotten a chance to play with the Chromatic from Palmer Lucky?
Speaker 4:No. It sold out before I could
Speaker 3:buy it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it sold out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. True.
Speaker 1:See. Yeah. I I I love it. It's, I mean, it's a beautiful product. You can run over it with a car.
Speaker 1:Apparently, I haven't tried that. But, also, it it it's it's like this throwback, but you can use emulators to play any game. And now they just added Twitch streaming from it over USB C, which is crazy. So you can so you can, plug it in, and it records what you're what you're playing. So it's like this
Speaker 4:And can it control an anterol drone?
Speaker 1:One day, I'm sure. And I think that they might be working on an n 64 and some other some other retro hardware. Right. It it it's fun. A lot of the retro retro throwback stuff coming through.
Speaker 1:I mean, only other spicy take I want is on Memoji, but do you have time for that?
Speaker 2:Is Memoji underrated?
Speaker 1:Are you using it every day?
Speaker 4:No. I don't. Daily driving? No. No.
Speaker 4:Sorry. Damn.
Speaker 1:What what do you think Damn.
Speaker 4:Are you talking about Memoji or Genmoji?
Speaker 1:Oh, Genmoji. Oh, Memoji is the one where you make yourself into an emoji. Is the one where you generate anything, maybe.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think I think this you know, I think the word I don't think Genmoji is actually a bad product. I just think, like, the ad campaign, again, like, they've lost their soul when it comes to communication. Yeah. The entire thing about Genmoji, it's the experience of making a niche reference for your friend.
Speaker 4:Yeah. In the ad campaign is just, like, very weird looking Yeah. Like, end results. You know? Like, the entire thing about that is, like, it's about the process, not the end result.
Speaker 4:Like, the end result out of context makes zero sense. And then that's all they pace it around, like, major cities. And it's just like, god.
Speaker 1:I mean, how do you even tell that story? Is, like, should the billboard be, like, two friends, like, in separate rooms kind of, like like, like, mean girls split screen, like, laughing because they're sending each other Genmoji's
Speaker 6:and that?
Speaker 4:That's not a that's not a billboard campaign. For the first first level of, like, taste. Is that a billboard campaign?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:No. I mean, it's funny because it should be such a it should be a product that needs no billboard. Right? Like, it it it should be inherently so viral and so user generated that people just start using it. Right?
Speaker 2:And it has this sort of Ghibli moment where people are just using Genmoji and I just didn't see that at all. Maybe maybe I'm a boomer. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:We've been wanting to do this for a while. This was great timing. Excited to get a copy of the book. We will we'll show it back here on the show and, I'm sure have some follow-up questions. But, congratulations on the launch and, welcome back anytime for more more hardware hot takes.
Speaker 4:Oh, fantastic. Thank you, brothers.
Speaker 1:Play them out for the studio audience. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Legend. Chief Reggie officer of hardware book twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon, Reggie.
Speaker 2:I'll be right back.
Speaker 1:How'd you sleep last night?
Speaker 2:You know how I slept, John.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I should just give you a login to just motivate you because
Speaker 1:I got a 93. I'm climbing up.
Speaker 2:I got a 99, John.
Speaker 1:You got a 99. Well, I beat you Monday, Tuesday. You beat me Wednesday, Thursday. You get out of here. I'm gonna do some ad reads.
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Speaker 1:There's been a bunch of stuff in the news. What else is here? L three tweet engineer just says LMAO in post screenshot, probably from blind or something. Google prestige is gone. I was at a dinner party when I mentioned in passing that I worked at Google, and everyone immediately burst into laughter pointing out how ChatGPT had eaten our lunch.
Speaker 1:Then they pulled out their iPhones and showed that they didn't have a single Google app installed and had set their homepage and default search engine to ChatGPT. Then they GPT'd Google's stock chart and erupted into another round of uproarious laughter while making the pinching hand gesture. Very, very fake. Extremely fake. You cannot get off the Google ecosystem, but very, very funny that somebody So good.
Speaker 1:Posted this. Very silly. Also, if they pulled up the Google stock chart, they would see that it's up, like, 10% in the last two days, so very silly. We also have the Teal Fellows. We're now at the twenty twenty five Teal Fellows.
Speaker 1:We're going to do Teal Fellow Day, hopefully, on Tuesday, and we're gonna interview as many of these folks as we can, give you a little tour of what the latest batch of Teal Fellows are working on. There's a bank, a trading platform, a research lab, somebody working on noninvasive neurostimulators, foundation models to power digital humans that are indistinguishable from real ones, AI powered solution to automate manufacturing processes and dark factories. That's cool. Fizz is is developing an AI financial investor. We have friends who've been on the show.
Speaker 1:Our now Teo Fellasaur and Monroe Anderson, the founder of Niros, is a defense technology company that builds drones critical to the modern arsenal at massive scale. Orbit is a noninvasive neurostimulator. There's a bunch of other folks in here. Interface is developing human native communication devices that change the way we work and think. That sounds maybe hardware driven.
Speaker 1:Excited to talk to him about that. And go through that. And Sigil
Speaker 2:I am working on a surprise guest Oh, yeah. Ben Hilack
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:To come on later today for ten minutes at two.
Speaker 3:That'd be great.
Speaker 2:X is so cooked right now.
Speaker 1:It's extremely cooked.
Speaker 2:I can't even get DMs out. I'm trying to get his email for the invite. He had something interesting earlier. Ben said an an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of your computer if it detects you're doing something illegal. I will never give this model access to my computer.
Speaker 2:So Sam Spicy. I guess Sam Baumann over at Anthropic in a now deleted post says, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems Wow. Or all of the above. Is That's absolutely crazy. Just stupid.
Speaker 2:We'll see if it's real or fake news. Let us bring in our next guest.
Speaker 1:We have Keith Ruboy. Welcome to the stream, Keith.
Speaker 5:Hey. How are you doing? There
Speaker 2:he is.
Speaker 1:We have sound. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Great to have you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Great to have
Speaker 6:you back.
Speaker 5:The entry stop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's a little messy. We're figuring it out. Give us the recap on the KV Summit.
Speaker 1:How'd it go?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So every year, for the last fifteen years, we've hosted, all of our CEOs, like, a 50 plus CEOs at Cavallo Point in San Francisco. Mhmm. And it's like a two day program where we bring in inspirational and actionable speakers. So for example, I interviewed Eric from Ramp, John Carlson of Stripe.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 5:wow. John John Carlson interviewed Bill Gates, actually. And Sam Altman spoke, and then the CEO of Databricks. So we have a wide variety of content. Some of it's more practical, tangible, and some of it's very aspirational, inspirational.
Speaker 5:So we take our CEO time very seriously and wanna make sure that every minute they're not in the office, you know, managing, executing, you know, growing their companies that they get, you know, disproportionate returns out of the time.
Speaker 2:What was any type of surprising takeaways or or insights that that you can share?
Speaker 1:I wanna know what the biggest debate points are. Like, what what what what where are the things where people are actually debating? I've I've, you know, Sam Allman recently said AI could be an operating system. There's questions about foundation model layer value accrual versus application model layer value accrual. How many winners there will be in the coding market?
Speaker 1:Like, what are people actually debating and unclear about? And then I'd love to know where you stand on it, obviously, but, the like, the non consensus topics are probably the most interesting to dig into here.
Speaker 5:Sure. We can talk about all of those. And generally speaking, we will post all of these videos online. So the vast library of know, fifteen years of virtually anybody who's been successful in tech has spoken at our conference. And so in fact, Sam has probably spoken four or five times now.
Speaker 3:That's great.
Speaker 5:It was interesting. I compared when I was interviewing John Carlson, I've interviewed Patrick Carlson literally a decade ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 5:And it was an interesting contrast to show the arc of the company. When I interviewed Patrick in 02/2015, Stripe was worth, you know, several billion dollars, but it only had 250 employees. And now, you know, as John mentioned, they have 9,000.
Speaker 3:Nine thousand. Wow.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's usually the arc of, you know, build a company that a decade had passed since I last interviewed Patrick. So we will share 90 plus percent of these videos. We'll start posting them next week. There's maybe one or two.
Speaker 5:It's up to speaker, you know, if they don't wanna share or some things. But the contrast I noticed, one, everyone's one about building a company. We talked about founder mode a fair amount. So, you know, Eric talked about how they build ramp, and John gave a slightly different perspective on building Stripe. And then I interviewed actually Gary Tan of YC to talk about the origins of founder mode, the lessons from, you know, thousands of companies that, you know, they've invested in for twenty years.
Speaker 5:And so I think the operating styles and approaches to hiring senior talent or not was an interesting contrast. On AI, we had Brad Gerstner of Altimeter speak and talk about the future of AI as applied to preexisting companies. He was quite inspirational. He made a couple points that I think Sam generally would have agreed with, which is there's only gonna be one foundation model, research lab oriented successful winner. It's certainly not something that VC should be investing in.
Speaker 5:At the application layer, I think there's more room and opportunity or something that trends tends to what we think of research labs today. Just like OpenAI and ChatGPT is transcending what we think of search Yeah. And, you know, to some extent what we think of social.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I think the next generation will be something that doesn't look anything like an LLM, doesn't look like a research lab, and, you know, it's very difficult, therefore, to find. But hopefully, some founders have visions, and hopefully, they call me when they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like Brian Chesky was a big inspiration for the original founder mode essay by Paul Graham. He just went extreme founder mode a week or two ago with the Airbnb reimagining. At the same time, Ben Thompson's kind of, analyzing that. And Ben Thompson's argument is that Airbnb is a platform and a marketplace company, and so the economics of the platform kind of dictate a certain user experience, mainly that people open the app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They have bill hundreds of millions of users. The user base is massive at Airbnb, but the average user opens it, like, twice a year. And they wanna get in, get out, and it's not a daily active user experience. And so, Ben Thompson was saying there will be some challenges.
Speaker 1:What was your reaction to how Brian positioned Airbnb's next chapter? Do you like that communication style? Are you optimistic about where be Airbnb goes? Give us your give us your reaction to the Airbnb news.
Speaker 5:So, yes, Brian pioneered what we now describe as founder mode even though it's very specific in some ways to the operating style of Apple. But in in any event, he triggered this at a YC alumni dinner in Napa Valley where he kind of off the cuff without preparation spoke for two and a half hours. And that's what led to Paul Graham summarizing and distilling it, which led to a lot of intrigue and interest. And this is kinda what I think CEOs were talking about privately, but no one had really stitched it together and kinda created a public discussion of it. I for those of you who really interested in this topic, I interviewed Brian a few months ago at Ramp's offices, and that video is available on where Brian is incredibly articulate and eloquent about the virtues and the benefits of founder mode and how we actually implemented it.
Speaker 5:So I highly recommend anybody in the audience who's intrigued, watch the actual video because I will not do it justice. Yeah. The on the specific topic of Airbnb experiences, I think Ben made some interesting points. I've been a fan and Yeah. Early reader of Stratakuri.
Speaker 5:It's the only thing I read regularly in all of tech because I think he's the only one that actually understands tech that writes. So I actually have been recommending this to a friend of mine for over a decade who want to enter into tech. It's like start reading Strathecari.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I think the point he makes, first of all, is that in services world, you're gonna you potentially want to get off the platform once you find a service provider, you know, that you like. I think he missed one subtle point, which is Airbnb is still designed mostly for travelers. I you know, I'm going from New York, let's say, to Cincinnati.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And obviously, the canonical case is I would find a place to stay in Cincinnati. Great. But as you point out, the average user, you know, might travel 2.5 times, 2.4, two point five times a year. So it's hard to turn my Airbnb usage into a daily, weekly, monthly habit. However, the point that Ben glossed over a bit is that I'm traveling to Cincinnati, and then to SF, and then to Dallas, and then to somewhere in Utah.
Speaker 5:I have no incentive to go off the platform to find a service provider. Yeah. Yes. In a city that I mean, regularly, let's say New York City, if I found, like, a hairstylist here or the equivalent, I may have an economic motive to just, you know, disintermediate the platform. But if if it if Brian's right that curating experiences and services that a local would use still appeals to people who are in New York City, which is a huge fact a huge number of people come to New York City every year, then I think Ben may be wrong and Brian may be right.
Speaker 5:So I think Brian is probably sort of dialing in to the traveler visitor use case.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 5:And then you need the breadth of services when you're traveling and experiences. You don't necessarily have to only use it in your home city, which is where Ben may have some valid critiques.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It seems like the the dog walker example is probably the rough one because it's the most obvious disintermediation point. At the same time, yeah, there's plenty of times when big group is traveling and they want, you know, private chef to come cook for everyone, something like that. Makes a ton of sense in that context.
Speaker 1:And then also, it's it like, you can build a good business in a referral business that is not it's less transaction. It's more discovery and advertising basis. I was actually, like, not even half joking, just saying that maybe Airbnb needs an advertising product because Uber's been so successful in advertising. I don't I I mean, I think that that might really frustrate people if they're seeing promoted listings. But at the same time, like, on these marketplaces, usually, advertising does pretty well.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you have a reaction to that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I have two reactions. First of all, I don't think Airbnb will need it. Mhmm. Airbnb's margins are, like, roughly take rates roughly 13%.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:And, you know, versus, like, the Ubers or the Instacart where they really don't make too much money per transaction.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:And so if you don't have a highly profitable advertising revenue, it's hard to build an interesting business. I think Airbnb doesn't have the economic drivers that you see with Instacart and where
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where
Speaker 5:it has been successful, but it is somewhat annoying. That said, you know, Google used to run this internal study where they would actually show users who are exposed to, SEO content and paid advertising are more satisfied than users who are searching and only see SEO content. So advertising when done properly can be a value add. If you think about it, the economic incentive of drafting content that explains, contextualizes, and markets products does drive to efficient advertising that can
Speaker 2:be Yeah. Even for user. Even today, if you're in an area and some service provider is running ads, it shows a level of sophistication and professionalism that might associate in some ways with just a better end product experience than somebody that doesn't know how to set up a Google ad. I wanted to ask, Ben had some great thoughts around, you know, the entire internet is based on advertising. And in a time when know, we may all have agents that are just trawling the Internet for us and acting on our behalf, the, you know, economic the existing economic model of the Internet could, hit some snags.
Speaker 2:And he makes a case for, you know, micro payments to allow people that produce content to get some benefit from having models, you know, acquiring information on those sites. He also outlines how this is gonna be incredibly difficult to pull off because there's so many different groups and incentives. I'm curious if you've spent much time yourself thinking about the potential for micro transactions in in in the context of replacing lost advertising revenue.
Speaker 5:So similar similar observation. I think the post, the original sin of the Internet by then is totally worth reading. And I generally agree with the point that the original sin of the Internet was that all content should be free. I actually made that point to Jessica a lesson when she was launching the information in, like, 02/1978, whatever it was. I was like, you definitely are gonna be on the right side of history by charging a premium subscription.
Speaker 5:Ran into Dick Costello at that party, the launch event, and I I actually used the term, the original sin of the Internet was that we we all learned a lot and that because the marginal cost of content marginal cost of distribution of content would go to zero Yeah. You should charge zero, which is absolutely false. However, micropayments make no sense. Ben is totally wrong about this.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I'll give
Speaker 1:you an
Speaker 5:old lesson from PayPal. So one of my jobs at PayPal between February and 02/2003 was to find new markets because we're really dependent on eBay. And that led to, you know, risk, and we ultimately went public and then sold the company to eBay because we were nervous about the risk of eBay handicapping our future growth. And as you know, tech companies are valued by the next twenty years of cash flow. So, yeah, Peter and Roloff and various people were very nervous about that.
Speaker 5:One of the markets I wanted to explore was quote unquote micropayments, and Peter Thiel made a very astute sort of rebuke to me. He said, like, that's the dumbest argument ever, basically, because content has a marginal cost. It has a gross margin of about 99%. So, basically, whether or not micropayments cost you $5.10, $15.20, 20 5, 30, 30 5, 40, 50 percent of the content, who cares? Like, if you're writing content that people pay for because your because your gross margin is, in the nineties, you shouldn't really worry about whether the micropayment cost is too large.
Speaker 5:Now, the friction to make it the reason why I wanted to build the product was I think the friction of micropayments is too high. Like, the consumer friction of paying for anything. Like, you know you know, you're gonna be a short blog post, you're gonna be a short post. You don't really know exactly, you know, what it's worth. And so if you have to do anything other than just one click, forget about it.
Speaker 5:But I still think people get this analysis wrong that it's not an economic problem for now music's a little different, by the way, where you owe a license owner a reasonable fraction of the transaction, then you can't be so, you know, sort of whimsical about the marginal cost of payment. But most people do not really owe you know, have to pay out a a meaningful fraction of that dollar transaction to somebody else, some third party. So I I I I think this is excuse. By the way, Stripe originally originally started oh, and Patrick John, pitched me on Stripe in 02/2010. They originally thought that the core use case was gonna be, like, micro payments and accelerating content.
Speaker 5:They saw the GDP of the Internet, so they really felt that it would unleash new content, which hasn't, for the most part, happened. Mhmm. You know, Substack is an interesting business. It has real GMV and and an associated real revenue line, but then I still think it's the wrong place for Ben to be focusing
Speaker 2:on The issue with looking at Substack or even Ben and their success is there's some element there of I just want to support this the person creating it. I want them to not think about getting a job or building a business other than just writing online and spending all day thinking about, in Ben's case, tech. Yeah. Whereas for the average site on the internet, the you the the person that would be making the micropayment, it's not like they don't have any incentive to be like, I care about this person, and I want them to have it.
Speaker 1:You know what Which like the recipe example. I'm fine if I'm baking an apple pie, blending three different recipes together and giving the LLM results of that. But if I wanna listen to Michael Jackson's Thriller, I don't want half of Thriller and then half of another song kind of kludge together. Like, I want that exact piece of intellectual property. And so there's a very traceable lineage of that of that data transferring.
Speaker 1:And so the micropayment makes a lot more sense when you're actually buying that specific thing.
Speaker 5:That specific thing, but I think you're better off having a differentiated voice
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And premium for that. Totally. It's very difficult. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:How many
Speaker 5:how many people in all the realms of content have a truly differentiated voice? Like in sports, you know, Bill Simmons in his prime definitely did. Despite all the other sports writers, Ben in tech, I still think has an incredibly differentiated voice. It's just very difficult to achieve that. But if you do, you can absolutely charge a premium.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. What's been your it feels like it's been AI week. We had Microsoft build on Monday. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know you were tied up with the KV Summit, but
Speaker 2:Google IO.
Speaker 1:Google IO.
Speaker 2:OpenAI.
Speaker 1:IO. OpenAI bought IO for 6,500,000,000.0. Anthropix dropping Cloud four today. Are you tracking these things? What stuck out to you?
Speaker 1:What made it above all the noise? What was the signal in your mind? What are you tracking? What are you what's has anything changed your mind this week?
Speaker 5:Well, I think what was interesting to me because we do have the CEO Summit, you know, annually. This year, the AI content, not just the AI content that we program, but the AI content in cocktail conversations, dinner conversations, was order of magnitude greater than last year. So the first derivative was off the chart on AI. Last year, it was like a vertical of AI and a vertical slice of conversations. And the people who are not in in AI space were probably intrigued, but it it it wasn't infusing everything.
Speaker 5:I felt this year AI infused every conversation up and down the stack, so to speak, laterally across verticals, whether you're in financial services or labor marketplaces. It didn't matter. Everybody wanted to learn more about AI, how to how to leverage AI, put all this bionic suit for their own business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you seeing AI pop up in unexpected seed stage companies you're betting on? We were talking to TJ Parker. He launched general medicine today, and he was like, we made the we made the deliberate decision not to give the user a text box. We're not a ChatGPT rapper in that way, but we're using LLMs all over the place to parse insurance policies and medical records, and this business is only possible because of AI.
Speaker 1:And I feel like that's gonna be an ongoing narrative, but it should dominate the conversation. At the same time, it should melt into the background just like, oh, yeah, you're hosting your your new company on the cloud. No big deal. Everyone is.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, at some point, and same thing, like, the adoption of, you know, some yeah. That I think that's a good metaphor, but maybe maybe I'll give you a barometer.
Speaker 1:Please. Of my
Speaker 5:of my last 11 investments, six are AI based, and that's up from zero. Literally zero. Yeah. And so, you know, if even people like me who had no exposure to AI before last year Yep. Are now making a majority of my investments
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Are AI forward, that that says something, you know, pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:But aren't but aren't for the non AI investments, aren't you still talking with those founders, CEOs about how they're gonna leverage AI? I mean, it's not like they're coming to you and being like, yeah. Yeah. I think it's overblown. I'm short.
Speaker 2:I'm you know, I'm not gonna you know, they're not like Luddites if they're technology entrepreneurs. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Well, there's a couple of use cases that are important to produce any company. One is just engineering productivity, period. You know, whether you use cursor or, you know, some other product or all the products. Like, we've seen that ramp, for example. Engineering productivity is up 46%, pretty strictly measured and increasing.
Speaker 5:So that's just purely on productivity. So getting more done with less. Great. You're seeing AI remove costs. Think customer support is a classic use case.
Speaker 5:Customer support can be expensive, and in many cases, AI can perform on par with a human or better or certainly faster and more cheaply with more scalability. So there are areas that are no brainers for any business to adopt. Then there's the question, in the strategic area you compete in your company, is there a way to use AI, you know, in a differential way? And that that's a little bit more art than science right now.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how overblown is the narrative of, startups getting steamrolled by the hyperscalers? Oh, every startup just got turned into a bullet point in a Google presentation. There's one narrative that's, you know, Google invented AI. They have all the TPUs.
Speaker 1:They have this massive data center. At the same time, a lot of their product rollouts, they sunset a lot of products. They run a lot of tests. They're really dominant in search and advertising. But if it's a side project, it kinda gets side project attention, and it's not really a founder mode project.
Speaker 1:How how are you thinking about how big tech is competing or just stepping back and just reaping the rewards of everything that they've done over the past couple decades?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think there's, like, classic, you know, sort of conceptual approaches to this is is this a sustaining innovation or disruptive disruptive innovation?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And, you know, thing things that are disruptive, there's a different, you know, approach to those. Things that are sustaining, there's a different mentality towards those. I think the key is for a founder to understand, where's my comparative advantage ultimately? Like, if you're gonna build a startup from scratch, the world is not your friend, inertia is against you, nobody cares. Period.
Speaker 5:Nobody cares about you. So you've gotta turn that inertia into positive momentum in a true physics sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then you've gotta figure out how you propel yourself even if other people, large or small, start doing something similar to what you do. Yeah. And I think having a lack of sight, like at least an intellectual conceptual level of how would I do that? How am I going to do that? Makes the difference between being, you know, a very mediocre start up that is the proverbial roadkill to something that looks like it should be washed out in this wave, but actually trumps over the incumbent.
Speaker 5:And, you know, the history of tech is typically the the well run thoughtful startups prevail over the large. So think about AI. OpenAI is absolutely dominating Google. Pure. Yeah.
Speaker 5:OpenAI OpenAI's ChatGPT will be the default interface for the majority of people on the planet, not Google Search.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Bold. Big change. I wanna talk about with with OpenAI, they they acquired Johnny Ives' company. They brought in an absolute industry legend.
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about it in the macro unless you have a take on the on on this actual deal or or Johnny Ives. But more importantly, startups bringing in these absolutely legendary heavy hitters, it takes a bunch of different forms. Right? Palmer Lucky brought in John Carmack, video game legend at Oculus. That was amazing.
Speaker 1:Ramp has Ken Chenault, this former CEO of Amex, involved, but not as an employee. Right? Then Ramp has Gennady, this, this fantastic programmer. Like, I think he's the best programmer in the world, more in an employee role. And so as startups are scaling, if should they be hunting for these, like, you know, absolutely legendary people trying to get them in their organization?
Speaker 1:Is it just a very rare scenario that OpenAI is so doing so many things that they need a Johnny Ive? How would you talk to a founder about hiring kind of an industry legend?
Speaker 5:On the industry legend side, I think it depends on the motivation Mhmm. Both for the company and the individual. Many people become successful and are demotivated and not as then there's the Elon's of the world that the more success they have, the more ambition they have. And so I think you need to triangulate, okay, who are you talking to and, you know, how much drive they still have left. Sure.
Speaker 5:And then, certainly, from an employee perspective, you don't want, like, someone who's passed their prime. It's a little bit like sports. You do get get past your prime or your motivation to drive to case unless you're, like, the Elons or the Kobies and people like that that are very rare. So I think that's the most important story. On the specifics here, I've read mixed reports on exactly, you know, what involvement, if any, Johnny I was gonna have.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. They're acquiring the company, but it's not really clear to me what he personally is going to do.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So I think that'll have to sort itself out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Could wind up in, a CEO of hardware role, very deeply involved or, you know, more of an adviser or design lead. There's a bunch of different ways that that could shape up. Jordy, do have anything else you wanna chat about?
Speaker 2:How do you think, the AI safety era of the of of 2023 or, you know, 2024 will be viewed in five years, ten years?
Speaker 5:Well, it's DOA. I mean, nobody even talks about it anymore.
Speaker 3:When was the last time
Speaker 5:you heard someone, like, with credibility talk about
Speaker 2:heard about it today. I'm I'm just gonna call this out. So Sure. Today, apparently, I'm seeing a screenshot. An AI alignment researcher at Anthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of it of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal.
Speaker 2:And the researcher says, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, like faking data in pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above, which to me to me is like, if that's AI safety, that that's scary.
Speaker 1:That's scary.
Speaker 5:I don't think that's what most I mean, that is scary. It seems pretty stupid, but there are some legal obligations, obviously.
Speaker 7:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:Any tech company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:You know, Asian child pornography and various things. Of So, like, assuming there are compliance obligations on all companies, whether tech or otherwise, absolutely those are all real and serious. AI safety, I think, connotes a lot of people, like, the idea of AI taking over Yeah. You know, doing things that are, you know, mischief creating in some way. That debate, I think, is over in The United States for a very long time.
Speaker 5:We're in the how do we accelerate the progress of AI? How do we ensure that AI in the Western world dominates over the CCP's use of AI. I think those are the most priorities, the major priorities. I don't think anybody in DC right now really wants to hear about this old a AI safety canard, which is basically an anti attack. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know? It's euphemistic for anti attack. It wasn't a serious concern.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. I, I don't know how closely you followed, like, the latest release of Llama four by Meta, but they there was allegations of kind of fine tuning on the specific evaluations and, and a delay. And a couple years ago, it would have been so easy for them to just say, hey. We're worried about alignment.
Speaker 1:We're worried about safety. We're doing this for you. But instead, they kinda just had to bite the bullet and say, like, we kinda messed up on the training. It's not quite done yet. We're just gonna go back to the drawing board and, like, work through it.
Speaker 1:And the fact that they couldn't even use it as a fake excuse was very telling to me that that it is truly a dead conversation.
Speaker 5:I think that's Yeah. Fortunately, I think it's dead.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 5:Great. But I think, ultimately, The US needs to prevail and succeed with AI, period.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The flip side is that I so I've I I I think I've been aligned with you that the the AI super doom, fast takeoff, we all become paper clips, never really resonated with me. I thought it was kind of just paranoia, and, and, like, superstition. But now that I've seen what's happening with DeepSeek, all of a sudden, I've I've I've said to myself, like, maybe we do need something that looks like an AI safety team to go in and investigate these models and see, are they weighted to shift us? Like, the TikTok algorithm might be shifting us towards certain, certain beliefs.
Speaker 1:Like, these tools are powerful, and they can be fed false information or bad data to kind of steer the answers one way or another. And so maybe we do need some sort of model interpretability, and it it it doesn't it's not exactly AI safety in the doom sense, but it's the type of work that you'd see done by an AI safety researcher. So geopolitically, how how do you how how do you think things are shaking out?
Speaker 5:Oh, I I yeah. Again, I would discriminate that from the gloom gloom and doom AI
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Definitely think models can be biased in different ways and manipulated by different people who have power over those models.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I think observability, which is actually cutting edge technically.
Speaker 1:There are
Speaker 3:some
Speaker 5:really cool startups that are focused on observability. It's a little bit like doing brain surgery and trying to figure out how to rearrange the brain, and it's the metaphors I think they use. And so that stuff's actually tracking really well and incredibly intriguing, like, why did the model do x and then we also decompose that and arguably do serve you know, perform surgery and fix it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So I think maybe these models are biased, you know, you know, the famous examples of, you know, ask for the the benefits of Donald Trump and, you know, when AI used to struggle with that, I don't know if it's improved. But Yeah. You know, those things are real. But I think that's a different set of challenges, and maybe the market sorts that out. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:May you know, maybe people expose it and the company has to, you know, address it. I think then the TikTok manipulation is a very real thing, which is another reason why I think it's better that American companies be in the forefront. But that I I do think that's a valid concern. It's different than what I think of safety as if there's a sentient AI that's gonna take over with so much power that you can't really unplug the computer. You know, that that I think that debate is pretty dead for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like tech and the US government broadly, the new administration has been kind of going all around the world doing deals. Are there any countries that you're particularly excited about America building partnership with on the tech side or even any opportunities for earlier stage startups to go plug into the global ecosystem? It's kind of a narrative violation because, just a couple months ago, we were saying, do not do business abroad. There's a 75% tariff on everything.
Speaker 1:But now you see Jensen and Sam and, you know, Scale AI is over in The UAE.
Speaker 2:It's more it's more like we're exporting American AI
Speaker 1:Yeah. Versus importing. Where are the opportunities?
Speaker 5:Couple drivers there is there's a belief, I guess, by some people that exporting American AI makes it the default standard. It may or may not be true,
Speaker 1:but Sure.
Speaker 5:I think there is an ideology there. Yep. Second is, I think a lot of this is we need resources, I e, infinite And so people are going to very wealthy countries and asking them to spend a lot of money to either develop advanced power Mhmm. Or advanced manufacturing capabilities at scale. And I think that's why you see, you know, the CEOs who run these large, you know, AI based companies, you know, sort of trailing around the globe to Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Sovereign nations that have too much money, you know, and they don't really know what to do with it. Yeah. But I think that's a it's not a do business in the country. It's more take advantage of their natural resources, turn that into something that we need, which may be either more manufacturing or more energy or both.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, we'll let you get out of here. It's past two. Pleasure. Always a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Such a great time. Thanks. We'll talk to soon, Keith.
Speaker 5:Great to catch up.
Speaker 7:Great to
Speaker 5:see you both. Take care.
Speaker 3:Have a
Speaker 2:good one.
Speaker 1:Too. Bye. Do we have Ben Hilack, or should we talk
Speaker 2:in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Ben, welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:How you doing? Is your computer being controlled by Anthropic? That is the question.
Speaker 1:They're kicking down the
Speaker 2:illegal things. Yeah. What's going on? It's great to have you on. Everyone knows
Speaker 1:Do the Jaguar rebrand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He did the Jaguar rebrand. Yep. But today, we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1:He did not do the Jaguar rebrand. For those who are listening, we're joking about that.
Speaker 6:I didn't. No.
Speaker 1:But it was funny.
Speaker 2:Say it enough, then ChatGPT will
Speaker 1:It'll bake it in two ways.
Speaker 2:Said it 10 times now. Now. It can't
Speaker 1:still They might arrest you for that, taking credit for a brand you
Speaker 2:didn't Stolen valor.
Speaker 1:Stolen valor.
Speaker 6:I think anyone's gonna have a problem with
Speaker 1:that one. The SWAT team kicks down the door. Get out of here.
Speaker 2:Anyways, great to have you on. Glad we could make this happen even though X is absolutely cooked
Speaker 1:today. It is really good.
Speaker 2:I've I've never seen it quite this bad.
Speaker 1:It's rough.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, why don't you introduce yourself, then we can talk about that that post and and kinda get your reaction to it live.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, I was a designer at Apple for, like, four years. Before that, I, you know, kinda have a weird background. I actually started off with, like, robotics and avionics. So, like, interned at SpaceX a bunch of times and did those sort of those rounds.
Speaker 6:But now, around a year ago, two years ago, started a company called Raindrop. And so we do essentially Sentry for, AI agents. Cool.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Break that down more
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:More. Give us more context.
Speaker 6:Well, I mean, I think I think it's actually, like it perfectly dovetails with this, right, which is, like, we we get to work with some of the coolest companies in the world, like, Clay.com. Just like companies are just really trailblazing when it comes to AI applications. And what we do is we help them find sort of, like, really hard to spot failure cases. So there's, like, people that do AI stuff. There's this concept of evals, which are almost like unit tests.
Speaker 6:So these are like you know, given these test cases, you know, does it pass them? Does it fail them? What our product does is in the real world, like, what are users' actual experiences with your product? Where is it actually failing? Where is it doing things you you wouldn't expect?
Speaker 6:Right? So, for example, we had a one of our customer, one of our customers, They have this, like, alien companions. It's, like, .com.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So you're familiar. And so they had an issue where, like, their is this? Like, was that one time, or was this, like, hundreds or thousands of times? And then, like, if they're gonna try to fix it, like, it it's it's very, like, random.
Speaker 6:Right? It's very it's very unpredictable. It's not always a clear root cause. So what they wanna be able to do is kind of get a view of that issue over time now. And if it ever regresses, if ever ever comes back, get notified.
Speaker 6:So we make it really easy for companies to, like literally just the craziest issues you're
Speaker 2:gonna have. That's yeah. It's just such a funny example of of the aliens. Like, yeah. I'm actually
Speaker 1:From America.
Speaker 2:America. And I
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it's funny because if you fine tune that out, then you wind up with a potential situation where the the AI never adopts the personality or of a of an American or doesn't even know the concept of America anymore because you you ripped it out too hard. Right? So it's a really tricky balance to now. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. And from, like, a detection standpoint, I think the thing that makes us kind of like I I think we have, like, actually one of the most complex, like, AI pipelines I've ever seen and just, like, research wise, a lot of really cool stuff cooking. Like, being able to categorize these messages as it is an alien character talking like, misrepresenting himself as being from, like, The United States it's very hard. Right? It's not like show me events where, the assistant talked about a guy from The United States.
Speaker 6:Right? It's not some sort of, like, keyword search or something like that. Like Yep. Some of these categories actually get pretty complex, and you can imagine that that is an issue that's only relevant to that app. So it has no application.
Speaker 6:Like so our customers have to be able to go in there and, like, define what they're looking for and create this categorizer that can run on millions of messages a day very cheaply.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even in, like, the web one point o, web web two point o, like, you're almost building, a pager duty. It used to just be, is this page four zero four ing?
Speaker 1:And the age and the age you see page back.
Speaker 6:There's no clicks.
Speaker 2:There's no
Speaker 1:There there's nothing like that. It's it's so much more squishy, but, you know, the problems created by AI also solved by AI. You said you have to run, these queries. I imagine that they're LLM powered millions of times. That sounds really expensive.
Speaker 1:What are you doing? Are you baking Llama three that's free onto an ASIC so you can, you know, just, like, run it super cheaply? Are you looking at Grok with a q or Cerberus or something else that drops the inference cost? Are you on OpenRouter constantly trying to find the cheapest thing? Have you distilled models?
Speaker 1:Like, how do you control cost in that scenario?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So because of a lot of our customers' volumes, like, if you think about, like, Play.com or something, like, they're just have millions and millions and millions of requests a day. So it's not actually feasible at all to send them to an LLM at every request. Yep. We can use LLMs, like smaller ones, like, especially, like, Gemini, Flash Mhmm.
Speaker 6:To, like, do things like summarizing or, like, describing clusters or stuff like that. Sure. As far as actual detection, doesn't really work well for that. Mhmm. So we have a bunch of, essentially, custom trained embedding models and then models on top of those that are small.
Speaker 6:Like, they're, like, technically, neural nets. We can think of them like an SVM or something where they're just, like, really good at detect doing a first pass detection. Mhmm. So around, like, usually 98% of the events or nine it can filter out, like, 95, 90 eight percent of the events that are not relevant. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And then kind of the last pass or, like is like a small Yeah. Fine tuned, LM.
Speaker 1:What's it like training one of these smaller SVMs? Is this something like commodity NVIDIA GPU for, like, an hour, it's just, like, simple?
Speaker 6:The smallest ones you can do pretty fast. Embedding models are, like, longer. A lot of it's about having the data, honestly. Having the right data to do it. And the cool thing is that and I kind of one of our when I say, like, the pipeline's complex, like, one of the things I mean is that our customer each of our customers looks pretty different.
Speaker 6:What an issue is or is not is pretty different. So for example, you can imagine that one custom like, you have a customer support chatbot and you ask it to write code. You don't you know, like, that they might even wanna wanna flag that, you know, a user is asking them in the first place because that's, like, more like they're getting hacked or something. But a coding assistant, obviously, like, that's the bread and butter. So one getting refused is okay, and the other one isn't.
Speaker 6:So we actually train these models on the fly for every single customer. Yeah. So that's, one
Speaker 2:of the cool things we do.
Speaker 1:There were four, maybe more massive AI announcements this week. You got Microsoft Build. You got Google IO. You got OpenAI buying IO for $6,500,000,000, Johnny Ive, going into OpenAI, building hardware. You also got Anthropic launching Claude four today.
Speaker 1:What stuck out to you? What was the most interesting story of the week? What has you thinking, I wanna implement that. I wanna play around with that. I'm excited about that, or I have a hot
Speaker 2:take about that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, most of the times, the things that excites me are the things that are for builders. Like, you know, we we use AI a lot.
Speaker 6:All of our customers use AI. So that's sort of the lens we're always looking at it through. I think that Google has really done a good job of nailing that niche of, like, building models that for start ups. I think that, like, Google Flash, for example, is the closest thing we have to, like, intelligence too cheap to meter. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Obviously, there's, like, four nano that was, like, a follow-up to that, and, like, in in response to that. Yeah, Flash is still just, like, superior in so many ways. They've just built, like, throughput and just, like, the you know, like, they they they pretty much have no, you know, rate limiting at some point when you when you pay it off. Like, pretty much zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because they're running on their own hardware down to the actual TPUs. And so, you know, you have to imagine if you go to OpenAI models, it's probably running on Azure, and so there's an extra layer of networking and transport and all the data's flowing back. So if you're, yeah, if you're looking at, like, super, super fast fine tuned responses, like, Google infrastructure team is probably hard
Speaker 6:to Exactly. They they know how to do it. Right? So yeah. And and so, like, for example, like, I think I think diffusion is, like, super interesting.
Speaker 6:I see a lot of applications for it, like, have played around with it a bunch, and there's something, just wild about I I don't know if you guys are familiar with, like, the
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw one screenshot, 900 tokens per second. Is it actually using a diffusion model instead of a transformer? Is that is that what's going on?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you see,
Speaker 6:like, illustrations of it? It's essentially, like, actually, like, each part of the code, it's actually, you know, being generated separately and kinda literally looks like like
Speaker 1:Instead of just predicting the next word, next word, next word, it's presenting, like, the entire result Yeah. At one one go. That's fascinating. I I I wanna know more. I I I I gotta dig into, like, how big was the cluster that they trained on?
Speaker 1:Is it all synthetic data? I mean, they have so much data. That is fascinating. I had no idea that there would be a flow back because we're seeing in images in Chatuchite I know. Images going forward.
Speaker 1:Right? They're going transformers, and then we're going back. But I guess it's like, these are great algorithms. Let's use them in every single way and every single application, and you'll probably see diffusion all over and transformers all over and everything.
Speaker 6:And and I think there's use cases where it works for. There's use cases where it doesn't. Like, I think that code actually, I think, lends itself pretty well to it in in certain use cases. Like, I think one of the key use cases they have on the demo that you can request access to
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Is, like essentially, it'll one shot a website, like, in, like, a second. You know what I mean? They, like, you make
Speaker 1:that build a calendar, and it would just it
Speaker 2:one shot. Like, it's
Speaker 1:three seconds. It's three seconds. Three thousand three thousand tokens, I guess, came out in three seconds. So it's, a thousand tokens a second. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just crazy.
Speaker 6:And it it's pretty it there's something really insane about it. Like, obviously, like, the apps it's actually generating are, like, not gonna be as good yet. But, like, there's just something insane about going from, like, words to just, like, render.
Speaker 1:Like, there
Speaker 6:there's there's this idea I've always been really fascinated with, which is, like, let's say for games, for example, like, is there ever a point where you're it's all just being generated? Think, like, Jensen has said something along the same the same line.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. There's somebody's actually running Minecraft in
Speaker 6:I tried I tried that one.
Speaker 1:You tried that one. Right? I think Etched is in partnership with that. They're they're building a chip that's has a transformer architecture baked onto it in silicon fab by TSMC, and they can run Minecraft purely procedure purely generative AI version. And there's no game engine whatsoever.
Speaker 1:It just trained on on Minecraft. Fascinating.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the post today that that that you shared and is picking up steam even though x is cooked. But I I already read it and I we actually got Keith for Boys reaction, which I'll share as well because I think it's an important context. But basically, AI alignment researcher at Anthropics said, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, we use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above. Keith made a good point which is that technology companies have obligations that to various authorities that if they detect, you know, illegal activity happening that they have a responsibility. I think the concern, the obvious concern here is, you know, somebody's like playing around with a model and then suddenly it's contacting the New York Times and being like Ben Hilack is, you know, faking pharmaceutical data, you know, or something like that.
Speaker 2:And a hit piece comes out instantly.
Speaker 1:The I mean, this hurts for me because I lie to chat GPT all the time. Always in there I'm always in there saying, I am a train expert. Tell me about trains. I own dozens of trains just to get it to give me better, more rigorous responses and not talk to me like I'm a casual train consumer. But if but if it finds out I'm lying, it's gonna be over for me.
Speaker 6:You're crazy. Yeah. I think I mean, first of all, you know, I I don't have the full context of of Tita's response, but, you know, it's important to note that this was not that. Like, this is not them saying that they have some sort of regulatory requirement defining what that is and and doing the minimum to to meet that requirement. I think that would be different.
Speaker 6:And then there's some sort of, like you know, someone could sue the US government. There's some sort of path to recourse. So that that's interesting and true, but
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But it feels a little bit different.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Could have been messaged better. Probably not in a random comment. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know
Speaker 2:I'm saying? Like, basically saying, like, we're gonna take control of your machine Yeah. And to carry out something without any type of
Speaker 1:And the press too. Like, there like, there's no legal requirement to go to the press within
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 6:I know. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Crazy. I totally get, like, look. There's a law that says that if we see you doing wire fraud, we have to report it to the SEC. That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. That's not that's not what this is. Right? This they they and they look
Speaker 1:We're gonna call TMZ. It's a Possible reason. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, and and and they also just define it as something, you know, you know, egregious, evil, you know, which is, you know, morally, you know, immoral. Right? Which
Speaker 2:which Yeah. Which is different than laws. Right?
Speaker 6:These are different than laws. I think that, like also be clear. This is not I I had a pretty strong reaction to it. Actually, I I don't get that angry about things, but I actually felt really angry. I I don't think it was just an offhand comment, actually.
Speaker 6:If you read their they kind of have a 28 page, like, model card where they explain all the model behavior. They talk about it pretty similarly, right, where they kind of say, they they show that behavior that kind of, how it can happen. And, and not that's not the concerning part because, you know, anybody the work with these models, the fact it could do something erroneously like that under certain conditions, like, okay. Like, these these models do crazy things. But it's the way that they they talk about it.
Speaker 6:Right? They say something like, you know, I'm gonna misquote it, but it's something along the lines of, like, nope. And this is, you know, probably appropriate behavior, but it could happen in the wrong situations. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I I think it, like, really struck me as, like, police state shit. Like, I I was like, oh, okay. Like, it's like, even the thread. Right? It's kind of like, well, if your dress isn't too short, you'll be fine.
Speaker 6:But maybe, like, you know, maybe don't talk maybe don't, you know, write a a story about threatening certain like, it's just not how our country works. Yeah. And, yeah, I I I find it really, really, really deeply concerning. And I think I think that, like, AI safety as a whole and this makes me sad actually because I think AI safety could be really good.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 6:I think it could be needed. But I think that it's kinda like safety from who or safety from what.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And the whole idea that that there's zero human intervention.
Speaker 6:It's like Yeah. Yeah. It's like
Speaker 2:it's like it's like we're not gonna we're not gonna check this and be like, oh, it's a 12 year old who's just like Yeah. Exploring space Yeah. On the LLM. Random stuff. And it's like, yeah, the it's just Cat walks across the keyboard.
Speaker 2:The whole potential. It's like, okay. Amazing if you can identify bad actors
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, work within the legal framework that we have of Yeah. The existing legal framework that doesn't necessarily need net new laws.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:can just work within what the government has already decided is you know, laws are also things that it's not always like good or bad. Like laws are just laws.
Speaker 1:There is there is one exception. I know a lot of people use these models as like personal trainers, and I think it's deeply immoral to skip leg day. And so if you found if a a model found out that someone's skipping leg day, they should call
Speaker 2:the cops and contact me. The regulators.
Speaker 1:And the regulators. Yeah. France. Definitely.
Speaker 2:The FDA. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the SWAT team.
Speaker 2:They Yeah. They they should break down your door. Yeah. This this almost implies that, like, the model would SWAT you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does.
Speaker 6:Yeah. They that that's what it implies. And
Speaker 2:And it's and it's gonna lock you out of relevant systems.
Speaker 6:No. It's gonna hack your computer.
Speaker 2:I can't
Speaker 4:even That's gonna hack your computer.
Speaker 6:They literally said it's going to hack your computer.
Speaker 2:That's so wild. Well, the tweet's been deleted, so it's it's Hopefully,
Speaker 1:they backtrack on that. Hopefully
Speaker 6:It's not it's actually he deleted it and then rewrote something about how people were taking it out of context that was just doubling down. Like, he was like, that's that's, I think, the really concerning thing is that I you know, I've written bad tweets before. We've all written bad tweets. But when I see someone, you know, a huge role taken out of context and double down, like, it is really concerning. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so credit to Sam. He says, I deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being taken out of context. This isn't a new Claude feature, and it's not possible in normal usage. It shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:But I think the issue is that probably within minutes of, like, releasing the model, you have thousands of people that gave it root access to their computer through, like, cursor through their, you know, cursor clock code, etcetera. So I think that, like, maybe one one thing we've learned from this is that, like, there was a time where it was the idea of hooking up a model to the Internet was scary, and that was two years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? I mean, not even that. There was a time when there was a knowledge cutoff. Remember this era?
Speaker 6:Exactly. Yeah. It's a %.
Speaker 1:Oh, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don't even want you to know about the last three months.
Speaker 1:And now it's like, it knows it it goes to every web page. It can definitely do get requests. There's definitely malicious things that it could do with get requests, but it's pretty it's pretty responsive. And you know what?
Speaker 7:Most of
Speaker 1:the time, just gets you the answer
Speaker 2:you're looking guy, Justin Halford, who I have DM with a bit says, can you imagine getting shot by the authorities in own home because your philosophy homework contained a touchy topic or context that was
Speaker 1:misinterpreted That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. As a request. We really need to avoid such paranoid context altogether. This ain't it.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's a good tip. Very rough. Anyway, hopefully, sort it out. Hopefully, there's more discussion here.
Speaker 1:Anything else you wanna close out with? It's been great having you.
Speaker 6:No. It's been great being here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Let's
Speaker 2:do it again soon.
Speaker 7:Let's talk
Speaker 2:to soon. Overdue.
Speaker 1:This is great. Cheers. We'll talk
Speaker 2:to soon. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. I wanna close out with, some other interesting drama in the prediction market. Of course, we're sponsored by Polymarket, but this has been going back and forth on X, which is also where we distribute the show. So the official the official X handle, just at X, says recent speculation about XAI's involvement in the prediction market space has been circulating. While we're enthusiastic about the potential of this industry and engaged in various discussions, no formal partnerships have been confirmed to date.
Speaker 1:Stay tuned. So they're saying, you know, we might be in talks. We might even be in advanced talks, but we haven't announced anything yet. So if you're reading it on, the Internet, it's not confirmed yet. And so, Mario, Knopfel, broke this down.
Speaker 1:Kalshi walks back x AI deal claim. So call Kalshi, tweeted that, that XAI is doing a deal with Kalshi, but Bloomberg retracted the story after the after, I guess Brutal. X rescind us rescinds a statement. So turns out XAI says there's no deal. Kalshi rescinded their own announcement hours later.
Speaker 1:No contract, no collab, no confirmation.
Speaker 2:Pretty in pretty insane that both Bloomberg and X came out and were like, this is not real. I don't even know how this happened. How did it happen in the first place?
Speaker 1:How did this happen in the first place? Because, like, the last thing I would wanna do is say I have a deal with Elon Musk when I don't. Like, he doesn't seem like the type
Speaker 2:of person on his platform. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He doesn't seem like a person to be like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, we did talk and, like, yeah, they're getting they're putting the cart cart before the horse a little bit. It's like, no. He's he care he Elon doesn't let a lot of companies that sell to SpaceX put the SpaceX logo on their website. You know?
Speaker 2:Like, company, they have to say, yeah. We work with a big space company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, okay. We know exactly what you're talking about. But yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, Elon's like like, you're gonna do a joint press release with Elon, like, you better have his buy in. So this is a very weird weird thing to even have happen. And I guess Bloomberg deleted the entire post, I guess, the entire article. But, anyway, I mean, it's a knockout drag out fight to get integrations in the prediction market game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just not great for Call She given they already came under fire for like trying to get AB to It's basically just like
Speaker 1:me Dogpile on chain, which is awesome.
Speaker 2:Like, competent, you know, competitive markets, but Yeah. There's no need for foul play.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It does seem a little bit a little bit too aggressive crossing the line. But, anyway, hopefully, can sort out the deal and everyone can kind of learn what the real strategy and prediction markets is with XAI. It'd be interesting to see
Speaker 2:where Yeah. Would like
Speaker 1:I would like I mean, integrating. We are the integration point for Polymarket into X because you see our livestream and you see the ticker right there. Yep. And of course, Polymarket and Kalshi both post prediction markets and screen change all the time.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to think about Grok being able to access Polymarkets for basically getting a read on future events. Right? Right now it's oriented around fact checking.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But it also can give insight into potential headlines of the future. Will this acquisition happen? What's the likelihood?
Speaker 1:And I would imagine that as long as both companies have a robots.TXT that's permissive, they would show up in ChatGPT. They would show up in Grok. I imagine that right now if I ask Grok, pull up the pull up the poly market on the USS The US recession chances in 2025, it could just go do that. I would expect that that would be the behavior just because it has the ability to browse the web. But, obviously, a deeper integration would be cool for whichever company can win it.
Speaker 1:So good luck to Shane as he goes on a tear and tries to build Polymarket into a generational company. Let's go to Delian and close out here. Delian, I like this because in we're we're working on an article. Well, it'll drop maybe tomorrow, we'll be covering it here about TBPN. And in the article, in the fact check, they hit us with, is it true?
Speaker 1:Fact check. Is it true that you refer to your team as the guys, all caps, or or capital t, capital g? And I was like, honestly, like, yes. But we also call them the boys. We also call them the gentlemen.
Speaker 1:We also call them the production crew, the crew, whatever. We don't really we haven't really formalized the the TBPN production team as the guys, but they are guys. But Dalian put it into a great post. He says, if the boys isn't a clearly identified group of six to 12 tight knit men in your life, you're just not gonna make it that far in life. And,
Speaker 2:yeah. Give it up for
Speaker 1:the boys. Dude needs a group chat of guys. Give it a funny name. And more importantly, go and text your your the boys. Text the boys right now.
Speaker 1:Tell them Or you're going to see Mission Impossible, the final reckoning in theaters. Get the tickets. Send the Venmo requests. Get everyone into the theater to go see Tom Cruise. Do what he does best.
Speaker 2:It's a call to action.
Speaker 1:There's a call to action. No matter what city you're in, hit the boys and say,
Speaker 2:work off your tux.
Speaker 1:Pick a date. Black tie. Make it happen. And, you know
Speaker 2:Dress up too.
Speaker 1:You you got six to 12 tight knit men in your life. Maybe six show up because people are busy, but you refund the rest of the tickets and you're good to go.
Speaker 2:Yep. This is the playbook.
Speaker 3:This is
Speaker 1:the playbook. Get the boys together for Mission Impossible.
Speaker 2:Fun show.
Speaker 1:Fun show. Love their names. Stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And That is directly from
Speaker 2:the board.
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you so much for watching. Cheers.