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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Meta is selling compute. They're getting out of the computing business. They said we don't need computers anymore to do what we need to do. We don't need them. We're gonna be selling them.
Speaker 1:Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business to sell access to AI computing power and models competing with industry leaders like AWS and GCP. The company is considering selling access to various AI models hosted on its existing AI infrastructure as well as raw computing capacity as part of its Meta Compute initiative. Meta plans to generate revenue from excessive computing power, could help return its investment in AI infrastructure, which includes hundreds of billions of dollars spent on data centers and expensive chips. And so lots of reactions to this. The neo cloud market is selling off.
Speaker 1:Oddly enough, Meta has a bunch of neo cloud contracts. Some of those companies are selling off because now they're a buyer and also a competitor. Lots of different takes about, you know, Meta finding its footing, finding something that justifies the massive CapEx. Of course, Meta
Speaker 2:It's deeply confusing, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah? Is it?
Speaker 2:I mean, the whole thing. The whole Okay.
Speaker 1:What's confusing about
Speaker 2:I think it is practical what they're doing. Yeah. But as somebody that that, you know, I would say overall has been a big, you know, cheerleader for Meta. Think it's truly the best. In in my view, it is a perfect business.
Speaker 2:It doesn't give you a lot of confidence in like the strategy overall. If they're signing these neo cloud deals worth tens of billions of dollars, they're built, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And, yeah, they can make the argument that these type of like doing any type of neo cloud deals themselves is just good business. It's it's just like how it's just the best way to get ROI today. Yep.
Speaker 2:It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that there's near term products on the horizon for Meta that are gonna be able to utilize that capacity themselves, which is clearly been their strategy.
Speaker 1:I know
Speaker 2:Mark and and the team have never have never said we wanna be in the cloud business. They've talked about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They've talked about the possibility of it. Yeah. But the stated goal of MSL is personal super intelligence. We don't know
Speaker 1:Which I was a fan of. And I think you were a huge fan of. You were
Speaker 2:like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Manus on your phone, going around your social networks. That's my biggest bull case for all of this. Like, it's very there are so many different applications that I can imagine being a daily driver of in the meta of apps. Oddly, none of that has really been even tried, in my opinion. It feels like a little bit
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All really the call.
Speaker 2:Seen so far is Muse Spark. Good on benchmarks. Like, decent, you know. Again, not anything to that that anyone should really get that excited about.
Speaker 1:As a, you know As a as an API provider. Exactly. Exactly. They did announce they were going to release it via an API. I don't think they have.
Speaker 1:They might
Speaker 2:still It's good model, sir, but I don't think it will have a lot of demand. Yeah. And then we've seen Meta Vibes, which was a mid journey
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wrapper. Even if Muse Spark is not on the super giga frontier, can it be good enough to get some work done inside Meta family of apps? Like, should. I would imagine, yes.
Speaker 1:But they just haven't found that that killer feature. There are plenty of applications that are AI powered. There are plenty of models out there that have found their footing without being on the, you know, super intelligence path or on Yeah. That particular curve.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting because yesterday we were talking about the story where Google had been telling Meta like, hey, we don't have the capacity Yeah. For you. And here, Meta is with with plenty of capacity themselves. I don't think we can read too much into this because Yeah. It's just one article from Bloomberg.
Speaker 2:I think it will matter a lot who the potential buyers of Yeah. Compute are gonna be. Yeah. If it's there's a number of companies that I think the market would get excited about. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if they're actually just going and trying to compete as Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's weird that it came as a leak about around, like, a plan to sell Compute as opposed to just what SpaceX did where it was just like, boom, huge contract with Anthropic, lots of excitement going into the IPO. Like, that was such a perfectly massaged story as SpaceX entered the public markets. That would have been great if they just said, hey. We have a Frontier lab that's paying us a billion dollars a month now. And, like, it's gonna show up in earnings next quarter.
Speaker 1:Like, get ready. But the stock market loved it. Like, the stock is way up. And I don't know if it's way up because they see it as a huge growth area for Meta. Now, is it that crazy?
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's hyperscalers people have been wondering on platform.
Speaker 2:Where's the ROI gonna come from for this hundreds of billions of dollars Yeah. To spend. Yeah. And up until now, there's been no obvious place that it's gonna come from. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Manus deal, that's being unwound. Yeah. They have the the deal with, you know, mid journey and vibes. That's, you know, unclear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's it seems very obvious that they're gonna be able to integrate AI into their glasses over time. Yeah. But the glasses that have product market fit today are more of just like the I I think the product market fit is really with the camera, not the intelligence combined with a pair of glasses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is also surprising that we haven't seen a diffusion model, an image model. Instagram in general is pretty it's it's remarkably slop free, least my feed is. I don't see a lot of viral slop images. But you can imagine AI powered features, background replacement, a lot of that stuff being AI enhanced and people receiving that very positively and enjoying that.
Speaker 1:I was using Adobe products recently and like in Photoshop they have an integration with Gemini, Nano Banana and you can plug in all the different image models and you can actually use the tools in very interesting ways. I keep going back to that idea of like the personal super intelligence. What do I actually want? I ran into an interesting conundrum the other day because I've been sort of disappointed by the lack of AI in Meta apps, which I know I'm like the only person that feels that way because the general vibe on Instagram is like extremely anti AI. Meta does have granular data about every reel I post.
Speaker 1:Some do better than others. I went to Meta AI in the Instagram app, I asked, what should I do more of in order to grow my account? This would be useful, sort of a high powered analytics tool, personalized analytics tools for what I do. But I got this very generic LLM response. We might be able to pull it up.
Speaker 1:I think it's in I shared the image in the timeline. Let me see if I can pull it up here. It said, Buffer recommends focusing on sustainable organic growth instead of quick hacks like follow trains. Post reels consistently since they get 36% more reach than carousels and a 125
Speaker 2:It's so funny to be referencing it's referencing a blog post from a social media management SaaS
Speaker 1:company. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Like, you would think that Yeah. If you had I mean, and clearly, they're not focused on this use case.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you would think that there would be an opportunity to give creators personal and super intelligence to just keep creating on the platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I said use Instagram analytics to see which content converts viewers into followers and double down on it. Like, that's what I asked you to do. I said, what can I do better to do my following? Like, you have all the data about what does well.
Speaker 1:I don't want to go and look at this reel got 5,000 views. That one got 50,000 views. What's the difference here? I want you to do that. Collaborate with microcreators in your niche for authentic cross promotion rather than paid ads.
Speaker 1:Engage with responding to comments and testing out trust. It also said to optimize your profile with clear keywords in the bio and maintain a consistent visual brand. It's like a lot of that I'm already doing. A lot of that is is is is old. And so I'm just, like, sort of disappointed that say what you want about Muse Spark and its benchmarks or whatever.
Speaker 1:Like, clearly, if they wire that model up to the user's data, they should be able to integrate appropriately, and they just haven't productized it properly. And maybe if I get Manus and I get an API integration, like, I could get there. But like, it should just live in the Instagram search box, I imagine, since they already have an LLM there. It's just a legacy one. On the product side, it's just not enough to get to, Okay, there's crazy demand for AI within the app.
Speaker 1:Adam,
Speaker 2:it's Did you ask very it if the shareholder value is three eggs as the goose value?
Speaker 1:That just sounds like a like a jumble of words. Is that even a correct sentence? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I Sounds correct
Speaker 1:I mean, honestly, like the best place it's very ironic, but the best place for Instagram growth hacks these days is just Adam Messeri's front facing videos. He takes to Instagram. He uses Instagram very well. He goes direct, posts
Speaker 2:reels That's right.
Speaker 1:About all sorts of things. So today I got surfaced one. If you post something and it doesn't do well, should you delete it and then post it again? And he says no, because the algorithm will give the same result. And your followers who saw the first one didn't like it.
Speaker 1:They're going to see it and like it even less the second time they see it. He just answers a bunch of common questions. He does Q and As, and it's actually the best way to communicate and get insights into how the Instagram platform works. But it's not personalized. Like, he's just giving generic one size fits all advice.
Speaker 1:I want the Adam Messeri brain enhanced with Meta's AI tailored to my account. That's what I want. And, like a social media copilot. But maybe I'm in the minority here. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'm the only one that would want this. I feel like tools for creators would be a great way to to launch this. Even like a small user, they all everyone almost always cares about, oh, I'd love to get a couple more views on whatever, even if they're just using being primarily a consumption tool. And then there's also agentic shopping, which we asked Mark Zuckerberg about at Meta Connect last year. This idea that, you know, they're Meta Ray Ban displays, they have the they have the HUD, They have AI.
Speaker 1:You should be able to look at a pair of shoes and say, order me those. And he sort of, like, gestured towards that being one potential possible future. But it's crazy to me that we haven't even seen them really try to remove at least one click from the shopping experience, store some more of your data, shorten the funnel, increase conversion rates. That's good for brands. That's good for companies that advertise on Meta.
Speaker 1:It's good for Meta. It's good for users. And it just doesn't feel like that's where the energy has been in terms of productizing AI within the family of apps. And so it feels like e commerce will see agentic shopping happening. We're getting closer.
Speaker 1:Computer uses be getting better. APIs are there, MCP servers, and Shopify has a bunch of tools for this stuff. But it's weird that Meta hasn't even been experimenting there. And we haven't seen like, oh, yeah, like they launched a thing where if you see an ad, you can click a button, and the agent will try and go check out with you and then just confirm the details within the Meta app, you don't actually have to open up the Safari window. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe that works. Maybe that doesn't at least run the experiment. Maybe they have. I don't know. Maybe I just it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This feels like a wind down of the super intelligence ambitions that Zuck was gesturing towards last year. But I don't know. Maybe this is in the path. Maybe this is just a temporary thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if you look at the SpaceX deals with Google and Anthropic, they were they weren't, like, five year deals. Right? They were shorter term opportunities for both sides to get out. And I think that Meta could easily do something like that where they could make again, this is like the practical decision and say like, hey, we actually do have way more capacity than we need.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. We plan on being able to utilize it fully over time, but we need to get our products sort of ramped up. And so in the meantime, why not sell that capacity and signal to the market that we're not entirely irrational?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I think Meta can actually wait be until, like, the the features that they need to implement are, like, extremely obvious. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, Apple waited a long time to actually implement these things even though everyone was, like, basically begging. I I don't know if people are, like, begging for AI features in Instagram, and maybe that'll happen in the future, and they can just basically just wait while, like, oh, we're not really sure how to implement this stuff. Yeah. You can put in the search bar or whatever, but it doesn't improve the experience that much. But maybe, you know, in a year or two, there's gonna be some feature that, wow, everyone really wants this in Instagram.
Speaker 3:By then, you know, they'll have all the compute necessary. They can you know, ninety days before they implement it, they they can, you know, get out of the the lease or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I feel like they just need to do more product experimentation.
Speaker 1:Like, the core the core Instagram team, they launched the the what's it called? Glimpses or something? It's like a shorter even shorter version of stories, like lower. It it, like, sits in, like, this little sidebar of the chat. Like, they are launching different features across the family of apps, but that culture like, it feels like they have a research organization, but they don't have an AI product organization that's actively productizing things as quickly.
Speaker 1:I mean, Meta Vibes for you know, even though it was like this white label of mid journey was well, at least it was launched fast. And at least they got the feedback.
Speaker 3:I don't think they've ever been like the the company that like really innovates on on product. Right? Yeah. There's gonna be some some feature that everyone's like, wow. This is really great for AI.
Speaker 3:And then they can then
Speaker 1:Copy it.
Speaker 3:Just integrate it into all their apps.
Speaker 1:Buy it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They have all the capacity to serve it by that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where it goes. Amit is investing over there, shares his perspective, two perspectives on the Meta news.
Speaker 1:He says bearish. The bearish take is if Meta has excess compute that they're willing to sell via a new cloud business, doesn't that mean we aren't compute constrained? Isn't this really bad for Neo Clouds? Why would Meta give a deal to CoreWeaver, Iron, if they just sell the compute themselves? Furthermore, wouldn't they cut CapEx because idle compute as the basis for a new business means they don't need as much compute as they bought, which means CapEx should come down.
Speaker 1:That would be bearish for all semis. The bullish take is if Meta is building a cloud business, even if they are using idle compute, which means they aren't compute constrained, they might end up spending more on CapEx to compete with GCP, AWS and Azure. Like, if they realize that selling computing services on top of a metacloud is better than just ads, then wouldn't they end up having to spend in the same way that Google, Microsoft, Amazon do in order to build out a full cloud business? They do have a lot of capabilities in terms of spinning up data centers quickly, maybe not quite as quickly as SpaceX and AWS, but they're certainly, like, near the frontier of that capability in terms of putting up GPUs in tents. So more CapEx would be good for semi.
Speaker 1:So what do people think? Where do we land on this? The market is certainly reacting positively to Meta and negatively to the Neo Cloud because there's a new competitor in town.
Speaker 2:Anyway Zephyr and the Sertrini team are going pretty hard. Say LMAO. Zac finally takes the L.
Speaker 1:If this is a if this is a metaverse style side quest, and the and the superintelligence meta trained models are the VR of this cycle for Meta's attempt at a new business creation, and the meta trained models get sort of mothballed in the way that the Meta Quest and the VR strategy got mothballed. What is the meta Ray Bans of MSL? Like what would remain? Because when they wind down one of these projects, sometimes you get a meta Ray Bans, which is pretty good business and growing and cool and like there's development there, But it's a much more narrow focused. And I would say image model, but they they seem
Speaker 3:But wouldn't it just be this, like, neocloud business?
Speaker 2:Maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's what's gonna stay on.
Speaker 2:That's, like, profitable.
Speaker 1:Fun as Ray Bans, though. I want a consumer product. It's a consumer company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's interesting because you can can make the case that Meta could build an amazing inference business. Yeah. Right? They already serve millions of businesses Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Globally. Yeah. They could make a pretty compelling case for how, hey, we help people acquire customers, and we help people deliver products and services over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've talked about that before. I don't know that I buy that the fact that they have, like, single mobile gaming company and D2C e commerce business on is actually flows over to, well, now get your tokens from us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just think that people have it in their head like, Okay, Meta is a consumer business. They have massive sales teams, account management They know how to get in front of customers. Yeah. They've got to the point where, you know, again, they they're not operating a commodity business.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. Having their, you know, social networks. Cloud is is closer to one. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But anyways, I'm interested to see. I'm I'm I imagine they'll have to come out with their own kind of news around this pretty quickly. So that they're not sitting in limbo with just one kind of rumored article floating out there and Mhmm. And people are speculating.
Speaker 1:The meta Ray Ban display is a good example of like or meta Ray Ban's a good example of like, there's there's probably a piece of consumer hardware that's AI enabled, like the Ring or something where or just getting really good at voice models or just getting really good at image models. And if they're a little bit more narrow and constrained, they could probably completely dominate that. But trying to do super intelligence and coding agents and it's a little it's a little scattered potentially. Jae Yoon says, we are still massively short compute. Meta and XAI are selling compute because there's no inference demand for their models.
Speaker 1:It's a compute allocation problem. Too much compute in the hands of players with no internal use for it, not a compute surplus problem.
Speaker 2:More meta news.
Speaker 1:What is that?
Speaker 2:Apparently, according to Bobby Allen over at NPR Oh, had consider buying Kalshi Yeah. Before it's developing its own prediction market app that is sort of a classic meta
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Playbook. This sort of puts to bed your theory that they might be just making a a, you know Clout based. Clout based prediction markets where you compete for your ability to I see the
Speaker 3:Like, I'm still Manifold is that. Right? Yeah. So it's like a it's like a pretty big platform.
Speaker 1:Yes. But I was saying there's a chance right now based on the reporting that it could be the Manifold strategy or it could be the Polymarket Call Sheet strategy. And the fact that they didn't try and acquire Manifold, they tried to acquire Call Sheet sort of signals like, hey, they're probably going the the financially incentivized route, which I I think fits with your thesis that, you know, it's in consumer, it's profitable and growing very fast. And also, Tarek from was taking shots at Instagram saying it's brain rot. Saying that like every minute you spend on Call She is a minute that you're not spending brain rotting on Instagram, which is like, okay.
Speaker 1:A lot of people would say that these are like equivalent or maybe one is worse than the other.
Speaker 2:Is the potential profit pool worth the risk of all the attention you're gonna get from lawmakers globally Mhmm. By integrating like betting Mhmm. Into the product that is already under attack on like a million different fronts. Right? It feels like
Speaker 1:movie coming out and stuff. It's like you're jumping straight to the
Speaker 2:goose. Right? And the goose is getting valued.
Speaker 1:The goose is getting valued.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna just keep going back to the slides.
Speaker 1:I love these slides.
Speaker 2:The goose is valued. It's producing golden eggs when you see another golden egg
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's almost like a poison golden
Speaker 1:egg. And
Speaker 2:if you bring it over
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It might to the farm Spoiler
Speaker 1:goose. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Might kill your your main goose. Potentially. And so it feels feels risky.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Google AI overviews decreased outbound organic clicks by 40%. Eric Sufer is sharing a new paper by researchers at Carnegie Mellon in the Indian School of Business finds that AI overviews were triggered in roughly 41% of observed Google searches and when triggered, reduced outbound organic clicks by about 40%. That seems like one to one. The presence of AI overviews increased the likelihood of a zero click search by roughly 35%.
Speaker 1:Everyone is going everyone's going Google zero at this point. And the founder, Josh Marshall, of TalkingPointsMemo wrote about Google AI oligarchy and the end of the open web. It's an interesting read. Go
Speaker 2:through it another time. December 2010, Demis was scraping together a couple million bucks This is crazy. For a small company called DeepMind. This is for a founder that just like, you know, had their started their career in the last few years. This is like in inconceivable.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They're like, wait, you mean two on 50. Right? It's like, Sold Two on five. Half the company Two at 5,000,000 post as one of the most elite Can you imagine what technologists in the entire world.
Speaker 1:It stayed independent this whole time? I don't know. May may maybe there'd be another another path or something.
Speaker 2:Are you saying they sold too early?
Speaker 1:It seemed like they sold too early. I don't know. Hard to say. Hard to say.
Speaker 2:Paper hands? Paper hands, Pete?
Speaker 1:Oh. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:I think all the VCs didn't wanna sell. Especially because the whole Google thing, that was like the whole story was was don't sell to Google. Google's like the bad one, which is funny because like Google's been very responsible and and you know, great great company. I was I was playing around with v o three or v o four. Where where are we in the v o models?
Speaker 1:So good and yet still not indistinguishable from reality. We're so so close and yet so far if you wanna generate a video these days. It is cool you can do it on your phone though. I like it. And Jordy, people were asking you to do a little bit of a little bit of a spin for everyone.
Speaker 1:Show off the new merch you got there. I'll tell everyone about Just Codex on the arms. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, or just trying to Oh, we just trying to look good. Codecs.
Speaker 2:We we just got our first shipment of, I think, around 200 of one of our new merch products.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. I know the one you're talking about.
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Speaker 1:That's the one?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
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Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
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Speaker 1:It's groundbreaking.
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Speaker 2:it. And We had a breakthrough. We had a big breakthrough. We had a big breakthrough. Took a long time.
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Speaker 2:But but No. The merch will finally be for sale and we will make the it will be dropping in the chat Oh, yeah. First. Yeah. We're not exactly sure exactly when.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But we will give it to you guys first and thank you for the patience. Yeah. We appreciate But on that note
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:We love you.