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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.
Let's get into the show. What happened over the weekend? Did anything happen over the weekend, John?
Speaker 2:There were a couple things. The big debate that I was tracking sort of outside of tech, but tech adjacent was the cancellation of Hank Green, the YouTube creator. Not quite a cancellation, more just some backlash. Hard to always put a proper sizing on a mob when a mob comes after a creator. But Hank Green, the YouTuber and really media entrepreneur, he's grown a huge business which we can sort of go into, is getting pilloried on social media over using ChatGPT for research.
Speaker 2:Very controversial these days. Only a billion people do it. But yeah. It's the number one app in the app store. But he's getting he's getting a lot of backlash from certain members of his audience.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna characterize the whole audience as being part of this, but it's a very silly
Speaker 1:thousands of people.
Speaker 2:It seems like about it. It's always hard to tell. I mean, thousands of people that are liking a post about it. There's like maybe dozens of posts. I don't really know how to put how to put a scale on these things, but Hank Green is definitely going through it, having to sort of apologize or qualify or sort of, you know, state that he will adjust things in the future.
Speaker 2:And it's just sort of interesting to hear how he went through this process, what he says is gonna change and where the backlash is coming from because there's a lot of misunderstandings misunderstandings about about it. It. And what's interesting is that he is a science and education creator, and science and education are potentially the most affected by AI right now. And so, it's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math. I'm going to cover science.
Speaker 2:But I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad. Because as we also saw over the weekend, AI is making a bunch of advancements on math. We've been seeing this for a while, but the latest version of the story comes from Noam Brown polynomial over at OpenAI. It says an an internal version of Astra.
Speaker 2:OpenAI's next major model family solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science. The achievements are so so extreme at this point that I don't even think it's worth us trying to break them down. Like, did that with the So instead existing problem.
Speaker 1:Tyler is gonna run a five k here in the UltraDome to do a little victory lap for the research team.
Speaker 2:But not everyone is impressed Get
Speaker 1:ready, Tyler.
Speaker 2:With it because Gary Marcus says, wake me when Astra solves a significant open world problem that doesn't revolve around formal verification. And of course, Daniel Eath says, the goalposts are on a completely separate planet. It is a good point. Obviously, AI is doing better in formally verifiable tasks. At the same time, still impressive because there's a lot of things that are useful and verifiable, like did this drug cure your cancer or not?
Speaker 2:Or did this job get done or not? Like, we've been using these recommender systems for lots of things. They're very valuable all over. But it is funny.
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 2:debate over is this AGI, is this ASI? Those terms will always be vague.
Speaker 1:Going back to Hank. Yes. So, all he did was admit that he used some sort of AI tool for research?
Speaker 2:Yes. So I will take you a little bit more through it. So Hank Green, he's an OG YouTuber. He joined YouTube in 2007, I think less than two years after the platform actually launched. And he grew he got a lot of views, he also built a huge audience and created a real media company around it.
Speaker 2:So he has Vlogbrothers, like a vlog channel. Then he has Crash Course, which is a really, really huge educational channel. He runs VidCon, which is basically the the premier conference around YouTube and the creator economy. I've been, I think, once or twice. It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:And over the last twenty years, he's become one of the most trusted educational creators in the platform. He's also just like he gets the vibe of YouTube very well because he's been been around it so long. Never really stepped back fully, but always been, you know, solid audience there. So last last Wednesday, he published an episode of a show called Ask Hank Anything, and it's an interesting concept for a show. So he brings on a guest, but then instead of just doing the interview, tell me your life story, ask the ask the guest a whole bunch of things, the guest brings questions for him about science or whatever.
Speaker 2:They they they have a big long conversation. And if there's something in the show that he can't answer on the fly or he's not prepped for, he will go do the research and then get the actual answer and then cut that into the final episode. So you'll be watching them hang out. They'll talk about some odd thing. He was talking about this have you heard this kiki and booba thing?
Speaker 2:There's like two words that basically there's two shapes. One's like a fluffy cloud, the other's like spiky star essentially. And if you ask people generally, which one would you assign the word kiki to and which one would you assign the word bouba to? People always pick bouba is the cloud and kiki is the spiky one. And it's like the sound of the word has a shape to it even and this is just something in our language that shows up all over place.
Speaker 2:So he's, like, telling the story of this, like, just somebody ran a science experiment. They, you know, put a bunch of people here. They pulled a bunch of people. They put together this result, and this is what happened. And so he needs to compile all of that quickly because you get off the show, you have the rest of your job, but then you have to go answer these questions and have all the information.
Speaker 2:And of course, he uses all sorts of research tools, but he was accused specifically of using ChatGPT to write the script, which is interesting because after the episode went up, manager Jojo posted a clip of him from the episode and accused him of using ChatGPT to write the script. The key line is Hank saying, I appreciate the pushback. That's sort of an AI phrase, but that wasn't one of the really trigger AI phrases like, You're absolutely right, or It's not this, it's that. I appreciate the pushback is something that the AI models say occasionally, but you wouldn't think it would make it into a script. But that's why people jumped on it.
Speaker 2:They were like, wow, he was so careless that he left in a turn of phrase that was the model talking to him about I appreciate the pushback. That's not what happens. He's actually responding to the guest pushing back on him and about this concept, and then he answers it. He was just talking, but it feels out of place because he's talking to the camera at that point, even though in the video he's talking to the guest after the fact. The way it's edited is him direct to camera.
Speaker 2:So him saying, I appreciate the push pushback to the camera. What is this? Beans?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:But him him saying that, I appreciate the pushback, feels a little weird when you just watch it, but it makes sense in the context of the longer video. So the headlines proliferated over the weekend to the tune of Hank Green accidentally reads AI prompt feedback left in his script. Hank has to deny this, but he goes on to admit that he does use ChatGPT for research. This did not land well. No, People did don't like the idea of him using ChatGPT research.
Speaker 2:Clearly, it's just a small subset of his audience that actually takes the time to flame online about AI usage. But it is a there are still dozens of posts, maybe hundreds of posts about how AI cannot be used for research because it hallucinates or it removes some key human element of the process of learning, something like that. It's very odd for anyone who's used modern models because there's a lot that AI can't do well yet, but pulling a bunch of links and quotes together from across the Internet is
Speaker 1:something Pretty good.
Speaker 2:Pretty good at. And it's definitely reliable for that. And so Hank clarified the script was not written by AI. He was just going on ChatGPT and saying like, hey, where where did this original research come from? Pull up the paper.
Speaker 2:Download the PDF. Crunch it all together for me. You know, pull some quotes from it. Change this into a different format. I want it in this units instead of that units.
Speaker 2:Those types of questions. He still said that he has not been happy with how he's been using AI and may wind up publishing less as a result. He feels like he's on a little bit of a treadmill because he's more productive with AI, but then he posts more and then that's a feedback loop. Of course, like, at this point in time, he's like built his career over twenty years. He has a very sustainable business.
Speaker 2:He probably doesn't need to be on on as much of a treadmill as perhaps an early stage creator might be. It doesn't feel like it's total audience capture, but there is this interesting opportunity here that I was sort of just identifying. Like AI is clearly this wedge issue. Billions of people use AI and get value from it, but at the same time it's deeply unpopular and there's lots of people who like to post angrily online about how AI is bad for a variety of reasons. But education and science in particular are going to be intertwined with AI for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2:Like every advancement in science is going to be AI enabled. And so if you're a science educator and you constantly have to be dancing around AI and be like, Oh, yes, like they solved this math problem, but I don't like it because AI was used, well, you're going to wind up just not being able to talk about math or science or whatever's happening because you're constantly doing this dance around AI. And so that's fine. There's that audience that will love that. But there's also an opportunity for a new audience that's maybe a little bit more nuanced about this and maybe just, Yeah, it's fine that you use that for doing research.
Speaker 2:As long as the script sounds good, I'm fine. Or, As long as you are clear about your policy, which is odd because that's what he he was always clear. He just still got attacked and had to go on this defensive. I believe he has like a published policy around how him and his employees at his media company can use AI or do use AI or don't in various scenarios. But this was the first time I've seen a real backlash to just pulling that up on ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:A lot of people in tech, I think, were getting sort of whiplash from from watching, all of these arguments pile up. Someone put together a cool chart here of, the good arguments and the bad arguments from the pro AI crowd and the anti AI crowd. So an example of a good argument around this from the pro AI crowd would be AI is a powerful and capable tool. And then like a bad argument from the anti AI crowd would be AI is useless in researchin general. But there were bad arguments that were put forth by pro AI people, Something like, you use you use data centers.
Speaker 2:Like, Hank uses data centers. And it's like, yes, YouTube is hosted on a data center
Speaker 1:in Yes.
Speaker 2:So are
Speaker 1:you to write this comment?
Speaker 2:Yes. But that's not the the the actual like data center that's required to host an online comment is wildly different than a massive Gen AI system like cooking tons of tokens and actually setting the GPUs on fire. Right? And then a good argument, the best argument from the anti AI crowd was said that AI usage in science communication reduces trust at least a little, which is interesting. I mean, yeah, you do have to check these things.
Speaker 2:And we do see tons of examples of people actually leaking AI phrases and weird AI hallucinations into scientific research. There was that example of there was some PDF that was scanned and there was a word on in one column and a word in another column that got bled together when the document was imported. And then a whole bunch of a whole bunch of scientific research started referencing this phrase that doesn't exist and just came from basically a hallucination or like a a quirk of the optical character recognition. So anyway, they canceled my goat for using LLMs to search papers that he would need to read to make his videos. They want him to use Google search like a caveman in big twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2:That about The crazy
Speaker 1:thing is I don't Can you can you even turn off AI mode in Google now?
Speaker 2:Maybe? You can. I think you can. You can use DuckDuckGo. I don't think that has AI yet.
Speaker 2:We'll see.
Speaker 1:Brian Lowe on X is sharing a heartbreaking essay by a mathematician last week Mhmm. For this most recent news drop. So this was before Noam Brown Yeah. Showed the recent breakthroughs by Astra. Said there's nothing I can do.
Speaker 1:There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action. I just wanna be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen. I want folks like me to feel seen.
Speaker 1:I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eyes and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grace. I need most of all for us to understand what we are really doing.
Speaker 2:The dark knight of mathematics, Kirwan Hampshire, mathematician researcher from the University of Auckland who recently authored the viral essay. Studied mathematics. Interesting. I I it feels like I would be surprised if if mathematical education goes away. It feels like a lot of these problems should be interesting to apply, but I understand that's a different that's a different discipline.
Speaker 2:It will be interesting to see what happens next because there are more advanced problems. The Millennium Prize problems, P versus NP, Navier Stokes. Right? There there are a number of problems that are still unsolved. What happens when they're all solved?
Speaker 2:Do we create new problems? Where do we go from there? Do we start applying them in different ways? What do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, obviously, like
Speaker 2:Any advice for mathematicians?
Speaker 3:I I think so so in this article, he says, like, mathematicians are paid to, like, solve
Speaker 1:21 year old podcaster has advice for Yeah.
Speaker 3:Why not? Exactly. Like, so he he says, like, mathematicians are are paid to solve theorems, which, obviously, I'm not in academia, but it seems like that it's like kind of their job but also it's like you're in a university. Right? It's like teaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of there's plenty of math professors that need to sort of try and solve theorems but also mostly teach and, you know, don't solve that many theorems or
Speaker 3:Yeah. And also like presumably, if you can solve all these conjectures, like there's gonna be new questions that open up. This is like the entire history of all science. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It will be interesting to see the application of this stuff because it's so abstract at this point and and and it's it's it feels like it's a very everyone's saying like, okay, based on this, like this is gonna like flood through material science and flood through chemistry and biology and that would be awesome. Everyone would love, you know, oh, all of a sudden like the electric cars have twice as much range because we solve some fundamental thing. It'll be interesting to see where the new bottlenecks are. There of course will be always math professors hate AI for one simple trick.
Speaker 2:Just scale scale scale, I suppose.
Speaker 1:It's time. What? It's time to talk about the rise of one person, $1 companies. Wall Street Journal is saying AI tools make it easier for founders to get started alone and many stay that way as they grow. Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:That name's familiar. On the show.
Speaker 1:Already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in 10,000,000 in revenue this year. One thing he hasn't added, any other employees. The 40 year old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching and often running new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca's emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers, and grant refunds when issues arise. Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun drenched Sausalito, California living room.
Speaker 1:I think compromises make lukewarm results, he said. Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone. An analysis by the payments company Stripe Tyler, look up Stripe. Shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company's platform that are generating over 1,000,000 in revenue with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025.
Speaker 2:That's pretty crazy. So this is on Right?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Oh, on Stripe?
Speaker 1:Definitely not.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:This is just Stripe. Okay. The number of solo, I'm sure I I would be curious if Polsia has any companies that do more than, you know
Speaker 2:A thousand.
Speaker 1:Thousand dollars.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're you're looking because at the
Speaker 1:because to be honest marketing because to be honest, like, I actually do think success for Pulsea is like just making back a doll like even a dollar more than you're spending on on Pulsea. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:Because There's a YouTuber who's been demoing different AI systems, Fable and Soul and Kimmy and saying like, go make me money is like basically the only prompt and he lets it cook for like a week and he'll be on like a two hundred months $200 a month subscription, see if it can make 6¢, see if it can make $10. And he's getting closer every time and he, of course, has to do some things, set up API keys and do little things. But it's an interesting experiment. Ben Awad, you should go check it out.
Speaker 1:So the number of solo operators according to Stripe also crossing the $10,000,000 threshold nearly tripled in that same span. In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground. Now, AI can be a built in business partner.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We how does how does Stripe know if you're a solo operator? Like, you're because if you're a podcaster and you set up a Stripe account to accept money from advertisers, you could be having a million dollars move through there. But if you hire an editor or not, that doesn't necessarily show up in Stripe. So they must do some sort of polling and ask
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I think in your account
Speaker 2:You say. Some point
Speaker 1:you say how Okay. Employees do
Speaker 2:you have. Okay. And you can say, yeah, just got one.
Speaker 1:But Interesting. I guess one question I have It's definitely grow. One question I have with the data is like, what if you just set up your Stripe account? It's like, how many employees do you have and you
Speaker 2:and then you don't go out and update. Yeah. Possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because they don't have the the payroll. I I don't know how I don't know how they would have visibility into into payroll, especially like individual employees.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They do have a sense for how many people obviously are like added to your account. But sometimes it's like
Speaker 2:Oh, true.
Speaker 1:Account if you add your CPA.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know? And and and that's a contractor, not an employee. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. AI's ability to handle various administrative tasks makes potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology's ability to handle key tasks in tech like coding make that field a particular hotspot.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But among all industries, new business applications in the information sector
Speaker 2:I've seen the biggest percentage increase nearly 45 over the past year. Yeah. At the same time, the rate of information sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry. This census data set doesn't track solo operated businesses, but the numbers broadly show in tech and beyond that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that's a strong sign that solo operators are in the upswing.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. That chart is really up and to the left. New business formation. This is in the information sector in particular.
Speaker 1:So Tyler, update.
Speaker 3:Okay. So so they basically calculate the number of like solopreneurs based on how many people have like there's like special plugins or platforms that are directly for like the solopreneur.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So they basically use that to like get a proxy of Mhmm. General like percentage of solo people on Stripe.
Speaker 2:On Stripe? Oh, they have like a special flow for solopreneur? Interesting. Yes. Oh, cool.
Speaker 3:So they say that they're almost certainly underestimating the number.
Speaker 2:Hey. Julian Weiser, I know him, says the bar is getting the bar for getting started has never been lower, said Julian Weiser who runs a San Francisco based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May. Now, he's been growing this a lot, but that that is staggering. A lot of people wanted to be solopreneurs.
Speaker 2:Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers' accounts while paying to access to run his clients' requests, that AI company, as well as others charged based on usage. He has since switched to free open source models from China. Broca says he has raised $30,000,000 from investors and at the same time has saved millions in salaries since he hasn't needed a team of software engineers. Another risk, if it's easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI assisted business, copying them can be easy too.
Speaker 2:This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnson who runs an AI assisted business alone in Orlando, Florida. Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now. Johnston, what a great quote for the journal. Amazing I love it. He's 40.
Speaker 2:He used an AI he used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. It's interesting. Pick pick which card you want to use because you might have multiple cards, one that's good for dining and you build an app for that. There's been a few apps that do that. The points guy had a whole blog around it, a whole media company around it, still does.
Speaker 2:But interesting to sort of like, yeah, go and go and actually vibe code that. Lot of these things it's like you could probably just use the models themselves for this. Just have a thread that says, hey, these are the cards I have. Go pull all of the data. When I'm about to buy something, let me know.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, there might be some value for something new with a deeper integration somewhere. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit with no employees and continuing to grow. What a run for John Troy Johnson.
Speaker 1:Great story.
Speaker 2:Who loves who loves King Arthur related metaphors for business. What one person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown that Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go to loan entrepreneurs show the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities. If everyone's hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to headcount?
Speaker 2:Said Rembrandt Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co authored his recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees. It's interesting because haven't we seen that that the the ramp data that said that AI AI adopting companies were hiring faster, but maybe they still operate lower operational headcount but hiring faster because of hiring growth. There's like three different factors that are going on here sort of mixing altogether. Koenig, the professor, also believes in a believes a soft hiring environment that has left some people mired in logged job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Some founders cite different motives. It's a perfect storm of post pandemic burnout and a reevaluation of one's priorities and also booming AI and a sense of what's possible, said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Brenningsville, PA. Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he liked to chart which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing.
Speaker 2:It was like my chief of staff, a second in command. The business ultimately petered out within months though and Ahmad is back to full time corporate role with a utility company. For Claire Vaux, 41, AI helped turn her passing impulse into a business. She was working full time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late twenty twenty three to help code an app that would help manage documentation and design for new products with customers ranging from financial services to health care firms. I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT said Voe, who lives in San Francisco.
Speaker 2:She put her app online for $1 a month. Wow. That is cheap. And within weeks,
Speaker 1:people We don't downloaded thought we didn't know how to make apps that cheap anymore.
Speaker 2:I mean, it is a subscription, at least not one time. But she put it online for a dollar a month. And within weeks, people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo's company, which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer, now has a 100,000 users and is on track to make 7 figures in profit this year. Wow.
Speaker 2:That's remarkable. At a dollar a month. That's crazy. AI handles the company's marketing, sales, and customer support. Well, AI is a shortcut.
Speaker 2:Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. I think people over index how on how easy AI is and under index on how much I did to get to this point. She's still
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I just wanna see I wanna see five companies. Mhmm. That make more money from their business than they give Pulsia every month.
Speaker 2:Yes. So so Yes. Pulsia has has some public dashboards for how much people are spending or something like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So right now, you can see all the different things that the companies on Pulsi are doing or at least some of them. Mhmm. Right now, so far today, companies on Pulsi have spent $373
Speaker 2:Is that today?
Speaker 1:On ads. Today. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's still morning.
Speaker 1:It's still morning. So we're we're pacing
Speaker 2:Okay. Only
Speaker 1:about I don't know what time zone this is in. But, yeah. The the the big question is like, is any of this stuff actually working? Or is it more like kind of a video game effectively
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That people just enjoy like watching the machine Yeah. But there's not really much happening?
Speaker 2:I mean, was the thing for Midjourney and Suno, I think, in in many ways. Like, Midjourney, when it launched, people
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 2:no. Okay. Hear me out.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'll hear
Speaker 2:you out. Okay. When mid journey launched
Speaker 1:The steel man.
Speaker 2:When when mid journey launched, people were like, this is going to take artists jobs. And it was like, okay. So if that plays out, then I'm gonna go to the MoMA, and there's gonna be a show for someone that just prompted Midjourney. And the highest auction at Christie's is gonna be some Midjourney artist. And that's not really what happened.
Speaker 2:Like, people aren't using mid journey to make fine art, but people love mid journey. Like, they love the activity of going on mid journey and generating and prompting and getting an image back. And then maybe they send it to their friends, maybe they use it a little bit. But it's not exactly the same of like the process of becoming a fine artist. It's more like they're enjoying the process of just making.
Speaker 2:It's more like just having a guitar that you just like to practice and noodle on versus like actually being a touring artist. And so, like, that's certainly my experience with Suno is it's fun to try and make a song and then listen to it and then be like wrestling with the thing. And it's possible that that could be the same activity for, like, okay, I'm gonna go build an online business, see if I can get something out. But it's not really like a job. It's more of like an entertainment product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. What do you think?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, you could easily see it turning into like an Ender's Game scenario where it's like a game and then it's like, oh, that was actually a real business you were starting, Ender, you know.
Speaker 2:You you offshored the last job. You sent out you sent off labor overseas. You rolled up the entire HVAC industry. That wasn't a simulation. Mark Zuckerberg, was answering questions about his AI strategy on the latest Meta earnings call.
Speaker 2:And Ben Thompson wrote about, what Meta's position is in AI, how they're grappling with a few things. There were a bunch of interesting points in this Strathecari update. One I wanted to call out was what Ben Thompson thought the best moment on the call was when an analyst asked him why the company can't just use other models. Like, why can't you just do the Apple thing? Do nothing, win.
Speaker 2:Like, partner with one of the labs, do some license agreement. If you need an image model, you get an image model. If you need a text model, you get a text model. If you need to speed up your programmers or your engineers, hire the best coding agent and negotiate with them. Right?
Speaker 2:And here's how Mark Zuckerberg answered it. He said, I can take the open source question. Let's see. So basically the question is, do we think that because there are some open weight models that we can just rely on those? I mean, right now, the open source models are not as strong as the frontier models.
Speaker 2:Good point. So, no is the basic answer. Meta needs to be on the frontier with their intelligence that they use, so they have to be there. There's also just always the perpetual both policy debate and question around other companies' actions and whether that's a thing a company like Meta can rely on. So, if you're using Chinese open source and there's some regulatory risk, it seems like that's sort of what he's getting at is these things might not rely they might not be available all the time.
Speaker 2:And then also, some of these companies, they might be open source for a few years and then go close source and then start charging you an arm and a leg. So you don't want to be in a place where you become super dependent and then all of a sudden get hurt once you're super dependent on a particular product. So, he says, And I think that's very tricky. So, on both fronts, we believe we're going to be able to do better work, and we think that there's some risk in that reliance. I don't believe that's the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:So, that felt like not a great answer to me in the sense that the the Apple approach seems to be working so well. Then he goes on to explain some of the history of Meta, and it's very, very interesting. He says, I think that we're a company that if you look at Meta from take a step back on this. A lot of people view the surface layer of, we build some social media apps and we have an ad business. We are really a full stack technology company.
Speaker 2:We build our own data centers, our own infrastructure, our own chips, our own low level software. When we got started, he says, my background in engineering, I wrote a lot of the systems code. A lot of the reason why Facebook worked was because it actually it just worked, which is a crazy thing to say based on the history, But he makes a really good point. He's like, it literally worked when other social networks did not work fast and efficiently. And I think we just have the ability to build things that can be more personalized, more optimized, more efficient.
Speaker 2:Some qualitative experiences are just not even possible for others to build, because we go all the way down the stack. And it just seems to me pretty clear that having kind of sovereignty over building your own models is going to be an important part of that stack going forward, which is why it's important for Meta. And so, that was very interesting that that was a differentiator in the early days that certain other competitor sites would just be slower. They wouldn't be able to launch new features quickly. And by vertically integrating all up and down the tech stack, they were able to do things very aggressively.
Speaker 2:This is the reals thing. They built two extra data centers to be able to do the reals algorithm, because if they didn't have that compute capacity, they could not have launched a competitor to TikTok on any normal time frame because it was actually a compute intensive project, not just a design. People see, oh, they just put a new button there and there's some videos. But it's like behind those videos is a massive recommender system that is very computationally intensive and stores a lot of data. And you can't just spin that up for 3,000,000,000 users or however many billions of users they have on a a dime if you don't have the infrastructure, you're not actually vertically integrated.
Speaker 2:So there's a whole bunch of other things where, terms of personalization, understanding the user, delivering a really first class experience, they sort of do need to bring it in house. But investors are very upset about this. They're not very happy because Ben Thompson calls it calls it the financial tail wagging the dog and says that they have to sort of double spend right now. He makes a good point about this. They're double paying.
Speaker 2:The company right now is basically double paying for infrastructure without a clear path to monetization. And to make matters worse, its improving monetization story lost a bit of its luster. So they're both renting AI compute, paying a bunch of money for new researchers, then also spending all the CapEx for the next data center. So all of that needs to come together in this moment to actually deliver. And the investors are starting to ask all these questions about what the what the strategy is.
Speaker 2:But Zuck's sticking with it. He's not he's not backing down. But we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tough position to be in when capital markets don't have a ton of faith and you just see that in in the stock price. The the company broadly, right? There's a lot of infighting, frustration around just how MSL is treated versus the rest of the company, which is paying for MSL. So Zuck is is at war Mhmm.
Speaker 1:With fighting a war with multiple fronts.
Speaker 2:It is. It's a big war. Let's go to this Paul Graham post. He had such a wild experience as he bought bought a book. It was awful.
Speaker 2:Didn't want it on my shelves, but I couldn't throw it away. So it sat on a table near the door.
Speaker 1:I know someone that will rip it apart, feed it to a machine, and burn it. Know someone I don't know them personally, but I know they they would They love they would love to to take Rushing this off your to
Speaker 2:an appointment this morning, I grabbed it to read it, first mistake, then went to breakfast and had nothing else. So I spent the morning reading the worst book I have found. It's such a funny such a funny, like, like, I don't know. But say, it feels like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode or something like that. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN today.
Speaker 2:We'll see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. We just got cars and Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Speaker 1:It's been an honor.
Speaker 2:Sign up for our newsletter. Tbpn.com. Goodbye.