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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.
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Speaker 2:wrote about Netflix. There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Strathecari and Netflix co CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Strathecari interview. And they go back the only mention of AI in like an hour long interview or something, it's just two little exchanges. Ben Thompson says, is AI slop going to save you if it overwhelms the UGC platforms? And basically, it's like you're a refuge.
Speaker 2:So this is actual. This is real. And Greg Peters just says, think it's credible. I don't know if that's the reality. So I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible possibility.
Speaker 2:So it's like maybe that's case. It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been trading down, over the last couple months, but in general, it's up I think it's four x up since the launch of ChatGPT. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue, how will AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood.
Speaker 2:I mean, was I was reflecting on the Avengers. I just remember seeing maybe it was even in in one of the first ones the whole the whole CGI process for Thanos. He has this, like, very distinct large chin. So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos.
Speaker 1:Is he a mauger?
Speaker 2:He is a mauger. He has this huge chin. This it's actually like
Speaker 1:He's kind of like the OG.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It he it looks like chin implants. It's kinda crazy, but it has these, cracks in it. It has this very distinct look, Thanos. And normally, the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face, and then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face.
Speaker 2:It tracks all the points, so when you smile, like it sees that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling, and then that facial movement is transferred. So they're recording the lines, they're acting it out, they're giving their facial performance, and then that's transferred all the little subtleties of how their eyebrows move all of that is transferred to the CGI character. It can look a little flat, though, so what they did with this is they still have all the points on the face, but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face into a higher res model. Yes, don't read that. Don't read that.
Speaker 2:Don't read that. It is a good point. So all of those are tracking markers. And then the question is like, you have a much higher resolution CGI model. If you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like and the way it moves.
Speaker 2:And so Digital Domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight up machine learning pipeline. Like, they used AI it wasn't a diffusion model, it wasn't an LLM but they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots, to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018, the movies. Obviously, didn't see any of these movies, but I don't remember like AI backlash.
Speaker 1:My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed.
Speaker 2:But truly, like, I mean, people did make the, Oh, it's too CGI. The explosions are too crazy. It's too over the top. But in general, weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of tomb. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic.
Speaker 2:This is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie. Like, we're fine with all this. And there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of, like, AI tool. Now obviously, Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property.
Speaker 2:But the the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry, and it will continue to be used. Interestingly, I talked to Jason Carmen about The Carmenator? The Carmen The Carmenator. About using AI tools in filmmaking because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And I was like, certainly if you need to rotoscope out a background.
Speaker 2:So rotoscoping is where you are basically using like you're cutting out like a subject from the background and then just doing like a background replacement. That's an example of rotoscoping. But it's over motion, it's moving. So you need to track the hand here, move it over here, track it again, track it again. And it can be very, very time consuming.
Speaker 2:Typically, this is offshore to like a BPO, and then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it, and they have some software that's used. But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one shot. He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver. He wanted to deliver in four ks. And so he went to a team.
Speaker 2:I think he paid him a fortune. They did it. And when they rotoscope ahead, they actually draw new hairs on to of create this. It's very artisanal still. But obviously, AI can rotoscope.
Speaker 2:Rotoscope. You see it in the CapCut edits
Speaker 1:and Where's the rotoscoping NeoLab?
Speaker 2:It's actually Runway. We've had Cristobal on the show. And pre ChatGPT, Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple dots on what you wanted to keep, and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out. And it would sort of use that as an intuition for the model to drop out the background. And you could do a really, really clear cut this person out of this video just in Runway.
Speaker 2:And now that's available in CapCut and edits. And that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where you'll see the F1 driver like standing up and then it'll like it'll drop out the background and cut in a different background. And then the F1 driver drops out and it's like this very like schizo edit. It's a really cool technique. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can see is this runway's edit editing tool. So it it basically draws a mask around it. You just highlight, like, what do you wanna actually run this. This is an example of, like, motion adding motion to a video, but, like, you're you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste. So I don't think Netflix should take a hard line stance on AI broadly because they want to use AI tools.
Speaker 2:Obviously, they've been using AI for recommendations forever. Models, and that's how you open up Netflix and says, We think this would be good for you based on what you watched, and it is much more nuanced than just, If you like K pop demon hunters, we're going to recommend Squid Game next. Next. So many of these rote tasks will be AI enabled, and they already are. And there's not going to be I don't think there'll be a crazy pushback here, although it's possible that there's some sort of comms mishap, especially if a director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI.
Speaker 2:But there's a VFX house that, in the motion capture stage, did use AI to up res motion capture data. You could see AI being used in matte painting for the background, and the director doesn't even know because they just said, yeah, the background, just make the forest a little bit bushier. And they think that they're hand painting it. After that, they were using CGI and three d modeling it. Now they're using AI and that sneaks in and then all of a sudden they face some backlash.
Speaker 2:I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that big of a deal. The bigger question is like how does Netflix position itself against YouTube and the UGC platform? So Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI, and I liked his stance. He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything.
Speaker 2:We're going to let you use AI tools right in the Shorts Creator. We have VO3. We're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this and the algorithm will sort out if you like it. And if you think it's SLOP and you don't want to see SLOP, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff.
Speaker 2:But for the people that like that, they will be served it. It is sort of a balancing act and there's definitely this like stated preference for, like, I don't want any AI on my platform. Now, how real is that? We'll see.
Speaker 1:What we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision, the decision that's bigger than just, are we going to sort of lean into AI or not Mhmm. Will just really be, do we have does Netflix ever lean into UGC, right? Been signing some bigger podcasts. Yes. And they obviously work with independent media companies.
Speaker 1:Yep. But there's a very big difference between just allowing people to will they ever have an upload button? It feels like no. And I feel like that could end up being their advantage. Part of what has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody could go and upload a video.
Speaker 1:Anybody could be a creator. And I think as the amount of content that gets created 10, 100x's, 1000x's because of AI Netflix could be this refuge where you're like, Okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free for all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than like AI on Netflix. Exactly. That's think that's a very good thesis.
Speaker 2:YouTube has been on an absolute tear. In terms of watch time on TVs, according to Nielsen, YouTube has been one in streaming watch time in The U. S. For nearly three years. And so this has been the backbone of the case for like let Netflix buy Warner Bros, even though they'll get HBO Max, like you're merging two seemingly big streaming platforms, but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube.
Speaker 2:But the bigger question is like there's this gap between Netflix and YouTube. And at the start back in I mean Netflix is almost 30 years old, YouTube's over 20 at this point. Back in 2005, these were seen as wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail and the other one was a video of a guy going to the zoo on his VHS camera. They felt extremely separate.
Speaker 2:And they felt extremely separate for years and years and years. Now they are starting to converge, especially around video podcasts, I feel like. I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting. Podcast was, think, I invented by Apple or
Speaker 1:Yeah. When I started doing any work with YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, there wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly these were just different types of creators. Totally. And then there was a big shift.
Speaker 1:It was, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table. I'm not uploading to YouTube. And that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Yeah, there was the pivot to video. And then Spotify went really big into video podcasting. I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Eck really did around podcasting.
Speaker 2:So seven years ago, in 2019, they acquired three companies, Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast. Anchor is more of like a product. Parcast had a bunch of
Speaker 1:Yeah, Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a Yep.
Speaker 2:They knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast wanted to distribute it everywhere. But they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well, so that did very well. And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people.
Speaker 1:Interesting the timing. Apparently, was somebody sent me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. You saw that chart.
Speaker 1:Jeremy shared this with us. That's a crazy chart. It actually fully retraced to now. There's sub 50,000 a year. That feels like you'd really have to maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is.
Speaker 1:Sure. But either way, there was Yeah, of If you look at the chart, it looks like there was like an insane bull market in podcasts and then a huge correction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID. I mean, we talked to the folks that acquired about that and they said that during COVID, they saw a huge spike in people just going for walks, throwing on AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time AirPods were getting to like mass adoption. So we were just throwing on podcasts constantly, and it really, really grew. There is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough of YouTube getting sloppier by the day, that Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two.
Speaker 2:So I think of Netflix and YouTube as starting out extremely separate, then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience. Yeah. And I mean Portnoy and Bill Simmons, both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Isn't there a deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix? Exactly. The audio is still elsewhere?
Speaker 2:Why do you remember that? Because Portnoy drilled it into your head. He said, if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. Video, Netflix. Barstool video, Netflix.
Speaker 2:And it's true. And so I would think of Barstool like if I'm trying to watch a Barstool YouTube video or a a podcast, podcast, I would just go to YouTube. Now Netflix is getting into that. So the gap between Netflix and YouTube is getting like pretty narrow, like they're becoming competitors. But there's this question on the AI issue, do they diverge more and is that valuable?
Speaker 2:The pure AI feeds like Sora and Meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. The struggle will be to create, like, unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated. I still feel like the K pop demon hunters moment, the Squid Game moment, the Alex Honnold Taipei one zero one moment, these live events, these like key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the the Warner Brothers acquisition. People still dress up as Batman around Halloween.
Speaker 2:And if you can be the place there, that's way easier than Well, I did I I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a t shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that? It's AI Slop Man? I'm not a fan of that. I like Batman.
Speaker 2:Slop Man. It's almost better to think about Netflix less as being AI free and more about being UGC free. They're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on thirty years in the business. The AI tools will come. Some fully AI generated content will come.
Speaker 2:But true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think that that's important for a lot
Speaker 1:of viewers. Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?
Speaker 2:Yes. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on in The Middle East?
Speaker 1:According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the crown prince's economic overhaul. I saw this headline and was deeply concerned. I was like, why aren't aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole build out? We
Speaker 2:were kind
Speaker 1:of counting on you guys to be quite liquid while the rest of us over here in America are levering up. So seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. They've been raising tried to raise money from the Qataris. They apparently asked for something like $10,000,000,000 from the Qataris in The UAE. Qataris threw in 10b.
Speaker 1:Allegedly, The UAE did not. There was frustration around
Speaker 2:that. Thought you were going say the Qataris threw in 10b. And Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it.
Speaker 1:Time to re up. Time to re up. So as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1,000,000,000,000 wealth fund called for more collaboration on deals. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses.
Speaker 1:Local families are being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom.
Speaker 2:Years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf nation's ability to bankroll expense expansive projects planned under the $2,000,000,000,000 Vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the twenty twenty nine Asian Winter Games, and the government had previously pared back spending on other elements of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a winter game. That seems extremely expensive to host a winter games in Saudi Arabia, if that's what's going on.
Speaker 1:Don't they have some mountains?
Speaker 2:They have mountains there? I don't know. Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The number of family offices in The Middle East in 2019, 250.
Speaker 2:2024, two ninety. Now we're up to three ten, and the projection for 2030 is three fifty family offices. There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable. These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy, and close to 95% of private businesses in The Kingdom are family owned.
Speaker 2:Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Of these, many groups are only just starting to form family offices as they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations. That makes both established and new family offices a prime target for more investment. They're naturally looking to looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface.
Speaker 2:In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices. That includes private credit and industry in its infancy in The Kingdom as overstretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment. Not expansive. Not not expanding.
Speaker 2:Exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses, and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi diversification agenda, but they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.
Speaker 1:You're bearish on the US dollar, the token used to buy AI products? Bold.
Speaker 2:That's really good. Yes. The US dollar is all over the place. Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal hoard. I did not see this.
Speaker 2:This is interesting. There are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. So many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used, one of them though is a hive of activity.
Speaker 2:Every week more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high security vault owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings S. A, which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global global gold market, the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never before seen highs above 5,200. Now it was 5,000 yesterday on the cover of the journal. Gold is on an absolute tear.
Speaker 2:And yet relative, relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC Holdings last year, the industry was abuzz about gossip whether about where they would head next. Few guessed that the answer was Tether. Chief executive Paolo Adorno said described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold backed alternative to the dollar. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal.
Speaker 2:We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative. Right? EGLD even before Bitcoin?
Speaker 1:Was EGLD actually gold back?
Speaker 2:I think that was the whole pitch. Was yeah. It was it was it was trying to be digital gold, man. I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was very early.
Speaker 2:Late nineties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tether has a scale now. They they also launched their US focused stablecoin this week to compete with USDC. The new token is known by its ticker, USAT. Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tether's mainstay, dollars 186,000,000,000 USDT stablecoin will do the same for the new coin as its designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer.
Speaker 1:So USAT is already available for trading as of yesterday. It'd be interesting if like at what point does USDT de peg upward if gold keeps ripping, right?
Speaker 2:I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of Tether? I think that's not what the product is. I think I think like the Tether stock would own the treasury.
Speaker 1:Sure. But historically, when you when you saw a stable coin like DPEG, it was based on concerns around the reserve.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think that the contract is that they will they'll never give you more
Speaker 1:than $1
Speaker 2:so it would No.
Speaker 1:I know. I know. But I'm just saying, like, stranger things have happened in crypto where
Speaker 2:No. It's always been a very profitable company. So certainly certainly bullish for them. So Tether makes its money from its dollar stablecoin that is the giant of the sector with a 186,000,000,000 in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest and trading profits.
Speaker 2:Processing the physical metal is crucial so much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker in Switzerland guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says, it's a James Bond kind of place. It's crazy. That's a great quote to give Bloomberg. If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy.
Speaker 2:The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than a 151,500 tonnes of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market. Do you think, you know, a the the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold?
Speaker 1:We'll see. I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically
Speaker 2:Because the from
Speaker 1:the twenty twenty twenty twenty one era. I mean, you gotta be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Gold watches and other precious metals Yeah. Just given that your input costs are are going. You know, I'm sure they have like one or you could imagine one or two years worth of Yeah. Of of supply. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they're not they they can be somewhat insulated. Yeah. But price prices will go up or at least costs will go up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I heard a very funny very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex, and he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you? Yeah. And he's saying that like
Speaker 1:This was army army hammer.
Speaker 2:Think was army hammer. And he's saying
Speaker 1:It's like obscure
Speaker 2:It's such a funny such a funny situation. But he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of a building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you, someone shows up with a helicopter, and they're gonna save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is, and they know that that's valuable. But if you're
Speaker 1:You're not gonna have time to be like, no. It's an FB dor. It's a
Speaker 2:it's a Patek. Know? Like, let me explain high horology.
Speaker 1:Here's here's Here's the term aftermarket prices.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always gonna trade.
Speaker 2:And now, it's probably gonna trade even higher.
Speaker 1:Paula says SF Escape Room called the permanent underclass. And it's just a room with a laptop and Claude code installed.
Speaker 2:How are you getting there's something here that's funny. Have you ever done an escape room?
Speaker 1:No. I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun nor thought that this is how I want to kill time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you?
Speaker 2:I'm not into them, but I've done them, and they're fun. Sometimes it depends on, like, if it's a well structured one. But I like puzzles. Like, it's fun. It's like a fun puzzle, like, figure out.
Speaker 2:But you can very quickly get caught in, like, just, like, overthinking what's going on and Being like, oh, it must be some complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to press this lever instead of analyze the situation or something.
Speaker 1:Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? I imagine there's only
Speaker 2:Just take a picture.
Speaker 1:There's probably only is is it like a series of rooms that
Speaker 2:you're in? Yeah. Well, usually, you you start in one room. They're all different. But oftentimes, you'll start in one room, and then you'll there'll be a series of puzzles, locks and keys and whatnot.
Speaker 2:And then oftentimes, like, you'll unlock something, and then you'll progress to another room, and then you'll progress to a third room, and then you'll finally get out of, like, a series room. Because it's a lot of, like they're pretty easy to set up in sort of, like, a defunct office space or like storefront that's just kind of like going in between. It's like the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate. Anyone can come in and just say like, oh, we'll be in there for like a couple months. It's not super permanent.
Speaker 2:The build out's pretty simple. It's mostly just like some some walls and decorations and like some creativity on on the puzzle side.
Speaker 1:Trey says, can Yeah. You guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends?
Speaker 2:I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room. I think most of them aim for like 45.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe we need to make one.
Speaker 2:Have you done one, Tyler?
Speaker 3:I have not.
Speaker 2:Are you interested in it? You're a speed cuber, so, you know Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, could be fun. I don't know. Yeah. I'm kind of in the Jordy camp.
Speaker 2:When they came out, there was definitely like a boom in like escape rooms.
Speaker 1:Bobby in the chat says escape room would be a good benchmark for AI. Yeah. Certainly certainly a humanoid.
Speaker 2:Let's click over to rewatching the interview with the Claude Bot creator, Peter Steinberger.
Speaker 4:So in November
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I don't know. You know, I I wake up every day. I'm like, okay. What do I wanna work on now? What would be cool?
Speaker 4:And then they was like, okay. I I wanna check with my computer on WhatsApp because because if my agent's not run is running and then I go to the kitchen, I wanna check up on them. Or, like, I wanna, like, do little prompts. Yeah. So I I just hack together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls Cloud Code, and then returns what Cloud Code returns.
Speaker 4:One shot. Yeah. And it took, like, one hour, and it worked.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 4:was like, okay. That's kinda cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image. Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. Mhmm. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just like make a screenshot so that agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I had to get images.
Speaker 4:And then I I was on a trip in Marrakesh with, like, a weekend birthday trip. And I I found myself using this, like, way more than I than I thought, but not for not for programming. It's more like, hey. We are like there's, like, restaurants because it it it had Google in it, and it it it could figure out stuff. And it's like especially when you're on the go, it is, like, super useful.
Speaker 4:And then I wasn't thinking. I was just sending it a voice message. You know? But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there.
Speaker 4:So so so the reading indicator came, I'm like, oh, I'm really curious what's what's happening now. And then for ten seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, how the f did you do that? And it replied, yeah. You sent me you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file.
Speaker 4:There's no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's Opus. So I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to to WAV. And then I wanted to use this, but but didn't have it installed, and there was a install error.
Speaker 4:But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I unresponded. That was, like, the moment where, like
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, it's like that's where it clicked. These things are, like, damn, smart, resourceful beast if you actually give them the power.
Speaker 1:Sure. The reason that I I feel like that is such a powerful moment, and I'm glad that he shared it, is if you're talking with a model Mhmm. And you give it a task Mhmm. And then it just hits a dead end Mhmm. It's just incredibly like, that's sort of like people are very used to that right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not that it needs to be that way, but it's just kind of like the steady state.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People are used to And Like, okay. I I know To
Speaker 1:me that's what the models can do. That's effectively the agent having real agency. Yeah. That makes it an agent. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's saying like, well I didn't know how to do this or I was confused. Mhmm. And I tried a number of things until I did I did what you wanted. Right? That's like what you want out of it's what you want out of a team member.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Right? If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task Yeah. They don't just try one thing and come back and or just say like, I actually can't handle this because the file type's wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like convert it. Figure it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like What was your reaction, Tyler?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's like pretty insane. Definitely it definitely raised my, you know, chance of permanent underclass.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. I
Speaker 3:I you know, it's making me a little worried.
Speaker 2:So where do we move the goalposts now?
Speaker 1:I think Yeah. I'm so I'm so
Speaker 2:What what what are you gonna
Speaker 1:have Peter and Steve?
Speaker 2:You're on I I I know there's gonna be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like, you can't be satisfied. Me? Yeah. Me?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Permanently dissatisfied.
Speaker 1:Well, part of it's a bit.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:Of course. But I have to provide, like, an alternate Of course. Of course. Opinion. But of course, we have the goalposts.
Speaker 1:Yes. And we do. Sitting in one place. But I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product, this novel experience that has taken the world by storm. How much did we know they only spent you know, a few months on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How much did they actually how many people actually worked on it?
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And what was their total? How much did they spend in total on tokens? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because they're spending some with can
Speaker 2:sort of see that from the GitHub commits. Right?
Speaker 3:Probably Yeah. Mean prefer
Speaker 2:some sort of average.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you can do that. But then I mean, just based off the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like, okay, $51,000 on 2 50,000,000,000 tokens.
Speaker 2:And a lot of those tokens are probably using Cloudbot to do things. Right? Yeah. Not just not just building it. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, that was over how many months? Like, all those tokens were not just on Cloudbot.
Speaker 2:But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions. Like, it's it's it's pretty accessible. I don't know. We need to we need to find a new AGI benchmark.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I think one of the main takeaways I have from this is just that big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing. Right? Yep. Maxim companies are not gonna like talk to each other.
Speaker 3:They're not gonna you're not gonna get OpenAI in in WhatsApp, stuff like this. So it really really puts us think do
Speaker 1:they would go so far as to say, we are not going to allow you to navigate our applications using something like
Speaker 2:I mean, that's literally happening with like, The New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bot.
Speaker 1:But it's different having your local device being effectively used by
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:It is like the computer just using itself.
Speaker 2:At the same time, if OpenAI has the ChatGPT app, right now, if you go to the ChatGPT website and you say, hey, I'm a subscriber to The New York Times, and there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link. Can you open the link and turn it into some bullet points for me? It'll just say, no. No.
Speaker 2:No. I can't go over there. Like, they they said, don't go. I'm not going. Now if I download the ChatGPT app and it's able to run that and maybe The New York Times can't block it, The New York Times still has the ability to, like, sue OpenAI and, like, be a headache.
Speaker 1:Users are basically gonna demand I I agree. My data I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud Yeah. I wanna be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into Yeah. Even if I'm not physically present with the device. I agree.
Speaker 2:I I I
Speaker 1:And so I just I just think it's gonna be a really, really, really tough argument for some of these larger companies Yeah. To say, you can't you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself. I don't know. Like, how do you actually enforce this? Is is Google Drive gonna say, you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?
Speaker 3:If you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only only real solution is to have like actual, I think, deals between these, like, different companies.
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