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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 06/30/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.
Speaker 1:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. We got a great show for you today, folks. It's summer. Every venture capitalist is
Speaker 1:on vacation. They're celebrating the fourth in France.
Speaker 2:We're not. Yes. Literally, everyone is abroad. But we're here in Hollywood, California, the future center of media and entertainment. If we play our cards right.
Speaker 2:We're gonna take you through the five most important stories in technology and business from our perspective, kicking it off with a yeah. Get that gasp ready because there's a dramatic story in wired. OpenAI leadership response to Meta's offers. Someone has broken into our home. That's the title of the article.
Speaker 1:Well, you you could hear show. It was written, but you could hear the pain in Mark Chen's
Speaker 2:voice. Show? I would call him a personal friend. He's a great guy.
Speaker 1:We've had people try to poach our team members
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:With, I wouldn't say similarly sized offers, but meaningful offers.
Speaker 2:Meaningful offers.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, certainly certainly a high stakes, situation. People think of OpenAI as a $350,000,000,000 juggernaut, 90% market share in consumer AI. They're doing great. They're they are the steamroller.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But you forget that Zuck's built different. He has a $100,000,000,000 in free cash flow every year to play with.
Speaker 1:And the vibe shift from two weeks ago, where everyone was like, oh, okay. Zuck acquired scale. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then, oh, he's got Nat and oh, he's got DG.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And and then Sam's like, well, they're we they don't have any of our they're not recruiting any of they're not able to get any of our best people to. It feels like somebody has broken into our house Yep. And stolen, something Stolen something. Very significant.
Speaker 2:So Bill Gurley has the post that defined the story. He says the company that was already planning to lose $7,000,000,000 this year, that's OpenAI, is reevaluating comp to be more aggressive. Put that in perspective, and he's got the yeehaw cowboy hat emoji on. I love it.
Speaker 1:I love I love post post Yeah. You know, retirement bill. Oh, yeah. It's just like, before he would be much more concerned about this. Now he's got the the cowboy hat on.
Speaker 1:He's just
Speaker 2:He's just watching Riding into
Speaker 1:the sunset.
Speaker 2:You know? Podcasting, riding in the sunset, talking about the drama.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have him on soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It'll be fun.
Speaker 1:I saw there there was someone else posted that, and I thought this was accurate. People forget that Zuck yeeted, like, $20,000,000,000. You know, he's willing to lose tens of billions of dollars, and he can
Speaker 2:lose this? On this? The Meta Quest three s Xbox edition? Oh. I don't he would hear.
Speaker 2:I don't think he yeeted 20,000,000,000 on this. I think it was worth every penny. We're gonna be putting this to the test on the show today. Stay tuned. Tyler Cosgrove, our intern, is gonna be trying to beat the first level of Halo in virtual reality.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Anyway. OpenAI has incredible access to capital Yes. But they are losing
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:A obscene amount of money. Meta has incredible access to capital and can deploy it and still generate tens of billions of dollars of net income.
Speaker 2:Yes. And uniquely, Zuck has incredible control over the board and shareholders. And Yeah. And and so he controls enough of the vote that he can't that he can't be he's also just so big, but he can't be the subject of activist shareholder attacks saying, hey. We want earnings per share to go up by a little bit more.
Speaker 2:We'd like our dividends to be a little bit bigger. He's in that early Bezos era where he has the full faith of the shareholders and also the legal control to actually go and spend, you know, tens of billions of dollars on a project that might prevent disruption, which is absolutely in the long term best interest of
Speaker 1:He's not thinking quarter by quarter.
Speaker 2:Exactly. He's he's fulfilling his fiduciary duty just on a different timeline. Yeah. And so the only reason that an investor would be upset if they're like, yeah. Well, I just want the stock to pop this quarter, but he can tell those people that I'm not I'm not building with you in mind.
Speaker 2:So yeah. Yeah. It's a it's it's it's getting spicy. It's some mark on mark violence. Mark Chen
Speaker 1:the stocker today.
Speaker 2:Pull it up. I'm sure
Speaker 1:I'm sure Half a point. The market loves it.
Speaker 2:The market loves it.
Speaker 1:No. Clearly
Speaker 2:What is that? 5,000,000,000?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's 5,000,000,000. Something like that.
Speaker 2:I mean, billion, that'll pay for what? 50 researchers. That's exactly how many you need. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the the who who is telling us the price?
Speaker 1:Priced in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Perfectly priced in. Nikita Beer. We got a trade deal, baby.
Speaker 1:Trade
Speaker 2:deal. Nikita Beer has joined Axe as the head
Speaker 3:of product. Order inbound.
Speaker 2:You probably know him from his viral social apps. He's he's he's been he sold one to Discord. He sold one to Facebook back in the day. Now he didn't even have to sell one. He's just going directly to He's going direct.
Speaker 2:He's joining as the head of product.
Speaker 1:He's cutting out the middleman, which were his start ups.
Speaker 2:He says X is the most important social network in the world. Fully agree. Fantastic app. I'm I'm obsessed. It's where we built this company.
Speaker 2:It's where Internet culture originates and where the world's most influential people convene. Finding my community and building an audience on x has impacted my life more than any single thing. It's unlocked friendships, professional opportunities, and it's even where I met my girlfriend. Nice. Well, I already spend every waking hour on this app.
Speaker 2:I'll now be spending that time helping others unlock the same value, And we'll certainly be leveraging the power of Grok to create hyper relevant timelines and help people understand everything that's happening. Thanks Elon Musk and the X team for inviting me to work on the product that I live
Speaker 1:in every I don't the product, but also poster and residence. Right? They lost Yeps Epstein
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:They did. Or fired him. But they're bringing back a new poster and resident who residence who's gonna be absolutely, you know, dominating the timeline.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think I don't know. It it it's interesting. Like, Nikitas had success iterating very quickly on product and and and developing viral apps. He's also spent enough time in large tech companies like Meta and Discord to, like, probably be able to play you know, there's probably some overhead that still exists even in the leaner x.
Speaker 2:So I wouldn't be surprised that he's actually kind of the perfect person there. And then obviously, the fact that he's so dominant on the platform and obsessed with it and really he's a power user. Probably exactly what you want in a head of product. So I'm bullish. Are you ringing the gong for me?
Speaker 1:Why I have this out?
Speaker 2:Why do you that out?
Speaker 1:Because the rumor is that x backed up the drinks truck.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:This one.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Dominate the gong for Nikita.
Speaker 2:Hit hit the gong. Congratulations to Nikita Beer. He's been on a generational run and it continues as ex's head of product.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna start texting him now when there's bugs. Yeah. Head of product, that means
Speaker 2:hot I actually don't experience that many bugs. I've I've been I I everyone says that there's a ton of bugs.
Speaker 1:You got
Speaker 2:you you any bugs. I think it's a skill issue. I've been having great, but there are a bunch of things that could, you know, be improved with the product. And so I'm sure he'll come up with some interesting ideas, and it'll be a lot of fun to follow. Anyway, in other news, you gotta also ring the gong for Apple.
Speaker 2:Our boy, Tim Cook, he pulled in. He paid for half of his annual salary just by selling a sponsorship in Apple's f one movie for a fictional team, APXGP. Expensify paid an 8 figure sum to become the title sponsor. They also sold sponsorships, Shark Ninja, IWC, the Watch brand. They really built it out, and it makes it look better.
Speaker 2:Think it makes it look better.
Speaker 1:It looks better than looks legit.
Speaker 2:No. It looks super legit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This was interesting. I Yeah. I I knew that, I don't have a lot of insight into how entertainment companies sell sponsorships in shows. I know it's super prevalent.
Speaker 1:Right? You'll see like, okay. Why is this character driving a Hyundai? Yep. It doesn't actually make sense in the context of their life.
Speaker 1:But like, clearly, it's Hyundai.
Speaker 2:It's all over the place. So sometimes, like, when I was running Soylent, there were people who would come to us and just, like they would just be like, we had it on the set that day, and we wanted to throw it in the fridge, and so we did. So you got a spot in this. We were in a Super Bowl ad once because they needed to the cars in the Fast and Furious movie were were driving through Times Square, and they needed a they needed, like, some billboard in the background. So they just put up an ad for our product, a Yeah.
Speaker 2:Virtual billboard. So sometimes it's we need some we need a product that we can clear. Like Yeah. You know, Andrew Huberman is gonna be fine with us with us promoting, you know, Matejina Yerba Mate on here. But if we were at a really, really Hollywood level, like, we would have if we were gonna drink, like, Monster Red
Speaker 1:Bull at a Hollywood level.
Speaker 2:I I know. But, yes, we are at Hollywood. Are But there is a level above where where where, like, you would have to get clearance to use the thing in the actual in the actual film. And so a lot of times, it's like, can we just get quick approval and not have to pay or not have to do any legal stuff? Other times, it's more complicated where they're actually going out and selling it.
Speaker 2:It sounds like they sold this for this.
Speaker 1:But anyway And Polymarket of the day They
Speaker 2:didn't just make money on the sponsorships.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The box They made money on the box office. 100 was it a 140,000,000? They crushed it.
Speaker 2:140,000,000.
Speaker 1:Blew it out. Polymarket had it. If you were looking, they clocked it last week. Yep. It was, the market was, hasn't I guess it's
Speaker 2:The predictions
Speaker 1:were resolved.
Speaker 2:I mean, the the the core predictions were around, like, 55,000,000, I guess, was kind of the middle band here. 50,000,000. And blew that I mean, f one's popular, and it it's it's so have you seen the other f one movies? Of course not. Why am I even asking?
Speaker 2:Ford versus Ferrari, you haven't seen that. Drive, you haven't seen that. Right? No. No.
Speaker 2:But big news, I saw my first UFC event, so I'm catching up. Jordy's gonna see his first movie. I'm gonna see my first UFC event. It'll be great.
Speaker 1:John. Yeah. We had a good crew.
Speaker 2:It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:UFC with with Senra
Speaker 2:The boys.
Speaker 1:And Rob Moore. It's great. And we had a great time. John John asked, who's playing tonight
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On Saturday? I said, well, John, I don't think they're gonna be playing. They're gonna be
Speaker 2:Fighting.
Speaker 1:Punching each other in the face. And Yeah. The knockout on Saturday was Yeah. Spectacular.
Speaker 2:My wife was like, oh, you know how, like, when guys go watch the football game, they, like, toss around the football beforehand? Like, are you guys gonna be, like, punching each other before you watch the punching? And I was wondering if you guys are gonna be like, yeah. Let's just go, like, spar a little bit before we sit down and watch you have to sit. Let's roll.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should do that.
Speaker 1:Next time.
Speaker 2:Anyway, this is actually massive news. Toby Lookie has summed it up well. But so Tesla has the first the world's first autonomous delivery of a car. So this Tesla, I believe it's a model y, drove itself from the Gigafactory in Texas to its new owner's home thirty minutes away crossing parking lots, highways, and the city to reach its new owner. And Toby look, he says, put it on the front page of all the newspapers.
Speaker 2:Well, we printed it. It's in the front page of TBPN. What else do you need, Toby? Come on
Speaker 1:the show. No. This is significant. It's it's costly to get a car delivered. Obviously, if you're getting a car delivered from hundreds of miles away, the gas fees are gonna be high, but, it costs money.
Speaker 1:The other thing, you just got a car recently and the shipper
Speaker 3:damaged
Speaker 1:the car Yes.
Speaker 3:While it
Speaker 1:was being shipped.
Speaker 2:It's itself.
Speaker 1:Now needs to be repaired.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so I'm I'm I'm very interested in what this actually means for, like, structurally for the business of Tesla. We'll have to dig into this. But I wouldn't be surprised if, like, that like, so Tesla's famously, like, cut out the middlemen of, like, dealerships, and I think that's really improved their margins. And I imagine that that delivery is not an insignificant line item for Tesla right now.
Speaker 2:Like, you you order them. They have to put them on trucks. They have to deliver them. There's all this extra all this extra step. And I I feel like delivery fees are around a thousand bucks, maybe.
Speaker 2:It depends on how far you're going, but, like, you have to have multiple people securing the car, traveling with it. It's not just
Speaker 1:Every time I've bought a car
Speaker 2:Hundreds of dollars at least.
Speaker 1:Outside of, you know, a few 100 miles away, it ends up somewhere a thousand
Speaker 2:A thousand bucks. Thousand dollars. Yep. And so and so, yeah, you assume that there's, a 50% margin tacked on that, and it's like a it's a high margin add on.
Speaker 1:Thing here is it's effectively passing on the delivery cost to the consumer because it's really just mileage. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mileage and and energy, and then you get a you get a half charged car, and you're like you're like, okay. I gotta charge it up. But who cares about that? Nobody care nobody cares about And so Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I wonder I mean, this this should be, you know, somewhat material. I just wonder how material. It might be like, okay. It drops their COGS by point o o 1%, but it certainly is exciting. And you could imagine we're one step closer to, like, push a button and buy a car and it just arrives, which is very, very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Finger hovering over the button. I with that one, I wanna get one just but I'll be waiting for the for the Naturally. The the naturally aspirated V 12 or v 12, yeah, version. Wait.
Speaker 2:As soon as they roll
Speaker 1:that out. Coming.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It'd be fantastic. Anyway, in other news
Speaker 1:Your your naturally aspirated v 12 Tesla is getting delivered.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And it's just getting noise complaints along the way because AI is just joy riding it, doing pulling over to do burnouts.
Speaker 2:Yes. Mean, you heard Doug DeGro's riff on electric cars, he says that they're technically naturally aspirated. They don't have turbochargers. They don't have superchargers. How are the batteries cooled?
Speaker 2:Naturally. All the air flows through the car naturally. There's no turbochargers. Therefore, it is a natural I mean,
Speaker 1:yeah. Xiaomi Xiaomi is not far. Right? I I posted a picture today. Their new car is just almost a one to one copy Yeah, they're in the journal.
Speaker 1:For Asanguay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the news is Apparently
Speaker 1:it's selling very well. They've got over 200,000 non refundable orders.
Speaker 2:Not just over 200,000. This is the electric SUV. Yeah. The new Xiaomi. 289,000.
Speaker 2:And that's not just so far. That's in the first hour.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's a lot. Solid.
Speaker 2:Potential Well,
Speaker 1:just to show that we respect business, I'm gonna hit the seis gone. Congratulations
Speaker 2:to the folks over at Xiaomi for ripping off the Purosangue success so successfully. That's on b three. Anyway, the last top story we have today is from Luke Metro. He says, I know a four zero nine evaluator hates to see this coming because Robinhood has tokenized stocks and everything else. And so now there are private company stock tokens, and they're shouting out OpenAI and SpaceX.
Speaker 2:But Luke Metro works at Anderol, obviously, has some stock options. And, he's getting ready to Anderol is to trade the Von Robin potentially. Who knows?
Speaker 1:In in the the pipeline. Yeah. In the pipeline, I would imagine. Yeah. This this is interesting.
Speaker 1:I mean, we had, Ken from Republic on last week also building his
Speaker 2:own private company. This was coming or something, or maybe there's some underlying market structure bill. But this feels like it's a wave that everyone's doing it all at once. Right?
Speaker 1:Part of it is that this administration has been extremely crypto friendly. Yep. Seems like everything not everything, but most things are fair game now. Yep. So I think a lot of companies saw this coming and have just been racing to deliver new product experiences.
Speaker 1:It is funny to think about I I guess these, the the SpaceX and OpenAI tokens are gonna be available to European, Robinhood users only. And so it is funny
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 1:think
Speaker 2:about When is
Speaker 1:Europe more Europeans
Speaker 4:Liberal day trading
Speaker 1:OpenAI and SpaceX shares? I mean,
Speaker 2:could be the best place for the beer and yield. Currently rolling out on the on
Speaker 1:the the Robinhood chain, so they're launching their own l two Interesting. With Arbitrum.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm interested to
Speaker 2:see I saw they cleared yeah. They cleared a an exchange of OpenAI tokens today or OpenAI stock. Like like, the first transaction process it. Yeah. The first the first transaction's gone through.
Speaker 2:Luke Metra had another funny post that was like, I just hope that my Andoril stock is valued at like the Robinhood DGN retail trader valuation and not the price that Founderspace. This is
Speaker 1:very funny. That's good.
Speaker 2:Anyway oh, sorry. Were you blocking the camera? Anyway, let's go through some some of the deep dives. I wanna I wanna dig into that Wired article that was burning up the timeline over the weekend, and then we'll we'll read through some of The Wall Street Journal coverage of The List, AI's secret file of geniuses. But first, we have our first intern challenge of the day.
Speaker 1:We The first.
Speaker 5:We procured.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There might
Speaker 1:be Even when you finish this, Tyler, you're
Speaker 2:not you're not safe. We we we were we we purchased and and received a Meta Quest three s Xbox edition. Very nice foil. Look at that foil. This is a nice product.
Speaker 2:So this is the latest and greatest out of Meta for their virtual reality headsets. And the challenge is to beat the first level of Halo complete edition, Halo CE. This is Halo one. Tyler, you've never played Halo at all?
Speaker 6:I've never played Halo.
Speaker 2:Okay. But you've played first person shooters?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:So you should be able to do it, you think?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:100%. So I asked ChatGPT. Team deathmatch. The the the speed run world record for Pillar Of Autumn, which is the first level in the first Halo game is like three minutes, but you have to like cheat and go through the walls and stuff. An experienced player can do it in like fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2:First time person ever playing should be able to do it in between twenty and thirty minutes. So for this, let's give you let's give you an hour. If you can do An hour?
Speaker 6:I was thinking like twelve minutes.
Speaker 2:Let okay.
Speaker 1:Let's keep Best of luck.
Speaker 2:Let's give you let's give you forty five minutes. Okay. If you can do it in under forty five minutes, you will get to keep this.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:So can we get a timer?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Start with the timer.
Speaker 2:So it is it is 11:20. Let's give you forty minutes. So if you can do it before noon. So go get it and start. Okay.
Speaker 2:Time
Speaker 1:starts now. He's hustling. He's hustling for good reason. Alright. Have fun, Tyler.
Speaker 2:So the problem is that the level takes like five minutes but unboxing and setting that thing up, think it's gonna take like forty minutes. That's the real challenge. Godspeed, Tyler. But Tyler will be working on that during the during the show and good luck to him.
Speaker 1:Anyways, back to the timeline. Yep. A by the name of Toucan says, nerds is quoting, on the left is Ronaldo, another post. Real Madrid spent 80,000,000 to sign him from Man United. On the right is Jia Hu Yu, which I am struggling to pronounce.
Speaker 1:Meta paid a 100,000,000 to sign him from OpenAI. And Toucan says, nerds have been complaining that athletes are overpaid for decades. Finally, the 9 figure nerd trading market has emerged. Take that LeBron Jameson.
Speaker 2:LeBron Jameson. Doesn't even know his name. He's fantastic. Well, you know, if you're, if you're on a hiring spree, gotta get everyone in your organization corporate cards. Head over to ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Anyway, let's dig into this OpenAI leadership. The OpenAI
Speaker 1:This was article was all this news was kind of coming out Yep. Over the weekend. There's no there's no decency anymore. Can't even take a summer weekend.
Speaker 2:Can't even send an email to a 3,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired. Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head to head with social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by Wired, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's super intelligence lab. I have a visceral feeling right now as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something, Chen wrote. Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by.
Speaker 2:I mean, this makes sense. You're like, you need to you need to tell the troops that, like, you know, we're prepared to go on the counter attack. Like, we got attacked, but we're ready to go back. What's interesting is, like, is, like, I don't think that don't think that Meta is necessarily gonna try and go eat ChatGPT's lunch. I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber, and he was saying like, you know, he was kind of reiterating like, never bet against Zuck.
Speaker 2:Like, he's working on an open source model, but a lot of it is is more of this, like, b to b applied AI necessarily than trying to go and and and disrupt ChatGPT because Google's already running that playbook. Like Yeah. Mark can see that and see that, like, what happens when you're a trillion dollar company and you roll out a basically a direct clone of the ChatGPT app. It's like, yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a numb in a notional terms. Like, I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has, like, a 100,000 user or a 100,000,000 users and, like, lots of five star reviews, but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:And so when you pull someone off the street and you say, what do use for AI? They say chat. They don't even say ChatGPT anymore. Yeah. So dominant.
Speaker 2:And so I think Mark knows that he shouldn't necessarily try and go after that, but he should be going after the next thing and the next next thing and have a model that he can Yep. Pipe into all sorts of different features within the meta ecosystem. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. The crazy thing is there there's not it doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid of a a talent raid of this magnitude. Right? We we covered Ken Griffin raiding Enron
Speaker 3:It was after. Post
Speaker 1:the collapse. Yep. Right? Yep. Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox PARC in in 1979 in the early eighties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like was
Speaker 2:kind of a downswing.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. It wasn't it wasn't Yeah. It wasn't anything of this magnitude nor nor was it, hey, we're gonna come in and just give you these like nine figure off, you know, packages and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's very common for a start up to to be able to pull people from the big legacy company that's kind of sclerotic.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, we've seen a lot of people that were at Apple or Google or or Microsoft or Xerox, and then they went to Google, and then they went to Meta, and then they went to OpenAI. I mean, Brett Taylor, who's the who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI, was the CTO of Meta. Right? And it's like, okay. He clearly just wants to be in, like, the hot thing, and he's he's like a startup guy almost.
Speaker 2:And I I believe he was at Google before because he worked he yeah. Yeah. He redid Google Maps. Yeah. And so, like, the like, the story of Bret Taylor is really, like, the default, I think, for most, like, startup people.
Speaker 2:It's like, he's at he's he's early at Google. He works with Paul Buchheit on Gmail. He works on Google Maps. Then he goes over to Meta, CTO there. Then he goes to OpenAI as chairman of the board there.
Speaker 2:And it's like, he is a he's a startup guy. And so he's always riding like the new wait. You usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One one other some other precedent here in 2011 in 2010 and 2011 Mhmm. Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google. Yep. So Facebook had crossed half a billion users.
Speaker 1:They were trend in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And they went heavy into Google. So they went and got high performers from ads, search, mobile on the Android side Yeah. And and some of the social product people from Google plus. And Zach did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went in with these sort of heavy, heavy, heavy comp packages and was very successful. Google had to respond and increase comp in in a number of different
Speaker 2:roles. Did they poach any designers? Any people that use figma.com? Any people that think bigger or build faster? Anyone that you know?
Speaker 2:Because Figma helps design and development teams to create products together. It would be a different place existed back then. But fortunately, you can go to figma.com.
Speaker 1:You can think bigger. You can build faster.
Speaker 2:Anyway, what do you think of the the the buzzword super intelligence? This whole they like, they've they've really rebranded it. Is it a goalpost shifting I think
Speaker 1:he's smart. I think he he poached Yeah. The the the word superintelligence.
Speaker 2:Think it's mine.
Speaker 1:Mine now.
Speaker 2:It's mine now. Because
Speaker 1:And he's not saying and he's not saying the safe superintelligence team. He's just saying
Speaker 2:superintelligence. Implies Reckless Safe superintelligence? Implies reckless superintelligence. I like that. But it's funny because, you know, everyone was focused on, like, AI as a buzzword, then it was AGI, then it would now it's superintelligence.
Speaker 2:But, like, you know, within our group, like, we all think, like, superintelligence is kinda the old thing. Like, everyone like, me and you, like, we we we know the secrets to this stuff. Like like, it it's kind of it's kind of already priced in. The real killers, they're focused on the next thing. You you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Right? Giga intelligence. That's the one that people are getting. Right? Really?
Speaker 2:The the real killers are like, yeah. Well, like Yeah. AGI is basically here. Super intelligence is basically here. But giga intelligence, that's the one we're working on.
Speaker 2:Because we're gonna need a new buzzword because we're burning through buzzwords and increasing rate. And so we're just we we we we just steamrolled the touring test, completely blasted through AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you got, you know, super intelligence. We're gonna solve this buzzword. We're gonna churn through this in a year or two. We gotta start working on Giga intelligence now.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is the way.
Speaker 1:Anyway Start adopting it.
Speaker 2:Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers adding, we've been more proactive than ever before. We're recalibrating comp, and we're scooping out and we're scooping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent. Still, even as OpenAI's even even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. While I'll fight for to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others, he wrote.
Speaker 1:It's such a brutal dynamic if you're Mark Chen Yeah. If you're Sam because not everybody at OpenAI is getting poached. But presumably, Zuck is working with all the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at OpenAI, who do we really want. Yep. And then going to them and making the maxed out offers.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, it it it you can't like the the team dynamic, if you have a few researchers on a team and somebody gets know, somebody's potentially getting poached by Meta and you say to retain them, you're like, okay, we're gonna give you this sort of massive incremental grant and the other people on their team are gonna be like, wait, well, is that my market value? Facebook or I I didn't I I turned down. I never took the meeting or whatever. So you should pay me the same thing too. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm loyal.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't don't you wanna pay I'm a missionary. Yeah. I'm a missionary.
Speaker 2:Why are you paying the mercenaries more? You should pay you should pay them the missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries. Rough. For sure. Good all.
Speaker 2:Anyway. Let me tell about
Speaker 1:And and and no. The the other the other thing is is it creates this like really nasty incentive Yeah. To basically be like, oh, yeah. You know, you maybe got hit up by a meta recruiter like many months ago. And you're gonna be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, they reached out to me and suddenly they're like hovering around you Yeah. Like being like, alright. What's it gonna take?
Speaker 2:What's it gonna take? We really
Speaker 1:don't wanna lose you. Yeah. It is a
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's crazy game theory. Like every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory.
Speaker 1:And then timing that timing that with
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:With this like summer break that I guess OpenAI was saying like, hey, everybody should take the week of the fourth off or not the week of the fourth,
Speaker 2:but Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's good. Anyways, you wanted to say something more important.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, you know, if you wanna see who your high performers are, just look in the linear. Right? Linear is purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
Speaker 1:If Zuck were able to gain access to OpenAI's Linear, it would be illegal, but Yeah. It would also tell him tell him a
Speaker 2:lot. Yeah. You don't wanna do anything illegal, Zuck. You wanna be on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove continuously.
Speaker 2:Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So the news comes as competition for for top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100,000,000 signing bonuses to some OpenAI staffers according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. So this this $100,000,000 signing bonus, this just got baked into the lexicon. But I was listening to Dylan Patel on Jordan Schneider's China Talk podcast.
Speaker 2:It's actually transistor radio, but it goes out on China Talk anyway. And Dylan Patel was saying that that might be that might be a kind of a game of telephone a little bit in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making a $100,000,000 over a number of years in stock based on appreciation, but he was very skeptical that anyone was getting a 100,000,000 on day one without any sort of strings attached for, like, a true signing bonus. So I don't know how real that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember that the
Speaker 2:Zurich team
Speaker 1:came out and said the Zurich team explicitly said we didn't get it.
Speaker 2:But I know. I know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The way that he phrased it, it
Speaker 2:Could have been more. Clearly we're getting No. No. No. You know, something.
Speaker 2:No. I I I I do think that that the the round numbers are are easy to latch on to. Like, why is Mamdani talking about billionaire specifically? He doesn't have a problem with 999 millionaires because, like, that that's, like, not easy to grasp. Like, people latch on to round numbers.
Speaker 2:A 100,000,000 is so much. A billionaire is so much, and it's easy to it's easy to quantify. And so the 100,000,000, if it was 80,000,000, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100,000,000. And so so I I I don't know I don't know how real that is. Maybe that was thrown out as total package, and then it got kind of telephoned into, well, you know, they it's basically a signing bonus because they they got the deal on the on the as soon as they signed, but they do have some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some way.
Speaker 2:But there's a bunch of creative accounting that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like a $100,000,000 of value, which is not far off from, okay, what what would it take? You know, Johnny, I've got, you know, a huge offer to go to OpenAI. And it was structured in an interesting way with, like, an acquisition and, you know, but he got well, it was a few points. Yeah. We were it was a few it was a few percentage points.
Speaker 2:And when you think about the scale of OpenAI and the scale of Johnny Ives legacy, like, yeah. Like, what would it take to get someone like that's a joint he's a founding designer, basically. So it's a couple couple percentage points. So multiple sources of OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number to Wired. So I don't know because they they kind of benefits, like, both sides to to have that number out there.
Speaker 2:It's kind of unclear who would who would really wanna confirm that and then what the nature of
Speaker 1:these things were. The other thing that's interesting though was just interested going is if you're working in OpenAI, and let's say their top researchers have on average a $100,000,000 in OpenAI shares that they're
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like the truly top people. Yeah. And then you get an offer that's like a $20,000,000 signing bonus, but it's, you know, it's kind of paid out over time and that or or they can claw it back if you don't stay past a certain date. And you're kind of looking at it and be like, okay, I'm already a Scenti and I'm getting an offer to like go to a new team that I don't know if I'm gonna like and it's and it's unclear like, the vision is not quite as clear at meta.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Right? I'm joining the super intelligence team. It's gonna be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources. That's exciting.
Speaker 1:But it is a big switch if you're already happily investing out tens of millions of dollars. So it would make sense that these $20,000,000, you know, if it's $20,000,000 Yeah. I can see that. If it's a $100,000,000 for the for the top, top, top people, it makes total sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, like, what was the I mean, the the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably, like, way over a 100,000,000 to him personally based on his ownership in that company, which was acquired. And so, like, that number doesn't feel impossible. I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it based on based on what Dylan
Speaker 1:was talking about. There's just enough precedent here that, again, going back to Yeah. Zuck rating Google
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In in twenty ten, twenty eleven, he was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid level engineers just because he was like, I need a really good ad product. Yeah. I wanna make my ad product great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, have you seen the why am I even asking this? Have you seen the BlackBerry movie? Of course not. But the but in the BlackBerry movie, there's this whole story about they go and and they try and poach someone and then it was controversial because they like backdated some stock options for someone to basically give them more, like, cash, but without having like the the the initial impact of that cash.
Speaker 2:It's kinda interesting. But I mean, to poach top talent, it's expensive. It kind of benefits both maybe. I mean, I don't know. Like, on on the meta side, do they want does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up to a $100,000,000 out there?
Speaker 2:Like, maybe because that that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh, wow. Mark is really taking this seriously. I should I should talk to Meta's recruiting team. I should actually hear them out. And then if they wind up coming back to me with a $50,000,000 offer or a $10,000,000 offer, like, you know, we can discuss that and I can see it and and they can evaluate how much I'm worth.
Speaker 2:They can make an offer, but at least it got the conversation started. But I don't know. There was also the theory that Sam Altman put that $100,000,000 number out in order to kind of, like, poison the well. Because if if Mark comes to you and says, hey, you're a top AI AI researcher. Come over here.
Speaker 2:And then the top AI the AI researcher says like, yeah, great. I hear I hear a $100,000,000 is the going rate. And Mark's like, no. No. No.
Speaker 2:That's like fake news that that Sam was spreading. Like, we're actually paying 15. Then you're
Speaker 1:like, well, no. I was I was hoping for a 100.
Speaker 2:But it's
Speaker 1:kind of both Machiavellian people and Yeah.
Speaker 2:You see, it could be like 40 chess on both sides. I don't know. Yeah. Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort and has repeatedly and most unsuccessfully tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with with, comp focused packages Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI, Google, OpenAI and Google.
Speaker 2:Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta, one source tells Wired. They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky's the limit, which is funny because, yeah, of course, like, Anthropic's, like, so missionary driven. Like, it's gonna be very hard to to to go to Anthropic and research scientists and be like, ads. Better ads. They're like, we're building God here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway $100,000,000 is a $100,000,000.
Speaker 2:Not for not for anthropic guys. Anthropic guys are true believers. They don't care. What's a $100,000,000 in a post scarcity world? Doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:You wanna be on the you wanna be on this on the the post scarcity train. Chen's no
Speaker 1:is so is so telling though, like how you how you like sort of like try to, you know, pinpoint like Zuck's views on AI. Yeah. He's like, I'm not even gonna bother with those people. Anthropic. Not a culture fit.
Speaker 1:Too AGI pilled.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 1:Senator, we sell ads.
Speaker 2:Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax superintelligence, go to numeralhq.com. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with superintelligence for sales tax.
Speaker 1:The official sales tax Superintelligence. Provider for Lucy.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's true. Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company, where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for Meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off.
Speaker 2:It's not nice to pressure people and potentially the most important decision. Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a C suite executive. This is weird. Where's the where's the end of this quote? That's odd.
Speaker 2:I'd like to be able to talk you through it, and I know all about their offers. The remarks come as OpenAI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding eighty hours a week. OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge. Let's give it up for OpenAI's grind set. It's really fantastic.
Speaker 2:Also, extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4. Like, I'm normally pretty anti taking time off, but if you're gonna go really hard on a particular holiday, make it July 4. You know? Yeah. Give a week off around July 4.
Speaker 2:I love it. Was I I was posting, you know, the over I need a poly market on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4. Do you think it'll happen?
Speaker 1:I actually think they're a 100% should be a poly market on that.
Speaker 2:Right? It's kind of fifty fifty. Right? Like, is definitely locked in, very busy, probably not a lot of time off. He sees that he knows from this that OpenAI is down this week.
Speaker 2:So that's probably, like, really encouraging to be like, I wanna go harder this week. They're off. Yeah. My my At at the same time like, it's one of the greatest pieces of content he
Speaker 1:puts Think about how hard Zach is going right now.
Speaker 2:Go harder.
Speaker 1:Week of July 4. And just don't get outworked by him. Yes. Just don't get outworked by Zach. This week is gonna be tough.
Speaker 2:He's in year 20. What excuses do you have? You're you're three months into your startup.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Come on.
Speaker 1:Go harder.
Speaker 2:Go harder. I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation. Another leader at the company wrote. If you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and wanna support you.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:While OpenAI's leadership is taking Meta's efforts seriously, Chen also said that the company is getting too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short term comparison with the competition. The sentiment is backed by a former OpenAI staff who worked closely with Altman and and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements announcements every few months. This was a really this was a key to their strategy was like,
Speaker 1:cool. Buzzy announcement ready. If the competition has anything, just drop a
Speaker 2:Oh, Google IO is happening? Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called IO the day before or something like that? Like, we're like, oh, the Google's announcing the new Gemini. Let's just steamroll them in the timeline that Oh, deep seek.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd love to introduce you deep research.
Speaker 2:Like, I mean, it's it's masterful. And like but that's the game you gotta play. That's the game on the field. Like, I I I think No.
Speaker 1:He he really is.
Speaker 2:Aggressive, but he's not doing anything wrong.
Speaker 1:He he is up there with Elon in terms of Totally. Creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Real Yes. Product value Yes. To justify the hype that he that was being sold Yep. You know, six months ago, basically. So like staying on the bleeding edge.
Speaker 2:And this is why the anti tech people hate hate him and Elon so much because they're like they're like, it's overhyped. It's not useful. And then like a year later, it's like there's Tesla cars everywhere. The rockets are landing and like 90% of people are eating every day. Tens of billions of vehicles monthly.
Speaker 2:Okay. So it was real, but also he was overpromising, but he delivered at a at a higher level than anyone in human history. And that's just like, it's it those two things are in in in conflict. So someone said this, Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey or whatever. P T Barnum.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot in a a human in a suit acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing, which is just it it just breaks people's brains. Anyway, we need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to to compute. A lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year into intelligence. Chen wrote, this is the main quest and it's important to remember that skirmishes with Meta are the side quest.
Speaker 2:Last but not least, I'll be around this week recharged and ready to go pound for pound. DM me anytime. I love it. He's ready to fired up. Get him the ring.
Speaker 1:I love talking with Mark. Yeah. That was a that was a fun conversation.
Speaker 2:Also, I mean, guys in shape. Let's get him in the let's get him in the octagon with Zuck. Mark on Mark violence. Let's see it.
Speaker 1:I mean, if if there was a pound for pound list for the top AI researcher in the he's in the conversation.
Speaker 2:He's in the conversation. It's amazing. It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process especially when he has had to make tough decisions Altman wrote in on Slack in response to Chen's message. Very grateful to we have him as our leader.
Speaker 1:I mean, these it can't be overstated making these decisions. Right? Yeah. One of your best people comes comes to you and says It's hard. Hey.
Speaker 1:Yep. I'm really happy here at OpenAI. Yeah. I have $80,000,000 of stock. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was just offered a 150 over the next year and it's highly lick or over the next few years. It's highly liquid. Yep. Meaning that I can market sell it quarterly forever.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And meanwhile, you're going through this for profit conversion.
Speaker 2:Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all?
Speaker 1:I mean, obviously
Speaker 2:What you I mean, like, if you want to let's say you want to buy a $50,000,000 house and you have a $100,000,000 in like illiquid open AI. Like, is that gonna be hard at all? I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, private wealth management are gonna be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares. Sure. You're only gonna have to put down 10%.
Speaker 1:Sure. But but meanwhile, the company's failing to go through a for profit conversion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I
Speaker 1:mean, Satya has taken 20% off the top.
Speaker 2:I mean that applies.
Speaker 1:No. I'm just I'm
Speaker 2:just saying Supplies like a a small haircut. I I would say.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying there there is always
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There is always gonna be a tension of somebody having massive wealth but not having greenbacks. Yeah. There's always gonna be that tension. Yeah. And people seeing that that Meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can constantly trade in and out of it. And it's ultimately just it's stable. Right? So
Speaker 2:I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. Multi asset investing. Industry leading yield.
Speaker 1:Old fashioned stocks.
Speaker 2:Trusted by millions. Who knows? Maybe they'll have open AI soon. Anything's apparently Anything's possible. You Yeah.
Speaker 2:We should we should, you know, Robinhood has, you know, the the tokens around private companies. Maybe we should tokenize nonprofits. I wanna be able to trade, you know, PETA. You know? Let me let me let me go long PETA.
Speaker 2:Let me get some let me get some leverage on that. I want some Leverage please. Levered options on PETA. Look at Tyler right now. Get on the
Speaker 1:Tyler cam.
Speaker 2:How how are we doing
Speaker 6:on I think I'm in the right mission.
Speaker 2:Oh, you did it? No way. Fifteen minutes left. Let's see it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. I can't believe you got it
Speaker 2:set up so fast. That's amazing. Okay. That's honestly He's sitting at he's sitting at twenty six minutes so far.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, have fun in there, Tyler. I just
Speaker 2:look over and I just didn't realize he was on It's amazing. I think he's actually playing it. This is crazy. Because my number one complaint with with the Quest was that it just takes a long time to set up And I think that it caught cause a
Speaker 1:lot of intentionally did this challenge
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:And made it seem like, oh, I'm gonna happily give away my my new Yeah. My VR Xbox. Yeah. And thinking that there's no way he could finish in Yeah. But now now he's I think he's gonna
Speaker 2:do He's
Speaker 1:speed running.
Speaker 2:Speed running. Pillar of Autumn, it's happening. Anyway, Swiggs has the story. He's breaking it down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some good highlights here. The Mark Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mark the Mark
Speaker 1:War has resulted in going from, oh, the good people don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something. One week company shut down, question mark, question mark. I mean, I was going back and forth here. I I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that, hey, people already need a break. We shouldn't have them walking around the office.
Speaker 2:It it with the way they were writing it, it felt like this had been on the table for months because the company has been working really hard launching a ton of stuff. Yeah. And it seems like if it it it just seems like an odd an odd choice to if you're in the middle of this mark v mark war, that that would be what you choose to do would be a one week company shutdown. But I don't know. Maybe.
Speaker 2:I I I I I'm just I'm not a 100% that, like, the the the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown. It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time. Anyway, this third point is very interesting. Pivoting product launch calendar to AGI race, especially when Stargate comes online. Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online, and that should be a big like the biggest the biggest cluster ever and unlock even even more maybe pre training scale, but there's a question about how how important that is and maybe you can do more reinforcement learning in a more distributed way.
Speaker 2:So I don't know. Also, like, it's not exactly like Zuk is GPU poor, so I don't know I don't know how big of a deal it is, the Stargate thing. We'll see. But number four, for some reason, Meta is ignoring Anthropic. Don't care about safety.
Speaker 2:If this is true, of course. The Anthropic point was very funny. Anyway, there's other posts in here that we should cover. Satwik Singh says, what Sam never understood was that Zuckerberg torched 20,000,000,000 over VR headsets with Nintendo Wii graphics and didn't even flinch.
Speaker 1:Didn't even flinch.
Speaker 2:You know what's so funny? Like, those the the Nintendo Wii graphics thing, that was like that was like three months. And then after that, it was he was doing that that Lex interview in the metaverse. Did you ever see that? Where it's like, it is like photo real immediately.
Speaker 1:We got a wild demo at MetaHQ Yeah. Of all the new products, and we were blown away. I'm not even sure. I don't think we can
Speaker 2:say much about in like the abstract. But but yeah. I mean, none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics. But but but, I mean, that that was that one picture was like iconic and kind of like, it felt like, oh, this is kind of a step back in terms of
Speaker 1:Well, many more people saw that picture than actually use the product. Yeah. And so.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because there were plenty of there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics. Like the hero game for the for the quest when it came out was Robo Recall, which looked super sci fi and just looked awesome. And it was it was it was great. And there were a bunch of other games.
Speaker 2:But, yes, I mean, the point is is that, like, Mark is totally ready to spend $20,000,000,000 on a big project if he thinks it's valuable. And here he clearly does, and so he's going after it. Anyway, similar founder led company that's building amazing AI stuff. Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. We've had Owen on the show before.
Speaker 2:He's been on
Speaker 1:Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in bake offs. One on
Speaker 2:g Let's go. So if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn.
Speaker 1:I'm saying this, they're not saying this, but I'm gonna say this is the official the official AI CX tool of a both AI safety and being AGI PILT.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Because Anthropic uses
Speaker 2:Oh, really? No way. There we go. Okay. Awesome.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sure Anthropic will love that. They're like, we said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these
Speaker 1:the technology's data is two five thousand You can say it's the
Speaker 2:official way over their skis on this endorsement.
Speaker 1:The official CX agent.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Rune had an interesting take here diving into the the why the these trade deals are so not really trade deals, but these poachings can be so can be so damaging. And he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms. We're gonna debate whether or not his point is well taken. He, of course, works at OpenAI and has for a number of years. Rune says, intellectual property by default is a market failure.
Speaker 2:Single, well informed, talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions of dollars of tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. The athlete metaphor is somewhat wrong. In industries where patents and such aren't viable market participant aren't viable, market participants will drastically under invest in r and d efforts due to IP seepage just like the I drink your milkshake milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights. There is a compelling pro consumer case for non competes. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non competes. Interesting. I mean, the the the immediate impact of non competes in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Rune, which is interesting. The other question is
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting you'd have to move AI out of California.
Speaker 2:Oh, people would then. May maybe. Or they or they
Speaker 1:would choose to move really want to use noncompliance Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go where they can be enforced. Right?
Speaker 2:But then as a historically impossible. As an AI researcher, you'd say, I definitely don't wanna leave California
Speaker 1:because I you're gonna get a much better deal here. School here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. My my my question is, like, I've always been interested in, like, why can, you know, like, the consumer packaged goods industry, like, patent, a tab on a can for twenty five years and, like, Walt Disney can own, like, the shape of mouse ears for, like, eighty years, but, like, Google can't own the transformer for, like, even a minute? Like, I get that it's, like, some sort of fundamental discovery, but I've always been interested in how little IP works in technology. So
Speaker 1:that's interesting. Is is a a byproduct of hacker culture
Speaker 2:The culture?
Speaker 1:Sort of, like, positive some culture of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you think that would change if there were $10,000,000,000 on the table.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's a culture of, you know
Speaker 2:So I agree with you, and I'll give you an example. So so pull to refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee. Like a Twitter UX UI developer built that built that user interaction, and then Twitter had a patent
Speaker 1:on it. Lauren Brickter. Yes. American soft software developer
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Best known for creating pull
Speaker 2:To refresh.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The pull to refresh interaction.
Speaker 2:So we created that that that design pattern and then he had a patent on it. Twitter owned the patent and Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said, you know, we're not gonna enforce this. And then it got baked into Instagram and it's it's now natively in iOS and it's in in all of, you know, it's basically a one button to like
Speaker 1:If you're if you're true if you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day. True.
Speaker 2:Like, little slots. Now we've actually moved past that. We've moved into endless scroll where you actually don't need like, if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh. You're just keep you just keep scrolling to the bottom. So so we're actually post pull to refresh, and now we're in the endless scroll.
Speaker 2:But endless scroll, I believe, was developed by Pinterest, and they had a patent on it for a while, I think. I might be wrong here. But Yeah. But endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned, which is just odd to me. And then and then there's the other question of like, Coca Cola has been able to keep the the the, you know, the formula as a trade secret for like a hundred years or something.
Speaker 2:And it's just odd that that tech companies can't seem to do either. They can't keep the secrets.
Speaker 1:And you can have trade secrets. Right? It's not like an OpenAI researcher can go over and say, here's here's a bunch of code. Let's roll let's roll it out. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It it it's basically their the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company Yeah. For a certain amount
Speaker 2:of time. Tasset value of knowing what works and what doesn't. And so the my my, like, naive read on this is that if you had had a top tier OpenAI researcher at Meta during the LAMA four build out, that researcher would have said, hey, don't focus on pre training scale as much. We need to get a reasoning model out, and we need to focus on RL and post training much more. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Much more. And and when you talk to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about DeepSeek and how DeepSeek was was was doing all these innovations and, like, moving to floating point eight, like, smaller smaller basically, smaller numbers storing the weights. And he was like, oh, yeah. But OpenAI was doing that, like, two years ago. DeepSeek just open sourced it.
Speaker 2:And so it's like the world found out if you found out the best practices from DeepSeek because they open sourced it, like, you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been poaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier.
Speaker 1:So two things could be Yeah. Could be happening here. One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and try to recreate some of the magic and and get a, you know, leading a leading model or or set of models out of it that he can use in a bunch of different ways that we've discussed. Or none of this matters and Rune is is baiting baiting Zach into just overpay.
Speaker 2:This is like The 40
Speaker 1:chest is like, oh, yeah. This is they're getting They're taking everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:No. I I I don't I don't I don't necessarily believe that because I I did talk to Rune like years ago. And I was like, but like, is this gonna commoditize? Like is the foundation model layer gonna commoditize? And he was like, they're like, there are like the secret to OpenAI in many ways is like the Thielian secrets.
Speaker 2:Like they understand things at a lower level that other people just don't, and so that will compound and stay at advantage. And he hadn't even predicted the dominance of the consumer, and like the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end consumer AI that's incredibly valuable. But just on the research side just on the research side, like, they can stay ahead just by understanding, like, the secrets of what works and what doesn't. Yeah. But it's interesting.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the new is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Next level. Next level. It will I mean, we, you know, we have a light guest booking today.
Speaker 2:But, you know, we're we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. We can continue. We can we can do go over to the Wall Street Journal because in the exchange section, there's a fantastic article related to this. It says, it's known as The List and it's a secret file of geniuses. And I'm looking at this.
Speaker 2:It says, Mishka Belenko, Yu Zhong, Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list. Lucas Byers on this, the new guy. It says, Jordy Hayes, John Kugen, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, couple other folks. But, you know, it's just the usual people that we know. Anyway, it's known as The List and it's a secret file of geniuses.
Speaker 2:Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them, even if it costs ungodly sums. We love ungodly sums. We should be ringing the gong more this this this episode. All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about the list.
Speaker 2:A a compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together. Lucas Beyer works in multimodal vision research, which Tyler broke down for us.
Speaker 1:Can can you imagine if if if Zac spun up basically, like a hot or not style tool that just like pins pin pins two researchers together. Yeah. Like, he makes other researchers, like, just do the test. And then just puts out a list of, these are the this is the the top 50 people.
Speaker 2:Yep. This is so good. So Lucas Beyer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation creation of awesomeness. Yuzhong specializes Very
Speaker 1:Reddit coded. But he's a poster on X
Speaker 2:as well. Yeah. Of course. Yuzhong specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers. Misha Belenko is an expert in large scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and hill climb hiking and skiing, or as he puts it on his website, applying hill climbing search and gradient descent algorithms to real world domains.
Speaker 2:That's very cute. The recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They also have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their twenties and thirties, and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power, and their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued.
Speaker 2:The chief executives of tech goliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial
Speaker 1:It is funny. Some of the, you know, some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs because how do you compete That's true. How do you compete when, you know, historically you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest? You could have come to them with a ridiculous, what what would be very ridiculous for a VC which is I will spin up a new company, not ridiculous, it happens, but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways. Spin up a new company, I'll give you 200 on a billion Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And you can take 10,000,000 personally and secondary Yeah. Immediately. Yep. And that is no longer even that compelling of an offer. If the odds of actually winning are low and you just want the most access to compute and be Traded.
Speaker 1:Absolute banger ripping. Was Tyler's handy
Speaker 2:Oh, Tyler, how we doing?
Speaker 6:I I I'm in like some kind of maze right now.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. You lost.
Speaker 6:No. I lost already?
Speaker 2:I think he lost. It's past noon. Or or or or It's past noon. Wait. Woah.
Speaker 2:Ben, what you got on the timer?
Speaker 1:I got four minutes still
Speaker 2:on the timer. Four minutes still. Okay. Well, let's give him another four minutes. You better finish this.
Speaker 2:Surprised that but I bet you I bet you if we roll the tape, it took him thirty minutes to set up. And he's and he's actually on track. I bet he's gonna I bet he's gonna finish the pillar bottom, the level in normal time, like twenty or thirty minutes. But the setup was because I only gave him ten minutes for the setup. Mogged.
Speaker 2:Anyway Mogged. This is this Who is
Speaker 1:looking reality of of pledging, man. Pledging to be a technology brother.
Speaker 2:Podcast. Nobody is in this escalating arms race is chasing the prize recruits quite like Zuckerberg, who has tried to raid Silicon Valley's top research labs, dangling a $100,000,000 pay packages. We're hearing it again. She has select few superstars in hopes of poaching them. The billionaire CEO of Meta wants them to join his new com company's new lab focused on super intelligence.
Speaker 2:One recruit has who has spoken with Zuckerberg, who is personally courting his dream team of potential hires, describes the company's goal as nothing less than a transfusion from the country's top AI labs.
Speaker 1:It's all it is. It's a transfusion.
Speaker 2:It's a blood transfusion. It is it is wild. Yeah. The yeah. I I we we gotta talk to some more VCs about how they're coping.
Speaker 2:We got we we gotta get some coping VCs on here to hear them cope about. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's actually a fine time to invest in AI. Hey.
Speaker 2:What do we got here, Tyler?
Speaker 6:I'm done. I'm done.
Speaker 2:You're done? No way. What's the clock? What's the clock?
Speaker 1:Two minutes forty five seconds.
Speaker 2:What? No way. He did it?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Congratulations
Speaker 2:Tyler.
Speaker 1:Did you even get to play your new
Speaker 2:No. He he had to unbox it. I did I wanted the unboxing to be part of the experience.
Speaker 1:Wow. He just ate your lunch Sean.
Speaker 2:He did. Congratulations Tyler. Very good. That's amazing. Okay.
Speaker 2:So break it down. How long did it actually take you to get set up and get the game running?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, okay. For the first like five minutes there was just like a software update.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Then I That's what was worried about.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And then I had to connect to my phone. Okay. There's like the Meta Horizon app.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 6:And then it was probably like another couple minutes. I had to create a new Microsoft account Okay. And then get Xbox game pass. Yeah. And then I I wasn't sure which Halo it was.
Speaker 6:Okay. It took me like a minute or two there. Yeah. And then the first like probably five or six minutes of playing the game was just cutscenes.
Speaker 2:Cutscenes. It
Speaker 6:wouldn't let me skip. It was it's like the tutorial of how to play
Speaker 2:the game.
Speaker 6:And then finally and then I just crushed through it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So crushed through it. So how long do you think it actually took you to go from like, I gave you the box to you were playing the game?
Speaker 6:I actually have no idea. I mean, I was pretty locked in. Don't how long I was playing.
Speaker 2:Okay. We should have had splits because because my my my big pushback on VR right now is that if you get an n 64 or you get an like the old if you if you got an Xbox for Christmas with Halo, the DVD, like, you would put that thing in, plug it into the the TV, and you would be playing in two minutes. Like it was so fast to get up and running. Yeah. And I've always been upset with how many things you have to you have to link it to your phone, take it off, log in, create a password, like all of that I've always been really annoyed with.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that they should make you do the account creation after the fact, after they let you get hooked on playing and be like, this is fun. Okay. Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now I wanna create a social profile because I'm I'm having fun. Anyway.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, the app seems very unnecessary. I don't know what the app is for. Odd. Because it wasn't like to sign in.
Speaker 6:I I still to sign in on the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Using the joy sticks.
Speaker 2:I mean, at one point, I had I had four I I I counted. Had like six different passwords that were relevant to play Oculus games because I had Wow. I had a pin code that was like, you draw it. I had a an Oculus password, but then Oculus got rolled into Meta, and so I had a Meta password. But then I also had a Facebook password that was different.
Speaker 2:And then I had like a pin for paying with things, and it was just like so many different things. And and it's not that hard when you're on your phone and you get one password and you just kind of like auto fill passwords all day long and two factor codes. But when you're in VR, it's super hard to type everything out. So, wow. I'm very very impressed that you pulled that off.
Speaker 2:I thought that that was gonna be a Thank you. A failure. So congratulations. Thank Enjoy it. Wait.
Speaker 2:So so break down the experience of actually playing. Were you playing on a big big two d screen and you were sitting there in like a theater basically?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So the screen was probably like six feet in front front of
Speaker 2:me. Okay. It was
Speaker 6:like in front of this light. It was like great experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was a
Speaker 2:great experience.
Speaker 6:I didn't find it to be like like the refresh rate was like totally fine. Great. I I'm not motion sick at all.
Speaker 2:No screen door effect or anything?
Speaker 6:No. It was totally fine.
Speaker 2:And then and then also break down. So you were you technically streaming the game over Wi Fi?
Speaker 6:I believe so. I I I'll look, but I think it was like cloud gaming, I think.
Speaker 2:So I think I think the the actual Xbox, like like, frame rendering is happening in the cloud and they're and they're streaming that to you and then rendering in VR and then the headset's just pinning that to the world, which is really, really cool. So I have this thesis and and and you'll have to play with the headset more and and let me know if it plays out that I think that, you know, Palmer Lucky has that take that's like soldiers will be wearing VR headsets on a daily basis before consumers are because the the military can underwrite, like, a $5,000 VR headset. And so he's he's betting on augmented reality glasses for the warfighter being the first real use case. I have this thesis that, you know, before before people were using the iPhone for dedicated iPhone apps like TikTok and Uber, people were using to make phone calls. Like, it was a phone first.
Speaker 2:And I think that that will be basically a TV first, and people will be playing traditional video games and watching traditional movies before we get VR GTA six. People will just be playing GTA five. And so I think all the VR companies should focus on making the the movie watching experience and the traditional video game experience, like, super super smooth so that you just get in. You can actually chill in that thing for two hours, actually beat Halo. May maybe maybe you know, the whole game only takes three hours to to beat.
Speaker 2:Maybe you
Speaker 1:got Okay, gamers. Gamers. Anyway Let's get back to the news.
Speaker 2:This is to the sleep scores. How'd you sleep last night, before we
Speaker 1:I was absolutely mugged.
Speaker 2:No. What happened? Get a pod
Speaker 1:Get a pod five.
Speaker 2:69. Rough. I got a 92, baby. Let's go. Generational run.
Speaker 2:Hit me with the Ashton Hall. You know the rule. If I beat you, I get that sound effect. Ashton Hall. 92.
Speaker 2:Get go to 8sleep.com/tbpn. I'm worried
Speaker 1:to think about what how I would have slept if I didn't have an
Speaker 2:eight sleep. And, you know, the only thing that I got penalized on was I went to bed too early, Nine And they're like, you don't usually go to bed at 09:30. And so I pulled it off.
Speaker 1:I was penalized by screaming
Speaker 2:Screaming children.
Speaker 1:In the middle of the night.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Inside the secretive world.
Speaker 1:Now we have some breaking news.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna dive into this. So this morning Zuckerberg announced his super intelligence
Speaker 2:thousand likes on this traded post? No way, Tyler. Oh, you're on a generational run.
Speaker 1:Today. Is amazing.
Speaker 2:Wow. Four k likes. Okay. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:Back to the breaking news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Please. Please.
Speaker 1:So Zuckerberg sent a message this morning in a memo introducing the new super intelligence team. So we were just covering his list. Yep. He got a seemingly a lot of people from his list. So Zuckerberg introduced Wang who will be the company's chief AI officer and leader of MSL, as well as former GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman.
Speaker 1:Friedman will co lead the new lab with Wang with a focus on AI products and applied research. Here's the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg's memo. It notably doesn't include the employees who joined from OpenAI Zurich office. Mhmm. So this is Kylie Robinson's reporting over at Wired.
Speaker 1:So, Trapit Bonsal pioneered RL on chain of thought and co creator of o series models at OpenAI, cracked. Xu Chao B, co creator of GPT four voice mode and o four mini, previously led multimodal post training at OpenAI. Hua Wen Chang, co creator of GPT four o's image generation and previously invented Masket and Muse text image architectures at Google Research. G Lin helped build o three, o four mini, g p d four o, g p d four one, g p d 4.5, g p d four o image gen and operator reasoning stack. Joel Pobar, inference at Anthropic, previously at meta for eleven years at HHVM, Hack Flow, Redux, performance tooling and machine learning.
Speaker 1:Jack Ray, pre training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5 Lead, Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind. Hong Yu Ren, co creator of GPT four o. And this just goes on and on and on. But the big takeaway here is that, these seem to be some important, people and not not what Sam had originally messaged as as none of our best people.
Speaker 2:Wow. That is a big
Speaker 1:But, obviously, things have changed since since
Speaker 2:I think we need some more trade deal posters, except it's not much of a trade deal. Just full poaching. It's pretty pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:Now, this there will whenever whoever writes the book on this era
Speaker 2:Ashley Vance. AI, Ashley Vance. Obviously.
Speaker 1:We'll have at least a chapter dedicated to this talent rate. Yep. Is Pretty unprecedented.
Speaker 2:But yeah.
Speaker 1:I think the difference the difference when when Facebook was rating Google Yeah. In 2010
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It was just spread out over a much longer period of time. That's narrow. It wasn't I mean, is unique because in that situation, Zuck was poaching from Google. Mhmm. Zuck poaching from a company that still is like many people view as a startup, right?
Speaker 1:Even though it's worth hundreds of billions. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Turner Novak said, is it true they poached Matthew McConaughey from Salesforce?
Speaker 2:I like that one.
Speaker 1:Anyways, so we could go back to this list. But clearly, he made a list. He checked it twice, and he got a very meaningful time
Speaker 2:for Zac to head over to Bezel and get him something get himself something to remember this moment by. Because his bezel concierge is available to source him any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. He could get a new Richard Mill. He could get a new Vacheron or a new Patek.
Speaker 2:He has a Cubitus. Maybe he needs to fill out the fill out the the stable a little bit after this. Pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other thing that's that's interesting here, Daniel Gross is not anywhere in this memo.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. It was rumored. Is the full memo listed or is it just like they just didn't include this because it's just why are reporting and they don't realize how big of a deal DG is?
Speaker 1:I I I think I think they They would have they would have
Speaker 2:included it. Yeah. Maybe maybe like the negotiation is still like ongoing. Like it is it is a more complex situation because it's like a CEO leaving an active company. And so it's not it's not like a full like free agent or acquisition or you know going from w two to w two.
Speaker 2:It's it's a little bit more complicated than that. So fascinating. Well, the AI talent wars are the current thing and we have been enjoying following them. It's a great time to be an AI researcher. Even better time to be a
Speaker 1:podcast Yeah. Incredible overnight success. Success for all these researchers. Not like they spent, you know, ten to
Speaker 2:Getting PhDs.
Speaker 1:Fifteen to twenty years, you know.
Speaker 2:Also in a field where people were like, oh, that will never happen. Like that like like this is crazy sci fi. This is not like going to ever be real. Like you're just you're doing like complex math. Cute chatbot.
Speaker 1:Cute Does it work? Picture.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cute picture that makes a morphed hand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh my god.
Speaker 1:But look at that hand with six fingers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'll never be commercial.
Speaker 1:You bozo. Oh, you're working on ImageGen? Yeah. Why does that person have Deep dream,
Speaker 2:the thing that puts dogs in every picture? Oh, yeah. That'll work. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:Cat detector.
Speaker 1:Hot hot What is it?
Speaker 2:Hot dog? Not hot dog? Yeah. No. It's the most valuable technology in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I'm I'm super I'm super interested in seeing like what they build. Obviously, like, it's going to be like a good model. Like, we know that they're going to try and build like a a a big good model.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be open source.
Speaker 2:Maybe. It might not be. Maybe not. There's the like like, Mark Mark has a guarantee that he'll be open
Speaker 1:source for really good now. We're gonna we're gonna charge for it. No. But but
Speaker 2:He could. He could. I mean, like, open source. Yeah. I mean, they it could be it could be closed source.
Speaker 2:It could be open source variations. It could be, you know, a a chat driven product that directly competes with ChatGPT. It could be something that just lives behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:He's gonna Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It could be a tab. It could be a new tab.
Speaker 1:Know what? I actually like I would like to own a piece of search too. I got a bunch of DAUs. They're searching stuff all the time. I kinda like that market.
Speaker 1:I think might wanna discover products that way. I think you could build a pretty good ad product on top of that. It is interesting though. I mean, that the the It feels like l l l m's right now are so single player and meta products are so social and communication and entertainment oriented. Yep.
Speaker 1:Launching a consumer
Speaker 2:And the social thing is like, it's right around the corner. It's right around the corner. Corner. Already, I will I will I I've done this with you where I will go and generate an o three pro response, let it cook for ten minutes, have have four o generate some charts or graphs or images off of it, and I will just share the chat with you. And then you can trace through the whole thing as you like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that workflow back and forth is amazing. Ben Thompson wrote about it, how he has a research assistant who isn't at the level of him in terms of analysis, but can ask a bunch of questions, and then he can go back and see, okay. He asked this question slightly the wrong way, so he got slightly the wrong answer. Let me just continue chatting with the same interaction in GPT four or four o and and actually improve and get the answer that he wants.
Speaker 2:So it's fantastic. Are you about to hit the gong for something? Are you
Speaker 1:I mean, there's like 20 researchers that just signed a beta.
Speaker 2:Do
Speaker 1:it. And I'm just gonna do it.
Speaker 2:What? Why did you throw it?
Speaker 1:We're just experimenting here. Yeah. It's funny. Dan Ratcliffe in the chat says, every researcher hire I see, think of Jordy's tweet on companies doing NBA style trade deals, OpenAI trading researchers for the Anthropic, throwing in a couple twenty twenty six Waterloo grads. The only thing here is it's very one way.
Speaker 2:It's very
Speaker 1:So I called it, but I kinda didn't call it and that Zach's just just just absorbing. You know? He's not saying he's not
Speaker 2:Turns out in tech, everyone's in free agency Yeah. At all times.
Speaker 1:At all times.
Speaker 2:Yes. There are no binding contracts that can keep someone at a company at a company for five years. It would be yeah. It would be very interesting if sports shifted to that model where there was no long term contracts. And you could just mid season be like, oh, I guess Tom Brady's going to the Eagles.
Speaker 2:I think Saquon Barkley is being traded mid game, like, at halftime and he switches teams because there's a there's a team that paid more. Like, that would be possible, I guess. Like and that's and that's what we're going through here. I don't know. We'll have to get we'll have to get Tyler to give us a breakdown of these folks on tomorrow's show.
Speaker 2:Maybe we could go through these folks and and talk about some of their history, what they've actually done, who's who's the most legit. I wonder how important the oh, what's that called? The Dunbar? Is it Dunbar's number? No.
Speaker 2:I forget. There there there's a a there's a quantitative way to assess how powerful, how, why can't I, Dykstra Dykstra's number? I forget. Bench press? Yes.
Speaker 2:Bench press. No. Basically, you look at the papers that they that they authored, and then you look at how many citations that paper has. And so if if really great researchers are citing your research, then you are a great research researcher, that type of thing. It's kind of like a six degrees of separation, the Kevin Bacon thing.
Speaker 2:Anyway, should we go to Apple f one? You know, there it's also on the in the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:Cover this cover this journey journal piece. Can Brad Pitt's f one movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit?
Speaker 2:It did. It did. This is old news. Also, it's funny because the paper version says, Apple is now trying to make people make movies people actually watch. Did you see how brutal the the the the written the written headline is compared to the online one?
Speaker 2:So the online one is, can Brad Pitt's f one movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit? Like, okay. That's, like, kind of shade at Apple. Like, they haven't really had a big screen hit. But then this one is just like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:They haven't even been trying before. And now they're trying to make movies people actually watch. Brutal. Well, you probably if you if you're familiar with f one, you're probably familiar with some from some billboard ads you saw. So if you're trying to run billboard ads, go to adquick.com.
Speaker 2:Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable seamless efficient ad
Speaker 1:buying How so the the I was off earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is Apple's first box off it hit. Yeah. It's a $55,600,000 debut. Yeah. And the poly market had it.
Speaker 1:There was under 43,000,000. Yeah. 43 to 47. '47 to '51. '51 to '55 and then over 55,000,000.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. It had it at 8071% Mhmm. Just about a week ago. And that ended up being true by half a million. So close, but accurate.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. I thought it was like a 140,000,000. Wait. What was that number? That that's different?
Speaker 1:I think I Okay. So they actually caught you pretty well
Speaker 2:with the with the Yeah. Okay. Anyway, we'll get the details here. So in the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1:It was so so it was domestic Oh,
Speaker 2:the domestic box office versus international? Yeah. Those are the numbers. Okay. Well, Ben Fritz and Joe Flint over at the Wall Street Journal have the story.
Speaker 2:They say when the team behind this weekend's Brad Pitt movie, f one, first pitched their idea around Hollywood, nearly every major entertainment company wanted in, and a bidding war quickly erupted. I really like that. Then Apple big footed them all. Tech companies, they love big footing. The tech giant agreed to spend nearly $250,000,000, more than two AI researchers, more than any other studio thought the drama about an aging driver's last shot at glory was worth, said people with knowledge of the matter.
Speaker 2:Pitt was paid more than 20,000,000 standard More than the $20,000,000 standard for A list movie stars and will get a cut of the film's revenue if it's a hit. F1 is one of Apple's biggest entertainment bets since it since it leapt into Hollywood in 2019 and embodies the unusually lavish and meticulous approach to the business, which has brought little commercial success. People who have worked at or with the company say Apple executives crave hits, but only want to produce content they believe reflects the high end aspirational qualities of the iPhone and MacBook. There's little chance, in other words, that Apple would make a critically reviled blockbuster like a Minecraft movie. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I talked to a a very successful Hollywood producer about this dynamic with Apple that so much of being a movie studio is it's a hits driven business. You gotta slop it up sometimes. You gotta do the kids movie like Shrek.
Speaker 1:Gotta hallucinate a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Shrek is not is not an Oscar winning film, but it's a hugely valuable franchise franchise. Yeah. And so he was basically saying that Apple had one hand tied behind its back because of the brand standard, And that it would only want to do things that had a polish and a prestige and that That
Speaker 1:were expensive.
Speaker 2:Expensive. And if you're if you're only doing, like, half of the surface area of what a movie studio can do, you you're you're just gonna get eaten by Netflix that's gonna say, like, yeah. Let's put the reality show on this show. Let's do this. Let's try this.
Speaker 2:Let's try some prestige. Yeah. Do Love Island. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's do Love Island. Whatever. And Apple just wouldn't do that because it's not the brand. But it seems like they're figuring it out, and f one's a good example that. So with sleek production values and strong reviews, f one is exactly the kind of movie Apple wants.
Speaker 2:It was made by Top Gun Maverick director, Joe Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Brookheimer, and Apple executives have privately said they hope it will be the land based version of the airborne blockbuster, which grossed 1,500,000,000.0 in 2022. Wow. You think you
Speaker 1:could get up there? That would
Speaker 2:be fantastic. But prerelease surveys indicate f one is struggling to generate interest among audiences beyond older men. Its success or failure will be a referendum on Apple's ability to meld carefully curated and I gotta go to b four. Carefully curated content with broad appeal after six years in which it hasn't released a single box office hit. To date, worldwide box office of Apple original films, Killers of the Flower Moon, I did not see that one.
Speaker 2:2023, 160,000,000. Napoleon, that was an Apple movie? Oh, 221,000,000. I saw that. Did you see that?
Speaker 2:People didn't like it. I I I thought it was pretty good. That was long, but it was fun. Argyle, 96,000,000. That one didn't do too well.
Speaker 2:Fly me to the moon, 2024 did 42,000,000. You have not seen any of those. Correct? Nope. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:One will be It's okay. I haven't seen UFC seven twenty four. Who cares? To each their own. F one will be available on Apple TV, the company's streaming service after it's run on the big screen.
Speaker 2:Apple's TV
Speaker 1:plus Yeah. Know, I knew this I knew this movie would be somewhat significant. Yep. I felt inclined to watch it. Yes.
Speaker 1:And so knowing that it was releasing, I thought it was releasing. I was like, okay. Great. I'll watch it on Sunday. There's no HBO.
Speaker 1:I watch it on Sunday.
Speaker 2:Okay. And what happened?
Speaker 1:And it wasn't on Apple TV. It was Yeah. It was at the movie theaters. Yep. And I didn't wanna go to
Speaker 2:that movie. You're allergic to movie theaters. When was the last time you were in a movie theater physically? When we Oh, when we
Speaker 1:saw Saw Dune two.
Speaker 2:Dune two.
Speaker 1:With an absolute squad.
Speaker 2:We did. This is the movie to take the boys to. We gotta do it. It's hard to schedule. We gotta do it.
Speaker 2:This is a call to action for all the fans.
Speaker 1:Many podcasters are descending on Malibu for the month of July This
Speaker 2:is the thing.
Speaker 1:To maybe we'll maybe we'll get it done
Speaker 2:together. So yeah. And and Ben Thompson's been beating the drum on this this idea of, like, Taylor Swift understands windowing better than, like, Netflix executives. Have you seen this thing? No.
Speaker 2:So basically, like, windowing is the concept that when you have a valuable media property, you should monetize it at at at at increasing rates of cost based on time. And so when Taylor Swift comes out with a new tour, you can first go and see it live in person at SoFi Stadium, and tickets are, like, a $100, maybe more, like, couple $100. It's expensive to go see it. Then months later, you can see the movie version of her tour in movie theaters, but it's not on streaming. And so then you're paying $20 instead of $200.
Speaker 2:Then after a couple months of it being exclusively in theaters, then you can stream it for free if you're subscribed. So it's like, let's call it like an average cost of like $2. So you went from like $200 to see it live in person, $20 to see it in the theaters, $2 equivalent to like streaming on Netflix for like, you know, 10% of your Netflix spend that month or whatever. And then eventually, it'll be, like, free on TV or whatever. Free.
Speaker 2:It'll be even free, or maybe she'll put it on YouTube. And so it's this very it's this very good way to price discriminate and get the maximum amount of value out of a piece of content. And Hollywood had been very good at this for a very long time. Like, you would come out in the movie theaters, then there'd be a big gap for, like, three months. You just couldn't see the movie at all no matter what.
Speaker 2:It was like, you gotta go see it in the theater because if you don't see it now You wouldn't be able see it months. Six months. Yeah. And then and then the DVD comes out or the Blu ray comes out, and it's, like, exclusive just and you have to buy it. And then and then after that, it goes to Blockbuster.
Speaker 2:You can rent it. And then it goes on TV or HBO later. And, like, it might not be it might be a year or two until you can actually go and see the movie for free. And so Hollywood was really good at that. They were printing money.
Speaker 2:And then then, you know, the streamers came and disrupted all this, and, like, the binge era started, and you can just watch everything for free constantly. But Ben Thompson's point is that they kind of went too far, and they started giving away things that people would actually go see in theaters for free on streaming. And so even this, the I I think there's gonna be a lot of people who are like, okay. It's an Apple TV plus exclusive. Like, how long do I have to wait to just watch it at home?
Speaker 2:Oh, like, two weeks. Like, okay. I'm not gonna go see it in theaters. But if they window it hardcore and they say, look. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It'll be on Apple TV plus in seven months, then people will be like, well, it's worth it for me to go see it now.
Speaker 1:Anyway Well, we have some notes in the chat. One What's up? Michael Ginsberg says community note, Shrek won two Oscars. Owned. Owned.
Speaker 1:Okay. Owned Shrek
Speaker 2:is Apologies. Apologies.
Speaker 1:Not only a cult classic, but it's an award winning
Speaker 2:job. It won wait. Did it win best animated? No way. Because that's actually hard one.
Speaker 2:Fact check. Best CGI or best music or something.
Speaker 1:Then Blake Blake Dryer says just got back from f one IMAX incredible as a fan of sport. Very well.
Speaker 2:I I I think you gotta see it. I I think it's also the type of movie that you want says
Speaker 1:it wasn't a bad film.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:Nick Kotov says it was just too long.
Speaker 2:So F one too long? How long is it? Two hours over two hours? That'd be ninety minutes. Get me in.
Speaker 2:Get me out.
Speaker 1:Two hours thirty six minutes.
Speaker 2:That's so long.
Speaker 1:Anyone that would put out content
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:More than two hours a day is just completely Unhinged. Out of line and unhinged. We would never put out three to four hours a day.
Speaker 2:Pot calling the kettle black situation, but we're doing it.
Speaker 1:Yes. So Shrek, according to Michael says best animated feature and best adapted screen.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. I say I corrected.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up
Speaker 2:for really think Shrek meets the brand standard of Apple? Like, no way. Right? My my point holds. I don't think Apple
Speaker 1:Cook would kill to to be able to put out a film of that caliber.
Speaker 2:You think so? Well, the Wall Street Journal disagrees with you. They say that they wouldn't put out the Minecraft movie. Anyway, Apple TV plus has earned a reputation for content that excites critics more than audiences, including the Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro.
Speaker 1:Synthetics cites critics.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Apple TV.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of examples of that in media. There's the there's lot of tech media that's just for the insider for me for the media folks. It's journo on journo content. Killers of the Flower Moon, Oscar's Best Picture winner, CODA, literary adaptation Pachinko and the spy drama Slow Horses. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tried to watch Slow Horses. Was pretty good. Its its few mainstream successes include sports comedy, Ted Lasso, sci fi workplace drama Severance, and straight to streaming film The George or The Gorge. We're into entertainment to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well, says Tim Cook. He told Variety, an Apple TV plus spokeswoman declined to comment.
Speaker 2:Analysts have questioned why Apple spends billions annually on a business so far afield from its core consumer electronics operation even if it's barely a blip for the company worth more than 3,000,000,000,000. The strategic value it brings is sufficiently mysterious for people not to talk about it very much, says Craig Moffett at Moffett nath Nathanson, good buddy of Ben Thompson's. Apple TV plus cost $10 a month. And So a lot of people think that the Apple TV plus, like, production team is to, like, take take pressure off of the, like, the 30% Apple tax discussion. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show.
Speaker 2:Will is in the studio. Welcome back to TVPA. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:How's it going?
Speaker 2:Congratulations on the trade deal. Thanks for
Speaker 1:having me back. What
Speaker 2:supercar did you buy? Did you go Bugatti Chiron? Or you go f 80? I mean, we we hear that the the numbers are huge right now for folks like you.
Speaker 5:I mean, I'm taking a plane more. So, like Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. People say, you know, fly you know, we wanted flying cars. We got
Speaker 1:high degree. That you would imply that Will drives himself.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's offensive. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 5:While I Waymo for the first time recently, I'd like I'd been to, like, SF, but, like, I hadn't been around SF proper that much since the the Waymo craze took off. And so, like, that's been, like, the the car experience really.
Speaker 3:Like Sure.
Speaker 5:Self driving cars, Dan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So are you in SF full time now?
Speaker 5:Still back and forth New York. I'm, like, kind of slowly starting to spend more time in SF.
Speaker 2:It's on brand. You're decentralized. You're decentralized with AI. It's it's it's a perfect fit. Perfect fit.
Speaker 2:Anyway
Speaker 1:Did you touch grass at all this weekend, or were you locked into the timeline?
Speaker 5:It's a lot of stuff was happening on the timeline. I did I mean, I'm in New York right now. I did some New York stuff on Saturday. But yeah. I mean, it's been it's been good.
Speaker 5:Lots of drama, intrigue as usual.
Speaker 1:It's a drama.
Speaker 5:The trade deals. I know I've been tuning into earlier. I know you guys have gone over all the the major roster updates. But, yeah, it's exciting times. OpenAI, open model soon, hopefully, but not this week.
Speaker 5:Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah. I I mean, the first place I wanna start with is the actual trade deals. Did do any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting? Have they been on your radar? Have you met any of these folks?
Speaker 2:Can you give us more context on how how academic are they? How product oriented are they? It does it's it feels like this is purely research, you know, beefing up of the research team, and Meta kind of has products solved. That the right model to think about this? What how how can you characterize Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or even shape of the
Speaker 1:team that Zuck's building? Even there's thousands of really great software engineers that work in AI.
Speaker 2:Yep. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:And but what you know, even kind of getting a sense of, like, how many people was was Zuck really going after? Was it 250? Was it a 100? The list that came out today is know, somewhere somewhere I don't know. There's, like, 20 people on it, something like
Speaker 7:that. Right.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it's a great list. It's a lot of, like, very senior senior researchers who know who have, like, been through some, like, real product cycles who, like I think the goal is people who can bridge the gap from research to product. Because, like like, one thing Meta has a strength of, but I think doesn't translate in, like, this era is they have a lot of really good, like, academic researchers.
Speaker 5:Like, Jan McCun's whole org has a lot of very talented, very capable researchers who write important papers, but it's the kind of stuff that doesn't really turn into exciting products. It's, like, more betting five or ten years out how do we wanna do things eventually versus, like, going through a pretraining cycle for a Gemini or a Quad or an OpenAI model. Like, that has a different set of considerations.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 5:And so this to me looks like they want, like, ten, fifteen great people who have been through those research to product cycles in terms of the model being the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And it seems like they probably like, they got, Alex Yep. And then supposedly, Nat and or Daniel, to kind of handle a little more of the not the business side, but product y business stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a management role.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what is your take on Yan Lakun right now? How should we think about his position in the AI world? There's, I've I, you know, I see these memes of, like, he's a non believer. He doesn't believe in, super intelligence and, like, AI god.
Speaker 2:He's a little more practical. It seems like he's been he's been right about some things in the sense that, like, we haven't had we we're not feeling a fast takeoff right now. So I think you gotta give him some credit for that. At the same time, like, there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing on Lacuna a little bit for not driving the the product side of the business. It's like, it's one thing to say that, hey.
Speaker 2:We're not gonna go straight shot to AGI god, but then the the the downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're gonna be living in, like, b to b SaaS world of AI implementation and productization productization, then, like, go do that and, like, make sure that the models work really well for business. And so I don't know. What what is your take? How how would you how would you describe Yan Lakun in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to, like, a layman?
Speaker 5:Sure. Yeah. So I think people over index on thinking of Yan as the meta guy, like, too much. Sure. I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone in the llama org who was as visible as him because he was not involved with llama at all.
Speaker 5:Like, fair fundamental AI research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Yan Lakun's work is very academic. And it's really like it's I think he's like I think on one hand, he, like, is right in the sense of, like, we don't have the full picture yet. Like, we don't have full on AGI that can, like, do a human's job forever. And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is, like, there's more work to do.
Speaker 5:There's more science to do. It's not just productize the current set of techniques Mhmm. In terms of, like, the end of AI forever. But his goal is not to do the productization. Like, he, like, the org he's in at Meta is really isolated from product.
Speaker 5:He's there to kind of boost the reputation of the org academically as well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more productive. But his job is not to, like, go train a business model. That you train a model that is going to be used by businesses and, like, I think people like, that org fair, the friends I have who are there, like, are there because they essentially wanted to be a professor, but they want tech company resources and not not to teach. And that is essentially what that org is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Does that lead to better recruiting on campus, essentially? Like, you can go get researchers because Jan Lakun can come do a a really powerful lecture.
Speaker 5:Maybe. But I think of it more as, like, the same way that Zuck did metaverse stuff. Zuck is very willing to make ten year bets.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so that org for Meta is not about what product are released next quarter. It's what are our ten year bets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. I wanna
Speaker 1:What about sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:go ahead MetaShares just hit an all time high. Really? So the stocks the stocks performing. I'm I'm curious from your time at Morgan Stanley. Thank you for that, John.
Speaker 2:It's incredible. Yeah. That is that is incredible.
Speaker 1:But but generally up 5% over the last week. Wow. What how did Wall Street generally sort of like process the like meta AI story? Because now, obviously, at least the market seems generally excited. It may get to the point where we did with VR where people are like, hey.
Speaker 1:Woah. Woah. Woah. Cool it on the metaverse. You know?
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny because, like like like, you add all you add all this up. Even if the $100,000,000 offer number is real, it's like, okay. So now we're at, like, $1,000,000,000 in spend. It's 5% of the metaverse hole that was burning. And it's like, you know, from a Wall Street perspective, you're like, I don't care about I don't care about $1,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:I care about $20,000,000,000. Because that was what was weighing on the stock during the metaverse build out. But this is like AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it upfront. And it seems like even though it's a big number, a $100,000,000 offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. What do you think, Will?
Speaker 5:Right. Yeah. I mean, I think the I don't know the context fully of the 100,000,000. I know people have all these theories, but, like, the the Scale AI numbers we do know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And, like, that that's a big chunk of their, like I don't know. They don't do those every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But they've done a handful in the past at that scale. Like, WhatsApp was 20,000,000,000 or something like that.
Speaker 7:And,
Speaker 5:I mean, it's hard to read into, like, the the charts. Like, I
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think people are generally, like, expecting that Meta will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change Whether that is, like, justified or not, I mean, we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was interesting, George.
Speaker 5:Product side is gonna be interesting because, like Yeah. They're not a b to b SaaS company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, so
Speaker 1:I I wanna push back on They're an entertainment company. Yeah. I think that that I I don't I don't think that people are are fully understand potential of gen AI around entertainment. Like it gets talked a lot around, oh, you're gonna be able to generate, you know, an entire movie or generate video games or things like that. And I and I think that we haven't seen, we've seen some fantastic examples so far but nothing Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Nothing that that is I I I think like George Hots was on our show and he was talking about how like basically AI is gonna be like having five CIA agents follow you around all the time convincing you to buy buy products. And like that is like one kind of dark bold case for
Speaker 2:Dark bold case. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Dark bold case for meta in the context of AI because it's like, it's possible that that Facebook is already the best ad advertising product in human history. Yep. Like period hands down, there's nothing better. And then could you make it like two three times Yeah. Better?
Speaker 1:It's very possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna push back on the b to b thing because, yes yes, they don't sell b to b software. But I was thinking about it in this terms, like, if you if you were running a company where your entire you only had one client and that client was Meta, and you sold them CRM and infrastructure and LLMs to improve the back office and do, you know, censorship and and, you know, and and reality checking and and looking for bad words and looking for improper posts and recommendation algorithms. Like, how much would that company be worth and how much revenue would they be making just from that one client? And I think it's in the billions because it's just such a large organization that it's potent it's potentially like just the b to b applications of AI inside of Meta are, like it it's a multibillion dollar, like, cost center or revenue driver or something like that.
Speaker 2:Don't know.
Speaker 5:I think a company at Meta scale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most. Like, they probably have some services Yeah. That they're using, but, like, they like, they could they rebuild their own cloud? Like, because they use AWS for a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Can they're not a compute company, though. And in terms of, like, platform stuff
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:I feel like those companies, once you hit a certain size and you just, like, have so many engineers that you want everything like, Google rewrites all their own stuff. Yeah. Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. Mhmm. And can they is there another, like, a tale of end of that that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of?
Speaker 5:Sure. Entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that just I was just reminded of, have you seen the Italian brain rot videos?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Love them.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I know people it's, silly. It's stupid. But it there is something there in terms of this, like, communal narrative storytelling with a level of vibrancy that we haven't seen so far.
Speaker 5:It's like Looney Tunes. But people just, like, come up with these where you could imagine Meta kind of eating a good chunk of the, like, video gen market, if they have an answer to, like, v o three, where that becomes part of the platform. Ties into the whole metaverse thing of, like, creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But instead of, like, Instagram stories, it's like, okay. What's what's the evolution of stories?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you have you seen Higgs Field? No. Higgs Field AI. I think it's an ex Snapchat team.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I've seen this.
Speaker 1:Photorealistic. But in the sent photorealistic
Speaker 2:It looks like like
Speaker 1:Full time influencer generated it after spending hours trying to create it. And you can't tell that it's not real. And so it it feels like it feels like meta integrating that kind of thing where it's like
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It it it'll be interesting to see how this actually plays out because everybody will be able to be a super tasteful creator or like generate these sort of unique styles. And I'm sure at that point, it'll switch. Everybody will be like, well, I only follow organic farm to table influencers.
Speaker 2:Who knows? Yeah.
Speaker 5:I feel like they their AI integration so far have all been kinda weird. Like, there's these, like, Instagram accounts you can chat with, and then there was the whole, Meta AI homepage disaster where old people were, like, leaking personal info without realizing it. But Yeah. I guess Facebook has always had that. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I think it'll they'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that will have they'll have to get creative because they haven't like, it's been a while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really sucked. Like
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a Studio Ghibli moment by you're like going
Speaker 2:I was saying this. They should just pre render everyone's profile picture as a Ghibli. And just when you open the Instagram app, it's just like, here, we did this for you. It would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost, but then it's just like you could share it and it's just more virality around it. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:And and, like, even baking that down into a filter.
Speaker 5:No. It can be so, like, OpenAI branded now. They have
Speaker 1:to go Yeah. They're not not saying I'm saying, like, an entirely new. Sure. But yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Basically, like,
Speaker 2:the the the filters in the Instagram app should be, like, style transfer or, like, fully generative instead of just like color grades. That's clearly the next thing and they should just and they should just do that. But what do you think of Sam Altman's ability to get through this? Like he's had a series of exoduses and seemed to continue to march on the anthropic departures, then SSI and thinking machines, x AI. Like, this is not the first time.
Speaker 2:First rodeo. It's not
Speaker 1:his first rodeo.
Speaker 3:It's first rodeo.
Speaker 2:So there's this whole narrative, like, never bet against Zuck. He's been down on the metaverse, came back. He's been down on mobile with the HTML five thing, and he came back from that, went native, and super dominant and bought Instagram, WhatsApp, super dominant in mobile. And so never bet against Zuck, but then also maybe never get it bet get bet against Sam. Maybe they both win and maybe, like, the real loser is, like, I don't know, some some other company or something.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 5:I think as long as OpenAI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, like, they have the center of gravity for the AI world. Like, in the same way that no matter what Android ships, people are not gonna switch from their iPhones. Like, it's something that have to go very wrong for people to not see OpenAI as the winner, I think, or there's the kind of the default.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the other thing is, the average ChatGPT users not waking up today being like, oh, I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers. Right? They're Right. They're just still using ChatGPT as a Google replacement or they're talking with it as a companion.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I think the lead is still very, very real. And and I just and again, it's gonna create opportunities for people to say, hey, I wanna go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day.
Speaker 5:Right. And I do think it'll get to a point, especially with, like, 2025 into '26, where there's a lot of product stuff that people seem like, I think we're early on products, and we'll keep getting better versions of the same things in a way that's, like, kind of predictable. Like, the image models will keep getting better. The agents will mess up less. But, like, we can already use those things, and we can start building proof of concepts around them.
Speaker 5:And the question is, like, okay. What are the winning apps? Like, I I imagine that, like, the real time Cluelink kinda thing, some OpenAI is gonna do their version of that at some point. Other people probably will too. Like, does that become modality that people really want, like, live overview, on their screen, on their phone?
Speaker 5:Like, what's the what's the way that people are gonna be interacting with AI generally? A lot of those use cases, like, it's they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models, like, way smarter or whatever. It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging?
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of paths here going back to the Cluelly thing where one, Roy is like right about the UX and like Yeah. Wins the market. And the other option is like, he's right about the UX but like doesn't win the market and then there's like, you know, it's just not the right form factor or whatever. But any any of at least the first two outcomes are hilarious and that and that Roy Lee ushers in the new the new paradigm of for for engaging with with language models. I'm curious any is all the stuff around every b to b SaaS player descending on the sort of like single interface like a a chat interface that generates software?
Speaker 1:Was that predictable to you? Do you think that's do you think that that's like part of a multi year trend, or is that just FOMO?
Speaker 5:I mean, like, Copilot was early. It was, like, 2020, 2021, like, the first GPT three Copilot came out. And, like, that was already one of the early, like, LM applications that people were interested in at all. And then it took until Cursor for it to really like, I think Cursor plus, like, three five Sonnet was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. And it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more useful than a toy and, like, a thing that actually wanna use day to day.
Speaker 5:And so I think that, like, that's one path is, and then the more background agent kind of things are, like, starting to take off now, which I imagine, like, those will get reliable enough that they're, like, useful for cranking stuff out. They already are kind of depending on what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, I think yeah.
Speaker 1:We're about halfway through the year. What what are what are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking the the OpenAI? Open source model could be one. Whatever meta launches next. Right?
Speaker 1:I'm assuming they're gonna be dark until this new team can can really cook and and bring something great. It it may maybe they don't do anything this year, but I would assume they they come with with something. What else are you are you tracking?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, for me, the o three release in ChatGPT was, like, a pretty, like, game changer kind of thing where it was, like, we saw with, like, deep research that, like, okay. They kinda figured out how to make agents work, but it was also just, this one version of an agent. In o three, you can kinda get it to be a pretty general agent
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Where it can, like, do some pretty complex stuff that was kind of new to see like, geoguesser thing was crazy. Yeah. And having that as a, like, vision of, like, what AGI starts to look like, I think it's pretty cool. Of course, from the, like, research open source world, there was a deep sea as, like, the RL craze taking off. But, like, I mean, I'm I work on RL, so I, like, obsess over it and, like, think about it a lot.
Speaker 5:But I do think we're really starting to see these recipes, at least in the broad strokes of, okay. Here's how the LM thing can go. We figure out what we want it to do. We give it some tools. We set up these environments.
Speaker 5:We figure out who how to evaluate it, and then we can just kinda, like, let it go, and these things get better at doing those things via trial and error. And so, like, I I, like, I think that is one way to kind of forecast where things are going. It's just, like, what are the plausible use cases that people wanna use LMS for? They want an agent to do x y z. And then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb?
Speaker 5:And I think, like, you see a lot like, there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to, like, sell their RFT service. There's these startups popping up. There was a Was the RFT service? Reinforcement
Speaker 2:pricing. Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so, like, they're pushing this pretty hard.
Speaker 2:Is the is the if you're spending over $10,000,000, like, Palantir, OpenAI will also customize a model for you?
Speaker 1:So they have, like, a That
Speaker 2:was the headline.
Speaker 5:Serious heavy kinda like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have, like, a more, like, in the thousands of dollars service.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Where you are getting to essentially do fine tuning on o four mini.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:And that is a little more self serve. But they're also, like, doing consulting around that before we're deployed, paying around that.
Speaker 2:Is that an important strategy for OpenAI to to to kind of stay in the game against open source models like Llama?
Speaker 5:Yeah. But I think also against other, like, thinking machines. There was some report that
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:This is a version of the strategy they're getting. It's like, go to enterprises Yep. Talk to them about their problems, turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. Mhmm. And if the like, that's one potential road map towards, like, having more, like, AI everywhere.
Speaker 5:It's just, like, having services that were whose job is to, like, come in, whether or not it's fine tuning or not, just, like, make them into agent shaped tasks, where you can then optimize the model, have someone craft the model experience, like, for you. Because, like, I think a lot of enterprises are still, like, in the spot where they don't really like, there's there's not as you see by the, like, the talent war, there's just not that many people in the world or in the market who really understand this stuff at a level where they can go make it happen.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And so, like, the open source thing, on one hand, it's cool that you, in theory, can go do it, but it's also, like, there's not that many hands who can who are equipped to, like, go make the thing happen.
Speaker 2:Actually fine tune Llama four Yeah. Or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We actually talked to a startup that's doing basically that, like, small models for specific business use cases. Like, okay. You just have a ton of CSVs that need to be turned into JSON, and we build you an LLM that just does that or whatever. Interesting.
Speaker 1:How do how do hear about After the the scale news and then there's a bunch of players popping up or, you know, everyone from Mercor to Labelbox to Handshake.
Speaker 4:It's a lot
Speaker 2:of them.
Speaker 1:A lot of different people competing for that market. How do you see that market evolving over the next one to two years? I think there are certain people saying scale got out at the perfect time Yep. In many ways. But clearly, there's a lot of at least gross revenue up for grabs right now in the near term.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I think like the the broader sphere of, like, creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that curation is gonna be important, especially for these, domain specific applications. I think it's gonna be less like, oh, we just need more tokens, and it's more about we need, curation of goals and objectives.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Because, like, tokens, you kinda hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just, like, more Internet text or more, like, human written math solution examples, and it doesn't scale super well. But the thing nice thing about the past specification is you can kind of, like, pour in more compute without necessarily needing more data. Mhmm. It scales much better with compute. Whereas we don't really have, like, a great way of, like, spending a 100 x more compute per pre chain token other than make a giant model.
Speaker 2:Yep. Do you think, Lama will stay open source for the foreseeable future?
Speaker 5:We'll see. I it wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route where, like, they are still they still do open source. They still have the Llama brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But it isn't, like, their flagship thing where they start doing whether it's for internal products or it's they really wanna show that they're the winner, releasing closed models, via API or other services where
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do they do they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model? I mean, you mentioned that they use AWS, so it'd be kind of awkward. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much. I I think that it'd be something that comes in a product.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 5:Or maybe they partner with like, you could see them partnering with someone like a CoreWeave
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Or NVIDIA directly. NVIDIA's hoping to get into the inference serving game, it sounds like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think so so one of Swix's takeaways from the the Wired article was that, like, one big development that's coming is when Stargate comes online, OpenAI will have the largest single cluster for pretraining, but it feels like we might be at the end of that game, and we might be doing more compute intensive work in a distributed fashion. And so maybe having it all in one place is a little bit less relevant to just, you know, oh, trump card, Stargate, boom. I win. I have the best model by far.
Speaker 2:How how do you think about the impact of Stargate on, like, the AGI race?
Speaker 5:I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely gonna do is a pretty big model. I don't if it'll be, like, quite as big as, like, a 4.5, but, like, a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's on the app. Like, what does, like, an o five level of RL look like?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:See how good that is.
Speaker 3:See what what new task
Speaker 2:is that unlocked. Do that, though, or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Because I've heard, like, a lot of RL is, like, you're generating, you're doing verifiable rewards, you're generating in a bunch of different data centers, you could do it completely distributed, and you don't necessarily need a Stargate to do that.
Speaker 5:You can do it distributed. Like, it is very inference heavy. There is still, like, a lot of weight updating. You have to sync the model across. You have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And so having it co located certainly makes it easier. You it's easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre training. Mhmm. But it's not, like, trivial. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But I think, like, a lot of this is just data people are building the data centers without necessarily knowing exactly what experiments they're gonna run. They just know more stuff is coming. But also a lot of this is gonna be inference where, like, they wanna be able to do like, Meta has a ton of GPUs that they just use for Instagram ads Yep. Recommendations. A lot of Stargate will probably be serving Gibley.
Speaker 5:Like
Speaker 2:I mean, that makes a ton of sense. Like, I'm I'm running into rate limits on
Speaker 1:haven't seen one
Speaker 2:in Literally everything. Like like Yeah. Google. It's like, how how do they run on GPUs? They spend 60,000,000,000 on CapEx every year at least.
Speaker 2:And and and o three pro too. I I mean, I I get time outs on this stuff.
Speaker 1:Last question. I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI leveraging the TPU for for inference or reporting to be starting to use it? Was was that kind of
Speaker 5:I mean, it makes sense that they are considering all options given the friction with Microsoft. Like, they don't have a a core cloud that they're super close with. They're not like, there's they need to both try to lower their cost for inference, as well. Like, that maybe was a factor behind the because the o three had a big price drop that might have been TPU related. I don't know, to your speculation.
Speaker 5:But, like, Google has TPUs, and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well, really fast. If OpenAI wants to compete at that level, they kinda have to consider all options.
Speaker 1:Yep. Makes sense. Well, great day to have you pop on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks so much for helping out.
Speaker 1:Knowing knowing how things are unfolding, we'll probably we'll probably ping you to jump on again later this week. So stay ready. Good. Continue to be on Hot Topic. Cheers.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bye.
Speaker 1:I'll be right back.
Speaker 2:And we got another Will coming in the studio. It's Will Day on TBPN. We got Will from Ulysses coming in. Not talking about AI, talking about the ocean, talking about boats, talking about the Gundo military. Who knows what we'll talk about?
Speaker 2:But we will talk about the origin of his company. How are doing, Will?
Speaker 3:I'm good, John. How are you going on?
Speaker 2:I'm great. Good to have you on the show finally. Would you mind kicking us off with just the introduction on yourself and your company?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. My name is Will O'Brien. I'm one of the defenders of Ulysses. We are building autonomous vehicles to solve the most critical tasks in the oceans.
Speaker 3:So in practicality, the what that looks like, we build an autonomous surface vehicle. It's a 30 foot vessel that launches and recovers swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles. These underwater vehicles can read as well as write. They can sense. They can take maps.
Speaker 3:They can take images and collect data, but they can also do physical manipulation as well and robotics. They can they can do kind of whatever you want, whatever you wanna toss them to. And we make both these vehicles probably about 10 times cheaper than anyone else in the world. So while some people are building maybe humanoid robots as a general purpose robotics platform for land, we're building the maritime equivalent to that. Humans obviously are not evolved for for land, so or for the ocean, so we need we need something for that.
Speaker 3:So that's a bit about us. We're based in San Francisco. As you can tell, I'm not an American. I'm I'm Irish, some of our offenders, founding team are Irish and Scottish. And, yeah, that's a that's bit about us.
Speaker 2:How'd you settle like yeah. Yeah. What was the inciting, like, problem set? Like, how how how'd you land on this industry to work on? Like, what what what what got you in the industry?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Good question. So over two years ago, one of my cofounders, a crazy Scottish man called Jamie Wedderburn was on a search trip, and he got talking to a biologist working on this plant called seagrass. He'd never heard about seagrass before. I had never heard about seagrass really before despite growing up by the seaside.
Speaker 3:And he became captivated by it, and then he like, you know, like any good autistic engineer does, he goes down a rabbit hole learning about it, and telling all his friends about it, telling us about it. Seagrass is this wonder plant in the oceans that supports 20% of the world's fish stocks. It holds about 20% of the the carbon in the ocean as well. Underneath it, it's 35 times better than rainforest or removing carbon. But it wasn't in Finding Nemo, nobody knows about it really.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we kinda discovered this and, you know, in learning about it, he realized, like, it's going off all around the world. And it's basically very time intensive and expensive to bring it back to restore it. And basically, the methods people are doing to restore it are manual. Their divers going down with their hands, and they're manually planting seeds, and takes a lot of time, takes a lot of money, and it's it's not really working.
Speaker 3:And he kinda had the you know, he kinda had this insight then that, like, well, we've mechanized, you know, nearly every kind of form of large scale outdoor work on on land, that really hasn't happened in the oceans yet. Like, nobody's built the the tractor equivalent for the oceans. That really, like, a lot of the kind of tasks in the ocean, whether it be in this, you know, narrow, weird, wonderful domain of seagrass restoration, or in in the the world of defense or in the commercial industry, if you're building infrastructure, we're still sending down tons of divers to do, like, manual tasks that really just, like, make absolutely no sense. They're dangerous. They're expensive.
Speaker 3:And so we kind of started in this, like, world of seagrass. Got very obsessed with that and and had a very successful kind of first year just doing autonomous seagrass restoration services for for different governments around the world, working with governments in Australia and The US. We did a a million dollars in revenue last year, we're on track
Speaker 1:for for over two this year. Congratulations. Yeah. I When I met when I met Will and I heard this, like, initial wedge, I was like, this is so fascinating and interesting. Like, find, like, the most weird, obscure market that no one would ever think of and just just absolutely dominate it.
Speaker 2:It's awesome.
Speaker 1:And then use that to earn the right to do many other things. And I think I introduced Will to like 10 seed funds in like thirty minutes at one point. Without getting the opt in from Will. It was like, people need to meet you. And then within a few days, people were committing.
Speaker 2:So That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's Yeah. I good to you on show Will. I learned to scuba dive off the coast of Catalina Island. And when I was I was like 15 when I was doing it and it was had all this amazing tall California kelp. And I went back
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Couple years ago. And you you've heard the story. There's like an invasive kelp species that came over from Japan, I believe, on like a shipping container, shipping shipping tanker. And it completely wiped it out, and it looks completely different. And I I don't know if it's particularly important to restore the original California kelp.
Speaker 2:I imagine it probably is in some abstract sense, but it was just a bummer as a as a scuba diver to be like, it's not what I remember, which was like swimming through this beautiful forest. It's just kind of these tumbleweeds now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's man, it's those fucking purple urchins.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:It's it's that's it. What happens a big a big way of, like, that invasive species are transmitted in the ocean is, like, a a like, a a ship will, like, you know, be in in the in the in Tokyo and in the port. And then it'll fill up its its like its ballast, it'll pull in water. And when it's pulling in water, it'll take in fish or urchins in this instance
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And fill up, and then it'll go out to sea, and then it'll land in San Diego or San Francisco in the port, and then it'll release them all. So this happened as well with lionfish in
Speaker 2:The Caribbean
Speaker 3:and Miami. And, yeah, those lionfish are gnarly. They're just like chewing up the coral everywhere. Yeah. I I went I went calling them once you get I was in in the in the Cayman Islands working there one summer, and we were getting paid to, like, spearfish
Speaker 2:these Yes. I've heard this. Lionfish. Yeah. Mean, that is
Speaker 5:taste great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They taste great. That is the good side of the lionfish is that you can just hunt them relentlessly because no one cares about them because they're so invasive. And they're like pretty fun to shoot and you shoot them
Speaker 3:with And you can make leather wallets with them. Yeah. I know. I'm lionfish leather wallets.
Speaker 2:And you're like, I'm actually I'm hunting but I'm saving the world. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But these are pigs in Texas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like pigs in Texas. Yeah. I mean, it's actually a problem, and and it needs to be, like, really dealt with. But as a as a consumer of hunting, it's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's great. But, yeah,
Speaker 2:these are
Speaker 3:these are good examples of tasks again that are just, like, still today. It's like Irish dudes with spears going down just like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Realistically, there aren't that many people that wanna go spearfishing, lion fishing all day, every day, forever. No. Because, like, the the p they like, yeah. A couple tourists doing it once a weekend is not gonna do the job.
Speaker 2:So, you you need automation.
Speaker 3:A 100%. Yeah. And, like, we've we yeah. So that's the kind of these are the types of this is, you know, that same platform that we built for seagrass. It's a service vehicle, underwater vehicle with a different robotic payload and a different model on board, fine tuned on finding urchins or finding lionfish.
Speaker 3:You could, you know, we could have like a service that just like solving this problem for someone.
Speaker 2:What's the origin of the name?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was there was there was kind of a few things. I mean, as most great ideas, it was conceived in the midst of drinking a record points. And but we were we were me and my co founders were out, we were just, like, thinking about different names for the business. And then we were thinking about that 1997 animated movie, the called Treasure Treasure Planet, where these, like, people, they go on these these quests and the submarine to to kinda save the world, and they they they they we looked it up, and it was called the the submarine in that movie was called Ulysses.
Speaker 3:And then, interestingly, when we got our first office, we got our first office in Dublin just after we raised the the pre seed in October '23. And we got our first office, and to to the left of us was the house that James Joyce grew up in. I would say Ulysses have the Irish connection as well, which is, you know, another reason we chose it. But to the left of us, there was a house the house that James Joyce grew up in. To the right of us was the house or the Museum of Literature Ireland, where the first copy of Ulysses kept.
Speaker 3:Wow. In the in the park opposite our street, just there's a big huge statue of James Joyce with a quote from Ulysses there. Mhmm. That also, like a bit of week later, my mom found a photo of me at home next to like a picture, or an extra like a James Joyce quote, and there's a quote underneath it. All all this kinda happened in the same week, so it's kinda like, okay.
Speaker 3:We're keeping it now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because the nominative determinism here is that I mean, the story of Ulysses Odysseus is, like, a ten year grind. Yeah. And it's, like, absolutely miserable, like, facing the Cyclops and the getting enchanted by Cersei and the sirens. And, like, I imagine that if things if nominative determinism holds
Speaker 1:The sirens for you
Speaker 2:are You won't getting a quick buck in a aqua hire at meta anytime soon. You're gonna be at this for a very long time. I'm rooting for you and I think you will ultimately ultimately be successful. But buckle up, you're gonna go on an entrepreneurial journey if the name holds.
Speaker 1:What who who are your who are your biggest Irish Irish tech heroes? What makes the Irish so So dumb. So infatuated with technology?
Speaker 3:I mean, what makes Irish people so infatuated? I mean, you guys are well aware of the Hibernian conspiracy, Of
Speaker 2:course. As
Speaker 3:as to I I don't know what you guys have to say about your the the accusations that, you know, that mister Kugen and mister Hayes are at the core of this cabal of Irish people in technology or Irish. Never beating the allegations.
Speaker 2:Never beating the allegations.
Speaker 3:What about Paki McCormack? What about Molly O'Shea? What about all these people with Irish surnames? What are they doing? Why do they why do they all suddenly have media programs?
Speaker 2:Why do
Speaker 1:all follow each other?
Speaker 2:Why does Apple domicile all of their cash there? It's a good question.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You think you think it's, the Rothschilds, you know, running the money supply to actual Hollisans. Exactly. So, actually, Satoshi Nakamoto Nakamoto is actually an Irish name. The the old father on on Nakamoto.
Speaker 3:So there's
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:All these notions here.
Speaker 2:Here we go.
Speaker 1:It goes it goes deeper.
Speaker 2:It goes deeper.
Speaker 3:And mine my my favorite Irish technologist would probably be George Buell, the inventor of, Boolean algebra.
Speaker 2:Oh, there you go.
Speaker 3:Foundation for modern computing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I didn't realize he was Wow.
Speaker 1:Deep cut. Deep cut.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then modern modern ones. Owen McCabe is a good friend as well. Big final one. Hoping they're doing it the Very, very inspiring to see to see someone like that.
Speaker 3:And obviously, the Collisons as well. Yeah. But I feel I feel the Collisons everyone appreciates the Collisons. I don't think I don't think people appreciate the the great business that the the guys at Intercom are building. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I know you had him on the show recently and
Speaker 1:We just partner with him. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's a sponsor now.
Speaker 3:Ring ring the bell. Ring
Speaker 2:the bell.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You can have in your tinfoil hat conspiracy, there's definitely a line between us and OWN and then us and intercom and own appeared on the show.
Speaker 2:He just happens to pay us through stripe, know.
Speaker 1:I had a random question for you that I'm sure you have strong opinions on. Every now and then I'll see a video that's off the like coast of Chile and there's just like just fleets of fishing Mhmm. Vehicles as far as the eye can see. What's going on down there? Is there any solution to it?
Speaker 1:I'm sure you've gotten asked that. Is is your guys' tech something that could help Yeah. Address that?
Speaker 3:It is. Yeah. And we're speaking with some partners about about kind of supporting on the this problem right now. I think there's, like, two aspects to the problem. So, yeah, like, characterizing the problem.
Speaker 3:The Chinese are, you know, destroying many oceans around the world, particularly in countries where they basically just don't have the money to monitor their their seas and enforce marine protected areas and these sorts of things. So open down the coastlines of, say, America. This is the single biggest thing that, like, say, the American navies are spending time on right now. West Africa as well is just being complete like, the fisheries there have been completely decimated. In and around the Antarctic as well, there's massive krill populations.
Speaker 3:And krill populations are they're this kind of foundational species for a lot of other marine life in the ocean. You take away the krill, which is the kind of bottom of the food chain, you know, it knocks all the way up to the to the whales. And and then you lose the whales as well, and nobody wants to lose the whales. So that's kind of like character of the problem. Okay.
Speaker 3:The reason the problem exists is okay. Two reasons. Navy's that basically just can't cover enough area and get maritime domain awareness. They just can't they don't have enough assets, and, you know, that's part of the problem. And there's a governance aspect to the problem as well.
Speaker 3:Right? So how does China get away with it? Well, so, you know, the the the people responsible for kind of looking after, you know, law on the high seas quite often is what you'd call the flag stage. So where the boat is registered, all these boats are registered Chinese. Chinese kinda, like, knows this is their kind of this they use this as what, you know, you'd call, like, gray warfare, and it's kinda similar with the critics of undersea infrastructure.
Speaker 3:You know, it's not really officially the Chinese state, but it may as well be because they're not, like, prosecuting on it. So on the on the technical side, I suppose, like, the the problem here is, like, the again, the paradigm of of maritime operations is kind of, you know, is is stuck, and it's it's broken. Right? It's you know, you could probably characterize it and call it this the heavy tech bottleneck. Right?
Speaker 3:So, basically, any mission you wanna do in the ocean kinda has, like, a few features around it. It, like, it it generally, you know, relies on these expensive manned assets. So these could be airplanes like p three Orion's, or they could be, you know, expensive national security quarters, these big coast guard quarters, these 100 foot, 200 foot long vehicles. And these costs, like, tens of millions to you know, in in CapEx. And then the running cost for them on a day is, like, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to run daily, and then you use these things as, like, a platform on which you put sensors or you you use it like an unmanned system, and that's kind of, like, what it relies on.
Speaker 3:So it's, small numbers of very expensive assets. Whereas the way we're seeing autonomy going around the world, whether it be, like, self driving transfer networks, like self driving cars or drones in Ukraine. It's like we're moving away from these small networks of exclusive vehicles to large networks of small autonomous vehicles. Right? So it's like going from buses and trains to, like, a network of Waymo's or Tesla Robo Taxis.
Speaker 3:You know, on the battlefield, it's moving away from fighter jets to like a a bajillion NEEROS drones. You know, it's like it's like, this is like just the way we're going, but that hasn't really happened yet in the ocean. And the limiting factor that we think is that basically drones are still, like, crazy expensive in the ocean. Unmanned systems are crazy expensive. Even if you wanna buy, you know, the the sexiest unmanned surface vehicle, you're still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater vehicles.
Speaker 3:You're spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. And but we haven't had, like, a DGI yet for the ocean. Right? We haven't had someone that really completely collapsed costs to the degree that you can buy fleets instead of single units. So, again, that's kind of, like, what we're trying to position ourselves as is, this big person who you can buy if you're like the Argentinian Navy and your fishery is just getting obliterated.
Speaker 3:You can buy like a swarm of surface and subsea vehicles to kinda solve the problem for the fraction of a cost you purchase a manned asset for that works twenty four seven, with zero OpEx
Speaker 2:How much
Speaker 3:which is controlled over .com.
Speaker 1:How much is the problem that peep you know, these governments don't know something is happening or they know, but it's 30 boats that have showed up somewhere and they're just going to fish, you know, and and basically decimate all life until they're maybe pushed away by a boat. Like, what what is I I can see the technology angle of of getting just like more coverage and knowing more about what's happening in these different areas. But it feels like there needs to be more will from the government as well to just say, like, we're not gonna let this happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, the the the the will is, like, certainly there. It's just they don't they don't have the budget on current assets. Like, it like, you know, like, some of these, like, if you wanna buy more of these, like, like, boats that they would need or these planes that they need to, like, survey or or get, like, awareness on the area, but these are, like, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions for some of these assets. And the Argentinian Navy just doesn't have that kind of money.
Speaker 3:So they know that in general there's a problem there, but they just don't have enough assets out there. I mean, it's crazy that, like, most of the Argentinian air force's time is now spent on looking for Chinese ships over their waters. It's it's so it's like, they just yep. They they don't have the money. So, yeah, you really do need cheaper solutions for for these types of folks.
Speaker 1:What other what other stories are you are you tracking or kind of problems globally that that you think you're
Speaker 2:attacking? Like this big shipbuilding bill. Like, how does the new budget fit in? What are you tracking in DC? I know you're still an early stage company, but I imagine that the the long term has to be figure out a way to get to program program of record, work with the DOD.
Speaker 2:But break it down, how are you actually thinking about that? Because it feels like there's a lot of different applications. You gotta stay dual use. You gotta stay agile while you're building the underlying tech. But what are you what are you looking at in DC?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, for us on the kind of government BD side, there's there's kind of three plates that we're always spinning. Right? There's, like, the the DC plate. There's the, like, operator or war fighter end user state, and then there's, the acquisition star teams in that place.
Speaker 3:So we're always just, in constant dialogue and with, like, you know, different members of these these three these bodies. So, yeah, the the the most recent, you know, appropriation for for defense is very interesting. There's many, many billions going to maritime unmanned systems, particularly surface vehicles and underwater vehicles. I think there's a general recognition on the hill right now that, like, you know, the, you know, the Chinese are producing, like, hundreds of ships per per year, and, you know, US is producing one ship per year. And that, like, trying to beat them on shipbuilding is, like, probably not feasible.
Speaker 3:We're not gonna ramp up that production that quickly. We need to just play a different game. And I think they're seeing, like, unmanned systems is, like, the the way to that. And so yeah. Just this week, it was announced again.
Speaker 3:Another 9,000,000,000, you know, few months ago as well. There was another 4,000,000,000 allocated to this line item. So yeah. They're the things that that that we're tracking. There's some some existing program of records that are already set up that that were, you know, in the kind of running to to kinda to kinda challenge for and get a get a position on.
Speaker 3:And there's also talk of some new ones being set up for these some of these newer categories of vehicles that haven't been developed yet. But, yeah, out of the three plates that we're spinning right now, it's, you know, generally the you know, you you you do wanna have, like, a presence in DC kinda like at this early stage. It's not the main focus. The main focus is refining our product with the end user, understanding what their needs are, and building building to spec. So that's kinda like our main focus right now.
Speaker 3:It's spoken to speak to some some folks in Navy about that. And and DHS and the Department of Homeland Security and other other groups as well on this. So they're kind of our our main focus right now in that front.
Speaker 2:Probability p Atlantis. What's the probability that you guys find it?
Speaker 3:I think I think very high. I think it's probably a
Speaker 2:Very high. You think that Atlantis exists?
Speaker 3:Yes. I think there's, like, two very good candidates for Atlantis. There is one structure in Mauritania, in modern modern day Mauritania, called the Recap Structure. So the Recap Structure is basically three concentric rings in the middle of the desert with salt deposits between each of them and looks man made. You can see it from space.
Speaker 3:You can look up the Recap structure or I c h a g. And the only description the only description we have from of of Atlantis is actually from Plato. Plato describes it as being this, like, walled city full of gold with Mhmm. You know, built with the kind of this city hall being at the middle of three concentric rings. The ring you know, the rings were each filled with seawater.
Speaker 3:And modern day Mauritania is also where the richest the richest man that ever lived existed. So there was this Mauritanian king who had more gold. He would have been the, I think, the, you know, the first trillionaire. And yeah.
Speaker 2:That's fair.
Speaker 3:For And and and and and so that that's the gold part of it, the reconstruction of the three rings of that part of it. And then there's also these all these, like, salt striations all the way from the coastline West Africa to this location. So it's kind of the theory that there was this there was this apocalyptic event about eleven thousand five hundred years ago called the related to the comet hitting the earth and Atlantis was there. There was a great flood and this this city was lost. So that's that's one location.
Speaker 3:The other one is in the in the is in the Atlantic Ocean, which then would lead to some of the first survivors potentially leaving the Atlantis and going to Ireland to set up the the next modern day civilization.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. We're bringing back. This is fantastic. Next time, we're getting to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle.
Speaker 2:But thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon, Will.
Speaker 1:Great having you on Will.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us. Cheers. Bye. Really quickly, let me when we find Atlantis, you know what we're doing?
Speaker 1:The cure for male loneliness being called lads.
Speaker 2:Lads. Yeah. What are
Speaker 1:we doing?
Speaker 2:What's the first thing? Set up a wander.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You gotta find
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Speaker 2:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel green amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and $24.07 concierge service. It's a vacation home or better.
Speaker 1:A video dropping with wander this week. We do. Cannot wait to release.
Speaker 2:And we have a new guest dropping on the stream.
Speaker 1:We are surrounded by journalists. We're gonna bring in Kylie. Kylie did the reporting that we covered
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:For wired covering the leaked the leaked memo.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:So let's bring her on in. There she is. What's Welcome
Speaker 2:to the stream.
Speaker 8:Hello. Hello. My first time. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:First of many, hopefully. How's the day going? You've been scooping? Scooping up a Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's been busy. Just that this morning and tweeting nonstop and now you guys.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Awesome. So what did your what did your weekend look like? What what's
Speaker 9:the Oh, god.
Speaker 1:What's like, break down, like, a a weekend of of scoops.
Speaker 2:It's pushing a signal messenger to the max. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Well, it was pride weekend here in San Francisco, so that wasn't fun to combine. I helped a friend move, and then I got the first scoop and ran to Pride And Dolores, drank a bunch of White Claws, ran home, slept for twelve hours, and my editor
Speaker 1:got again.
Speaker 8:Then we're scooping again Monday, first thing in the morning,
Speaker 1:scooping again.
Speaker 8:What such
Speaker 5:as the vibe.
Speaker 1:Everything's been moving quickly. What was the first scoop? And and maybe, like, break that down. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. So I think that was Friday. I reported on a research paper that's not being released at OpenAI because it talks about the definition of AGI, and sources have said that allegedly managers were saying that the Microsoft deal and those negotiations were a reason for not releasing that paper. And it's really, really tense as the journal and Reuters have reported those negotiations.
Speaker 8:Then Saturday for OpenAI researchers went to Meta's new lab. Sunday, Mark Chen, an executive at OpenAI, sent out a memo saying they're basically Meta's basically robbing our home. My editor published that one. And this morning, Mark Zuckerberg sent out a list of all his new hires. It's been fun.
Speaker 1:Huge. So we gotta ask, who's your source?
Speaker 2:No. Kidding.
Speaker 8:You, Chris. You're not going on the record as you guys? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. No. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm curious kinda what what you expect next in this in this saga. Do you expect? I mean, it clearly OpenAI is not seeing Zac announced his current list and being like, okay. We're safe now. We don't, you know, we don't have to worry.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, you know, it it it's very costly that the worst is behind them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. My my my question, I I talked to Will about this was just like, were you surprised that the memo didn't lean more on the fact that this has happened like three or four times at OpenAI and they've gotten through it every time? Like, I would be leaning on the fact that like, yeah, Dario left. Elon started XAI. Thinking machines exists.
Speaker 2:SSI exists. We we still have 90% penetration in consumer AI. Walk down the street, ask someone what they use for AI. They're not even gonna say OpenAI or ChatGPT. They're just gonna say chat.
Speaker 2:And and just leaning into that that that, hey, we are this compounding dominant force in consumer AI. This is the place that you wanna stay and be as opposed to getting of I think a little bit more in the weeds of like the nature of the deal. It felt like an appeal maybe not defensive I don't know.
Speaker 1:And and came across. I mean, were clearly scared.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's seemed very focused on, like, the the the the the actual dynamics of, like, how, how one of these offers comes together as opposed to just Yeah. Just reiterating the strengths that, like, here you get to work on the consumer product in AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was it was, like, a lot of messaging around, please talk to us if you're if you're getting offers versus let's rally. Let's let's ride. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I think it's you know, a big part of it came over the weekends. Like, these people are just these executives are scrambling to tell staff, like, for the love of God, do not talk to anyone at Meta and sign any offers. And they're going on this, like, week long break next week, so I think they were just trying to get ahead of that. But I think that your guys' argument, that's right. I think it's just like a very emotional high stress time.
Speaker 8:They're trying to ship to very large models, and Mark Zuckerberg's coming in, calling employees directly, and offering millions and millions and millions of dollars. So I think, like, their response is emotional and defensive because it's, like, just so high stress. But that would have been a good tactic, and I don't doubt it's coming Yeah. Eventually.
Speaker 2:How how solid do you think you are on the $100,000,000 offer? That's been floated multiple times. And Yeah. It and we were kinda digging through the game theory of it like in in one way, it benefits Sam to get that number out because if someone if Mark tries to poach someone for 50, they might be like, ah, I've been hearing that everyone's getting a 100. Like, come on.
Speaker 1:Thought I was one of your
Speaker 2:top guys. Thought I
Speaker 1:was near the top of your list.
Speaker 2:And then and then, you know, it it in some ways, it benefits Mark because at at Meta because if you're hearing about these $100,000,000 offers, you might be more willing to take that preliminary phone call because you know that they are ready to put money where their mouth is. And so it it kinda benefits both sides. Dylan Patel was on a podcast a couple days ago talking about how they're not really sending a $100,000,000 wire with cash on day one, that there's earn outs to these structures, and they can collide back if you don't stay. And so how much nuance do you think there is on on that number specifically? Because it's certainly headline grabbing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the The Wall Street Journal, I mean, they they they put it in the special infographic right here. Like Heck yeah. Because a 100,000,000 is a nice round number, and it reads very well, and it works in a headline. But I'm just wondering if you think if you think it's a 100% real or fifty fifty or there's more nuance to it.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So my take is The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both printed that number, and they have really, really rigorous Yeah. Editorial standards to get get to print. So they must have seen something, some high level sources that proved to them that that number is real. I, for one, have not seen that number.
Speaker 8:And for me, I would have to see an offer letter with that number. Yeah. But knowing how tech salaries work, I don't think it's just like a wire transfer. It's, you know, going to be golden handcuffs. It's gonna be over a certain amount of time.
Speaker 8:And Yep. You know, the information had a really good story breaking down, you know, researcher salaries. And just imagine if you came to OpenAI a couple years ago at 80,000,000,000, 40,000,000,000 valuation and what that is now. They don't really need, you know, all this crazy money from Meta, but it is attention grabbing. It's also grabbing for sure.
Speaker 1:It's also just funny when you when you say a $100,000,000 for one person, it sounds like a lot. But if you were to say, we're gonna spend $5,000,000,000 to put together a team that is super core to our entire business and win, it doesn't feel nearly as significant for a company that is a multi trillion dollar company.
Speaker 2:Looking at the the the WhatsApp acquisition price and number of employees. I'm pretty sure they paid more than a $100,000,000 per person because it was $19,000,000,000, 4,000,000,000 in cash, 14,000,000,000 in Facebook shares, which are probably worth like a 120,000,000,000 now because this is in 2014. And at the time, WhatsApp was a remarkably lean team with around 50 employees. So, I mean, not far off. I mean, what if they had
Speaker 1:Slightly different comp though, just given that they were buying a product with
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. The product is super valuable, but, know, the the researchers that can build the next model and and and bring llama to the frontier makes a lot of sense. What what what else should we dig into here?
Speaker 1:I think that was it. Any yeah. I I don't know if you touched on this specifically, any any any like specific predictions about what comes next? Or are you just waiting waiting for one of your little birdies to send you a note?
Speaker 8:Well, if you're watching birdies, my signal is at kylie dot o one. I will be impressed if they get someone of Ilya's Ilya Sutskiver's capabilities. I think that the people who want to build superintelligence are true believers. And you're giving them a value proposition of we will give you so much money, but you're making superintelligence for Mark Zuckerberg. And I think that some of the best brains that really believe in AGI's this prosperous future or, you know, perhaps the end of humanity don't necessarily wanna do that for Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 8:So I will be impressed if he gets one of those minds. He still has about 50 people he wants to hire for this team, so it's just gonna keep coming. I think a lot of them are gonna continue coming from the top labs. But what the vision is, what Mark's vision is, I'm waiting to see. So
Speaker 1:What about last question. What about Daniel Gross? Had been initially reported, but but he wasn't on the wasn't on the list that that you released earlier.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. I noticed that neither was the the team from Switzerland. I I'm gonna guess this is pure speculation for Switzerland. They have EU laws that make it strange to employ them right away.
Speaker 8:But for Daniel Gross, I'm not sure what happened. I saw that was reported by the information with Nat Friedman. I've tried to be in touch with anyone who could tell me if Daniel's going, but he wasn't on the list. So I guess we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yep. Very cool. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you start getting some major offers. I could see the the the AI researcher space is heating heating up the AI journalist. It might be the next domino to fall.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Oh, god. We're here we're here to help talk you through any any sort of offers that you might get
Speaker 8:from the overall Perfect. You guys can take a percent. We'll work it out.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Awesome. Well, great great having you on. And, excited to follow the rest of your reporting this week.
Speaker 8:Thanks, to soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 2:Next we have Joshua.
Speaker 1:From Chai Discovery with a big launch this week. It's always tough to to launch when the biggest trade deal in tech history is going down. Not even a trade deal, the biggest poaching.
Speaker 2:We keep calling it a trade deal.
Speaker 1:It was not Not much on the other
Speaker 2:side of the trade.
Speaker 1:It was a non consensual trade deal?
Speaker 2:It's a it's more of like a a draft.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:is just drafting from the entire league.
Speaker 1:I take 12 of your best people Yeah. For nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's kinda just building an all star an all star roster. It's like all star weekend over at meta this Anyway, Joshua welcome to the stream. How are doing?
Speaker 7:I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Kick us off.
Speaker 1:Great work.
Speaker 2:You know
Speaker 1:launching on such a wild day in tech history.
Speaker 2:Is the run really getting like completely steamrolled by this story?
Speaker 1:Or don't know. Is
Speaker 2:it fifty fifty?
Speaker 1:Like that. Maybe maybe
Speaker 2:I feel like there's also people on vacation and stuff. But break it down for us. What is the big news?
Speaker 7:Well, the big news is we've just announced CHI two, which is our latest foundation model at at CHI Discovery. Chai two is actually allowing us to now generate antibody sequences with a success rate that's high enough for us to skip the usual high throughput lab testing. So this means that you can go take a target, put that into our model, go generate a set of potential protein sequences, and then test them in the lab, and they tend to work with extremely high hit rates. Previous methods were, like, point 1% or so, so you'd have to screen, you know, hundreds of thousands to to potentially find something. But here, the hit rates are actually upwards of of 15%, approaching twenty percent of of success.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Break down some immediate applications of that tech across maybe different types of categories.
Speaker 2:You wanna ask about making a more potent testosterone?
Speaker 1:Maybe we get to that next. Okay.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Maybe that's the right spin out. TBPN incubation.
Speaker 1:We said we would never incubate
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. But I think
Speaker 7:one thing that we're really passionate about is going after areas that are really hard to do today. Sure. You know, like, this allows us to do things faster and cheaper potentially, but I think what's really gonna be game changing is just opening up new kinds of biology that wasn't possible before. So we've got scientists that are, like, you know, maybe working for years trying to enable a certain class of drug program. And if we cannot use machine learning to jump to to potential solutions, that could really just really
Speaker 3:kind of
Speaker 7:push up the bar of of what people need to do. I think it's if you take a step back, like, look at what happened with LLMs, everyone has to be an AI company now to compete. Right? Mhmm. What's that gonna look like in biotech where if you don't have access to a technology like this and then you start to have these certain areas that are closed out to you, like, what is that gonna look like?
Speaker 7:So I think that that's something that we are really excited to figure out.
Speaker 2:Benchmark it to the LLM market, do you see yourself taking more of an anthropic path or an open AI path? And what I mean by that is, or do you develop the drugs? Do you wind up being the front end to this and kind of being full stack, or do you go more like b to b you have a bunch of pharma companies or, you know, traditional biotech companies that are buying a product or or service from you?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a great question. You know, I think if we take any lesson from the LLM market, it's that the winners are gonna be the ones who are most agile. The technology is evolving at a faster clip than we ever expected. Our our company goal for this entire year was to get to a 1% success rate on this task.
Speaker 7:And, you know, we're halfway into the year, and we're already past 15%. Mhmm. When you have progress like that, it is really hard to predict, like, how the market is going to evolve. And that's why I think just, like, being flexible, making sure that we have the best technology, making sure that we have the best way to use that technology as well. You know, it's not just throwing a model over the wall and you get a drug.
Speaker 7:We really have to make the models work well for the specific applications where they're most important, and we also have to make them much easier to use. We have to get them into the right people's hands. There's a lot of scientists that if we can bring their creativity and ingenuity together with these new models, that that's where the magic's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:What's the state of the art in, like, actual the actual impact of antibodies? Like, last time I heard antibodies in the news was when Joe Rogan was taking monoclonal antibodies for COVID infection. Yeah. And that that was one of those weird things where it felt like a very modern
Speaker 1:not controversial.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it felt like a very modern piece of science, and the narrative around him was that he was not adopting the modern science, but he was kind of on the cutting edge of that fork of the tech tree. And so is are monoclonal antibodies, like, the most like, the latest and greatest, or are there other applications that are particularly interesting or just driving value, even if they're even if they're are indeed like the traditional way?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So about half of drug approvals these days are are actually biologics protein drugs, so antibodies. Mhmm. Monoclonal antibodies are actually just one type. That's closer to what, you know, we've been exploring in in this paper, but I actually think what's going to happen is that people have now started to push beyond that.
Speaker 7:They're basic like, bispecifics are all the rage right now. That's basically you can think of it as two antibodies that are kind of stuck together. So you can actually go after multiple targets at the same time, or you can actually get, like, a more potent behavior for single target. You know, it's kinda just, two things in one. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So if we can make, you know, the fur if we can make each one of those chains, like, easier to design, then, know, bringing them together is gonna be gonna be even easier as well.
Speaker 1:So I
Speaker 7:think it just, like, raises the the bar for the kinds of therapies that you have to work on because it becomes easier to make those drugs. So that's what monoclonal antibodies are. They were really important in COVID. Right? They can neutralize viruses.
Speaker 7:The way that people found them during COVID was actually once a patients who had COVID Mhmm. They just like you know, you would go and just, take someone's blood, for example, and and try to find antibodies that are in there and then try to develop that into a therapy. But now we can just make it on the computer in twenty four hours and then go test it in the lab and have some results in in a few weeks. So there's a lot more work to do to make sure that these molecules will actually work in in in the clinic and will work well in patients. We have early signs that they have drug like properties, which is really nice to see.
Speaker 7:But we've got a lot of work ahead of us in order to really bring that to production, if you will. There's still some more engineering that you might want to do on the molecules that are coming out of the platform today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is your sci fi vision for the state of drug development fifty years from now? And how would the FDA have to adapt regulations to enable that? Cause I can imagine my vision is like you come in to some type of doctor clinic setting, you have some set of conditions and they're just sort of like auto generating drugs on the fly specifically to your current conditions, but that obviously wouldn't work in in the current paradigm. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, that that would be the dream. The North Star that we have for this space is something that we think of as, like, zero shot drug candidates. Right now, we have these zero shot proteins. Right? So we specify target.
Speaker 7:We get some protein that binds it. But the fact that this is possible makes us believe that someday we'll be able to actually just, like, have the models think about all the other properties that we need for a drug, it's possible that the first sequences that come out of the model will actually be good enough to eventually move into patients. Mhmm. And, yeah, if you can do that, then, you know, maybe at the next stretch is, like, can we actually do hyper personalized medicine? Right?
Speaker 7:Maybe there's something where we take some sample from a patient, we figure out what exact target we need to go after, then we go and generate the drug. I mean, there's multiple leaps that need to happen, but I I can't predict what's gonna happen fifty years from now. Like, honestly, I I failed in predicting what's gonna happen six months. I I bought this.
Speaker 1:Now you're gonna be at 1%.
Speaker 2:Do you use AlphaFold or is it just a separate tech that you is kind of complementary but not in your direct supply chain?
Speaker 7:Yeah. The foundation models are built in house here. Okay. We don't use AlphaFold. We actually can't use AlphaFold.
Speaker 7:The latest one is isn't available at company. So we built our own. Interesting. We have a state of the art model for predicting protein protein structure and its interactions with molecules. We actually open source that.
Speaker 7:So we started the company a little over a year ago, and then six months in, that was the first thing we did because you really need, like, an atomic level microscope if you're going to design drugs. That was our thesis when we got started. But we realized that, you know, that kind of level of the technology we thought would would get out there anyway. So so we open source that. It's being used in in most of the major pharmaceuticals today.
Speaker 7:I think the community has has gotten a lot of engagement around that. But now the models are becoming even more complicated. So that's why we're starting to invest in not just the model layer, but but how we actually make those models useful. They're they're really starting to look more like pipelines. It's kinda like chat GPT o three.
Speaker 7:It's not just a single inference. There's actually, know, a bunch of complex tricks that you need to run if you're gonna get the best results. So that that's that's kind of how we're thinking about it right now.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, congrats on the launch. Love to have you back soon. This is fantastic.
Speaker 1:With the with the rate that you guys are moving, I'm sure you'll be back on in a couple weeks.
Speaker 6:So Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Congrats to you and the whole team.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 7:Really appreciate it. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Good one.
Speaker 6:Bye. Guys.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have John from Campfire coming on the show. Welcome to the stream. John, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Here you go. I missed this. You you haven't
Speaker 2:been hitting the soundboard enough. I love it.
Speaker 1:Boom. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:How are you doing, John?
Speaker 1:Can you hear us?
Speaker 4:Yes. I can. Thank you so much for having me on today.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Do you wanna kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. I'm the founder and CEO at Campfire. We're based in San Francisco, and I was a finance exec for about fifteen years and just lived the pain Thank you. Software.
Speaker 1:Don't give me the heroes.
Speaker 4:Yes. The unsung heroes. Never featured in the all hands, but we're working on changing that here and lived in spreadsheets my whole life and just helping. I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon, but helping folks take all the transactional accounting, all the financial reporting, and get it into software. And so Campfire is the modern ERP for high growth companies to just help them move to an AI powered platform.
Speaker 4:And so that's what
Speaker 2:we do.
Speaker 1:How young were you when you realized you wanted to build the modern ERP?
Speaker 4:I would say it's not something you think of growing up. It's not like
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure kids these I'm sure some ambitious kids these days think I'm gonna build I'm gonna build the next gen ERP. But
Speaker 4:You'd be surprised. So going into Y Combinator, there's about 4,000 companies that have gone through it, but they've probably had hundreds of thousands apply. They're like, you know, no one came to us and said we wanna build a new ERP. They're like, you're you're like the only one excited about the category.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I would say this was in 2020, 2021 when I really was feeling the pain at a mid sized company that I'm like, this is the largest category in software. Why is nobody disrupting it? And that's that was a that was a critical moment for me.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because it's it's it's not gonna fit the probe, like, you need to have lived and breathed the problem to know what to build. And I think that YC has like the the sort of default type of founder that does that. Maybe they have a few years as an engineer at Palantir or they were a product manager at Coinbase or something like It's very different than being like on you know, being in being in the c suite, actually living and breathing and and having that ability to go and figure out what to build. Give us the latest on the fundraising side.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We announced today Excel is leading our $35,000,000 series ad. Here
Speaker 1:we go. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:I love it. I I wanna talk to You said high growth. I remember I was running a company, and there was a big debate over, like, oh, like, you know, like, thank goodness we don't need to implement Oracle. We get to implement NetSuite. And it was, like, still a lot of work.
Speaker 2:It was a big, big ERP. And so it seems like the the playbook is is start with high growth startups, be the first ERP, and then scale into that. And then eventually, you'll be able to service the really, really large Fortune 500 companies. But it's it's fair to say that you're not ready to go into a Fortune 500 company today. Is that right?
Speaker 2:And how do you think about actually growing the business long term?
Speaker 4:You said it well. We're hiring on the sales team, so we would love to have you. But in all seriousness, we are not ready for yet. Yeah. We do have customers with hundreds of millions in ARR Cool.
Speaker 4:Ripped out SAP. They've ripped out NetSuite. They've ripped out everything below that. So we are filling the pull up market quickly. And one of the reasons for the raise is to go make us enterprise ready.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And our customers are saying, I don't wanna be on an ERP for a few years. Right? I wanna be on it for ten plus.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I talked to the CFO at a 10,000 employee company still on NetSuite. They've already scaled into a $100,000,000,000 plus market cap on NetSuite, and they bought it at a 100 employees. Yeah. And so it's like, how do we go how do
Speaker 1:we get them at a
Speaker 4:100 and scale with them to 10,000? And and that's really where we're going.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, pretty sharp guy running the company over at Oracle, so it is a competitive market. But it does seem like there's there's lots of pockets of opportunity because the the I mean, I I remember just like the implementation bill for NetSuite was gonna be like half a million dollars in consulting or something like that. It it was it was pretty staggering. How do you think about pricing and getting a growth stage company to actually match the value that you're delivering with the money that you make?
Speaker 2:It's obviously great if you get a big contract upfront and they're locked in for a long time and they're paying this massive implementation bill. There's real cost to you if you have to implement stuff. How how are you thinking about ramping a customer into a great profit center for you long term?
Speaker 4:Yeah. First off, like, we've rethought the whole implementation process for the reasons you've stated. Like, you tell your accounting team, we bought an ERP. Like, everyone's ready
Speaker 5:to quit.
Speaker 4:Nobody wants to go through a one year implementation.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And so we've made it where, like, you give us a login to your old system. We go do all of the work because everybody says, I just don't have time. Our team is way too lean to do this. So a lot of the switching costs to your point, a lot of it is just, like, dollars, but a lot of it is just time. So we have solved for both.
Speaker 4:But to your point on, like, how do we get them into a profit center, we're just very focused on getting them in the door and making people super happy because we know, like, customers drive customers. Yeah. Like, referenceable and one of your sponsors, Ramp, has done a great job at driving referenceability and customer love has really been, I think, the the virality within the finance and accounting community. It's been a
Speaker 1:huge driver of their growth, and so we're focused on the same. How are you guys, leveraging AI internally and then in the in the product itself?
Speaker 2:Never heard of it. Irrelevant.
Speaker 1:But don't need it. Don't need it.
Speaker 4:What it stands for. I'm not familiar. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't need it. Built different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're We're doing it all right statements over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know.
Speaker 4:You know, I found I forgot what it was, but Excel's if statement limit. I like over you know, you you Let's go. That's the final boss
Speaker 2:of ERP. You have to build an ERP after you hit the limit on XL. Just unlock a like Satya Nadella just comes through the computer and says, good. You've out of the matrix. Welcome to the big leagues.
Speaker 2:Writes you a check. Anyway
Speaker 4:Our very first version of Campfire was I built a three statement model that was I framed into, like, a login.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it was it was me on the back end running a Google Sheet a three statement Google Sheets for customers.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 4:So you gotta start somewhere. Yeah. But, yeah, we're super excited about AI. So, obviously, one thing about us relative to the incumbents is, like, we are investing and putting AI everywhere. But whether it's Meta winning the AI talent war or OpenAI, like, we're always gonna be on the latest models, and we're always gonna be multi model.
Speaker 4:And so we're gonna be inheriting all of the amazing work of all of these amazing AI engineers, and we're, of course, building out our own proprietary AI models. But the gap between us and the incumbents is growing every time a new model ships irrespective of vendor because we're always putting in the latest models. A few examples, customers are uploading their board minutes from the last meeting and saying take all of our every row and campfire of every financial data and come up with a story narrative for the next board meeting.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And it's it's reading the board minutes. It's going through and it's like, here's the five things you should focus on based on all of it. On the accounting side, it's automating a lot of the accounting, but we've built, like, a ChatGPT for your finance and accounting data. It'll write to the ledger. It'll report for you.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Customers are saying, like, it kinda feels like we got a promotion. I'm not in there formatting my y and x axis anymore. You know, the charts are coming out through AI. And that that's been exciting to me because I I live that pain.
Speaker 4:Guys, I had a diligence report. I had to build the day of my wedding.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 4:We were we were in a bad ERP. So don't be mean. You know? Yeah. Enjoy your wedding day.
Speaker 2:That's good. Enjoy your wedding day. Last question for me in the news. Xero acquired The US the American b two b payments company Mello for 3,000,000,000. I think this was announced last week.
Speaker 2:2 and a half. Who who's who's counting at this point? Can you explain to me, like, what the rationale you think was behind that? Why? And and Xero feels like a different tier of product, not full ERP, more accounting suite for small businesses.
Speaker 2:Why would they need a payments product? Are you thinking about payments as a potential revenue generator in the future, whether it's through Stripe or Stablecoins or maybe you're gonna buy in payments firm at one point. I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, I can go really deep on this one. So as deep as you guys wanna go. But at Invoice2Go, we were an AR company, 250,000 businesses. We were powering their invoicing globally in a 150 countries.
Speaker 4:We competed with Meleo. We sold to bill.com. Obviously, they're a titan in AP, a billion in in AP revenue. And so I I know Xero and Meleo well. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I'll say Xero was really looking to be stronger in The US market. They're very strong in Australia, New Zealand, very strong in Western Europe and other parts of the world. QuickBooks, unsurprisingly given their headquarters is here, is dominant in The US. Yep. Mello brings a strong footprint.
Speaker 4:QuickBooks also launched their own AP product, and Xero needed a response to that. Sure. And so getting into the payments game, getting into APAR, and that solo entrepreneur category where I came from at Invoice2Go is where Xero and Melio have a lot of strength. We don't compete with either at all. Yep.
Speaker 4:So we're really, like, a cut above, so no competitive angle for for Campfire. But I think one that actually no one has really covered is Meleo is very strong in indirect. So Fiserv and others and
Speaker 3:this is
Speaker 4:public. Fiserv and others are are selling Mello through their channel. So Clover and other systems are out. And so this is a new go to market that's becoming really popular. We saw Brex launch embedded, Bill is embedded.
Speaker 4:Embedded go to market is is really a way to solve for really, like, efficient go to markets.
Speaker 2:Distribution.
Speaker 4:And I think this is a new one for for Xero that is a great play.
Speaker 2:That's really helpful. Thank you for that context. Appreciate it. I always like Great having you breakdown other stuff.
Speaker 1:And congratulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thanks, man.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Bye.
Speaker 1:Cheers, Sean.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Tom Lee from Bitmain, the first new treasury crypto treasury company, this time on the New York Stock Exchange, not the Nasdaq. We're gonna talk to him about crypto.
Speaker 1:Really really iconic stock exchange.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:If ask me.
Speaker 2:It's the New York of stock exchanges in many ways.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:The city that never sleeps, the Big Apple.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:If it was a stock exchange, it would be the New York Stock Exchange. Very excited to talk to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So today, they announced a 250,000,000 private to implement buying Ethereum for their ETH treasury. Yes. The stock
Speaker 2:ETH has been one of these
Speaker 1:48% in the pre market.
Speaker 2:Yes. So welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good. Good to meet you.
Speaker 2:Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and some of the news today?
Speaker 9:Glad to. My name is Tom Lee. I'm the, founder of Funstraat, which is a research firm, and many of those might know me from that role where I'm I periodically appear on CNBC and talk about markets. Mhmm. I'm also the chief investment officer of Bunstrat Capital, which is the asset manager, and we have an ETF called Granny Shots.
Speaker 9:That's, 1,400,000,000.0 of assets now. And Fund Shred, as a research firm, has 300 hedge fund clients and 10,000 RIAs. And our, and today, it was announced that I'm, taking a role separately from Fundstrat as chairman of Bitmain Immersion Technologies, and the ticker is BMNR. And that's to help the company transform its existing treasury strategy to be one that is focused on Ethereum.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What was the decision to go with Ethereum? We've seen a lot of Bitcoin treasury stories happening over the past year, would say. I mean, even going back further with micro strategy, but Ethereum is one that we have
Speaker 1:seen that much. That the that bit mine is up 679% today. So Good. The market is excited about what you're doing. But back back to John's question.
Speaker 1:Well,
Speaker 9:to me, one of the things that caught my eye is that stablecoins are the chat GBT of fintech right now because it's seen rapid adoption by consumers, merchants, and banks, and now Visa and credit card providers. It's because it really does have a a log function benefit over traditional dollars or over, you know, the credit card system. And, it's $250,000,000,000 today. Treasury secretary Besson estimated or said it's reasonable it could go to 2,000,000,000,000. That's a 10 x market, you know, addressable market change, which means it's an exponential opportunity.
Speaker 9:Stablecoins have to transact on a layer one blockchain, And the the blockchain that is considered the biggest and the most secure and the most commonly used for stablecoins is Ethereum. So we saw an opportunity to say, listen, let's think about more tokenization, You know, the ChatGP Stablecoins is the ChatGPT, but it's opening doors to other ways to tokenize assets. And so, we thought it would make sense to do some a treasury strategy around Ethereum. And it it plays a role that the bigger we become, the more important we are to the Ethereum ecosystem. So I think we're actually playing a role in stabilizing Ethereum because we essentially act as a staking entity.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And if we sort of think forward a few years sorry if I'm rambling.
Speaker 2:No. It's interesting.
Speaker 9:Goldman and JPMorgan, as they get into the stable coin business and Walmart and Amazon, they're gonna realize that they need to really secure the layer one that they're operating on. So they want it to be a big blockchain, a lot of validators. Ethereum is the biggest. And then the opportunity is that we're kind of like the plumbing of what banks will look like in the future. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Because they'll be staking Ethereum on their balance sheet or crypto in order to fund and operate their stable coin.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about the differences between the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq and what it means to be listed on one or the other?
Speaker 9:Yes. If you look at our press release, what we announced and we put prominently in headlines was New York Stock Exchange listed.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And, and we listed all of our partners. The reason for that is that most people know me as a traditional finance world person that also is trafficking in crypto. We've written about Bitcoin, for eight years. We first recommended it when it was under a thousand to our clients, but it's been a slow road. This project, the Bitmain Immersion's treasury strategy, is really a convergence between traditional finance and crypto.
Speaker 9:Right? That's where stablecoins are intersecting. And the partners we brought on, you know, Founders Fund, Pantera, Kraken, FalconX, Galaxy Digital, are companies that are really straddling the the crossover world, and we want it to be on a prestigious exchange. Most of these treasury strategies are trading on the Nasdaq Centimeters, which is like a a a sort of a junior league of Nasdaq. We want it to be on something prestigious because we want our traditional clients to come in and say, look, Tom, if we're gonna be interested in this treasury and learning about why this might be a new bank model, we don't wanna be buying stocks that are on a bulletin board.
Speaker 9:So it was really important to be on a prestigious exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. So I think that that's a real, you know, one of the advantages of, Bitmain Immersion is that they invested the time to be uplifted and so that they are on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:What, is is is liquidity, like, different on the stock exchange versus, like I mean, as as someone who's, like, younger and and more, I guess, Internet native, like, the idea of needing to buy a stock on a stock exchange is a little bit foreign compared to just, like, self custodying crypto directly. And then you have access to buy the major cryptocurrencies on pretty much any app in the App Store these days. Like, it it feels very accessible. And yet yet in the in the past, we've seen the ETF as a catalyst for price movements in the major l ones. So talk to me about, like, what's actually going on in the market and and some and characterize some of the different buyers and market participants and why they choose one way to get exposure over another.
Speaker 9:Yes. Yeah. And and so let's say I'll I'll take it in two parts. You know, the first is, like, in terms of a product to buy, as New York Stock Exchange listed stock, which is what BMNR is, has market makers. It's almost like you have, like, this invisible hand protecting price, and the exchange will halt the stock.
Speaker 9:If it's if it feels one-sided, that's really important because it protects investors. And these treasury strategies need to get institutional investors to sort of back the back this and become essentially create a two way market. So people can combine and sell these with with real little price erosion. Now, the second part, though, is someone say, well, Tom, why don't I just buy Ethereum Mhmm. ETF
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Or I'll just layer one. And I think the treasury the Ethereum treasury strategy now there's another one, which is Sharplink, which was led by Joe Lubin and Consensus, and that ticker's s b e T. I think the treasury strategies, especially for Ethereum, can actually deliver better returns for holders. Because let's say the metric for a treasury strategy is Ethereum per share. Now if you buy an ETF, your Ethereum per share is gonna always be fixed Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Because it's you're just buying a unit of Ethereum. So you only benefit if Ethereum price goes up. Whereas a treasury strategy, let's say, has a Ethereum per share value, then there's three ways that that price of that treasury stock goes up. One is that the company generates staking yield, So you're getting a little income. The second way that you benefit is if the company can capitalize on volatility, and Ethereum has twice the volatility of Bitcoin
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Which means the stock's twice as volatile. That means you're you're gonna be able to fund transactions like convertible instruments or sell stock in the open market, and people are buying it for the liquidity, and then you can increase the net asset value of Ethereum per share. So you're kinda, like, growing someone's actually if you own a share of a treasury stock, someone's working to get you more Ethereum per share for every share you hold. So they're they're actually, like, growing it. And the third, of course, is the price of Ethereum goes up.
Speaker 9:And that's where I think it's really interesting because, like, Circle, which is a the second largest stablecoin issuer, and it's been a it's probably the most successful IPO in, like, several years. It trades at around a 100 times enterprise value to EBITDA. So, so for every dollar of EBITDA, it's, like, a $100 of market cap. Ethereum has a network yield of four. So in other words, like, Ethereum's four times cheaper than Circle even though Circle runs on Ethereum.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So if usually, like, the more you get into the infrastructure layer, the higher the multiple is. That's why software has a higher multiple than a a retailer. So that means, like, if but if you just said Ethereum should be a 1% yield, then Ethereum should be, like, 12,000, per unit. And it's only, like, you know, 20, 500 now.
Speaker 9:So I think that there's the third way is, of course, Ethereum could go up a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What, what do you see as kind of the important milestones in Ethereum over the next few years? We went through kind of the NFT boom. We're now in the stable coin era. People have been still talking about store value.
Speaker 2:They're also starting to talk more about prediction markets. What is interesting to you about, maybe crypto broadly over the next few years?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Glad to. Well, you know, the I'd say the story arcs that we see is one, the regulatory landscape has become very friendly for crypto. Deal. The second is that institutional fiat money traditional is getting into crypto.
Speaker 9:95% of institutions don't own crypto, so that's a huge addressable market.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:But then there's technological innovation as you're pointing out, and that and there's a lot of great projects because of that. So Bitcoin, it's still our favorite layer one. And so, you know but that to us is digital gold. You know, it's it's really the best way to measure trust. And if it ever traded at the value of gold's above ground value, it's it's over a million dollars.
Speaker 9:So we still see a lot of upside. Ethereum unique feature is the smart contract. And we know that the majority of real world assets tokenized things, including tokenized dollars and tokenized real estate and equities, etcetera. They're actually being minted on the Ethereum or created on the Ethereum blockchain. So I I think as the world starts to tokenize and experiment and remember, there's a lot more equities and real world assets to tokenize onto layer ones than the other way is the traditional financial world is trying to equitize crypto, right, through ETFs.
Speaker 9:It's there's more to move into tokenizing on layer ones. And the third, of course, is things like solving some of the risks of AI, you know, the whole idea of a decentralized blockchain. I mean, look, let's face it. There is a a a non insignificant risk that AI is gonna be male malevolent. Like, there'll be a catastrophe because every innovation has always led to a catastrophe in the short term.
Speaker 9:Like, consumer credit was a technical innovation on, for consumer, access to money in nearly every country that rolled out a credit card, whether it's Asia or Latin America, had a credit crisis. And then in 02/2008, we had a mortgage innovation with the securitization of mortgages, and it boomed for a while.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:But then we had the GFC. So I think AI is obviously gonna be innovative, and there's a lot of opportunities, but it's inevitably inevitably gonna lead to a catastrophe. And I think that's when decentralized blockchains are gonna be one one answer to sort of managing the risk around AI. And so, I mean, I don't know if BitTensor is a solution, but I can see something running off Ethereum and validators, you know, human validators, is one way too.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. Talk to you all around about that.
Speaker 1:Any any reactions to there's been a couple announcements in the last week. Republic came out creating their mirror tokens products, which are bringing, private company stocks on chain and then Robinhood had an announcement, I I believe it was Yes. This morning Over June. OpenAI and SpaceX on chain. Any any kind of predictions around private company assets coming on chain?
Speaker 9:I I love all these experiments because they're trying to provide a a hybrid form of liquidity to things that are illiquid. You know? And so it it makes sense. And, you know, the the answer to that is it is a big deal that Republic and then Robinhood are doing this because you're you're gonna create the probability of a more healthy market. You know, this has to become a two way market.
Speaker 9:Because if someone's just tokenizing assets, but then very few people use it and the way what I mean by use it, someone may wanna own it, but someone might wanna hedge something. So, like, an OpenAI token isn't just someone's long bet on OpenAI. They might be invested in, you know, Grok or something, and then they need to hedge it by shorting the token. Like, you can create a two way market, it's definitely gonna work. But if the if the market is purely on, like, let's just tokenize it, you buy it and huddle it, then it's gonna have the same liquidity problem that it originally had.
Speaker 9:And then they might even trade it at discount, And then you you create other risk because now you're putting it on a blockchain, so now you have the actual risk of the physical asset being missing and then the blockchain being broken. So I think it'll be important for two way markets to develop around it.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:On the announcement, and, we're excited to follow along. Hopefully, have you on again soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fantastic. Well,
Speaker 5:thanks for
Speaker 9:having me.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Bye. Well, Drew, what else is going on?
Speaker 2:All of our ads. We are out of ads. We need we need more sponsors. Put more on that soon because we have a new one coming.
Speaker 1:There's a story on Apple Wang from Mark Gurman. Wang using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri in a major reversal. But let's save it for tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Save it for tomorrow. We do have some other news. Cursor is now available on your phone and on the web. Spin off dozens of agents and review them later in your editor. Andrew says, I joined Cursor to build the future of coding.
Speaker 2:And yes, as of today, you can code from anywhere with a coding assistant on every web browser and phone. Very very cool. We'll have to see how I'll have to give Tyler over there in the VR headset a challenge. Oh, he's back in.
Speaker 1:He's back in. There he is. What are you doing over there, Tyler?
Speaker 6:I'm just chilling in the metaverse.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah? Yeah. But what's what specifically are you doing? Are you
Speaker 6:I'm not playing video games.
Speaker 2:No? You're grinding?
Speaker 6:No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How how how is the now that you've had this headset for
Speaker 1:a few hours, how It's sick.
Speaker 6:Oh, it's way better. So I have the quest two at home. And I think it's just all the quest threes, but they have this like back strap. I don't know
Speaker 2:if you Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I see it.
Speaker 6:It's way more comfortable.
Speaker 2:It's way more comfortable.
Speaker 3:Like, I'm not
Speaker 6:it's like totally comfortable to wear this right now.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Are so are you doing pass through? Are you using your computer?
Speaker 6:I can see you guys
Speaker 2:right now. You can see me. Yeah. How many fingers? Four.
Speaker 2:No. I can see you. I'm using my How many fingers? Two. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:I can see right through. It's amazing. I don't I didn't realize the pass through was that good.
Speaker 1:New challenge don't take it off for twenty four hours. Starts now.
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:Go on a date with it. Use Cluelly with it.
Speaker 2:Yes. I mean, this is the Cluelly is the Cluelly device. We need Cluelly we need a Cluelly app in there ASAP. ASAP for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You show up there. Why why why don't you take off your your Meta Quest three s for the interview, actually. I I'd I'd prefer to leave it on. Anyway, there's some other good post we should go through. Apparently, Xfinity is allowing people to use WiFi signals to detect motion in your home at no extra cost.
Speaker 2:And this five seconds account says, I apologize to all my local schizophrenic schizophrenics. I owe you an apology. I wasn't really familiar with your game because it's
Speaker 1:Remember there was a super there was a video that came out probably a year ago where somebody was showing how you can use WiFi signals To detect people. Yeah. To get a very accurate map Oh, yeah. Three d render Oh, of what's happening in space. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:This was a 160,000
Speaker 1:hard to believe. And then now Xfinity for free. No extra Crazy. Crazy. The the the concerning thing here is is introducing this technology to more people.
Speaker 1:They're gonna realize, oh, I can if they have if they're in an apartment building, they're like, oh, I can Spot. See when my neighbor's home.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Or a thief could set up a WiFi router outside of somebody's home and start mapping it. See what what what what's this person's schedule?
Speaker 2:When are you gonna put this on a on an assault rifle and give the give the special forces wall hacks?
Speaker 1:I bet there no. No. Somebody was somebody was saying the CIA and and other law enforcement groups use this already to understand when there's like an active shooter scenario, understand where they are.
Speaker 2:The positioning of everything. They
Speaker 1:gotta fly on the set.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is who's going after you.
Speaker 1:But That
Speaker 2:was nice.
Speaker 1:Anyways
Speaker 2:In other news, Christophe Thulin Futurist says, I am developing an LLM benchmark test that I believe is truly the first of its kind. Very excited to launch this soon and hopefully partner with some of the Frontier Labs on Congratulations. We'd love to check it out when it goes live, Christophe. So Legend. For the hard You're you're you're going up against Arc AGI.
Speaker 2:So, you know, it's it's it's not easy easy. The benchmark battle is hot, but good luck to you. And Delian reflects on the progress of AI. He says, imagine gathering Alan Turing of 1942, Marvin Minsky of 1992, and Nick Bostrom of 2012, and explaining to them that we have passed the Turing test several years ago. And yes, there are some changes to society, but largely day to day life is the same.
Speaker 2:It would be a funny conversation. It is it is crazy. The soft singularity is real. Everyone's feeling the the soft acceleration. Anyway, any other I mean, it's just like yeah.
Speaker 2:There's just like yeah. We beat the Turing test. And now we're on to super intelligence, and then eventually giga intelligence. Yeah. But that's a great place to end the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and have a great Monday. See you soon.
Speaker 1:See you. Bye. Have a great evening.