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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
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Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 02/05/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome. Yahoo. The template technology, the fortress of finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Time is money saved. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a quite the lineup today. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Meet the system for modern software development.
Speaker 2:70% of enterprises on enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and we have a lineup for you today. We got Sam Altman from OpenAI joining Sholto from
Speaker 3:Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. Yes. They are the makers of Chatuchiki.
Speaker 2:Yes. I I did actually explain to someone. I was like, oh, you know I was explaining the show to to some kind of person. Was like, oh, they were like, do do? What do you talk about?
Speaker 2:And I was like, oh, you know like OpenAI? They're like, yeah. I was like, oh, we're having Sam on the show today.
Speaker 3:They're like, are they like, who?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. They were like, oh, that's cool. Like, that's good.
Speaker 2:Like, I I understand what this show is. Then we have Dan Barkello from t one energy talking about building solar panels in America and, of course, our lightning round, which I am very excited for. So we've been thinking more about the the Super Bowl that's coming up. We've been thinking more about ads, the response to the ads, the back and forth with
Speaker 1:the ads.
Speaker 2:Rune had a good post here. He said, putting on my media observe putting my media observer hat on. Anthropic ads are pretty brilliant because they're dishonest in a way that's only going to rage bait OpenAI heads and certain industry insiders, but are funny and striking to everyone else. When you're a call when you're a call option oh, calling them calling them a call option. Kind of a diss.
Speaker 2:I'm not inspired. Variants is good. Mario Kart blue shell. Are you familiar have you ever played Mario Kart?
Speaker 3:Do understand to get the reference.
Speaker 2:I played Mario Kart, I think, so long ago, blue shells didn't exist, but I've been playing with my kids, and I've since learned the importance of the blue shell. The blue shell, it targets just the first player, just whoever's in first. It's a
Speaker 3:great metaphor for what's going on here. When you're in when you're not
Speaker 2:in first place, you get the blue shell, you can take a shot at the leader without even needing to call them out. So you can just say, the category is bad. And everyone assumes you're talking about you know who. So I thought that was interesting.
Speaker 3:Trey says, Sam Altman, the Koenigsegg Collector.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. That one.
Speaker 2:Yes. Deep
Speaker 3:dive on So every everybody had a take on this yesterday. Yes. It it was perfect in how much kind of controversy it generated. Was wildly entertaining. I wanted to kind of I'll read through kind of like my updated take.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I got a little bit of Processed. Yeah. Got a little bit of pushback. I I said they were playing dirty.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Signal responded to me and said not dirty at all. So I wanted to address that.
Speaker 2:Okay. Dig in, but first let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests.
Speaker 3:Anyways, so yeah, I was processing this more. We obviously watched some ads yesterday. We watched the Get a Mac campaign. We watched the Bud Light special delivery one, is about Bud Light Yeah. Is in a castle.
Speaker 3:They get an order of corn syrup. They're like, we don't use corn syrup. That must be for Coors Light Yep. And and other other competitors. And so, like, I was processing them and, like, the difference there is that those advertisements are truthful.
Speaker 3:Right? Like Yeah. People people that have had a PC have probably gotten a virus. Right? So when Mac is, like, riffing on that Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like, it's truthful. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And not some data to back it up.
Speaker 3:I mean deceitful.
Speaker 2:I would I would say if I'm putting on my mic steel manning Microsoft in 2007 hat or 2003, I would say, hey. We do have Windows PC Defender. We're fighting viruses. And and is it possible to get a virus on a Mac? Probably.
Speaker 2:Is it is it is it possible to not get a a virus on a PC?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and on Microsoft's side, people are like, yeah. No one makes Microsoft or no one makes viruses for your computers because you don't sell very many. It's not very ROI positive. That's a good point.
Speaker 3:Anyways, and then Bud Light's campaign was truthful, even though it was aggressive, in that you could look up the ingredient list of their competitors and see that they did in fact use corn syrup.
Speaker 2:And you can make your own decision on whether or not you like that ingredient, but they were just drawing awareness
Speaker 3:And to so my point is that I think that anthropics ads are closer to political attack ads and that they're intentionally kind of trying to be deceptive. Right? They haven't broken any laws.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No.
Speaker 3:No. They don't name ChatGPT. They're just sort of like throwing mud at the whole category. I asked yeah. So anyways, I said they were playing dirty.
Speaker 3:I got some pushback on it. I asked Claude. I said, Claude, how would you define playing dirty?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And Claude said, playing dirty generally means achieving your goals through tactics that are deceptive, unethical, or that violate the understood rules and norms of a given context, even if you're not technically illegal. It's a bit it's a it's the gap between what you can do and what you should do. A few dimensions to it, and it goes into deception, misleading others about your intentions, hiding information, or creating false impressions to gain an advantage. These campaigns do an amazing job creating a false perception
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or or impression of of what ads in in LMs are gonna be like.
Speaker 2:I do think the response just to chime in some random stuff. But the I think the response to the ads, we were wondering, like, you know, outside of the, you know, the the TBPN, we love ads. Ads are fine, and and they're they're not gonna do anything weird. We're we're we're strong supporters. What will the public's reception be like?
Speaker 2:Will cloud skyrocket to the top of the charts because these ads are so effective? Will will general consumers, buy the line? Yes. You're the the the chat apps are gonna get weird with the ads or not. And I was scrolling on Instagram reels last night completely randomly.
Speaker 2:I was not looking for anthropic content. I think I followed the Claude account, maybe, maybe not. It just targeted me. It hits me with a vertical version of the the the ad. It's called Deception, I think, something like that.
Speaker 2:No. Violation. Yeah. Violation is one
Speaker 3:It's not called Deception. It'd be a little too on the nose.
Speaker 1:I think there
Speaker 2:is one called Deception. A bunch. They all have different names. Anyway, it's called Violation. And the the there's a screen grab
Speaker 3:here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember. So people were like, the the anthropic ad is deceptive?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So violation pops up, and it's this and it's this Cloud AI. And it has almost 6,000 likes, even when it just got served to me.
Speaker 2:I I my interpretation was like, this is working. This is popular. This is it's not just beautifully shot. It's well edited for vertical.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's either it's either really resonating or they're putting a massive amount of spend behind it or both. Yeah. So this
Speaker 2:is what it looked like vertically. And then this is the funny thing. So in this ad, you see the guy struggling to do a pull up. He asks, what's supposed to be an LLM. Create a fitness plan for me.
Speaker 2:And then the fitness bot says, hey, you know what else can help? One inch insoles from HeightMax or something like that. And it's like this LicksMax thing. It's very funny. But it's a it's a one inch insert that would go in your in your shoes.
Speaker 2:I scroll up. What's the next ad that meta serves me? An ad for a three inch inserts. Three inch inserts? And it and the ad is actually deceptive.
Speaker 2:It says, it says the guy can go from five nine to six one. That's four inches. And so these are full shoes that have the inserts built in. And for some reason, I got in even though I'm I'm not in the market for for for insoles, The the the algorithm just knows that I love these ads because they're very funny and they're very on trend with the Luxmaxing thing. And so I get served these ads constantly.
Speaker 2:This is all Meta shows me is is these is these height enhancing shoes because I think I actually clicked on them and was, like, digging in.
Speaker 3:So you you bought them. Right?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 5:Of course.
Speaker 2:So you're you're trying seven to feet. That would be that would be good. That would be good. Tyler, do you have something on this?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Was just gonna say, So I I saw on Instagram as well. I saw
Speaker 7:some of
Speaker 6:the clot ads. And in the comments, I mean, were riding with clot.
Speaker 2:They are?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:They are.
Speaker 6:It was like Normies. Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like like like like, they're winning the Vibe war. They've been winning the Vibe war with developers, and they've been winning the Vibe war on X, and now it feels like they're about win the Vibe war in the public in the public square.
Speaker 3:So I said two
Speaker 2:Really quickly. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma makes isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how things build, create code back prototypes, and apps fast. Sorry.
Speaker 3:I said two things can be true about the campaign. It's brilliant, well timed, and incredibly strategic for a few reasons I'll outline below. And it's designed to plant a false impression of Chad GPT's forthcoming ad product in the minds of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:They could argue, oh, we're not trying to do that, but you can't really kind of argue with the effect. So Anthropic accomplishes a lot. The campaign entertains America. Right? It's wildly entertaining.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's hilarious. Yeah. Truly. Like the the perfect like, sycophancy that you can hear.
Speaker 3:You can hear the em dash es, the pauses. It's amazing. Good. Mother Mother is the name of the agency that they they they crushed it. One they're also putting themselves on the map ahead of the IPO.
Speaker 3:Think in some ways, like certain audiences would know more about Anthropic than Claude. Right? Yeah. Even if you're just like generally interested in Totally. Investing in AI, you're probably hearing about Anthropic more than you're hearing about Claude.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It builds their aura with insiders. If I said if they spend a $100,000,000 on this campaign, all it does is help retain a couple of like truly elite researchers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's worth it. What are you laughing at?
Speaker 2:I love that Noah's saying Anthropic is campaigning to get themselves banned. Just like with misinformation just going way too far and it backlashes. This is funny to me. So we can go back to that.
Speaker 3:Can it it it somewhat continues their like fear based messaging that they've been they've been kind of riding with in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Look back at at the essays. More nuanced safety. Effectively rage baits open AI. Like, they got they got they got fully baited.
Speaker 2:Completely.
Speaker 3:Sam switched out of his, like, you know, lowercase Yeah. Typing and was, I gotta go into uppercase for this one.
Speaker 4:Lots of responses.
Speaker 3:It increases, the public's, like, general scrutiny of the ads rollout, and then Washington too is another factor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I I just think I just think it'll come up.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And then if you then have to ask Mark Zuckerberg, what do you how do you make money? Like, anything's on the table these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so so and then the other thing is like it's gonna broadly damage consumer trust in LLMs. That feels Some some people will just be like, wait, like, they're they've been kind of like making money on me without me knowing. Right? Or or Yeah. How how can I can I trust every output as as like actually good advice or or am I being monetized?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And this is the one that you think could come back to bite them. The other five are
Speaker 3:pretty good. Potentially. Right? But it depends what their consumer strategy is. Right now, they're saying we don't care about consumer.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They've said that a lot. Yeah. But their actions kind of speak differently in some ways. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I said, Anthropic has consistently told the market they don't care about consumer, but I'm not sure. The argument for ads is that they'll make LMs free for people that can't afford to pay Mhmm. A subscription. But Anthropic has already lost the race to serve billions of people. Right?
Speaker 3:I don't Yeah. Think that they're when you look at when you look at Gemini's sort of traction, OpenAI's, ChachiPadhi traction, like, it seems like the race to get to 3,000,000,000 monthly actives Yeah. Is kind of over. I don't believe that I don't believe that Claude's gonna come behind and get there, and they wouldn't be able to do that without doing ads. Right?
Speaker 3:Because there's like you can kind of run
Speaker 2:the blue shell. Yeah. They gotta take out the
Speaker 4:way in front.
Speaker 3:So so the question that kind of where I was taking this is Yeah. Can they can they deliver a luxury product to a smaller cohort Yeah. In the hundreds of millions to kind of iPhone numbers. Right? There's like roughly like one and a half billion iPhones that are like active Yeah.
Speaker 3:In the world. Those people could all buy a cheaper Android and and just cheaper devices, but they've paid a premium for the iPhone because they can, and for many people, it delivers a better experience.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I said the iPhone was not the first smartphone. Claude was not the first consumer LLM. The iPhone did differentiate on specs early, not unlike a model card, but Apple did eventually pivot to more emotional arguments for why you should be seen with an iPhone. It tells people you care about the environment, that you don't have adult apps flooding your app store, and that you take privacy seriously. These have had varying levels of success.
Speaker 3:Every tech company was able to tell an ESG story, and I can't imagine an Apple exec even saying the word porn today, even though Steve Jobs is very pointed about it back in 2010. He said, you know, there's a porn store for Android. You can download porn. Your kids can download porn. That's a place we don't wanna go.
Speaker 3:So we're not gonna go there.
Speaker 2:Calling out the competition by name and dropping that is like Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the and the key thing here is that it was factual. It was true. It was true. Like, it wasn't deceptive. No.
Speaker 3:No. And so I don't think I don't think that was that was edgy, but he wasn't playing dirty.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so Apple did, however, carve out a solid messaging strategy around privacy and allowed them to put the screws to advertisers. The market adjusted, and the ad industry obviously survived, but average Americans still feel that Facebook is listening to their conversations to target ads. Consumers deserve choice. It's great if they wanna pay for ad free tiers. Most don't.
Speaker 2:1% in Europe for Facebook, by the way. That's the stat. They all have the option to pay for Yeah. Facebook, for ad free Facebook,
Speaker 3:and only one Yeah. Percent So consumers deserve choice, but they should not be misled about how ad platforms work. Yep. Android has generated an immense amount of value for the world, so has Google broadly. Let consumers choose, but let them choose intelligently.
Speaker 2:Yes. I have a rebuttal, but I'm gonna tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So do you guys my rebuttal do, man? My my man is that
Speaker 3:And to be clear, I'm not saying Anthropic shouldn't have done this. Oh, yeah. I'm just saying that it was a little dirty.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're rolling around in the mud. It's good. They're in the trough. We love the trough.
Speaker 2:We live in the trough. We we we live for the trough. My steel man is that they didn't cross the line. They didn't play dirty because they didn't call out chap GPT directly. Okay.
Speaker 2:You can take that whatever you want. But
Speaker 3:will something like this? Are punching up. They are
Speaker 2:punching up. Yes. But third, there there is a world where something like this will happen. There is a world where the ads do get integrated in such a seamless way. If you look at the evolution of Google's 10 blue links, it started with 10 blue links, no ads.
Speaker 2:Then it was a very clear yellow box with ad, and it was very clear that it was an ad. And over time, the the UI evolved to be a lot less aggressive about telling you that it's an ad. And the ads on meta platforms do get creepy sometimes. You talk about something, and then you see the ad. And maybe that's just confirmation bias or some sort of cognitive.
Speaker 2:You only notice the ones that are weird, so they all feel weird. You see a lot of stuff that you weren't talking about. That doesn't trigger anything. But when you see the thing that you were just talking to your friend about, I was just talking to you about sweaters, and I see an ad for sweater. I'm like, how did it know?
Speaker 2:And realistically, it knows because you just went on Facebook. You found that sweater. You bought it. It knows that we're friends. We're DMing.
Speaker 2:We're talking. We're we're literally friends on the platform. And so it's like, look, Jordy likes this, and they're hanging out all the time, sending each other DMs. Why don't I just show John what I just sold to Jordy? That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:That's something that can be done with just stock vanilla machine learning, know, core AI inside Facebook and Meta, and they do that very effectively. But it can feel sort of creepy sometimes, and some people get creeped out by it, and they talk about it. And so the idea that an interaction like that might happen is not complete science fiction. It is possible. And so they are sort of warning that, hey, if you want to make sure that this never happens, it's our pledge, that that won't that's not even on the table.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Now, the big question is, when's Anthropic launching ads? We gotta get them to we gotta get them to launch ads.
Speaker 3:Well, I don't think they can now.
Speaker 2:No. They have to. It's okay. I give them permission. I will say, if you everyone's gonna be dunking, oh, you you you went back on your promise.
Speaker 2:No. I will be your strongest soldier. I will be your strongest soldier. And I will say it's the right thing to do. Put ads in Claude code.
Speaker 2:Put ads in Claude. Put ads in the comments of the code that you write. So if someone reviews the code, they're seeing an ad. That's what I want. That's the future I want to live for.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Oh, and you know I gotta tell you more about ads. Vibe, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. We love ads here, We love doing ads for ads.
Speaker 3:Zach Kukoff says, every time I see Anthropic and OpenAI try to distinguish themselves with comms marketing, I realize how much we are replaying the PC wars from the nineties. Anthropic, tasteful, elegant, opinionated, prosumer, expert, enterprise, OpenAI populous, broadly appealing, low consumer low consumer plus typical enterprise? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Anthropic is the Apple and OpenAI is the Microsoft. And they're also aligned with Microsoft or owned in part by Microsoft. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it would be it would be interesting to hear Dario just talk for an hour purely about just the risks of advertising and AI. Yeah. Right? Because that would be powerful.
Speaker 3:Certainly wouldn't have been as effective as as dragging OpenAI in front of hundreds of millions of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I mean, doesn't Anthropic have a podcast? Anthropic podcast? I think they do.
Speaker 3:TJ TJ was helping Sam with some comms. Said, Anthropic might think more he said fix it for you. Anthropic might think more seriously about adding ads if they had any consumers using their product.
Speaker 2:Just just just taking a very tactful response to a situation. Just being like, what if you amped it up, brother? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Mean, you've already lost if you're just dropping a massive word salad.
Speaker 2:Maybe. I don't know. I think there's a lot of nuance here, and it's good. I do think it's important to not mauled, to not be, you know, like angry and made mad and Don't let people
Speaker 8:spike your cortisol.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Like, they're gonna be gesture maxing at the Super Bowl, and you can't let it you can't let it affect you. You gotta focus on the new models, which are which have launched today. There's a bunch of new stuff. So GPT 5.3 codecs launched today, and there's a very, very cool there's a very, very cool update to or new product, Frontier, which is a product for building AI coworkers that I'm very excited to talk to Sam about.
Speaker 2:Because it feels like the first glimpse of an orchestration prod product, which we talked about yesterday, Gastown has been taking off. I mean, let's
Speaker 3:get some credit to John.
Speaker 2:Was saying Let's get him my teeth.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. It it
Speaker 3:would it might seem like John had early insight on today's OpenAI launch. He we did not.
Speaker 2:We didn't.
Speaker 3:No. We actually didn't. But in hindsight, you called it perfectly. Crystal ball.
Speaker 2:Crystal ball. A lead. Alpha. It could be one day of alpha.
Speaker 3:One day of alpha. Yeah. If you had launched a enterprise focused orchestration platform yesterday
Speaker 2:Yes. You could have raised money, got sold secondary.
Speaker 3:Right before OpenAI immediately launched a a very
Speaker 1:Are you
Speaker 2:gonna get Steve from OpenAI? They're not even thinking about this until they launch it the next day. Who knows? Who knows? Anyway, let's move on to Shopify.
Speaker 2:Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 3:Matt Turk says, regular startup. We closed a few customers and shipped some new features. Good week so far. Anthropic, we destroyed our main rival with our Super Bowl ads and tanked the entire software category in public markets by announcing some plug ins. Good week so far.
Speaker 2:Oh, We barely even talked about this, but Anthropic launched a lawyer in your pocket. They they launched a legal tool or they announced it. I don't know. Is it actually available in the app yet? Because this this it feels like, okay.
Speaker 2:Maybe this competes with Harvey. I'm not seeing it yet in the Claude app. But there
Speaker 3:I don't really think it competes with Harvey.
Speaker 2:No, no, no. So I don't think it does because they're selling it direct to consumer, I believe at least. But it seems like an amazing product. Like, it seems like the demand for this would be incredible.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It will compete with LegalZoom. Yeah. Like, LegalZoom is down 15% since this announcement. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. It's now a $1,380,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sort of in Chegg Chegg mode. Yeah. And not just for I mean, LegalZoom's a little bit different because you can actually file you incorporation documents, and they've been they face pressure from Stripe, Atlas for a long time on
Speaker 3:Yeah. Front bunch of other
Speaker 2:LLCs and whatnot. But, I mean, truly, like, you're getting a job and your employer gives you an an letter, like, taking that to a lawyer can be really expensive if you're if it's your first job. You're probably not gonna review it. A lot of people are probably just copy pasting it into Or asking their parents
Speaker 3:to take a look at this.
Speaker 2:Little bit of that, and then they can't. But just being able to just forward the email in or or integrate your Gmail and just say, hey. I got this offer letter. Like, does anything in here look weird? Is there anything I should ask about?
Speaker 2:I don't have a ton of leverage, but I wanna understand this document. Cloud should be able to do that, it makes a lot of sense. And I expect OpenAI to launch this product ASAP. Anyway.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, so I I think all that was actually launched for the Claude legal thing was just a plug in in Claude CoWork Oh, which means it's basically just, like, dot m d files. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's like Skills. It's like
Speaker 2:Cloud Code Skills. Okay. But it it feels like it goes beyond Skills because they probably had to do some legal work of their own to make sure that they're, like, not giving legal advice and that they're couching things properly. I I think that's also why Chatuchipity Health is in a different area because they don't want any risk of, like, pre training on your testosterone levels. And then I go into the next version of Chatuchipity and I say, what are Tyler Cosgrove's testosterone levels?
Speaker 2:And it just knows it because it learned it from the chats that you were sending it. There's a whole bunch of private information beyond testosterone levels, of course. Anyway, Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security automatically.
Speaker 3:Key over on X says, TBH, the Anthropic ads are good, but I think they're a bad idea. Normies are not going think, wow, this is what ChatGPT is going be like. I better subscribe to claud.com. They're gonna think, wow, this is what AI is gonna be like. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's Rune agrees. He's not biased at all. He says, suicide bombing strategy is bad for them, but worse for open AI. You almost have to respect it.
Speaker 2:What was the text I sent you? Quote, I don't know how to get on Anthropic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. John was asking asking a friend that that's outside of tech, and they were like, what's Anthropic? How do I get on it? I don't how.
Speaker 2:Let's go to Eric Sufort. He said, the Anthropic this Anthropic ad is simply obnoxious, and then we'll move on to other stories. Anthropic generates most of its revenue from enterprise business, so it can afford to not to maximize its consumer revenue opportunity. But the sanctimonious moralizing here presents advertising as a cynical business model choice. It's neither cynical nor choice.
Speaker 2:The freemium digital advertising supported model is the only repeatedly proven pathway for a consumer technology product to reach humanity at scale. There are just folks who can't pay $20 a month. OpenAI's advertising revenue will enable it to offer access to larger model to larger models for free tier users. To the extent Anthropic thinks chatbots powered by frontier models are valuable to society, it should aspire to provide access to as many people as possible. Now they'd probably say, hey.
Speaker 2:We're freemium. We do give we do give access to chatbots powered by frontier models to free users. They just only get a certain amount, and then they have to upgrade. But Eric's point still holds here for sure. Ads allow for that to an extent that no other consumer technology business model demonstrably can.
Speaker 2:This kind of condescending attitude toward digital advertising is economic chauvinism, and it represents a desire for technological gatekeeping. And the idea that ads will necessarily influence chatbot content is overstated, borderline anachronistic anachronistic because you don't do it that way anymore. You wait until, hey, this person's buying, you know, insoles or lifts, and they're asking about the Roman Empire, and this is the perfect time because they're just chilling reading the Roman Empire, and they're thinking, oh, okay. Yeah. I did need to buy that, and then they switch gears.
Speaker 2:Like, you don't need to put the ad right next to the content that relates to it. That's just an that's just an antiquated way of thinking about online advertising. Yep. It ignores functional yeah.
Speaker 3:Again, I I think Sam Altman did say in October 2024, I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us as a business model. Yep. So So again, he he's gonna you know, has to eat his words on this one.
Speaker 2:He gets to give a little bit
Speaker 3:of a victory lap there. Yeah. So in that sense, criticism is fair.
Speaker 2:Anyway, before we move on, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Claude also announced a new model from Anthropic, of course, introducing Claude Opus 4.6.
Speaker 2:We have Shalto coming on the show at 12:30 to discuss that. They say it's our smart it's the smartest model, and it got an upgrade. Opus 4.6 plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates reliably in massive code bases, and catches its own mistakes. It's also our first Opus class model with a 1,000,000 token context window in beta. So very exciting.
Speaker 2:They put a number of they put the model model card together. They did particularly well. What was the what was the the benchmark that stuck out to you, Tyler? You said
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think it was Arc AGI v two. Arc AGI It's now at like 69%. I think previous was I believe it was 5.2, which was at, I wanna say, 55 around.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So like pretty sizable upgrade. Yeah. But I mean, with these things, it's always so hard to tell. Like, it's really just like qualitative differences at this point Yeah. Where the models are like, you have to use it for like an hour or two and then you you can kinda tell what the differences are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and also like in new context. Like, in terms of just the vanilla go and ask a question, it's been able to get you a pretty good answer for, like, years now. But it hasn't been able to go and pull a bunch of financial data together, fact check it all, put it in an Excel sheet. Pushing, and this is what Cluso Investments is so excited about.
Speaker 2:Oh, says Cluso. Anthropic updates AI model to field complex financial research. So Opus four point six is designed to carry out financial research and other work related functions. The company's expansion into new areas, including legal service, has rattled Wall Street and sparked concerns about which companies and services will be disrupted by AI. The SaaSpocalypse is upon us.
Speaker 2:We will be asking Sam Altman, is software dead? Or are Are we back? Who knows? Claude four point six Opus is still best it still has the best SVG results out of all the models, just incredibly high taste as Lisan Al Gayib. And these are some pretty beautiful pictures.
Speaker 2:Are you familiar with SVG programming? So you basically just you draw each square and line in code. So you have to say, I want a square that goes from this pixel to this pixel to this pixel to this pixel, and you add and layer all those up. It can be extremely time consuming if you do it by hand, But Clog can just sort of one shot it, and it looks pretty beautiful.
Speaker 3:On brand.
Speaker 2:On It's an interesting benchmark because this isn't something you'd necessarily ask. It's these are not generative images in the diffusion sense. This isn't the mid journey model. This isn't what Sora uses. This is a different thing asking the model to basically write code that generates an image.
Speaker 2:So it really has to understand the back and forth between what it's building. So cool benchmark. I like that. I enjoyed that. I also like the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Do you wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange then. It's easy as that. Anyway, the Anthropic handle being owned by a guy who only posts his favorite form of AI saving. Wordles.
Speaker 2:He only posts Wordles. Oh, and he just has anthropic. That's very funny from Paula Rambles.
Speaker 3:So this is a strange thing with with X. Yes. They have policies around their handles Yes. That they really stand by. In that is at ramp Ramp is not owned by Ramp Yeah.
Speaker 3:At Anthropic is not owned by Anthropic. Yes. And when you look at the accounts, you think is this really the best use Yes. Of a handle like this Paul. Comparison.
Speaker 3:Paul
Speaker 2:Jankura who is at Anthropics is emphatically not an AI company. Ohioan, liberal bookworm news hound, c l e c Wow.
Speaker 3:He he probably Anglophile. He's a bookworm, he probably loves sitting on the anthropic handle Yeah. Given that it probably Warming has been their way through some books. Chewing through some books.
Speaker 2:Much like a worm. Yes.
Speaker 3:We didn't get to that article.
Speaker 2:That was a funny funny article. You gotta feed Claude. It's okay. The books the books gotta feed.
Speaker 3:And they have to yeah. Is actually
Speaker 2:potentially bigger than the water thing. Like, it's just so visceral. People love books
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And watching them be destroyed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If you didn't see book.
Speaker 2:Yes. I agree. But people don't like destroying books. They're sensitive about that. The very funny thing is that Paul at Anthropic on Twitter, on X, has has migrated to Blue Sky for many things.
Speaker 2:But he didn't get the Anthropic handle on Blue Sky. He's Anthropic forty two over there. So shoot him a follow if you're hanging out looking for Wordle progress. People
Speaker 3:are playing around with the nominative determinism. Yes. Say Google CEO is named Pichai. Yes. His purpose is to pitch AI.
Speaker 3:Dario's last name is literally AI model.
Speaker 2:Maybe I should change my name to Pitch MongoDB. John, Pitch MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next?
Speaker 3:Dylan Patel is sharing some data. He says 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20% of all daily commits by the 2026.
Speaker 2:That feels low to me. I I I'm expecting 99%. Sorry.
Speaker 6:Well, I mean so so I I I think the way you can see this is because,
Speaker 2:like Yes.
Speaker 6:Whenever you actually do a commit with Cloud Code, it adds itself. Oh. So so this list, like there's a ton of people that are, like, using Cloud Code but then not attributing back to to Cloud.
Speaker 2:Yes. And we also have some news. Doug O'Laughlin from Semi Analysis will be joining the show tomorrow to break down Claude Code. We might have to pull him out of his psychosis. He is addicted to Claude Code.
Speaker 2:He's running multiple instances at all times. And he has updated his profile picture in the semi analysis Slack to reflect his devotion to the showgoth, I suppose. Anyway, so OpenAI unveils Frontier, a product for building AI coworkers. This is in The Wall Street Journal, and OpenAI also posted about it. The new platform launched in market launched amid market fears over AI's disruption to software is aimed at helping businesses develop AI agents that work alongside humans.
Speaker 2:And so there are some interesting questions here about
Speaker 3:Think of these as, like, AI coworkers that are actively trying to take your job. Like, they're trying to help, but they're also like want they want your title, they want your comp. Yes. They wanna learn everything about what makes you great and they want
Speaker 2:be Or maybe they're just trying to empower you, Jordy. Maybe they're just trying to make you a better you. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Maybe they're just coming over just cracking jokes, trying to distract you Yeah. While learning
Speaker 1:They
Speaker 3:so that they can take you
Speaker 2:through. Literally do both. They can literally do both. Before we dive into this, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations.
Speaker 2:If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. So Frontier works with OpenAI's previously announced AI agent building tools and makes it easier for businesses to combine sources of data that agents need to perform tasks, the AI company said. The agents will be able to process information from various sources and complete tasks like working with files and running code, OpenAI said. So no more copy paste everything into your into your ChatGPT Enterprise Edition. It should have access to your network, plug into all your different systems.
Speaker 2:You'll be able write API bindings, I imagine. And there might be some forward deployed engineers or some associates from OpenAI that are helping you actually onboard fully to the agentic workflows that have been promised.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They're hiring how many consultants to help with this go to market?
Speaker 2:They are hiring hundreds of AI consultants to boost enterprise sales
Speaker 3:There we
Speaker 2:go. Information. Yeah. This is this is a great gig. Like, I would highly recommend jumping on this if you're in this in if you're in this market.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is hiring hundreds of new staffers to expand a technical consulting team that helps large corporations develop custom AI applications and agents to automate employee tasks according to a person of knowledge with the company's plans. The hiring effort could help it beat back a competition from arch rival Anthropic, which has also upped its game in catering to enterprises. It comes as OpenAI prepares to launch a new enterprise offering that would unify businesses' efforts to use AI. The ChatGPT maker is expanding its number of technical consultants, also known as forward deployed engineers, who can customize OpenAI's model using a client's own data, a person said. These engineers can, for example, help T Mobile develop AI to respond to customer service requests or help Intuit provide its customers with tax preparation services.
Speaker 2:So you have all this data. You want to do long context reinforcement learning on it. Long context reinforcement learning has been very, very successful in the coding world because Git has a complete history of every line of code that's been written, every comment, why it happened. You have this perfect record of everything that happened when you built a piece of software, and there's a ton of open source repositories. You can download all of GitHub, basically, and see how software is developed.
Speaker 2:You so you can train the model on that. Well, you can't really get the same level of free data with enterprises. A lot of this data is locked up, and a lot of it's specific to a specific business process business.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's pull up an image. There's a little graphic here that they made.
Speaker 2:From OpenAI's frontier, openai.com/index/introducing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If you can zoom in a little bit, at the bottom, you have your system of of record Yes. And you have business context, agent execution, evaluation and optimization. Your agents, OpenAI agents, third party agents, that feels significant. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? They they they wanna be the the orchestrator. Right? And if you wanna bring in some other other folks in to help out
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Great. Yep. At least for now. Yeah. And then they have interfaces, which they their ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI Atlas, and other business applications.
Speaker 2:I'm a little upset that they didn't go with a Mad Max theme like Gastown. I like the poll cats. I like the mayor. I like the the deacon. I thought that was a fun metaphor.
Speaker 2:They went with something a little more enterprise y, but I I think Frontier is a good name. I don't know. I can I it it it flows? Of course, it's not Frontier 5.2 high, so we gotta count our blessings here. But I think Frontier works.
Speaker 2:You know? Are you are you working on a Frontier integration project? Oh, those consultants from OpenAI, they're getting us on board to frontier. It sounds good. Why is Tyler laughing?
Speaker 3:Tyler's laughing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm getting flamed in the comments.
Speaker 3:What's up with Tyler's hair too? Yeah.
Speaker 2:What happened? Did you did you use shampoo nor conditioner?
Speaker 6:I need a haircut.
Speaker 2:I need a haircut. Maybe maybe you need
Speaker 3:a hat.
Speaker 2:Maybe you can grab one of those TVPN hats over there. You'll be good. Don't worry. Let me tell you about AppLoven. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon and .ai.
Speaker 2:Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 3:We'll get more from Sam on Frontier. Yes. I think we can move on.
Speaker 2:So the last thing on 5.2, the last benchmark that's interesting is g point GPT 5.2 with high, not extra high reasoning effort has a 50% time horizon of around six point six hours on our expanded suite of software tasks. This is the highest estimate for time horizon measurement we have reported to date, and it's right on track, doubling every one hundred and twenty eight days. It depends on what you're looking for, but the the implications of this are are, you know, more and more tasks are suitable for these models. Although I do think we're going through a shift with the orchestration thing where we might need a new benchmark because what happens if, you know, the individual model, GPT 5.2 high, can do one six hour task, basically, but you can deploy five that talk to each other. And when you combine those, it adds up to twenty hours of work.
Speaker 2:You just get a jump in the graph, but it's not technically the model, so you need sort of a new benchmark, supposedly. Jessica Lesson likes likes Sam Altman's post. She says, this is excellent comps from Sam Altman, an eye popping stat in an in an easy to understand claim. And I hate, though, this budding movement to frame the business model debate as elitism versus anti elitism when chatbots launched with subscription business models. I thought it would be a great new era of consumer tech blended with ads and subs, much as we've seen with Netflix and Spotify.
Speaker 2:It would be a shame if the OpenAI versus Anthropic rivalry wipes that away and makes it seem like subscriptions are only the domain of the elite. So many other consumer businesses show otherwise, and they are better off for the balance. I like that.
Speaker 3:Signal says either you or I have lost the ability to process reality. Mean, not a
Speaker 1:lot in a
Speaker 2:In response to this?
Speaker 3:In response to that.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. A lot of people didn't think this was great comms at all. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 2:I mean, I I
Speaker 3:would say like most of the posts I saw Yeah. Were like, hey, like this feels like you got baited.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Because you could have just not responded, I guess.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Or you could have said, he said later in the day, I'm excited to share that Codex has 1,000,000 users. Yeah. Yeah. Which a product they launch this week.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Just focus on yourself maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Meanwhile, over in Silicon Land
Speaker 2:Silicon Land.
Speaker 3:Greg says, GB 200 has really been enabling us to do some amazing things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is remarkable how how, you know, relatively slow the rollout has been. Obviously, it's been very quick, but but it does take time from the time that NVIDIA announces these chips to actually fabbing them, racking them, wiring them up, getting ready to train new models. And so
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I I think Dean Ball had a new post today and said, like, you know, companies don't even have Blackwells yet. Like Yeah. So we've seen there's no models that have have been trained on Blackwell.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Pretty It's like
Speaker 2:Get ready.
Speaker 6:Gonna get get ready to to see some May at progress.
Speaker 3:We got Mike Isaac in the chat. He says, not good comms.
Speaker 2:Not good comms. I'm I'm with Mike.
Speaker 4:Expand, Mike. Expand. I'm with Mike. Give us a
Speaker 2:small take. We'll see.
Speaker 3:Let me I'll look at Mike's
Speaker 2:And I will tell you about Google earnings because we touched on this, but it's important in the context. So Alphabet sales hit record, spending to double. They're going all in on AI. Google parent Alphabet reported an 18% jump in fourth quarter revenue driven by growth in digital advertising.
Speaker 3:Before we go into this, I did Mike had a banger yesterday. Said, by the number of OpenAI employees I see tweeting about Anthropic Super Bowl ad, Anthropic should be paying OpenAI earned media fees.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was a good take. Got them. That was a good take.
Speaker 3:Got
Speaker 2:them. Sales reached nearly $114,000,000,000 ahead of analyst expectations. Net income, 34,500,000,000.0, a 30% increase compared with the period a year earlier. The company reported a record $4.00 3,000,000,000 in sales for 2025. Profit, 132,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Not too bad. Alphabet shares were sort of all over the place. The The Wall Street Journal printed that they went down 1% in an after hours trade, but there's a lot going on. Google, like other technology companies, plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to develop AI models and build the data centers needed to train and run them. The company said it expected to spend between 175,000,000,000 and 185,000,000,000 in CapEx in 2026, up from 91,000,000,000 to 93,000,000,000 in 2025.
Speaker 2:So they're like doubling, which is it's exponential growth.
Speaker 3:You need to
Speaker 2:get ready for some AI progress.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Somebody I I don't have it pulled up, but somebody was saying that the the the 2026 projected CapEx will be more than the lifetime CapEx for Google up to 2021. So in a single year, they're gonna eclipse that, which is just insane.
Speaker 4:It's good.
Speaker 3:Buko had a good take. He said Google CapEx on purpose tell the market this is what it will take to defeat us before IPOs hit. Yeah. Certainly, nerve racking
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:If you're competing with them. But Yeah. They have the edge on on the capital side and the capital war
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Over Anthropic and and OpenAI, but the race is still real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. The Wall Street Journal had some more context on Google. Google leans hard into its AI winter status AI winter status, not AI winter.
Speaker 2:Ad and cloud growth acceleration justify the recent surge in Alphabet stock, but blowout CapEx forecast still takes one's breath away. The motto for the artificial intelligence race today should be, if you've got it, spend it. That's a message that Meta Platforms took to heart during its fourth quarter report last week when the Facebook and Instagram parent announced plans to spend up to 135,000,000,000 on CapEx compared to about 72,000,000,000 last year. Google managed to up the ante Wednesday with its own plan to spend as much as 185,000,000,000 this year, which would be about doubles last year's outlay. Google's annual revenue has now topped 400,000,000,000, about twice as large as Meta's.
Speaker 2:Still, that new spending target, even for a company that has been firing all cylinders lately, takes one's breath away. The stock price slipped in after hours trading after its fourth quarter report and conference call. Google has both the political and financial capital to lay such a bet. The company's Gemini three model has put it on top of a heap of performance for AI models while the unmatched distribution of its search engine and products like Gmail have quickly driven adoption. Google said Wednesday that it has more than 750,000,000 monthly active users just on its Gemini app, which only represents a portion of Gemini's actual users because it's vended into all different products.
Speaker 2:What's going on in the chat?
Speaker 3:Four o army has entered the chat. Interesting. They're hitting the chat with hashtag keep four o.
Speaker 1:Hey.
Speaker 3:Okay. They want to be heard by Sam Allman. Well, it's not
Speaker 2:it's not keep four o. Hasn't four o been deprecated? And so Yeah. They want that. The update the hashtag to say, like, bring back four o?
Speaker 3:Revive four o.
Speaker 2:Revive four o?
Speaker 6:It's actually not leaving till February 13.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:So there
Speaker 2:is time to to reverse the decision. I am interested to know about the the operating cost of keeping four o alive because it feels like if it
Speaker 3:rolls Well, that was over clearly something people were willing to willing to pay for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you just kinda leave in the corner and just swing a handle runs? It was, you know Yeah. Maybe more of like a user behavior decision than a financial one. Because it seems like like running legacy models
Speaker 3:Cancel gets really four o.
Speaker 2:Okay. Strong reception of Gemini along with Google's victory over the federal government's efforts to break up the company, have cheered investors when sentiment on technology and AI is faltering. Alphabet's stock price has jumped around 20% in the last three months. NVIDIA, Microsoft, amazon.com, and Broadcom have all lost ground during that time. But capital matters too.
Speaker 2:And here's where and here is where's where Google's business model pays off the most. The company's advertising arm has long been a lucrative cash cow that is still managing double digit growth rates. Growth has actually accelerated with ad revenue up 14% in the fourth quarter compared to 13% in the previous one. It's exactly what we saw at Meta. The ads are getting better, baby.
Speaker 2:The company's cloud computing division was even more impressive with with revenue growth jumping 48% year over year to hit 17,800,000,000.0. Google Cloud hasn't seen growth like that since early twenty twenty one when the business was still less than a third of its current size. Google Cloud turned in a record $5,300,000,000 in operating profit in the last quarter, a figure that was 45% higher than Wall Street's targets. The company's booming business produced nearly $165,000,000,000 in operating cash flow 2025, the highest in the S and P 500. These strong results will help investors digest the latest investment plan, but spending could be spending what could be 40 percent of annual revenue on AI chips and related infrastructure is still a sizable gamble.
Speaker 2:Such investments will sharply elevate depreciation charges, which in the latest quarter reduced net income by 18%. Google isn't in the isn't the bargain it was less than a year ago when break up fears had the stock trading at less than 16 times projected earnings. My question is, like, when does the AI build out stop? Because if you're constantly investing more and more, where does the cash flow come from? Like, as a as an analyst, you look at this and you say, okay.
Speaker 2:They're spending, you know, 50% of their revenue or 40% of their revenue, on the AI build out on data centers, but how long will they need to do this? Like, if they have to do this forever, then you just permanently have a worse business because you're just constantly buying hardware.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. I mean, you get a massive capability increase, lots of labor moves into data centers. Yeah. And eventually The revenue has to spike a lot. You you can enter a scenario where it makes sense to continue to increase CapEx because revenue is accelerating even faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Notable that NVIDIA is still, you know, trading down today even even after that update on earnings. Like, you would expect people to look and see like, hey. You know, Jensen had pretty given some pretty kind of wild projections, right, looking out over the next couple of years. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You have imagine here makes it
Speaker 5:a lot
Speaker 2:more a lot on TPU, but still, they they will be buying a lot of NVIDIA chips for sure. Really quickly, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 3:Richard says Google is a company that doesn't do hype. For them to go and increase CapEx 90,000,000,000 to a 180,000,000,000 is probably the most bullish thing long term investors can see as it shows the scale of future revenue growth.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I'm shocked that at this stage most still don't understand this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So excited about it. What did Doug say over at Fabricated Knowledge? He said Google made a 130 163,000,000,000 in CFO last year and is now planning to spend a 180,000,000,000 in CapEx next year. Now deaf think acceleration is coming, but wowza.
Speaker 2:I'd rather go bankrupt than lose the race, quoting Sergei. The trailing twelve months of free cash flow is staggering over there. Gonna make 200,000,000,000 in in cash flow this year, still less than CapEx for now. Also, gonna have 80,000,000,000 in net cash and probably a 100,000,000,000 in myriad minority illiquid equity stakes. So, yeah, they own, like, SpaceX and a bunch of Waymo.
Speaker 2:Waymo. With current rates of growth, they can raise 300,000,000,000 in 2030 without even going into debt. Totally agree, but this feels pretty close to the pedal to the metal to me, says Doug. So
Speaker 3:Joe Wiesenthal says the average person on earth is watching 25 YouTube Shorts every single day. YouTube Shorts average 200,000,000,000 daily views.
Speaker 2:That's a lot.
Speaker 5:That is just insane.
Speaker 2:That's a lot. I mean, you can watch a YouTube Short in like, what five seconds on average. Right? Because you skip one, you watch one for five seconds, one for fifteen seconds. So I mean 25 YouTube Shorts that feels like maybe five or ten minutes of browsing, but still like pretty pretty staggering.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I haven't I haven't migrated any like I don't I don't scroll on YouTube shorts yet. Yeah. I find if I search for something, like let's say I'm looking up a car Yeah. It's nice to get a sixty second explanation of it Yep.
Speaker 3:If I don't have time to like watch a review Yeah. But I'm not like sitting there scrolling. Yeah. It's still sort of Clearly a lot of people are.
Speaker 2:But I I rarely scroll through, whereas on Instagram I will scroll the feed of Reels. Yeah. Staying in the content world, Kalshi shared that just in YouTube generated over 60,000,000,000 last year, more than Netflix. And Polymath says, YouTube is beating Netflix with this really sneaky content strategy in which their creators make stuff people wanna see and are then rewarded for it with views and money. And it is a simple encapsulation of the YouTube strategy.
Speaker 2:This one
Speaker 3:One weird trick. Trick.
Speaker 2:UGC. UGC is a big big business. Who would have thought? But, yeah, the the the scale of the quality, I'm I'm I'm hoping we're gonna talk to mister Beast about his outlook on on YouTube and how it's changing soon because he's he's taken it in in such a incredible direction where the content is Netflix quality. I mean, he sells it to Amazon Prime.
Speaker 2:Right? So he's certainly certainly there. In the the antitrust division of the Department of Justice posted an update today. The DOJ antitrust division filed notice that it will cross appeal from the remedies decision in its case against Google's unlawful monopolization of Internet search and search advertising. So there's they're they're still hashing that out.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So big tech is is throwing cash into India in its quest for AI supremacy. We talked about this story a little bit yesterday. We can get to the bottom of
Speaker 3:the wall. Bloomberg. Yeah. Bloomberg had a story that
Speaker 2:It's about the facts.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Effectively Google's scaling square footage Yes. In India pretty dramatically.
Speaker 2:Yes. And and the question was, you know, why are they scaling it up at all? They're they're they're investing so much in CapEx and servers and digital workers, but, of course, they need humans as well. So American tech behemoths are racing to establish leadership in artificial intelligence, not just in The US, but also around the world. India is welcoming them with open arms, says The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:India is becoming one of the hottest markets globally for AI, for US AI titans looking to cater to the country's massive and digitally savvy population, looking to attract more tech investments. The Indian government announced plans over the weekend to give tech firms a twenty year tax break on overseas revenue gleaned from global data services based in India. So you go and you set up a data center or you set up a business, a tech business. You're making money off of that whole, you know, data center or whatever you're selling in terms of software, and you don't have to pay taxes to India for twenty years. That's a long, long time.
Speaker 3:Techno chief called this out yesterday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The move is part of the Indians of the Indian government's push to make the country a major provider of AI services, including low cost tools to solve local problems while leaving cutting edge innovation to deep pocketed firms in The US and China. This will give India the opportunity to become a major AI hub, said India's technology minister. In the past few months, US tech companies have unveiled tens of billions of dollars in investment in Indian data centers as they race to build AI infrastructure around the world. In October, Google announced a $15,000,000,000 investment in data centers in Southeast Southeastern India as well as undersea cable links in what the company described as its largest single AI hub outside The United States.
Speaker 2:In December, Microsoft unveiled its largest ever investment in Asia with a 17 and a half billion dollar pledge to develop the country's cloud and AI infrastructure. Amazon also has pledged 35,000,000,000 across its operations in India up until 2030. The U. S. Is big the the big U.
Speaker 2:S. Data center firms, as hyperscalers, are drawn to a country whose 1,400,000,000 consumers are some of the most prolific users of data and AI chatbots. Very interesting. Anyway, there's more news from NVIDIA in the information. NVIDIA is delaying a new gaming chip due to memory shortage.
Speaker 2:This is the line you don't wanna cross. The gamers are gonna rise up, and they're going to storm the data centers, and and they will they will be they will be putting the screws. They'll
Speaker 3:be They calling get their chips one way or another.
Speaker 2:They will. They'll be calling their representatives, calling their senators. Paws dot ai has a new cohort. If you don't give me a new gaming graphics card to play the latest games.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it's the first time in thirty years it won't release one in the calendar year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Every year the
Speaker 3:It's over.
Speaker 2:October TI, 2080, 3080. These were great graphics cards and now no longer. Just delaying it. I I I mean, I guess you can use cloud gaming or something, but also it it does feel like a lot of video games have sort of maxed out what they can do with stock graphics cards, and so there isn't as much as much need to upgrade every year. What do you think, Ty?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, also with with Genie three, it's like we're getting new enhancements in gaming.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 6:So they should be happy about this. You'll you'll own nothing and be happy.
Speaker 2:How much Genie three did you play yesterday, Tyler? It's fun. Right? It's fun. So you play it?
Speaker 6:I thought about playing it.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. You thought about playing it. But the mechanics weren't there.
Speaker 6:Right? Genie four Genie four, I'm gonna be DAE.
Speaker 2:That's the that's the that's the goalpost currently. I want mechanics. I want tire changes, gas refill as I'm driving the Nurburgring in my Genie three car simulator, race simulator. Anyway, memory chips are a key component of GPUs. Very excited to ask Sam Altman about the various pieces of the AI bottleneck since
Speaker 3:We should ask him about world models too.
Speaker 2:That would be interesting. I you know, Sorafield
Speaker 3:He's he's not one to not launch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's launched a lot of stuff. And, yeah, Ben Thompson has had this take for a while that AI generated video is the metaverse, and and that's what you're seeing with Meta Vibes. That's what you're seeing with Sora. This is sort of where things go.
Speaker 2:NVIDIA is also slashing production of its current line of gaming chips, the GeForce RTX 50 GPUs, because of the memory shortage, one of people said. Prices of NVIDIA's latest gaming GPUs have already risen at retail stores and websites doing due to their scarcity over the past year. I wonder how much it cost to actually build a modern gaming PC these days because it's been a while. It used to be like a few thousand dollars would get you sort of like a top tier setup, and I wonder I wonder how what it's looking like now with all the shortages. It's possible to be sure that NVIDIA executives could still change their mind and release a gaming chip if the market improves as the company is known for being flexible and moving quickly, so is the information.
Speaker 2:Demand for commuter memory chips has skyrocketed due to the AI boom as they are needed in large quantities to train and operate machine learning models. Memory chips act as warehouses for storing data. The memory chip shortage is expected to lead to higher prices in consumer electronics. Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the rising prices of memory chips would have an impact on the company's March margins. He's also saying that he's having trouble getting line time at TSMC to some extent.
Speaker 2:And so there's a lot of bottlenecks that are working their way through all the technology markets. He hinted that the impact would be greater in the future, noting, We do continue to see market pricing for memory increasing significantly. As always, we'll look at a range of options to deal with that. Gaming and AI chips use different types of memory, but both are made of the same raw materials coming from one of three main suppliers, that's Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technologies.
Speaker 3:Well, without further first guest of the show.
Speaker 2:Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He's in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Welcome back. Good. Thank you guys for having me back.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:Big day.
Speaker 2:Big day. Kick us off with where should we start? Should we start with the model or frontier?
Speaker 5:Can we start with the model just because I'm Yeah. Very interested on
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Break it down. What'd you launch?
Speaker 5:What's the 5.3 codecs. It is, I think, the best coding model in the world. We took a lot of the feedback that people had about five point two five point two codecs and got it into one model. It is much smarter at programming, but it's also way faster. You can interact with it mid turn.
Speaker 5:I think it's got a much better personality. Mhmm. It's really good at computer use. So it feels like a very big step forward. It was funny as we were deploying it this morning.
Speaker 5:A couple of very, like, extremely experts using these models noticed and said, man, something's really different with Codex, and they, like, caught it mid deploy. So I think you can really feel it quickly.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 3:Oh, you're saying people outside of OpenAI just everyday use Yeah.
Speaker 5:I like the set of hours that we put it out before we, you know
Speaker 2:Talk about interacting with a mid turn. How does that work? Why is that important? What does that unlock?
Speaker 5:So people are starting to use these these tools for very long pieces of work at one time, you know, multi hour tasks. Mhmm. And sometimes sometimes you don't specify it correctly. Right? Sometimes something's not set up right.
Speaker 5:Something just screws up. The ability they they can do amazing things with no steering, but they can do much more amazing things if you steer them along the way. So this has been this is one of the things I felt most new about this model.
Speaker 2:So talk about orchestration, how this fits into Frontier because I
Speaker 3:imagine
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:One one second. It's it's notable, like, you see a coworker Yeah. Making a mistake Yeah. And you don't interrupt them, that's rude. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, it's it's it's inefficient.
Speaker 5:It's It is incredible what these models can do without any feedback. Like, if you think about a a new coworker especially Mhmm. You know, you train them and you give them a lot of feedback early on and they learn the job and you correct them and they they kinda get practice in. The models, they will soon do that, But right now, they don't do that, so we just rely on either they get the right one shot or we collect them, correct them all along the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a lot of people that are running multiple agents and multiple tabs. They're starting to think about orchestration. Feels like Frontier is a piece of that. But if you're interacting with a model that's running mid turn, like, how does the user experience change for developers with 5.3?
Speaker 2:And then what will it look like in the Frontier world?
Speaker 5:I I think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they're managing a team of agents. And they'll keep as the agents get better, they'll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction, which at least watching what's happening so far is a is a jump that people are gonna make pretty well. Mhmm. The the models are so good now. There's such a capability overhang that building better tools to let people do that, which the Codex app that we launched on Monday was a great step forward for, will be very, very important.
Speaker 5:But you will be managing very complex workflows. The agents will keep getting better, so you'll keep working at the maximum of your management bandwidth or cognitive ability to keep track of all the stuff. And the tools to make that easy to do will matter, I think, more than intelligence for a little while because there's such an intelligence overhang already.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What's the role of a forward deployed engineer today at OpenAI towards the end of the year? Capability overhang that feels like raw meat for a for a forward deployed engineer. It's like the they like, they solve that problem. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, look, eventually, the models will get so good that they'll help companies deploy themselves, and the four deployed engineers will again get to work at a higher level of abstraction. But for now, you go into a company that is not AI native and say, okay. You've said you want us you know, they say they want to deploy AI. They really are not sure what to do.
Speaker 5:How do I hook this up to my systems? Do I need to fine tune a model on my code base? Yeah. How do I think about orchestrating agents and using things from different companies? Most of all, or at least what we hear most frequently is, how do I think about security of my data?
Speaker 5:And how do I know that these, like, AI coworking agents are not going to go access a bunch of information and share it in ways they shouldn't or get, you know, a context exploit or something like that? So the four deployed engineers take this incredible new technology and a platform like Frontier and say, we will connect your company to an AI platform so that you can use all these agents and workflows and everything else you want.
Speaker 2:How important are these metaphors or how temporary are they? I was very interested in reading about Gastown and you have these poll cats and it's this whole Mad Max world. And, that feels like maybe just a temporary aberration where you're setting up agents for specific tasks, but also that could be incredibly valuable in explaining to a large corporation of how they're gonna integrate AI across the whole organization?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I suspect, like, everything else that's happening when an industry is moving so fast, all of this is somewhat temporary Sure. On, like, a long enough time scale. And you as these models become more capable and these agents are operating on very long time horizons with the ability to just kind of figure it out and our trust in their robustness keeps going up, then maybe you don't need a lot of the abstractions we need today. You know, maybe you just, like, have a a single AI bot that runs at your company, and you can say, hey, I wanna, like, launch this new product, and it does everything an ambitious person would do.
Speaker 5:But that's not where we are today. So today, we have to Yeah. Put in a little more work to get the pieces put together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about the the the meter benchmark for long task horizon? You're at the top of the charts. At the same time, it feels like we might need a new chart if we're talking about agent swarms because they'll be able to do things that go for weeks, but they will subdivide the work. Yes.
Speaker 2:There's some subdivision that happens within a reasoning model, but it doesn't truly parallelize, at least that I'm aware of. So what does it look like in a world where you go to a model, but now it's spinning up a whole bunch of different models underneath?
Speaker 5:I think you're there's two of of the key insights of the whole fielder in this question. Number one, the implication that no chart in AI lasts more than a few years is right. And like this one, kind of, you know, we'll see how much longer it's really useful. Yeah. The second is a lot of people thought that, okay.
Speaker 5:We're gonna just need a super long task and a super long task horizon, so we need a super long context. And definitely what people have already seen with coding agents is by agents breaking up work, orchestrating it well, farming it off to sub agents. Even with the current limitations of the technology, we can do something, which should not be surprising because it's similar to how people do things and get amazing amounts of work done. So that's been cool to watch. I think that will keep going.
Speaker 5:A joke that some people at OpenAI make is that soon the chart that matters is just gonna be GDP impact. Yeah. And then the question is what's the one that comes after that? But everything else, these a lot of these proxy metrics, there's now so much economic value in what the models are doing.
Speaker 3:What do you think could come after?
Speaker 5:I have no idea. Do you
Speaker 2:have an opinion? Happiness?
Speaker 3:I don't know. When you look back at some of your when you look back at some of your blog posts from ten years ago, your predictions were usually pretty on point. Yeah. Maybe it's hard
Speaker 5:to Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 3:I the merge. The merge. Like the merge. Basically, mean Like right now, we're getting, you know, thousands of messages in the chat about four o and predicted in 2016 that people could would would become, you know, very attached to a chatbot.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm working on, like, a big prediction blog post for the next ten years seems too far, but the next five. Sure. But because it's like, I'm sure a lot of it'll be wrong and it you know, it's it's still fun to try. The the the sort of, like, relationships with chatbots, clearly, that's something that we gotta worry about more and is no longer a abstract concept.
Speaker 5:The the even the question of what comes after GDP, like, one reason I think that's interesting is the way we measure GDP now could start going down even though quality of life goes way up. Sure. And we don't have a lot of practice with things like that, but the the the massively deflationary Not just of Europe. We want quality of life going up too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not just going down,
Speaker 5:you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Switching gears, what do you think about the work that the NeoLab boom, the research efforts that are happening all over Silicon Valley? It feels like there's an acknowledgment that there's research breakthroughs that need to happen and everyone's taking different shots at those. Do you think that those companies will just find a breakthrough and join a lab or launch their own products?
Speaker 5:I think it's fantastic, first of all. Yeah. One of the meta things that we wanted to do when we started with OpenAI
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is when we started OpenAI is like, there had been a period where the technology industry and Silicon Valley in particular was amazing at new research labs or just doing new research in industry in general. Mhmm. And then it kind of fell apart and there hadn't been a good one in a while. And part of what we hope to show, and this was not only us, like a lot of people were excited about new research labs, is that industry could do research again. So, seeing that now become fashionable in all of these new labs, I think it's totally awesome.
Speaker 5:Some will succeed, some will fail, some will kind of go into some other effort. But, having industry support research in, you know, startup style, I think it's wonderful.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Over the next two years, would you expect to acquire more individual product companies or more research labs?
Speaker 5:Good question. I don't have a strong opinion there. I would bet well, I'd say the very best ones will often look like a mixture of both. Sure. Like, the the the one that I have in mind right now is something that very much looks like a a mixture of both.
Speaker 5:So maybe that's may maybe the shape of things to come is the really truly extraordinary product work will have more and more research component. Yeah. And it'll be kind of a more of a hybrid thing.
Speaker 2:Is data the new oil? Is there value?
Speaker 3:Were joking a couple bunch days ago that
Speaker 2:of data, but they don't understand AI. They don't know how to monetize
Speaker 3:phrase was effectively wasted a decade ago.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so to say it now sounds really silly. Yeah. But it feels like it could be more true now than
Speaker 2:ever. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, certainly yeah. Man, they really did waste it a decade ago. I was just thinking of the kind of people that used to say that
Speaker 4:and Yeah.
Speaker 3:TED talks.
Speaker 2:You're you're not supposed to call them out. They're nice people over at TED.
Speaker 5:You know, definitely, like, the the sort of the magic relationship of this last eight years, whatever you wanna call it, has has been like, you know, that we can put in more and more resources, compute data, new ideas, whatever, into creating an artifact. And it gets like the log of it gets better.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So you can throw in you know, that's why we have this huge exponential increase in resources, but we keep getting better and better models. And for all of the concern people have about it's it's gonna, like, top out or it's slowing down or whatever, like, no one's been right about that. I mean, sometimes they it looked like they were for a couple of months as we digested a new model or came to a new form factor, but it has been incredibly smooth last six or eight years of this. What those resources are, there can be some trade off between. You know, sometimes it's better to spend your money on better data, sometimes on more compute, sometimes something else.
Speaker 5:On the whole, compute power is the new oil is the statement that feels closest to true to me. Mhmm. But there will be other parts too.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Is software dead?
Speaker 5:It's different. It's definitely not dead. But what software like, how you create it, how you're gonna use it, how much you're gonna have written for you each time you need it versus how much you'll want sort of a consistent UX.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's all gonna change. You know, there have been a number of these, like, big sell offs of SaaS stocks over the last few years as these models have rolled out. There, I expect there will continue to be more. I expect there will be big booms in software. I think it's just gonna be volatile for a while Mhmm.
Speaker 5:As people figure out what this looks like. The statement that someone said to me that is stuck in my mind most these last couple of weeks is that every company is an API company now whether they wanna be or not.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:Because agents are just going to be able to
Speaker 2:Write a CS Yeah.
Speaker 3:Had we had Dara we had Dara from Uber on yesterday, and he had a pretty refreshing kind of approach. We were asking about integrating agents with Uber, and and he recognized that, yeah, the ad business could potentially be threatened if you can order an Uber and chat GBT, but he basically said, like, you have to think of the consumer. Yeah. The consumer wants to order an Uber via their preferred agent, you should let them. Otherwise, you're you're gonna have other problems.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And that that is the right take for sure. And I don't or I think so at least. Yeah. And, you know, we've been through platform shifts like this before where you I mean, Uber wouldn't have existed without one.
Speaker 5:It wasn't until iPhone where you could, like, have it make sense to order an Uber to right where you were Yeah. As you're out in the world. So I think there will be totally new things that happen. Other things you'll use in new ways. But definitely, as I've started using Codex, my excitement about having agents go off and do things for me and still use other services, pay other services, I'm sure we'll need to figure out new business models and
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:How revenue gets shared around, but that will happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk more about Codex desktop. One more
Speaker 3:question on on SaaS. Have any public market SaaS companies tried to get a soft landing with OpenAI? And do you think there's any there's there's any value? Just, let's say
Speaker 5:that I'm no one has no public SaaS companies that I'm aware of have tried that Okay. With OpenAI.
Speaker 3:Look, think some some some of will certainly be durable and and are on sale right now and and potentially just need new energy and and need kind of a new an entirely new approach, maybe OpenAI could provide that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. I think some will
Speaker 1:be
Speaker 5:incredibly valuable. Some do feel like a thinner layer now. But I don't know. Like, I was talking recently to a bunch of SaaS companies and they do not they do not feel unexcited. Like, they're like, we're gonna go through a big transformation here and, you know, yeah, sure, other people can instantly write software now, but so can we, and we got a great system of record and seems reasonable.
Speaker 5:Some won't make it, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about the the Codex desktop rollout. It feels like, you know, successful amount of downloads, but but key, like, a shift for, you know, people who are maybe lightly technical but don't have time to set up an IDE and configure an environment to actually start writing software.
Speaker 2:I wanna know about plans to integrate to the phone. That was a big moment, I think, for a lot of people with the the ClawdBot, MoltBot, OpenClaw thing was like, oh, I can text something and it will go and write code, and that's valuable, and that unlocks a new agentic experience. Like, where do you see the Codex desktop ecosystem going?
Speaker 1:I am
Speaker 5:so Codecs desktop has been a a somewhat of a surprise to me in terms of how much people love it, including how much I love it myself. You know, the I think it's a great example of 10% of polish of the experience of using these models, especially when there's so much capability overhang, goes an extremely long way to what you can build and how how you interact with this stuff. Of course, we should have an ability to kick off new tasks from mobile, and we'll do that. I mean I mean, really what you want is, like, your single AI that's working for you on a unified back end access to all of your data and your ideas and your stuff and your memory and your all the context and the ability to work across a lot of surfaces. And often, you'll be at your desktop.
Speaker 5:Often, you'll be on your phone and you just wanna add something in. But it it is a pretty profound shift in my own workflow, not just for coding tasks, but more general purpose tasks. It's still kinda hard to use if you're not at least reasonably technical, but obviously, we'll find a version of this product that can do other knowledge, work tasks, control your computer and things like that where you don't have to be. And and it'll bring the magic of building stuff, really, to a lot of people. Because even if you never look at code, you'll be able to build something reasonably sophisticated.
Speaker 5:One of the things that I have built when I was playing around with the new Codex app is this thing I had always wanted, Just like this magic auto completing to do list. Oh, yeah. I I really work with to do lists and this idea that I could just put tasks in and it would try to go do them. If it could complete them, it could complete them. If it needed questions, it would ask me questions.
Speaker 5:If it needed you know, if I had to do something, could still do it the old fashioned way. But an interface like that where, you know, all the stuff you wanna do, you just sort of explain to a computer or your AI and it tries to go off and do them. And sure, if you're on your phone, you're gonna just add a task on your phone or, you know, if you wanna easily import something from email, you're gonna do that. Like, felt feels really good. So I'm excited about all of the ways that this will just become a general knowledge work agent.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Were you unsurprised to see a product like OpenClaw come from open source? Because it's certainly, that kind of user experience is not I would imagine this is something that you knew would be a thing, and yet, I think part of the magic of OpenClaw is that it would be very, very difficult for a large tech company
Speaker 2:Peter didn't make many phone calls to hyperscalers to say, hey, I'm gonna be integrating It with your just went out.
Speaker 3:And you guys, you know, and and when I think back on like the Sky acquisition Yeah. This this kind of experience was probably very top of mind and things that you're working towards internally.
Speaker 5:I love the spirit of everything about OpenCLO.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And you are totally right that it's much easier to imagine a one person open source project doing something like that than a company who is gonna be afraid of lawsuits and data privacy and everything else. You know, they're like, I think this is kinda how innovation works. There there something like that starts. It's clearly amazing. There will be a way to make a mass market version of that product, but letting the builders build the equivalent of the home brew home brew computer club spirit go here is so important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. Can we switch to social? I feel like if I if I Google Sam Altman social, I get pure AI in Sora and then also demand or or predictions about a human only social network. Where do you see social going broadly?
Speaker 2:How do you wanna integrate it with it and power it in the future?
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 5:the mold book thing was, like, a very interesting social experiment to watch and I think points to agents interacting in some sort of social space, hopefully, on behalf of people, at least in some degrees, could be quite interesting. I don't think we know what to do there yet, but it feels like social is gonna change
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:A lot. And I am interested in the space of what a social experience can look like when your agent is talking to my agent and coming up with new stuff. Clearly, putting, like, a lot of AI bots on the existing social platforms is just making everyone crazy and not that fun. So that's not the right answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I think we can design something new for what this technology is capable of that will feel good and useful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there is there a solution to the bot problem that's just all the labs sort of integrating with all the other platforms? And and even if you can't detect it's AI generated, you can literally say, we just we just generated those tokens. Like, those exact tokens are in our data
Speaker 5:can't do Okay. That because their open source models are, like, good enough to write Sure. Points.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I am excited about sort of, like, assertion of humanity Mhmm. Instead of trying to, like, detection of AI as a as a thing here. I don't know if the social platforms it's, like, in their interest to solve this. It is cause it's creating, like at least in the short term, it creates, like, a lot of engagement and increased usage. So I believe they could solve it if they wanted to.
Speaker 5:I'm not sure it's in their interest. I'm actually not even like, it is I don't like it, but it's is some people do seem to enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about where Sora as as a video generation model is going? It feels like tool use is maybe under discussed, you know, adding adding reasoning. It's not just the diffusion model. It's giving Yeah.
Speaker 2:These models the ability to make linear cuts and overlay motion graphics. And when I scroll the Instagram Reels that I see, they're like Vibe Reels with cut cutouts and it flips negative and it's all color graded and stuff that like Yeah. Yeah, you could probably diffuse it all, but it's pretty cool just to teach a model to also use After Effects or whatever video, you know, motion graphics suite you want to use. Is that an interesting unlock? What do you see So going
Speaker 5:all of that stuff will happen, I agree with you. The models will get really great at doing that. People love generating videos. Sure. I would say people we have not yet found a way that people really love watching other people's videos.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. This is true for a lot of other AI. Like, they love to you know, people love talking to ChatGPT or whatever. It's not that compelling for most people to, like, read other people's ChatGPT generation. So I think there is something
Speaker 3:But isn't that for all writing and all video?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It seems stronger to me in this case than the general case, but maybe you're right. Maybe this
Speaker 3:is Yeah. But if but if if somebody says, hey. I generated a fifteen minute video. I'm I'm really excited for you to watch it. And you watch the first ten seconds and you're not that captured by it.
Speaker 3:I don't care that it was human made. Don't necessarily
Speaker 5:Yeah. Maybe you're right. And this is it it's not a it's not a special case.
Speaker 2:Do you see, like, the data with with Sora downloads? Because I've noticed that I'll generate stuff on Sora, download it, and share it to a group chat, then it's this little in joke that me and five other people get, and we see this, like, family group chats of, oh, it's our dog and our kids. But, like, there's not really, like, okay, yeah, this is a business. You know, everyone likes this.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. The the I would say that the most common use case is something like that. Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, like
Speaker 5:memes on group chats is a real killer use case of some
Speaker 2:How is the Disney rollout going? I was super excited about it. Jordy was extremely bullish on it from a business strategy perspective.
Speaker 3:Yeah. When you look at how image models have grown various LLMs historically, and now you're gonna have an image Yeah. Image and video model that can do something that no other LLM can do, at least legally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And he's Bob Iger joining OpenAI.
Speaker 5:Bob Iger, I love it. No. But a critic, thanks for that.
Speaker 2:Because he's he's gonna be looking for a job and Free agent. He's a free agent.
Speaker 1:Go pick
Speaker 2:him up.
Speaker 1:Hit him
Speaker 5:up for us, you know, do some recruiting. That'd be that'd be great. The I think that generating characters in images and videos is going to be very important to people and they really like that. Yeah. Like other like we were saying otherwise, I don't think many people, like, wanna watch me and some Star Wars character doing something together, but I might think it's
Speaker 2:cool. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's you know, there there's like a real trend going on right now with ChatGPT where it's make a caricature of me and my job based off of everything you know about me. Yep. And those kinds of things, people actually do, like looking at other people's
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Media.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's almost like a like a face filter or something. There's, like, enough of it's the Studio Ghibli moment. Like, there's enough of the human still in there that it's not it's not you can't yours is not the same as mine, so it's still personalized.
Speaker 5:It's personalized and it says something about you and, you know, the the the like, a lot of these things a a a lot of what's gone viral before with ImageGen, I think it's like if you can make people look a little bit more attractive or cool than they look in than they are in real life. Yeah. Without sort of having to ask for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about the actual the actual rollout? We were we were debating between like open the floodgates, you can generate any Disney property versus like it's One character Man week and everyone's posting Spider Man, and then it's it's, you know, Mickey Mouse week, and there's another viral moment.
Speaker 5:I'm not sure what the team is planning there. I know Disney's had some different opinions about how they what they want to do and try to be a good partner there, but I'd excited to open the floodgates, personally.
Speaker 2:Oh, that'd be fun. Cool. Talk about your first speaking of video, your first Super Bowl ad. It felt like not generated, lots of motion graphics, the black dots coming together. Like, what was the what was the goal with that ad?
Speaker 2:Who were you trying to speak to? It didn't feel like a direct response QR code. Download the app. No. What was the mission?
Speaker 5:I love that ad. I think that was such a cool one. It was it clearly not meant to be like a mass market or direct response ad.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But, you know, speaking to the, like, people who are at the center of this revolution and just trying to, like, celebrate everything that has come before and everything that will come after
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It we didn't hear a lot about it from, like, average users of ChatGPT, but we heard a lot about it from, like, researchers in the field and a lot of resonance there. It was definitely not generated. It was done the old fashioned way. Yeah. And, you know, it had, like a lot of people loved it and a of people hated it.
Speaker 5:And then many people in the middle didn't get it, and I felt okay about that.
Speaker 2:That's a great encapsulation.
Speaker 5:I like our ad for Sunday. Okay. It's about codex. No surprise. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about the evolution of the advertising to be more just clear about the actual use case, the value. Like, what are you trying to say with your advertising strategy now as it refers as it relates to, like, video?
Speaker 5:Well, the thing I would most like us to say, and and I think this is a new challenge given where the models are, is to teach people what they can go do with AI. Yeah. I mean, AI is now unbelievably capable, and most of the world, it's still, asking it basic questions on ChatGPT.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Everyone can go build amazing things now. Everyone can go do all kinds of work. Scientists are gonna make new discoveries. And I'd like to you know, to the degree that advertising we do can teach people how to use this, I I think that'd
Speaker 2:be awesome. Yes. So the KPI is, like, reduce the capability overhang broadly.
Speaker 5:I think that's should be a general KPI for us, not just of our ads. Yeah. The products that we build, how we teach people to use those products, like, the the that feels very important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anthropic also has a bunch of ads in the Super Bowl. Seems like they've run a ton.
Speaker 3:Damn heard.
Speaker 2:What do you think the people are getting wrong about about their characterization of how ads will roll out in chat apps?
Speaker 5:Well, it's just wrong. Like, the the the main thing that I think is we are not stupid. We respect our users. We understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people would rightfully stop using the product. No one like, our our first principle with ads is that we're not gonna put stuff into the LLM stream.
Speaker 5:That would feel crazy, dystopic, like bad sci fi movie. So the main thing that's wrong with the ads is, like, using a deceptive ad to criticize deceptive ads feels I don't know. Something doesn't sit right with me about that.
Speaker 3:I asked I asked Claude what if if what the definition of playing dirty and it said what did it say? Misleading others about your intentions, hiding information or creating false impressions. Yeah. Thought it was a little dirty. I thought it was well played, but it was it was
Speaker 5:It was it was well played for sure, and it was a funny ad, and and they, you know, like, this sort of the stuff about the chatty PT personality that most annoys me, which we'll fix very soon, I thought they nailed in the ad. So that part was funny. Yeah. But I don't know. You know?
Speaker 5:Like, I also like, I think it's great for them not to do ads.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 5:a different shaped business. I did notice that they said in their thing, like, we may later revise this decision and we'll explain why. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. The the We're pro ad. Was blog kind of did a good job of disarming the pro ad people, gave themselves an out Mhmm. In the future. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Do you think they care?
Speaker 5:I think it doesn't matter. Like, think it's a sideshow. You know? People are excited for a food fight and between companies. But, like, the the amazing capabilities of these models, the product, the kind of, like, the groundswell of excitement around codecs Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That feels way more important to
Speaker 2:me. How do you stop the pausing that happens in voice mode? Do you need new hardware for that, or is it a model capability thing?
Speaker 5:We need new model. We may need some new hardware too, but mostly we just need a new model. I think we will have a great voice mode
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:By the end of this year.
Speaker 2:What's the bigger bottleneck? Energy or chips?
Speaker 5:It goes back and forth. Right now, again, it's chips.
Speaker 4:Chips.
Speaker 2:Is there anything
Speaker 5:But it it, you know, be different different times.
Speaker 2:Is there anything we, like society in America, should be doing more aggressively to increase the supply of
Speaker 5:fabs? Or fab capacity? I think it is well, it may get solved on its own. It may like, normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding as a society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world and we're going to fund that, and we're going to get, you know, the whole supply chain and the talented people we need to make that happen would be a very good thing to do.
Speaker 2:Do you think there's an upper bound on model IQ? Like, the the race right now is is you're smart, but you're not smart for days, you're smart for hours. Can you go much further and get much smarter?
Speaker 5:It seems certain. Upper bound? I don't know. I don't know how to think about that question yet.
Speaker 1:I can't
Speaker 2:even yeah. I can't even reason about what 2,000 IQ looks like, you know? Like, I don't even I don't know what that means.
Speaker 5:It's funny you say I mean, I can't reason about what it means to think about a problem for like ten thousand human years.
Speaker 2:That's another good one. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's crazy. But maybe IQ is gonna feel even even weirder. I I
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I don't know. I feel like I somehow feel like this isn't going to feel as strange as it sounds. And the like, for a bunch of reasons, we're so focused on other people. We're so focused on our own lives. We're so focused.
Speaker 5:We have such a human centric nature that, like, okay. This thing is really smart. It's inventing new science for us. It's running companies for us. It's doing all this stuff.
Speaker 5:And that sounds like it should be impossibly weird, and I think it'll just be very weird.
Speaker 3:Do you think space data centers will provide a meaningful amount of compute for OpenAI in the next two to three years? No. Five years? No. Ten years?
Speaker 2:You just keep going. Ten thousand years.
Speaker 5:I I wish Ethan luck.
Speaker 2:Okay. The the the funny thing about the whole, like, back and forth about ads is that in in our world, the criticism is that you didn't launch ads early enough. Is there a world where you wish you launched earlier? How is the actual rollout going? Are advertisers happy?
Speaker 2:Do you have, like, a really long road map, or do you think you'll be faster at catching up to sort of what's frontier in ad
Speaker 5:We haven't even started the test yet. We started the test soon. Yeah. But, you know, we're gonna it's gonna take us some number of iterations to figure out the right ad unit, the right kind of the right way this all works. Do I wish we had started earlier?
Speaker 5:We have gone from, like, not a company, you know, three years and three months ago or something like that. We were like a research lab. Mhmm. And now we are like a pretty big company with a lot of products. So there's many things I wish we had done faster.
Speaker 5:I think we were correct on the trade off here of how we balance things that we need to do. Mhmm. I wish, you know, we launched this very cool enterprise platform this morning. Yeah. Wish we had done that earlier too, but had to, like, deal with the monstrous growth of Chateappity and Codex and all sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:Good problems to have. Last question for me. What happened to that internal writing model that you used to write the essay? That feels like something that was really cool, but we never really saw the light of day.
Speaker 5:We're gonna get a lot of that spirit into a future model. Again, it's like, there's so much stuff happening. Yeah. We have to make these hard prioritization decisions. Sure.
Speaker 5:I would love a cool writing model. Yeah. Not as much as I would love a cool coding model.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 5:And it's what is possible now for coding, for science, that's the thing I'm most excited about Mhmm. For accelerating all kinds of research, AI and otherwise, for really accelerating the economy. I think that's, like, the right thing for us to most prioritize in terms of new capabilities. But yeah. Well, like, you want you want a model that can write beautifully because it means it well, you wanna write a a model that can write beautifully if it can also think very clearly and express that very clearly.
Speaker 5:That's just useful in normal work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:Last question for me. How how have conversations been with the broad OpenAI leadership team? You guys are in a position where any single word or sentence you say in any situation can be spun into a headline immediately, and then you guys have to go on damage control, kind of correcting the narrative. But of course, the original message is often or at least the original news is seen broadly than the than the correction. It seems like an interesting challenge.
Speaker 5:It it is a strange way to live. It and I don't like I don't know of any private company that has ever, like, been so in the news and so under a microscope. And it you know, at some level, it's frustrating and, you know, we're so squarely in the sights of everybody's anxieties and every competitor trying to take us down, and everybody's like, just what is gonna happen with AI to their part of the business or their own lives, that there's, like, a lot of plasma looking for an instability to collapse on. In some other sense, though, the the subjective experience of it is we are so busy on so much exciting stuff that it often feels like there is this crazy hurricane turning around us. And when we sit, it's, like, fairly calm.
Speaker 5:You know, the media or Twitter goes insane about something one day. They're talking about a crazy meltdown. We're like, that is insane. Like, okay. And people talk about it all day and then later find out it's wrong and sort of seemed like a lot of wasted energy, but we're just like, we have this great new model coming.
Speaker 5:People are building incredible stuff. Companies are transforming. We're trying to, like, figure out how to get more compute and deal with this compute crunch. And we just kind of, like, keep going and we're busy. And then if we, like, open Twitter or pop up our heads and look at the news, it's like, wow.
Speaker 5:That is an insane, crazy thing happening. Completely divorced from reality or 99% divorced from reality. And, like, okay, someone will correct it, but then we get back to work and people flip out again.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 5:It's it is much it is weird to watch when we look outside, but it is it is less chaotic internally than I think you would imagine from reading the media reports.
Speaker 2:Yep. Makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on
Speaker 3:the I'm excited to see the Codex ad.
Speaker 5:Me too. Please try it. The app is the app and five three have been like, I think, the coolest thing we've done in a while.
Speaker 2:Yes. With one prompt, I rebuilt the tbpn.com homepage to look exactly like Berkshire Hathaway, and it was just immediate. It was very fun.
Speaker 5:Interesting choice.
Speaker 2:Plain text. It was very easy. We immediately one shot it. Did not really push it to its limits, but I'm having fun. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 5:Thank you. To catch
Speaker 3:up. Goodbye. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs, and I'm also gonna tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Shalto Douglas from Anthropic.
Speaker 2:He's a member of technical staff and he's here in the TV event. Shalto, how are doing?
Speaker 4:Hey, guys. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I am doing great. Seems like you're doing better. Tell us the news. What'd you release? What happened?
Speaker 4:Alright. Well, once again, we've got a new model. It's really fantastic. The camera's a little bit laggy, bit strange, but, know Should be good. Should be good.
Speaker 4:This model is really, really, really fantastic. So I think people have been comparing the previous generation of OpenAI and Anthropic models, and they've noticed there's some differences. Right? The OpenAI models were a bit better at trying really, really, really hard on tough problems, but the Anthropic models were much faster and so forth. And so they worked on speed while we worked on making the models much, much better at really, really tough problems.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And so that's that's I think where the model really shines, is it's able to think for really, really long time. It's able to expend a lot of test and compute on thinking hardware problems. It's also a massive step towards the coworker that we've been working on. Okay.
Speaker 4:I think I mentioned last time that we're seeing this continuous progression towards models that are as capable at the rest of knowledge work as they are at coding. And I think I'm really, really excited about that as well. You you can see it's lot better computer use. It's got we've got Claw to PowerPoint, Claw decided to become actually quite capable at Excel. You know, it's not perfect there yet, but huge steps, huge progress.
Speaker 2:Do you have internal benchmarks for things like PowerPoint now?
Speaker 4:We have benchmarks for everything that we work on.
Speaker 2:Then but what makes it to the model card?
Speaker 4:What makes it to the model card? Oh, the model card is typically only publicly released
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Because for our internal benchmarks, we usually hold them out for internal testing.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. What's the process for for bench what's the internal process for benchmarking a PowerPoint? Because it's not I
Speaker 4:can't talk too much about benchmarking a PowerPoint. But, you know, I'm not sure if you know, but a couple of years ago, did work at McKinsey. Okay. So, you know, sometimes maybe they just need
Speaker 2:So they show them to you and you say, oh, it's good or something. Exactly. Good, bad. Yeah. Probably a lot of mock people involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, talk to us about, like, what a difference between 4.5, 4.6 means. People might be familiar with pre training, the different buzzwords that go into changing a model. What technically happened at Anthropic over the last few months to enable this?
Speaker 4:Yes. So we actually we decorelate the model release versioning from any specific technical detail. Okay. It's more about the overall capability level that we're excited about. And actually, some like, I've been asked by many people why we didn't just name 4.5 as five because it was such a step up.
Speaker 4:And I think maybe we under anticipated. I mean, when I was last on here Yes. I don't think even I fully appreciated how much of a jump it was Yeah. From four to 4.5.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was great because because by the time there was the 4.5 hype cycle, we could repost a bunch of clips of you talking about it. And and people were like, wow. They covered it today. It's like, no.
Speaker 2:We actually had them on the day it launched. And so I'm sure we'll be doing the same thing with four point six. Talk about, task horizon, the meter survey. Is that important? I obviously, it's a public benchmark.
Speaker 2:We've talked about it before. But is that something that is a different trade off to the other? Because I I see it as like there's the IQ and then there's how long something can stay focused, like the locking in, like and is there any tension between those? Do you ever Yeah. Get a model that's like, oh, it's really smart, but it can't stay coherent for that long, or vice versa?
Speaker 2:It does, you know Yes. Dumber but longer tasks?
Speaker 4:I mean, I think the meter eval is possibly the best eval currently out there. Right? But you're right in saying that different parts of the chart measure different things. Mhmm. Initially, was just testing IQ.
Speaker 4:But then, as time goes on, it starts to test things where humans fail at tasks not because they aren't smart enough, but because actually persevering on a task for six, seven, eight hours is really hard. Mhmm. And you're right that these come apart. This is sort of like models you should almost expect to have superhuman perseverance Mhmm. But at the same time, maybe context coherence or something like this, like fights against that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it and that's a different access from raw intelligence or or knowledge on given domains. Yeah. So meter eval is the eval that I usually use when I'm referencing AI progress to people. Recently, we held this physics conference where we invited a whole bunch of physicists.
Speaker 4:We did it with Google DeepMind. We invited a whole bunch of physicists to try and convince them that AI was really a big deal. Mhmm. And and that was the chart that resonated most deeply with people. I think it's just quite conceptually graspable as, oh, okay.
Speaker 4:Things that would take me x hours, the models are now capable of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Semi reliable.
Speaker 3:It's it's it's an interesting benchmark considering that so many types of knowledge workers will never actually work on a task for seven hours straight. Like it's just like Right. Oh, I worked on it for twenty minutes and I jumped into a meeting and then I Oh, yeah. Took a look at it again and then I had lunch and then I went for a walk My then boss I came back, I worked on it, then I got somebody called, had to work on something else. So it's like very possible that a lot of people listening to this, you know, maybe outside of some software engineers have just never even in their career worked on something for six hours straight.
Speaker 3:The flow state
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Mean, you chain things together and Yeah. And so forth. But yes, I agree. It's a it's a new it's a new it's a it's it's new work. Right?
Speaker 4:I'm doing these day a or week long time horizons usually which feed into a several month long time horizon.
Speaker 2:So talk about orchestration. It feels like there's a moment happening. I I really like the Gastown analogy in the world that he's built there. You see all over. I have four Cloud Code instances running at the same time.
Speaker 2:It feels like there needs to be a new layer of abstraction. How do you think that gets solved? Now the time to start learning those things? What metaphors will be valuable going forward?
Speaker 4:Yes. So right now, the agent's still at this point where you need to manually multiplex across them. Yeah. You know, when I'm working, the the start thing about going from four to 4.5 and now 4.6 was that I went from maybe like 10% of my lines of code being written by me to 0% of my lines of code being written by me. But the thing is, need to actually sit there and constantly switch between these windows to make sure they're on track and give them guidance and feedback.
Speaker 4:Multiplexing maybe five at once or something like this when it's going really well, but you still
Speaker 2:need
Speaker 4:to be in there in the details. Mhmm. And I think the long term right way to think about is this constantly moving up levels of abstraction. So ultimately, you only wanna be talking to one agent that's maybe synthesizing the feedback from models as they come back and say I got stuck or I was unclear on this. And that model can act as the as what I was doing before and I can take a step back and sort of act an even higher level of obstruction.
Speaker 4:It doesn't feel like we ultimately wanna be playing Age of Empires or Starcraft with the models. Right? We shouldn't be APM bound. Mhmm. Instead, it should be the model surfacing information as you need it Yeah.
Speaker 4:So that you can so that you constantly act on whatever the most important thing is and the context which you're proposing.
Speaker 2:Speaking of gaming, do you have an update for us? When is the game shipping? Tell us about the game. What inspired this? Give us the backstory and then tell us what's going on.
Speaker 4:Well, I think like many other people, I really wanted to test the limits of the models over the holidays. Right? I mean, we saw all of that from people saying, I spent three to four days doing x. And I think that's really where almost the hype cycle for the most recent generation of models started in some respect, when people got a chance to properly test their limits.
Speaker 2:Tells you a lot about adoption and how Tells you a about adoption. And and how like diffusion takes time because you need to have the space to
Speaker 1:We need
Speaker 3:more long weekends.
Speaker 2:Seriously. Right. That's bottleneck. Long weekends are the bottleneck. GDP?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good for GDP, I guess. Holidays. Take them on pause.
Speaker 4:Play with coding models.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Anyway, so Dylan's been getting us all into Age of Empires with these five aside matches on the the downstairs table. Mhmm. And I wanted to see if I could make an age of scaling where you build solar panels and data centers, you train AI models and drones and so forth instead of instead of farms and and mining and and and all this. Yeah. You start in industrial area, you go all the way up to Kardashev.
Speaker 4:I'm only I only got like 80% done and all the mechanics work but Yeah. It turns out it's actually really hard to make a game that's fun. Yep. Like actually just clicking make solar panel a 100 times is not fun. Yep.
Speaker 4:Surprise, surprise.
Speaker 2:It's fun for some people. There are some of those crazy clicker games where you do that and it's just like a brain rock game and they're Right. Pretty successful, but but I think you should stay away from that. Not not even Factorio. These are like mobile games that are like really Right.
Speaker 2:Bad. Anyway, I don't think that aligns with your mission. There's an art to it. Yeah. But we we talk
Speaker 4:about the grand geopolitics and strategy of this era that we're going into. Right? Yeah. Where the most valuable resources on earth are, you know well, basically, the the economy is in some respects reorienting around compute. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so I wanted to capture some of that dynamic, the late night discussions of San Francisco in a game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love it. How are you processing the work that's being done in world modeling and generative worlds? I know that you're not generating images, but Claude can take in an image and process, and that has value. You text a screenshot and have them implement it or have him implement it or it implement it.
Speaker 2:But what do you think about world models? Is that going to play an important piece of a link in the chain of where you're going?
Speaker 4:Yes. So, mean, think there's two different things here. There's the direct path to AGI, which I think is very much coding, and then AI research, and general science, and so forth. And I don't think that requires world models.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 4:I do think the world models are incredibly exciting for a number of other things. I think they're very exciting from a gaming perspective. I mean, we also those demos are incredible with the Genie. It's just truly mind blowing. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I also think they're probably the unlock to training robotics properly. It it feels to me like there was this era of, oh, we're just gonna need to fill like like, basically do incredible amounts of behavioral cloning of people tele operating robots. Yeah. And it feels actually perhaps like the scalable way to get robots to work is is world models. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But unclear. I'm not I don't but I don't think it's on the critical path to to AGI, basically.
Speaker 2:Can you unpack the the concept of a software only singularity?
Speaker 4:Yes. So in this world, it's one where the models are far better at digital tasks than they are at physical ones. So, we see rapid change in the digital world with relatively little change in the physical world. So, information and software changes dramatically. And this ends up having some pretty weird effects.
Speaker 4:It means that maybe the drivers of what have been the last couple of decades of progress in the economy turn around, get concept, like get changed very rapidly. And I think we'll see that flow on into the physical world but at a delay. So you get much better doing chip design, you get much better training AI models, AI models get a lot faster, chips get a lot better. The general economy gets a lot more efficient because the sort of information and message passing that is much of the rest of the economy ends up becoming much more efficient. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But at the same time, you don't yet have robots providing limitless physical abundance. Sure. Science probably progresses really fast up to the degree that you need interaction with labs or larger particle colliders or something like this. And then you go, okay, well, I need to build the robots to
Speaker 3:But at the same time, automated automated labs feel more near term than unlimited robots in the real world manipulating, you know, the Earth. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, I I think maybe they actually arrive at similar ish times. I think you need pretty competent robots for the labs. Or or at least like no one's yet managed to figure out how to automate a lab without turns out there were all these really weird little tasks that require a lot of manual human dexterity that are currently part of biological protocols. And so a lot of biologists will say, no, like you just actually need something that's capable of of human level dexterity.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Maybe not for all experiments, but for for enough that it becomes annoying.
Speaker 2:And in this software only singularity, like, how are you defining singularity? You know, the the the Kurzweil formulation of, like, more computing power than human brains, that's one equation. There's also just this point beyond which we cannot see. How do you think about singularity in that context?
Speaker 4:I think there is a pretty tricky event horizon that I at least haven't found anyone that's made incredibly strong or good predictions. Yeah. It just feels like at that point you have as many digital intelligences or more and they're as smart or more smart than human intelligences. What does that even mean for the world? It's incredibly hard to predict.
Speaker 4:It's something we spend a lot of time trying to think about and try and trying to prepare the world for all of the eventualities, but it's, I think, difficult to make sort of top line predictions of of what exactly that looks
Speaker 2:Yeah. In original Kurzweil formulation, like, that was almost the definition of the singularity. Right. It was that you can't Yeah. You can't make predictions beyond it.
Speaker 2:So, you know, that, like, once the predictions break down, then you're there, which is is interesting.
Speaker 4:I mean, I think in the near term, you know, I went down with Dwarkash to his Elon interview in Austin. Oh, yeah. And I I think a lot of that sort of reflection of that in the physical world perhaps is is what ends up happening. Like, you do end up basically trying to climb the Kardashev scale and capturing more of the energy of the sun and so forth. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But but I think that takes some time.
Speaker 2:Is your current takeaway we're more chip constrained, energy constrained? What's the biggest bottleneck to AI progress?
Speaker 4:I mean, I think right now, we're I think I agree with Sam's earlier answer that we're more chip constrained in our progress. But I think it is interesting to roll forward two years and be like, okay, well, you want a 100 gigawatts or in four years and you want a terawatt, what does that look like? Where do you put that? And this is why Elon's going after data centers in space. Right?
Speaker 4:He thinks it's gonna be the easiest way to get a terawatt in space in in 2030. And and maybe it's space, maybe it's the, you know, a giant desert somewhere. It's the Atacama Desert, the Australian Desert somewhere in Texas, you know. Maybe Texas has a lot of solar panels.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Hard to know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jordy?
Speaker 3:How are you guys thinking about free usage limits ahead of the Super Bowl?
Speaker 4:It's really tough. I mean, like, one of the one of the struggles of this is that users like, compute is so constrained. Yeah. And so
Speaker 3:Yeah. I noticed you guys didn't say download the Claude app. There was no there was no direct call to action.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think the the purpose of the ad was very much one for provoking like thought and discussion.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And It was certainly successful already. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It did provoke a lot of thought and discussion.
Speaker 2:It did.
Speaker 4:And I think I mean, I don't think you need to do an explicit call to action for people to download things or to consider things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:But but but again, it sounds like it will be the GPUs will be on fire Sunday is the expectation.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. GPUs will be on fire, as has been as has been the case for the entire industry for last year. I mean, I I think we've all had to make incredibly difficult trade offs on on exactly how compute is used.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you can you, like, zoom in on your experience? Because I feel like, you know, everyone's sort of seen, like, rough growth curves for Anthropic on the revenue side or on the tokens generated side or whatever. And it feels exponential but smooth ish. And then Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Simultaneously, have these, you know, constant worrying about bottlenecks. Is is there enough capital? Are there enough chips? Are there enough data centers? Is there enough energy?
Speaker 2:Are we in an age of research? Are we in a plateau? How have you balanced those two narratives out? Your experience of smooth growth, even though it's exponential, with constant fear around something like a cloud hanging over the industry and maybe a slowdown?
Speaker 4:I mean, think, to note on the smooth or exponential growth, I think one of the things that really like blew me away was when Semi Analysis did that analysis and found that I think what we went from like 2% a month ago to or six weeks ago to 4% of GitHub commits Yeah. Done by Claude code.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And for the amount of GitHub commits done by Claude code to double over a few weeks is Yeah. Truly it's ludicrous. Right? Like Yeah. And there's no real visceral way to feel that.
Speaker 4:You almost feel like it's it's like feels like a a number on a screen, but you can't viscerally feel it.
Speaker 7:Totally.
Speaker 4:For us, we've always had a very, very strong conviction. And in many respects, Anthropic is a bet on this being true that scaling is continuing and that progress continues unabated. So in many respects, the external numbers are only a reflection of the the conviction that we've had internally for a long time about how we exactly how we expect all the trends to go. I mean, I think we're broadly on trend for like, know, if you look at situational awareness. I think pretty sure the power and energy and flops, their predictions are bang on.
Speaker 4:It feels more like we're hitting each milestone as we expect.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 4:roughly yeah. Roughly what we expected to have happened has has happened so far.
Speaker 2:In terms of diffusion of
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 2:technology, do you think that there's a role for forward deployed engineers to go in and change organizations. We saw some news that OpenAI is hiring a bunch of folks. Obviously, lot of a lot of enterprises are using Cloud now. But at the same time, that that that phenomenon of if you don't have a free weekend or a long weekend, you might never get around to implementing it. And so having a little bit of extra horsepower and knowledge around the office might actually pull forward capability.
Speaker 2:Is that something you could see growing at Anthropic?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I think it's a great idea. I I think it's like very clear that people don't know how to hold these things. And also the fact that we like, it's ludicrous. Three months ago, we didn't have this most recent generation of models.
Speaker 4:We didn't have a 4.5.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And like, you're meant to adjust your business strategy over the course of the holidays basically because the models are suddenly capable of doing things that they couldn't do right before you end, you know, end of the end of the year.
Speaker 3:Are you saying we could see a new white collar job creation?
Speaker 2:Oh, maybe.
Speaker 4:I I mean, I would look. I think these are really valuable jobs. Yeah. I think that there's clearly a hell of a lot of value to be unlocked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we asked Sam this, but I'm interested in your take. Is data the new oil?
Speaker 4:Or is it, you know, is it the fossil fuel, as Ilya said?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Is it is it but but the the more pointed question is just, like, are there organizations out there that have data that's locked away and it requires a business development deal or an acquisition or some sort of, you know, AI leadership to add that capability? Because there are effectively secrets, sometimes trade secrets. Don't know if the Coca Cola formula is in 4.6.
Speaker 2:But it will be if the Coca Cola company calls you. Right? So how do you think about that question and and that phrase? Even though it's been beaten to death, maybe it's making a comeback.
Speaker 4:I think it's maybe like there's two kinds of data and one of them is dramatically more useful than the other. And there's the kind of data which is like the kind of analytics that a company might have collected in the past or artifacts of that company's operation, internal documents and so forth. There's the other kind which is like the actual work that people did to produce those documents, and that's not recorded. And and so I think that like to the degree that I'm not certain it's data is in the oil so much as like the expertise of people. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And like models being able to understand and learn from people. You almost want the models to be an intern in an organization and get coached and feedback and learn about how to do the job. And you learn I guess, maybe what I'm analogizing to here is as a human, when you join a company, you mostly learn the job from your colleagues Mhmm. Rather than from reading the all the documents in the company. It's just much more informative.
Speaker 4:And I think I broadly expect that to be true of models as well. I expect them to learn in a quite human like way from their colleagues.
Speaker 3:Have you thought about a scenario where a company a company's maybe revenue goes to zero and all the remaining value is just in their historical data?
Speaker 4:I guess in this analogy, it would be it would be the the people that I think the the values would regress with.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:How when when when you guys are thinking about new opportunities, verticals, categories, how what is the thought process around UI? Because a lot of
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:A lot of people building AI native tools today. They functionally look like traditional enterprise software. And it's hard for me to imagine like Anthropic building out, you know, infinite surface area of traditional software to do things like orchestration. But like, what is the specific framework when thinking about interfaces for new products?
Speaker 4:We mostly wanna build something that fits in where the humans fit in. And can do like can help like, you know, sort of like interacts with you like a colleague. And and so we want something that can fit in and and yeah, rather than like absorbing interfaces, join in and use the same interfaces that you
Speaker 3:do Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And stuff like that. I think that's how
Speaker 3:And I think that's what companies want. If you if you ask any company in the world, hey, we we can we can get you the best executive in this function in the entire world. They will usually say like, we will pay almost any price for that, or, right, we will pay an extreme premium for that. And yet if you tell them a software solution, hey, this software solution can help you do this other thing. Maybe they wanna use it, but it's not as it's not as enticing as some something that can just do the work.
Speaker 4:Right. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also, I mean, there's yeah. The the the the UI evolution seems very, very underrated. I was processing the the OpenCLaw development, how important mobile was to that. Just this idea of somebody shows up and says, you're a busy you're a busy business executive.
Speaker 2:You're in meetings and phone calls all day. You're on flights. We got a great software engineer for you, but you gotta talk to them over the terminal on your desktop. It's like, I'm not gonna give that many commands because I'm on the road and I'm on my phone. And you see people walking off planes with MacBooks now because they need to get one more prompt in.
Speaker 1:I I have done that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I am so guilty of that.
Speaker 2:And so I I imagine that there's a lot of work that will be done on the on the mobile side. How do you think about Yeah. Please.
Speaker 4:Broadly true of like all AI interfaces. Right? I don't wanna look at a screen. Yeah. I don't wanna have like I don't even want like a terminal window or a chat window.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I just wanna ask my computer to do something or maybe like like sort of like ask the world around me to do for something to happen and for that to happen. Yeah. And so I think that this like focusing too much on the interface of today Mhmm. Versus how would you interact with an incredibly competent and and colleague is the right thing.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, I I just wanna text Claude and be like, hey. Yeah. You know, do you can you fix this up for me? Yes. Can you help me sort this out or book this trip?
Speaker 4:Or, yeah, I just he wants to yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone has that ability to text from a variety of devices. People have AirPods, Apple Watches, phones, laptops, tablets. Do you think we need any more new hardware?
Speaker 4:I think new hardware is pretty exciting and interesting. I like that people are placing bets on it. Yeah. I mean, I feel like something which can capture a bit more of the context that that you go that you have in your day to day life and that you can that you can talk to. I mean, one thing that Voice is higher bit rate than typing for most people.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right? But at the same time, like in most of our environments, actually quite annoying to imagine talking to your devices in crowded public space or at work or or so forth. So maybe something that captures that automatically would be great. Like, you know, you've seen those like Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm not
Speaker 2:sure if you've seen
Speaker 4:the YouTube videos Yeah. Where people, like, self vocalize. That would be cool. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Apple just bought a
Speaker 2:company that sort of looks at the skin movements and maybe can Right. Exactly. There's there's a number of companies in the space that seem seem like it's coming, and you'll just be able to plug into that as the as the as the evolves.
Speaker 4:That seems cool. Yeah. But also just my natural environment absorbing more of my context and and Yeah. And being able to just, like, talk to Yeah. You know, like, having speakers around my house or something like this, rather having to bring my phone around me.
Speaker 4:That would be cool
Speaker 5:as well.
Speaker 2:Do you see any any world where on device computation becomes more important? I feel like Anthropic as a whole is so back end heavy, like, none of the computation is done on the on the device. Yeah. But that could change in theory. I don't know what you think about
Speaker 8:the I
Speaker 2:mean, I think
Speaker 4:our general perspective is that given level of intelligence, you know, I mean, we've seen this trend. Right? Yeah. Intelligence gets 10 to 50 x cheaper for a given level of intelligence every year. Sure.
Speaker 4:Massively democratizes access to that level of intelligence. It's literally my Twitter bio. It's like intelligence too cheap to meet up. Yeah. Because this is in large part one of the things I worked on at Google and I've also worked on a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And one of the ways that happens is that that level of intelligence goes on device. Mhmm. Yeah. But then there's always, because scaling keeps continuing, there is this exponentially greater set of use cases which the models then get applied to. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So it's totally possible to me that like, you know, some subswarm might exist on your computer or you might get a laptop that has like better memory bandwidth and so it can you can, you know, have little models complete stuff. But at the same time, then you also want the the much greater intelligence going out there and and sort of like planning and farming things out to swarms and and really like munching on on the intensive and intellectually difficult work.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Jordy, anything else? Have have the market sell offs due to various anthropic releases been generally predictable or have there been any that have been surprising?
Speaker 4:Mean, I've honestly I didn't even notice the last one because I was just heads down on the launch. But, look, in this case, I think it's a little bit much to ascribe it to an Anthropic launch. I mean, there's been legal legal tools released with AI for we have many, many customers with legal tools that have do, you know, work for lawyers. I don't think this is crazily different to any of those. And I think
Speaker 2:this is,
Speaker 4:you know, as part of just a continuing trend that we've seen. Yep. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on launch day.
Speaker 3:Great to get the update.
Speaker 2:Thank you very talk to you the next time. We'll see you. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:I'm also gonna tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform, and I'm very excited for our next guest. We have Dan Barkela from t one Energy. He's the chairman and CEO. He's in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 2:Now he's in the TV What's going on? How are doing, Dan?
Speaker 7:Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. First time on the show, would you mind introducing yourself and the company? And then I'd love to know about the journey to the company, and then I have a bunch of questions about energy. But we can start with an introduction, if that's okay.
Speaker 7:Sure. Great. Dan Barcelo, I've been doing energy all my life, a native New Yorker, now a proud resident in Texas and we're building a lot of different energy systems. Yeah. You know, my journey took me a lot through different parts of the world building oil and gas systems and now we're really focused on building solar in America.
Speaker 7:It's exciting time to be doing it when everyone knows we need a lot of electricity and
Speaker 5:a lot of energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How did you wind up with T1?
Speaker 7:So T1 was a company we we saw the need for particularly utility scale, grid level type of energy systems to be, I don't want say disrupted, but needed to be impacted in a large way, whether it's on grid level storage or whether it's on solar. We were we were doing quite a bit on the grid level battery side and the battery side quite frankly had a wall of competition from you look left at Samsung, you look right, it's LG, you look this way, it's Panasonic and you got CATL behind you. And then, my God, here's Tesla.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:When you look at solar, it was very different in The United States. It's predominantly was by Chinese companies. The American technology of solar was something we kind of almost forgot how to do in The U. S. And build it out.
Speaker 7:But we had an opportunity to buy assets, buy the technology, the know how, now we run it. We bought a five gigawatt asset in Texas late twenty twenty four, and we're building a second part of the plant, which I can get to in a second.
Speaker 1:So for us, it was really about
Speaker 3:our initial reaction to the t we saw Video. Our first interaction with t one was seeing the video of your facility. Yeah. And John and I were like, high five. This is amazing.
Speaker 3:America's got it. Yeah. We can build solar and scale and then of course, we figured out kind of, you know, this a great company and and we're excited about we're excited that it's an American asset now. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And and look, we we have a million square foot facility in Dallas that is, you know, we brought that from producing zero. We commissioned that and brought it up to producing over five gigawatts in annualized runway in November. So that was a lot of work. A lot of robots in the factory, but a lot of humans.
Speaker 7:So we'll unfortunately is
Speaker 3:the yes, talk about, maybe talk about the scale of the operation in the context of overall US solar panel production because I think people hear five gigawatts, and maybe they can wrap their head around that. But it's a meaningful percent of of overall production. Is that right?
Speaker 7:The US is about 50 gigawatts, so this alone is about 10% of American production. Wow. It's extremely automated. It has 1,200 people. It's running twenty four seven, except of course, during those ice storms that people don't know how to deal with in Texas.
Speaker 7:Know? It's more about the people driving to work than the factory. Yeah. But it's a of significant scale. It's one of the
Speaker 2:most modern in the world. How does that 50 gigawatts of capacity in The United States compared to China? Can you lay the sort of geopolitical backdrop and get me up to speed on how much the American government is doing to support this effort?
Speaker 7:So look, China China is up to over thousand gigawatts, you know, 1.2 terawatts of capacity. China's adding from last year, probably close to three fifty to 400 gigawatts. That's close to the American grid. So it's almost like China can add an entire grid Yeah. Just in solar.
Speaker 7:So the numbers are are are wild. Yeah. I don't think I don't believe China's doing it to do, you know, lower carbon. I think China's doing it because they need to grow very, very, very fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I think that's what you're seeing last two two or three years in The United States, where solar and storage is also taking 75%, 80% plus.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You asked about like what The US aspects for it. I think, now The US both Democrats and Republicans have done a lot of disincentives and a lot of incentives for advanced manufacturing, whether it was the IRA in the past or the O triple B A now, those incentives are in place, there's a lot of tariffs in place. I think a lot of those create an ability for The US to be a level playing field with other competitors. Quite simply, I think America lost a lot of its manufacturing muscle. We're building a new facility outside, it's about an hour north of Austin in Rockdale.
Speaker 7:It used to be an old Alcoa plant. Now it's just a piece
Speaker 4:of dirt.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We're building a 2.1 gigawatt solar facility there. That's gonna make the cells that go into our plant in Dallas.
Speaker 3:So what what are the main what are the main bottlenecks? Is it purely capital? Because ideally, t one could just copy and paste the Dallas facility, you know, a thousand times. But what does it take to actually The do
Speaker 7:solar chain is really cool because it has like it's almost like four different parts.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It's got the digging out silicon, making polysilicon, the rocks, then you're going into ingots and wafers. And those wafers are also very similar in the semiconductor industry, then it kind of splits the high grade stuff goes to semiconductors, the low grade stuff goes to solar. Then you take a solar cell plant. The solar cell plant is basically a low grade semiconductor plant. You're making, you know, making the cells, making a fab, and then those cells go to the low tech part, which is in Dallas.
Speaker 7:Dallas is where I always I always joke about it. It's like it's a five Gigawatt site with 50 trucks a day bringing in glass, putting the cells in between and gluing together, and then you get 50 trucks a day going out with glass. Yeah. So it's like Dan's glass company. You know, we just moved in there.
Speaker 7:But the cell the cell part's really interesting and that's where a lot of the advances come from specialty gases to process equipment engineers to process equipment that's very specialized. That's the higher tech part. So for me, it's very interesting as we go backwards and integrate. To answer your question on how do we get more of it, starts with contracts. We're smaller company, we're not the scale of like what Elon's doing in terms of his announcement with solar, right?
Speaker 7:I don't have unlimited capital and funds nor do I want a lot of dilution on the as a public company. We need contracts, those contracts then allow us to get the risk capital that we need to build these plants. But the building part is not the hard part. I'd say the building part in America is more about navigating through certain regulations, they're navigating through certain delays there. Texas, think is very conducive.
Speaker 7:But as long as I have power, as long as I have access to water, and we go full recycling on the water, but as we go into water and power and low cost inputs, we we feel we're in a great place in Texas to build.
Speaker 3:Who are who are the, like, main buyers? Like, who are who is it is it, you know, traditional energy companies? Like, who who who are you spending the most time with?
Speaker 2:Or or will you actually sell to, an Amazon Web Services or Google who's, like, building out of a new data center?
Speaker 7:So we focus on utility scale. That's capturing largest utilities, but it's also capturing all the big tech companies that that you'd mentioned too.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:We're usually selling directly through developers that then face those customers.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 7:Some of them don't confidentiality, don't want to be disclosed. One of them Treaty Oak, we recently announced. They're a large developer based in Austin. So I imagine that they'll have a lot of their customers exactly what you just said. The demand for data centers is surreal.
Speaker 7:The demand for power is surreal. A lot of the everyone knows we're waiting for turbines until '29 to '30. So you're not going to get that there. So if you want to start scaling power fast, you solar and storage right now. So that's a big, big driver and that's the bulk of what's driving the demand.
Speaker 7:Behind that some smaller utilities are looking to add to the grid and capacity, but by far. The other big trend though is, as you're running out of spaces to connect power and interconnections, a lot of things are shifting to behind the meter or distributed generation. This is where you're building first power islands, you're building data centers with power islands that can later connect to the grid because affordability is a big issue. Nobody wants a data center that's gonna raise prices electricity. You know, the scientist was very vocal about that in Florida, like data centers, you know, bring good jobs and things, but then, you know, what are they gonna do to electricity prices?
Speaker 7:So I think it's really important that we that the industry gets a handle on how energy can also be in an area that's not going to put more stress on the grid.
Speaker 2:So just to restate the current status of the business, G1 is the first facility up and running G2, you're building. What does the future look like? How far into the future? Obviously, you need the contracts to unlock new plans, but how do you want this to scale? Where else do you want to build?
Speaker 2:How quickly do you want to copy paste these facilities?
Speaker 7:If I had the contract, I'd love to copy paste Dallas like that, know, whether it's, you know, six months to a year. Yeah. Those are those are fast. Okay. We publicly said that we're, you know, on track to build g two this year.
Speaker 7:And that's already started constructions. We started construction, we started that in December and we're tracking to continue to build that. So that's our main asset, main focus. G1 is operating, G2 is in build. And then if I go to the next part of supply chain, we get our polysilicon and our wafers from Corning and Hemlock.
Speaker 7:So that we've completed the entire chain to be an American chain.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you think about the data centers in space? Elon's notorious for vertically integrating, but there's going to be a lot of players. It's probably a slightly different solar panel than what you might put on the ground, I imagine. Is that something where you're interested in talking to folks about a contract to deliver solar panels that would wind up on satellites in space?
Speaker 7:I'd love to. You know, I think when you look at silicon based and probably more on the perks side than the top con side, there's quite a bit of demand for lower earth orbit in particular rather than deep space. So the silicon wafers do work in space. So the question really becomes, are we going to use it for terrestrial demand or space demand? Obviously, we're not sending up modules with glass up to space, but at the cell level or at the wafer level, we'd love to have and feed into that as a customer base.
Speaker 7:Love love
Speaker 4:to do that. What
Speaker 2:do you I mean, being a public company CEO can be stressful. What do the short sellers get wrong about t one energy these days?
Speaker 7:You know, being an ex buy sider and an ex sell sider, writing research reports about it, you know, I I know the journey to be a portfolio manager or to be a sell sign analyst and get a lot of things right and get a lot of things wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I think for the most part, short sellers as competitors like to say like, oh, they're not gonna make this or they're not gonna, you know, do it the right way. Compliance with US law in terms of being a fiat, you know, foreign entities are concerned. There's always concerns about the solar industry and misunderstandings about how China's influence is. That's something that I think is an old story. You know, we're an American company, American public company, New York Stock Exchange listed.
Speaker 7:And, you know, we bought an asset, you know, and we're running and building it now, but look, let's go for this.
Speaker 6:Let's go.
Speaker 7:That's that's one of the biggest parts. I mean, other part, you know, I I get stressed because it's sometimes my IR guy goes, don't read Reddit today. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1:but I
Speaker 7:want to. And I'm like, no. And then someone says, hey, go kill yourself or go to this.
Speaker 2:I'm like, Jesus, You know? Well, fortunately, some of your fans have come over to our chat and they wanna know when are we getting merch. They want merch. Any plans?
Speaker 7:We we will put that site up as fast as possible and get the hat and and get these things maybe without this logo here or this one here. We'll that there. But Yeah. No, we're excited to get the merch. We love we love our shareholders.
Speaker 7:We are thankful for that. And I think we have good feeling for all those parts.
Speaker 2:Jordy, any other questions?
Speaker 3:No. It was great to meet you and come back on as you have new announcements.
Speaker 2:Yes. I have one more thing. Just I'd love to know the shape of the company. It feels like a, you know, an American reindustrialization process. How big is the company?
Speaker 2:It feels like you're a job creator. What roles are you hiring for? If this really, really scales, as I hope it does, and I hope we're talking in a couple years and we're talking with a terawatt With
Speaker 3:a T.
Speaker 2:With a T instead of a G. What does the shape of the workforce look like?
Speaker 7:We're 1,200 already in Dallas. Wow. We're going to be 1,500 in Austin.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 7:Austin headquarters, we're going to be over a 100. If I can do my recruiting call, go to t1energy.comcareers, we Yeah. Need The more rogue you are as an engineer, the better. Yeah. This has to be a new style of manufacturing.
Speaker 7:And see you guys always, know, ramp is your big sponsor. We start with our whole thing is our corporate policy for expenses is very simple. Do not buy anything illegal, either good or service. Two, it's corporate money, be careful with it. Three, we can watch everything you buy with your ramp card and we do with AI and it's awesome.
Speaker 7:And the fact that no one has to do T and E reports or something, it's just about accountability to people. And we just have to build as fast as we can, as quick as we can. So throw some of the old rule books out, but that's part of the reason
Speaker 8:we want
Speaker 7:to be in Texas and in Austin, there's a lot of engineers there. We need them from the semiconductor sector, we need them from the manufacturing sector, from the robotics sector. So it's all about that growth. And more contracts, maybe some contracts for space one day, who knows? But the more contracts we get, the faster we can grow.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for everything you're doing. Thanks for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress. I'm rooting for you.
Speaker 2:This is an amazing project.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You should have. At some point, I think we were live between the first time we talked about T1 and the second, the stock was up like I think a 150%. And
Speaker 2:That's why we're podcasters.
Speaker 3:That's why we're
Speaker 2:podcasters We'll
Speaker 4:leave this on the buy side to
Speaker 3:But someone yeah. Thank you for the work.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time. Especially
Speaker 7:loud and clear, merch.
Speaker 4:That's the priority
Speaker 7:most priority. Right?
Speaker 2:It's priority number two after re industrializing America and we're saving the solar industry, but it's a close second. Anyway, thank you so much, Dan. Guys, thank you. Fantastic meeting you. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Welcome back anytime. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 3:Checking in on Amazon Yes. What happened? Reported earnings down seven and a half percent. I'm trying to find a good summary Mhmm. Of the results.
Speaker 3:Yeah. While I work on that, maybe we head back to the timeline.
Speaker 2:We can head back to the timeline. We can also do this Wall Street Journal, sort of trend piece about your AI habits. Obviously, saw a lot of the four point zero folks in the chat. The new family intervention, we need to talk about your AI habit. People are getting clingy with their chat bots.
Speaker 2:This is a knock on effect of relationships between artificial intelligence and humans. And the Wall Street Journal says it's giving their loved ones pause. So I wanna read some of this and you can give me your reactions. Tell me how you're using AI in your daily life with your family. I tell before
Speaker 3:Please I do that use some more details. Amazon's projecting 200,000,000,000 of CapEx.
Speaker 4:Woah. That's at the They
Speaker 3:said Gong. Can we get the we get the mallet?
Speaker 2:Gong. Let's begin the Lambda lightning round now. We have three great guests joining over the next half hour, and it's Lambda lightning round time. So let's bring down the mallet. You can take this one, Jordy.
Speaker 2:You're you're ready. Unhook the Lambda mallet and hit the axon. Hit that app loving Gong during the Lambda lightning round.
Speaker 3:Market. There's nothing like it.
Speaker 2:But we like
Speaker 3:We like it.
Speaker 2:We like it.
Speaker 3:We like big numbers.
Speaker 2:We like it. We like CapEx. We're we're very excited to see that. Anyway, let me tell you about Okta first. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk.
Speaker 2:Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And we will go into this Wall Street Journal article about how people are interacting with AI. So it started as an innocent hobby to entertain and distract herself while going through a divorce. Erica Atchison used Anthropix Claude to build a bot that generates images based on prompts from her and her friends.
Speaker 2:Soon she promoted Claude to an advisory position in her personal life. It didn't take long for her kids to think she might need a break from her new friend. These days there are two kinds of people, Those who using AI for everything and well everyone else. Super users are contracting out their work to groups of agents, amping up their productivity. They're dropping advice from Chatchippity aka chat as if the OpenAI bot is their most trusted consigliere, counseling on everything from business strategy to whether or not you should let your friend get a perm.
Speaker 2:Interesting question. Everyone else is wondering if their loved ones may be taking things a bit too far. Maybe some tasks should be reserved for humans. Maybe there's dignity in that. Maybe some of us like the way things are.
Speaker 2:Atchison says Claude was particularly helpful as she navigated a relationship she suspected wasn't gonna go anywhere. He was like, quote, this is Claude talking, hey, I don't think you're going to be able to extract yourself from this if you don't stop talking to this person for a while, says the Portland, Oregon resident who works in operations for a tech company. When she was later when she was later to when she was later tempted to rekindle contact, Atchison would check-in with Claude. Stick to your guns, it told her. AI hasn't been beneficial for every relationship, though.
Speaker 2:While her kids watch TV, Atchison likes to tinker with Claude. Her sons don't approve. It's a waste of her time, says Grayson, 11. She puts a lot of time into AI just to make boring old pictures. Wait.
Speaker 2:How is she making pictures with Claude? Yeah. I'm very image model.
Speaker 6:Must be calling some API under the under the hood. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Is she like she's like on Clog code harnessing Nano Banana Pro?
Speaker 6:Maybe she's talking about the SVG images.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes. Maybe.
Speaker 3:No. But there's an image in here that's her image, and it looks like a Grok Imagine image.
Speaker 2:Maybe she's on Grok. This is this is an odd article. I I'm very confused by this. Anderson eight has a different complaint. The technology's accuracy.
Speaker 2:Chattypete couldn't I couldn't correctly identify a Pokemon. Another time, he's just like, this is unacceptable. Zero on Pokemon bench. I'm I'm sell the stock. It's going to zero.
Speaker 2:It's over. It's over. It's over, says Anderson, age eight. Another time Anderson struggled to get it to generate a suitable picture of himself. Once I only had one leg, and once I had three legs, he said.
Speaker 2:This is so cute thinking about this eight year old being like, this this is slop. This is slop, says the eight year old. Eric Davik of StartUp founder in Brooklyn uses AI for recipe planning, workouts, business strategy, and vibe coding with his son. The 42 year old also uploads recordings of his executive coaching meetings to Chattypati to analyze his progress. I've done some I I I asked I asked Chattypati about a workout plan at one point.
Speaker 2:I I I don't go back to it that often. Recipe planning. I'll have it do I did have it do a deep research report all around where we could go to food.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 3:think it's actually good for do you think do you think LLMs are good for workout planning? That's just like the app. Like, I typically want a work out plan that is I mean, don't we don't we work out every day and we Yeah. Kinda do a vibes based approach, I would say. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Try to push it hard and not not Yeah. We're usually talking about technology and business during our workouts.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:But I you know, historically, let's say when I was starting to work out Yeah. I would find a plan Yeah. But I wanted it to be from a specific person that was making that plan with general Yeah. With with an intention around it Yeah. For somebody in that state which maybe like I've been weight training for Yeah.
Speaker 3:Six months Yeah. At the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's a huge And so if you just take like and the reason I ask is like, I've had terrible luck doing recipes Yeah.
Speaker 3:Getting recipes Yeah. From LLMs. Mhmm. Because I think it just takes the average of every recipe for a certain item on the internet and just kinda gives it to you. And you can end up with like I think we tried to make waffles once.
Speaker 3:And it just the waffle it was like, clearly the recipe was just wrong because they they were like really runny. Okay. You know, just wasn't it wasn't working. Was like
Speaker 2:It's rough.
Speaker 3:It had botched the different
Speaker 2:Well, haven't used the latest models. You throw you throw a Codex 5.3 at that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But but it's no. But it's obviously not an I
Speaker 2:Waffle Bench used to be
Speaker 3:It's not an IQ thing. It's just it's just
Speaker 2:We're creating Waffle Bench removing the goalposts. It needs to be able to make waffles. Great waffles. Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer.
Speaker 2:Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 3:Let's Anyways, the wife of this of Eric Yes. The startup founder says, his wife is reluctant to use AI especially for any writing related tasks. A freelance journalist, she doesn't believe the technology can replicate her twenty years of professional experience. Her husband's use can annoy her, like when she asked him to write an important email to her son's school. As she read it over, something seemed off.
Speaker 3:I was like, this is basically the same paragraph repeated three times. Says the 45 year old, she asked him, did Chatty Bichi do this? She says he admitted to it. She's probably not lying, he says. I don't remember the specific instance.
Speaker 3:Love how they're just, like, cross interviewing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very funny because I I leaned the complete opposite way on, on, like, preschool applications once, and was like, okay. I know that everyone else is gonna be using AI slop, so I need to write extra conversationally. And so I'm in the application being like, hey. What's up?
Speaker 2:My name is John. Just like completely just completely organically writing, like, flow of state. And then I was like, I probably need to polish this up a little bit, but I'm definitely not giving it the LLM flavor because I think that that's gonna be a tell for a lot of people on the other side reading these. They're like, another thing that's is this not that. It's not this.
Speaker 2:It's not that. A lot of another hyphens. Like, people are getting sick of this slop. But what do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I just, like, don't resonate with this article at all. Like Tell me more. Over, like, Christmas break, I think I onboarded my dad to Claude Code.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, I'm like, yeah. You need to be using the best model. Like, why you haven't tried four or five yet. Like, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But but what what what was the killer use case? Did you tell him, like, write software, get on GitHub? Did you just get him set up?
Speaker 6:Just like anything.
Speaker 2:Anything?
Speaker 6:Like, any task, just have Claude do
Speaker 2:it. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And it, like, it'll probably work.
Speaker 2:Probably work.
Speaker 4:I mean, I I
Speaker 6:don't cook much, so I I don't know about the the, you know, recipe stuff. But
Speaker 2:I mean, the funny thing is that, like, there are recipe you can just take a recipe book and open it. You can just Google a recipe, but you're like, I need Claude go to work for six hours to get me a recipe for waffles. It's like like, that's not actually the promise. That's not actually, like, advancing. Like, the advancing is like is like, build me a piece of software that that will generate me a new waffle recipe based on all what what's happening in the news and what my kids are gonna do and generate the images.
Speaker 2:Like, do a lot more that would take a long time. Say, like, you're not actually gonna be saving time if you're using LLMs for something that's Googleable.
Speaker 6:So Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I don't know. It's it's it's we're in a really weird moment right now Yeah. Where the models are good at so many things. They are also incredibly confident even when they're wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And sometimes you're making I I had a friend that got a ticket for they were dictating a text into their phone while driving, and they got pulled over and they were given a ticket. They were trying to figure out, okay, they were trying to figure out, okay, am I gonna get a point on are they gonna get a point on their license for this infraction? And I and the model was saying one thing. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But I've had other experiences very recently with models where they get get completely wrong. So I was like, okay, like, you kinda got like an indication
Speaker 2:Good thing you had me. Good thing you had me. And the thing we were talking about you.
Speaker 3:That was something that was something else.
Speaker 2:You texted me and I was like, I know more than Chad GPD about this topic. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And our first guest of the lightning round is here. Should we bring in Mandy Fields, the CFO of e.
Speaker 2:F.
Speaker 6:Beauty. Welcome to the show. What's happening?
Speaker 9:Hello. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Great to meet you. Would love a quick introduction on yourself since it's your first time.
Speaker 9:Sure. So, yeah. I'm Mandy Fields. I'm chief financial officer at e. F.
Speaker 9:Beauty. I've been here seven years, my twenty eighth consecutive quarter of reporting the results for e. F. Beauty.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Amazing. And what is what's the latest? What's the news?
Speaker 9:Well, the news is we just reported another tremendous quarter. 38% net sales growth, 79% growth in adjusted EBITDA. Oh, hey. Yeah, I love that. And so we're really having a lot of fun over here at e.
Speaker 9:F. Beauty, and that's the results.
Speaker 3:What's driving that?
Speaker 1:Right Yes, so
Speaker 3:now, feel like there's so much uncertainty around the strength of the consumer broadly, where there's so many different, like, you can look at government data and see one thing that might give you one signal, and then you look at report, you know, quarters like you guys are putting up and it says something else. But what are you guys seeing?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, it really comes down to three things. Our value proposition, and so, 75% of our portfolio and on the e. F. Brand is at $10 or less, and so that really speaks to that consumer seeking value.
Speaker 9:You pair that with our incredible innovation, the marketing engine that we have, who, by the way, I heard that you all are gonna be at the big game Super Bowl ad, so congratulations on that. We will be as well.
Speaker 3:You. Think we'll be at a smaller our buy is will be at a smaller scale than yours, I'm assuming.
Speaker 9:I saw that. I saw yours was about $50,000.
Speaker 3:Something like that. Something
Speaker 9:like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, yeah. Well, anyways, I wanna get into the Super Bowl too, but, continue.
Speaker 9:So, and then we also have the incredible addition of Road to our net sales performance. And so, Road is an acquisition that we did. We closed in August. That's Hailey Bieber's brand, and it has just had tremendous performance. And so you take all of those things together, that's how you get to that 38% net sales growth for the quarter.
Speaker 2:How is the marketing mix changing over the last few years? I mean, Meta had blowout quarter. It seems like ads are performing very well on that platform. The influencer economy is still growing. How much Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What what does the mix of marketing spend look like?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So our marketing spend is pretty well balanced. We we allocate 24 to 26% of our net sales to marketing and digital. Mhmm. And we are there on every platform where our community is present.
Speaker 9:And that has really been a key differentiator with e. F. I think that we are so close to our community. We keep our ear to the ground, and so that really comes through in our innovation, and the marketing campaigns that we decide to put forward are really culturally relevant and connected to our communities.
Speaker 2:And how are you thinking about the agentic commerce question? Is this something that you need to do anything special for? Does it just naturally happen? It's still so early, but it these things in AI, they take off so fast.
Speaker 9:I think it is still early. We're making sure that we have the the back end correct so that we can participate in AgenTek commerce. But, you know, AI is just one of those things where this is kind of one of those technologies that can help on both the revenue side as well as the efficiency side. And so I think it's pretty incredible from that perspective.
Speaker 2:Is it possible to build a direct to consumer brand from scratch these days without a huge celebrity partner? It feels like more and more of the deals that I see that actually go the distance, get to big revenue numbers, they got somebody attached.
Speaker 9:Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because I think that it's actually pretty rare for a celebrity brand to make it to this site. Like, if I think about Hailey's brand, Road, you know, very rare to see a company go to $200,000,000 in sales in less than three years on 10 products. Mean, you usually are seeing multiple products, multiple SKUs, categories to get there. And so I think what we found in Rhode is pretty rare.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so
Speaker 5:much.
Speaker 3:I wanted to before you before you jump off, I I wanted to ask kind of what as CFO, how you think about Super Bowl ads? I'm sure this isn't your first rodeo. What kind of goes into it? You know, there there's so much there there's there's so many different ways to approach Mhmm. The Super Bowl ad, but but what's what's kind of your logic going into it or kind of framework?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So Super Bowl ads are really about building awareness behind your brand. And so this is not our first rodeo. I think our first time was four years ago. We came with an ad with Jennifer Coolidge.
Speaker 9:It was a lot of fun. This year, we have Melissa McCarthy as the as the actress in our Super Bowl ad, and it's fantastic. So I really think it's about building brand awareness. If I think back, you know, five, six years, our overall awareness is around 13% as a brand, and now we're over 40%. And I credit that to a lot of the collaborations and the things like Super Bowl that we've done over the years.
Speaker 2:So so your team yeah.
Speaker 3:So your your your CMO and your marketing team are not coming to you and you're saying like, cool. I'll give you the budget, but, like
Speaker 2:I wanna see a move in top line the next week. It's more
Speaker 9:about I always say that.
Speaker 4:I always
Speaker 1:want to see always
Speaker 2:say Like, show me the money now. Okay.
Speaker 9:But in fact, it is sowing the seeds for a longer term investment. There are other things that we look at that are more direct revenue drivers, but Super Bowl investments like that are for the long term.
Speaker 3:What is last question for me. Yeah. What's your kind of M and A outlook for the next couple years? I'm sure in a perfect world, there'd be a new road every single year that you could roll in, but obviously that's not the way, you know, great brands don't get, you know Yeah. Started every single day or even year sometimes.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So how are you thinking about it?
Speaker 9:Well, we have a great portfolio of brands, with us today, and so that's really gonna be our focus on the existing portfolio and building those brands out even further, whether it be e. F. In cosmetics and skincare, Naturium, or Road. We have some really great brands in our portfolio, and so that's what we're gonna be focused on. If somewhere along the way we found another Road, we'd be happy to bring it into the portfolio, but staying focused on what we have for now.
Speaker 2:Makes a ton of sense. Awesome.
Speaker 3:Well, to meet you. Taking the time. Congrats on the ad on Sunday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very excited. We'll talk to Yeah. You
Speaker 3:Congrats on quarter. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Let me talk about Cisco. It's critical infrastructure for the AI era. Thank you to Cisco for partnering with TBPN. We had a
Speaker 3:lot fun on Monday.
Speaker 2:At the Cisco AI Summit. Truly, just just great interviews. If you haven't already gone and seen them, go check them out. Back to the timeline. There is other news as always.
Speaker 2:The number of horses per county? I didn't see this chart. And Chadson says, these are rookie numbers. Should be double, even triple this. Horses everywhere.
Speaker 2:Wall to wall horses.
Speaker 3:I agree. I am
Speaker 2:There should be way more horses.
Speaker 3:I totally agree. I found out, I'm, as you know, in the in the in escrow on a on a new property and, I was talking to somebody very enthusiastic about horses and I was getting the breakdown on what kind of horses I'll be able to support on the properties and they were giving me the lay of the land. I hope to contribute to It's gonna be on everyone to get these numbers up right. It's not enough for Totally. One of us.
Speaker 2:Mean, Darik Oshashari, CEO of Uber, yesterday came on and said that, you know, 75% of all land in cities is parking lots or something. That's not the real number, but, there's a lot of parking lots. What's gonna happen to them when we don't need them because of autonomous cars? Stables. Yep.
Speaker 2:You take your Waymo or your autonomous Uber into the city, you hop on a steed, and you go from place to place. Excellent execution, Doreen. Excellent execution.
Speaker 3:I love
Speaker 2:horses. I do love horses. I also love Gusto because horses have Gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve its small and Backbone medium sized
Speaker 3:of TBPN.
Speaker 2:It is the backbone of TBPN.
Speaker 3:According to the information, upcoming Avocado model from Meta is referenced as the most capable model to date internally.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I This doesn't tell you that much.
Speaker 2:It doesn't. It's the most powerful iPhone ever. We get it. We get it. Get it.
Speaker 2:But it has no benchmark
Speaker 3:Not even that. No? This is like this is like some, you know like they could make the most capable model for Meta Yeah. Could be the least capable if you compare it to Yeah. Other left.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but but it's the same thing that that happens in WWC where you stand on stage and you say, it's the most powerful iPhone yet. It has the most battery life of an iPhone ever. And it's like, well, if it was a less powerful iPhone, you probably wouldn't launch it. But it's very exciting to see that they're making progress and they're sending out memos and they're leaking to the information and they're excitement building. And I think that I do think that we are gonna get something pretty powerful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm I'm excited about it. Based on the team And it's great everything like Avocado is a good name and based on the team and the compute and the money, like, they're gonna jump to the frontier. Like, there's just no question that they'll be really really close to frontier.
Speaker 3:We gotta go back to the horses. Al Al in the ex chat says they have two horses doing their part. Yes. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you, Al. And full circle
Speaker 3:Get those numbers up, don't just say, oh, I'm doing my part. I don't Like if you
Speaker 2:You gotta be growing exponentially. You gotta go to four, then eight, sixteen, 32, etcetera.
Speaker 4:We have time.
Speaker 6:Just on the on the meta model thing for a Historically, food based models with the name with food in the name have done really well. Ready? You have nano banana. Yes. You have strawberry.
Speaker 2:Strawberry?
Speaker 6:Yep. Yeah. That's all I can think of. But I mean avocado, it's a good sign.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's good. It's good.
Speaker 2:Wasteland
Speaker 3:capital Wasteland capital
Speaker 2:doing posting.
Speaker 3:A black pill.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Tech has now entered a liquidation spiral where people, e. G, hedge funds, are forced to sell good, cheap, accelerating assets like semis to cover their losses and expensive decelerating high p e s h I t, like SaaS and AI victims. AI victims. Not sure how long this will take to play out.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 3:It's been a brutal week. Needed the red suits this week.
Speaker 2:We did. But fortunately, our guest who's in person has a very special suit that I'm very excited to show you after our next guest who is in the restream waiting list.
Speaker 3:Last post, Joe Wisenthal
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Wisenthal says the sell off in everything that is not canned soup is relentless.
Speaker 2:How's Caterpillar doing? Probably doing pretty
Speaker 3:well. Campbell's is up today.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 3:Up 6% in the last five days. Flight to safety. Flight to Campbell's.
Speaker 4:Flight Yeah. Buy some soup.
Speaker 3:Buy to some soup.
Speaker 2:Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, a deep multimodal understanding. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We have Ivan from Daytona. Great name. Great.
Speaker 2:Great name. We love Daytona.
Speaker 3:We gotta we gotta talk about this because you had one of my favorite interactions on X. Okay. This was like a month ago. You remember you were you said something like I'm working late on a Sunday and somebody commented like that, yeah, why are you even doing that? Nobody knows who you are.
Speaker 3:And Ivan was like, that's exactly why.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so good. That's amazing. A great response. That's a great response.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So it was basically, the reason was like, it was just for the holidays, and everyone was talking about, oh, no one were no one took a break on during the summer, so we're all taking breaks on, you know, winter, like, founders and investors or whatever. And I'm thinking, like, are we serious? This is, like, a once in a generation opportunity, And, like, if you go rest, like, you won't probably make it. Right?
Speaker 8:And I just tweeted that. And then to your point, someone was like, I've never heard of you. Like, exactly. That's why we have
Speaker 3:to work.
Speaker 4:So yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, hopefully, people hear about you now. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?
Speaker 8:Sure. So I'm one of the cofounders and CEO of Daytona. Daytona is on a mission basically to give every single agent a computer or a sandbox as it's popularly called. Right? And so the com the team has been working together, the founders, for almost twenty years.
Speaker 8:So we're quite old, and we've always been in for people, everything from screwing together servers Overnights.
Speaker 2:To creating
Speaker 8:on orchestrators or whatever.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Orchestrators, tell me more about where you're seeing the orchestration market going. I'm a big fan of Gastown and the metaphors, and it feels like it could be, like, the hot new trend, but I don't know if it's too early or or where we'll see all that go.
Speaker 8:I mean, trends keep changing as you've seen. Like, every, you know, two months, things change. But one thing is for sure, and this is what I mean, I love what Gascon is doing and all these others, which is basically the ability to spin up multiple of these agents. Each of these agents needs a computer. And I don't think we stop here with, like, two or four or 10 or 50.
Speaker 8:Like, this will go exponential. Yeah. And so that's why we're doing what we're doing. So we really love what Steve is doing at Gas South and all these other people that are creating this.
Speaker 2:Talk about talk more about where the product is, the evolution, where the team is, kind of the the current state of the company, and where you wanna go.
Speaker 8:Sure. So the company's almost three years old, but we actually, like, hard pivoted and, like, fired all our customers and everything. And we decided so, yeah, that was a hard one. And we saw what was coming. We weren't actually a first, but we did see that agents would need these computers.
Speaker 8:And so we actually rebuilt the product from Xero, launched it eight months ago. Mhmm. And since then, we've got the number of customers has been insane. The growth has been insane. We've got everything from YC companies, growth companies, Fortune 100 companies.
Speaker 8:Everyone building agents either internally or as, you know, as products are using us or someone like us. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Talk about why an agent needs a computer. I've know, there's been this debate over OpenClaw, formerly Clawed Book, around, like, oh, should you host it virtually, or should you run it on a MacBook Mini? And if you do run it locally, that's a security risk. But then you talk to the people and they're like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're running in the cloud, but you still gave it access to your email. And so, like, you kinda let the fox in the henhouse. So what does it mean to actually provision a computer versus just APIs to other compute resources?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Exactly. So I think that's the the most interesting part where originally agents were like these use, like, Rag based systems. They could connect to APIs, and they can usually, like, consume information, analyze it, give you some feedback, and fire off some tasks. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But if you actually think about that, if that is a way a not digital knowledge worker would work, the two of you wouldn't have laptops in front of you. Right? Like, there's it's it's not that ideal. It's, you know, it's messy. You have to download things.
Speaker 8:You have to install things. You have to analyze things. If And we think of AI agents as digital knowledge workers, it actually makes, like, super sense that they do need these computers. The OpenClaw or whatever it's called right now and Cloud Code and whatnot, I can't there's, three names.
Speaker 4:It's OpenClaw.
Speaker 2:No d OpenClaw.
Speaker 8:Yeah. OpenClaw. Yeah. So this just shows that everyone buying Mac minis, I think this just made people understand why it needs computers. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But if you think of if you look at our use cases and what people use H1 to build for, we basically have three, which is code and command execution, computer and browser use, and RL.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so the first one, like, canonical, these are not our customers.
Speaker 1:I'll just
Speaker 8:say the highest brands just so people know. It's like if you think of, like, Lovable. Yeah. And if think of Lovable, you as a human type with Lovable, and then it spins up a sandbox to write the code, preview the code, run the code. And so Lovable has how many users?
Speaker 8:And so it needs, like, hundreds of thousands of these sandboxes to be run so their agents can get there. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:The second one is, like, if you can need your agent to, you know, do QA testing of booking.com's website. Like, it needs a computer to be able to run the browser to be able to do these things. Mhmm. And the most the newest sort of use case for us is just, like, the RL environments.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And I think Dylan Patel, who was a guest yesterday on your show. Yeah. And also, I'm gonna also know we're doing a conference next week, and so he's one
Speaker 2:of our guests.
Speaker 8:Going? He got him. Yeah. He's going. So at the Chase Center, we rented out the Chase Center to do a conference called Compute.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 8:amazing. So you're very you're very invited if you guys wanna join. And so he has this article about our environments and how most of the models have now, over the last eighteen months, become better because of post training and spinning up these our environments. And these companies to spin up these our environments, they need not only fast computers or sandboxes, they need them they need them in concurrency. So they need a 100,000 or 200,000 to be spun up in an order of, like, three minutes.
Speaker 8:Right? This is not a trivial thing and not something that you can really take off the shelf. And so when you think about why agencies need computers, like, you when really think about the market of AI agents and softwares, that's sort of where that fits in.
Speaker 2:I want Dylan Patel doing the little Yachty walkout that he's he's made fake AI versions of it so many times, and now he's at the Chase Center. A 100 a 500, 1,500 builders there. You gotta get the little Yachty playing so you can do the walkout. I saw first mark in the chat. Give us the news.
Speaker 2:What happened?
Speaker 1:Breakdown Yeah.
Speaker 8:So we raised a $24,000,000 series a. Boom.
Speaker 3:Congratulations. Thank you
Speaker 8:so much. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Very, impressive progress. Yes. And, I'm sure it'll be back on very soon. And have a great time at the at the conference Yeah.
Speaker 3:Pulling together 1,500 people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're excited.
Speaker 8:Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:It's great to meet you, Evan.
Speaker 2:Have a good
Speaker 3:rest of Cheers. Your
Speaker 2:Goodbye. And without further ado, we've been keeping our next guest waiting. He's live in the TVPN UltraDome. It's Scott. You
Speaker 3:He's suited up.
Speaker 2:Following me suited up. Thank you so much for coming here.
Speaker 3:Look at this suit.
Speaker 2:This suit.
Speaker 3:Is that game worn?
Speaker 1:Someone's gotta bring some swag to the show. No quarter zips here. Okay. Okay. No half assed it.
Speaker 1:Custom suits only.
Speaker 4:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Men's wear. It's actually
Speaker 3:nice. Yeah. What what what's the origin of the suit?
Speaker 1:No. Shynasty. I got a prep. Oh, see. No.
Speaker 1:You guys got your sponsors.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I got my sponsors. Shynasty.com. They make all my No way. Custom suits.
Speaker 4:That's great.
Speaker 1:By the way, it's a shame. The sports card company, FLIR, isn't still in business. FLIR? Remember FLIR sports cards? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because then they could have called us the FLIR Ultra Dome. Yeah. You've been giving out gold medallions. I had to do that for Dylan. Dylan needed
Speaker 2:to FLIR Ultra Dome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's big he's big yeah.
Speaker 2:How'd you how'd you how'd you meet Dylan?
Speaker 1:Dylan and I met at HQ Okay. When he came on board. I was hosting it. He came on board as a partnerships guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Absolute wizard.
Speaker 2:He is.
Speaker 1:Yep. You guys are so lucky.
Speaker 4:We
Speaker 2:are. Have him. We are.
Speaker 1:With Savvy, if we were just a little earlier market, maybe we could have hired him first.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Guys, We'll poach him one day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Introduce That'll be a good talent warp.
Speaker 1:That'll be a
Speaker 2:good day. And then and yeah. Yeah. Introduce Savvy. Get us up to speed, and then, of course, we'll go back and talk a lot about HQ.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. So Dylan and I met met at HQ where if viewers aren't familiar, was this live interactive mobile game show viral phenomenon.
Speaker 3:Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. 2017, you guys played? Oh, yeah. Age of Beauty's
Speaker 2:here? Of course. We're Age Beauty's. Alright. Alright.
Speaker 2:We never won. I don't think I
Speaker 1:Neither did I, man. Oh, yeah. Well, you were playing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That would be insider trading.
Speaker 1:It's it was tough, though. Honestly, part of, like, the journey to Savvy is, you know, taking a lot of learnings and insights from HQ, which Mhmm. Tremendous success at first. Yeah. Viral international hit.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But when you think about it, and in hindsight, you go, oh, maybe it was a flawed product. Mhmm. Because it was this really impossible game to win. Right? Very few people actually won it.
Speaker 1:A lot of very smart people, including Stephen Colbert. Yeah. When I did his show, he told me be behind the curtain. He didn't do this on the camera. He goes, I played your game a couple times.
Speaker 1:Didn't win. Yeah. Stop playing.
Speaker 3:Stop playing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's like, oh, interesting. Because if you're a smart person, you wanna just
Speaker 3:lose over and over and
Speaker 9:over and over
Speaker 1:and and over It's not a good feeling. So from that perspective, it was maybe not the best.
Speaker 2:Because, yeah, if you play Fortnite or Call of Duty and you're not doing well, they will pair you with other people that are at your skill ceiling. Like, the skill based matchmaking happens in most you go to chess.com. You'll be matched with someone at your level, so you can get a couple wins under your belt. Yeah. With HQ, it just gets more and more competitive, more and more competitive.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And then the company obviously has to raise the bar or else everyone wins.
Speaker 1:Yes. And iterating on the products, adding feature, adding new formats. They just never quite got there. So with Savvy, one of takeaways is we want to make this game something that everybody can play all the way through. Because with HQ, if you got out on question two out of 12, you were done.
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1:So now you can play all five rounds of Savvy, which are word puzzles. We thought about trivia, but I think AI has put a kibosh
Speaker 2:Oh, shit.
Speaker 1:On trivia for
Speaker 2:cash. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it's just too easy with these bots, man. Yeah. But with the tech savvy as they end
Speaker 5:the game
Speaker 3:Somebody would have just, like, the biggest bot farm in the world just trying just winning every every single time.
Speaker 1:Mean, they were already doing that eight years ago, so just imagine what you can You do
Speaker 3:guys were dealing with bots?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it was AI back then, but there were, you know, Discord farms and bot people. I don't know. I'm not a tech guy, so I don't really know how that stuff works. But with Savvy, I mean, we're doing word puzzles.
Speaker 1:So it's basically like a live Wordle meets connections on people who play those games. So it's a version our version of that, five rounds, timed rounds, you can score points. And the key differentiator, you're playing against me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's you.
Speaker 1:Right? It's it's the host. Yep. The host plays too. So imagine HQ if I was just if I was asking the questions and answering them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. And if you answer more than me, you won. Yeah. Imagine that's that's how HQ works.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's how Savvy works. Yeah. If So you score more points than me, you solve the puzzles quicker, if you get you beat the host, you're a host buster.
Speaker 2:A host buster. What's your what's your what's a day in the life like then?
Speaker 1:Right now? Yeah. Well, guys, I just moved to LA last week. Mhmm. So I'm trying to get
Speaker 3:What do you think?
Speaker 1:Day in the life. Oh, I love it. I mean, I I was here a few years ago.
Speaker 2:New York guy before?
Speaker 1:New York my whole life. Mhmm. But no, I spent about twenty one to twenty four in LA, moved back to New York for some relationships. Mhmm. And I came back here for my new relationship.
Speaker 1:My new commitment Mhmm. Is this app because frankly, the time
Speaker 3:You're married married to the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not married to anyone else, this game. I'm committed like Kurt Russell to Goldie Hawn. You know? I'm that level of commitment.
Speaker 4:That's great.
Speaker 1:Arizona iced tea, 99¢. Yep. That commitment, that's my commitment. That's my commitment. But, no, I'm here for a week, so I really haven't gotten my day of the life routine yet, but I'm trying to.
Speaker 1:Walk the dog in the morning. I'm still getting up early with that time zone difference. Have my coffee, making a breakfast, doing a great Are
Speaker 3:you gonna stay stay on New York time?
Speaker 1:Thought about that. It might happen. I mean, you guys are up early for the show, I know. So it actually helps, right, kind of staying in there.
Speaker 2:We do the workout. We go get breakfast, prep the show, go live at eleven. How important is going live at a particular time? The iteration, any of this recording? Like, how are you thinking about just rotating another host, like, your your your workflow and your involvement?
Speaker 2:Because I I feel like the unlock is the talent, is the host. Right?
Speaker 1:For sure. And we're gonna definitely find other hosts. We have to. I mean, already already just talked today about doing a gig in Miami on March 18. So I'm like, alright.
Speaker 1:I gotta find so we're gonna have other hosts. We're gonna have other shows. That's all gonna happen. Mhmm. But, look, this is so cool being here.
Speaker 1:First of all, watching you guys grow the way you have, I've been following along and watching, it's very cool to see. And it really
Speaker 2:brings There's lot of HQ in
Speaker 1:here. There's a lot of HQ in
Speaker 2:here. There's some clubhouse, there's a lot of different stuff that has been tried, and we just sort of pieced it back together.
Speaker 1:And you realize the importance of cadence, of going live every day, for you guys having that long show, for us it's a short burst of tight attention span, but no, we're a whole different thing, we're playing a game. But it really is like, so for example, we were doing beta shows weekly in New York, okay? And I knew going in weekly isn't gonna Never
Speaker 3:do anything weekly.
Speaker 2:Always do it strongly. I like that. Say.
Speaker 1:Who doubts It's good. I so we started doing daily shows now. We're going live five times a week, Sunday through Thursday, school nights, live on school nights at 9PM eastern, but doing them here. So last Thursday, we had 1,200 peak concurrence. Wow.
Speaker 1:About 1,500 total entered. Last night, less than a week later, 3,000. Wow. We've had doubling growth week over week. There you go.
Speaker 1:But we don't Monetization, we sold one t shirt on TeePublic, got $3 for that.
Speaker 2:Ta ching.
Speaker 1:Dollars in the door. Fantastic. Think we made 4¢ on TikTok live. Oh. Simulcast.
Speaker 1:So we are monetization post monetization
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Post revenue. That's great. But no, we're listen, I'm bootstrapping this thing to talk business.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. Was gonna ask you though. So you talked about some of the product challenges with HQ, just if every if the average user's losing every single night
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:That's rough. But, yeah, what about from a business standpoint? It also feels like HQ was in this position where once it had real venture dollars behind it, you just have to go for scale. And when you're bootstrapping, as long as the business is sustainable, there's no reason to stop. You don't It's You can reach a point where you're like, okay, we've hit a ceiling and that's okay.
Speaker 3:Like Yeah. Maybe maybe there is no ceiling, maybe there is, but it doesn't really matter either way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I don't have a very sanguine view about VC culture and holding based on my experience with HQ. Mean, look, you give a bunch of young people a lot of money and just say go scale a company, go lead a team, go manage people. Not very many people
Speaker 2:Go compete with Facebook. Go compete with Google.
Speaker 1:Like, it's all over. Even just like personal mean, also, you know, business sense and, you know Yeah. Yeah. Most of these people didn't go to business school. Really?
Speaker 1:Anyway, my point is we have, like, a philosophy here where we're really trying to just bring as much as we can to this as a full team. I'm putting my money in. One of my other cofounders putting money in, and we are really trying to commit to doing this ourselves for as long as we can. We did take a couple of meetings with some early stage seed guys just to validate the product. Not like
Speaker 8:the other
Speaker 3:VCs. I won't tell you to
Speaker 2:crow The at other question is, is this almost more suitable for someone who is in the entertainment industry and not thinking about this as, okay, this is gonna be a tech company, an AI company, blah blah blah. But more like the values in the talent, the values in the community, the values in the the product and Yeah.
Speaker 3:I feel like I feel like in Hollywood and entertainment, it's very much calculus of like, hey, if we can spend $20,000,000 to make this movie and it makes $80,000,000, that's a win. Yeah. And in VC, if if a company says we're raising $20,000,000 and we only ever wanna make 80,000,000 Then we're wrapping
Speaker 2:it up and moving on to the sequel maybe.
Speaker 1:Which also is insane to me because 60,000,000 is not bad. I'm very happy. Give me a quarter of that. Yeah. So, no, I mean, listen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I get it. There's a whole ecosystem of of of the of the investor. And listen. We we we were certainly open to it.
Speaker 1:Listen. We'll be open to it if we need to go there. Yeah. But thankfully, we're in a position, although I don't know after the market today. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Might have to might have to reevaluate some of that.
Speaker 2:We'll see.
Speaker 1:Yikes. Yikes. Bad day.
Speaker 2:Bad day. How'd you originally get the job at HQ?
Speaker 3:You're just you check your portfolio. You're looking in the
Speaker 8:In fact,
Speaker 1:I'm getting I'm getting a text like, yeah. We actually do need a check right now. So if any VCs are watching. No. You're You
Speaker 2:How'd you get the job at HQ?
Speaker 1:Oh, that was that was an audition, man.
Speaker 2:An audition? So Even though it was a tech company, they held full auditions. Like, how did you did you see it on, like, a talent casting website or Craigslist ad or flyer?
Speaker 1:It was purely like a a a, you know, a a friend Friend working. Thing. Yeah. Mean, a
Speaker 8:guy used to work with at the Onion. Let's give it up for networking.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love the Let's give it networking. Yes.
Speaker 2:The Onion. You worked there?
Speaker 1:So in 2008, I interned there. Wow. And this guy Nick was the photo editor. Yeah. And we became friends, you know.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Couple of young guys. Yeah. Funny guys hanging out in New York. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we stayed friends throughout, you know, on Facebook mostly. But like, I got my roommate a job at the company that was HQ, it turns out, because Nick had put out a message on Facebook saying, Hey, looking for an animator. My roommate was an animator, so Russ got the job there.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then lo and behold, few months later, Nick calls me and goes, You know, we're casting a host for this game show on your phone. I'm like, I was about to move to LA. This was 2017. Already moved out of my apartment in Brooklyn. I was ready to go, and I'm like, I guess I'll do one more edition.
Speaker 1:I failed every edition. Just flunked them left and right for shows like Broad City and Search Party. Remember the Delta commercial with Noah Syndergaard. I was gonna take my shirt off, and I was excited to do that.
Speaker 3:Because you were diced.
Speaker 1:I I love because I love Thor and the Mets. Oh, yeah. And I'm actually a JetBlue guy, to be honest. But listen. I failed all those auditions, and this is the one audition I got, the last one I took, it changed my life.
Speaker 1:And what can I say? It's just but, you know, you mentioned, like, the the whole media and tech hybrid, and that's what makes that's what made HQ very unique, but also what makes Savvy unique because, look, HQ had interest from NBC, Disney, Fox, also Facebook, also, you know, the venture capital. You know, Founders Funnel put in 15,000,000. I remember. But, very few companies have that type of dual interest and attraction from those major, major spheres of influence and money.
Speaker 1:And it's about managing those types of investment partners, also just managing the product and understanding that when you're doing a live interactive game show on a phone, on your own app, just like what you guys are doing in terms of building your own network, you gotta think about, yeah, there's technology involved, look at what's happening with the streaming and everything, but it's a show, it's entertainment, you guys are doing it all just like we're doing it all. It's exciting, it's very heady, it could be scary at times. Very few people are doing it, so give ourselves some credit for doing the media tech hybrid ish. Can I
Speaker 3:They impossible? Said it How soon do you think Zuck will clone Savvy?
Speaker 1:I would love for him to try.
Speaker 3:Someone else breakdown how you process that?
Speaker 1:Listen, man. I mean, they they say flattery is the I forget what this is.
Speaker 2:Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 2:We like to say imitation just sucks. Imitation
Speaker 1:especially imitation crap.
Speaker 2:It's for losers.
Speaker 1:You ever thought imitation crabs in California rolls?
Speaker 3:It's disgusting.
Speaker 2:It's disgusting and despicable and you should be ashamed for imitating me.
Speaker 1:And and you say this
Speaker 2:Not flattered at all.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly. And and nobody at CNBC would have any issue with that. Yeah. But look, we all imitate, we all remix each other, but that's the thing.
Speaker 1:It's like, don't what you guys are doing is like, oh, don't need a job on CNBC. Can create my own goddamn CNBC. Make your own squat
Speaker 3:box. We love you. I honestly
Speaker 2:would have never even thought like, I should apply for a job there. I don't even know how to get into that world. It's just like Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you John and I even a year and a half ago Yeah. Hey, would you ever think about could we
Speaker 2:Doing business television. Yeah. Be like A news anchor.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:know. Like we're like, let let let let's have a podcast with two microphones. Just talk to each other. Exactly. And then it turned into a TV show kind of but streamed online But
Speaker 1:you know, someone would someone asked me when I was hosting HQ, I, you know, get interviewed and they say, where do wanna be in five years? What's the next move for you?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. I go, I'll be here for twenty years if this thing stays on. This is the future.
Speaker 2:It was so good.
Speaker 1:It didn't last very long, but with Savvy, like I said, I am in this to win this for the long haul. My skin's in the game. My face is, again, front and center, for better or worse. I don't think America I don't think a 100% America loves this face, but enough people do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Enough people do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What was chat back like that? Don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 1:Can be a little rough.
Speaker 2:You know? We've been there. We've been banned by all sorts of just today.
Speaker 1:Don't know it's really
Speaker 3:I guess, word leak that Sam was coming on to
Speaker 2:the Leaked. We promoted it everywhere.
Speaker 3:Well, no. I'm saying it leaks to the part of the Internet where there's a lot of people that are really frustrated that four o, the model from OpenAI is being deprecated. A lot of people fell in love with the model Yeah. Have a very close relationship with the model. Yep.
Speaker 3:And so we basically couldn't even look at the chat at one point because there was, you know, a message every second from somebody saying didn't
Speaker 2:realize how big that army is. I I've seen a couple posts. I thought mostly maybe fake AI generated or something like they were there, they were real and like and and they had points to make.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is the problem with people who can't Yeah. Fall fashion model. They fall in love with AI models and it's a whole different of
Speaker 2:we person. Have like a really core community that's really positive and everyone gives each other feedback. The the the core
Speaker 1:Of course. No. I mean, I'm I'm I'm just screwing around. Like Yeah. Obviously, every chat's gonna have a few trolls in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1:But no, we welcome everyone and Yeah. And there really are like HQ, the community of HQ was so tremendous. These HQTs. I mean, millions of people playing. I I've heard from people who got married because they met someone playing HQ, Strange you families coming
Speaker 3:How many how many people of of the early user base for Savvy are just people that were waiting for it to be reborn in some A bunch. I mean, you
Speaker 1:know, what what we noticed was well, again, live interactive. Not a lot of people are doing it, and platforms aren't built for it. So even on, like, TikTok and and Twitch, when people are going live, they're finding hacks to make interactive gaming. Totally. But no one's doing this one to one interactive, the host versus the audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Streamer versus audience. Very unique. And that's kind of the thesis behind building our platforms. We wanna make this streamer to audience interaction that no one else is doing, live, appointment based, games, cash prizes, the whole shebang.
Speaker 2:So how do you think about syndication and marketing, like, turning the show that's live interactive? That's a very high bar. I mean, we see it with, the number of people that show up live and watch the whole show is way lower than the people that watch our RSS feed or YouTube videos or Shorts or clips. And so how do you take something that you gotta be there Yeah. But if you see it, you might be like, I wanna be there for the next one.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Well, that's that's the marketing. I mean, we haven't spent any money on marketing. Really just been my social media posts that have gotten us to these 3,000 people or so.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, you know, coming on shows like this. I'm hoping we get the TBPN bump tonight. Oh, yeah. Let's let's crack it out. 3,000.
Speaker 1:We get to 3,500.
Speaker 2:If it happens, we're taking
Speaker 3:credit. We're taking credit.
Speaker 2:You should.
Speaker 1:I mean, how about even Sam Altman's trolls will take you
Speaker 2:to it. You know?
Speaker 3:Tell him tell him that four o's hosting.
Speaker 2:Four o's
Speaker 1:four o's gonna need some art.
Speaker 3:Proposition. Four o's a four o's host.
Speaker 2:I think it can never never stops.
Speaker 3:Wait. So you touched on monetization earlier. Yeah. Is is this the kind of thing you get if if 10,000 people, 20,000, a 100,000 some days showing up every single night, they would happily pay some amount of money to for that experience. Right?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And again, to bring it back to Dylan, who was the one responsible for getting those deals on board, I mean, we ultimately, we were doing million dollar deals Yeah. For single shows
Speaker 3:with Yeah. But why wouldn't why wouldn't a player just subscribe too? Oh, we have subscriptions also. Yeah. Subscriptions, so you have that, like because I think if you're running Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I can just imagine if you have a 100,000 people that play the game all the time, why would they not play?
Speaker 1:There's
Speaker 3:Yeah. A lot of value
Speaker 1:No. Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna do subscriptions. We're rolling that out for our season one premiere March 1. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Subscriptions and, of course, sponsorships could be a part of that too. But no. Absolutely. I mean, the the the you know, when we see people on Twitch donating $10 a month to their streamers for nothing Yeah. In return, it's like, well, if we can offer, you know goals.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just donate. It's like, it's like, know, Patreon, it's support. Oh, it's support, and that's it's an amazing community of support out there, like from fans to artists, right? Fans to content creators. So we don't have that mechanism yet, but when we roll out the subscription, it's like, hey, if you love Savvy, you love Rock With Me,
Speaker 2:how those big shows, those big monetization moments came together.
Speaker 1:How they came I mean, how they came together was we were able to get a million people playing in the game live. If you get a million live devices, and it turns out
Speaker 3:guys,
Speaker 1:if if Dylan only knew this when we were making those deals, we probably could have doubled Because later on, we hired Nielsen, the ratings company, to come in and do a study. And they put like a 1.7% multiple on our viewers. Frankly
Speaker 2:People are looking over your shoulder.
Speaker 1:Exactly. If there's one person holding a phone, maybe there's an office all playing together, family So playing honestly, two and a half million connected devices was our peak with The Rock Wow. When he hosted. Yeah. That was Warner Brothers sponsored event.
Speaker 2:So was sponsored for Warner Brothers For movie.
Speaker 1:Promote Rampage. I think it was the movie at the time. Yeah. Instant classic. Classic Rampage, of course.
Speaker 2:Of course. Still still getting paid.
Speaker 1:Still talk about that movie. Yeah. Two but 2,500,000 connected devices really, yeah, close to, like, 5,000,000 Yeah.
Speaker 2:Viewers. And then and then what's your interaction with the Warner Brothers team on that? Like, are you you Are you stop? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:During the show, are you is it just overlays, graphics? Are you stopping, doing ad reads? Like, what do they want to really make that pop for a million bucks?
Speaker 1:It was mean, we we showed the trailer. We put the trailer in the in the lobby. Sure. And we and we I'm definitely talked about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, probably wrote a whole script around.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:we did a Ready One
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Deal. Right?
Speaker 2:And maybe some questions that are linked.
Speaker 1:Some questions linked to A lot of, you know, know, graphical integration, the UX UI, but I think it were like the the Ready Player One goggles on air even. So that kind of stuff. And product reads are gonna be part of Savvy as well. Again, we're taking the live podcast ecosystem of ads, as you guys well know, you guys are like NASCAR drivers over here.
Speaker 3:Do you think that energy or compute will be a bigger bottleneck?
Speaker 1:Great question and I don't know what either of those words mean. No. You know, yeah, it's gonna get expensive.
Speaker 5:But I
Speaker 3:expect you guys to train your own foundation model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's our
Speaker 1:own own reps.
Speaker 2:We we got a foundation right here. You're a foundation model of a man.
Speaker 1:I'm a foundational element. I'm a fundamental aspect of consciousness live on your screen. Yes.
Speaker 3:Love it.
Speaker 1:You know, real humans are gonna be a scarce commodity in the near future.
Speaker 3:How are you thinking about building the team?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's important, obviously. I'm CMO, co founder technically, so we've got our COO Josh, our CTO Ben and CEO Johan. Johan and Ben are based in Europe actually. Most of our team is in Europe, we're distributed across the globe.
Speaker 1:And they're doing a lot of the hiring decisions there for the key roles, back end stuff. But we are
Speaker 2:looking
Speaker 1:animators, social media manager, community manager is key. Really, we're looking for just you know, it's like the be, do, have way of thinking. Yeah. We just want people who are gonna be their best, bring their best self to the job. And if they're doing that, then they're gonna have success, and we're gonna do well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you get any inbound from companies that wanted to dip their toe in live post HQ, people that wanna like, what was the what was the post HQ sort of like idea maze for you?
Speaker 1:Oh, it was wild, man.
Speaker 2:Because I imagine you could just go and say, like, I'm gonna be an actor, put me in a TV show or whatever. There's game shows, so you can compete in that. There's also a lot of tech people that were aware of you. How you navigate that?
Speaker 1:Well, mentioned the failed auditions before, I'm not much of an actor, turns out. So I wasn't gonna go that route.
Speaker 3:Play yourself well.
Speaker 1:I do play myself well, and that's all I really need to know how to play, just me. I the way I look at it is like there was probably two dozen people
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Contacting me over the last seven years. You know, had this baseball show. I went from HQ to this baseball show called Change Up on DeZone.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Supposed to be a three year deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:COVID killed that. The major leagues became the force majeure leagues is the joke I like to make. Oh, yeah. They killed it's a contract joke.
Speaker 2:They killed Yeah. Because just baseball went on hiatus.
Speaker 1:Baseball was on hiatus.
Speaker 2:There was no
Speaker 1:need. There was no need for the show, and
Speaker 2:they used
Speaker 1:it as an opportunity to pull the plug.
Speaker 3:Brutal.
Speaker 1:So I lost that gig, but look, I had dozens of people reaching out about all sorts of things. I even tried to start a company back in 2019, 2020 pre pandemic with a guy, and that had its issues. But, you know, the thing about these guys who who who hit me up, it was Benjamin and and and Yohan, these two randomly on Twitter. They messaged me over a year ago now and said, hey, we have this idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interaction host versus streamer. I'm like, I've heard a lot of pitches. I took the meeting. They showed me their demo. I was like, these these guys are on they're like 27, 28 years old.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And I've I've met with lots of people, lots of ideas, some fly by night stuff, some really earnest people, but just dealing with the right team, right product. These guys seem like they had the experience with mobile gaming. That's what they pitch me on. They go, we work at mobile gaming companies here in Europe.
Speaker 3:That's what we need.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's what we need. So they know the retention mechanics
Speaker 3:They of don't necessarily have have needed to do the exact same thing, but having having done something, the the scale, the interaction, the engagement, all these things.
Speaker 1:Something else lacking from HQ, by the way. I don't think a single person on the team had mobile gaming experience or Hollywood production experience. It was wild.
Speaker 3:No one had any wild. No. Seriously. Yeah. Does anyone here have experience
Speaker 1:with any? I mean, no. Very talented people. I'm not taking away from but, you know, coming from Twitter, coming from Uber, coming from, you know, big tech companies and but but I I really don't think I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Some engineers, maybe but mobile game is a very specific field.
Speaker 1:And, again, entertainment in Hollywood media is very specific. So I brought that entertainment side of things. These guys have the mobile gaming tech side of things. We've married together. Our CEO, Josh, is kind of the glue guy who's really keeping the company running and taking care of all that, and also our production manager helping set up the streams.
Speaker 1:He just did a whole overhaul of our new studio here in LA. Shout out Forever Dog Studios, our version of the Ultra Dome. But no, we're I mean, it takes, as you know which one is this?
Speaker 3:That's a dog panting.
Speaker 2:What's the name of the studio?
Speaker 3:He said Forever Dog.
Speaker 2:Oh, Dog.
Speaker 1:So we play Dogs Out. I like it. Okay. Forever Dog.
Speaker 2:There we go. The dog.
Speaker 1:Forever Dog Studios. I'm thinking of my guy right now. He just left my dog at home. But no, man. It's a unique entity what we're doing.
Speaker 1:I say we because you guys are doing it too. How are you
Speaker 3:doing I love media. Love that it's a business that doesn't exist if you don't show up and make it every single day.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 3:great. And that that scares a lot of people and sure there's like downsides to that. A lot of people wanna say, you know, the idea of SaaS, it's beautiful. You build this thing one time, you sell it, you know, and Passive income.
Speaker 2:It's not passive.
Speaker 1:I was talking about UGC. Yeah. And this is the classic dilemma for me because what HQ did, I think, amazingly the most innovative aspect of HQ was the fact that it was an app that worked for fifteen minutes a day. And it was not UGC, it was PGC, producer generated. It was a single show, a single purpose on this customized platform.
Speaker 1:What a concept, right? Because you could say, well, open it to everybody, and the funny thing is, twist on this is that HQ derived from a previous iteration of an app called Hype. These founders, they had a company called Intermediate Labs, it was about building apps. They built some kind of dance app for Instagram. They built an app called Hype, and it was, we're gonna allow people to make their own talk shows from their bedrooms, give them templates, give them music, almost like TikTok talk show thing.
Speaker 1:And I don't know, maybe a few thousand people downloaded it. One woman was doing a trivia show from her bedroom
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they saw the show, they're like, let's just do our own show.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's how they got the idea for HQ Trivia. So they tried UGC at first, it wasn't working.
Speaker 3:The PGC Yeah. The challenge, it's a very small market of people. Even even even Twitch is still so power law driven in that you take away the top 30 creators in the platform is probably worthless.
Speaker 1:It's very true. So we are basically kind of gatekeeping the creators on our platform. Very very highly curating it is probably a better way to say it. Curating it to just me right now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But we'll open up. If you guys It's got gatekeeping. That's That's gatekeeping. Work. I can't say gatekeeping anymore.
Speaker 1:You guys I wanna bring you guys on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be great.
Speaker 1:You'll cohost with me.
Speaker 4:Love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll do cross promo. We know
Speaker 2:how works. Oh, I app is in the app store and I wanna read this review. It's amazing. HQ done right. This app is so much fun.
Speaker 2:I've missed the live game shows of the 20 tens and this app delivers on the best of those. Not only is quiz daddy back, but there's also new features that reward you just for playing the game. Can excited to see how Savvy grows from here, but they're off to a promising start. Five stars.
Speaker 1:Sounds like chat GPT. That's very nice. I mean, and really the feedback has been phenomenal. The community has been phenomenal.
Speaker 3:Can we sponsor a suit?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you want your own cost?
Speaker 3:I'll connect you Yeah. Wanna do a TVPN suit that you wear during the Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. I like that.
Speaker 2:Oh, you had stickers.
Speaker 1:What about I I'll give you some stickers. I'm trying to stickers. Put on your your app. Console. And yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure. I'll wear I'll wear a TBPN suit. Let's get the
Speaker 3:the custom t b p n suit. Love it. Congratulations. I'm super I'm super excited for you. It sounds like you have a fantastic team taking the Founder market fit.
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. This is the You gotta your your our friend Jeremy Gaffan talks about this idea of everyone is like pre or post fall. Like you've like like there's people that are doing really well and yet they haven't, you know, been like deeply humbled by life yet. They never suffered a setback.
Speaker 3:You've you've you've gone through that now now you've daddy's
Speaker 1:he's eaten a help a helping of humble pie or two over the years. It tastes pretty good, actually.
Speaker 3:Kind of more than your fair share.
Speaker 1:I can't complain about anything. I've been so blessed, even these last seven years of wandering the desert to get to this point. But I'm so excited for this launch, and truly, if we can get the TBPN community on board tonight, download the app, playsavvy.live. On board the cameras, playsavvy.live Android, Apple, tonight at 6PM Pacific, 9PM Eastern. Let's get over 3,000 encouraged and I'm gonna give you guys credit.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I think it's time to play at the bottom and get out of here. Thank you so much for coming out. We'll close out the show with you on here. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 3:Fun shout it out.
Speaker 2:The newsletter Rain. Tbpn.com. Yeah. We did have Range. We went all over.
Speaker 2:It was fun.
Speaker 1:Sam's a Savvy. Sam.
Speaker 3:Sam's a Savvy.
Speaker 1:Nice booking. It's
Speaker 2:good stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Living Legends.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we will be back tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. We have Doug O'Laughlin joining. We have a bunch of other fun folks joining the show and
Speaker 3:It'll be a great day. Have a great day. Day. And evening. We love you.
Speaker 3:Bye. This is weird.
Speaker 6:Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.