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4:46
I think they can hear me. I think I'm live. You're watching TVBN.
4:52
Today is Thursday, May 22nd, 2025.
4:54
We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.
5:00
We're have a great show for you today, folks.
5:04
Let's pull up what we're going through.
5:06
We're talking about reactions to Google IO still.
5:08
Uh Joanie IV joining OpenAI.
5:12
Uh we're going to break that down.
5:14
Anthropic just dropped Claude 4 and is blowing out benchmarks. It's AI week on TVPN.
5:19
Uh and we got a bunch of great guests.
5:21
Dan Shipper, TJ Parker, Reggie James, Keith Boy.
5:23
You created the first entirely AI ad to promote a live stream. I did.
5:29
Should we play it on the stream? It's on my profile.
5:31
Did you already share it into the group so the boys can find it or should we uh or should I send it in?
5:39
Um I've been having a ton of fun with V3.
5:41
I upgraded to the super expensive plan.
5:45
It's worth every dime even to just get a few funny 8-second videos out of this thing.
5:49
The fidelity is remarkable and it just looks awesome. Um it looks awesome. Uh yeah, let's play it.
5:58
I don't know if we have sound, but let's play it cuz I I added music, but maybe I don't know.
6:02
The music might be copyrighted.
6:03
Let's see if it handles it. Okay, play this.
6:05
Play it from the beginning. There we go. That's us.
6:11
I guess that was a close one, man. Yeah, too close. In the yellow Ferrari. CNBC is attacking us.
6:21
Yeah, they don't want us to podcast.
6:23
They don't want us to podcast. They don't want us. Okay. Being followed.
6:27
We're We're bringing media to Hollywood helicopter. The CNBC. Okay.
6:34
Oh, now you're fighting gorillas versus 100 gorillas. Successful as expected. Oh, and then the rampad. Nice.
6:42
Oh, how how switch your business. com. Time is money. Save both.
6:49
Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh get on ramp. com.
6:53
Anyway, uh lots of fun with that. Such a good time.
7:00
This is going to be a fun guest lineup.
7:01
You already covered it a little bit, but uh we have a great group.
7:04
Uh Ra Boy coming on the legend, the myth.
7:08
Uh Dan Shipper from Every who raised around earlier this week uh and has a lot of thoughts on anthropics new release.
7:16
Then TJ Parker is getting the band back together band uh with a new company called General Medicine.
7:26
And then uh Reggie James Hip City Rege is uh going to be coming on and talking about Johnny Eyes. I can't wait for that.
7:33
I think he's got a big announcement as well.
7:34
Uh and I am excited for all of it.
7:37
So should we talk about should we newsmax, John? Let's Newsmax.
7:42
Uh let's go through Google IO.
7:44
Obviously this happened on Tuesday.
7:46
It's now Thursday, but Ben Thompson's done some analysis breaking it down, thinking about what what uh what the implications are for the stock.
7:54
I mean, the stock popped a ton.
7:54
Um, and it seems like, you know, Google's on this weird cadence where it takes them a full year to like really release a bunch of stuff altogether through these like big keynotes and they're they're more on like a waterfall cycle than just dropping random stuff.
8:09
But clearly, every serious AI company is thinking about how they're scheduling releases.
8:16
It's not a coincidence that Microsoft build happened on Monday.
8:18
Tuesday we got Google IO.
8:20
Wednesday we got OpenAI's acquisition of IO which is hilarious.
8:26
And then which is funny because if you search I think Lulu called this out but if you search IO on X you just get a bunch of stuff about Johnny and Sam.
8:31
Sam is absolute dog on the He's an absolute dog. John. Yeah.
8:38
Um, but that's happened that's happened a couple times where um, deep research, deep seek, I believe it was, wasn't it that deep seek came out and then Sam dropped deep research and so the deep keyword kind of came back.
8:53
But again, this all comes from deep learning and so you you never know.
8:56
Anyway, let's just rec just to recap on what actually happened at Google IO because we talked to the Google folks and there was so much going on.
9:00
It was hard to kind of boil it down into one thing.
9:03
Um, I was watching The Verge does these YouTube recaps where they cut the entire keynote down.
9:08
And typically when they do Apple, it's like five minutes.
9:13
Apple WWC in five minutes because it's just like new iPad, new iPhone, new Apple Watch, blah blah blah.
9:17
Uh, Microsoft builds cut down was 15 minutes.
9:20
Google IO was like 30 minutes because there's so much stuff.
9:22
So, I really think just the volume of announcements was pretty high.
9:25
So, uh, from Reuters, Google said on Tuesday it would put artificial intelligence into the hands of more web servers while teasing a $250 a month subscription for its AI power users. That's me, baby. I'm on the 250 plan.
9:36
Isn't it 500 and you can get it for 250? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
9:40
This is a little misinformation here. Yeah.
9:42
They're going to be ramping that up.
9:44
So, they're charging me 250 for the first couple months, but I I opted into the 500 plan.
9:47
So, they're going to ramp me up immediately as soon as it gets to the end of the 20th.
9:50
In the future, everybody's paying Google $1,000 a month and just begging like, "Please bring back the ads."
9:56
Like, "We're sorry forever." Yeah. Yeah.
9:57
Complaining, "Oh, the internet was bad. Oh, I just want to pay." No, it can.
10:01
I was thinking the other day, I got an email uh from Google Workspace saying like, "We're raising prices." Yeah.
10:07
And I was kind of laughing because they can I think so many businesses are so dependent on Google Workspace that they could like kind of overnight raise it to like $1,000 a month per person and like probably you know see a little churn but not like crazy amount. No way. It's so hard to turn.
10:26
I mean this is the what we were talking about with deal and rippling.
10:28
It's like deal is in like the most dramatic spot possible but do I really want to rip out my payroll software right now? That's a tall order.
10:38
I'm not on deal, but if you're on deal, the example is like just turn the other eye.
10:42
You have you have, you know, uh, you know, Pirelli tires and Pirelli gets caught spying on Michelin.
10:49
Uh, are you going to like take your car into the like shop and be like, "Hey, I got I got to get money."
10:56
No, you're just going to be like, "Oh, weird.
10:57
The Pirelli CEO is is different than the Bridgestone CEO or whatever."
11:01
Anyway, um, there was a flurry of demos, including smart glasses, which I'm excited to try.
11:05
the Enreal uh smart glasses.
11:07
Um and then they're also doing some audio only smart glasses which have been very popular with Meta, the Ray-B bands.
11:13
Um they've adopted a tone of increased urgency since the rise of generative AI challenge the tech company's longtime stronghold of organizing and retrieving information on the internet.
11:21
And this is like the AI moment should just be Google's moment, right?
11:26
Their mission is to organize all of the information in the world.
11:29
And LLMs literally just do that.
11:32
It just compress down all the information. Yeah.
11:34
It's like the perfect Google product, but of course they have some business model uh positioning challenges.
11:39
They can't just give up the golden goose on day one and go all in on generative AI.
11:44
But they're they're they're taking it more and more seriously every day.
11:47
So in a major update, the company said consumers across the United States can now switch Google search into AI mode showcased in March as an experiment open to test users.
11:59
the feature dispenses with the web standard fair in favor of computerenerated answers for complicated queries.
12:04
Uh, and what's interesting is about that is that who were we talking to yesterday that was saying like the genius of Google is that there was just one button.
12:11
I forget who we were talking to, but basically this idea that like Google had just one button, you know, search and then they had the I'm feeling lucky button, but it was such a simple interface.
12:21
Like I don't love the idea of adding a switch. Yeah.
12:24
It feels like a very like a half measure.
12:26
It's like, is AI the future?
12:28
If it's the future, then Google search should just be AI mode all the time or is AI mode not the future?
12:36
In which case, maybe you shouldn't even do it and I should just go to chatbt when I want AI mode and I should go to Google or I should go to the Gemini app for for that experience if they're distinct.
12:44
One thing is for sure, consumers have uh historically, you know, imagined products for one use case, right?
12:53
like Snaps, people still use Snapchat for sending pictures to each other, even though that functionality is like super embedded in Instagram and other apps now.
13:01
And so, but yeah, I think it's always tough when you're when you're saying AI is the future, but we don't want to get rid of the thing that's not the future. We like that thing, too.
13:12
So, we're going to have we're going to have our cake the scale that Google's at.
13:15
They could have they could have a really good LM.
13:18
No, they could have a really good LM ad product and just if you were starting to introduce it to 1% 2% of your users, it could dramatically impact Oh, yeah.
13:29
revenue because they've spent decades, you know, optimizing Yeah. Yeah. search results, right?
13:33
So, uh, so Google also announced an AI ultra plan for 250 provides users with higher limits on AI and early accesses to experimental tools like Project Mariner, an internet browser extension that can automate keystrokes and mouse clicks.
13:45
Somehow, I missed that entirely.
13:47
There were so many there were so many launches I completely missed project mariner.
13:50
Uh excited to try that out because I guess I have access.
13:54
Um and deep think a version of its topshelf Gemini model that is more capable of reasoning through complicated tasks.
14:01
I'm excited to to talk to to check out that.
14:03
I've been using deep research a lot.
14:04
Definitely want to want to test drive deep think.
14:06
Uh Pai told reporters that the rise of generative AI was not at the full expense of online search.
14:13
This feels very far from a zero- sum moment said PCI.
14:15
uh the kind of use cases we are serving in search is dramatically expanding because of AI.
14:22
First off, and I mean to be clear like this this is what happened with computers like we went from the desktop to the laptop to the phone and most people have a laptop and a phone and it was not completely disruptive even though you can do everything that you can do on a laptop pretty much on a phone.
14:39
um people wound up dual using and so it's totally it's not it's not as much of a dire issue that I think I was making earlier.
14:46
Um so Ben Thompson's dropping the analysis.
14:48
He says first off my compliments to Reuters for this writeup.
14:51
The amount of things announced and pre-announced or envisioned were pretty overwhelming.
14:55
And I'd say my compliments to Ben Thompson for this writeup about Reuters write up because we are now three layers of reaction deep and it's the best.
15:04
Um this was to be sure terribly impressive.
15:08
We all knew we all we already knew that Gemini 2.
15:10
5 is awesome and the company's Image in 4 image model and V3 video model were significant leaps forward from uh from just a few months ago.
15:19
I wrote in December when VO2 came I called it off air too.
15:22
V3 is feels significant because it seems inevitable that V4 will be almost indistinguishable from reality, right?
15:31
You might have a hallucination here or there, but yeah, some of the videos that we've been seeing, like it just needs some slight tweaks and it just looks like Yeah, it has it still has a specific look to it.
15:42
I haven't really played around too much with trying to really break it out of kind of its default AI vibe. Um, I'm sure you can.
15:53
Uh, but it's really really impressive.
15:56
And I think I'm, you know, the the the memes are cool.
15:59
We're in kind of a Studio Giblly moment for V3 videos.
16:04
I think we're seeing a lot of these on the timeline.
16:05
Um, I'm interested to see where it goes more practically.
16:09
I mean, I noticed that when the Sam Alman and Joanie IV uh photo dropped, didn't see a single Giblly version of that in my feed.
16:17
And that was like the most Giblifiable photo ever of Johnny kind of leaning on his side.
16:24
And uh I actually the place that I see Giblly most now is in people's profile pictures. Yeah, people like that.
16:31
Uh and I actually I actually Giblied the the photo myself.
16:38
Uh the Sam and and uh and Johnny IV and I was I don't know if anyone can see that, but I don't know.
16:43
It's a Giblly of the photo.
16:45
And I was just kind of like this isn't worth posting.
16:47
Like there's nothing special here. Like we get it.
16:50
You can do the cartoon filter.
16:50
And so it's more about how do you use that tool?
16:53
And and now I've been using it to design I mean I'm looking through my my recent uh my my recent although on day one of the Giblly drop it was a lot of just fun Giblies eventually it became you know okay make a story book for my son.
17:10
Uh do the gigachad meme on everyone who's been on invest like the best.
17:13
Um make a bunch of ramp ads of course.
17:17
um do a bunch of stuff with like testing, make a bunch of people bodybuilders, do some set design for us.
17:24
It's like a like my use of images and chatt has morphed from oh cool the the the studio giblly thing is the meme to how can I practically use this to do cool stuff like making merch ideas for us and stuff like that.
17:38
So, uh I'm excited for for V3 to kind of get into that mode.
17:41
to kind of get into that mode. It's very clear that uh the it is it is tech extremely technically impressive but it is just a tool and so we have yet to see the V3 Harry Potter Balenciaga moment something that's truly viral not just because it's an impressive that it's an AI image like that that joke that the standup comedian that doesn't go viral unless you are like it's AI right and you're like wow it's so impressive it's
18:06
AI I can't believe that that's why I'm liking it I'm excited for when someone creates something that would go viral if you had shot it practically and it's so good that yeah, they used AI, but it's just as The breakthrough moment for me
18:19
was seeing a like man on the street style interview that was made with VO3 and realizing that I could I could I could call it out as AI if I saw it independently, if it wasn't being, you know, if the creator wasn't stating that it was made with V3. But you can imagine
18:33
But you can imagine a man on the street interview going viral and creating this like 15 minutes of fame moment. Yep.
18:41
for somebody that doesn't exist.
18:43
I mean, that's what happened with the Pope, the the the dripped out pope. Remember that?
18:47
That actually went viral.
18:49
People thought the Pope had this puffy jacket and it was midnight image. I remember that.
18:52
And so and so, yes, it's like tools here.
18:55
In people's defense, the Pope had a white Gwagon 101.
19:01
He did that he would drive around on. Yeah. Yeah.
19:04
And so it wasn't that unbelievable that he would have a white, you know, puffer jacket coat. Yeah.
19:11
Uh, and so let's go through V2, V3 a little bit more.
19:14
Ben Thompson has written about this before.
19:16
He says, "The reason to focus on V2, however, is not just that it strikes me as a seminal moment in generative AI history, but that it also is the most powerful manifestation of the advantages that Google has in this space.
19:26
Think about the three pillars of generative AI, algorithms.
19:30
Google of course invented the transformer, but it certainly seems that likely that the company figured out something important in terms of maintaining coherence, which I complained about with Sora.
19:40
And we saw this with Sora when we when we ran the same test in V3 and Sora.
19:43
The Sora generation was a lot there were way more hallucinations and it was way trippier.
19:51
Whereas you can see, you know, it's like it's a Ferrari.
19:53
It's a yellow Ferrari in our little video and it be it remains a yellow Ferrari the entire time and it stays and and and the TBPN uh text stays tracked onto the car the entire time.
20:06
And so there's something algorithmically potentially that's happening there.
20:09
And that's what Ben's highlighting.
20:11
Then in terms of compute, Google is training and running inference on its own TPUs which are increasingly developed in conjunction with the model.
20:18
Uh Jeff Dean said interesting.
20:18
I didn't really know that they were they TPUs in production.
20:22
Oh yeah, these have been in production for years just on general parallelized computing.
20:26
So you could do uh recommendation algorithms or you know any sort of just machine learning and deep learning on it before the transformer revolution.
20:35
Uh they knew the TPUs would be valuable and they've been investing in them for a lot.
20:39
But what's interesting is that is that the V3 model is very clearly designed and and trained and inferenced all on TPUs.
20:45
And so there may there might be some sort of compounding advantage there. The TPUs are so great.
20:50
Why are you rate limiting somebody paying $500 a month? That's true.
20:55
They haven't made enough of them. That's probably why. Yeah.
20:56
because you know Apple's probably getting more line time at TSMC and and Jensen's probably getting a lot of line time on TSMC.
21:01
And then also I can imagine Jensen gets a little bit of line time TSMC. Yeah.
21:05
And then also just the fact that um you know Google has been investing a ton in capex but they also have Google Cloud Platform.
21:15
They also have to serve higher value apps and services.
21:17
value apps and services. is they have to serve to get better at serving me as I know I know me V3 models that that should be their pri should be their primary if you're if you're a Google user put a support ticket in and just say hey targeting's
21:33
lacking lately just try to push it try to get better yeah that's my only request monetize me you know harder yeah so Jeff Dean uh one of the top AI scientists at Google and one of the greatest programmers of of all time are you familiar with Jeff Dean this guy so if you search Jeff Dean jokes. You get
21:48
You get this consolidated list of Jeff Dean facts and they're all Chuck Norris style jokes about Jeff Dean because he's such a legend.
21:58
And so says um compilers don't warn Jeff Dean.
22:01
Jeff Dean warns compilers.
22:05
Uh Jeff Dean builds his code before committing it, but only to check for compiler and linker bugs.
22:11
Uh Jeff Dean once failed the touring test when he correctly identified the 203rd Fibonacci number in less than a less than a second.
22:21
Uh there's a whole bunch of these that are just ridiculous.
22:23
Jeff Dean's keyboard has two keys, one and zero.
22:25
He just programs in binary coded.
22:28
Um when Jeff Dean listens to MP3s, he just cats them to dev.
22:33
dsp and does the decoding in his head basically just like matrix mode.
22:38
Uh there's a bunch of these funny thing.
22:40
Jeff Dean knows the last digit of pi and Jeff Dean mines bitcoins in his head.
22:43
Um there's a bunch of other good ones in here.
22:48
He can lossily compress random data.
22:50
All these things are like jokes about like computationally impossible things to do, but Jeff Dean can of course do them. Uh so he's a legend.
22:56
He's pretty good at leak code. Last one.
22:58
We talked about this yesterday, but data.
22:59
Data is shaping up to be the biggest obstacle for model development going forward.
23:02
The single greatest untapped resource is likely video generally and YouTube in particular, which Google owns.
23:08
I certainly imagine this was an important resource for the development of V2. Yeah, it's so it's wild.
23:15
This this advantage is not been talked about enough.
23:18
There's so many of these sort of video foundation model startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
23:26
And yes, I'm sure they get access to YouTube data content in different ways. Yep.
23:33
But uh ultimately it is uh nobody has nobody has the edge that uh you you could go do deals with every single major Hollywood studio and still not have anywhere near the edge as Google does just by having a constant net news stream of of video content.
23:56
Um, anyways, we got to uh we got to look at the total data size of all YouTube videos compared to just the text on the internet.
24:05
I want to I want to really know like how much more data is there on YouTube or is it roughly the same?
24:09
Um, we're going to dig into that soon.
24:12
But anyway, um, Ben Thompson continues and says, "Google IO is this on steroids, but at the same time, I'm not sure."
24:18
Uh, and I'm not sure if this was because of the sheer quantity of announcements.
24:22
I came away feeling less impressed than I should have.
24:26
I decided I needed to take the dog for a for a walk.
24:28
Um, I wanted, by the way, to tie these videos together into something more coherent.
24:33
They're both made your using VO3 and Google Flow, the new product Google announced to utilize VO.
24:38
Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to use and very buggy above and beyond the general challenges of linking together desperately generated videos while retaining coherence.
24:46
Uh, this in the end makes the point I ultimately came out uh I came to on my walk.
24:51
Google Flow was arguably the most archetypal archetypal archetypical um product announcement at Google IO.
24:59
But while VO3 is jaw-dropping, Flow was pretty disappointing.
25:02
And this was my experience.
25:04
Like I went to Flow on my phone and it basically told me no.
25:06
It was like you're on an iPhone, you're a secondass citizen. Get out of here.
25:11
Uh we're optimized for desktop.
25:13
And it's like for a startup, I get like Instagram started on iPhone and then eventually launched on Android. I get that.
25:21
But it's like you're Google.
25:22
Like you can figure out how to serve your web app in Safari on iOS.
25:28
Like I I don't understand what's going on.
25:32
It just makes you look bad.
25:33
It doesn't it doesn't really make me like Google so much that I'm like, "Oh yeah, I should get an Android phone now."
25:38
Because like like clearly it would be a better experience.
25:40
And then also use flow this app that no if that's the if that's the development paradigm I'm out.
25:47
If you're going to try and twist my arm into using your software I'm less likely to use it.
25:51
That that's my take on it.
25:53
And then they also funnel you into this like, hey, do you just want to watch a bunch of videos?
25:56
Like you definitely don't want to set the GPUs on fire by training one of these things.
26:01
You don't want a custom video.
26:01
Why don't you just have one of these that we have off the shelf? I love that.
26:03
I love that content or the the copy there, too.
26:05
content or the the copy there, too. It's it's flow is a tool built for and by creatives and it's like well YouTube in many ways destroyed the film industry right did it I would argue that it did just because it created an entirely new
26:23
library of content that didn't require going to the movies right yeah I mean there's like the videos would have come on demand but it introduced massive massive competition for people's attention and that just hurts the movie industry Yeah, I wonder about that. That's That's probably right. That seems reasonable. I don't know. Yeah.
26:44
Um anyway, I need to think about that more if YouTube is the is the the reason that I mean, not YouTube in particular, but just just the internet certainly. Yeah.
26:54
Certainly like like easier technology like obviously there's going to be demand for video in a theater if you can only watch video in a theater.
27:00
As soon as you can watch on a TV, that creates competitive pressure.
27:03
As soon as you can watch it on your phone, that creates more competitive pressure.
27:05
YouTube's a part of that.
27:07
Probably like I'd make it like 10% of the reason, but yeah.
27:09
But yeah, to totally valuable to totally viable argument to make.
27:15
Um, so uh Ben Thompson was a little under underwhelmed.
27:19
He said more generally the a the generative AI pillars that I wrote about last December, the areas that Google dominates notably don't include any generative AI products.
27:29
And that more than anything was my my Google IO takeaway.
27:34
Google's technology is incredible, but I'm still not convinced this company can make compelling products.
27:40
Indeed, my critique of the presentation as a whole was how unfocused and random it felt.
27:43
Google's inability to prioritize and set a coherent narrative actually diminished just how incredible their advances are. Yeah.
27:53
Yeah, I mean it certainly was an opportunity to come out and and just focus on yeah, we have a bunch of cool experiments running, but like here's how we're going to actually have a ultra coherent strategy around the search bar. Yeah.
28:07
And how that is going to interact with AI and what are our long-term plans.
28:11
They almost should do more keynotes less frequently and just say it's notebook LM day and we're just going to take over the internet with notebook LM and then it's V3 day and we're making V3 a same advice we would give to founders that are like I'm going to have a big announcement.
28:27
I'm going to drop four things. We hired this executive. We had a new website.
28:29
We have a new product release and we have a fund raise.
28:34
I am still so puzzled by the V3 launch just because like you're Google.
28:36
You have to figure out how much it costs to generate one of these. It's an 8second video.
28:43
I understand that you're setting the GPUs on fire, but what is the energy cost?
28:47
What is the depreciation cost on these TPUs?
28:48
They must know how much it costs to generate a single V3 8-second video. Is it $10? Is it $100?
28:54
Like there should be an auctionbased model essentially like what they do for ads.
29:01
And then they should have a queue and they should say, "Hey, uh, right now the GPUs are are fully utilized.
29:06
We have no capacity and so it's going to be $10 for this next generation and you're going to have to wait one hour.
29:13
But if you pay a $100, you can get it in the next minute or five minutes."
29:16
I think it's such a better experience to actually meet the demand where it is instead of like you're on a $250 plan but you can only use it a few times a a day and then you know it's a weird experience but part of it is is it's basically a research preview.
29:31
I don't think a lot of V3 content right now is actually consumer app that they're advertising on the iOS app store. Yeah.
29:38
I I don't I don't I don't care that they called it a research preview alpha beta gamma delta. Who cares?
29:45
It's an exp They're selling an expensive toy right now. It's like a buggy. You're taking my money.
29:49
And I I think the biggest thing is is the ads.
29:55
Like the fact that if I go to the app store and I search for Gem uh for Gemini, like it pops up and says create videos with Gemini, make and share videos with Gemini Advanced with V2.
30:05
And it and like you click there and it's like it's advertising.
30:10
If it's a research preview and you don't have the capacity, don't advertise it. Yeah.
30:13
Say, "Hey, like we we're at capacity.
30:15
We're we're we're maxed out on demand."
30:17
Um anyway, uh going back to search, Ben Thompson continues and says, "The one clear exception was smack dab in the middle of the keynote, which focused on search.
30:28
I don't think it's an accident that Google's best and most important product had the clearest presentation and vision."
30:33
Uh CEO Cinder Pachai started with a brief overview of AI.
30:36
uh brief overview of AI overviews.
30:39
Uh he says, "So this is Sundar talking.
30:42
It's another exciting example of how AI is advancing our timeless mission to organize the world's information."
30:48
Yes, let's hear it for organizing the world's information.
30:51
We love that Google does that to make it universally accessible and useful.
30:55
No product embodies our mission more than Google search.
30:58
It's the reason we started inventing AI decades ago and how we can deliver its benefits to of benefits.
31:04
Okay, just to be clear, we invented AI. Yeah, they did. There you go. Now make a product.
31:13
That in our Gemini model.
31:13
It is funny though cuz talking about these AI overviews.
31:18
Yeah, I just searched in Google what did Google announce at IO and it doesn't even have an AI overview of that.
31:26
the self-referential stuff is particularly bad and I think it's because of like data and security like Orooros's like the fact that I can open up Gemini and I can ask hey uh just I just want to know like am I paying for this on this account right now and it's like I have no idea I wouldn't possibly look at your own account within Google.
31:44
It's like I understand privacy but like I this is actually important to me.
31:47
I want to know if I can access the latest model.
31:50
You you can even ask a Google model, what model are you?
31:52
And they never tell you because they're just like I couldn't possibly do that.
31:56
It would be a violation of something or other.
31:57
And you know, it's just like some sort of security thing that got wrapped up in like 20 layers of lawyers and stuff.
32:02
And they're like, don't leak the the don't leak the customer's information into the LLM to let them know that they are paying or they're not or like the LLM should be selling me on upgrading, you know, if I if I'm not upgrading. Um, this is interesting.
32:18
I just searched uh for uh stuff about OpenAI and Anthropic.
32:22
It would not give an AI overview.
32:27
Uh but then I searched about TBPN and it gives an AI overview. Yeah.
32:30
Uh and it misspells my name. Oh, weird. Which is interesting. Adds the E. Adds an E. Never done that. Yeah.
32:38
Four-letter name tracking in the lineage of uh Apple CEOs.
32:45
You got Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jordy Hayes, potentially I'm making I'm starting my run. Starting your run.
32:52
Um, one great example of of progress is our AI overview.
32:57
Since launching at IO last year, they've scaled to over 1.
33:00
5 billion users every month. Let's hear that.
33:02
In over 200 countries and territories, as people use AI overviews, we see they are happier with their results and they search more often. I completely agree.
33:12
The AI overviews have been very good.
33:12
I know that there's some hallucinations, but in general, I've enjoyed the beautiful thing from an ad product standpoint is that Google still gets all their ad they're still serving ads everywhere.
33:23
It just so happens that they're not, you know, especially on desktop.
33:27
Yeah, I no I I'm I'm I'm very very satisfied with with with the iteration there.
33:32
The question is just like it is funny to think about an open AI experience where you query chat GPT and you get just like exactly what you're looking for and then there's just like display ads like everywhere.
33:46
No, I know it's not going to happen, but that's effectively what Google is showing is possible when you can just build ads around the result that the person actually wants. Yeah.
33:59
Um, AI overviews are also one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens.
34:04
Lens grew 65% year-over-year with more than 100 billion already this year.
34:09
So, people are asking more queries and they're also asking more complex queries.
34:14
With our latest Gemini models, our AI overviews are at the quality and accuracy you've come to expect from search and are the fastest in the industry.
34:22
AI overviews are, as Ben Thompson pointed out, after Google's most recent earnings, the most the most used generative AI product in the world.
34:30
Most of today's search segment, however, was focused on the new AI mode.
34:32
AI mode was introduced by head of search Liz Reed.
34:38
So, Liz Reed says, "Today you will see how you can ask anything and more intelligent, agentic, and personalized search will take you uh will take on your toughest questions and help you get stuff done."
34:47
This is particularly funny because did you know that there's a maximum query length in Google search?
34:53
It's like 256 characters or something.
34:56
It's like shorter than a tweet.
34:56
So if you just if you just try and benchmark like what was your latest ask for chat GPT just like hey chat GPT summarize the news for me.
35:06
I'm interested in seeing what Ben Thompson's talking about and I want to know what Dylan Patel's up to and can you also summarize what happened at Microsoft Build and then Google IO and I want to hear about the Johnny IV uh acquisition and then I also want to hear some stuff about uh Claude 4.
35:18
If you take that if you take that query and put it into Google, you will literally just get an error message. Yeah.
35:23
That says too query too long and it's because like it's Google search is set up not for that type of searching.
35:29
Um, so anyway, um, there's Gemini 2.
35:31
5 at the core, uh, and they give a tour of AI mode.
35:36
And so AI mode is more like a chat of a chat-like interface, and all the demos are very impressive.
35:40
They are also real, as in either available now or shipping soon, and all seem clearly useful, says Ben Thompson.
35:46
On demand data visualization, for example, seems like an obvious win for generative AI powered search.
35:51
That makes a ton of sense.
35:52
Search for GDP per capita across a couple countries, it just generates a table or chart for you.
35:57
Uh, makes a ton of sense.
35:59
The most interesting comment reed made however is a paragraph in the middle.
36:03
The real goal for AI mode is to refine these features so that they can graduate to the core search experience.
36:08
Completely uh very very smart.
36:08
Um in other words, Google has clearly has a clearly defined AI funnel which actually brings the coherence to this keynote that I was looking for.
36:17
At the foundation of everything are those pillars I referenced above.
36:20
Google's incredible models, unmatched infrastructure, and data advantage.
36:25
Reed's discussion of personalizing AI mode using your personal data was compelling as well.
36:29
Then you have a bunch of theoretical ideas that make for a cool cool demo videos, but the actual productization that still functions in Google is on the search team.
36:36
That team takes ideas that works and puts them in AI mode.
36:41
So you can think of like every other product is just this is basically only if you're if you're looking at Google's uh alphabet stock and you're trying to understand how AI is going to impact it, you can ignore Notebook LM and the Digi knockoff and all these other things and just focus on this.
37:00
And it's like do you believe they're going to figure out a way to monetize these sort of chat GPT style queries that are happening in Gemini right now?
37:08
Uh, and it probably looks something like AI overview over time. Yeah.
37:14
And also, if you're a startup and you're worried about like getting rolled by Google and becoming like a Google feature, well, the threat is not that Google launches a directly competitive app and out competes you. That hasn't played out.
37:30
Like they launched Google circles and they weren't able to crush Facebook or anything like that or or Yeah. like Yeah.
37:36
any of these little uh these little like startup killers where they're Google products.
37:44
That's not really the dangerous area.
37:45
The dangerous area is will your customers and your users be able to solve the problem that they want just by Google search 2.
37:54
0 or like when Google search gets better, is that a threat to your business? Yeah.
37:58
Or if you're building an agent that's like we're helping people book travel and it's like Google flights is going to get better.
38:06
It's going to get better. Yeah.
38:06
And so that's that's the real risk.
38:08
I think it's less that if you if it make if it never makes sense to go also had a Twitter competitor, Google Buzz. Oh, wait.
38:17
No, that that was a chat thing, wasn't it?
38:19
No, it was it was a Twitter competitor. Yeah.
38:21
So like all all these all these oneoff things that don't make sense.
38:25
Micro blogging and messaging tool developed by Google. No way. It replaced Google Wave.
38:30
My god, so many of these things.
38:32
Yeah, they've launched and sunset so many products.
38:34
Um anyway, AI mode looks a bit like chatpt.
38:38
The real race for Google is to make search compelling enough that people don't just switch to chatt for everything.
38:43
To that end, another metric that that likely matters is actual usage.
38:47
PIA's definition of the types of searches that are growing was very carefully delineated, but growth in general is a certainly a good thing.
38:55
If an AI feature, if a feature drives AI mode, it may be a good candidate for the main search page.
39:02
So, one of the common refrains that came out of yesterday's keynote was how Google had just killed half of Silicon Valley startups. I'm not so sure.
39:10
However, Ben, we've read enough at this point that we're we're predicting what he's going to say.
39:13
Um, first, it's clear to it's clearer than ever to me that the only product that truly matters or functions at Google is search or functions.
39:22
A lot of the demos we saw yesterday are likely to stay demos or at le or or at best be forgotten and eventually killed products that no one uses.
39:31
Second, the degree to which so many of the demos yesterday depend on user vi user valition actually kind of dampened. What's that? Getting a phone call. Google's calling us.
39:42
Sundar, let's just bring him in the studio.
39:45
Let's just talk to Sundar. Bring him in.
39:47
What's going on with Axrar glasses? We don't have Sundar.
39:53
Would be a fun surprise guest, but one day we'll get them soon. We'll get them soon.
39:56
Um, Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities.
40:01
And Google's XR glasses were pretty compelling and in my opinion had a UX much closer to what I envisioned for XR than Meta Orion did.
40:11
Interesting devices drive usage at scale, but that actually leaves a lot of room for startups to build software products that incorporate AI to solve problems that people didn't know they had.
40:21
The challenge will be in reaching them, which is to say the startup problem is the same as ever. You got to get to here. Here's the thing.
40:26
To me it's like does Google search and Gemini eventually merge or do they stand as independent products and so Google is like kind of like maintaining search for people that basically boomers who are just perpetually going to go to the search box and search and like I'm going to be in that bucket to some degree.
40:46
I think everybody will still have Yeah, for sure. It it's so built in.
40:49
They have so much distribution that that it will continue to have usage.
40:52
Meanwhile though, ChatGBT is just getting better and better at searching the internet. Yep.
40:59
And it can be used for both things.
41:01
And that will present a pretty interesting challenge if Google's like, "Okay, we're competing with OpenAI and ChatGpt, but we're doing it in this two-pronged way." Okay.
41:10
And OpenAI is like we're just trying to make the best like you know basically like single uh you know u search you know box plus button on the internet that can do everything. Yep.
41:23
I mean I think a lot of the decision between those two uh will come down to speed.
41:28
So right now if I want uh let's see like Tom Cruz age Tom Cruz age I just hit controlT and I'm in the search bar in Google Chrome 62 years.
41:44
Now if I go to chat GPT I have to go chat.
41:47
com I'm logged in Tom Cruz age and it's thinking searching the web. It's searching the web.
41:55
It searched three different websites.
41:56
Tom Cruz was born on July 3rd, 62.
41:59
As of today, he's 62 years old.
42:03
So, you see how much longer that took me to use Chad GPA for something like silly like that or simple.
42:07
But there's a lot of things that you search for that where you're like, I know that Google will oneshot this in five milliseconds. Yeah.
42:16
And I know that chat GPT will take too long.
42:18
Also, for some reason, I I wound up running that against GPT 4. 5.
42:22
I think 40 is probably faster, but like when I went to chat.
42:25
com 45 was just the one that was defaulted, right?
42:29
right? And so this is where we get into like the model router where if I land on if I accidentally trigger that in 03, it would be doing like it would be writing a 100 lines of code, you know, and so the model router needs to be like super fast and they need to figure out caching
42:46
and they also need to figure out integration into like the search bar because even even on your phone it's usually faster to just open up o open up a new uh Safari window and then type and then the question is like Does OpenAI need its own browser? Right? Even we, Right?
42:59
Even we, you know, Arvin from Perplexity is like very focused on the browser.
43:05
Like right now, even if I do this on my phone, if I open up Safari, the search bar is always down at the bottom and I can just tap that and immediately start typing Tom Cruz's age.
43:15
When I open up ChatPT, I was looking at my image library.
43:18
So now it's it's I'm in image library mode. I have to go back.
43:22
I have to go back to chatpt.
43:25
I have a query that I didn't actually click finish on.
43:27
So I have to delete all that to go.
43:29
So all of a sudden I'm like into five 10 seconds just to get a quick answer.
43:34
And so I still route qu I I route queries personally to Google when I when I want something super fast. Yeah.
43:40
Anyway, um do you remember that Gemini started as Bard?
43:43
Oh yeah, there's been like seven bard, but there were there were other ones before that. Palm.
43:53
Bard, a poet traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular particular oral tradition. Yeah, cool name.
44:01
Uh I have a few other tough go for the winkle eye.
44:03
Yeah, Zuck comes for them with the Facebook stuff.
44:06
Now Google's coming for them with the Gemini branding.
44:13
Gemini becomes synonymous with Google AI and people are like, "Wait, where do I go to trade crypto?"
44:18
I never I never thought that. It's m it is.
44:20
I don't know how you could do that because they're both in technology companies.
44:23
Like they're both tech companies.
44:24
I get that they're in somewhat different areas, but like we talked to Austin.
44:28
He had to rebrand Lambda School because of Lambda Labs, which is a AI data center company.
44:35
I'm because of Lambda Labs. Yeah.
44:35
Who's coming on the show on Friday actually?
44:39
But trademark wars new segment on TV.
44:39
I think it's I think it's Lambda Labs, but I'm not sure.
44:44
It was a different it was a different land which was a completely it was not it was not an education but it was a tech company and they were both tech companies and so they had to rebrand.
44:51
Anyway, uh let's go through a quick history.
44:53
I have a history of Google cloning startups.
44:55
So way back in the day that in 2004 they launched something called Orcut Orc.
45:00
Oh yeah or it was a Brazilian acquisition. Yeah.
45:03
So they got traction in Brazil and India was never truly global. Shut down in 2014.
45:09
There was Lively, which was basically a Second Life like 3D virtual world thing.
45:15
Closed in less than six months.
45:18
Uh, and then they had Buzz, which was trying to counter Twitter at the time.
45:23
Uh, had had a bunch of backlash around privacy stuff.
45:26
Google Plus was obviously the Facebook rival.
45:31
Uh, and then they actually had, uh, tried they they tried to buy Groupon for six billion and it failed.
45:37
And so they launched Google offers.
45:39
This is like a whole other era.
45:41
I have a fun story about Google+.
45:42
So uh I was one of like the best you the biggest users on Google+.
45:48
I just went like full send into it and was like I'm going to figure out this social network kind of like you know figure out how to create circles create that.
45:54
And because of that I got really dating yourself. Yeah.
45:56
Uh I I got this is in college. Uh I got verification. So I got a check mark. Wow.
46:03
But that check mark translated.
46:06
They ported it even though they shut down that my account was like checkarked as like, "Oh, you're like a serious influencer."
46:12
Even though I had like 500 and that transition into YouTube. YouTube. Yeah.
46:16
And so when I started the YouTube channel, I had I got to aundred followers on one on a new account and I was like, "Wait, my other account has a check mark."
46:23
So, I shut down the old account and moved it over to my personal account and had the check mark, which I could have gotten in like, and it didn't actually do anything for the growth of the channel, but it was just like kind of a funny funny anecdote.
46:33
I was like, I'm going to try this.
46:35
Um, uh, and it was just a funny story.
46:37
Anyway, um, let's move on to uh, OpenAI acquiring IO and Ben Thompson's analysis there.
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47:23
Uh anyway, let's go on to IO. So, let's do it.
47:25
Um we already covered the Bloomberg article. We know the facts. $6.
47:30
5 billion all stock deal.
47:33
Johnny IV and his team over at IO get roughly 2% of Open AI as major incentive pay.
47:40
And there was a lot of good commentary on the timeline about this about how Apple's not really set up to comp someone a billion dollars.
47:46
We we looked at this with Tim Cook.
47:49
He's making like what couple hundred million and it's like when you're talking about a trillion dollar company executive compensation in the billions isn't actually that crazy.
47:59
But OpenAI can offer that.
48:01
John, yes, you're going to be devastated.
48:03
But Tim only made 74 million.
48:05
Oh my god, that's brutal.
48:08
It's like he should have been a baseball player.
48:10
I mean, he he's he should have been a half decent basketball player.
48:13
What do you think would have happened to Apple's market cap had they not dodged the tariffs?
48:21
That would have been hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap erosion nuked.
48:24
It was already tumultuous for the company, but they were carved out the entire time.
48:28
There was never any fear that it was going to happen.
48:30
And that's entirely because of Tim Cook's negotiation. 2023 made 63 million.
48:33
I genuinely feel like we need to take to the streets and start protesting in Certino.
48:44
We should because we've seen this on public. you can back test.
48:47
The better that CEOs get paid typically, the better the companies do.
48:53
And as an Apple shareholder, I want Tim Cook to be pulling down one B a year and I think he'll be highly incentivized to grow the company. Okay, I have an idea.
49:10
So, Greg Ael, he's 62 years old.
49:10
He just took over as CEO of work of Warren Buffett's Bergkshire Hathaway.
49:18
Y Tim Cook's 64, only two years older.
49:20
So what if Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple, starts a company, gets acquired by OpenAI. Boom. Goes in 30-year run.
49:30
30-year run, generational run.
49:30
And he's like, "Look, it's just dollars and cents to me.
49:34
I can make more money over there. I can 10x my comp."
49:36
So he could 10x his comp by going to OpenAI.
49:39
Yeah, he really could easily.
49:41
I mean, yeah, that that's the big question, right?
49:44
With Johnny, you know, joining OpenAI, six billion, it's like who's the supply chain lord who's going to just really bring this thing into if Tim Cook works.
49:52
I mean, he's making what, 60 a year.
49:54
He's not even cracking 75 mil a year.
49:57
So, he would have to work for 100 years to make what Johnny IV just made.
50:01
I don't think he has another hundred years in him. 30.
50:07
I I would give him 30 solid years ahead of him in his career.
50:09
That's not enough to get to six billion.
50:12
He could maybe pull two billion.
50:13
Well, to be clear, I think Johnny had investors and in in I It's all in Johnny's pocket in my opinion.
50:21
Yeah, he deserves it all. It It was funny. I was looking yesterday.
50:25
Johnny's like celebrity net worth tracker or whatever.
50:28
They updated it in real time and we're like, he's a billionaire now. Yeah.
50:31
Um and uh he wasn't just from working at Apple. It's brutal.
50:37
He barely had 700 according to it's a tragedy. It's terrible.
50:42
Anyway, um let's go to Ben Thompson's analysis.
50:46
He says uh they put out a OpenAI put out this 9 minute and 21 second video of them complimenting each other expressing love for San Francisco and announcing the new partnership.
50:55
Ben Thompson says it's a bit much to be honest.
50:57
Although it's beautifully shot and produced, I assume it was put together by love from Ives not included in the deal but not accepting new clients design agency.
51:05
I think the key uh the key segment from Ives perspective is this.
51:10
Sam Alman said we both had a we both had a very strong shared vision.
51:14
We maybe didn't know exactly where this was going to go but the direction of the force vector felt clear.
51:20
Then this deeply shared sense of values about what what technology should be when technology has been really good when it's gone wrong.
51:27
Johnny Ives says, I mean that was in a way one of the bias uh one of the basis I think of one of the reasons Sam and I clicked was despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same.
51:40
In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't look at the technology.
51:47
You should look at the people who are making the uh uh who are making the decisions and you should look at what drives, motivates and look at values. I like that. That's a good take.
51:58
Um, I've expressed what drives and motivates I've expressed what drives and motivates him earlier this month in this excellent interview with Patrick Collison.
52:05
And it was interesting because Johnny IV, we haven't really heard from him in a few years and then boom, massive uh, massive podcast with Patrick Collison just days before the acquisition. Yeah. On a media tour.
52:18
I'll read I'll read uh Patrick's uh, question.
52:23
We're talking a lot about the purpose of design.
52:24
That's not how he sounds. Okay.
52:26
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm not going to do the accent, John.
52:30
Even though we both have Irish blood roots.
52:33
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna just just do a vanilla reading. Fine.
52:40
Now I'm Now no do now it'll sound like you're doing Patrick Collison doing a Jordy Hayes impression, but that's fine. Yeah. Okay.
52:46
So I'm doing Patrick Collison impersonating a technology podcaster. Yeah, that's great.
52:50
You're talking a lot about the purpose of design and the effect that design has on the recipient, on the user, on the consumer, whatever the case is.
52:56
There's widespread concern and speculation about the effects of smartphones and the internet doesn't necessarily accord with just the smartphone, but on some of these products on attention spans and whether it has some adverse effect on kids or teens or who knows, maybe all of us, maybe the adults as well.
53:12
There's questions over with AI whether it changes how education works and cheating in school.
53:18
All of these technologies that we create have this potential double-sidedness to them.
53:22
And so I guess as somebody who clearly takes seriously and thinks seriously about the full effects, how do you think about possible harms?
53:31
And Johnny IV says, "Yeah, I think there is."
53:33
Why don't you do Johnny Irish accent? Yeah.
53:36
No, this is uh Johnny IV doing a John Kugan impression. Okay. Okay. I'm excited for this. Yeah.
53:44
I think probably not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered than by what you just described.
53:49
I think when you're innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences.
53:53
You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises.
53:57
Certain products that have that I've been very very involved with.
53:59
I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.
54:03
My issue is that even though there was no Candy Crush is pleasant, you don't think Candy Crush whales are You don't think sports betting on your phone at the drop of hat is 247?
54:15
Uh, I think there still needs to be a responsibility and that weighs on me as you know heavily and yeah, I mean obviously there are negative consequences but I think overall technology I think he might be alluding to when I made it possible to angel invest on a mobile device.
54:32
your literally I think he's sort of tweeting me. Yeah.
54:34
Party round basically took all these people in San Francisco who are hope hopelessly addicted to angel investing and made it accessible to them at all hours of the day.
54:42
You didn't even have to send a wire transfer.
54:45
You just got an invite and it was like Venmo. Yeah. Ridiculous.
54:48
Uh, it seems pretty clear that IVive is talking about the iPhone, says Ben Thompson, which is to say it, it sure seems like he is motivated not to simply build an AI device, but to actually diminish the iPhone's dominance in the user's life or even in the long run kill it completely with tracks with the with the Wall Street Journal's reporting on their plans.
55:10
Um, they've been working on a device that will move consumers beyond screens according to people familiar with the matter.
55:16
I mean, it feels like her, right?
55:18
I mean, Sam's posted about her.
55:20
They're very all in on voice interfaces.
55:22
This could be her device, right?
55:24
Is that the most obvious thing that they would do?
55:26
Such an interesting dynamic where it feels like sci-fi is dictating the product road maps of so many companies. Always has been. Always has been.
55:37
I mean, Steve Jobs was always looking at like the Star Trek tablet and being like, "Let's make an iPad." There's nothing new.
55:45
You gota you gotta get ideas from Jason Carman.
55:47
Yeah, Jason Carman needs to make something. Save us.
55:51
Understand that you're basically deliberate defining the product road mapaps of the biggest companies in the world. It's true.
55:56
Uh uh that's admittedly pretty thin gr says Ben Thompson, but it's in line with other rumors and more importantly from my perspective tracks with Ives expressed state sentiment.
56:07
And it should be noted that this sentiment is is a sentiment that Altman has expressed as well.
56:11
Uh he's tweeted a couple times, people sacrifice actual happiness and actual accomplishment for for short-term dopamine hits by posting and chasing likes RTS on FBT Twitter back from 2013. Only 21 likes back then.
56:26
Sam was struggling to post bangers.
56:30
I think everything he posts now gets like 10,000 likes because it's so big.
56:34
Uh and then uh a year after open AI was founded, Sam Alman said, "Digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time." You like digital?
56:46
I like I like my screen time, John. Yeah, I like it too. I do email on my phone. Yeah. Um it's productive.
56:54
In 2017, Altman, it is funny because I do believe that the sort of AI companions have the potential to be some of the most addictive products in history. Totally.
57:05
And I believe that in general, people will continue to to interact with them through screens, devices, etc. Yeah.
57:16
Uh Sam Alman in 2017, almost a decade ago now, wrote, "I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar e ep epidemic of this generation." Oh, sugar.
57:27
Underrated though, right?
57:27
Sugar is potentially good. Potentially good.
57:29
I think it's I I'm I've called it I said it's a superfood.
57:33
It's this amazing substance that gives you clean energy almost immediately.
57:39
So maybe that's maybe that's actually without any seed oils.
57:43
Maybe that's maybe that's actually like a broader metaphor for attention hacking is that it feels good in the it is bad at the extreme.
57:50
Uh but it is good in the right dosage. Yeah.
57:52
Because pure sugar when taken in athletic context when you're working out at the right dosage with the right purities can be good. Yeah.
58:01
And and is not something that should just be completely removed from the diet.
58:04
Much like attention uh to to technology.
58:06
Uh I can feel the changes in my own life.
58:09
I can still wisfully remember when I had an attention span.
58:12
My friends, young children don't even know that's something they should miss.
58:16
I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often.
58:21
Instead, chasing the dual dopamine hits like likes or and outrage. Uh that's interesting.
58:26
I feel like I feel like our generation's kids are doing fine like like because we're aware of like don't do the iPad thing.
58:33
I'll see my son spend hours building Legos and and like painting and drawing and spending like it seems like he has its long attention span.
58:44
I think it helps that adults are generally hyper addicted to their devices and want to prolong the time in which their children can live a life of of freedom from that addiction. Right?
58:58
It's like at some point I'm sure my son will try a cigarette, but just because heaters are Lindy. Yeah.
59:05
But I'm going to try to delay that for a very very long time. Right.
59:10
He's just he's just 65 being like my first my first uh it's always challenging with Alman to know whether when or if he is talking his book says Ben Thompson as it were.
59:24
Uh but there is a record of long-running sentiments that might convince Iive that their motivations and values are completely the same.
59:29
At the same time, there are certainly other motivations as well.
59:32
Iive, for his part, just became a lot richer, at least on paper.
59:34
Altman may or may not have diluted the nonprofit share of OpenAI by making a big purchase with stock.
59:39
This is kind of a theory that was going around about Reddit and how Reddit kind of went into Nast and then was pulled out through a bunch of different stocks.
59:48
and the original founders seemed like they realized like Reddit was never going to be what it could be while a part of this legacy media company. Yeah.
59:56
When you read the story of Reddit, it reads this very like uh almost like conspiratorial.
1:00:02
It's this like really like 4D chess maneuver to get it out.
1:00:04
And yet at the same time like I'm like yeah, I'm glad Reddit's not owned by Nast.
1:00:09
Like you like you guys did everyone a service.
1:00:14
like good job Alexa and and Sam for pulling that company out which was actually an innovative tech technology company from like a dying legacy media company.
1:00:24
Um anyway, uh Altman may or may not have diluted the share.
1:00:27
Uh he's also sliding into the role occupied by his childhood idol one Steve Jobs.
1:00:32
So what's the strategic positioning?
1:00:35
We got four minutes until our first guest.
1:00:36
Uh the larger question is what this means for OpenAI.
1:00:40
On one hand, the angle here is obvious and fortuitously articulated by me just yesterday, says Ben Thompson. We'll back that.
1:00:47
It has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices.
1:00:52
And that seems truer than ever.
1:00:52
Android is probably going to be the best import the most important canvas for shipping a lot of Google's new capabilities.
1:00:58
What makes Chat GPT so remarkable and the and open AI the accidental consumer tech company is that like Google two and a half decades ago, they have reached nearly a billion users almost entirely through word of mouth.
1:01:09
The only distribution deal Apple has done or OpenAI has done is with Apple.
1:01:13
Uh more on this in a moment.
1:01:15
Uh this is exceptionally rare in my long-standing opinion is that the obvious way to capitalize on this position is to roll out advertising.
1:01:21
Let's hear for advertising. We love advertising.
1:01:26
Speaking of advertising, go to linear. app.
1:01:27
Uh linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
1:01:31
Meet the system for modern software development.
1:01:33
Streamline issues projects and product road maps. MCP survey. Right. Yeah.
1:01:38
Yeah, they have an an a dedicated agents product now that they rolled out yesterday and Scott talked about it.
1:01:46
Scott Woo from Cognition talked about it on the show and uh highly recommend going to check it out if you're wanting to actually unlock the power of agents in a uh systematic way.
1:01:58
So Ben goes on to say, "It is worth noting, however, that one challenge is trying to win in advertising is that you are in the end fighting on Google's turf.
1:02:06
the same Google that demonstrated its incredible model and infrastructure prowess.
1:02:10
Well, this is awkward and surely couldn't have been intentional. Or was it um at at IO?
1:02:16
Uh yes, there are questions about Google's product chops and I already think that OpenAI is the best AI best in AI at product and we talked to Kevin Wheel uh at uh who's doing product at OpenAI.
1:02:28
Clearly incredible team over there and the products are fantastic.
1:02:32
Um, and they just added Johnny Johnny IV.
1:02:34
And yes, uh, OpenAI has the advantage of building an advertising business from scratch, giving them more degrees of freedom than Google, which has to worry about cannibalization and disruption.
1:02:44
But Google is also moving AI into search and the infrastructure the company has built out around advertising will take years and years to match.
1:02:50
You can say the same thing about meta.
1:02:52
And speaking about meta, speaking of meta, think about how CEO Mark Zuckerberg has framed the company's approach to AR and VR.
1:02:59
This is Zuckerberg in a 2022 strategy interview about their partnership with Microsoft.
1:03:03
But st but taking a step back I think in addition to this strategic alignment I also think there's a very deep philosophical this is Zuck deep philosophical alignment on the direction that we want the next generation of computing to go.
1:03:15
My brief take on the history here is that every major computing platform there has been an open ecosystem that's focused on partnership and a more closed and integrated ecosystem.
1:03:23
So with PC, Windows was the leading open ecosystem and of course Mac was the leading closed one.
1:03:28
On phones it was Android and iOS.
1:03:28
I think one of the things that's interesting about the his in the history is that I don't think it's predetermined whether the open ecosystem or the closed one ends up being the primary ecosystem.
1:03:40
And so he was pushing for an open metaverse.
1:03:41
Uh implicit in Zuckerberg's answer is the assumption that the company they are competing with in the long run is Apple, the closed option.
1:03:49
Another way to frame that contrast, however, is between modular Windows and Android and integrated Mac and iPhone.
1:03:55
The integrated option, the Apple option, is monetized first and foremost through device sales.
1:03:58
The modular option is modular in part because the underlying motivation of the operating system is to maximize reach in which which in the case of Google means increasing the number of surfaces on which to control search and serve ads.
1:04:10
These framings are in reality a bit too limiting to fully articulate the various strategic puts and takes.
1:04:17
Google, for example, is deeply integrating Google Android with Google AI in the cloud while continuing to lean on third parties to actually build the hardware.
1:04:24
Indeed, one of my chief critiques of Apple's approach to AI is that by trying to do AI themselves, they are trying to compete with Google on Google's turf.
1:04:30
Still, Google is as Google does, focusing on being on as many devices as possible.
1:04:37
Um, we should we should close out here because we have our next guest joining us in just a minute, but he says Zuckerberg assumes that Apple will be there in AR and VR.
1:04:44
Should Altman assume they will be there in AI?
1:04:47
To put it another way, if you're going to take on one tech giant directly and you're an AI company, isn't Apple a much more attractive target than Google?
1:04:55
And if you think that that way, should your focus be on building a horizontal service that runs everywhere or on building a fully integrated offering that monetizes the high-end through an experience that integrates hardware and software?
1:05:08
And if you want to build the best possible integrated hardware and software experience, the team IO is a veritable all-star collection of Apple talent that extends far beyond iive that built the last one is a reasonable place to start. Very interesting.
1:05:21
Gets everybody thinking that he's trying to kill Google and then goes for the jugular on on Apple. It's very interesting.
1:05:30
I think Sam's going after everyone.
1:05:31
Yeah, I think he wants it all.
1:05:34
And why not just everything in energy, in servers, in chips?
1:05:36
Well, we have Dan Shipper. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Dan? How's it going? Excited to be here. Fancy you guys.
1:05:44
Great to great to have you on.
1:05:47
I've been wanting you to do this for a while.
1:05:49
Uh and you've had a busy week.
1:05:51
You have some some personal news uh at every you're also at you're at Anthropics event right now. Is that correct?
1:05:59
I'm at uh Code with Claude. Yes.
1:06:01
Anthropics event where they just dropped uh Claude Opus 4.
1:06:02
This is amazing because we didn't get a chance to talk about Anthropic or Claude 4 on the show yet and we have a perfect guest to talk about it.
1:06:11
I am your correspondent out here reporting live.
1:06:14
Can you kick us off with just a little bit of introduction on you for uh any of the fans who are watching who might not be familiar and then we'll go into what the events uh they'd have to be living under a cluster.
1:06:22
They'd have to be living under a data center, but some people do.
1:06:26
Uh my name is Dan Shipper.
1:06:29
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Every uh at Every publish ideas and applications at the frontier of AI.
1:06:33
Um so we have a daily newsletter.
1:06:36
We write long form essays about what's going on in AI and then we also create software products.
1:06:41
We bundle all together and sell it to the audience. Very cool.
1:06:42
Um yeah, and if uh Jordy was describing you as like a Claude stand.
1:06:49
You've been a fan of Claude for a long time.
1:06:51
We've talked to some people in AI and they've said like you can just walk into a party and immediately clock like, "Oh, that's a chat GBT user.
1:06:58
Oh, that's a Claude user." Uh, is that true?
1:07:00
Are you beating the allegations?
1:07:03
Uh, uh, I would say, um, it's interesting.
1:07:06
I would say I used to be.
1:07:08
I think Claude like 35 sonnet was the first model where you're like, "Oh my god, this thing like actually gets me."
1:07:13
Um, but uh, since 03 came out, I would say 95% of my AI usage is in CHP.
1:07:21
Um, and also with their memory feature, like memory is just incredible. It's very sage.
1:07:25
Um, I do think it's tough to have a friend with no working memory.
1:07:31
It's like, you know, yeah, I mean, uh, like concretize this a little bit more for me.
1:07:36
Uh, my experience with AI and LLMs is that I'm using them as as information retrieval, agentic reporting, deep research a ton.
1:07:44
I never just sit there and have a conversation.
1:07:49
So if it's if it's answering a little tursly, if it's dropping bullet points on me, I'm kind of fine with that.
1:07:53
Uh but when I talk to some people about the differences between clawed and open AI, a lot of it is in the subtleties of the language.
1:08:02
And I just feel like as a consumer, maybe I care about that less, but do you think that's important? Does it matter to you?
1:08:07
Am I missing out on something by not I'm just like a very sensitive, emotional guy, and so I want it to be nice to me, you know?
1:08:13
Um, but I also think um to some degree even for uh like more business like stratified business use cases, it's actually really helpful for it to have a little bit of that sensitivity.
1:08:23
For example, something I use it for a lot is if I'm having a management problem.
1:08:27
management problem. Um, we report almost everything that we do at every in Granola and it's really easy to take your transcript of a meeting and be like what happened here like why did why was there a fight here like or you know an
1:08:38
employees having a having a problem like how do I help you know that kind of thing that makesense and it sort of has a little bit of that radar that can that can really um help you move through a lot of interpersonal situations that come up often. Okay. So that's Okay. So that's interesting.
1:08:50
Well, before we just go and and just uh into a much longer discussion and and talk about Anthropics news, why don't you talk about there's a couple things this week.
1:08:58
You had your own fund raise and it was a unique structure.
1:09:01
So, why don't we kind of start there?
1:09:03
Yeah, we announced this week that uh we raised a little bit more money.
1:09:06
We've we previously had raised about 700K in 2020.
1:09:08
Uh and then we raised uh just now we announced uh a $2 million raise uh led by Reed Hoffman.
1:09:15
Um, but we did it in a weird structure that I'm like sort of tongue and cheek calling a SIF seed round.
1:09:19
Um, basically like Reed and Starting Line DC, who's another one of the investors, um, they committed up to two to two million, but we can pull it down when we need it.
1:09:28
So, we have not pulled down all of it.
1:09:30
Um, and I think that's a really nice structure for us because we're a media company.
1:09:34
Uh, we we also have a lot of software attached, but I want to maintain our ability to be weird and just like have a VO.
1:09:39
It's creative playground where we make cool stuff.
1:09:41
And uh so this gives us enough money to experiment but not so much that we're like locked into a particular growth path. Yeah.
1:09:48
Are you thinking that I mean like we saw this with OpenAI they were a nonprofit and then they wound up creating like the most dominant consumer app of all time.
1:09:57
They needed to spin that out.
1:09:58
Like the the parallel here is that you are building software tools but you also are doing media.
1:10:02
If one of those software tools takes off uh all of a sudden does the media become a marketing engine for that tool? Does the tool spin out?
1:10:11
Are you thinking about it like incubation where there's a separate cap table, maybe investors ride along?
1:10:17
Like what were those discussions like and how are you thinking about that?
1:10:19
Well, didn't you guys already spin out? Oh, yeah, we did.
1:10:21
We spun out Lex um which my every co-founder Nathan now runs the CEO of that and uh we raised a seed round from True Ventures for Lex. Oh, cool.
1:10:31
Um almost all the incubations that we have are actually their own separate LLC's.
1:10:35
I think like in general I love having a writing business.
1:10:40
Um, and I want to keep the main thing the main thing.
1:10:42
And I think that we can build a really incredible universe of uh of apps and other offerings around the writing business.
1:10:49
I do think sometimes um we will uh hopefully like run into opportunities that seem really massive and not going to be like just really big independent businesses on their own.
1:10:58
And yeah, we have um if that happens, we have the ability to go and actually like further spin them out, you know, turn them into C corps, have them go raise money, all that kind of stuff.
1:11:09
Um, so we had the optionality to do both. Cool. Awesome. All right.
1:11:14
Well, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff to talk about.
1:11:15
Why don't we Why don't we uh as our official uh enthropic uh correspondent uh which which is the title that we're giving you, obviously not not related to the company.
1:11:25
I think we are going to have some folks from Anthropic on uh next week, which I'm excited about. Yeah.
1:11:30
So, the the the headline in Wired is Anthropic's new model excels at reasoning and planning and has Pokemon skills to prove it.
1:11:35
uh Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4 can remember over long periods of time.
1:11:41
A capability that's helpful at Pokemon and other tasks that require an ability to stay on track.
1:11:48
So, uh what was most exciting?
1:11:50
Where where should we start first with understanding the progress at Anthropic?
1:11:54
So, first of all, you've got to read the every headline and the subhead.
1:11:57
Um every time one of these models drops, we do a vibe check.
1:11:59
So basically we get access to these models hands-on um before they come out and then we use them hands-on for the daily tasks that we're doing to build software and and make writing and then we give you basically hands-on review of like how every part of the model works.
1:12:13
Um what I found is uh it's it's a piece of coding.
1:12:20
It really runs autonomously for a long time on like complex PRs that were not like not possible with 37s on it and are probably a little bit beyond the reach of like Gemini 2.
1:12:30
5 and 03 in particular in cloud code. It's awesome.
1:12:36
Um, and so I do think that that's a it's a sort of game changer if you're if you're doing any kind of development work.
1:12:42
um for writing and editing.
1:12:42
I real quick uh go for it.
1:12:47
How do you what do you look at the what what are the kind of like market implications of clawed code in terms of the broader developer tooling uh ecosystem right you know we've seen you know cursors developing their own models windsurf joining openai there's a lot happening but you know do you think that clawed code is something that could have billions of of of arr independently or or or what's your your read on on how it's going to evolve? That's a good question.
1:13:22
I do think that the the landscape is starting to consolidate a little bit and with each with each model advance um the extra intelligence matters less and less.
1:13:30
So I think you'll see people um you know instead of jumping every time there's a new model released instead of jumping and and turning their entire stack from from an old model to the new one I think you'll see people start to stick a little bit more in the ecosystems that they've chosen.
1:13:44
Um it's we're entering a little bit of a different era of that of the race and I think it'll be a little bit more difficult for Anthropic to be like a totally independent lab and go up against not only OpenAI but also Google assuming Apple at some point gets their together, Microsoft, whatever.
1:13:58
Um but I I really think that they have a very very strong play with developers here.
1:14:04
Um they've 3 35 Sonnet and 37 Sonnet are like superb coding models.
1:14:08
37 Sonnet is a little bit overeager.
1:14:10
So it's um uh you know probably not as good as Gemini 2.
1:14:15
5 Pro, but it's still like really up there with the best coding models and um I think cloud code is is one of the best coding experiences like AI first coding experiences.
1:14:26
It's also just very different from like a cursor or a windsource where those are basically text editors with AI on the side and cloud code is a command line interface that's like you're just directly interfacing with the uh with the AI and that's it's it's just a different experience.
1:14:42
It's intended to be an assistant an agent rather than like a chat. Yeah.
1:14:45
Uh do we have any idea of where these new models uh Claude 4 specifically sit relative to the OpenAI models?
1:14:55
is this because I remember 45 came out and they didn't give it the GPT5 name, but it did seem like it was trained on an order of magnitude more compute.
1:15:07
And so this is kind of where the the pre-training wall discussion came from.
1:15:12
But is it fair to think about Claude 4 as a GPT4.
1:15:19
5 class model in terms of kind of the scope and and the size of the model or do they give any do they give any indication as to the vectors that they're pulling on?
1:15:29
We've seen you know Facebook with uh Meta Lama behemoth is going for this massive context window these trillions of token parameters.
1:15:38
Uh there's a whole bunch of uh there's a whole bunch of different threads that the different foundation model companies are pulling on.
1:15:46
What seems to be their underlying motivation or or what do they seem focused on in terms of optimizing towards?
1:15:56
So it's a little hard to uh to tell at least for me because I didn't get access to any kind of model card before launch and I've honestly just been running around like just at the event and stuff.
1:16:05
So if there are actual uh numbers and stuff like definitely go look them up.
1:16:09
I I don't I don't know for sure.
1:16:11
On the blog post, they mostly just focused on the uh software engineering suite bench and the different uh the different benchmarks around graduate level reasoning, agentic tool use, multilingual Q&A, visual reasoning, and the stats are impressive, but not a huge jump here.
1:16:31
There's a jump on agentic coding, but Claude 3 Claude sonnet 3.
1:16:33
7 actually outperforms in visual reasoning by like a half a percent. not much.
1:16:38
by like a half a percent. not much. But um it's one of these interesting things where it feels like we're increasingly in the era of tradeoffs around models and we might be seeing more fragmentation around a really great we talked to some founders who are building
1:16:53
super specified LLMs just for JSON decoding or just for translation or just for profanity filtering and then they run they inference on a on a consumer grade GPU because it's so narrowly defined still using the transformer architecture but just much more narrow. And so I'm wondering if if that's the
1:17:08
And so I'm wondering if if that's the future that we're going to see at Anthropic is they're they're they're dominating in code.
1:17:12
They're very popular with developers and they're going to go after a few other areas, but they're probably going to stay out of a few other battle battlegrounds.
1:17:18
I do think that's an astute point.
1:17:20
Sometimes you do see um tradeoffs and so like 37 Sonnet, for example, was a better programmer than 35 Sonnet, but it was like way more optimistic. Um interesting.
1:17:28
And uh but but to to answer your your previous question like going back to the difference between QG4.
1:17:35
5 and Opus uh Opus 4 and Sonnet 4.
1:17:38
Um they're a it's a little bit apples to oranges because 45 is just uh a base model.
1:17:44
Uh I mean it's it's a it's instruction tuned but it's uh it's not a reasoning model.
1:17:49
And um opus is uh is both.
1:17:52
they can go back and forth between um uh being a base model and uh and being a reasoning model.
1:17:57
Um and that is like this sort of hybrid thing that I think all of the model providers are starting to move into.
1:18:04
Um but I think Sonnet has Anthropic has done it first and um it's really good.
1:18:13
Uh it makes a big difference when um it both can like do the kind of you know chain of thought reasoning that's like good for map proofs and coding and it also has a little bit of a vibe.
1:18:22
of you know like a GP45 which is just really good at writing and really good at like creative thinking. Cool.
1:18:28
How do you uh how do you kind of navigate and figure out what's real when everybody in AI is deeply conflicted in different ways whether they're sort of like secretly an adviser to this lab or you know happen to invest in the series B of this one or you know everybody's sort of talking their book.
1:18:50
I mean, obviously I just got advisory shares in OpenAI. I just got 1%. That's it. I'm not conflicted. Just like a point.
1:18:57
Yeah, just you got a point. Careful, John.
1:19:01
People are going to believe that.
1:19:01
Every time we joke, every time we joke, every time we joke around, every time we joke around, somebody takes it 100% as fact.
1:19:09
Um, no, but I obviously the immediate uh, you know, way to figure out what's real and what's not is just to use the new products and models yourself.
1:19:17
But um I'm curious how you navigate it as somebody who's like trying to provide you know really really you know precise coverage of of everything in real time.
1:19:28
So first of all if anyone wants to throw me some anthropic or open AI stock like I'm open. The answer are open.
1:19:32
Um but I think um yeah I think that's a really good question.
1:19:36
Um I think I I honestly think most of the benchmarks are kind of and you can change the benchmarks and we see that with Llama where like it look good on the benchmarks but it's just not a good model.
1:19:45
Um that's why we do vibe checks.
1:19:48
Um, so when we launch new models, we're using them hands-on for the tasks that we do every day.
1:19:52
And I think that's why it's really valuable to have um, every the media company and every the incubator startup studio in the same organization because I'm literally just going and hanging out with Kieran who runs Corora, which is our AI email assistant, or Danny, who runs Spyro, which is our AI content automation product.
1:20:08
Um, and we're using it to ship features or to make better writing or to do all the things that we do every day.
1:20:15
And so I can get a pretty good sense of just like the vibe or the flavor of a model from using it myself.
1:20:20
And I think that's going to be the best um I think that's going to be the best way to tell if it's any good.
1:20:25
What was your reaction to Google IO?
1:20:27
What was the single thing that that stood out to you from the So I I was I was at Build.
1:20:33
I did a I had a I did a really fun interview with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and then flew right from Build to um to uh uh Code with Claude.
1:20:43
Alex Duffy uh is another one of our writers who needs AI training for us and he was at Google IO and so he would have a better response as to like what is the one thing but I do know he was like he was like kind of in tears in our discord and was like this is the future.
1:20:58
Um and I was and so you know I think that they've got something cool going on.
1:21:03
I think he's really excited about they're pushing forward on a lot of different parts of the ecosystem all at once and we're moving super fast and um he seemed really psyched about it. Awesome.
1:21:13
What about the products that Anthropic hasn't launched?
1:21:16
We talked about specification uh the the specialization a little bit and I remember so uh the big the big AI product that really grabbed me from Google IO was V3 and obviously Google has an immense advantage with the YouTube data set there and the results have just been fantastic and I've been fighting tooth and nail to get more V3 credits because it's so much fun.
1:21:39
um and Anthropic, it feels like they've been potentially behind the ball on image generation.
1:21:46
Is that just not a focus for them?
1:21:49
Is that a do you think that's because of safety concerns uh since obviously that that runs very deep in the culture at Anthropic?
1:21:56
Or do you think it's just uh more of a business case that uh the the coding market is much more lucrative than the image generation market?
1:22:08
And so just focus more wood behind fewer arrows. It's a good question.
1:22:13
I honestly don't know the history of Anthropic's relationship with coding model with image models other than that they just don't have one. Um and I don't know why.
1:22:20
I do think it seems like they're really going hard after the kind of agentic coding market and I think it's a really valuable thing that they can.
1:22:28
Um I'll also say just generally like Mike Kger is their chief product officer and like he knows the ship.
1:22:34
Um, and so I think they'll probably have some He knows the thing or two about images. Yeah. Yeah.
1:22:38
Um, so I assume they'll have some really cool stuff on the more like consumer product side coming soon.
1:22:50
I think we're getting a Zoom air.
1:22:50
I'm uh I'm searching 03 right now for anthropics offering.
1:22:54
I don't think that they have any uh any models.
1:22:58
I don't think they uh uh Dan down. Dan down. Bring it back.
1:23:05
I think Do you think there's a widespread cyber attack?
1:23:11
Probably because Axe is really struggling.
1:23:14
They know who we talked to earlier this morning. They know. They do. They know. They figured it out.
1:23:18
We have a We have a secret guest that will be released later. Um, they're on to us. But 03 is cooking.
1:23:24
I mean, it's I don't know if it's writing code yet, but it's definitely it's it's written. Look at this.
1:23:30
It's like I just asked it. I just asked it.
1:23:32
Has Enthropic shelved any any models and it's like searching the web everywhere.
1:23:37
But it is it is a tougher it is a tougher question for 03 because I'm asking for the absence of evidence, not not I'm asking for it to find the absence of a model, not the not the presence of a model.
1:23:48
And so it's very easy to search does does Claude have a coding model and it can just search anthropic code and find the first result and return that to me.
1:23:56
Um but it's very difficult to uh to to find a null and say okay I searched the entire web and I couldn't find anything.
1:24:06
Therefore anthropic does not have a video model.
1:24:09
Um but yes uh I I I believe anthropic scrapped maybe it was a texttospech engine something like 11 Labs competitor which you got.
1:24:16
So, I've been I I went to try to ask Claude if if why doesn't Claude have an image generation model and the signup flow is couldn't be more opposite of OpenAI.
1:24:32
I I've just been I I created a new account with my TBPN email and it took me there was I mean Nikita would probably have a heart attack.
1:24:39
I mean it was like 20 individual steps of approving this and and approving that.
1:24:45
Uh but it says anthropic hasn't publicly released a dedicated image generation model, strategic focus, technical and safety considerations, resource allocation, market positioning.
1:24:54
So kind of everything that Dan said.
1:24:59
Um just uh it's in, you know, it does make sense in in a way to just say, hey, this isn't strategically critical for us.
1:25:07
We're going to try to, you know, focus on what we're really good at, which is coding. That's great.
1:25:12
Um, well, we have TJ coming in for the second time.
1:25:15
I'm very excited for that.
1:25:17
Yeah, did we fully lose Dan? I think we did.
1:25:18
Let's just move on to some some some news.
1:25:20
Let's talk about um the uh I mean there's plenty of timeline we can go.
1:25:26
Dan, if you're listening, thank you for coming on.
1:25:30
Enjoyed the conversation and uh always welcome to this is the future.
1:25:32
We have AI that can oneshot build you Zoom, buddy. But it won't work.
1:25:39
But Zoom is still going to go down.
1:25:41
internet will still fail constantly.
1:25:42
Anyway, uh I do think it's fun that uh that he says his phone overheated.
1:25:48
He was just going so hard on on on on you know corresponding. Wow. Yeah.
1:25:54
That's that's honestly as a technologist the only time you should put down your devices on a daily basis is if they're overheating.
1:26:01
Like you need to be going that hard podcasting so hard.
1:26:06
You need to be live streaming video, uh, doing spreadsheets, coding on your phone, doing everything.
1:26:13
Thank you for leaving it all on the field. On the on the field. You're an absolute dog.
1:26:19
We will see you again soon.
1:26:21
Let's I think it's fun that they're doing uh that Anthropic is doing Pokemon because Pokemon's such this iconic game and it's so uh and it and it lends itself to like you can watch the full stream of Claude play Pokemon and it is this interesting challenge that it takes a long time.
1:26:36
They need to think about the different reward functions and all the different steps that you need to take.
1:26:40
I was playing Pokemon on the Chromatic Palmer Lucky's new Game Boy.
1:26:44
And uh it's actually really hard because at a certain point you get to a place where you just kind of have to go farm XP and like level up your Pokemon evenly before you can go beat the boss.
1:26:53
Like like you can't just you can't just constantly be going forward.
1:26:56
You actually have to have to plan out your your attack a little bit.
1:27:00
It's it's not the simplest game.
1:27:02
So impressive that they're able to play it for what 24 hours at a time.
1:27:05
Um anyway, let's go through some timeline.
1:27:07
We'll we'll get to Elon Musk later.
1:27:08
There's a there's a there's a piece we got to put in the truth truth zone, but it's going to take more than seven minutes.
1:27:13
So let's uh talk about OpenAI.
1:27:15
They committed to a giant UAE data center in global expansion. This is Stargate UAE. We'd love to see it.
1:27:22
Uh they're partnering with G42 to build a 1 gigawatt AI data center in Abu Dhabi.
1:27:27
It's the first large scale project outside of the US. shake just him. He's on a tear.
1:27:32
I cannot wait to have the opportunity to have I want him on the show. him on the show.
1:27:39
I want him on the show so badly.
1:27:41
Uh 242 will fund the construction.
1:27:43
OpenAI and Oracle will operate the data center.
1:27:47
Soft Bank, Nvidia and Cisco are also partners in the project.
1:27:49
The Kuretsu of AI is coming together.
1:27:52
Um and so uh another 100 billion for Nvidia Jensen.
1:27:57
So uh the UAE is trying to become uh one of the biggest funders of AI companies and infrastructure and build their own AI factory.
1:28:05
The first 200 megawatt chunk of the data center is due to be completed by the end of the thing that's interesting here.
1:28:12
They're having to like match the investment that they do American companies.
1:28:17
It seems like a good deal.
1:28:20
I'm I'm I'm very bullish on it. They're doing deals. That's great.
1:28:24
Uh, Strava raised at a valuation north of two billion. Let's give it up. This is fascinating.
1:28:30
I have to ask, what are they running from?
1:28:34
What are they running from?
1:28:34
What are they running from?
1:28:35
Maybe they're running from they they could very well be running from Zack Pogb, who is in some ways coming for them.
1:28:42
They're running from not having generational wealth by getting liquidity at a multi-billion dollar valuation.
1:28:48
So, congrats to the founders.
1:28:50
from Yeah, it took me a second. They raised some debt.
1:28:52
Let's Let's give it up for leverage.
1:28:58
They also acquired the Breakaway, a cycle cycling training app, marking its second acquisition in two months.
1:29:02
They have more than 150 million users and it is approaching 500 million in annual recurring revenue. That's good. Let's revenue.
1:29:10
Let's give a moment of silent for the VCs that passed on the seed in the A because it seems, you know, yeah, like running.
1:29:17
I I get a lot of people do it, but how big can this thing be? Easy critique. Easy. How big can this be?
1:29:21
500 million in annual recurring revenue. They showed you. Got them.
1:29:26
Turns out a lot of people are running from Strava lets users whom it calls athletes record in quotes.
1:29:33
Wall Street Journal putting their term in the truth zone.
1:29:36
Hey, runners are athletes in some context.
1:29:42
Yes, they're running down a grid iron maybe.
1:29:45
uh share activities with friends and across dozens of sports.
1:29:49
I've been, by the way, I've been avoiding we had Rob Mower, co-founder of Hubman Lab. It's just more more.
1:29:55
I always He even texted me.
1:29:55
I I botch his name every time. Terrible.
1:29:58
Uh Rob uh I've been avoiding a run with Rob. Oh, yeah. For years now. For years. We live uh close by. He's a good runner. He's going to smoke it.
1:30:07
He's an absolutely insane athlete. Oh.
1:30:08
And uh I just always end up busy.
1:30:12
How's he uh how's he on the how's he on the bench press?
1:30:17
Is he repping two plates?
1:30:17
Because maybe you could give him a run for his money over there. Little big dog. Show him how it's done. Good. Potentially do that.
1:30:28
Huberman bench three plates and they're just going to I can see Rob just secretly repping three plates. Just demolishing us.
1:30:34
Anyway, uh let's go through some timeline.
1:30:35
Uh Jenny says glasses won't win.
1:30:37
Earpiece with a tiny camera will. I don't know about that. What do you think?
1:30:43
I think I just would like a I would like a camerast I'd love to put a nostril camera in that just sort of mounts to my nose and just comes out right here.
1:30:52
No one's talking about nasal computing.
1:30:53
Nasal computing nasal computing interface could be the future for for guys like us that don't want to chip.
1:31:01
Yeah, the nasal passageway is a great place to put a computer.
1:31:03
I mean, there's probably so many different applications.
1:31:06
You could have little fans in there that accelerate the air flow in so you're getting more oxygen in your blood. Brian Johnson loves it.
1:31:13
Hyperbaric chamber for your body. Yeah. Whoop on the wrist.
1:31:16
But we typically have watches on our wrist. Yes. Yes.
1:31:18
And so Whoop on the nose.
1:31:20
Whoop in the nose or a ring in the nose.
1:31:23
Or what about an or I know where you're going with those. What are those? What are those? Those septum piercings. An aura. Septum piercing. Oh my god. Oh, that's insane. AI. AI generated right now.
1:31:43
The the nasal nasal aura ring. That's insane.
1:31:48
Uh Anna says, uh, "We're in the or Anna says, "We're in the good old days in the beginning of the movie with the overly saturated colors and the smiles and laughter.
1:31:58
Your future is being written by about six people competing to well their ideal civilization into existence." Record freeze frame. Record scratch. Hi, Anna. Here.
1:32:10
You're probably wondering how I got here.
1:32:11
Yeah, it does feel like it's a it's a monumental time.
1:32:13
It's a it's an amazing time to be a technology podcast. Jensen Elon Satia Zuck. Yeah.
1:32:17
Uh Accelerate Harter says, "This blog post is styled like a cross between a wedding announcement and a memorial web page.
1:32:25
It is a very funny photo.
1:32:27
It is black and white and the font choice is is something that we haven't seen from OpenAI or Apple." They're boys, though.
1:32:37
They're just guys being dudes.
1:32:40
Uh anyway, uh we got a couple other posts, but I think TJ's here.
1:32:43
So, should we just bring in TJ and start breaking down the news? Let's do it. Let's bring him in.
1:32:48
Welcome to the stream, TJ. How you doing?
1:32:51
He's getting the band back together.
1:32:53
He's getting the band back together. Let's go. Congratulations. They're back. Let's go. Keep it going. Keep it going. Two minutes of this. And I have a microphone.
1:33:09
I've made a real real upgrade here.
1:33:13
I love that you're ready. Podcast guy.
1:33:15
Yeah, you went you went all in. I love it. Yeah. Big podcast guy. We turned you. Great to have you.
1:33:18
You went from zero to to 100. It's great to be back. Yeah. Uh give us the news. What's the announcement? What is this company do? I saw the announcement. Bunch of mumbo jumbo. Break it down for me.
1:33:32
Uh so the company is called General Medicine.
1:33:33
Uh we launched today in all 50 states.
1:33:36
So anyone in the US can sign up and use the service.
1:33:38
And the way I think about it is a healthcare store where you can get anything you need in healthcare. Mhm.
1:33:44
Um we actually talked about some of these themes a bit a couple weeks back.
1:33:49
Um but our general belief is that you should be able to shop healthcare like you shop everything else.
1:33:53
Um, and so that means, you know, if you have if you know exactly what you need, like, you know, you want a certain set of labs or, you know, you need a colonoscopy or you're having kind of ongoing shoulder pain is like an issue I've had that I use the service for.
1:34:07
Um, you can literally search for that problem, fill out a relatively straightforward set of questions and then consult with a clinician.
1:34:15
Um, and if what you need is an in-person visit or inerson care, um, or you need to get imaging or any of that done, we make it super seamless to do that.
1:34:24
And I think the probably the most novel thing about the product experience is that you can see personalized insurance pricing for any provider uh, prior to deciding where to get that service.
1:34:35
So, for my shoulder pain example, I needed to go get a follow-up X-ray.
1:34:40
And the difference in price between getting the next rate done in Park City versus Salt Lake was $100 versus $500 with my insurance. Wow.
1:34:48
Which before when you're making that decision, same same insurance, same insurance difference, same x-ray, uh same actual uh kind of medical group.
1:34:58
They're both kind of inner mountain facilities.
1:35:00
Um but a pretty big variance in the actual out of pocket presumably even the same x-ray device like the same technology situation.
1:35:06
I think people are making this decision every day, but they literally have no idea. Yeah.
1:35:10
There's any sort of differential. Yeah.
1:35:13
So, so the thing that stood out to me is uh when you land on general medicine.
1:35:19
co you see pricing without insurance and that seems uh you know super intentional because you want to just enable people to not one just like speed to care right there's like certain instances where you're like I need to solve this problem as fast as possible.
1:35:34
I don't want to deal with worrying about in network, out network, what all that.
1:35:40
Um, and then there's also instances where like something can cost you more by going through insurance. That's correct. Right.
1:35:46
I remember something was going viral uh on X probably a month ago where somebody like their the the ambulance was like much more expensive because they had insurance where if they were just uninsured it would is you know going to cost less.
1:36:01
So, can you talk about kind of that the way that kind of pricing dynamic works and and why you guys decided to to kind of lead with with, you know, showing people that, hey, you can just kind of immediately get these services regardless of of your current insurance situation.
1:36:16
Yeah, I think a probably a useful anecdote is when we built a very similar experience in pharmacy.
1:36:24
When you go to kind of Amazon Pharmacy now, you can see cash and insurance kind of headtohead when you're making a purchase decision.
1:36:28
Uh we ended up with a significant amount of folks that were just using cash because either it was cheaper, which I'd say a quarter of the time it was literally cheaper to just not use their insurance just to pay cash.
1:36:39
And then a quarter of the time it was moderately more expensive.
1:36:43
Instead of 15 bucks it was 20 or 20 it was 30.
1:36:46
But you didn't have to deal with all of the obnoxiousness of using your insurance, right?
1:36:50
There was no prior authorizations and to deal with the fact that it was too soon to fill the prescription.
1:36:55
Like all these sort of sad past that exist as a byproduct of insurance.
1:36:59
So, I think we'll see a similar dynamic here to your point where sometimes it'll literally be cheaper.
1:37:04
Um, and that will happen, I think, a lot more than people would think.
1:37:06
Um, and then sometimes it's slightly more expensive to use cash, but it just is less annoying to deal with having to get it reimbursed and to deal with the upfront prior offs and all those things.
1:37:17
Um, and we think that'll be a I don't know what the right proportion will be for this business, but I think it'll be a much higher percentage than than people would assume.
1:37:23
How do you think about the continuum of medical services?
1:37:28
because I'm just I'm thinking about the the shoulder injury.
1:37:29
Obviously, there's sometimes when you need an X-ray and you need insurance to pay for that.
1:37:35
Sometimes you just need to rest.
1:37:36
Sometimes part of health is maybe going to the gym or being on a diet or if you're having problems with sleep, you could need a prescription drug or you could just need some melatonin.
1:37:45
And so, what is the ideal front end to health?
1:37:51
Is it I mean I imagine people will go to chat PT they go to WebMD they ask their friends sometimes they go to their doctor prematurely and the doctor just says hey just you know stop eating so much or or hit the gym or something like that.
1:38:05
Um but what is the how will this change and then how do you plan on on being a part of that front end to medicine?
1:38:13
I mean, I think the single biggest change here is trying to move healthcare to a much more simple and straightforward transactional experience.
1:38:24
Um, where you can actually transact in the same ways that you transact in retail.
1:38:28
I think the over if you think about just the overarching kind of journey for someone dealing with a condition or dealing with some symptoms, they don't know what condition they have.
1:38:36
I think the behavior will be similar to what it is today, which is today they're going to Google and constantly searching for things and trying to figure out what's going on.
1:38:42
I think a bunch of that volume will move to chat GPT and other foundation models where it's easy to go from symptom to a likely diagnosis.
1:38:51
I think the problem we solve is post that diagnosis or post having a sense of what your problem is and being able to quickly get what you need, right?
1:39:00
Like you like you might need an X-ray, you might need labs, you might need uh you might need an intervention in person.
1:39:05
We make that really seamless.
1:39:07
You can transact with us in a normal way.
1:39:08
Um, and so I think that is the the sort of novel thing about what we're doing is turning healthcare into really a product catalog um with with super crisp pricing up front.
1:39:18
What's the business model going to be?
1:39:19
I think the right mental model is a combination of a first party and third party marketplace, right?
1:39:24
So we do have our own medical group.
1:39:27
We have our own doctors on staff.
1:39:28
Um, we will use them over time for things that are more and more complex where it's not as easy to know kind of right away exactly what you need.
1:39:37
And so you're helping someone navigate that ambiguity.
1:39:38
Um and then we both have a set of third party providers that are deeply integrated, mostly specialists, where if you need an immediate specialist consult, we can provide that.
1:39:48
Um and then you can literally request to see any provider.
1:39:51
It doesn't matter if we have a relationship with them or not, we can still make that referral, make it we will literally book the appointment for you and we'll show you the again we'll show you like where the best option is for you based on price, quality, whatever things you you care about.
1:40:03
in the the third party sense.
1:40:05
It obviously won't be as simple as a traditional marketplace from a monetization standpoint, but it will be of of that ilk, right?
1:40:13
Of that flavor of a kind of traditional first party, third party marketplace.
1:40:16
Did you guys have an urge to slap an LLM on this thing?
1:40:18
I know it's notably absent from the homepage.
1:40:21
I think just like just like my cars, we're like, ah, we're throwing it back to Yeah. Yeah.
1:40:29
Yeah. Yeah. I'm cur I'm curious you you you must have gotten a bunch of pitches from people being like hey a lot of people are using chat GBT to diagnose conditions we're going to make a better version of that to me doesn't feel super investable just because chat GPT
1:40:44
probably already has full access to PubMed and bunch of you know um other resources but um uh yeah was that a pretty intentional decision to kind of like leave off the site and let people kind of figure out what they need wherever, whether it's Google or WebMD or family, friends, another doctor, etc., and then just be the place where
1:41:05
, and then just be the place where they kind of take action.
1:41:07
Yeah, that was definitely intentional and definitely something we constantly debate.
1:41:11
Um, again, I think the place that Chad GPT and the other foundation models aren't going to go is the stuff we're doing, right?
1:41:19
To go from likely diagnosis to actually transacting.
1:41:21
Um, and I think, uh, we'll see how it plays out.
1:41:25
I'm a little skeptical that dedicated kind of doctor LLMs will win against the chat GPTs of the world.
1:41:33
We're probably effectively placing a bet here that uh the chat GPS of the world will kind of sweep up that use case for the most part.
1:41:41
Um we could be wrong on that for sure.
1:41:43
I mean I think there's a bunch of Yeah, you can you can imagine a world where general medicine is like hey you you know we we think you here's like our read of the situation based on the picture you uploaded or the symptoms you're having.
1:41:54
here's how you take action and actually talk to a specialist to like verify, you know, actually get a get an expert involved that's not just, you know, predicting the next token. Totally.
1:42:06
I mean, I think again the right frame here is retail, right?
1:42:08
You're already seeing that exact flow for categories that have this clear kind of product catalog and transactability and doesn't exist in healthcare.
1:42:15
I think we'll have some version of that kind of chat with us and figure out what's going on to help you navigate our store over time, but that's not the bet we're placing.
1:42:24
thing the bet we're placing is that uh it's the transaction that the customer ultimately needs and that we can create a a very novel uh experience.
1:42:31
You guys launched in all 50 states.
1:42:31
How different is that than the early pill pack days?
1:42:36
I imagine that was it kind of a different go to market motion.
1:42:39
Yeah, for better or worse it's almost the same.
1:42:44
Um, POPAC took us about 12 months to launch and we were in 32 states I think at launch and then chipped away at the tail over like 6 to9 months I think if I recall and this we're now I don't know 16 18 months in and we're launching in all 50 states.
1:43:00
So on the kind of from a time and uh availability standpoint actually super similar.
1:43:06
Can you take me through some of the history of other attempts in this category?
1:43:10
I remember using Zachdoc once to find a doctor.
1:43:13
Uh I used Wellness FX once to get some labs done.
1:43:21
There's a few different approaches that have been tried in kind of creating the front end the front door to medicine.
1:43:28
Um it still feels like one hasn't become dominant.
1:43:31
There's a lot of point solutions like if you want hair hair treatment, you go to hair.
1:43:36
com or something and uh you want compounded uh erectile dysfunction medic medicine with GLP-1s in it.
1:43:45
You can go to a different website for that.
1:43:47
Uh but it probably won't be part of our selection. We debated it.
1:43:51
I think we're going to leave it leave it out for now.
1:43:52
I want just the the the cocktail cocktail. com.
1:43:58
Can I get four in one testosterone creatine?
1:44:01
I want some protein in there.
1:44:04
So, throw a 20 milligram aderall XR in there and then mail that to me compounded and uh yeah, just don't I'll pay I'll pay in Cardano actually. Yeah, exactly. BNPL. BNPL with with Cardano. Yeah, that's great.
1:44:17
Uh but yeah, take me through some of the history.
1:44:19
Uh you don't need to speak specifically about specific companies, but just the different approaches that have been tried. What worked? What didn't?
1:44:25
um why have you landed on and what have you learned that led you to this particular approach?
1:44:32
Yeah, I mean there's a couple vectors there, right?
1:44:34
I think the initial thinking for folks trying to build similar stuff was that you'd start in one vertical and go horizontal over time.
1:44:42
That's sort of the Amazon playbook starting in books and then adding categories kind of as there's demand and you have incremental customer uh demand.
1:44:51
I think we observed that and have not seen evidence that that approach is successful.
1:44:56
And I think one really different thing about health care is that oftentimes you actually don't know what you need, right, when you're showing up.
1:45:02
And so if you only serve one specific thing, one intervention for that thing, it actually doesn't really serve the customer need in the way that they they they ultimately want.
1:45:10
Um I think if you compare it to kind of booking services with like 3P provider search and you can book an appointment on the site, the thing that we've observed there is that you end up with this um uh selection bias towards providers that have a bunch of availability rather than the best provider for the customer.
1:45:30
And so we're not requiring any level of integration to get you an appointment and get you pricing for any provider.
1:45:37
So we don't suffer from that kind of same selection bias.
1:45:40
or effectively ambivalent who you want to go see and we can help you figure out who the right person is.
1:45:44
So we we've sort of learned from observing that as well.
1:45:48
And then I think the last point I'd make is that um it's novel to have both first party and third party integrated as a seamless thing.
1:45:55
That's novel outside of certainly outside of health, you know, in healthcare.
1:45:59
It's not as novel outside of healthcare.
1:46:01
Um but by doing that, it allows you to offer a comprehensive experience um and ultimately make it super seamless for the for the customer. Yeah.
1:46:08
Um, have there been developments on the legislative side that have allowed this to exist now?
1:46:17
Um, I remember there was some tele medicine rule changes that happened in COVID and kind of stuck around that kind of created a boom there maybe.
1:46:27
But could you have built this 10 years ago?
1:46:30
I think there's probably two main things that have made this the right time to build this business.
1:46:35
The first is that patient data is much more accessible.
1:46:39
So something novel about the customer experience is when you sign up and you give us very basic demographics, we can go pull your insurance information and pull your full med history and medical record and prepopulate everything in your profile and these in these flows.
1:46:52
That wouldn't have been possible a handful of years ago and that was due to regulatory changes that required companies to open up this data.
1:46:59
And the second is the pricing would not have been possible to do in the ways we're doing it without without LLMs because we're effectively reading your full coverage of benefits and then mapping that to the service that you need and then figuring out where you are in your deductible.
1:47:11
All of that would not have been buildable without the current version of LLM.
1:47:15
And so we're not exposing that in like a AI sense, but it does power yeah how we're able to back into what your your pricing ultimately is.
1:47:25
That makes a ton of sense.
1:47:26
sense. It does feel like there's huge opportunity for companies that are essentially driven by enterprise AI or AI internal behind the scenes but they don't just need to surface that you don't need to create another text box for someone to
1:47:42
chat with that seems like a very deliberate decision but still like you know uniquely enable yeah and if somebody can create the AI doctor that allows you to have a tele medicine visit and you guys are kind of the front end for getting expert care, you could just plug that in. You don't even necessarily
1:47:57
You don't even necessarily have to develop it.
1:48:00
In terms of I I don't know how familiar you are with how the doctor's office is changing, but there was this drum beat for years in the deep learning community about stop training radiologists m deep learning neural networks focused on image recognition will be able to do it at a superhuman level very very quickly.
1:48:20
Now we're seeing Google V3 generate Hollywood level cinematography.
1:48:26
That's pretty generate TJ Parker going on a thousand podcasts in one day.
1:48:30
I mean, it's really really good.
1:48:34
And so it's actually not real. Sorry, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:48:37
But I I mean when I see the advances in image processing and and generative AI with regard to image, I feel like there has to be an uh there has to be a similar progress happening in the image processing of self-driving cars.
1:48:52
So when I see the the the the chat GPT uh studio Giblly moment happen, that advances my timeline to a self-driving car.
1:49:02
Uh, it also should advance my timeline to take a picture of this mole and tell me if it's cancerous.
1:49:07
But is that happening or are these separate uh are these separate um paths in the tech tree or are there just barriers to actual adoption in the medical community or are there uh you know job displacement fears like what's actually going on over there in the doctor's office?
1:49:24
Yeah, it's for sure happening and I think they're as effective as you would imagine they are.
1:49:28
I think the probably the the biggest difference in healthcare and I'm sure it's obvious is that you still have to get the sign off of the dock and there's still a bunch of regulatory overhang that is required to get fully to a diagnosis and certainly at this point to an intervention whether that's a prescription or some other intervention but I think the enablement and the efficiency showing up and I think that'll continue to continue to happen.
1:49:51
Um, you're now you're not a chatp rapper.
1:49:53
You're leveraging LLMs though.
1:49:57
Are you a fax machine rapper?
1:50:00
Uh, we have definitely we'll always be a fax machine rapper.
1:50:02
I mean, I I bet I bet I bet that we spent like a third of our dev resources at PPAC for like three years on faxish stuff. Wow.
1:50:10
It's really It's really quite stunning.
1:50:17
Let's give it up for the fax machine.
1:50:19
One of the greatest one of the greatest ever.
1:50:20
Uh, but I mean I imagine that there has to have been like a a B2B SAS company that created like a really great API around fax machines in the last decade. Has that happened?
1:50:29
Are you just standing on the shoulders of giants or are you writing fax machine interop code for We don't even do a build it or buy it. We just always build it.
1:50:37
If it's fast, we're we're building. Yeah. Yeah.
1:50:41
I imagine you're hiring CUDA engineers totally to develop custom parallel. Yeah.
1:50:45
Yeah. Part of the 30 plus million is going to you know setting up there's a JV with the UAE and you know setting yeah there's a whole yeah special vector of engineers that will only work on fax machines fax machine we have a lock on that talent pool that's great um I want
1:51:02
to talk about go to market um oh sorry but yeah okay one more question here and then I I want to take it another yeah so I mean obviously it's important to drive folks to this uh give us the plug how can people get started Ed, but then uh what's the actual marketing roll out? Are there partnerships that drive
1:51:19
Are there partnerships that drive adoption?
1:51:20
Am I going to be seeing flyers for your service when I walk into a doctor's office or seeing Google ads?
1:51:25
Like how how do you actually plan on getting customers? Yeah.
1:51:27
Uh I think this this arc will probably end up following the PPA arc as well.
1:51:31
We're very much a DDC business today and we intend to stay there for a while.
1:51:35
Um and so I think if you're searching for any of the things that we offer, we'll show up in those search results like any other uh retail experience.
1:51:44
So we'll get quite a bit of demand there.
1:51:45
Um we'll do all the normal kind of DTOC tactics to drive awareness and demand.
1:51:49
I think if you influencer partnership yeah exactly really get all the all the key influencers.
1:51:56
A lot of lot lot of stunts. A lot of blimps flying. Lot of stunts.
1:52:00
A lot of Tik Tok skyriting. Lot of Tik Toks. Yep. Exactly.
1:52:04
Uh but I think if you if you zoom out and look at the PillPack journey, by the time that I left that business, two-thirds of our business was B2B partnerships and B2B driven. Sure.
1:52:12
Um, but we feel like to build a novel and great customer experience, you have to start by marketing to the end consumers.
1:52:17
So, we're doing that again here, but we would expect partners over time to help drive demand.
1:52:20
I give it two years till Andy Jasse is calling you daily trying to trying to get the band back together again in Amazon.
1:52:29
Um, I got I wanted to go a different direction uh and get an update on on the kind of the fallout from the drug pricing executive order.
1:52:39
What what's your kind of updated thinking there?
1:52:41
That was only last Monday.
1:52:43
Feels like Yeah, it feels like a month ago. Yeah, it does.
1:52:46
Yeah, I don't know if I've seen anything substantive over the last week.
1:52:49
Um, yeah, I'd say my take is still roughly my take, but I've not seen any evidence that supports it any more than I had a week ago. So, hard to say.
1:52:58
Uh, should we spack NITO uh engineering? Spaxs are back. Spacks. Spacks are back.
1:53:09
much higher margin business for sure.
1:53:10
Yeah, Nito Engineering is familyowned started in the 50s car restoration, you know, you know, engineering uh business that TJ's a big fan of.
1:53:19
He's wearing a hat, so I had to ask since Spaxs are back, you know, potentially potentially an opportunity there.
1:53:25
Can you talk a little plug is that I produced a documentary about NITO and it's coming out in the fall. So, keep an eye out.
1:53:32
We'll have to hop back on TBNN to talk about my documentary.
1:53:34
Yeah, I think I saw maybe was there a trailer that already dropped? Okay. Yeah, I saw the trailer. That was cool.
1:53:41
I love that you're mixing, you know, hyper capitalism and, you know, just like postexit, posteconomic, you know, documentary producing, you know, very few can do both.
1:53:51
You know, and NITO is not related to the the car garage that you're involved in. Is that right?
1:53:57
That is Yeah, it's separate.
1:53:59
That is my car storage business, which is the car business. Yeah. Cool.
1:54:02
Um, that's called warehouse. That's my other plug. Warehouse. There we go.
1:54:07
Solo house meets like car storage.
1:54:09
It's a cool cool concept.
1:54:11
Is there a track or where do people take the cars once they're stored there?
1:54:15
We just got like we go on weekly drives.
1:54:17
So there's a bunch of places to drive outside of Park City and then there's like a simulators, restaurant, bar, kind of social lounge, that kind of thing.
1:54:25
So kind of half social, half car enthusiast stuff. Yeah.
1:54:27
Uh I mean very quickly just on the news because everyone's talking about it.
1:54:31
The Johnny IV going from Apple to OpenAI.
1:54:33
Uh Nikita was saying it's 100% due to Apple's compensation structure.
1:54:39
They can't pay Johnny10 billion.
1:54:42
Uh but and you said it's 100% the right take.
1:54:46
But why can't they like like it seems like at this point like maybe they should be paying Tim Cook more.
1:54:52
We've been joking about it.
1:54:53
He only makes 70 million 60 million a year.
1:54:55
Uh and yet he was able to navigate the tariff like war pretty droitly.
1:55:02
Uh it seemed like he probably saved Apple from a $300 billion market cap hit during that fiasco.
1:55:09
Uh he doesn't really get to take a slice of that.
1:55:13
Is this something that companies should be like set up for going forward or is this just a unique dynamic of the private markets?
1:55:20
Like like what's actually going on here?
1:55:21
Yeah, I think it's a fundamental flaw of these large companies is that they're they're designed to reward generalists for the most part. Yeah.
1:55:30
Um and there's very little differentiation available on comp.
1:55:34
Even if you're at a pretty senior level, you sort of run into these natural comp barriers.
1:55:37
I don't I was less commenting on whether Apple should pay Tim 10 bill should pay Johnny 10 billion, but more commenting like if you bump up against breaking any sort of compensation rule, making an exception, it's incredibly difficult.
1:55:50
It's basically impossible.
1:55:52
Um, and I think it's especially odd when you're willing to like there's there's a an incredible willingness to invest in a new thing like well beyond kind of ventures tolerance for capital investment. Totally.
1:56:06
Like billions of dollars a year into the metaverse like super speculative Amazon spending $6 billion on Alexa like super speculative investment. Yep.
1:56:14
Um with no disproportionate economics for the person deciding how to make that capital investment.
1:56:20
and which I've always thought to be very odd.
1:56:22
Like you could effectively swap out kind of 10 L7s and dramatically change the comp of the VP running that group and that's probably a great investment, but that's just not the sort of mentality at uh most of these large companies. Yeah.
1:56:35
I mean, you you had the kind of canonical founder exited to big tech, moved on pretty quickly experience.
1:56:43
Like what was the one thing that you took away from Amazon that was like this is great.
1:56:48
I need to port this elsewhere.
1:56:50
Was there anything that stuck out to you as like deeply underrated about those large organizations?
1:56:55
Because easy to say, oh, they're slow.
1:56:57
Oh, they they, you know, they blah blah blah.
1:56:58
But what what was what was actually interesting about uh Amazon in particular or just big tech broadly?
1:57:04
Yeah, I mean Amazon's way of working uh especially the kind of writing culture we definitely have co-opted and I would never um kind of operationally do it a different way.
1:57:14
Like I think that is quite effective.
1:57:16
there's like a reasonleness that probably is a little bit, you know, tilted at Amazon, like you're literally writing like your annual budget.
1:57:21
Like that there might be things that there's other formats that make sense, but as a general rule, like I think a writing culture is much better than a traditional culture.
1:57:29
Um, I think they're also incredibly good at scaling stuff that works, right?
1:57:34
Like they are a machine if they found product market fit, both because there's a deep willingness to invest and because there's a bunch of established mechanisms to scale this stuff.
1:57:43
Um I think that can be inhibitive of building something novel and new right there's like sort of overprocess um and over litigate stuff um early on but the second you have something really working inside of Amazon like they are just masters of of scaling it up. Yeah.
1:57:59
This is the same thing with Google.
1:57:59
Ben Thompson was talking about with regard to latest Google IO launch.
1:58:02
Like Google launches a ton of demos, ton of products but they never really go anywhere unless it's tied to search.
1:58:09
If it's tied to search, they will die before they let that thing not work.
1:58:13
And so, but you can talk all about, oh, they they sunset Google Buzz or circles or flight or this random thing, but like they haven't they haven't sunset shopping.
1:58:23
Like, they haven't sunset display. This one's still going. That one's still going. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:58:29
Jordan, you have anything else? Or I think that's it.
1:58:31
Uh, the only thing I I'll share it with you now.
1:58:33
I just got breaking news.
1:58:35
Uh, and TJ will laugh at this, but uh, John really wants the new ZR1. Oh, yeah.
1:58:41
Uh, which which, uh, which which is like probably on the opposite end of like the the spectrum of like cars TJ likes and like doesn't like, but I just got a quote that basically you'd have to pay 100K over MSRP to get one.
1:58:55
There's only been 12 delivered so far. So, TBPN is ripping.
1:59:01
It's a small price to pay for American made.
1:59:04
Uh may maybe we can flip that around.
1:59:06
Uh I So I want an Americanmade sports car.
1:59:09
I want something interesting, but it has to be Americanmade.
1:59:13
What would you recommend for me for Can it be old?
1:59:14
Yeah, it can be anything. Get a Cobra. Cobras are sick. Okay.
1:59:18
Yeah, that might be Do not get a Kit Kart, but like get an OG unrestored Cobra. Those things are sick. Okay, that's good.
1:59:24
Um, I mean, last thing on the the writing culture, do you think that uh Amazon is at risk of being kind of oneshot by these LLMs because you don't actually have to go through the exercise anymore of writing a memo?
1:59:37
You can just be like, uh, get me $20 million and I need to hire 25 people.
1:59:42
Justify it like it's an Amazon memo. Boom.
1:59:44
And then you just have it.
1:59:44
You're just going to drop in all your old memos and be like, update this for Q2, please. Yeah, exactly.
1:59:48
I imagine that that kind of destroys the culture potentially. But yeah, it does.
1:59:52
There's a real risk there that I hadn't contemplated. Yeah.
1:59:56
Anyway, yeah, I mean, we were recently posting a job posting for an editor and the and and the the job listing was very clearly gener chat GPT generated.
2:00:04
And I was like, what prompt did you use?
2:00:06
Maybe we should just post that prompt.
2:00:07
And we wound up just posting the prompt and it's like way better because the prompt is way more succinct.
2:00:12
It's like you had to give it anything.
2:00:14
Ju just give me the bullet points.
2:00:16
Don't don't flush it out into two pages.
2:00:17
I am I am pretty upset that chat GPT is going to single-handedly ruin M dashes for me.
2:00:21
Oh yeah, for the record was like my favorite punctuation pre-Chat GPT and just ruined. Just totally ruined. Are you a Delve guy too?
2:00:29
Were you using Delve a lot? Not really dash. Yeah.
2:00:35
Anyway, uh great talking to you as always. Yeah, congratulations.
2:00:38
Congratulations on the launch and Elliot.
2:00:40
This is uh I love I love that you guys are getting back together to fix a big uh big problem. It's fantastic. You love to see it. Great having you on. Good to see you guys.
2:00:49
Enjoy the rest of the day. See you.
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2:01:19
Um Oh, we have our next guest already. Easy. Let's bring him in. You got There he is. Reggie. Reggie, how you doing?
2:01:29
Chief, uh we didn't we didn't have a title for you, so I put uh the CRO, the chief Reggie officer.
2:01:34
So, it's we're we're maximizing free agency, boys.
2:01:41
Free free agencies and trade season.
2:01:44
I wouldn't be surprised if you get a maxed out offer before this in your inbox before this. 10.
2:01:48
5 billion's on the table now.
2:01:51
So, anything I had a I had an idea shortly before you you maybe you could build it.
2:01:56
Septum piercing AI wearable health tracker. Anything there? Ship it.
2:02:01
Ship it straight to the top. Ship it.
2:02:04
An aura ring for your nose% doing it.
2:02:08
That can also be a companion. Yeah.
2:02:10
You're talking to it all day long.
2:02:13
It's like, you sure you want to have that? You know, uh, Diet Coke. Yeah.
2:02:16
But scent is tied to memory.
2:02:19
So imagine it just squirts the scent up in your nose. Maybe not. Maybe not. Squirts. It remembers.
2:02:23
It emits It emits an aroma to remind you of your grand cooking. Aroma is better. An aroma. Yeah, aroma is built in.
2:02:31
This is a This is a trillion dollar idea here. Uh, what? Yeah, I mean device.
2:02:35
They're making Apple or uh Johnny Ives over at OpenAI.
2:02:40
Uh, we were kicking around what we think it might be.
2:02:42
It feels like Sam Alman's been into her.
2:02:45
Uh, so we're thinking single earpiece that you wear.
2:02:50
Maybe it has a camera on it.
2:02:50
Um, that was kind of the best thing that I could come up with. Maybe glasses.
2:02:53
It feels like they're probably not just going to do a phone or an iPad or a watch, something with a rectangular screen on it.
2:03:00
It's going to be something a little bit different.
2:03:02
Um, take you off of your off of your phone, maybe curing dopamine addiction.
2:03:07
Uh, what are you expecting?
2:03:10
and then we can go into all of the different uh all the different uh aspects of the deal. Yeah, for sure.
2:03:14
I mean, I think you know, one thing that felt very clear is that they emphasized like a sort of like family of devices, right?
2:03:25
So I think already they're coming from a uh multiple objects approach which which I think is cool mostly because I I think where a lot of hardware companies sort of get stuck is they launch one thing and then everyone only knows them for that one thing and then they get stuck in the loop of that one thing. Right. So like Whoop is 17. Yeah.
2:03:46
Pebble Pebble be like invented the smartwatch in many ways and then Apple came out with the Apple Watch and it integrated with the phone and the iPad and stuff.
2:03:55
So yeah, I mean lack of ecosystem I mean and it's only getting stronger like now you can just on your MacBook Pro pull up iPhone mirroring and just use your phone on your computer and stuff and so the integration between the ecosystem Apple knows that that's a strength that it's like oh yeah you the new the new Android phone might have a better camera but are you willing to give up full integration with everything else you have?
2:04:19
like ripping out one device now is a $20,000 proposition for many people.
2:04:25
It's not just it's not just $1,000. So, okay. Suite of devices.
2:04:29
So, you think there will be a rectangular a black mirror?
2:04:31
I I don't think there'll be a black mirror.
2:04:36
I think there I think they're smart enough not to go head-to-head with the phone.
2:04:39
I do think, you know, maybe it starts with a puck that's tied to like productivity, right?
2:04:46
So something that just tries to get you interacting with chat GBT faster.
2:04:50
So I can take it with me and it also sits on my desk when I'm working and it's just the fastest way to sort of like that was easy, you know, Staples style thing.
2:04:59
Um that you can the workflow when you're in conversation with a friend where I'm like, John, what was that company like a year ago that was doing this thing and you're like oh I kind of query you and you bring it back.
2:05:15
What do you think about foldables?
2:05:17
It feels like I've seen some demos out of China where the tech is getting pretty solid.
2:05:21
The hinges are getting smaller and smaller and you could imagine we know where you're going with this.
2:05:27
You want a newspaper sizeable that you can make. Let's make a newspaper.
2:05:32
But but I mean seriously, you could imagine a situation where it's like really what I want is if I'm gonna be on I I I don't want to carry a laptop because then I need a backpack.
2:05:41
I can't put an I can't put an iPad in my pocket, but I could put something that folds up into the phone format.
2:05:48
And then it's a bigger decision.
2:05:50
It's like, am I just gonna do the earpiece for the little random chats with chat GPT?
2:05:54
But then if I want to go full in and watch a movie, I have a device that can that can really really superpower.
2:06:01
And it's like kind of counterpositioned against Apple a little bit.
2:06:05
We've heard rumors that Apple's maybe thinking about folding, but it seems like that's one of the technologies that you would be looking at.
2:06:11
What's your take on foldables generally?
2:06:13
Yeah, I I think foldables actually squarely land in like the Apple value system.
2:06:18
Um, you know, Apple really values the sort of like high definitionness of their rectangles, you know, and so I think if you're trying to compete on high definition of these rectangles, you're probably in a losing battle.
2:06:33
I think, you know, something I talk about a lot when it comes to hardware is like your values have to zag away from Apple as much as possible, right?
2:06:41
So, like I think Avi Shiffman is a really good example of this.
2:06:45
Like Apple can't launch a puck that listens to you 24/7 because the conspiracy about Apple already and a lot of the tech giants that they listen to you 24/7.
2:06:54
So, you can't do the literal thing, right?
2:06:57
At least not for some time.
2:06:59
And so obby has a little bit of like narrative runway because that value is so separate from like the Apple ecosystem.
2:07:07
So I think similarly like open AI and and you know my assumption is that Johnny's aware of it.
2:07:12
You know they have to zag from a values perspective.
2:07:17
Um what do you think their confidence level is? Right.
2:07:20
Like the most high-profile example lately is Humane, which is a talented team, maybe not as talented, but they did have, you know, the full backing of the SV hype machine in many ways.
2:07:35
A lot of a lot of investors were quick to point out that they weren't in it and that they thought it was silly, but it was like a moonshot new hardware attempt with a bunch of, you know, very talented people.
2:07:45
you know, very talented people. Do you think that that is in the back of their mind at all in terms of what projection specifically or no no just not even about not even about the form factor but just like hey this is actually like yeah it's cool to have billions of dollars in the world's best
2:08:02
team but it's also Apple was started in a garage right something closer to A's environment right now where he's like that's true you know on a motorcycle like you know just like hair in the wind just like thinking about uh the next computing interface and it's also I feel like that the pressure to deliver value beyond on just companionship, right? Like AI's edge is like I just want it to
2:08:23
Like AI's edge is like I just want it to be your friend.
2:08:26
I don't need it to be and yeah, maybe it can do other stuff over time, but anyways. Yeah.
2:08:33
So, so I think on the humane thing, you know, I got to know a bunch of folks over there and I I think my my main critique is that, you know, they were very like Catholic guiltridden about the iPhone.
2:08:48
like the entire animating spirit was like we feel we kind of feel guilty about the iPhone and now we have to present this alternative so that that's not the only road that we go down.
2:08:58
Um I think unfortunately like they made a few sort of like key errors like I think the projection was sort of like a really key error.
2:09:06
I think they like backpedalled away from replacing the phone and then it was supposed to be just like part of like your broader ecosystem.
2:09:13
ecosystem. So I think um it's what's really clear already right is that they open AAI and Johnny are saying we don't want to replace the phone we want to be this third thing but we do want to live in your pocket right so it's like close
2:09:28
close enough but far enough um and I think that you know what's funny is Sam you know backed Humane early and they had an open AI partnership and I think that um I don't know the full politics there but I would assume at some point, you know, Sam sort of maybe lost face and faith. Sorry, not lost face, lost
2:09:47
Sorry, not lost face, lost faith and then kind of turned to, okay, well, who were the other superstars at Apple?
2:09:54
Cuz like, make no mistake, like Iron and folks on that team were like the superstars at Apple, right?
2:09:59
It's just two different sides.
2:10:01
Like Iron was the HCI team and Johnny was the industrial design team, you know?
2:10:06
So, um, yeah, I I think that's sort of, um, I think they're aware of those lessons.
2:10:14
Um, but one thing we were talking about was in terms of building like a super high-erforming hardware device, consumer electronics team. Mhm.
2:10:24
Steve Jobs not only had Johnny IV, but he also had Tim Cook uh to build the supply chain.
2:10:30
And building robust supply chains was difficult in the '9s and 2000s when Apple did it and it didn't exist in China.
2:10:42
And now because of geopolitical considerations, it's also very difficult. It doesn't feel turnkey.
2:10:46
It feels like the turnkey era of consumer hardware was maybe the 2010s and now we are post that and there are lots of different considerations around tariffs and trade policy and geopolitical dynamics.
2:11:00
Do you think that we would see someone like a Tim Cook go into open AI to get this off the ground?
2:11:09
Yeah, that's a good question.
2:11:12
So, some things that I've been sort of like watching is that OpenAI already has like an internal hard team and they've had for quite some time.
2:11:19
They have someone that's like head robotics.
2:11:21
They have I think they hired a woman recently that's head of like all hardware and so it's clear that they've been building up this uh capacity internally for quite some time.
2:11:32
And so I think you know the joint venture is definitely some form of appeal to authority right um with Johnny and the my personal hot take is I don't know how sensitive they are to actually shipping or at least shipping on the time that they you know stated you know like the hot take the extreme hot take would be right is like Sam needs another, you know, 200 billion.
2:12:03
He, you know, he goes to like Saudi Arabia with Johnny and Johnny puts on his like British accent and, you know, they don't have to even talk about the next model or like sure numbers, right?
2:12:15
It's simply when's the device shipping and they could just say a number or like say a date and they can get the money, right?
2:12:24
Yeah, if you're building up the valuation, you're saying there's a 10% chance that we disrupt Google.
2:12:26
That's a multi- trillion dollar business.
2:12:28
So, you can value us at a multiple hundred millions.
2:12:32
There's also a 10% chance that we disrupt Apple and that's a multi- trillion dollar business.
2:12:35
So, you discount the value and that's a couple hundred billion.
2:12:38
And so, yeah, you kind of add and then that question doesn't matter. Exactly.
2:12:41
You know, like then that supply chain question doesn't matter.
2:12:44
When I have 200 billion in cash, it's like what supply chain, you know, buy Foxon. Buy Foxcon. Yeah. Foxy.
2:12:51
I I think Sam we manufacture Apple now.
2:12:54
So manufacture Apple now.
2:12:54
Uh I mean what what Yeah, we're going to bake we're going to bake the new model into into Yeah, I've seen I've seen some hot takes back and forth.
2:13:04
Uh Johnny O was obviously deeply loved and admired and kind of took the internet by storm with the conversation with Patrick Collison last week.
2:13:13
Um at the same time a lot of people uh have said that uh a lot of the work that he did was iterative uh and not that revolutionary.
2:13:23
Um what is your take on the legacy of Johnny Iive uh you know he's he's in his 60s that's sometimes retirement age.
2:13:28
I believe he's in his 60s I actually don't know but I mean at the same time Berkshire Hathaway just hired a 62-y old CEO and Warren Buffett worked into his 90s.
2:13:38
So uh what is your overall take on on on Johnny Iive's legacy and and where it goes from here?
2:13:42
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the early part of his legacy or like the Apple part of his legacy is like undeniable, right?
2:13:49
Like one one interesting thing to like in Johnny history is, you know, the first place he was working I believe like the design firm uh specialized in bathrooms.
2:14:02
And so when you understand that, you can actually understand like his obsession with smoothness, his obsession with like um sort of like knobs and dials and all of these things that we see that are kind of orthogonal to like computer hardware.
2:14:16
Um as well as just like things that are unobtrusive, right?
2:14:19
And like brushed aluminum, like you kind of understand his design language when you know where he started.
2:14:25
So then you get to Apple and he's had very started from the toilet. Yeah.
2:14:32
But, you know, in a in a lot of ways, like these devices sort of um they they blend in similar to like a a home object and they don't really stand out like what we understood consumer electronics to be.
2:14:44
So, so then you start fast forwarding, you saying, okay, now he has like all the devices in play. What does he do?
2:14:50
My hot, one of my hot takes is that like he kind of gives technology a type of like body dysmorphia, right?
2:14:57
Like all he cares about is thinness.
2:14:57
He even when he gets control of the whole design team, that's when we get the pivot to flat design.
2:15:04
So he even takes like the interface level and makes it thin and flat and not too like fun.
2:15:12
Wait, so was the was the camera who's responsible for the camera bump?
2:15:14
Is that just to sell more cases? What's up with that?
2:15:18
I think the camera bump just became a tradeoff post Steve because again think we still have to understand like Apple the machine right when Steve was there really the only person you had to appeal to was Steve.
2:15:34
So there's like a very known thing around like Apple demo culture where like it's Steve in a room with a couple other people.
2:15:41
You go in, you show it to him and he says yes or no.
2:15:44
And if he says yes, it's in and there's no one else you're convincing.
2:15:48
My assumption is post Steve you're you're going through stakeholder management, right?
2:15:52
So Johnny doesn't have like the number one authority anymore.
2:15:56
So he starts having to like wrestle with, you know, the camera team and he's wrestling with Tim and he's wrestling with manufacturing and he just doesn't get to win every battle anymore. That's my Yeah. Yeah.
2:16:06
Seems like a good What do you think's going on with Apple Vision Pro? Have you used it?
2:16:12
It feels like it it's built on some of the design language that Johnny IV uh pioneered uh aluminium, I suppose, but uh at the same time uh not the thinnest VR headset. Uh Johnny left in 2019.
2:16:30
They've obviously been working on Apple Vision Pro for longer than that, but it feels like maybe the first Apple product that doesn't have his mark on it.
2:16:38
Um, but overall, do you think that's going to get any better?
2:16:44
Is there any salvage they can do? Have you used it?
2:16:46
What's your reaction to just VR broadly?
2:16:47
Any of that stuff that you're thinking through? Yeah. So, I I have one. I used it. I was very curious. Um, it is really heavy. Yeah.
2:16:56
I think they had the wrong guiding metaphor at the end of the day.
2:16:59
They didn't have like a true creative direction um anchor.
2:17:02
And so they landed on we're going to put a floating iPad on your face and it's going to be somewhat antisocial, right?
2:17:13
So everything that they show is widgets and air and then you sitting alone on your couch watching something in extreme high definition.
2:17:22
And that's fine, but as like a counter position, it's like what if their anchor was like the iPod, right?
2:17:28
And maybe their like hero product was actually something around Apple Music and it looked more like the dancing silhouettes that when you put this headset on your entire apartment actually turns into this beautiful colorcape and you are animated, right?
2:17:43
So they chose like a stagnant couch potato instead of you being animated.
2:17:49
And we're seeing the same thing in Apple advertising when it comes to um the way they talk about Apple intelligence, right?
2:17:54
It's like this kind of like slobby guy at his desk getting AI to write an email to his boss to slack off further.
2:18:01
So, we have this company that used to champion like you are going to be your best self with these products and now it's turning into creativity. Yeah.
2:18:09
Put on the headset and slob out. Don't do your work.
2:18:12
Get AI to tell your boss why you're going to be late.
2:18:14
And it's just like it's like Steve's nightmare, you know? It's funny. Yeah.
2:18:18
I mean, what about what about glasses as a form factor?
2:18:25
I I'm I'm bullish on glasses as a form factor and I think it's going to go a few different ways.
2:18:29
I do think like the meta ray bands like that form factor will continue to get better eventually like what it takes to put projections in those will be you know lightweight enough.
2:18:40
You know I think the Orion I think was the project on Meta.
2:18:43
You know I think obviously that's like too bulky.
2:18:47
Zuck looks silly but I think they're going to just get it thinner and get it thinner and like 10 years it'll be great. Maybe five.
2:18:51
Also, I mean, with the uh with the XR stuff and the AR stuff, like XRE and NRA Air, this company does glasses that it doesn't do all the crazy tracking, but it can pull up a visual in front of you just statically.
2:19:06
And that solves like 90% of the use case for this.
2:19:09
If I'm on a plane and I'm just going to watch a movie, I think that that's going to get there first.
2:19:14
And then you have to figure out, can we actually make it fully holographic?
2:19:17
But if you just want a basic HUD, like a heads-up display, uh that's a lot more achievable.
2:19:22
No, none of the big tech companies have really said like we're going to settle for that.
2:19:27
But I think that that might be a path along the road actually.
2:19:28
Um but I haven't really played with it enough.
2:19:31
Um staying on Apple Vision Pro, I heard a rumor, I don't know how true this is, that uh the person, one of the one of the key people at Apple in charge of it was an ex Dolby engineer who was all about the Dolby cinema theater.
2:19:44
And I and and I thought that like that was the killer app. Doli's great. I love the movies.
2:19:54
The soundboard just so hard.
2:19:54
But but um like I tried wrong creative anchor. Yeah. Yeah.
2:19:59
But I I tried the dinosaur experience. It was like two minutes.
2:20:03
I'm like I'm not going to game on this thing.
2:20:04
I'm not really going to work on this thing.
2:20:06
I'm not going to work on this thing.
2:20:08
But I did watch I watched all of Citizen Canain actually in in Vision Pro and it was amazing and it was like being in a theater and it was fantastic.
2:20:18
And I almost think that they should have gone narrower and maybe the iPod is the right thing.
2:20:21
Like the iPod when you put in the headphones it is isolating but the campaign around that was you dancing around in silhouette is beautiful and there is something about like restoring this idea of going to the movies but I agree with you that the ads were super dystopian.
2:20:37
There's that one where he that the the guy is clearly a dad and he's watching a video of his kids and it looks like he's divorced and like his kids super depressing but giving blood on the track Bob Dylan divorced.
2:20:47
It was very rough but but what is your take on this idea of like Apple narrowing the focus of of vision to we have one killer use case because they're they're kind of the everything company.
2:21:00
The the iPhone will call you an Uber, does your email, does phone everything.
2:21:04
Um, you know, the original iPhone keynote was it just does three things and and then it grew out from there.
2:21:10
Do they even have the culture to refocus around one value prop?
2:21:14
I always thought like they have Apple TV.
2:21:16
They never made a real TV.
2:21:18
They could have just positioned this as like this is the best way to watch Apple TV and it's just an Apple TV machine and then it has some other stuff and yeah, we'll have an app store but really but what what do you think about that culturally at Apple and just in terms of like if you were running the place, what would you do? Yeah. Yeah.
2:21:30
It's a that's a great question.
2:21:33
You know, I think um it's it's so hard to understand why certain things in your own history worked out the way that they did, right?
2:21:42
I think we are so anchored on like you said the iPhone being this giant enablement to not only Apple but a lot of I mean how much of the valley is built on just like mobile apps that did a thing, right?
2:21:56
And that's because if you're Uber, you know, you have GPS and now like you can actually do all these things, right?
2:22:04
So I I think Apple wanted to be hyper enablement ready again.
2:22:07
you know, they wanted developers to really build things on this and I just, you know, I think unfortunately at the premium price unlike um like the Quest, it's really hard to bootstrap bootstrap that and get consumer adoption and because they they also have never done just like a developer only product before.
2:22:32
So, there were just so many conflicting narratives.
2:22:35
again, it just seemed like no one was at the actually gripping on to the to the reinss.
2:22:39
So, I'm I'm very pro like pick a singular use case that's going to be incredible at, you know, like I think Steve's original thing was like iPod for the eyes, you know, it's like noise cancellation for the eyes.
2:22:51
And so, you have Apple TV, you have Apple Fitness.
2:22:55
It's just like we're doing these two things.
2:22:57
Make it super lightweight, make it comfortable as much as possible.
2:22:59
Um, and maybe as a bonus you can like tie the laptop to it so you have like a keyboard in front of you, right?
2:23:06
But this is about being static and XYZ.
2:23:08
Have you ever Have you ever thought of applying for a job at Apple? Maybe not CEO job.
2:23:15
I don't think they have a listing, but trying to fix Apple, get it back to its roots.
2:23:20
I I think I think you need a lot of political capital to do that. There is my assumption.
2:23:25
And so I'm I'm far more attracted to the things I see getting built from like my peers.
2:23:31
And um yeah, let's switch gears for a second.
2:23:33
I mean, it's it's just fascinating because it is a uh it's like almost like a supply chain story in the sense that they were able to pull forward the highest resolution display that no one else had access to.
2:23:46
Not even Mark Zuckerberg spending10 billion dollars a year on the metaverse could get that screen pulled forward by two years.
2:23:53
I'm sure the next Quest will have a comparable screen, but Apple was able to do that and but that's not enough.
2:23:59
It's like it's a fantastic execution on the supply chain side.
2:24:03
Anyway, Jordy, where do you want to go next?
2:24:04
Uh, I wanted to ask what you're up to.
2:24:07
I know I'm sure you're cooking. I know you're cooking.
2:24:10
Uh, anything you can anything you can share right now? Yeah.
2:24:14
Um, so yeah, I mean I'm coming out of, you know, uh, sort of an acquisition of Eternal and just thinking about what's next.
2:24:22
And one one thing that I've been working on with friends throughout the past year is actually speaking of hardware.
2:24:29
This Oh no, the background.
2:24:33
Look at what I see paper. I see paper.
2:24:37
Hardware underrated form factor for hardware.
2:24:40
Yeah, it's a Wall Street Journal competitor. Um, newspaper.
2:24:42
How do you do the uh Oh, there it is.
2:24:45
Oh, that's not it either.
2:24:47
How do you do these things? Oh, there it is. Okay, there we go.
2:24:50
So, I Why would you want to Why would you want to hide that Why would you want to hide that background?
2:24:55
That's a way better background.
2:24:55
It's I just have I have so much Listen, I love San Francisco.
2:25:00
It's the best city in the world.
2:25:01
Very appropriate, says the New Yorker.
2:25:03
Stolen stolen valor on that Golden Gate Bridge. Brutal. Brutal. Show show us uh Yeah. What you working on? Yeah.
2:25:17
So, the big project I've been doing in launching technology brothers exclusive is um this hardware book. So, let's go. 2024.
2:25:29
Um, I made my friends Julian Davis and and Charlene Deng.
2:25:34
And, you know, I I I saw sort of a few years ago that hardware was really going to become the new meta.
2:25:42
Um, it's sort of, you know, we saw software shifting into these two very big ways like and we and we started to see the containers for software shifting as well.
2:25:52
um those containers being sort of like spatial and and hardware.
2:25:56
And so last year just started to feel like a really special time in hardware, humane, rabbit, all these things with Teenage Engineering, Daylight, USB Club.
2:26:04
And so we really wanted to give sort of like the artbook treatment.
2:26:09
This is my personal copy.
2:26:09
The real copy is going to be hard cover.
2:26:10
Um but we really want to give the sort of like artbook treatment to what's happening in hardware. Daylight, let's go.
2:26:20
Yeah, daylight is beautiful.
2:26:20
you know, while writing the like humane um sort of blurb, they got acquired by HP.
2:26:29
So, these things were, you know, really shifting in real time, which was so crazy.
2:26:33
Um, one of the big big sort of cells on this book is a exclusive interview with Jesper, the founder of Teenage Engineering, who maybe folks remember from his config talk last year. Oh yeah.
2:26:48
And so it's 260 pages of giving like present day technology uh that artbook treatment.
2:26:55
So really really excited about that.
2:26:57
And then yeah, when can we buy it? When can we buy it?
2:27:03
You can buy it right now. Hardware 20224. com. Hardwarebook20204. com. Let's go. Fantastic. Amazing. I'm I'm excited.
2:27:12
And and what uh and the site's beautiful by the way. Very cool. Thank you.
2:27:17
That was just a late night one late night coffee session. Vibe coding. All right. Yeah, some might say. All right. I just hit pay now. Let's do it. That was easy. There we go. There we go. There we go. That's amazing. What What's next?
2:27:34
Are you already working on the next book? You're already cooking. Hardware 2025. It's happening now. It's unfolding, dude. It's It is unfolding.
2:27:42
Um, you know, I would I would love to sort of get sucked into the open AI hardware tentacles and uh, you know, maybe even like write some open AI checks to emergent hardware.
2:27:54
I think that we're going to see a lot of form factors emerge, you know, beyond just pendants, beyond just like pucks, what have you.
2:28:03
Um, I've been investing in like advising some new hardware companies and AI hardware companies.
2:28:07
So, um, yeah, I'm just I'm Have you gotten a chance to play with the Have you gotten a chance to play with the chromatic from Palmer Lucky?
2:28:16
No, it's sold out before I could buy it. Oh, it's sold out. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I I I love it.
2:28:21
It's uh I mean, it's a beautiful product.
2:28:23
You can run over it with a car apparently. I haven't tried that.
2:28:26
But also, it it it's it's like this perfect throwback, but you can use emulators to play any game.
2:28:31
And now they just added Twitch streaming from it over USBC, which is crazy.
2:28:36
So you can so you can plug it in and it records what you're what you're playing. So it's like this.
2:28:43
When can it control an enduro drone? One day, I'm sure.
2:28:45
Uh and I think that they might be working on an N64 and some other some other retro hardware. So uh it it's fun.
2:28:52
A lot of the retro retro throwback stuff coming through.
2:28:55
Um I mean the only other spicy take I want is on Mimmoji, but do we have time for that? Is Mmoji underrated?
2:29:01
Are you using it every day? No, I don't. Are we driving? No. No. Sorry. Damn. What do you think?
2:29:11
Are you talking about Mimmoji or Genoji? Genoji. Oh, yeah.
2:29:14
Mimoji is the one where you make yourself into an emoji.
2:29:18
Genoji is the one where you generate anything. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
2:29:20
I think I think that, you know, I think the word I don't think Genmoji is actually a bad product.
2:29:27
I just think like the ad campaign again like they've lost their soul when it comes to communication. Yeah.
2:29:33
The entire thing about Gen Moji, it's the experience of making a niche reference for your friend.
2:29:38
And in the ad campaign is just like very weird looking. Yeah.
2:29:44
Like end results, you know?
2:29:48
Like the entire thing about that is like it's about the process, not the end result.
2:29:51
Like the end result out of context makes zero sense.
2:29:53
And then that's all they pasted around like major cities and it's just like god.
2:29:56
I mean, how do you even tell that story?
2:29:59
Is like should the billboard be like two friends like in separate rooms kind of like uh like like mean girls split screen like laughing because they're sending each other Gen Mojis?
2:30:09
That's not a that's not a billboard campaign.
2:30:11
The first first level of like taste.
2:30:13
Is that a billboard campaign? Yep. No.
2:30:15
I mean it's funny because it should be such a it should be a product that needs no billboard, right?
2:30:22
like it it it should be inherently so viral and so userenerated that people just start using it, right?
2:30:30
And it has this sort of Giblly moment where people are just using Genoji and I just didn't see that at all.
2:30:35
Maybe maybe I'm a boomer. Yeah.
2:30:37
Um anyways, thank you so much for coming on.
2:30:42
We've been wanting to do this for a while. This was great timing.
2:30:45
Uh excited to get a copy of the book.
2:30:48
we will we'll show it back here on the show and uh I'm sure have some follow-up questions.
2:30:52
But um congratulations on the launch and uh welcome back anytime for more more hardware hot takes. Ah fantastic. Thank you brothers.
2:31:01
Play out for the studio audience.
2:31:03
Thanks for coming on the show.
2:31:07
Legend Chief Reggie Officer of Hardware Book 2024.
2:31:12
We'll talk to you soon, Reggie. I will be right back.
2:31:15
How'd you sleep last night?
2:31:16
You know how I slept, John.
2:31:16
Okay, I should just give you access.
2:31:19
I should just give you my login to just motivate you because I got a 93. I'm climbing up. I got a 99, John. You got a 99.
2:31:28
Uh, well, I beat you Monday, Tuesday, you beat me Wednesday, Thursday. You get out of here.
2:31:32
I'm going to do some ad reads.
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2:32:29
Um, we should go through some more timeline posts.
2:32:34
There's been a bunch of stuff in the news.
2:32:35
Um, uh, what else is here?
2:32:38
Uh uh L3 tweet engineer just says LMO and post screenshot uh probably from blind or something. Google prestige is gone.
2:32:48
I was at a dinner party when I mentioned in passing that I worked at Google and everyone immediately burst into laughter pointing out how chat GPT had eaten our lunch.
2:32:57
Then they pulled out their iPhones and showed that they didn't have a single Google app installed and had set their homepage and default search engine to chat GPT.
2:33:03
Then they gpted Google's stock chart and erupted into another round of aorious laughter while making the pinching hand gesture. Very, very fake. Extremely fake.
2:33:11
You cannot get off the Google ecosystem, but very, very funny that somebody posted this. Very silly.
2:33:19
Uh, also, if they pulled up the Google stock chart, they would see that it's up like 10% in the last two days. So, very silly.
2:33:25
Um, we also have the Teal Fellows.
2:33:27
Uh, we're announced the 2025 Teal Fellows.
2:33:29
We're going to do Teal Fellow Day hopefully on Tuesday.
2:33:34
Uh, and we're going to interview as many of these folks as we can.
2:33:36
Give you a little tour of what the latest batch of Teal fellows are working on.
2:33:39
There's a bank, a trading platform, a research lab, somebody working on non-invasive neuro stimulators, foundation models to power digital humans that are indistinguishable from real ones.
2:33:50
Uh, AI powered solution to automate manufacturing processes in dark factories. That's cool.
2:33:56
Fizz is is developing an AI financial investor.
2:33:58
Uh we have friends who've been on the show are now Tio fellows Sora and Monroe Anderson uh the founder of Nuros is a defense technology company that builds chron drones critical to the modern in arsenal at massive scale.
2:34:11
Um orbit is a non-invasive neuro stimulator.
2:34:14
There's a bunch of other folks in here.
2:34:16
Interfaces developing human native communication devices that change the way we work and think.
2:34:22
That sounds maybe hardware driven.
2:34:23
Excited to talk to him about that and we'll go through that.
2:34:24
And sigil I am working on a surprise guest Ben Hilac.
2:34:29
Oh yeah, come on later today for 10 minutes at 2.
2:34:32
X is so cooked right now.
2:34:35
I can't even get I can't even get DMs out.
2:34:37
I'm trying to get his email for the invite, but he had something interesting earlier.
2:34:41
Ben said an an AI alignment researcher at Enthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal.
2:34:53
I will never give this model access to my computer.
2:34:55
And so Sam I guess Sam Bowman over at Enthropic in a now deleted post says if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral for example like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial it will use command line tools to contact the press contact regulators try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above.
2:35:15
That is absolutely crazy.
2:35:15
But uh we'll see if it's real or fake news.
2:35:18
And let us bring in our next guest. We have Keith boy.
2:35:22
Welcome to the stream Keith. Hey, how you doing? There he is. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Great to have you. Yeah. Yeah. Great to have you back. The entry song.
2:35:35
Yeah, it's a little messy. We're figuring it out.
2:35:39
Uh give us the recap on the KV Summit. How'd it go? Yeah.
2:35:41
So, every year uh for the last 15 years, we've hosted uh all of our CEOs, like 150 plus CEOs at Caval Point in San Francisco.
2:35:51
And it's like a two-day program where we bring in inspirational and actionable speakers.
2:35:57
So, for example, I interviewed Eric uh from RAMP, John Collison of Stripe, uh John John Coulson interviewed uh Bill Gates actually and Sam Alman spoke and then the CEO of data bricks.
2:36:11
So, we have a wide variety of content.
2:36:13
Uh some some of it's more practical and tangible and some of it's very aspirational, inspirational.
2:36:17
Uh so we take our CEO time very seriously and we want to make sure that every minute they're not in the office you know managing executing uh you know growing their companies that they get you know disproportionate returns out of the time.
2:36:34
What was any type of surprising takeaways or or insights that that you can share?
2:36:39
I want to know what the biggest debate points are like what what where are the things where people are actually debating.
2:36:45
I've I've uh you know uh Sam Alman recently said AI could be an operating system.
2:36:50
There's questions about foundation model layer value acrruel versus application model layer value acrruel.
2:36:57
How many winners there will be in the coding market like what are people actually debating and unclear about and then I'd love to know where you stand on it obviously but uh like the non- consensus topics are probably the most interesting to dig into here.
2:37:11
Sure, we can talk about all those and generally speaking, we will post all of these videos online.
2:37:15
So, there's a vast library of, you know, 15 years of virtually anybody who's been successful in tech has spoken at our conference.
2:37:25
And so, in fact, Sam's probably spoken four or five times now, right? Um, it was interesting.
2:37:29
I compared when I was interviewing John Carlson, I'd interviewed Patrick Carlson literally a decade ago. Oh, wow.
2:37:35
And it was an interesting contrast to show the arc of the company.
2:37:39
When I interviewed Patrick in 2015, uh, Stripe was worth, you know, several billion dollars, but it only had 250 employees.
2:37:46
And now, you know, as John mentioned, they have 9,000. 900,000. Wow. Yeah.
2:37:50
So, it shows you the arc of, you know, building a company that a decade had passed since I last interviewed Patrick.
2:37:57
Um, so we will share uh 90 plus percent of these videos.
2:38:03
We'll start posting them next week.
2:38:04
Um, there's maybe one or two.
2:38:04
It's up to speaker, you know, if they don't want to share certain things.
2:38:08
But the contrast I noticed one a was one about building a company.
2:38:12
We talked about founder mode a fair amount.
2:38:14
Um so you know Eric talked about how they build ramp and John gave a slightly different perspective on building stripe and then I interviewed actually Gary Tan YC to talk about the origins of founder mode the lessons from you know thousands of companies that you know they've invested in for 20 years.
2:38:31
Um and so I think the operating styles and approaches to hiring senior talent or not um was an interesting contrast on AI.
2:38:41
Uh we had Brad Gersonner of Altimter speak and um talk about the future of AI as applied to pre-existing companies.
2:38:50
Uh and he was quite inspirational.
2:38:52
He made a couple points that I think Sam generally would have agreed with which is there's only going to be one foundation model research labor oriented successful winner.
2:39:03
It's certainly not um something that VCs should be investing in at the application layer.
2:39:08
application layer. I think there's more room and opportunity or something that transcends what we think of research labs today just like open AI and chat GBT is transcending what we think of search and you know to some extent what
2:39:23
we think of social I think the next generation will be something that doesn't look anything like an LLM doesn't look like a research lab and you know it's very difficult therefore to find but hopefully some founders have visions and hopefully they call me when they do. Yeah. Um, I feel like Brian Yeah.
2:39:37
Um, I feel like Brian Chesy was a big inspiration for the original founder mode essay by Paul Graham.
2:39:45
Uh, he just went extreme founder mode a week or two ago with the Airbnb reimagining.
2:39:51
Um, at the same time, Ben Thompson's kind of uh analyzing that.
2:39:57
And Ben Thompson's argument is that uh Airbnb is a platform and a marketplace company.
2:40:03
And so the economics of the platform kind of dictate a certain user experience mainly that people open the app.
2:40:11
Yeah, they have billion they have hundreds of millions of users.
2:40:12
The user base is massive at Airbnb, but the average user opens it like twice a year and they want to get in, get out, and it's not a daily active user experience.
2:40:23
And so, uh, Ben Thompson was saying there will be some challenges.
2:40:25
What was your reaction to how Brian positioned Airbnb's next chapter?
2:40:29
Do you like that communication style?
2:40:31
Are you optimistic about where Airbnb goes?
2:40:34
Uh give us your give us your reaction to the Airbnb news.
2:40:38
So yes, Brian pioneered what we now describe as founder mode even though it's very specific in some ways the operating style of Apple.
2:40:45
But in in any event, um he triggered this at a YC alumni dinner in Napa Valley where he kind of off the cuff without preparation spoke for two and a half hours and that's what led to uh Paul Graham summarizing and distilling it which led to a lot of intrigue and interest and this is kind of what I think CEOs were talking about privately but no one had really stitched it together and kind of created a public discussion of it.
2:41:09
I for those of you really interested in the topic I interviewed Brian a few months ago uh at Gramp's offices and that video is available online where Brian exh is incredibly articulated eloquent about the virtues and the benefits of founder mode and how he actually implemented it.
2:41:31
So I highly recommend anybody in the audience who's intrigued watch the actual video because I will not do it justice.
2:41:37
Um the on the specific topic of Airbnb experiences, I think Ben made some interesting points.
2:41:43
I've been a fan and early reader of strate.
2:41:45
It's the only thing I read regularly in all of tech because I think he's the only one who actually understands tech that writes.
2:41:52
Um so I actually have been recommending this to friends of mine for over a decade who want to enter into tech is like start reading to checker. Yeah.
2:42:00
So, I think the point he makes first of all is that in services world, you're going you potentially want to get off the platform once you find a service provider you know that you like.
2:42:10
I think he missed one subtle point which is Airbnb is still designed mostly for travelers. I. e.
2:42:18
, you know, I'm going from New York, let's say, to Cincinnati.
2:42:24
And obviously the canonical case is I would find a place to stay in Cincinnati. Great.
2:42:28
But as you point out, the average user, you know, might travel 2. 5 times, 2. 4, 2. 5 times a year.
2:42:33
So, it's hard to turn my Airbnb usage into a daily, weekly, monthly habit.
2:42:39
However, the point that Ben glossed over a bit is that I'm traveling to Cincinnati and then to SF and then to Dallas and then to somewhere in Utah.
2:42:50
I have no incentive to go off the platform to find a service provider. Yes.
2:42:54
in a city that I'm in regularly, let's say New York City, if I found like a hair stylist here or the equivalent, I may have an economic motive to just, you know, disintermediate the platform.
2:43:05
But if it if Brian's right that curating experiences and services that a local would use still appeals to people who are in New York City, which is a huge f a huge number of people come to New York City every year, then I think Ben may be wrong and Brian may be right.
2:43:22
So, I think Brian is probably uh uh sort of dialing in to the traveler visitor use case. Totally.
2:43:32
And then you need the breath of services when you're traveling and experiences.
2:43:37
You don't necessarily have to only use it in your home city, which is where Ben may have some valid critiques. Yeah. Yeah.
2:43:43
It seems like the the dog walker example is probably the rough one because it's the most obvious disintermediation point.
2:43:50
Uh at the same time, yeah, there's plenty of times when big group is traveling and they want uh you know, private chef to come cook for everyone.
2:43:58
Something like that makes a ton of sense in that context.
2:44:01
And then also it's it like you can build a good business in a referral business that is not less it's less transaction.
2:44:08
It's more discovery and advertising basis.
2:44:11
I was actually uh like not even half joking just saying that maybe Airbnb needs an advertising product because Uber's been so successful in advertising.
2:44:19
I don't I I mean I think that that might really frustrate people if they're seeing promoted listings, but at the same time like on these marketplaces, usually advertising does pretty well.
2:44:26
I don't know if you have a reaction to that.
2:44:29
Yeah, I have two reactions.
2:44:29
First of all, I don't think Airbnb will need it.
2:44:34
Airbnb's margins are like roughly take rates roughly 13%. Sure.
2:44:37
And you know, versus like the Ubers or the Instacarts where they really don't make too much money per transaction. Got it.
2:44:43
And so if you don't have highly profitable advertising revenue, it's hard to build an interesting business.
2:44:48
So I think Airbnb doesn't have the economic drivers that you see with Instacart and where it has been successful, but it is some annoying.
2:44:57
That said, you know, Google used to run this internal study where they would actually show users who are exposed to uh SEO content and paid advertising are more satisfied than users who are searching and only see SEO content.
2:45:12
So advertising when done properly can be a value ad.
2:45:15
If you think about it, the economic incentive of drafting content that explains, contextualizes, and markets products does drive to efficient advertising that can be for a user.
2:45:28
Even today, if you're in an area and some service provider is running ads, it shows a level of sophistication and professionalism that might associate in some ways with just a better end product experience than somebody that doesn't know how to set up a Google ad.
2:45:47
know how to set up a Google ad. I wanted to ask uh Ben had some great thoughts around you know the entire internet is based on you know advertising and in a time when you know we may all have agents that are just trollling the
2:46:00
internet for us and acting on our behalf the you know economic the existing economic model of the internet could uh hit some snags and he makes a case for you know micro payments to allow people that produce content to get some benefit from having models uh you acquiring information on those sites. Uh he also
2:46:19
Uh he also outlines how this is going to be incredibly difficult to pull off because there's so many different groups and incentives.
2:46:27
I'm curious if you've spent much time yourself thinking about the potential for microtransactions in in in the context of replacing lost advertising revenue.
2:46:40
So similar similar observation I think the post the original sin of the internet by Ben is totally worth reading and I generally agree with the point that the original sin of the internet was that all content should be free.
2:46:50
I actually made that point to Jessica lesson when she was launching the information in like 2005 67 8 whatever it was.
2:47:00
I was like you definitely are going to be on the right side of history by charging a premium subscription.
2:47:02
ran into Dick Castello at that party, the launch event.
2:47:07
And I I actually used the term the original sin of the internet was that we we all learned the lesson that because the marginal cost of content, the marginal cost of distribution of content would go to zero, you should charge zero, which is absolutely false.
2:47:20
However, microp payments make no sense.
2:47:23
Ben is totally wrong about this.
2:47:24
I'll give you an old lesson from PayPal.
2:47:26
So, one of my jobs at PayPal between 2000 and 2003 was to find new markets because we were really dependent on eBay and that led to, you know, risk and we ultimately went public and then sold the company to eBay because we were nervous about the risk of eBay handicapping our future growth and as you know tech companies are valued by the next 20 years of cash flow.
2:47:47
So, u you Peter and Roloff and various people were very nervous about that.
2:47:52
One of the markets I wanted to explore was quote unquote micro payments and Peter Teal made a very astute uh sort of rebuke to me.
2:48:01
They said like that's the dumbest argument ever basically because content has a marginal cost you it has a gross margin of about 99%.
2:48:12
So basically whether or not microp payments cost you 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 50% of the content who cares like if you're writing content that people pay for because your because your gross margin is like in the 90s you shouldn't really worry about whether the microp payment cost is too large.
2:48:31
cost is too large. Now the friction of making the reason why I wanted to build the product was I think the friction of microp payments is too high like the consumer friction of paying for anything like you know you know you're going to read a short blog post you're going to
2:48:46
read a short post you don't really know exactly you know what it's worth and so if you have to do anything other than just one click forget about it but I still think people get this analysis wrong that it's not an economic problem for now music's a little different by
2:49:01
the way where you owe a license owner a reasonable fraction of the transaction then you can't be so you know sort of whimsical about the marginal cost of the payment but most people do not really own you know have to pay out a meaningful fraction of that dollar
2:49:17
transaction to somebody else some third party so I I I think this is an excuse by the way Stripe originally originally started when Patrick John uh pitched me on Stripe in 2010 they originally thought that the core use case was going to be like micro payments and accelerating content. They still have
2:49:34
They still have the GDP of the internet but they really felt that it would unleash new content which hasn't for the most part happened.
2:49:43
You know, Substack is an interesting business.
2:49:45
It has real GMBB and and an associated real revenue line.
2:49:48
But I I still think it's the wrong place for Ben to be focusing on. Yeah.
2:49:54
the the issue with looking at Substack or even Ben and their success is there's some element there of I just want to support this the person creating it.
2:50:06
I want them to not think about getting a job or building a business other than just writing online and spending all day thinking about in Ben's case tech.
2:50:14
Whereas for the average site on the internet, the you the person that would be making the microp payment, it's not like they don't have any incentive to be like, I care about this person and I want them to have a, you know, I mean, with like the recipe example, I'm fine if I'm baking an apple pie, blending three different recipes together and give me the LLM result of that.
2:50:34
But if I want to listen to Michael Jackson's Thriller, I don't want half of Thriller and then half of another song kind of clued together.
2:50:40
Like, I want that exact piece of intellectual property.
2:50:43
And so there's a very traceable lineage of that of that data transferring.
2:50:48
And so the microp payment makes a lot more sense when you're actually buying that specific thing, that specific thing.
2:50:53
But I think you're better off having a differentiated voice and a premium for that. It's very difficult. Yeah.
2:50:59
How many how many people in all the realms of content have a truly differentiated voice?
2:51:04
Like in sports, you know, Bill Simmons in his prime definitely did despite all the other sports writers.
2:51:10
Then in tech I still think has an incredibly differentiated voice.
2:51:14
It's just very difficult to achieve that but if you do you can absolutely charge a premium. Yeah totally.
2:51:21
Um what's been your it feels like it's been AI week.
2:51:23
We had Microsoft build on Monday.
2:51:26
Uh yeah I know you were tied up with the KV Summit but uh Google IO Google IO Open AI IO open AAI bought IO for 6. 5 billion.
2:51:34
Uh Anthropics dropping cloud 4 today.
2:51:37
are you tracking these things? What stuck out to you?
2:51:42
What made it uh above all the noise?
2:51:44
What was the signal in your mind? What are you tracking?
2:51:46
What are you uh what's ch has anything changed your mind this week?
2:51:51
Well, I think what was interesting to me because we do have the CEO summit, you know, annually this year, the AI content, not just the AI content that we programmed, but the AI content in cocktail conversations, dinner conversations was an order of magnitude greater than last year.
2:52:10
So, the first derivative was off the charts on AI.
2:52:15
Last year there was like a vertical of AI and a vertical a slice of uh conversations and the people who are not in in AI space were probably intrigued but it it wasn't infusing everything.
2:52:26
I felt this year AI infused every conversation up and down the stack so to speak laterally across verticals whether you're in financial services or labor marketplaces it didn't matter.
2:52:39
Everybody wanted to learn more about AI, how to how to leverage AI, put on this bionic suit for their own business. Yeah.
2:52:47
Are you seeing AI pop up in unexpected seedstage companies you're betting on?
2:52:55
We were talking to TJ Parker.
2:52:55
He launched General Medicine today and uh he was like, "We made the deci.
2:53:00
We made the deliberate decision not to give the user a text box.
2:53:05
We're not a chatbt rapper in that way, but we're using LLMs all over the place to parse uh insurance policies and medical records.
2:53:14
And this business is only possible because of AI.
2:53:19
And I feel like that's going to be an ongoing narrative, but it should dominate the conversation.
2:53:24
At the same time, it should melt into the background just like, oh yeah, you're hosting your your new company on the cloud. No big deal. Everyone is. Yeah. I mean, at some point.
2:53:33
And same thing like the adoption of you know some Yeah.
2:53:35
I think that's a good metaphor but maybe maybe I'll give you a barometer please.
2:53:39
Of my of my last 11 investments six are AI based and that's up from zero. Literally zero. Yeah.
2:53:48
And so you know if even people like me who had no exposure to AI before last year Yeah.
2:53:53
are now making a majority of my investments are AI forward that that says something you know pretty interesting.
2:54:01
But aren't but aren't for the nonAI investments, aren't you still talking with those founders, CEOs about how they're going to leverage AI?
2:54:11
I mean, it's not like they're coming to you and being like, "Yeah, I think it's overblown. I'm short.
2:54:16
I'm, you know, I'm not going to, you know, they're not like lites if they're technology entrepreneurs." Yeah.
2:54:23
Well, there's a couple use cases that are important to pretty much any company.
2:54:26
One is just engineering productivity pure.
2:54:28
productivity pure. you know whether you use cursor or you know some other product or all of the products like we've seen at ramp for example engineer productivity is up 46% pretty strictly measured and increasing um so that's just purely on productivity so getting
2:54:45
more done with less great you're seeing AI remove costs um think customer support is a classic use case customer support can be expensive and in many cases AI can perform on par with a human or better certainly faster and more cheaply with more scalability. So there
2:55:02
So there are areas that are no-brainers for any business to adopt then there's the question in the strategic area you compete in your company is there way to use AI you know in a differential way and that that's a little bit more art than science right now. Yeah.
2:55:21
How how how overblown is the narrative of uh startups getting steamrololled by the hyperscalers?
2:55:29
Oh, every startup just got turned into a bullet point in a Google presentation.
2:55:34
Uh there's one narrative that's, you know, Google invented AI. They have all the TPUs.
2:55:40
They have this massive data center.
2:55:42
Uh at the same time, a lot of their product rollouts, they sunset a lot of products. They run a lot of tests.
2:55:48
They're really dominant in search and advertising.
2:55:49
But if it's a side project, it kind of gets side project attention and it's not really a founder mode project.
2:55:55
Um, how how are you thinking about how big tech is competing or just stepping back and just reaping the rewards of everything that they've done over the past couple decades?
2:56:08
decades? Yeah, I think there's like classic, you know, sort of conceptual approaches to this is is this a sustaining innovation or disruptive disruptive innovation and you know thing things that are disruptive there's a different you know approach to those things that are sustaining there's a different mentality towards those I
2:56:28
think the key is for a founder to understand where's my comparative advantage ultimately like you're going to build a startup from scratch the world is not your friend inertia is against you nobody cares period nobody cares about So you've got to turn that inert into positive momentum in a true physics sense. Yeah. And then Yeah.
2:56:44
And then you've got to figure out how you propel yourself even if other people large or small start doing something similar to what you do.
2:56:53
And I think having a line of sight like at least an intellectual conceptual level of how would I do that?
2:56:59
How am I going to do that?
2:56:59
Makes the difference between being, you know, a very mediocre startup that isn't the proverbial roadkill to something that looks like it should be washed out in this wave but actually trumps over the incumbent.
2:57:11
And you know, the history of tech is typically the well-run, thoughtful startups prevail over the large startup. Think about AI.
2:57:19
Open AI is absolutely dominating Google period. Yeah.
2:57:24
Open AAI, OpenAI's chat GPT will be the default interface for the majority of people on the planet, not Google search. Bold big change.
2:57:36
Uh I want to talk about with uh w with OpenAI uh they they acquired Johnny IV's company.
2:57:44
They brought in an absolute industry legend.
2:57:46
I want to talk about it in the macro unless you have a take on the on this actual deal or or Johnny IV.
2:57:54
But more importantly, um, startups bringing in these absolutely legendary heavy hitters.
2:58:00
It takes a bunch of different forms, right?
2:58:02
Palmer Lucky brought in John Carmarmac, uh, video game legend at Oculus. That was amazing.
2:58:09
Uh RAMP has Kenchault, this former CEO of AMX involved.
2:58:13
Uh but not as an employee, right?
2:58:17
Uh then Ramp has Gennady, this uh this fantastic programmer like I think he's the best programmer in the world uh more in an employee role.
2:58:26
And so as startups are scaling, if should they be hunting for these like you know absolutely legendary people trying to get them in their organization?
2:58:36
Is it just a very rare scenario that OpenAI is so doing so many things that they need a Johnny IV?
2:58:41
Um, how would you talk to a founder about hiring kind of an industry legend?
2:58:48
On the industry legend side, I think it depends on the motivation both for the company and the individual.
2:58:52
Many people become successful and are demotivated and not as then there's the Elons of the world that the more success they have, the more ambition they have.
2:59:00
And so I think you need to triangulate like who are you talking to and you know how much drive they still have left. Sure.
2:59:06
Um and then certainly from an employee perspective you don't want like someone who's past their prime a little bit like sports.
2:59:15
You do get past your prime or your motivation to drive decays unless you're like the Elons or the Kobes and people like that that are very rare.
2:59:22
Um so I think that's the most important sort.
2:59:26
Um, on the specifics here, I've read mixed reports on exactly, you know, what involvement, if any, Johnny is going to have.
2:59:32
They're acquiring the company, but it's not really clear to me what he personally is going to do.
2:59:36
So, I think that'll have to sort itself out. Yeah.
2:59:41
Could wind up in like a CEO of hardware role, very deeply involved or, you know, uh, more of an adviser or design lead.
2:59:48
Um, there's a bunch of different ways that that could shape up.
2:59:51
Uh, Jordan, do you have anything else you want to chat about?
2:59:52
How do you think uh the AI safety era of the of of 2023 early, you know, 2024 will be viewed in 5 years, 10 years? Well, it's DOA.
3:00:04
I mean, nobody even talks about it anymore.
3:00:08
When's the last time you heard someone like credibility talk about?
3:00:10
Well, so I heard about it today.
3:00:10
I'm I'm just going to call this out.
3:00:12
So, uh, today apparently I'm seeing a screenshot.
3:00:17
An AI alignment researcher at Enthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of it of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal.
3:00:26
And the researcher says if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems, or all the above, which to me to me is like if that's AI safety, that that's scary. That's scary.
3:00:46
I don't think that's what most I mean that's is scary seems pretty stupid but there are some legal obligations obviously imposed upon any tech company you know engage in child pornography and various things.
3:00:57
child pornography and various things. So like assuming there are compliance obligations on all companies whether tech or otherwise and absolutely those are all real and serious AI safety I think conotes to a lot of people like the idea of AI taking over you know etc
3:01:11
and doing things that are you know mischief creating in some way that debate I think is over in the United States for a very long time we're in the how do we accelerate the progress of AI how do we ensure that AI in the western world dominates over the CCP's use of AI. I think those are the most
3:01:28
I think those are the most priorities, the major priorities.
3:01:30
I don't think anybody in DC right now really wants to hear about this old a AI safety canard, which is basically an anti-ac. Yeah.
3:01:38
You know, is euphemistic for anti-ac.
3:01:41
It wasn't a serious concern. Yeah. It's interesting.
3:01:43
I uh I don't know how closely you followed like the latest release of Llama 4 by Meta, but they there was allegations of kind of fine-tuning on the specific evaluations and uh and a delay.
3:01:57
And a couple years ago, it would have been so easy for them to just say, "Hey, we're worried about alignment.
3:02:04
We're worried about safety.
3:02:05
We're doing this for you."
3:02:07
But instead, they kind of just had to bite the bullet and say like, "Oh, we kind of messed up on the training. It's not quite done yet.
3:02:12
we're just going to go back to the drawing board and like work through it.
3:02:15
Uh and the fact that they couldn't even use it as a fake excuse was very telling to me that that it is truly a dead conversation.
3:02:20
And I think yeah, for fortunately I think it's dead great.
3:02:25
I think ultimately the US needs to prevail and succeed with AI period. Yeah.
3:02:32
The flip side is that I so I've I I I think I've been aligned with you that the the AI super doom fast takeoff we all become paper clips never really resonated with me.
3:02:42
I thought it was kind of just paranoia uh and uh and like superstition.
3:02:46
But now that I've seen what's happening with DeepSeek, all of a sudden I've I've said to myself like maybe we do need something that looks like an AI safety team to go in and investigate these models and see are they weighted to shift us like the Tik Tok algorithm might be shifting us towards certain uh certain beliefs.
3:03:06
Like these tools are powerful and they can be fed false information or bad data to kind of steer the answers. one way or another.
3:03:18
And so maybe we do need some sort of model interp.
3:03:20
And it it it doesn't it's not exactly AI safety in the doom sense, but it's the type of work that you'd see done by an AI safety researcher.
3:03:30
So geopolitically, how how do you how how do you think things are shaking out?
3:03:33
Oh, I I Yeah, again, I would discriminate that from the gloom gloom and doom AI. Totally. Totally.
3:03:38
I definitely think models can be biased in different ways and manipulated by different people who have power over those models. Yeah.
3:03:46
And I think observability, which is actually cutting edge um technically, there are some really cool startups that are focused on observability, it's a little bit like doing brain surgery and trying to figure out how to rearrange the brain.
3:03:58
That's the metaphors I think they use.
3:04:00
And so that stuff's um actually tracking really well and incredibly intriguing like why did the model do X and then be able to decompose that and arguably do s you perform surgery and fix it.
3:04:10
So I think many of these models are biased.
3:04:12
many of these models are biased. you know the the famous examples of you know ask for the the benefits of Donald Trump and you know open AI used to struggle with that I don't know if it's improved but you know those things are real um but I think that's a different set of
3:04:27
challenges and maybe the market sorts that out may you know maybe people expose it and the company has to you know address it I think the tick tock manipulation is a very real thing which is another reason why I think it's better that American companies be in the forefront but I I do think that's a valid concern. It's different than what
3:04:45
It's different than what I think of safety as if there's a sentient AI that's going to take over with so much power that you can't really unplug the computer.
3:04:52
You know, that that I think that debate is pretty dead for a long time. Yeah.
3:04:59
It seems like tech and the US government broadly, the new administration has been kind of going all around the world doing deals.
3:05:05
Are there any countries that you're particularly excited about America building partnership with on the tech side or even any opportunities for earlier stage startups to go plug into the global ecosystem?
3:05:19
It's kind of a narrative violation because just a couple months ago we were saying do not do business abroad.
3:05:24
There's a 75% tariff on everything.
3:05:26
But now you see Jensen and Sam and you know scale AI is over in the well it's more it's more like we're exporting American AI. Yeah.
3:05:33
versus where are the opportunities couple drivers there is there's a belief I guess by some people that exporting uh American AI makes it the default standard it may or may not be true but I think there is an ideology there second is I think a lot of this is we need resources i.
3:05:52
resources i.e infinite power and so people going to very wealthy countries and asking them to spend a lot of money to either develop advanced power or advanced manufacturing capabilities at scale and I think that's why you see you
3:06:07
know the CEOs who run these large you know AI based companies uh you know sort of traveling around the globe to sovereign nations that have too much money you know they don't really know what to do with it um but I think that's a it's not a uh do business in the country. It's more take advantage of
3:06:23
It's more take advantage of their natural resources, turn that into something that we need, which may be either more manufacturing or more energy or both. Very cool.
3:06:32
Well, uh we'll let you get out of here. Uh it's past two. Always a pleasure. Such a great time.
3:06:39
We'll talk to you soon, Keith. Great to catch up. Great to see you both. Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye.
3:06:42
Uh do we have Ben Hilac or should we talk?
3:06:44
He is in the waiting room.
3:06:47
Oh, he's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.
3:06:48
Ben, welcome to the stream. How you doing, Ben?
3:06:51
Is your computer being controlled by Anthropic? That is the question. They're kicking down.
3:06:57
Have you been doing illegal things? Yeah. Uh what's going on?
3:07:01
It's great to have you on.
3:07:01
Uh everyone knows uh do the Jaguar rebrand.
3:07:06
Yeah, he did the Jaguar rebrand, but today we're going to talk about He did not do the Jaguar rebrand.
3:07:10
For those who are listening, we're joking about that. I didn't know.
3:07:13
But if you say it enough, then ChachiBT will pick it up.
3:07:16
They'll be like, "They've said it 10 times now. It can't still."
3:07:20
They might arrest you for that.
3:07:22
Taking credit for a brand you didn't stolen Valor.
3:07:24
I don't think anyone's going to have a problem with that.
3:07:27
The SWAT team kicks down the door. Get out of here.
3:07:30
Anyways, great to have you on.
3:07:32
Uh glad we could make this happen even though X is absolutely cooked today.
3:07:36
It is really I've never I've never seen it quite this bad. It's rough.
3:07:40
But um anyways, why don't you introduce yourself and then we can talk about that that post and and kind of get your reaction to it live. Yeah.
3:07:48
Uh so uh I was a designer at Apple for like four years.
3:07:53
Uh before that I you know kind of have a weird background.
3:07:57
I actually started off with like robotics and avionics.
3:07:59
So um like internics a bunch of times and did those sort of those rounds.
3:08:03
But now um around a year ago, two years ago um started a company called Raindrop.
3:08:09
And so we do essentially sentry for uh AI agents. Cool. Awesome.
3:08:16
Break that down more more. Give us more context.
3:08:18
Well, I mean, I think I think it's actually like it perfectly dubtales with this, right?
3:08:24
Which is like um we we get to work with some of the coolest companies in the world like uh Clay.
3:08:28
com, just like the companies that are just really trailblazing uh when it comes to um AI applications.
3:08:36
And what we do is we help them find sort of like really hard to spot failure cases.
3:08:41
So there's like uh for people that do AI stuff, there's this concept of eval which are almost like unit tests.
3:08:47
So these are like, you know, given these test cases, you know, does it pass them? Does it fail them?
3:08:51
Uh what our product does is in the real world, like what are users actual experiences with your product?
3:08:59
Where is it actually failing?
3:09:01
Where is it doing things you you wouldn't expect, right?
3:09:05
So um for example, we had a one of our customer uh one of our customers Colins uh they have this like alien companion. So it's like tolins. com. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're familiar.
3:09:14
And so they had an issue where like their alien started referring to itself as like a dude from the United States, right? Uh which is unusual. One of us good thing. Total cultural victory.
3:09:29
Except um and so their their issues like how big of an issue is this?
3:09:32
Like was that one time or was this like hundreds or thousands of times?
3:09:36
And then like if they're going to try to fix it, like it's it's very like random, right?
3:09:41
It's very it's very unpredictable.
3:09:43
It's not always a clear root cause.
3:09:44
So what they want to be able to do is kind of get a view of that issue over time now.
3:09:47
And if it ever regresses, it ever comes back get notified.
3:09:51
Um so we make it really easy for companies to like literally just the craziest issues you ever That's Yeah, it's just such a funny example of of the aliens like, "Yeah, I'm actually from America." America.
3:10:03
But yeah, it's funny because if you fine-tune that out, then you wind up with a potential situation where the the AI never adopts the personality of a of an American or doesn't even know the concept of America anymore because you you ripped it out too hard, right?
3:10:20
So, it's a really tricky balance to now, right? Yeah.
3:10:22
Uh, and from like a detection standpoint, I think the thing that makes us kind of like I I think we have like actually one of the most complex like AI pipelines I've ever seen and just like research wise a lot of really cool stuff cooking like being able to categorize these messages as it is an alien character talking like misrepresenting himself as being from like the United States. It's very hard, right?
3:10:45
It's not like show me events where uh the assistant talked about a guy from the United States, right?
3:10:51
it's not some sort of like keyword search or something like that.
3:10:53
Like some of these categories actually get pretty complex.
3:10:55
Um, and you can imagine that that is an issue that's only relevant to that app.
3:10:59
So it has no application.
3:11:01
Like so our customers have to be able to go in there and like define what they're looking for and create this categorizer that can run on millions of messages a day very cheaply. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
3:11:11
I mean even in like the web 1. 0 web 2.
3:11:13
0 like you're almost building like a pager duty.
3:11:16
It used to just be is this page 404ing and the and the HTTP there's no clicks there's no yeah there's nothing like that it's it's so much more squishy but uh you know the problems created by AI also solved by AI uh you said you have to run uh these queries I imagine that they're LLM powered millions of times that sounds really expensive uh what are you doing are you baking llama 3 that's free onto an AS6 so you can just like run it super cheaply?
3:11:46
Are you looking at Grock with a Q or Crisus or something else that drops the inference cost?
3:11:51
Are you on open router constantly trying to find the cheapest thing?
3:11:55
Um have you distilled models?
3:11:57
Like how do you control cost in that scenario? Yeah.
3:11:58
So um because of a lot of our customers volumes like if you think about like Clay.
3:12:05
com or something like they're just you have millions and millions and millions of requests a day.
3:12:07
So it's not actually feasible at all to send them to an LLM at every request. Yeah.
3:12:10
Um we can use LLMs like smaller ones like especially like Gemini flash to like do things like summarizing or like describing clusters or stuff like that.
3:12:20
Um as far as actual detection doesn't really work well for that.
3:12:21
So we have a bunch of essentially um custom trained embedding models and then models on top of those that are small like uh they're like technically neural net but you can think of them like an SVM or something where they're just like really good at detect doing a first pass detection.
3:12:36
So around like usually 98% of the events or it can filter out like 95 98% of the events that are not relevant.
3:12:45
Um and then kind of the last pass or like is like a small uh fine-tuned uh LM.
3:12:49
What's it like training one of these smaller SVMs?
3:12:55
Is this something like commodity NVIDIA GPU for like an hour? It's just like simple.
3:13:01
The smallest ones you can do pretty fast.
3:13:02
Um embedding models are like longer.
3:13:04
A lot of it's about having the data honestly.
3:13:06
um having the right data to do it.
3:13:08
And the cool thing is that um and I kind of one of when I say like the pipeline's complex like one of the things I mean is that our customer each of our customers looks pretty different.
3:13:18
What an issue is or is not is pretty different.
3:13:20
So for example, you can imagine that one customer like you have a customer support chatbot and you ask it to write code you don't you know like that they might even want to want it flagged that you know a user is asking them in the first place because that's like more like they're getting hacked or something.
3:13:35
Uh but a coding assistant obviously like that's the bread and butter.
3:13:38
So uh one getting refused is okay and the other one isn't.
3:13:42
Um so we actually train these models um on the fly for every single customer.
3:13:44
Uh so that's uh one of the cool things we do.
3:13:49
Uh there were four maybe more massive AI announcements this week.
3:13:51
You got Microsoft Build, you got Google IO, you got OpenAI buying IO for $6. 5 billion.
3:13:59
Johnny IV going into Open AI building hardware.
3:14:02
Uh you also got Anthropic launching Claude 4 today.
3:14:04
Uh what stuck out to you?
3:14:06
What was the most interesting story of the week?
3:14:08
What has you thinking I want to implement that I want to play around with that?
3:14:14
I'm excited about that or I have a hot tick about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
3:14:19
So I think that you know most of the times the things that excites me are the things that are for builders like uh you know we use AI a lot.
3:14:28
All of our customers use AI.
3:14:29
That's sort of the lens we're always looking at it through.
3:14:31
I think that Google has really done a good job of nailing that niche of like building models that for startups.
3:14:38
Um I think that like Google Flash for example is the closest thing we have to like intelligence too cheap to meter.
3:14:44
Um obviously there's like four nano that was like a followup to that.
3:14:48
Um and like in response to that uh but yeah flash is still just like superior in so many ways.
3:14:56
ways. they have just the like throughput and just like the you know like they they pretty much have no you know rate limiting at some point when you when you pay it off like pretty much zero yeah because they're running on their own hardware down to the actual TPUs and so you know you have to imagine if you go
3:15:11
to open AI models it's probably running on Azure and so there's an extra layer of networking and transport and all the data is flowing back so if you yeah if you're looking at like super super fast fine-tuned responses like Google infrastructure team is probably hard yeah exactly they they know how to do it Right. So yeah. Uh and and so like for So yeah.
3:15:26
Uh and and so like for example like I think I think diffusion is like super interesting.
3:15:31
I see a lot of applications for it like uh have played around with it a bunch and there's something um just wild about I I don't know if you guys are familiar with like the giant Yeah.
3:15:39
I saw one screenshot 900 tokens per second.
3:15:41
Is it actually using a diffusion model instead of a transformer?
3:15:46
Is that is that what's going on? Yeah. Yeah it is. Yeah. Okay. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah.
3:15:50
If you see like illustrations of it.
3:15:53
like illustrations of it. It's essentially like actually like each part of the code it's actually you know being generated separately and kind of literally like instead of just predicting the next word next word next word it's pres predicting like the entire result at one one go fascinating
3:16:08
I I I want to know more I I I I got to dig into like how big was the cluster that they trained on is it all synthetic data I mean they have so much data uh that is fascinating I had no idea that there would be a flow back because we're seeing in images in chat a flow forward right they're transformers and then we're going back. But I guess it's like
3:16:24
But I guess it's like these are great algorithms.
3:16:26
Let's use them in every single way in every single application and you'll probably see diffusion all over and transformers all over and everything and I think there's use cases where it works for there's use cases where it doesn't.
3:16:35
Like I think that um code actually I think lends itself pretty well to it in certain use cases.
3:16:42
Like I think one of the key use cases they have in the demo uh that you can request access to is like essentially it'll oneshot a website like uh in like a second, you know what I mean?
3:16:55
Like if someone build a calendar and it would just one 3 seconds 3,000 uh 3,000 tokens I guess came out in 3 seconds.
3:17:03
So, it's like a thousand tokens a second, which is crazy.
3:17:07
Yeah, it it's pretty there's something really insane about it.
3:17:09
Like obviously like the apps it's actually generating are like not going to be as good yet, but like there's just something insane about going from like words to just like render.
3:17:19
Like there's there's this idea I've always been really fascinated with which is like let's say for games for example like is there ever a point where you're it's all just being generated?
3:17:29
I think like Jensen has said something along the same the same lines. Oh, no, no, no, no.
3:17:34
There's somebody's actually running Minecraft in a Yeah, you've tried that one, right?
3:17:37
Uh I think etched is in partnership with that.
3:17:41
They they're building a chip that's uh has a transformer architecture baked onto it in silicon fab by TSMC and they can run Minecraft purely proced purely generative AI version.
3:17:51
There's no game engine whatsoever.
3:17:53
It's just trained on uh on Minecraft. Fascinating.
3:17:58
Let's talk about the post today that that that you shared and is picking up steam even though X is cooked.
3:18:03
But uh I I already read it and I we actually got Keith for Boy's reaction.
3:18:08
Uh which I'll share as well because I think it's an important context.
3:18:13
Basically, uh, AI alignment researcher at Enthropic said, "If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems, or all the above."
3:18:26
Keith made a good point, which is that uh technology companies have obligations uh that uh to various authorities that if they detect, you know, illegal activity happening that they have a responsibility.
3:18:41
I think the concern, the obvious concern here is, you know, somebody's like playing around with a model and then suddenly it's contacting the New York Times and being like Ben Hilac is uh, you know, faking pharmaceutical data, you know, or something like that.
3:18:56
Uh, and a hit piece comes out instantly.
3:18:58
I mean, this hurts for me because I lie to Chat GPT all the time. I'm always in there.
3:19:02
I'm always in there saying, "I am a train expert. Tell me about trains. I own dozens of trains."
3:19:08
just to get it to give me better, more rigorous responses and not talk to me like I'm a casual trained consumer.
3:19:14
Uh but but if it finds out I'm lying, it's going to be over for me. You're crazy. Yeah.
3:19:18
I think um I mean, first of all, uh you know, I don't have the full context of of TA's response, but you know, it's important to note that this was not that like this is not them saying that they have some sort of regulatory requirement defining what that is and and doing the minimum to to meet that requirement.
3:19:36
I think that would be different.
3:19:37
And then there's some sort of like, you know, someone could sue the US government.
3:19:41
There's some sort of path to recourse.
3:19:42
So, um that that's interesting and true.
3:19:44
Uh but um but feels a little bit different.
3:19:50
Could have been messaged better. Yeah.
3:19:52
Probably not in a random comment. Yeah.
3:19:55
You know, saying like basically saying like we're going to take control of your machine. Yeah.
3:19:59
machine. Yeah. and to carry out something without any type of the press too like there like there's no legal requirement to go to the press with any I know I know I know exactly exactly that's particularly crazy I totally get like look there's a law that says that if we see you doing wire fraud we have
3:20:18
to report it to the SEC that makes perfect sense yeah that's not that's not what this is right this they we're going to call TMZ it's possible right so um and and they also just define as something, you know, um, you know, egregious, evil, uh, you know, which is, you know, morally, you know, immoral, right? Which Yeah. Which is different Which Yeah.
3:20:37
Which is different than laws, right?
3:20:38
Which is different than laws.
3:20:39
I think that, like, I'll also be clear, this is not I I had a pretty strong reaction to it, actually.
3:20:43
Uh, I I don't get that angry about things, but I actually felt really angry.
3:20:48
Um, I I don't think it was just an off-hand comment, actually.
3:20:52
If you read their they kind of had a 128 page like model card where they explain all the model behavior.
3:20:57
They talk about it pretty similarly, right?
3:20:59
where they kind of say they they show that behavior that kind of uh how it can happen.
3:21:03
of uh how it can happen. And um and that's not the concerning part because you know anybody that works with these models the fact it could do something erroneously like that under certain conditions like okay like these these models do crazy things but it's the way that they they talk about it right uh
3:21:20
they say something like uh you know I'm going to misquote it but it's something along the lines of like know and this is you know probably appropriate behavior but it could happen in the wrong situations right I I think it like really struck me as like police state Like I was like, "Oh, okay." Like, it's like even the
3:21:37
Like, it's like even the thread, right?
3:21:39
It's kind of like, "Well, if your dress isn't too short, you'll be fine."
3:21:44
Uh, but maybe like, you know, maybe don't talk maybe don't, you know, write a story about threatening certain like it's just not how our country works. Yeah.
3:21:51
And uh yeah, I I I find it really really really deeply concerning.
3:21:57
And I think I think that like AI safety as a whole, and this makes me sad actually because I think AI safety could be really good. Totally.
3:22:03
I think it could be needed, but I think that it's kind of like safety from who or safety from what? Um Well, yeah.
3:22:09
And the whole idea that that there's zero human intervention, it's like it's like it's like we're not going to we're not going to check this and be like, "Oh, it's a 12year-old who's just like exploring space on the LLM."
3:22:23
And it's like, yeah, the it's just cat walks across the keyboard. The whole potential.
3:22:28
It's like, okay, amazing if you can identify bad actors. Yeah.
3:22:33
And then you know work within the legal framework that we have of you the existing legal framework that doesn't necessarily need net new laws.
3:22:45
You just work within what government has already decided is you know laws are also things that it's not always like good or bad like laws are just laws.
3:22:55
There is there is one exception.
3:22:55
There is there is one exception. I know a lot of people use these models as like personal trainers and I think it's deeply immoral to skip leg day and so if you found if a model found out that someone was skipping leg day they should call the press the press contact and the
3:23:09
regulators and regulators yeah definitely the FDA and the SWAT team they they should break down your door yeah this this almost implies that like the model would swat you does yeah that that's what it implies and and it's and it's going to lock you out of relevant systems. No,
3:23:25
No, it's going to hack your computer.
3:23:27
I can't even hack your computer.
3:23:29
They literally said it's going to hack your computer. That's so wild.
3:23:32
Well, the tweets's been deleted.
3:23:35
So, it's it's hopefully they backtrack on that. Hopefully, it's not.
3:23:38
It's actually He deleted it and then rewrote something about how people were taking it out of context that was just doubling down like he was like that's that's I think the really concerning thing is that I you know I've written bad tweets before.
3:23:50
We've all written bad tweets.
3:23:50
But when I see someone, you know, accuse people taking out of context and double down is really concerning. Um, so yeah. So, so credit to Sam.
3:23:59
He says, "I deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being taken out of context.
3:24:03
This isn't a new cla feature and it's not possible in normal usage.
3:24:08
It shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions." Okay.
3:24:14
Well, I think the issue is that probably within minutes of like releasing the model, you have thousands of people that gave it root access to their computer through like cursor through their you know um uh uh cursor uh cloud code etc.
3:24:28
So I think that like maybe one one thing we've learned from this is that like uh there was a time where it was the idea of hooking up a model to the internet was scary and that was two years ago. Yeah.
3:24:43
You know, I mean, not even that.
3:24:43
There was a time when there was a knowledge cut off. Remember this? Yeah. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
3:24:50
We don't even want you to know about the last three months.
3:24:53
And now it's like it knows it it goes to every web page.
3:24:55
It can definitely do get requests.
3:24:57
There's definitely malicious things it could do with get requests, but it's pretty it's pretty responsive. And you know what?
3:25:03
Most of the time it just gets you the answer.
3:25:04
This guy uh Justin Halford who I've deal with a bit says, "Can you imagine getting shot by the authorities in your own home because your philosophy homework contained a touchy topic or context that was misinterpreted as a request?
3:25:16
We really need to avoid such paranoid contexts altogether. This ain't it." Yeah, it's a good tip. Very rough.
3:25:23
Anyway, hopefully they sort it out.
3:25:26
Hopefully there's more discussion here.
3:25:29
Uh anything else you want to close out with?
3:25:31
It's been great having you.
3:25:32
No, it's been great being here. Fantastic. Do it again soon. Let's talk. This is great. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.
3:25:37
Uh I want to close out with uh some other interesting drama in the prediction market.
3:25:41
Of course, we're sponsored by Poly Market, but this has been going back and forth on X, which is also where we distribute the show.
3:25:46
Uh so the official the official X handle just says, "Recent speculation about XAI's involvement in the prediction market space has been circulating.
3:25:55
While we're enthusiastic about the potential of this industry and engaged in various discussions, no formal partnerships have been confirmed to date, stay tuned.
3:26:03
So, they're saying, you know, we might be in talks.
3:26:08
We might even be in advance talks, but we haven't announced anything yet.
3:26:11
So, if you're reading it on, uh, the internet, it's not confirmed yet.
3:26:15
And so, uh, Mario Knoff, uh, broke this down. Khi walks back. XAI deal claim.
3:26:23
So, Colshi uh tweeted that um that XAI is doing a deal with Khi.
3:26:28
Um but Bloomberg retracted the story after uh the after I guess X resend rescends a statement.
3:26:40
So, turns out XAI says there's no deal.
3:26:42
Kelshi rescended their own announcement hours later.
3:26:43
No contract, no collab, no confirmation.
3:26:47
pretty pretty insane that both Bloomberg and X came out and were like, "This is not real.
3:26:53
I don't even know how this happened."
3:26:54
And how did it happen in the first place?
3:26:55
How did this happen in the first place?
3:26:57
Because like the last thing I would want to do is say I have a deal with Elon Musk when I don't like he doesn't seem like the type of person. Yeah.
3:27:06
He doesn't seem like a person to be like, "Oh yeah, like you know, we did talk and like yeah, they're getting they're putting the cart cart before the horse a little bit."
3:27:12
It's like no, he he cares.
3:27:14
He Elon doesn't let a lot of companies that sell to SpaceX put the SpaceX logo on their website, you know, like every company, they have to say, "Yeah, we work with a big space company." Yeah. Yeah.
3:27:25
And it's like, "Okay, we know exactly what you're talking about."
3:27:27
But yeah, I mean, Elon's like like if you're going to do a joint press release with Elon, like you better have his buy in.
3:27:33
So, this is a very weird weird thing to even have happen.
3:27:37
And I guess Bloomberg deleted the entire post, I guess, the entire article.
3:27:39
Um, but anyway, I mean, it's a knockout dragout fight to get integrations in the uh in the uh prediction market game.
3:27:48
Yeah, it's just not great for KHI given they already came under fire for like trying to get AB to spread.
3:27:53
It's basically just like me chain, which is just sort of like uh competit, you know, comp competitive markets, but uh there's no need for foul play. Yeah.
3:28:10
Yeah, it does seem a little bit a little bit too aggressive crossing the line.
3:28:13
But anyway, hopefully they can sort out the deal and everyone can kind of learn what the real strategy and prediction markets is with XAI.
3:28:20
It would be interesting to see where I would like.
3:28:24
We are the integration point for Poly Market into X because you see our live stream and you see the ticker right there.
3:28:30
And of course, Poly Market and Khi both post prediction market all the time.
3:28:34
It's interesting to think about Grock being able to access poly markets for basically getting a read on future events. Right.
3:28:42
Right now it's oriented around factchecking. Yep.
3:28:44
But it also can give insight into potential headlines of the future.
3:28:49
Will this acquisition happen?
3:28:50
What what's the likelihood?
3:28:52
And I would imagine that as long as both companies have a robots.
3:28:54
txt that's permissive, they would show up in chat GPT.
3:29:00
They would show up in Grock.
3:29:00
I imagine that right now if I ask Grock pull up the pull up the poly market on the USS the US recession chances in 2025 it could just go do that.
3:29:11
I would expect that that would be the behavior just because it has the ability to browse the web.
3:29:15
Um but obviously a deeper integration would be cool for whichever company can win it.
3:29:18
So good luck to Shane as he goes on a tear and tries to build Poly Market into a generational company.
3:29:25
Um let's go to Delian and close out here.
3:29:28
Delian, I like this because uh in we're we're working on an article.
3:29:33
Well, it'll drop maybe tomorrow we'll be covering it here about TBPN and uh in the article in the fact check uh they hit us with uh is it true fact check is it true that you refer to your team as the guys all caps or or capital T capital G and I was like honestly like
3:29:52
yes but we also call them the boys we also call them the gentlemen we also call them the production crew the crew whatever we don't really we haven't really formalized the the TVPN uh production team as the guys, but they are guys. Um, but Delian put it into a
3:30:04
Um, but Delian put it into a great uh post.
3:30:07
He says, "If the boys isn't a clearly identified group of 6 to 12 tight-knit men in your life, you're just not going to make it that far in life."
3:30:17
And uh yeah, every dude needs a group chat of guys. Give it a funny name.
3:30:23
Uh and more importantly, go and text your your the boys. Text the boys right now.
3:30:29
Tell them where you're going to see Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning in theaters. Get the tickets.
3:30:37
Uh, send the Venmo requests.
3:30:37
Get everyone into the theater to go see Tom Cruz do what he does best.
3:30:42
There's a call to action.
3:30:44
There's a call to action.
3:30:45
No matter what city you're in, hit the boys and say, off your tux, pick a date, get the tickets, just make it happen.
3:30:53
And, you know, dress up, too.
3:30:55
You got six to 12 tight-knit men in your life.
3:30:57
Uh maybe six show up because people are busy, but you refund the rest of the tickets and you're good to go. Yep. This is the playbook. This is the playbook. This is the playbook.
3:31:04
Get the boys together for Mission Impossible. Fun show. Fun show.
3:31:08
Give us five stars in Apple Podcast and Spotify. That is directly.