All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Can the AI Industry Regulate Itself? Stripe Wants PayPal, China Catches Up, NY Bans Datacenters

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, welcome back to the world's greatest podcast, the number one podcast, your favorite podcast, the All-In Podcast. I'm Jason Cali Kellenis, the world's greatest moderator with me, of course. Chimoth Pali Hoppetita. The great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchild, Jason was of a hooker. You saw that from a prisoner? And a purse snatcher. This comes from like a history of France.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Some history panel said they let you add. This was the deal in 1719, Sacks. If you're a prisoner in Paris, you were offered your freedom on the condition that you marry a prostitute and move to the great state of Louisiana. What are you saying? So actually taking the deal? It explains a certain of your proclivities, J.

Starting point is 00:00:51 I thought you were asking me to see if they would extend the rule for you. No, I'm saying that you're great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, I'm not French. I'm Greek. That's what I'm saying. Very explicitly. She was a hooker. We never spent time in a prison.

Starting point is 00:01:05 Also, of course, David Freeberg is here. How you doing, brother? Living the dream. Good to be back. I missed you guys last week. How was Brad? How did he fill in? That was great.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Yeah. Yeah. Trump account victory lap. He had a little victory lap. We played chariots of fire. And how was your special time at Blank? And your time next week at Blank. Thanks for having me on your show, Jigal.

Starting point is 00:01:32 All right, we got a full docket today. Lots of stories. Let's start with Deep Mines. Demis Hesabas just dropped an AI regulation proposal, and it's pretty popular with the boys. In an ex-article, Demis called for a U.S.-led international AI standards body. Proposal is modeled after FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. That's a self-regulatory body, and this would be federally overseen, but industry funded and run by

Starting point is 00:02:05 independent technological experts. Frontier Labs would submit their models 30 days before release, and it would be voluntary initially, then mandatory at some point. The models would be assessed on risk to cybersecurity, national security, biological threats, and other high-risk domains. Benchmarks would be updated quarterly, and the body can coordinate a slow date. down in development if the situation demands. I guess that would be if there was a cyber risk, et cetera. Looks like on the positive side, we have Elon who said it was thoughtful, Sam and Open AI, Jack Clark at Anthropics, Sundar, Satya,

Starting point is 00:02:48 Jack Dorsey from Block, the Carlson brothers. So, Freiburg, your thoughts on Oh, well, way to really put in the effort today. Go ahead, Jason. Good. Just pass it to me, Jim. I'll take care of it. Go ahead.

Starting point is 00:03:05 Let me, what do you want me to do. Oh, my God. What an incredible topic. Give me the mic. All right. Here, let me do it. You want me to do it right? Three, two.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Some of us actually care about this topic. Let's go. Okay, yeah, you care about it. Okay, here we go. Three, two. Here's a clip of me calling it on the All In Podcasts first. The whole industry is going to need to be regulated. And I think the industry needs to regulate themselves.

Starting point is 00:03:26 That's the key to this. We need to have a set of tests that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, all agree to, Elon. Hey, these are the things we should test, and they should self-certify each model before asking the government, which doesn't understand the models to certify them. The industry should have an industry certification like they do for countless other things. I've talked about the NPA and the video game industry. We should just self-certify. It's a simplest thing in the world to do. And then we could release the models ourselves without the government getting involved.

Starting point is 00:03:58 Greg, would you like to congratulate me on nailing it again? Well, first of all, first of all, I thought that Demis's proposal was really smart and thoughtful. Now that I know that you may have shared the same thought, I think we should just do something to a way different. I can't win, Sachs. Even when I nail it, I hit a half-course shot, Chamon's like, move the net. Move the net. I think it's worth putting a little definition around this proposal, which is to form an SRO self-regulatory organization because they're not purely independent. SROs like FINRA and the National Futures Association,

Starting point is 00:04:31 they exist in the financial markets, and they were created to allow the financial institutions to set their regulatory rules, how they check each other, how they make sure that everyone is being safe because they're obviously all trading risk with one another. So the industry doesn't want to have exposure, and they certainly don't want to have things get slowed down

Starting point is 00:04:50 because that would make the market's inefficient. So the analogy with AI is pretty appropriate here, which is that there are many players, in the industry, they are all trying to progress AI technology, and no one wants to have a single regulatory body that comes in from the government or outside that says, here are the tests you guys have to pass with your models in order for them to be appropriate. As we saw in California, when California tried to pass AI legislation, I think it was about a year, a year and a half ago, none of what they wrote even made sense at the time, but fast forward a year, none of those

Starting point is 00:05:23 kind of rules and requirements actually mapped to the technology of the day. So the purpose of an SRO like FINRA and NFA is they can adjust how tests are being run, who is actually running the test and make sure the right experts are involved in doing this, independent experts, that is, to do the testing with federal government oversight, but not control. So in the case of FINRA NFA, they report up ultimately to Senate Committee and House Committee that gives those committees oversight of those governing bodies that are supposed to be doing the work to make sure that they're doing their friggin' jobs. So the SRO concept would be that experts could be brought in from industry that know how to assess

Starting point is 00:06:03 models for things like cyber risk, for things like bio risk, for things like weapons risk, social manipulation, et cetera, et cetera. That independent body can get voted on, can get changed over time. And because they actually have expertise in running software valves and running tests like this, they can operate at a faster pace than setting up a new government agency. So it's kind of a very elegant solution. And I think it's why everyone, to your point, Jay, Cal, and I'll say this is right,

Starting point is 00:06:31 the industry recognizes that there needs to be some degree of oversight and checkpoints here. And I think that this could actually solve that problem. So that's why I think everyone's kind of climbing on board with it, because it doesn't actually hand stuff over to the government. It says, hey, we're going to get the right people to take a look at these things. And the government is going to have oversight ultimately.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Did Anthropic and Open AI have a point of view? They both signed up to it. I don't think Dario directly, but Dario's president gave his thumbs up, and then I think Sam gave his thumbs up. Which means they're on board. Sachs, is this the best of the possibilities in your mind, is the industry regulating itself after they have now provoked governments around the world to be so concerned about this issue?

Starting point is 00:07:16 Yeah, and I talked to Demas about this, and this may surprise people, but I told them that I could potentially get on board with this. Speaking just for myself, not on behalf of anyone on the government, because I thought that an SRO, again, a self-regulatory approach should be infinitely better than creating a new government agency that I think would rapidly become a DMV for AI. Dario calls it an FAA for AI. The government does not have the expertise to evaluate AI models. The criteria are changing too rapidly. You're going to very rapidly

Starting point is 00:07:48 end up with a queue where all the models would be waiting to get tested and it would start with a month-long delay, it would end up being many months, and we would just lose AI race. So I think an SRO approach would be infinitely better than that if it was done right. And I outlined for Demis five criteria or conditions that I thought were really important in order to make this work. And if I could, I'll just run through them. All right. So number one, I think the SRO has to have broad representation from within the industry,

Starting point is 00:08:20 the AI industry. it has to include startups and open source. It can't just be the three biggest labs, you know. Can't just be Google. Yeah, exactly. And that's precisely to avoid the problem of regulatory capture, right? If you have a diverse enough group of interest being represented, it's much harder for this to turn into red capture.

Starting point is 00:08:41 So for example, I think if you had Jensen, Elon, Zuck, and maybe Mira, because she just launched a very interesting open way platform that's based on open source. Yes, exactly. Then that, I think, would address the red capture problem to a large degree. So that's number one. Number two is, I think that this body should only be reviewing frontier models, meaning the true frontier, the models that really represent an advance in the state of the art of artificial intelligence. And models below this level should not be held up from getting to market. And I do think that is a big risk under regulations is that the leader, in the market use this as a way to tie up lesser models. And there's no reason. If a model is not at the frontier, why hold it up? Okay. So they have to be in maybe the top 10 performers, top 20 performers on the benchmark test. I think when they benchmark on key dimensions of intelligence, they have to represent an increase above where the current state of the art is. If it's not a step change, then how are you dealing with some new incremental risk, right? I mean,

Starting point is 00:09:45 this is all about dealing with some sort of incremental catastrophic risk that could be introduced by some new step change in intelligence. And that brings me to number three, which is I think this body should be dealing with catastrophic risk only. And to my knowledge, those right now are cyber and CBRN, meaning it's chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear. So it should not be things, for example, like disinformation or microaggressions. This should not become a speech regulator, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:14 or just things that seem kind of trivial. The only reason to have this is for truly catastrophic risk. So that's number three. Number four, and Devin's mentioned this in his post, is that I think it should be voluntary first. This new organization should prove it works before it gets legally enshrined and becomes mandatory. And then number five is this should be a substitute for a new regulatory agency. If it's just additive, then it defeats the purpose and there's no real reason to support it. So again, I think this has to be a substitute, not in addition to a bunch of, new regulatory structures. So I think if you did those five things, I think this becomes much more palatable. And Demas said, I mean, he didn't put all these points in his blog post, but he did say to me that he thought those were good ideas. So I think if those notes were adopted, this is something that we potentially get on board with. That doesn't mean I don't still have concerns. I'm quite concerned, for example, that, you know, I think Dario has expressed support for this. However, I think this is just an

Starting point is 00:11:19 opening bid for Anthropic, meaning they'll take this. Thank you very much. This is more regulation than we have today. But that won't be the end of it, right? This will just be the stepping stone to get what Dario has now called for many times, which is the FAA for AI. And if I could, let me just, as a final point, I just want to explain what the FAA does because people need to understand, you know, FAA for AI sounds really nice, but actually it's a really extreme proposal. What the FAA does, among other things, is approve new airplane designs. Okay. And specifically, it requires what's called a type certification for any new aircraft design or

Starting point is 00:11:57 major changes. And for an entirely new aircraft design, it takes five to nine years to get the certification. And if you merely want to amend a certificate, I guess for, you know, major changes, or I'm not even sure how major the changes need to be, it takes three to five years. So the Boeing 737 Max, for example, took about five years. So this is permission-based regulation. There's no approval, no flying commercially. It's safety first.

Starting point is 00:12:27 Look, that might make sense in the case of preventing plane crashes. But when you're talking about AI models, you're talking about replacing a system that is releasing new versions every couple of months with one that is potentially fully under the control of government, fully government approved. everything has to be certified and you could expect the timeline to go from months to years. Again, I think we'll just simply lose AI race if that happens because China's not going to abide by those rules. So just to sum up, if my choices are between FAA for AI or what I would call the DMV for AI, I would much rather go for Demis's SRO for AI, the self-regulatory approach, but we really have to keep it honest and pure because, again, otherwise it will just be the opening bid in a coming new wave of regulation. And it will be the vehicle for massive regulatory

Starting point is 00:13:19 capture. And to your point, it can't restrict open source. Yeah. Can't restrict open source. I think that's so important because all of these other efforts require money that you have to spend, which is always where regulatory capture happens. And you have to enable startups and open source to compete effectively. Chimath, any thoughts on this new self-governing body? I think it's really important. And I hope it happens quickly. The thing we have to keep in mind is there's going to be a torrent of money that's going to try to influence both sides of the political aisle to regulate this in a way that creates some form of regulatory capture. We just don't know what. And so the faster we avoid that off-ramp by actually establishing a set of rules and superseding the need for federal

Starting point is 00:14:11 oversight is a really important thing. Now, at the end of the day, you still have federal oversight in some ways because you still have commerce that plays a huge role in these standards. You still have the DOJ. So it's not as if it's going to be a Wild West, but what it prevents is a handful of actors using their balance sheets and their capital to essentially pull the ladder up. And I think if that happens, we're in a really bad place. So I think Demis's proposal makes a ton of sense, and we should just get on with it. Right. Right. Yes, provided, I mean, again, just provided that I think we make sure that, I mean, look, in my view, there are five conditions, but I think we do have to make sure it's pure. Even in the FINRA example, that's the analogy that Demis used was that we should set this up in the same way that FINRA set up.

Starting point is 00:14:58 FINRA does report in ultimately to the government or reports into the SEC. And so, you know, if we are going to step this new SRO, where is it going to report to in the government? there's going to be a huge food fight over that, and it will then be subject to political pressure. The software industry has never been regulated in that way. We do not have a dedicated regulator for software. I think you're right. But those issues are important. But my point is, I'm just saying these things are never ideal. But if the choices are we kill open source and we ladder pull the entire market so there's a duopoly, or there's this, I'd say this. For sure. And that's, you. And that's the crux of my argument is it's definitely the lesser of two evils.

Starting point is 00:15:42 I'm not sure those are the only two choices. But increasingly, there's no question that the pressure is coming to regulate AI more and more. And frankly, this all goes back to Anthropics government relations effort. They poke the tiger. Yeah. Well, it's more than that. They're funding the meat for the tiger. Yeah, I want to give an update on that, actually.

Starting point is 00:16:02 I would say poking the tiger of like the American public getting really freaked out and then the government stepping in. Yeah. Totally. And there's a couple of data points on that, actually. I just want to give a quick update. So in October of last year, I tweeted that Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear mongering. And everyone kind of went crazy over this. This was again like a very hot take or spicy take at the time. Back then, people thought that I was beating up on a little startup. Now I think everyone can kind of see the truth, which is, look, this is not a little startup. They already have a trillion dollar market cap valuation. Gavin Baker thinks it'll be at three trillion after the IPO. this is actually one of the biggest of the big tech companies, and they are, I think, by pretty much every criteria, including revenue, the leading AI company. So I think people can see now that they have enormous resources, and they're putting those resources behind an effort to, like Chmoth, you said, pull up the ladder, and it's classic regulatory capture. And there was an article in Politico, just the other day, is called Inside Anthropics State-by-State Plan

Starting point is 00:17:03 to ratchet up AI rules. And what it says is, quote, AI Giant Anthropic is pursuing a strategy of one upmanship that encourages states to impose increasingly tougher AI guardrails rather than align around a single set of regulations. So the basic idea is that they get a set of regulations passed in one state like California's SB 53, and that was then supposed to be the model, at least for all the blue states, but then with each new state, they actually make the regulations more and more strict, more and more all-encompassing. So there's not actually a stable equilibrium. What they're trying to do is drive each incremental state to more and more regulations.

Starting point is 00:17:43 And so this is actually an article explaining that they're doing the opposite of trying to create what we wanted, which was a single national framework. They actually want the patchwork because they're using, again, the pressure they're creating at the state level to impose more and more regulations. And again, what I said last year was that Anthropic was principally responsible for the state regulatory. frenzy that is damaging the sharp ecosystem. Again, everyone went crazy at the time. I think now there's plenty of evidence showing this is their agenda. And by the way, they're going to win that because states have great sovereignty rights and like we're seeing what self-driving. The states are going to decide it's not going to be a federal mandate. The states get to decide just the nature of the US. They're going to win on that in a couple of states, right, Sachs? They've won in a bunch of

Starting point is 00:18:33 States. They're one in California and Illinois and New York. And I mean, they're winning in all the blue states and maybe even some red states. But look, ultimately, the reason why Anthropics arguments are finding purchase is because when you go to the government and say, please regulate me, you know, you should have more power. There is hardly anyone in government will ever say, oh, no, no, no, we're not qualified. Like, we don't want that power. We're for less government. Yeah. There are very a few people who are principled that way. And most people in the government will say, thank you very much. What else can we take? And this is the mistake that I think a lot of people in the tech industry are making is they think that they can just buy off politicians of the

Starting point is 00:19:10 political system by making concessions. No, that will just lead to a ratching up of the pressure. The government will be happy to take this and then come back for more and more and more until it's fully under government control. So at some point, I think these companies are going to have to grow a spine and fight and decide where they're willing to draw a line. And if Demis's SRO is the line, if they're saying, okay, we think this is the right solution and we're going to fight here, and this has to be it. And in exchange for this, we need preemption and we need other things written into law that make sure this is where the line is, then I think it can work. But I think if you're just kind of offering it up for free and all these companies are just going to say,

Starting point is 00:19:51 oh, yeah, regulates, give us the SRO. That will not be the end of it. That will just be the opening bid and the government will come back to take more and more and more. Yeah. All right. Let's keep moving through the docket here. Stripe, which is still a private company, much to the chagrin of many of the shareholders, I think, now is they going to their second day on this? Yes. I mean, I'm in a couple of funds that have large positions, like go public, boys. They are bidding, bidding. Fifty-three billion for your alma mater, David Sachs, PayPal, which is a public company, Stripe and the private Equity Fund Advent are jointly offering to acquire PayPal for about 60 bucks a share, which is a premium. Most people may go for more like $70 a share. PayPal stock jumped on the news,

Starting point is 00:20:38 obviously. Were you able to get to the bottom of this that was it just Stripe and Advent because then somebody else reported that it was also Block? Yes, Block is coming in as well. It's so confusing. Every other media sources like they're all over the place. of this. Yeah, no, I think it's because there's a breaking story and maybe they were trying to keep it quiet. It's a huge deal, though, if Block is a part of it versus if they're not, I think. Yes, and Block formerly known as Square is Jack Dorsey's payment company, one of the few entrepreneurs to ever create two deck accordance in our industry. And they're contributing $17 billion in equity in the combined offer. How they chop up what's inside of PayPal would be the big question.

Starting point is 00:21:23 Obviously, they own, you know, a number of different brands, including Venmo in addition to PayPal. That might go really well with the, I'm just taking a guess here, with the block assets. Stripe owns Bridge. That's their stable coin infrastructure company they acquired for a billion dollars in 2025. PayPal has SIUSD, which is already in circulation. That's their stablecoin. So stable coins are part of this. But the biggest thing is PayPal is still a juggernaut, Sacks, 430.

Starting point is 00:21:53 9 million consumer accounts. You did something right there 25 years ago. It's still the test of time. It's kind of amazing. It really is. It's amazing that it's still that strong. Yeah. It's weird when brands keep going for that long.

Starting point is 00:22:07 But the problem is that the product is getting very long in the tooth. I think it's only growing 7% a year, which is a lot on the base that it's grown to. It's a big base. But the product has become somewhat obsolete. And in a way, it's a legacy product. I'd be curious to hear from the Stripe guys how they would fix that. I think that's a very hard problem to fix. Maybe they wouldn't.

Starting point is 00:22:29 Maybe they would just run it more efficiently and kind of milk it for all its worth. I think there's a different question. Kind of do a private equity play. The different question. What's the interesting question to ask is, what is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are, creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.

Starting point is 00:22:57 Because you now have upwards of six or 700 million accounts. You have massive stable coin infrastructure. You have all of the risk management infrastructure that Stripe is built over the last 15 or 20 years. The big critique of Stripe's business model early on was they had to build so many value-added services because everybody always thought the take that they could make as a middleman sitting on top of the traditional rails would effectively get competed away. Now, to their credit, they've done such a good job that that hasn't happened.

Starting point is 00:23:32 But I think what it means now is you can vertically integrate and go soup to nuts. That is probably the most obvious thing to make out of it so that now Stripe gets access to an ultra low cost set of payment rails literally like to zero, brings it everywhere all over the world. So does block, Advent can pour money into it. So it's quite powerful if it comes together. Brubberg, what does this say about private market companies at scale and Stripe potentially never going public? I mean, how does a private equity firm get their return on this investment in two, three, four years? Do they wind up selling more of it to Stripe? What are your thoughts here on the structuring capital market implications here? I think there's going to be more of these

Starting point is 00:24:19 kinds of deals. If you look at Ryan Cohen's bid for eBay, I think it's probably a second dot on a line that I think is emerging, which is folks that are, call it AI Native, are looking at, call it first generation digital native businesses that have become mature and old and stale and aren't run by the founders anymore and have not yet realized the opportunities with AI, have not yet realize their potential or overspending in a lot of ways. And when you take a look at those businesses as a modern day AI operator, you're like, what the hell? This thing is so underutilized. They're not using their network well. They're not operating well. They're overspending. They're not using AI well. And there's a set of opportunities that become quite obvious. And I think the capital

Starting point is 00:25:12 markets, as we've seen with like Josh Kushner's roll up of accounting firms and General Catalyst has a project like this where you can kind of use capital to go by, you know, in those cases, traditional services businesses and AIify them. I think this is part of a line of maybe looking at traditional digital businesses and AIifying them. And there's a long list of these. There's a couple dozen of them. So I think if you looked at the public markets and you said, hey, where are all these kind of software companies, network businesses that emerged in the early part of the internet or even in the more recent part of the internet aren't run by their founders anymore have stalled out, there's a massive opportunity. Now, the question as a capital provider is

Starting point is 00:25:55 who do you partner with to go and execute that operational revival of that business? You're not going to go hire some McKinsey consultant to do that work for you. It's got to be the best of the best. It's got to be the right players in the business. So I think Ryan Cohen has proved his medal, obviously, with some of the things that he's done with Chewy and GameStop, and that's obviously debatable. I spent some time interviewing him to understand his processes. This was on the all-in interview program. You can go to our channel and find it there as last month. Thanks for the plug.

Starting point is 00:26:24 And obviously when it comes to payments, who better than Stripe? And maybe Jack Dorsey plays a role here. And by the way, I think because capital, I mean, if you think about that $17 billion equity contribution, what that technically means is Stripe is selling and Block is selling $17 billion of equity to the cash investors. that cash is then going to buy a PayPal. Therefore, Stripe and Block end up owning a piece of PayPal.

Starting point is 00:26:53 The private equity investors own a piece of Block and Stripe. And what is not clear in the deal docs that were published, because I don't think it's relevant to the public markets, is who's actually going to operate PayPal post-close. And my bet would be that they're going to hand it over to the Stripe guys and say, you guys go for it. Yeah, because they're the most qualified. and they will have the biggest stake in it.

Starting point is 00:27:17 So I will make a prediction. I think that eBay and PayPal are probably the beginning of a wave of mega deals, of call it flaccid, you know, digital businesses. You have to match attention. That can be revived. Okay. With the blue chew of capital and the right operator, again, I think that there's probably a big wave of this to come.

Starting point is 00:27:39 The other thing is this is probably not the final clearing price. I think the price is probably another 10 to 15% higher from here. And I will say that there is a certain individual that must look very closely at putting in a competitive bid. Oh, a certain individual who may have his fingerprints on the original PayPal, who might also have $4 or $5 trillion in market cap to play with, who also made a $60 billion acquisition. recently we don't have inside information here. To your point, Freiburg, correct.

Starting point is 00:28:19 This is becoming a playbook. There's a company called Bending Spoons that just went public. They bought a bunch of non-founder-led assets. AOL for $1.4 billion. Vimeo for $1.4 billion. We transfer event bright. Brite code. Tom, have you no time with him?

Starting point is 00:28:34 I was just deemming with him. He's awesome. I've hung out with this guy. This guy is an absolute friggin operational killer. He, you know, he bought Evernote. Yeah, in Milan. Yeah, he runs the whole thing from Milan. He bought Evernote, and he just goes in and he diagnoses these businesses.

Starting point is 00:28:50 He's like, how are they being over? Where are you overspending? Where are you under spending? What are you doing wrong with the product? And what are you doing wrong with marketing? And he just frigging fixes it. And he's just a killer. And he's taken all of these what we're called Web 2.0 businesses,

Starting point is 00:29:01 and he's revitalized them, rolled them up and printing cash out of them. And lowers the cost to run them. And lower the cost. He's using young AI first executives from what I'm told. Totally, it's a great call out, Jekyll. Like, bending spoons is the roll-up of this sort of strategy. But for these mega deals, I think there's more of them to come. I will say, you know, the higher order bit here, which we talked about for a couple of years,

Starting point is 00:29:25 was venture capital was on the ropes for a couple of years under the wrath of Lena Khan. And then once Trump got elected, all the executives working in corporate development said, hey, looks like M&A's back on the menu. And now we're seeing deal after deal, after deal, get consummated. people are no longer scared of doing deals. Uber just bought delivery hero today. That's going to like jump their revenue by 20. Yeah, and that's going to jump their revenue by like they're getting diluted 10%.

Starting point is 00:29:55 It's going to jump their revenue 24% or something crazy like that. And this is going to be, I think, the big story of the next couple of years and all this liquidity, talking to LPs and family offices, which I do on a regular basis, they're all like, hey, when's your next fund? Hey, when's the next deal? Because now people are believing in. venture because of the SpaceX distributions and all this M&A. And we have four or five companies that got bought since Donald Trump was elected president. Thank you. My president, Donald J. Trump,

Starting point is 00:30:24 putting M&A back on the menu, Sacks. M&A, back on the menu. Why didn't you make a bit Sacks for PayPal? Been there, done that. Been there, done it. Okay. No, but look, you have to have synergies. There was a moment. This is like 15 years ago where they asked Sacks to go back and be the CEO. That was right. I remember that at the poker game. He and I immediately flew to Vegas and spent the weekend there to think about it. I was like, you know what? I wasn't. No, they didn't ask me to, uh, but I mean, I was, well, no, I never got the offer,

Starting point is 00:30:55 but it was down to like final two or something and it was between me and someone else. And actually, they ended up going with some, you know, like traditional like credit card executive. And to be honest, that's why PayPal has stagnated is that as soon as it was, you know, as it was acquired back in 2002, they basically blew out, like all the founders, all the founding DNA, and it was just kind of run by, you know, consulting types. You got to remember at that time, it was acquired by eBay, and Meg Whitman had worked at Procter and Gamble and Disney, and she'd spent like eight years at Bain, and it was like a very corporate mindset. I mean,

Starting point is 00:31:33 among all the internet companies of that era, it was definitely the most corporatist. And they saw the founders, the founding generation at PayPal is just a problem. Just a bunch of like cowboys they couldn't control. They made no effort to retain them. And I think they were kind of relief when they all left. And then that's what created the PayPal Mafia was that, you know, normally in an acquisition, you'd lock up all the talent. But in this case, they locked them out. They're like, these guys are hard to manage. Change the keys. I've said for a long time, it's a misnomer to call it the PayPal Mafia. It's really the PayPal diaspora. Our homeland was taken over and they burned our temple and then kicked everybody out.

Starting point is 00:32:10 And that's why the whole PayPal Mafia got started with all those companies. But as a result of that for decades, I don't say anyone was a victim. Look, when you acquire a company, you get to decide what to do with that asset. So, I mean, that was just the reality. But it's not like, you know, I don't think anyone was bitter about it. They're all like, okay, this gives us the capital to go all do the next thing we want to do. Well, the new CEO, by the way, Enrique is really ACEs. I've met him before and they're doing a great job.

Starting point is 00:32:40 Apparently, which is why they probably got these offers because they've been tightening that business up for the last couple of years. Well, no, the reason they got these offers is the market cap is down to, you know, was down in the, what, like 30 something billion. I mean, this is a company that was worth 200 billion, wasn't it, roughly? 322, I think was the peak. Mm-hmm. And before this offer, it was down to, what, 30 to 40 billion?

Starting point is 00:33:01 Yep. So the reason why it's attracting offers is it's so beaten up. And so now the question is, can anyone else do something with it? Zach, to your comment about you've got to have synergies, doesn't it seem to be the case that in this era, the core synergy that any great operator can bring to the table in this sort of a scenario is AI? Like, you can leverage, whether it be in this business or others, you can leverage tools that drive automation, that drive product development,

Starting point is 00:33:28 that drive improvements and efficiencies across the organization that make the product actually better for the user, et cetera, et cetera, that simply isn't obviously being well-implementation. Well, look, I think you have to have a product vision of how you would use AI to make the whole user experience better. And yes, you're right that. You could just use AI to drive efficiencies and that will improve your profitability and earnings. And so on a financial level, you could make the acquisition work. But it seems to me the existential issue for PayPal is that you're dealing with a product that's 25 years old. I mean, it's the same thing that we created back, you know, like 27, years ago. I mean, it's changed a little bit, but not that much. And the problem is that that interaction model is legacy. And so unless you've got a vision of how to resuscitate it and rejuvenate that product, I think, yeah, it could be a good financial play. Maybe I think they're buying the accounts. Yeah. Yeah. 400 million users. Yeah. What you're saying is interesting,

Starting point is 00:34:30 because with Stripe, I mean, this is the advantage that Stripe has is that they have a ton of merchants, So they've become the preferred mechanism for merchants to basically accept payments via APIs. And I think they're doing about $2 trillion a year of annual transaction volume. I think PayPal is doing 1.7. So actually, Stripe is a little bigger than PayPal now. But the thing that PayPal has that Stripe doesn't really have is the consumer relationship. So, you know, over 400 million active consumer accounts. So you're right, Chamath, that if somehow you could combine.

Starting point is 00:35:06 the merchant relationships with all those consumer accounts, then bypass the credit card networks, because in theory, there could be a lot more on us transactions. Exactly. And that's where the value is. PayPal already owns Braintree. So now you have Stripe and Brain Tree that effectively were competitors that won't be. And then what Block gives you is an entire point of sale infrastructure. And you get the cash out.

Starting point is 00:35:29 So you put it all together. And I think it's a shot across the bow for Visa and MasterCard. Rain Tree is the other one that I think you just mentioned there, Chimov, that's important because that is a very strong business that people don't even know that PayPal owns. Venmo is also, that speaks to a lot of young people. So you kind of get in two generations, you're getting Gen X and millennials, a lot of bang for your buck there. It's what Zach said is true.

Starting point is 00:35:55 They have enough of this things to go end to end on their own rails. That is a very, very important option. Yeah, the question is whether you can package it all together in a way that the consumer will actually choose because it's one thing to say, well, we take the merchant relationships of Stripe and the consumer relationships of PayPal. No, you don't do that. But what if the consumer doesn't want that? No, you don't do that.

Starting point is 00:36:16 I think what you do is you go to places like all of the merchants that use Stripe and say, we'll give you a three or four or five percent discount. And they'll be like, okay. And so you'll see these prices that just fall everywhere. Like imagine if Shopify was like to all their merchants, okay, you have two choices. The old way or the new way? new way, you put another two or three or four percent in your pocket. Of course they're going to pick the new way. Well, and this is the paradox of like modern M&A. If you look at protecting the

Starting point is 00:36:45 consumer, this will ultimately be great for the consumers. This is going to lower the prices on it. They're not buying this. Okay, you're saying something really interesting. It is so good for consumers if this were to happen. This is the exact reason why, if this had happened two years ago, this would have been the antitrust equivalent of a colorectal exam. Oh, God. You would not even get one step close to doing this deal two years ago. Well, that's really interesting, actually. I mean, the key question with antitrust is how do you define the market?

Starting point is 00:37:19 And so if you define the market as APIs for merchants, then J. Cali would be Stripe versus Brain Tree. And then the government would say, well, that's, you can't consolidate it. share. However, if the real market is Visa and MasterCard, that's the ultimate duopoly. And if PayPal can add competition to that market, which is infinitely larger than APIs, then it's actually pro-competitive. So how you define the market determines whether it's anti-competitive or pro-competitive. And those guys are smart enough, and they've read enough books where they won't fuck this one up. All right, let's get to the next topic. Somebody else is suing Open AI. This time, it's Apple. On July 10th, Apple filed a 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged, alleged stolen trade secrets.

Starting point is 00:38:06 Apple says OpenAI stole their IP to develop their consumer hardware device. Remember, we had Sarah Fryer at liquidity, and I probed her on this new device. And she said it was very human and lovable. She gave us a little bit of the goods. Well, it turns out Apple is alleging that maybe this is partially their IP. Tang Tan, Apple's former VP of iPhone design, is OpenAI's chief hardware officer. He allegedly directed Apple job candidates interviewing at OpenAI to bring, quote, actual parts to interviews, to quote, show and tell in the interviews. Chang Liu, former Apple senior technical engineer, sent this text message to a

Starting point is 00:38:55 a still employed Apple colleague. Quote, LOL. I found out I can access the network storage. So funny. During all of this, OpenAI has poached

Starting point is 00:39:05 over 400 Apple employees over the last year or two. Big numbers of poaching Apple and Tim Cook have seen enough Chamath. Tim Cook greenlit this. As insane as this is, Sam Waltman has found a way,

Starting point is 00:39:21 found a way to screw yet another party. Screwed Elon, his first benefactor. Shemot, if you remember correctly, the default for iPhone AI was supposed to be chat GPT. So they took this relationship. Sam took this relationship

Starting point is 00:39:38 where he got to be the default on the most important platform for AI, the iPhone. And now it's wound up in a massive lawsuit. What are your thoughts on this? I haven't really seen Apple act very litigiously. in 25 years in Silicon Valley.

Starting point is 00:39:58 So that's obviously a concerning data point for OpenAI. They're very reactive more than they are proactive on these things. So there must have been something that really, really upset them. Egregious, yeah. So I don't know. It's going to take a court to sort this out. I don't really want to gossip because, like, who knows what's actually going on and who said what and blah, blah, blah. But nobody should be stealing things for.

Starting point is 00:40:25 from their former employer. Nobody. Obvious. You're just not allowed. It's just obvious. These people are very, very smart, and they're very successful. And, you know, that's why Open AI probably wanted them. And that's why they wanted them. You know, and you come to them with the collective wisdom of what you accumulated.

Starting point is 00:40:41 And I think that's sufficient. You don't need to, especially as a senior person, do this. So I just hope that this stuff isn't true because I think, I don't think that Sam or Sarah or anybody else there are trying to induce this to happen. I don't think so. Yeah, I doubt they induced it, but I do believe that it's true or Apple wouldn't have brought it. Sacks, when we look at this, maybe you could open the aperture here if you want, or you can just go very detailed, but the nature of we have a free market, we don't have non-competes

Starting point is 00:41:12 in California, generally speaking, you can just employment at will, go where you want, but we have had instances, you know, Waymo famously, you know, brought some IP to Uber when When they did, Travis and the team said, leave the building, your job is rescinded, you don't get to bring that information here. In this case, it seems maybe they didn't induce it, but it occurred for some period of time. So take us through big picture what you think is going on here and what it means for the industry. Well, like Jamas said, I have no idea what's going on here. I mean, this is a lawsuit.

Starting point is 00:41:50 The facts are all alleged. We don't know. It's going to be adjudicated. So I really don't want to opine on what happened here. But if people want to know a very simple rule of thumb for how to avoid these types of disputes, it's just when an employee leaves her previous company and joins the new company, just don't take anything with you. The only thing you can bring to your new job is what's in your head.

Starting point is 00:42:11 Your memories. Your memories. That's fine. Whatever's in your head, you're allowed to take. But never leave with anything else. No thumb drives. No CD drives. No documents.

Starting point is 00:42:22 No nothing. thing. Just what's in your head is okay. But that's it. Freeberg, any thoughts here on just the number of lawsuits that seem to be piling up over at OpenAI? Bad luck. A couple dots make a line, I guess. Okay, there you go. Very well said. A couple of dots make a line. Okay, SpaceX had a data leak this week. They launched Croc Build in public beta at the end of May, the newest coding model, GROC 4.5 powers GROC build. I've been playing with it. It's extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:43:01 It's a coding tool that works inside of Cursier. SpaceX previously told users, Shemoth, nothing from your code base is transmitted to XAI servers during a session. But what actually was happening is every time a developer, or according to reports, use Grockbill, the tool was sending their entire code base to SpaceX Cloud servers without alerting the users. not just the files that were needed to do that specific coding test, just everything. Passwords, API keys could have got pulled up there, all the change logs, etc.

Starting point is 00:43:33 The privacy setting was supposed to stop this, but it didn't work. SpaceX quietly disabled the upload on July 13th by flipping a switch on their servers. Elon Musk, friend of the pod, promise on X that all previously uploaded data has been deleted, I guess. And in response, SpaceX open source rock bill, that's their harness. So that's another open source win or win for the open source community and AI sovereignty. You got any kind of thoughts on this? Obviously, this was not intentional, but trust is important with these models as we've been talking about for the last couple of months here on the All In podcast. I would actually connect this to my comments on CNBC earlier this week, which built on top of Alex Carp's comments the week before.

Starting point is 00:44:19 privacy in AI is very fragile and it's very brittle. And this is despite the best efforts of great businesses. Like, you know, you may not like Elon for personality quirks, but he is incredibly trustworthy. He's overly transparent. And so to their credit, they shut it off immediately. But my takeaway is that there are all kinds of non-obvious data leak vectors lurking in AI. And so if you think that you're going to flip a ZDR switch, zero data retention, which is the magic term that the industry uses to tell you that everything's going to be okay, I think the answer and the message should be, it's not going to be okay,

Starting point is 00:45:07 because you can't guarantee any of it. So the model companies, when they give you these zero data retention policies, are probably trying their best. But I think the reality is you are leaking information where you do. don't know it, and they, despite their best efforts, may still have trapped doors that they don't even know about until it's figured out by somebody else, like in this example. So all of this speaks to you have to have a stratified ecosystem. You have to have third parties. Now look, that's very biased for me because it's in part what we do for large enterprises at 8090 when we

Starting point is 00:45:40 implement our software factory. But the reason why it's working so well is this exact reason. You need an independent third party layer to interface to these models to manage this exposure, because there are trap doors everywhere. And that's what Sotia just said in a really interesting blog post. Did you guys see that? Yeah, I thought that was excellent. The reverse information paradox. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:01 That's exactly the takeaway that he left with. He was building on Alex Karp's supposed crash out, you know, the point that Karp made about how enterprises who have technical ability, one control over their compute, models, weights, data, and alpha. But he went further with that idea. I mean, he started with Karp's idea, but then he kind of provided a respy or roadmap for how enterprises should operationalize that. And what he says is that enterprises, they have to establish a real trust boundary with

Starting point is 00:46:35 private evals, proprietary learning loops inside the tenant, decoupled orchestration, and the explicit right to fine-tune their own outputs. So he kind of goes through a litany of fairly technical things that enterprises should do in order to achieve the operational control that Karp was saying that enterprises really want over their AI compute models and data, their alpha. So it's really interesting. I think now there's a virtual almost like college dorm session going on between the leaders of these companies who are brainstorming some of these concepts and now extending them,

Starting point is 00:47:13 right? And what's happening is you're starting to see the formation of not really an alliance, but like an ecosystem that is trying to create alternatives to, you know, a monolithic closed model stack, which is where anthropic and to some extent, open AI want to go, is they want you to be locked in to their stack, right? Their models, their harness, they control the data, you know, all of that. And now you're starting to see all these different companies. And you pay a huge premium for the privilege for them to do it, which is even more insane. So I saw this data.

Starting point is 00:47:49 And Nick, maybe you can find this companion clip. The companion clip I'd like you to find is Eric Gleman, who's a CEO of Ramp, was on Squackbox, I think today, talking about a new feature where you can manage the token maxing of your employees through your ramp card. But the data that I saw was that a million tokens on Fable is about SAC's $56. A million from Seoul is about $26. which is the same as Quad 4-8. A million input tokens from on GROC is about $1.50.

Starting point is 00:48:24 Okay. Zucks is about $1.50. Elon's about a dollar. And the Chinese models are 50 cents. Wow. So on top of the whole data sovereignty, bleeding your alpha way, can you imagine that you're paying $56 bucks as well? For that risk, that is insanity.

Starting point is 00:48:43 I'm using perplexity computer and they started supporting GROC. and they already support GLM 52. So when you're like using Claude or opening eye, you can only use their models. So I started effing with the different models. And I gave it all the same basically PRD. And I said, I want to make a podcast player that deep link. So like if we were talking about, I don't know, mythos, it would play me all the miso, mythos clips across all the different tech and business podcasts, but make it into one stream.

Starting point is 00:49:09 And I was like, this would be like really helpful for me for prepping for the show and just be interesting. I did it. It took a couple of hours. it cost $11 on the new GROC. It was hilarious how cheap it was. And then adding to this, I don't know if you saw... Sorry, did you try to do it on Fable to see how much more expensive it would have been?

Starting point is 00:49:30 I didn't, because I was out of Fable credits on my $200 account. So, you know, look at this clip here, Nick, play the clip from Eric Glenn. That's kind of interesting. We're thrilled to be launching token spend management today. It's available to ramp and non-ramp customers. And he's exactly right. Over the last year, I looked at the stats this morning. Token spend among ramp customers has grown by 21 times. 21 times. 21 times. Not 21 percent. We're talking about 21 times.

Starting point is 00:49:58 That's exactly right. So being off by a few pennies as a CFO actually might be quite nice. At the rate it's going, it might be several dollars. And look, like, I think that for many CFOs, they're often very surprised by the bill because what the AI companies have functionally set up is you have a tab, you can spend as much as you want. It's very hard for CFOs to see proactively what people are spending on. And every time they're introducing new models, the rates often go up. And so there's very misaligned incentives. So part of what we're trying to do is make it easy for CFOs to see the spend, understand the spend, and control it. Thanks, Nick. He's saying something so important there, because if your engineers are going off randomly in an unguided system and then just

Starting point is 00:50:41 ripping through a million tokens at 56 bucks, what he's talking about is the eventual downstream impact to earnings. And that eventually a bunch of these public market CFOs are going to show up to Wall Street and they will have missed earnings because they're up-x. At some point, if things are 21-xing every few months, somebody's going to miss a quarter. I don't know who, but somebody. And it's not just going to be, you know, I was speculating it'll be a few pennies here there, which they'll have to say is because of token spend. He's saying it could be as much as dollars at this rate, which also could be the case. I think the point that we're all trying to make is, unless you get a control of this and you can directly say how much money you're making,

Starting point is 00:51:23 this is a bridge to know it. It is a money-burning furnace. The good news is, this is all creating a massive market opportunity sacks. BitTensor subnets, GLM-52 hosting, GROC 4.5, Now, Inkling, Inklink, Miramiris, new model. Mirro's inkling. Everybody's now saying, hey, wait a second, I can give you a better deal. You're paying two bucks. I can get you one buck. This is.

Starting point is 00:51:50 No, no. People are paying between 26 and 56 bucks. They should be paying 50 cents. Exactly. Well, you know, and the inkling announcement was kind of interesting because I think the value prop there is she's explicitly saying that, look, we're not frontier intelligence. We're just under that. but we're a platform for fine-tuning these open models, which are much, much cheaper,

Starting point is 00:52:12 and then you can achieve the result you want based on fine-tuning. And so that's really interesting. Yeah. But, you know, these open models won't be around for very long if Anthropic has its way. It's a reason they want to stop. It's just they have such a monopoly. Of course, you're selling most of the product for 50 cents per million tokens when they're selling theirs for 56 bucks. Of course you don't want that to happen. Of course you want to try to

Starting point is 00:52:41 stop it. But that being said, they're still growing like crazy. Just to be clear, I mean, you know, you are seeing this explosion of interesting things happening with open models. Like you said, you know, the latest Grock build is open, thinking machines open and so forth and so on. But still, I mean, they're growing. They're still the industry leader in terms of revenue growth. So these things are happening side by side. Yeah, I would, I think that the interesting thing is Eric would not have released this ramp product unless CFOs were like, I can't control the spend. Yes. And then he's like, well, here, let me build it for you.

Starting point is 00:53:15 And then if enough CFOs essentially turn that feature on and start to rate limit how it's spent, because maybe they're not getting the ROI. And the engineer doesn't care about ROI. The engineer's like, I want to use the latest, greatest model. Yeah. And maybe you don't need it. Maybe Mur is right. And for 95% of the tasks, you should be at one level lower, especially when it costs

Starting point is 00:53:36 one one hundredth of the cost. But the engineer will never make that tradeoff because they'll never want to think about it. You're right. And also, they're not tied to the money. The CFO is tied to the money and the engineer wants to go on an exploration on using the latest, greatest thing. Yeah. And until those two things have a reckoning. If you're booking your travel, you're like, you don't even see the price. You're like, yeah, just put me in business class, put me in a nice hotel and like the travel department handles that. You're saying something really interesting. What percentage of you had to guess of Fable 5 prompts are just average Michigana that should be running on... 98%. I was using it for stupid stuff that I could be

Starting point is 00:54:14 using Quinn for. I think, this is my micro prediction here. Mark German, who's like the most in the know guy when it comes to Apple, he says, and you know, we got this new CEO coming in for Apple. John Furness. Yeah. And he is a heart. hardware engineer. M7 Ultra, because we're on M5 chips now, you can get like, you know, 456, 50012 gigs of RAM. He says M7 Ultra is going to support as much as 1.5 terabytes. That's double what they're already supporting. So if you think about frontier models, like the last generation, this is like an opus level model running on your Mac Studio. You guys all use Mac Studios, your rich venture capitalists, whatever. You're like, yeah,

Starting point is 00:55:00 I'll take a four or five thousand dollar computer. This is going to change everything. You're going to have employers go, oh, I can just run, you know, 90% of my workloads, 99% of the workloads on the local Mac studio. I think Apple is a screaming buy right now. And it's not financial advice, but my lord, that company could just run the table on AI if they get this right. All right. Apple? Yes.

Starting point is 00:55:27 Because I, they're going to make such a fortune. You got to just let them move on. You got to just let it move on. It's just like the iPhone. Everybody laughed at the iPhone. People overpaid. Nobody laughed at the, they did not. When the first iPhone came out, many people laughed at it.

Starting point is 00:55:41 Not true. Steve Ball said. That was it. That was the big one. I can still hear I'm laughing. No, if you think about how they make money off of hardware, off of their devices, they will put so much downward pressure on Claude and Open AI by just putting local models and supporting them with this memory architecture. It's going to be wild when people have unlimited tokens on their desk.

Starting point is 00:56:05 I don't know if you guys saw this, but there's a very large solar company called Sun Run. They just announced this week that they're making distributed data center blocks that you can put in your house. Another company that did it is a company called Span that partnered with NVIDIA. So to your point, Jason, you're seeing this. fragmentation and distribution of edge compute, which I think is a theme. Definitely a theme. Well, it's also chasing energy, right, Tramoth? Like if you've got some solar, if you've got excess battery power, hey, we power up your batteries at night cheaply? I think I told you this last week. We are so massively short electrons. By 2050, the United States of America will be two

Starting point is 00:56:47 and a half California's worth of energy in deficit. Two point five Californians, the fourth largest economy in the world, we will be short, 2.5x of all of the energy consumed by California by 2050. This week, there was an auction by this huge utility called PGM, which serves Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, you know, 13 states. And that auction is where they publish a forward curve and say, hey, listen, guys, here's my forecasted load, and here's how much energy I need. and people signed up to essentially get paid a guaranteed rate every date so that they have to fork over the energy in the future. Kind of like a forward option. They needed like seven or eight gigawatts.

Starting point is 00:57:33 They had 156 megawatts or something show up. We are in such a bad place right now on electrons and electricity prices. Did you see what our boy did this week? We need. So this is behind the meter, which is different. And Elon needed to do this, by the way, just so, you know, know, because there's an issue in Memphis where he was very clever about how he was able to get Colossus off the ground.

Starting point is 00:57:57 That regulatory art is not. Explain this. Well, look, when you try to power a data center, typically you have what's called grid power. So you go to the utility in the area and you say, hey, please run me a line off of that main transmission line. And that's how you power your data center. when that runs out or is so backlogged, you have to do what's called behind the meter,

Starting point is 00:58:24 which means on your own property that you own, you build something for yourself. Now, there's a problem with that. You would think, well, that's smart. Yes, but like in everything in America, there's regulation on top of regulation, top regulation. And one of the most complicated regulatory schemes that you have to overcome is clean air permitting.

Starting point is 00:58:45 So even if you say you're going to do, behind the meter, then you're like, well, what can I do? Solar you can do, but it takes too much space from most places. Batteries you can do, but you need to generate the electricity in the first place. So people use that gas. So Elon cleverly bought a ton of 18 wheeler like engines, basically. He bought the company that makes all this and provide them. Mobile turbines. And then just, and then just, you know, pin them to the ground and ran it. And, you know, those are, personal use essentially, and so they came under the clean air permitting requirements. But then when you act as a block, you could make the claim that it doesn't. Now, there are new solutions like Bloom

Starting point is 00:59:26 Energy, which allows you to have huge installations and still fall under the personal use clean air permit. And so for all of Elon's future capacity, he needed to have this in place so that he gets the clean air permits and he's able to have a clean run of site to continue to build domestic data centers. Anyways, there's your little TED talk on energy, but we are in a bad place, guys, and it's only getting worse. Speaking of data center, sacks, everybody's favorite socialist governor, Kathy Hochel in the great state of New York, my hometown. Powered by fossil fuels, they drive up our carbon footprint. They occupy massive amounts of land, potentially displacing agricultural space and open spaces. The bottom line is progress shouldn't arise on a higher utility

Starting point is 01:00:19 bill, deleted water supply, or noise pollution. So we have no choice but to address these challenges created by these massive facilities. That is why. Today I'll be signing the nation's first ever statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers. Everything she's saying there is a false accusation on the data center. So let's just go one by one. So she's saying, that they eat up all of the power. Well, yeah, I mean, look, if you connect to the grid without producing more power and you force data centers to compete with, you know, residential ratepayers, then yeah, you could drive up utility prices.

Starting point is 01:00:58 However, if you do what Chimass said and let them build behind the meter, then they bring their own power. And that's what the president has advocated for since the beginning of his administration has let the AI companies become power companies. So that is the way to solve the energy problem or the utility. problem. Then she's talking about, you know, eating up land. The reality is these data centers are a model of land use efficiency. We have a ton of land in this country, obviously. You can find places where there is enough open land to build a data center. The economic impact and value of a data center

Starting point is 01:01:30 relative to the land use, again, is one of the best ROI as there is. The supposed noise pollution, that's largely made up. That can be dealt with. You obviously don't want to put these things right next to a residential area, but create a little bit of distance, and it's fine. The whole water consumption thing is largely a hoax. The modern data centers recirculate the water. Closed loop systems. Yeah, and I think there was a study that showed that a typical data center uses the same amount of water as two and a half in and out burgers. So in and a half burger chains. I mean, just go after the almonds if you're concerned about water, people. Yeah, or golf courses. I mean, there's many, you know, there's many uses of water.

Starting point is 01:02:11 that are way more wasteful. So when you compare economic impact to all these different things, data centers are like honestly one of the best things we can be building as a nation. And Sachs, there's all these taxes and incremental revenues. Did you see the article where I think it was in North Dakota or something where like teachers were getting like 30 and $40,000 bonuses from all the tax revenue that was coming in? There's all these upsides. That's right.

Starting point is 01:02:38 They generate a lot of tax revenue. They've created a blue-collar construction boom. It's not true that there's no jobs once they're built, that you do have ongoing jobs there. And then, oh, one final thing, just on the point that Hockel is making, she said it created a lot of pollution. Natural gas, which is how most these data centers are powered, is one of the most clean burning sources of power that we have. 100%. These data centers have become the scapegoat for all of the angst that people have about AI. And it's kind of become this very clumsy way.

Starting point is 01:03:10 of trying to throw a wrench in the gears of innovation and just kind of slow the whole thing down. All I have to say is welcome to Texas. We got plenty of land here. And for now. So stupid about her proposal and her talk, aside from the things she got completely factually incorrect, is New York State is like 80% underdeveloped. Drive upstate, folks. You're thinking of New York City. Yes, New York City's packed. You go upstate. It's literally 70 to 80% of the land. in New York State is undeveloped. There's so much land. It's ridiculous.

Starting point is 01:03:47 New York is giant. It's giant. On this topic, this week, I just want to give a shout out to Senator Dave McCormick. He had a defense and innovation summit in Carlisle, Pennsylvania at the Army War College, which a bunch of us went to, POTUS came, gave a speech, had a CEO roundtable, a lot of defense company, CEOs, et cetera. But Chris Wright was there, Sacks. My guy.

Starting point is 01:04:16 He's great. And Chris mentioned this insane story. He said, you know, there is a lot of common funding because Dina Powell asked this question on stage. And he said, there's a lot of common funding patterns of these people that are protesting the data centers. And he said, you can actually trace it back to the same people that in a different era were protesting fracking.

Starting point is 01:04:38 And so he was saying, like, it's the, it's. These are all just hobby horses that they use to raise money, have a job. They're like professionally paid protesters. They kind of just show up out of nowhere. I didn't realize that there was such a commonality, but they're the same people. The thing that I just can't understand for the life of me is why Anthropic is still funding these groups that want to put the kibosh on Udada Center construction. There's one called Public First, where Dario just gave his first seven-figure contribution

Starting point is 01:05:07 and then a bunch of other employees that Anthropic gave it. all these groups are trying to slow down AI develop with new regulations and making it harder to build new data centers. And at a certain point, you just have to wonder, I mean, is this regulatory capture or they just kind of lost the plot? Because the number one thing slowing down the growth in Anthropics revenue, it's not demand. I think it's the availability of compute and data centers. And so you're just kind of wondering, like, what is the point of all of this? It's so true. I was talking to someone in politics about this. And the theory that they had is, well, the Democrats aren't going to pause the data centers forever.

Starting point is 01:05:47 They're going to pause them until they feel like they're in enough control that they can dictate all of the rules. And so in other words, they're calling this a moratorium. And I think it does mean that the data centers are going to stop. But eventually they're going to be in a position to say, okay, here are our terms if you want to turn these things back on, right? You want to lift the moratorium. And then that's when we get this, you know, big government, Democrat-defined AI regime. And you know that it's going to consist of a new regulatory agency and new speech controls. The whole trust and safety agenda from social media will be ported over.

Starting point is 01:06:24 That's this was this one person I was talking to. This is what he was speculating is a real agenda is that eventually once Trump is no longer president or in some future Democratic administration, they will eventually lift the moratorium. but on their terms. Now, I think that's a really dangerous thing to do because, you know, Trump is president for another two years and then no one knows what's going to happen after that. And even if you lift the moratorium in, say, two and a half or three years, it's going to take a couple of years for those projects to even ramp back up.

Starting point is 01:06:57 So when you start talking about a moratorium on data centers, it's not like a few month pause. It's probably a good five years at least before, you know, you can get another data Center switched on in the state of New York. Just so you know how bad it's gotten, there's a curve that you can use to price data center assets. And I think you guys know this, but I have this portfolio of these assets that myself and my partner, Nita, have accumulated.

Starting point is 01:07:24 And what's so interesting is when we talk to all of the hyperscalers about giving us a price, because we're trying to figure out whether we should keep it or build it or just sell it. The most incredible thing is how extreme the price is at the front end of the curve, when you you have verifiable, energizable power today. And the reason is exactly everything that you're saying, Sacks, which is that when you look out into the future, you know, we've said this before, but it's about 40% of all these projects are getting mothballed and stopped.

Starting point is 01:07:53 And so it's creating this massive deficit of available energy to actually drive the use of AI. So to the extent that you actually want, you know, drug discovery, or you want cancer diagnoses or you want better health care or better legal advice, we may actually not be able to service it based on all of the demand that exists because the power isn't there, the energy isn't there, and the reason why that's not there is because folks are just kind of reflexively protesting something that they don't completely understand, clearly. So I think it's a really big problem. I mean, we're going to have GPUs chasing energy.

Starting point is 01:08:30 Like, where is their energy and just drive the GPUs there is what's going to happen, right? Let me add one layer to it, which is there. only trying to stop data centers from being built in the U.S. They're trying to stop data centers from being built internationally in our friends, allies, and partner countries. And the way they're doing that is the same political forces that are stopping data centers are also behind all these new export controls on chips. So they want to make it harder and harder to export chips to more and more countries, including our friends and allies. And so there's not going to be data centers here. There's not going to be data centers in our allies. I mean,

Starting point is 01:09:04 where are we going to put these things? Yeah, and some of those allies have unlimited energy, Middle East. Like, if you want some data centers. Well, what's funny, Jason, is, you know, we did a bunch of Middle East data center stuff, and then it's kind of stopped, meaning like there wasn't this growth that I thought would happen because it's a very conveniently placed geography. It's the Middle East for a reason. And so, you know, you can serve four billion people very quickly in under 200 milliseconds from there.

Starting point is 01:09:32 Instead, what happened was there was this explosion in 18. and specifically in Australia, which kind of surprised me because I would have thought that those folks are a little bit even further out on the DSA, you know, far left. I thought these things would not have happened, but they were able to get big deals done. So in this weird way, you have all of these other countries kind of running to try to embrace this stuff quickly. They've done a decent job. They're doing stuff to sort of like displace some of the energy that is needed in the U.S. But the problem is we need to have enough surplus here. because this is where most of the commerce is going to get created that really that I think should power. These are luxury regulations. Like you can afford if you're in New York State or California to be like, you know what, we don't need this. It's just like a luxury for us to have an extra day. But I think the back to it might really need the money.

Starting point is 01:10:21 If you're Texas, you might really want the money. So this is what's crazy. Like virtue signaling only goes so far until your debt to GDP is high enough and or your productivity is low enough and or your foreign direct investment is low enough where you're like, all right, you know what, screw all that. we're just going to build a data center. But the other thing is, if you saw what happened this week, the UAE now is able to import the best in class leading chips.

Starting point is 01:10:44 And so to your point, Jason, I think it restarts the cycle where you have to look very carefully at the Middle East because it's a very attractive place to build these things. And by the way, I don't know if you saw the, the, you know, even if you just, if you think about fiber and the milliseconds as you're talking about, yes, you can get to the 4 billion people. But I don't know if you saw the giant Starlink versions now. They make like a really big version. I think it's actually got like one of the enterprise versions, but there's like an even bigger enterprise version,

Starting point is 01:11:10 and they can bundle them together, and you're starting to get to like 10 gig, 20 gig setups. So that means you can start putting these things almost anywhere, which gets also like adds another wrinkle. Can we see your clip, the thing that you were mentioning before? This is not, to your point, as prevalent in the Middle East, where you have monarchies and governments that aren't ruled by,

Starting point is 01:11:35 But in democracies, we see this anti-data center movement taking hold. This chart is something that for me always kind of played a role in my understanding of where the incredible anti-GMO sentiment came about in the United States. This is great. Russia today, this Russian media outlet launched in the U.S. in 2010. They were kicked out of the U.S. by Biden in 2022. And you can see that prior to Russia today existing in the U.S., there was no anti-GMO sentiment.

Starting point is 01:12:07 GMOs were around since 1996. That's when they first had their big commercial launch in the U.S. and were pretty prevalent for, you know, 14 plus years before everyone started to think GMOs are bad. We got to get rid of GMOs. And you could ask people 100 different ways very pointedly and specifically about the facts on the matter and the science of GMOs and all this sort of stuff.

Starting point is 01:12:27 But everyone always had a reason why they didn't want them, similar to what we're hearing now with AI and data centers. And it turns out that if, you track back all of the media that had all this anti-GMO sentiment that ultimately got picked up by the mom bloggers that ultimately got put into social media feeds that ultimately everyone just accepted as truth. A lot of it originated in this Russian media push that happened around this era. And you can actually see this on the Google trend data that shows GMO and it's kind of right up. And then as Russia today started to get cut by different media outlets and people

Starting point is 01:12:59 stopped retweeting them and stopped reflecting them and stopped writing articles that followed Russia today, the anti-GMO sentiment declined in the U.S. And I think you can see this going back decades. You know, there's this effort that the KGB kind of designed during the Cold War called directed measures, which was really meant to try and create an influence campaign through affecting media. So putting this kind of propaganda out through foreign media, particularly targeted Western democracies. And, you know, you could argue that maybe you could trace back what happened in Germany with nuclear energy as being kind of similarly originated, but there have been a series of these pushes that seem nonsensical if you're fairly rational and can have an

Starting point is 01:13:43 actually objective debate about the scientific merit, the economic merit, the benefits of these technologies. But for some reason, what we call the activist community become heightened to them, say that we've got to get rid of them, and everyone's got these different unfounded, scientifically unfounded reasons why they want to get rid of them. And you're like, wait a second, how did we end up in this place that we're literally handicapping ourselves. And I think we're seeing something similar happening with data centers in the U.S. today. The funding of the NGOs, as they're being called, the media that's supporting this, the retweeting of the media. And then you asked people, there was a poll that came out today, something north of 50% of Americans believe that data

Starting point is 01:14:21 centers increase the cost of water and electricity. Even if the data center is fully recycling the water and they're producing their own electricity, there's still this kind of repugnant reaction to the data center. And so there has been this like deeply sewn psychological shift that's happened in the United States. And, you know, people have these, well, I hate the rich. I hate tech. I hate AI.

Starting point is 01:14:44 I don't want any of the stuff. I don't want any of the stuff. But where does it all come from? I do worry that there's some degree of kind of call it foreign, you know, influence. I don't love the word influence because everyone kind of, everyone captures it up. But there is some degree of this like, yeah. I would say there's foreign interest. Let's call it that.

Starting point is 01:15:04 No, I think it's more than that. Just one month ago, just one month ago, OpenAI published a blog post called PRC linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the U.S. And Politico covered this and a lot of other sites covered this. Basically, what they are saying, and in fact, many people are saying, is that China is behind a lot of these influence campaigns to shape U.S. attitudes on AI. data centers. It makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and there's going to be a congressional investigation of this. It does make sense because it is in their interest, right? If they can

Starting point is 01:15:39 stop us from building this necessary infrastructure, then that's the way for China to win the AI race. If they can conclude the market, if they can incentivize Anthropic to, you know, pull the ladder up, if they can kill open source in the United States and constrain demand or the optionality and choice of lower, cheaper models. Think about that for a second. At $56 per million input tokens, I mean, versus 50 cents for the rest of the world, all of a sudden it doesn't take a company

Starting point is 01:16:10 that's much, much worse than you to beat you when your cost is 50 to 100 X more. Right. That's just the math. The math ain't mapping. You know, Sacha made the point that these enterprises are not just paying for AI. with money. They're paying again by feeding those frontier models or proprietary knowledge,

Starting point is 01:16:33 right? And all their, they're alpha. So it's like a double whammy. It's like it's more expensive and you're potentially mortgaging your future. Look, let's be honest. It is obvious where foreign governments have an enormous incentive to try to manipulate and influence the comings and goings in America. I think we should just acknowledge that. The idea that doesn't happen is very naive. Now the question is we have to be able to call it out and put our finger on it because otherwise what is clearly happening is that there's a lot of Americans that will just fall for this shit. And they will not think from first principles. We have a huge moral panic going on with respect to AI. Look, when you talk about catastrophes that could result from AI,

Starting point is 01:17:14 what are we talking about? We're talking about things that might happen in the future. Nothing resembling this has happened yet. Even the cyber risk that everyone's been talking about. Job loss. or job loss. It's like none of it's turned out to be true. We haven't seen any of it so far. But we're on the threshold, I think, of destroying the crown jewel of our economy, which is the system of free market innovation that we have, this culture of rapid iteration, of anyone with a good idea can go raise risk capital and start their idea, start their

Starting point is 01:17:46 company. And we're on the verge. Now we're talking about, think about how far the Overton window has moved where we're actually saying that creating a fit. FINRA for our industry might be better than all the alternatives. FINRA is a bunch of stockbrokers writing rules. And when's the last time there was ever any innovation in that sector? I mean, I guess Robin Hood made trading free.

Starting point is 01:18:09 That was it. Yeah, that was a big one. Yeah. That was it. Okay. But that's not real innovation. Okay. That's like an innovation with respect to our pricing model.

Starting point is 01:18:16 And we're actually saying that that might be the least bad alternative is having the equivalent of a bunch of stockbrokers creating new rules. that all these AI companies are not going to have to abide by. It's crazy. We are going to throw away the lead that we have in this. And by the way, Kimmy K3 just came out, and people are saying it's now right up there. It's very, very close to the frontier. We may have months on China, if that.

Starting point is 01:18:42 And we're going to create all these crazy rules and new regulatory bodies for risks that have not manifested yet. It's worth monitoring the situation, but it's not worth panicking. Like you should monitor the situation with self-driving cars and job loss. China is certainly doing that. They just stopped giving out permits for self-driving cars as an example because it's going so well. And they're losing jobs. And there are people who are getting – there's a little civil unrest.

Starting point is 01:19:06 So they just said we're going to make self-driving cars licensed. And so they're not giving out any more licens moratorium on license for now. It's worth watching Mythos and if it could hack your system. Palo Alto Network's checking it out. Other people checking out. It's all worth monitoring. But yes, there's no disaster here. today because of AI. Nothing's jumping out of your chat GPT window. You know, the worst case

Starting point is 01:19:27 scenarios, you blow out some tokens, you know? Okay, great. That's the biggest. There's only a handful of companies that are even at the frontier. And they all have safety testing and red teaming and all the rest of doing a good job. Yeah. You're doing a good thing. Stop that. I'm just questioning whether we need some vast regulatory apparatus now to start doing all this rulemaking. And we did this because of science fiction and Dario. saying all jobs are going away. I mean, that was the most ridiculous thing. When he said, he's panicked that it's going to be 80 or 90 percent jobs in 20, 26, what was his claim? Nick, get the exact claim. I think he said 50 percent of jobs right. He said with it, he said,

Starting point is 01:20:06 50 percent of entry-level knowledge worker jobs are going away within one to five years. That was one year ago. So it's a little ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, it's, but he's been in a state of panic. He's been in a state of panic since GPT, too. Yes. Yes. Yes. Remember, they wanted to have regulatory approval for models that use 10 to the 25th flops, right? And every single AI model is like well past that threshold now. Yeah. And we haven't seen any of the harm. Look, they thought that 10 to the 25th flops would be enough compute to create, you know, the Terminator, you know, to create Skynet.

Starting point is 01:20:47 No offense, Freeberg, but one guy's panic attacks, one guy's anxiety condition might. of shape the whole course of history here. Like, does Dario have like, I'm not making light of it, but does he have an anxiety issue where he's like overly concerned about this stuff? Or is it just delusions of grandeur? Come on the pod, Dario. Invites open. Come hang out.

Starting point is 01:21:06 I'm sure he'd love to come on the pod after you just accused him of having a panic attack. I mean, he seems like it's a perpetual one. No. Am I wrong? Listen, it could be psychological, but I actually think that there's a strategy that makes a lot of sense. And it's a very simple, straightforward strategy. Number one, brand yourself as a safe AI company.

Starting point is 01:21:25 Number two, ban unsafe AI. Three, profit. Yeah, there you go. That's the strategy. Kind of brilliant. All right, everybody. Go to all-in.com slash events and sign up for the All In summit in September. Scholarships are open.

Starting point is 01:21:41 Let's do a quick, amazing, deep, robust science corner with our boy, David Friedberg. Before we get into the science corner, I'm going to give a shout out to Ronnie. dog for adoption. I love family dog rescue in Sonoma. Check out his Instagram link. God, here he goes again. In the description, this dog needs a home. He was fostered and he lost the foster home.

Starting point is 01:22:03 Someone come and grab him. He's awesome. All right, let's get into science. This is what we're doing now. This is what we're doing. He's trying to get more cue points. That dog looks delicious. Gross.

Starting point is 01:22:15 Dog carpachia. You don't live in Sri Lanka anymore, Chama. Yeah, seriously. Oh, Sri Lach had taken a spray. Oh, my God. How do you marinate that dog in Sri Lach? Do what you got to do in Sri Lanka? Is it just salt and pepper, free burger?

Starting point is 01:22:30 Do you like something else? You know, just a little salt and pepper? Well, bower marinade. Do you like a little yogurt and garam masala? Maybe do a little ticcadossi. Do you guys want to talk about reversing aging? Yes, I want to talk about it. I got to drop.

Starting point is 01:22:46 All right, guys. I got to go to the Apple Tower. I'll cover it. The audience. Take around. Science Quarter. All right. So, Jamop, you can drop too if you want. I'll cover Science Corner Solo. So in the past, we've talked about Yamonaka factors, which are these proteins that can go into cells and reverse the aging of the cell, and the cell starts to act young again.

Starting point is 01:23:07 Pretty amazing. And there's a lot of advancement happening on that front. But this paper that came out just this week that everyone's kind of going crazy about was put out jointly by Calico, which is Google's kind of age reversal. startup that's super secretive that they're not a lot of talk about in partnership with a group called Revel Pharma. And what they focused on was what's called the extracellular matrix, the parts outside of the cell that age. And what does aging actually look like outside of the cell? Well, over time, sugars and fats bind to proteins in the area between ourselves, and they accumulate and they don't get cleaned off. And as they accumulate and they don't get

Starting point is 01:23:47 cleaned off, they make it harder for your body to clean out that area, to maintain that area. It causes stickiness. It causes binding. And that reduces mobility and ultimately leads to things like wrinkles in our skin. Is that harder for our joints? Is that what visceral fat is? No, it's called glycation. And so it's the binding of sugar and fat to the proteins that sit in that extra cellular, which means that. In between the cells. Exactly. And so it's that whole gunky area in between the cells that when you're young, works well, everything's smooth, the proteins get replaced if they break down, and as you get older, sugars and fats kind of stick to these proteins, block them up, and as they get blocked up, your body can't repair them, it can't clean them,

Starting point is 01:24:30 and more importantly, it changes the structure and the shape of those proteins, so things like collagen that are far apart stick together, and that causes things like wrinkles, and that causes immobility, and it also causes inflammation, because then those proteins kind of look different than they're supposed to, and your body starts to attack them. And that activates inflammation. And that's one of the reasons why we get more and more inflammation as we get older. And so one of the key, what are called advanced glycation end products, that's the term for these things, is called CML. CML is kind of the predominant molecule that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging. And nothing breaks it down. So these scientists set out to try and create an enzyme, an enzyme is a protein that

Starting point is 01:25:14 break something down that can break down CML. And remember, a protein is just a series of amino acids, and those amino acids are programmed by DNA. So you can put three letters of DNA to make an amino acid. So you can literally just print DNA and then put it in a bacteria to print proteins and then test those proteins to see what they do. That's the modern kind of era of kind of protein synthesis and protein testing. And so these guys kind of went out and they took the target, which is CML, and tried to figure out, okay, how do we actually degrade CML, clear that extracellular matrix, and reverse aging. And they started with AlphaFold, and they used AlphaFold to find a protein that could bind to CML and activate an enzymatic

Starting point is 01:25:56 or process. It would break it down. And then they took that protein from AlphaFold that comes out of a bacteria. They produced it. They started to test it. And then they started to find some of the binders or the parts of that protein that they could make better. And they used, you know, DNA programming to change it. And they made hundreds and then thousands of variants of it to measure activity, which is how good is it at breaking down the CML? And they did this recursively, five different cycles. And then eventually they tested it once they'd kind of gotten it breaking down the CML really well in a test tube. They started to test it on the proteins that we would find in our body, cassine, collagen, retinal proteins, which are in your eye, hemoglobin.

Starting point is 01:26:38 and they were able to get rid of 52 to 97% of the CML, just degraded away. And then they found several sites where they were able to degrade over 90%. And then they took actual human skin from elderly patients that had donated their skin and they put this enzyme onto that skin and they were able to eliminate 55% of the CML on the skin,

Starting point is 01:27:04 which basically reversed the skin's age down to the age of a 31-year-old. This is from greater than 70-year-old patients, just by putting this enzyme on the skin. And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of alpha-fold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high-throughput screening, and ultimately make a novel protein that doesn't exist in nature today that can do something pretty profound for human health. And now the next set of questions is, okay, well, great, this enzyme is awesome. How are we going to get it into our bodies? How are we going to get it

Starting point is 01:27:40 into that extra cellular matrix? Is it going to be a cream? Is it going to be a shot? A supplement? Could we eventually take an RNA shot that makes the protein inside of our body and starts to do the degradation from within? A lot of questions kind of still to be answered. But it really, I think, lights a great path forward for these novel therapies that we're developing. It's fucking awesome. I mean, dude, I got all these joint pains in my hip and my shoulder now. Like everything, you can feel yourself getting older. I will tell you this right now, that will not be the first market.

Starting point is 01:28:10 The first market will be cosmetic. Cosmetic skin. It will be a trillion dollar market. If you can create a queen. If you could put this enzyme literally on your skin and have it absorbing. It's a cream. Game over. That alone is two trillion dollars.

Starting point is 01:28:27 But I mean, dude, AI, let's just talk about applications of AI, why it's actually awesome, that everyone should be able to agree on and you can't be convinced by some foreign sciop, this is fucking awesome. I mean, this was alpha-fold. It's amazing.

Starting point is 01:28:39 You used to discover this thing and evolve it and drive this outcome. Everyone can benefit from it. It's just so profound that we have this pool at our disposal in this day and age. I think it's pretty awesome. Anyway, thanks for sticking around for Science Corner. It's guys, I love you. All right, bro. Love you, too.

Starting point is 01:28:55 We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sachs. Open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wes. They just need to rel. Merchies are back. I'm doing it.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Can the AI Industry Regulate Itself? Stripe Wants PayPal, China Catches Up, NY Bans Datacenters

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