TBPN Live - ChatGPT’s Three Year Anniversary, OpenAI Partners With Thrive, David Sacks Vs The New York Times | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

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It's been three years since ChatGPT launched. I wanted to reflect a little bit. Everything changed, or maybe nothing changed, or maybe some amount of change in between everything and nothing. You're more on the nothing changed camp. I sort of agree with you. I was sort of reflecting on like, OK, Thanksgiving's happened.

It was Thanksgiving over the weekend. How different is my world? Like, there's not a humanoid robot that's cooking for me. And also, even if we had a humanoid robot, I think Thanksgiving would be the day we let the robot sit in the closet. because we enjoy no no let us cook we enjoy cooking let us thanksgiving is like the track day of cooking like even if you have the robot

does it you still want to do it on thanksgiving you don't want to cook on a random tuesday king i was reflecting more on the agentic commerce thing it feels like chat gpti and open a i they really are pushing to make revenue from agentic commerce like in this holiday season incredible speed of execution like clearly it's a big opportunity if you can figure out how to you know run ads a commerce convert take a cup of that that's big. The actual product in Chachapit is pretty good, but you can see that the walled gardens are already going up. So one place that I like to go to for reviews of products specifically around the holidays is the wire cutter. Now the wire cutter, their whole twist was they

wouldn't rate each product. What they would do is they would pick a category and then they would just tell you what their best product was in that category. Sort of like a cluster max of vacuums. So they would give you the platinum tier vacuum and then a bunch of budget pick they were acquired by the New York Times the New York Times currently in a lawsuit with open AI and so if you go to chat you BT and say hey I think they're about to be in a lawsuit David Sacks maybe but if you go so I went to chat you BT and I was like hey okay pull a deep research report just pull everything from the wire cutter and and tell me every category in every product that's top

ranked but it couldn't do it it it said hey we don't we can't touch the wire cutter like it's off limits you got to head over there yourself pop open a Chrome tab brother if you over there. Like, that's on you. The one thing that did really change on Thanksgiving was the discourse. Like, the AI narrative has fully arrived to just family and friends. You mean family in the in the home? Yes, yes. In people that don't work in technology that don't, their job is not podcasting. Their favorite trough. Not that. More talking about is it a bubble. Where do you think all this stuff goes? The stuff that, you know, we've been talking about for months. You're not living in a bubble? You think the average family in America is. I saw multiple. I saw multiple. I saw. I saw. I saw multiple newsletters where the whole conceit of the newsletter going into the holidays was how to talk to your family about the AI bubble and how to talk to your family about AI generally and I think it's real because if you've been watching your 401k over the last

year you've seen a massive spike and then a recent sell-off and if you've turned on any news or opened up any newspaper you've been hearing about one trillion dollars and you're like a trillion dollars that chat GPT app they need a trillion dollars to make that thing Chat? Right, chat? I wanted to reflect on like what has actually changed over the last three years and specifically in the Mag 7. The Mag 7 has been on absolute tear.

Just over the last three years, the value as a whole has basically tripled. It was a little under $8 trillion. Now it's over $21 trillion. It's a lot of value created in the last three years. NVIDIA was second to last in the max in the Mag 7 when ChatGPT launched. It was worth just $420 billion. billion dollars, something around there. Today, the stock is up over 10x, basically. It's 4.36 trillion dollars. And up today. And up today. Despite all the chaos. Dylan Patel was trying so hard to bring

that stock down, but he couldn't do it. I do think that the invidia, the 10x that's happened, has really created some crazy zealots and just an entire industrial complex because there are so many people who put who heard AI they tried the chat GPT thing and they were like this is big how do I get it on this I can't buy open AI opening I was running away with it oh they need invidia chips that's the logical next step they went into invidia and they got a 10x and they could have gotten a 10x on like a million dollars 10 million dollars siki Chen from runway was saying that back i think it was 2020 2021 he he said he put an uncomfortable amount of his net worth to invidia yep And obviously...

And near Cyanne, same story, right? Still underappreciating, the NVIDIA 10-year fund. All it does is buy NVIDIA. Just by investing in it, you can't possibly sell. God's chosen company. Yes. That's what the, I think, title of the fund was. Oh, really?

Yeah, that's hilarious. Previously, the world's largest company in November of 2022 was Apple. And at the time, they had a sizable lead over Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Now that gap has closed a bit as the hyperscalers have grown more over the last three years on the back of the AI boom. And it's interesting. I mean, you can sort the Mag 7 by market cap. And today you get the following ranking. Tesla, then Meta, then Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, and then Nvidia at the top.

And the big question, I think, that's on everyone's mind and kind of underpins the horse race that we cover every day on the show is, what will that ranking look like in the next three years? Is NVIDIA really a monopoly? Is it impervious to attacks from the, from, you know, different suppliers? What does Broadcom have to do to get into the Mag 7? There's also just like a bit of branding. Like some of the companies that made it into the Mag 7 were, I feel like the Mag 7 leaned understandable, like not that deep in the supply chain. Even Nvidia was the deepest.

Nvidia had the least of like a consumer brand, but still a lot of people use the gaming graphic gaming graphics cards. Broadcom is really tricky because there's no consumer angle whatsoever. Consumers can buy Tesla. They can use meta products. They can buy on Amazon, have a Microsoft operating system. They can use Google. They can have an iPhone. And they can have an Nvidia gaming graphics card. The top 10 right now, Tesla is sitting at 10. TSMC at 9. 8 is Saudi Ramco, 7 meta, and then 6 is brought. I also think you have to be an American company to be in this like mag seven or whatever the hot ranking is like fangang did not include never included oil companies never included international companies because if you go there then you could be like oh well

let's include like the chinese tobacco company that's worth a trillion dollars or something like that like there are some crazy there's some crazy like foreign owned companies that are if they were independent might be worth a trillion dollars because they just have so much of true monopoly assets yeah exactly but it doesn't really count because it's just sitting there out in the out in the ether Gemini app downloads are catching up to ChatGBTGBT.T and Gemini users now spend more time in the app than ChatGPT users. People are going back and forth on Can Gemini catch up? The model clearly very good. The big bombshell in the semi-analysis piece over the weekend, this idea that Open AI has not done a proper pre-trained since 40, and the 4-5 pre-trained kind of got mothballed.

There was this question about, is pre-training dead? It seems like the Google folks said, no, it's not. And then they went and did a pre-trained and Gemini 3 outperformed. Anthropic also pre-trained. I mean, yeah. We asked Chilto about this and he said, oh, yeah, we're still bullish on scaling. I feel like there's still there's still juice in the lemon of pre-training. But it's not scale.

Like we only have one internet. Ilya was correct about that. I think the thing that no one is debating is the fact that the Gemini 3 as a model with Nano Banana Pro with V-O-3 is just like the actual foundational. intelligence is plenty good to be dominant in the consumer AI category. The question is, can you actually get people to install the app, use it, can they enjoy it? Do they not churn and go back to ChachibbT? It's a really, it's a sprint to actually create an app that is as sticky as ChatGPT.

Because ChatGPT, the app is fantastic and very, very well designed. I would much more look at like, what are the structural advantages that we know exist? And I mean, with Gemini, one of them is. to that point about the wire cutter you know where the wire cutter shows up Google search results you know what you know what company has one bot for scraping everything Google so the Google bot is identifies as one entity so you can either say I'm allowing Google or not and it's a big it's a tall order to be like yeah I don't want to be in Google results a funny a funny Gemini integration that I that I've used is that you land in a hangout and you just say it's Who is this person? Is this real? You can actually do that? It is.

It pulls up a sidebar. You can just ask, like, who am I meeting with right now? And it'll give you like a... It's clearly. Who am I meeting with? What should I say to that? What should I ask them? What is my name?

What do they want to know about me? What should I tell them about me? David Sacks is going to war with the New York Times. He says, inside the NYT's hoax factory, calls it a hoax factory, because the New York Times posted a piece of a piece of the New York Times. a piece about David Sacks saying that the headline was Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends. He says five months ago the five New York Times reporters were dispatched to create a story about my supposed conflicts of interest working as the White House AI and Crypto czar through a series of fact checks. They revealed their accusations, which we debunked in detail. Not surprisingly, the published article included only bits and pieces of our responses. Their accusations range. from a fabricated dinner with a leading tech CEO to non-existent promises of access to the president

to baseless claims of influencing defense contracts. Every time we would prove an accusation, false NYT pivoted to the next allegation. This is why the story has dragged on for five months. Today, they evidently just threw up their hands and published this Nothing Burger. Anyone who reads the story carefully can see that they strung together a bunch of anecdotes that don't support the headline. And of course, that was the whole point. Well, people have been supportive of this broadly in tech.

Let's go through some of the reaction. Sam Altman says David Sacks really understands AI and cares about the U.S. leading in innovation. I'm grateful we have him. Here's my takeaway. If you believe that AI and crypto are industries that we should support in the United States, then you want to have a czar focused on those things that generally. feels positively about those things I think that there's actually a debate on both fronts right like there's people on the left that think AI and crypto are just

default bad and they want less of them and there's people on there's people on the right that believe that too I think that ultimately there's arguments for why the US should bleed in in stable coins which you know is part of why the Genius Act is important and a lot of you know the AI action plan there's to be debates on on individual points in that but in general i think uh you know creating an environment in the u.s where we can continue to lead in ai is is important i didn't see any sort of like smoking smoking gun in any of the stuff there were some allegations around uh around the all i don't think they smoke very much at all i think it's mostly tequila drinking that's true they do all in tequila

i didn't see anything uh very specific i mean it's it's it's all in like they're They are super connected if you partner with them in some ways. Like you would expect to get more of a read on where they're spending time in D.C. What they're seeing, that seems like there are cleared lines on what you can share. Like what turns you into a lobbying firm and what doesn't? I don't know David Sachs, but I want more expertise in government. Experts tend to have made money in their area of expertise, have friends in their area of expertise. If people can't have history or friends in a field before least,

it then our leaders won't know anything and I thought this is a good distillation of like the core debate about like should you have someone who has never participated in in an industry overseeing it and I believe there's some readers yeah and probably people at the New York Times that would like somebody that hasn't participated in either industry to be running in a role like that yeah and just blanket against both industries yeah sort of like hold them back so Alex says the construct you're thinking of is called a council it's been used for a long time to allow the elected with limited knowledge on a domain to get a consensus of options from a range of experts. This minimizes conflicts and prevents kleptocracy. Isn't that what a czar is? I thought, I thought, I thought, I thought, I thought, Sachs was a council. He's not an elected official. The elected official is Donald Trump, the president. And, like, there's a variety of folks there. And then, and then, uh, Sachs is, like, appointed to this czar role. He doesn't have the ability to just, like, create legislation out of thin air, right? I was trying to look at the history of czars, right? It is weird. It is.

Like, have we always had czars? I know there was a whole thing about the border czar. The first major czar was Bernard Barak, appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to head the War Industries Board in 1918. The press dubbed him the industry czar because he had sweeping powers to coordinate wartime production. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed several czars to manage the massive wartime economy, including a shipping czar and a synthetic rubber czar. These roles were essential... Synthetic rubber czar? People are stoked for that.

People don't talk about the need for our ongoing need for synthetic rubber czar. No. These roles were essential because existing government bureaucracies were too slow to handle the urgent demands of total war. During the 1973 oil crisis, Nixon appointed William Simon as the energy czar to manage fuel shortages. Anyways, again, I think unless you're just blanket against these industries, it's hard to argue that you want somebody that doesn't have any expertise in said industries if you're the average New York Times subscriber yeah this is probably that you were they were probably like very excited by this story all in pot about to be an all-timer after this article do you

think it's possible that David and Jason coordinated to get this hit piece done to grow all in even further the timeline truly isn't turmoil over this lots of people are sending me the New York Times story on David Sachs outside of the all- in sponsorship proposal, which feels oblivious at best, corrupt at worst. I'm not seeing much in there that's new, at least to those who've been following. Dan Premack says, as an aside, it's true that SACS slash Kraft still have a ton of AI investments. Thing is, all tech investments at this point are AI investments. It's kind of like internet investments at this point. If you invest in tech startups, you de facto invest in AI startups. If anything going deep in

politics has been a net negative for all-in, at least in my opinion, we would be growing faster and wouldn't have lost some percentage of our left-leaning audience if we'd stuck to tech, markets, science, VC, et cetera. That's an interesting take. I still think that politics made all in so important. It made it so big. Well, yeah, and it made it made the content polarizing. Yeah. But I think that polarizing in media is good. You actually get more attention, not necessarily good from all points of view, but good from a pure just like reach. CNBC is bigger than Bloomberg by like a pretty significant margin

because Bloomberg's like extra wonky and CNBC's a little bit, I mean it's literally called consumer business news. Like that's what the C stands for, I believe. And then you have Fox, which is even more. Like Fox News is political and it's much bigger ratings than CNBC or Bloomberg. And then ESPN is like by far the biggest.

Yeah. Because it's like sports. love sports when my wife asks what we should eat for dinner but says no to my first two suggestions we are back to the age of research i like it and then uh when she asks what i want for dinner from bay's lord the answer to that question will reveal itself i think there will be lots of possible answers very true uh it's a great great new meme template i like it when my husband asks how many amazon packages are still on the way the answer to that question will reveal itself i think There will be lots of possible answers.

But I think that's actually true. Like, if he creates some new AI, like there's a bunch of different ways to monetize it. We know this is a fact. But of course, Ilya is now joining the ranks of Jan Lacoon and Rich Sutton and under Carpathie of sort of industry legends that are more or less saying that scaling is over and LLMs are dead. Scaling is over and LLMs are a dead end. Ah, you're sweet. Scaling is over and LMs are a dead end. Hello.

Human resources. I love this meme template because it's like, yeah, Jan Lecun has been saying the same thing. He says, for the record, my current BMI is 24. This guy rocks. And the timeline wasn't turmoil. Lots of people very, you know, upset with semi-analysis's latest post. How dare you watch a, they take a, they took a swing at the king.

They said, TPUV-7, Google takes us. a swing at the king. King is of course Nvidia. They are asking, is this potentially the end of the Kudamote Anthropics? They're talking about Anthropics, one gigawatt, TPU purchase. The more TPU meta SSI, XAI, Open AI, Anthropic buy, the more GPU capex you save. And they're going into what the battle between TPU and the next generation GPU out of NVIDIA will look like. This upset some people. lot of folks who are long NVIDIA, either they have invested in NVIDIA, they made a lot of money in VIA, or their whole business is tied to NVIDIA or AMD. In general, the response to this article was very positive, but there were some folks who were very upset by it.

And on accounts that put a noun and then capital as their name. Yes. And suddenly they're an expert on everything. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, it was a little odd seeing the credentialism come out from the Anon's. because like i don't think we should get in the two can play that game uh camp it's a little bit rough so a lot of people are going back and forth on you can semi-analysis be trusted because they're writing about uh about you know invidia and and uh dillon i think some people didn't understand that he was joking zephyr here has a post dylan is being tongue-in-cheek but he's not wrong invidia was extremely dominant for the last three years as we saw in the stock it's up 10x over the last three years. New competitors will cause a reduction in market share and margin compression,

but Tam is big, so revenue profits won't go down. 75% of GM is just unsustainable. Hyper-scalers will also use the cheap TPUs threat to extract better deals from Jensen, priority access for Ruben Feynman or discounts on GPUs. Jensen called Altman and initiated the $10 billion deal after he saw the information about the information article about opening eye testing TPUs. This is in reaction to that. that point about open AI hasn't even deployed TPUs yet and they've already saved yeah percent Dylan's speed running through all the learnings of sell-side research industry capture pissing off IR execs gatekeeping info based on client tier

difficulty scaling beyond single star analysts distorted MSN representation of your notes eventually spending too much time marketing versus researching amazing biz obviously Dylan would would push back on a lot of this stuff if you actually read through the entire article there's nothing in the article should actually in this article should be that surprising because so much of the article is just referencing old semi-analysis research part of part of i think the surprise here is just how much um how much faster this conversation has really come to ahead than people may have expected at least like surface level on the timeline i think people felt like the tp u threat

was maybe like a 2026 2027 conversation versus being like it's a part of these buying discussions right now and negotiations. The other buried lead in the article was, of course, about pre-training. OpenAI's leading researchers have not completed a successful full-scale pre-training run that was broadly for a new frontier model since GPT40 in May of 2024. Like, if this was wrong, you would imagine that there would be a whole bunch of reaction from OpenAI people or like proxies or surrogates, right? People quote reading and be like, that's just not true.

Wow, somebody else is cooked. But the fact that I haven't seen anyone respond to this and say, like, oh, this is, this is wrong, like we actually did. Not that, not that, like, that's the north star for what the business is. Like, the business's job is to create profits, right? It's not to, you know, complete successful, full-scale pre-training runs. That's not the goal. That's just something that they might do in service of making a better model, making a better product. But ultimately, it's whatever the customers want.

And if the customers are happy with 4-0-level base pre-train and a business, bunch of reasoning on top, that's fine. Also, I mean, it really, it does make me happy that we didn't go deeper into ranking people because it does feel like when you create a list of tiers and rank a bunch of people, you're just creating a big bucket of enemies down at the bottom of like people who want you dead because you rank them low. My theory is that meta deliberately leaked the story to the information about acquiring Google's TPUs. For meta, it's a classic risk-free power play. The moment Jensen Wong reaches wind, catches wind of meta using Google Silicon, Nvidia is likely to rush in with an investment. They might even be negotiating as we speak.

This allows meta to secure capital and shift from burning their own cash to potentially getting discounts or effectively buying Nvidia chips with Nvidia's own money. Plus, if they actually do secure Google TPUs, they solve their compute shortage. It covers all bases. But the issue, the issue is how many red flags would be waving if Jensen was like, yeah, investing $20 billion in meta. We're very, very excited about meta and owning a piece of, yeah, it seems very, very odd. So he's in a position where I don't know what kind of leverage Jensen has in those conversations with meta because he doesn't want a discount. And it's not like an open AI where he can just announce an investment or an anthropic, et cetera. So how does any type

of like rebate actually happen is a question. So Clyde Chan says, I keep seeing stuff about TPU. Has anything materially new happened? There's no evidence Google has ever trained Gemini on non-T hardware going back to pre-GPT models like Burt. TPUs predate NVIDIA's own tensor cores. Anthropic and character and SSI and Mid Journey have long used TPUs. I'd be surprised if meta weren't looking at them. VINVIDIA's moat has never been deep for the big labs. See open AI deciding it could do better than Kuda and investing in Triton instead. Regularly edging out CUDNN on benchmarks. There's nothing magical or structural about any of this, just good engineers doing good work. TPUs are not that much more efficient than GPUs, and small performance per watt difference are dwarfed by whether

meta has the right kernels and systems engineering talent to pull it off. Both NVIDias and Google's moats are small, and we are still at the point where individual good engineers can flip the entire balance. Why was this not priced in? This is all super old public info. I have a feeling that Clive Chan, who I guess is, over at, was it Tesla and then Open AI is a little bit of like first time in the public markets, first time

realizing that the people who trade this stuff are not necessarily like on the super inside of the labs actually understanding the decisions that are being made inside the labs like it's a completely separate ecosystem. And that's why organizations like semi-analysis exist. Josh Kushner

is partnering with OpenAI. We are excited to announce a strategic partnership between Open AI and Thrive Holdings. Through our partnership, Open AI will become an equity holder in holdings, and collectively we will set out to deliver frontier technology to our customers. For decades, technology has transformed the world's largest industries from the outside in. We believe the AI paradigm will be different in that some of the most profound transformations will now occur from the inside out.

We view the businesses that we own and operate as the right reward system. to build, test, and improve industry-specific products and models. The race is on. Is it inside-out or outside-in transformation? What's going to happen? These are the new fast take-off, short timeline, long timeline. Are you an inside-out guy or an outside-in guy? This is going to be the defining debate over the next couple days.

So get ready to lock in. We'll be covering it here. We'll probably have some people on who are digging into this, investing in this, have long takes, short takes. Who knows? But I want to get to the bottom of what this outside. in versus inside out transformation will look like you can feel the panic behind the urgency and intensity with which people are defending invidia it feels visceral and quite intense you can tell

how much there's riding on this it makes a lot of sense I thought it was notable pager duty has fallen to a 1.1 billion dollar market cap and there are 500 million of air are so trading they're not growing anymore they're trading a 2.1 X ARR it's profitable according to jason lemkin over at disaster. So yeah, rough time out there if you're not growing, regardless of the revenue scale. Two days ago, we shared that Enron back November 29th, 2001, Nvidia replaced Enron in the S&P 500. I saw this post go out from our incredible team, and I immediately Googled to fact that. I was like, there's no way. Someone has made a terrible mistake on our team, and we are doing fake news, unironic. now. We used to have some fun, but apparently this is real.

It's real. It's real. It's real. Genson was like, I'll take that spot. November 29th. Obviously, that's not how it works. It is much more mathematical than that, I believe. Standard & Poor's picks the largest companies. And after certain ebbs and flows of the market, they swap folks in and out. but this went pretty viral 5,000 likes. But what is really interesting is, of course, the Nvidia Enrod comparisons are just so silly to me. What is incredible is this branded shirt he's wearing.

Look at this thing. Fantastic. So awesome. I love it. Not enough people trying to go snipe vintage Nvidia merch. It's a great shirt. It's a great look. And I feel like it's got to make a comeback.

The button down, This is the pre-Silican Valley. I'm just in a T-shirt era, but it's post-suits. You know, it's like, we're not suits. We're working in technology. We're still going to throw on a collar, but we're going to dress it down a little bit. No tie. Guys, scroll up.

Scroll up on this for a second. Yeah. I'll keep going. Keep going. Oh, who's not, who's not following? Tyler, you got to follow the account. No, this is not my account. I think this is more of like a burner account situation.

Oh, it's a scraper that we use to for the show. It is. You've got to correct that, Tyler. Come on. Oxford Dictionary didn't get the memo. Apparently, rage bait named word of the year. I think it, I think it... No, no, no.

It's appropriate that it would be the word of the year. But it is so funny that you posted this and then Oxford Dictionary. Yeah, so this is true. According to the BBC, rage bait named Oxford Word of the Year 2025. It certainly feels that way on the timeline. Your post, one million views on this. And we'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.

Cheers. Bye.