TBPN Live - Harvey’s Margins, Are Insects Worth More Than Humans?, Meta Tests Human Help for Muse | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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Starting point is 00:00:01 Uh, Jordy, his hat game has evolved. He's now wearing the fedora with the blackstone cap on top, which I assume can only mean one thing. It means that your top priority is safety in financial markets, financial markets and the financialization. Oh, but also my safety as well. Oh, you care about both. I care about both. So you want to accelerate the AI build out safely. Safely. Yes. I thought it was, I thought it was you're going to blend the two and you're like, look, I want insane private. credit deals, trillion dollars of capital to flow into the AI build out, but I wanted to do
Starting point is 00:00:36 do it safely. Every contract. I want to prioritize safety on the whole frontier. Okay. Safety around the models. The capital markets? Safety and financial. In the capital markets. Got it. Okay. Okay. I'm seeing where you get there. Anyway, you want to do Harvey first? Let's, uh, people are, people are taking shots at Harvey. It started with Samuel Rowling. I won't stand for it. I won't stand for it. No, I like Harvey. We, we've talked to some lawyers that use Harvey. Seems like We also had Logora on the show just last week. Had a good time with them. Seems like a very competitive space.
Starting point is 00:01:06 But the headline that grabbed attention. They say, track changes. Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% to negative 50% by June as agent token use spiked 20-fold on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models, Bloomberg reports. And so it seems really bad. Like you definitely don't want negative gross margins as a software company, as a tech company. As any company. Really, as any company, actually, you don't want to be selling a dollar for 50 cents. And that's exactly what they did in June, basically.
Starting point is 00:01:37 That's what they were doing. They were selling tokens at negative gross margins. Not good, but there's way more details than the actual reporting. So you should go read the Bloomberg report. So the first thing is, like, cost did explode, but it was on the back of more product usage, which is good. They're growing ARR. We'll get into that. And token consumption increased 20x this year.
Starting point is 00:01:55 So basically, they are feeling the reasoning era, the agentic era, one job. one job, one process in Harvey is generating a lot more token. Had seat-based pricing. Yep. And then AI got a lot better. So every seat was just using it way more. Yeah. Very simple.
Starting point is 00:02:10 But it's not just using it more. It's that the lawyer might be saying the exact same thing as they did a year ago. They might say, review this. But instead of like one-shotting it with no reasoning, they went to reasoning, which generated way more tokens. And then they went to agents. So they were like, okay, it's actually going to fan out, look at everything across your firm. all the other records that you have, all your different policies and MD files, like everything that you have is going to be worked through this agent.
Starting point is 00:02:37 And so you're generating way more tokens. So that created negative gross margins. But the good news is that they're already back to positive gross margins, which is in the Bloomberg article, kind of criminal not to repurpose that because it really makes it look like they are running at negative gross margins. They had a negative 50% gross margin in June, but they are back to positive gross margins.
Starting point is 00:02:57 They change their model usage, of course. a whole bunch of models that are cheaper and better for certain things. And they actually fine-tuned, an open-weight model. So they did post-training on an open-weight model, and they're calling it Harvey Tenet. And there's some interesting details there. I want to debate with you on the value of that, where that goes. First. Gabe, one of the founders of Harvey responded.
Starting point is 00:03:19 He said the hardest thing about building, Harvey is doing what's best for our customers, despite immense pressure to do what's easy. The easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins. We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime, even though it hurt our margins. This meant optimizing our product through routing, harness improvements, and post-training so we could serve Frontier Intelligence at an affordable price.
Starting point is 00:03:47 It also meant building the infrastructure for customers to monitor and manage spend, usage dashboards per matter cost attribution, spend caps, and ROI reporting. As a result, we improved our gross margins, from negative 50% to positive in a single quarter, despite usage doubling month every month and continuing to serve the best models. Our philosophy is simple, do what's best for our customers, even when it's painful, hurts our margin or draws criticism from competitors X in the press. We believe the most important part of building a company is earning and keeping your customers trust. You do that by doing the hard thing for them, even when it costs you.
Starting point is 00:04:23 A bunch of great points in here, even outside of the Bloomberg piece and the subsequent coverage, Max from Lagora was going pretty hard saying it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to train your own models because the public, basically like publicly available frontier models are dropping and cost and the quality is increasing. So you're just sort of like wasting your own. And again, like that's a bet that he's making. Harvey's going to make another bet.
Starting point is 00:04:52 Probably some mixture of both is going to be the right approach. There's another interesting sort of like how bad is this. situation, just comp, which is, so they had negative 50% gross margins in June. They're at a $400 million run rate for ARR, I suppose. And so that's $33 million a month. And so negative 50% margins means they lost $16 million, but they've raised like $500 million. So in terms of like burn, it's not super cause for crisis in my opinion. And what's interesting is that even through June, Maybe they did the Sequoia deal that valued the company at 15.5 before that happened because it was announced September 9th. But I have to imagine that the deal probably got done with at least some insight into those negative gross margins in June.
Starting point is 00:05:45 What do you think? I would assume so. But the main thing is like every application layer company has like gone through a moment like this, even if it was for like a single day. Totally. So it matters how quickly you can respond and adjust. Yeah. So where do they need to get to you? Like what is the standard for the legal technology industry?
Starting point is 00:06:03 There's some comps here. E-disco provider disco, public company, 75% gap gross margins. Like it is a software tool that when you're going into discovery, you need to connect with a bunch of data. Okay, we got a whole bunch of tech messages, a whole bunch of emails. Let's put them in a system so we can review them, sort of normal SaaS. I'm sure there's a bunch of AI involved now. but that business is running at 75% gross margins.
Starting point is 00:06:28 Thompson Reuters has a legal professional segment of software. That's running at almost 50% adjusted EBITDA margins. So like true, true net profit. So that's sort of the way they want to be. Also, peer play law firms have really high margins as well. Hard to comp them to businesses because they pay out to the partnership. But Pricewaterhouse Coopers reports net profit margins around 41% for the top 10 firms. It's lower for firms 10 to 9, 10 to 100 or something like that.
Starting point is 00:06:58 But still, lots of health in the legal industry broadly. Obviously, everyone knows that lawyers make money. That shouldn't be surprising. And, yeah, tokens are getting cheaper by the day. There's a bunch of model launches. Opus 55 launched today. GROC 4.7 was yesterday. And GROC 4.7, no one was, even Elon was like, okay, we're not jumping straight to the frontier with this.
Starting point is 00:07:20 It's going to be a couple more iterations, but we're excited with the progress. But there was one benchmark that really jumped out. And it was actually the Harvey legal agent benchmark, which is interesting. So I don't know how insanely good that benchmark is. It might be, you know, you could benchmax against it. But the interesting thing about that particular benchmark was that it was a legal task benchmark based on cost. And so GROC 4.7 is particularly cheap for the type of legal work that at the very least Harvey wants to do. So you could see them funneling more token spent towards XAI and GROC.
Starting point is 00:07:54 Do you have something? You wanted to give it up for big law? The chat wants to give it up for big law. They're the real winners here. Additionally, GPD6 and Luna are starting to roll out. So we'll look out for announcements there soon. There were some cool demos. I saw one Opus 5-5.
Starting point is 00:08:16 I mean... Chad says the combination, the hat jacket combination isn't working, I'll try to adjust a little bit. I'll try to adjust. Hopefully that's better. Well, well, thank you. Thank you for flagging. Huge upgrade. Very funny. Yeah, I saw a cool, I saw a cool demo where someone sketched out on a piece of paper, sort of a trebuschet and Opus 55 took that image into simulation and created like a virtual version of it. AI continues to impress in terms of translation. of things, oh, your kid drew a, you know, some crazy mythical creature, turn it into a story,
Starting point is 00:08:57 turn it into a movie, turn it into a video game. Whatever format you want, if you want to, if you want to read a 2000-page novel based on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, like you can probably do that now. So you can have your content in any specific format you want. It seems to be where the AI continues to impress. Anyway, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I've been having a lot of fun generating AI videos with Codex. Should we pull up your latest masterpiece? Yeah, the literally me compilation. It burns up the Internet and vibrails all of the time. But now, if you see those literally me characters and you're like, I am Jake Jalenhall and Nightcrawler. I am, I forget who else is there. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
Starting point is 00:09:57 You can put yourself in the movie. There's Inception. We got Jordy in there. That's Drive. I think that's Heat. Mad Men. Can we call them out? I think that's Bike Club.
Starting point is 00:10:06 You got Joker. You got Taxi Driver. You got Nightcrawler. No Country for Old Men. Social Network. Godfather. Back to Joker. I forget that one's Hachshank maybe that one's collateral then blade runner
Starting point is 00:10:19 blade runner again I think yeah some of these some of the renders are really really good that one like your face doesn't quite fit on Leo's head but that one's really good that one works pretty well this one's a little awkward the Joker it's really just walking Venus's face didn't actually swap you in there's even like it did the Joker was like do it anyway I don't care it's fine it's gonna be on screen for two seconds one's good. John is really my human agent. He just, he's sort of like an ambient always on agent. That's what I'm saying. I don't even have to tell you. You just predict my needs, right?
Starting point is 00:10:57 You'll send me something like this. Everyone should have a John in their life. Everyone should have a John in their life. Everyone should. But yeah, fun, fun, powerful tool. Still got 500 bucks locked away in Higgs field in the wrong section. Can't do anything with it. Maybe just give away the account or something. Anyway, what matters more? People or insects? Tough call, John. We should get into maybe one side of it first.
Starting point is 00:11:26 Yeah. And before we form an opinion. Okay. The human side? Do you want to steal man the human side? Look, and I'll just say that we're coming to you life. We're coming to, we had a rough morning with the mosquitoes. We actually had to, we had to.
Starting point is 00:11:43 We had to dooredash one of those bug bite treatment thing, the heat, whatever, what do you call them, Tyler? I think it's like insect bite healer. That's what it's listed as. It did work because I, yes, Sebastian says I'm famously pro-mosquito. Yes. But a mosquito did bite me on the face today and a bunch more time. So I ended up capitulating and having to get one of these. But I don't like using these.
Starting point is 00:12:10 I don't like using these. It's funny because I can't stand EA's and I think they're weird freaks and I don't think they should be anywhere near public policy or anything like that. But the one thing that I can agree on with Ben, this guy writing this post that insects are more important than humans is I don't think anyone should, I don't think we should harm the insects. I think humans are more important, but that doesn't mean you got to like take them all out. Yeah. Just go somewhere else. You would take sort of, you would be altruistic towards the insects. Ellie says mosquitoes are terrorists of the air.
Starting point is 00:12:46 They really are. You would, you, you want to be altruistic towards the mosquitoes. You want to be effective in your altruism when it comes to the mosquitoes. You don't want to arrest. No, I want them, I want them effectively to be nowhere near me. An effective altruist who writes under the name Bentham's Bulldog went viral over the weekend for an essay titled Insects matter more than people in the aggregate, arguing that the combined welfare of insects outweighs that of humanity. His basic argument is one of scale. Insects are so numerous that even if their
Starting point is 00:13:22 capacity for suffering is only a tiny fraction of ours, their total suffering could still dwarf human suffering. It's almost just a thought experiment. There's so many other directions you could make. Why not go pound for pound? Maybe cows are the most important because there's a lot of cows and they weigh a lot. There's probably more aggregate pounds of cow than humans. Maybe they matter more than humans in the aggregate, right? Or fur, like the amount of fur on all the monkeys in the world is more than all the fur on all the humans in the world. And so maybe monkeys matter more. I don't know. It's completely arbitrary where people draw these lines. But he estimates that for every second of human life, insects collectively spend roughly 270,000 seconds dying,
Starting point is 00:14:09 about 75 hours, and notes that more insects die in a single second than the total number of humans who have ever lived. Wow, that's a crazy stat. I mean, the guy pulled some cool numbers together. This is interesting. This is fun fact territory. A large part of the essay turns on whether insects can experience pain. Bentham's Bulldog argues that they can, even weekly. If they can, even weekly, their suffering should count morally just as ours does. What species you are is just totally irrelevant to whether it's bad for you to feel terrible pain. Using what he describes as a conservative assumption that insects experience pain at just one 10,000th the intensity that humans do, he concludes that the sheer number of insects would still produce vastly more suffering in the aggregate.
Starting point is 00:14:54 He ultimately argues that insects may experience more suffering in a single day than humans have throughout all history. Now, is there a piece on this where this is the view of this community with the relative, like, are they looking forward to how a world might interact with like a godlike machine super intelligence and humans? So the idea is like, we got to stand up for the insects now because we are the insects of the future. so we want them to make the same calculus. I think that's certainly like where the thought experiment goes. Yeah, right? And so this feels almost like bait or like a trap where it's like if you are the type of person that jumps on this and says, no, I disagree. Like insects don't matter more than people in aggregate.
Starting point is 00:15:43 Then you're setting yourself up for like the dunk that's, okay, well now there are a quadrillion superintelligences that can all feel pain. in some abstract way. And so they're more valuable in Santa, now you're the insect. And so your previous argument can be used against you to advocate for your own eradication. And so it's like, stand up for the insects now lest you be discarded in the robotic future.
Starting point is 00:16:10 I don't know. The reactions to this were rough. People did not like this argument at all. Well, it's just the timing is funny because there's so much tension building around the sort of EA rationalist movements which is super fractured. People don't realize how fractured it is.
Starting point is 00:16:25 Yeah, but it's sort of boiling up to the sort of national level in a way that it hasn't before. Yeah. And so during the midst of that broader conversation to come in and being like, yeah, insects actually matter more than people. Yeah. In the aggregate. What were some of the reactions? Doomer said, if you truly believe that a bug's life is worth more than a human life, you will immediately feed yourself to bugs. Do it right now.
Starting point is 00:16:47 If you don't do this, you are a fraud, a liar, a poser. I think it's actually important for people to read the, before you go and comment on this article, watch a bug's life at half speed. Half speed. Yeah, watch the whole movie at half speed. You're a movie guy, but maybe you're not a fan of watching movies at a half speed. It's not really how the, but half speed is a great sort of tool to have in the tool chest when you want to deeply comprehend. 2x speed, 3D glass. with the two different movies interlaced so I can get one movie in one eye, another movie in the other eye, one audio book here, one podcast here.
Starting point is 00:17:29 Duo. While I'm sleeping. Yeah. With the duo. Exactly. Max, Brainrod. I mean, the fracturing of EA really, like, leads to a really, really wide range of outcomes that get sort of lumped together. Everything from the Pace the Frontier essay to this.
Starting point is 00:17:46 These are clearly very, very different pieces of communication, and yet they get sort of lumped together. It must be full employment if you're in the public relations department over there. Yeah, I was going to say, I think the shrimp welfare stuff makes more sense to this because like I'm not really sure what, like after reading this and say, I agree, like, what are the next steps? Like, we're not like really factory farming insects. Sure. Maybe through pesticides or something. Speak for yourself, brother.
Starting point is 00:18:12 Yeah, yeah, the shrimp, the shrimp welfare. Got some big announcements coming to. Like what percent of these like 600 billion insect deaths per second are preventable? Preventable. Yeah. We're like with the shrimp. You know, you can say like, okay, change the farming practice or just don't eat the shrimp. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:29 So I think that's why maybe this was less impactful. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's all a continuum to like until you get to like the veganism, like the animals who you can pet, you know, should be able to live full lives. This is sort of the most abstracted version of that. But yeah, I don't know. It's odd. More importantly, update on TBPN's Road to Christmas.
Starting point is 00:18:51 Oh, yeah. We're down to just 93 days. 93 days. A lot to think about, a lot of moves to make, and we couldn't be more excited. Start counting it down. I was trying to think of a realistic AI doom scenario. Like everyone's like, oh, I can't imagine it. And so I actually mapped out one that maybe I could take you guys through.
Starting point is 00:19:14 I wrote a little script here called the old way. So, you know, fades in, starts in the TBP and Ultradome. Me, you, Tyler, we're all doing the show. All of a sudden, all the phones in the Ultradome light up. Emergency alert, unknown biological events. Shelter immediately. Outside, alarms begin to sound across Los Angeles. A strange haze starts pouring through vents and drifting across the streets outside.
Starting point is 00:19:40 I see a cloud approaching the Ultrodome entrance. First thing I do, bioweapon attack, this is what you got to do. Boom. Right there. It's not going in your mouth. You're good. Second step, pull out your gun. Boom, boom, boom.
Starting point is 00:19:52 Start blasting whoever's responsible. You're just firing wildly. Once you got the situation a little stabilized, then we got to start, we got to figure out what's going on. So I go over to Tyler and I say, look, we got to hack into the superintelligence. We got to figure out what is going on with this bio weapon. And he's like, sure. like, yeah, let's hack into it. Like, I'll open up codex.
Starting point is 00:20:14 What do you want me to prompt? I'm like, no, the AI has gone rogue. We have to do this the old way. He's like, okay, I'll open clog code. Like, what do you want me to prompt? And I'm like, no, the old way. He's like, okay, I got cursor open. Like, what are we doing here?
Starting point is 00:20:27 I'm like, no, Tyler, we have to go back to the old way. He's like, okay, I got GitHub copilot. Fired up. I'm like, no. Tyler, you can't use any AI at all. He's like, okay, just let me know what code you want to write, and I'll look it up on Stock Overflow. And I'm like, no.
Starting point is 00:20:41 The internet has been contaminated, Tyler. We can't use anything. We have to code the old way. We have to do it by hand. And Tyler's like, I can't. We don't know how. I don't remember anything. I can't write any code.
Starting point is 00:20:55 So what do we do next? We got to get George Hatz. He's the only one who can help in this scenario. So we go. Because he's the only one that remembers how to code. He's got local models stored. He's got his own hardware. So we go get George Hots.
Starting point is 00:21:07 And then we're like, okay, George Hacking and the superintelligence. Tell us what's going on with this bioweapon. and why aren't we affected? Like, we've been walking around. We seem to be fine. Everyone else is turning into a zombie. What's going on? So he locks in, he writes some code, he hacks in, figures it out.
Starting point is 00:21:22 This is, Jordy, tell me about your diet. And you're like, well, I just eat at heroin exclusively. And he's like, yeah, my analysis shows that your body has never had a toxin in it. And so you are immune to the bioweapon. It doesn't affect you at all. And I'm like, but how do you explain me? I only eat heroin once a day. And he's like, well, John, my analysis indicates that you might have had the original four loco?
Starting point is 00:21:47 Drink the original four loco? In large quantities? And I said, yeah, I was daily driving in college. Why? It's like, your body consumed so much original for loco. It's now essentially pure toxins. So the bioweapon sees it as a hostile environment. It doesn't even try to infect you.
Starting point is 00:22:04 So you are immune. So we're both immune. But the bioweapon is still wreaking havoc on America, so we've got to get to the bottom of it. So we're going to need some muscle. So we go get Sam Seulek. So we go get Sam Seulik. We're like, let's go. We got to go to the data center.
Starting point is 00:22:18 We got to break in and shut this thing down. That's the only option. So we get in the Cadillac Blackwing. We jump it off of ramp, slam into the data center, pull out the gun, start blasting the GPUs. We're just firing everywhere. Finally, after we've shot 90% of the data center,
Starting point is 00:22:33 it's just bullets everywhere. Finally, a humanoid robot emerges. It's Mecca Hitler. We got to fight them. We got to fight them. We're shooting. We're shooting. The bullets are just bouncing right off. They're just bouncing right off. We're getting beat up. We're trying to fist fight it. Sam Seulik's doing nothing. It's not working. And then at the last second, do do do, do, John Sina breaks through the roof, slams down the humanoid robot, rips his head off, and humanity wins.
Starting point is 00:23:04 So that's kind of like a concrete example of like how AI Doom, how, you know, a runaway roadie. Just one scenario. That's one possible scenario. I put it at 10%. That's the way it plays out. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm at right now. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:18 That's how I'm thinking about it. Meta, the AI agent company, Mews, they're putting humans in there. Meta is testing human concierge for its new personal agent Mews. Meta has been testing human concierge for its new personal AI assistant. This is in Bloomberg, which entails having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed by the digital agent. Amazon's like, no, no, no.
Starting point is 00:23:39 we're going to block your browser. Well, did you block everyone's browser? How's that going to play out? I was thinking about at some point, if I write a really, really bespoke a, like basically a CLI, like a really bespoke weird CLI, like I vibe coded, but I use sort of odd techniques. Like I'm like, okay, use computer use and open up opera or, you know, Mozilla and click around and add some randomness and do this. And it's like, and I basically create a CLA that wraps. an agent where it's like it runs on my home Wi-Fi. And I just do this. I don't productize it.
Starting point is 00:24:14 So Amazon like can't really detect it. Do you think I could potentially be in front of their battle forever and then puppeteer it from other agents? I just asked Chad Chavit, can you order Amazon over the phone? Because I would think that at that scale there would be at least one way to do it. Totally. It seems like you can only use their customer service number to help with existing orders. So one thing is you could order a bunch of the wrong thing.
Starting point is 00:24:39 like a hundred of the wrong thing, a hundred like, you know, bug treatment. Order everything and then have your agent refund everything but the thing you want. No, have your muse agent, have a human via muse call Amazon and say, hey, I actually got the wrong thing here. Can you swap it with this other thing? Interesting. And just do that as many times as necessary to get the right order. Maybe have one order that's just always open where you're just adding and removing that. They have to be completed orders because you have to have made a mistake.
Starting point is 00:25:09 first to call the customer service. Oh yeah, you can charge me, but just add it to the order. I don't know. We're going to get, and so it's going to be a weird battle. Ben Thompson was writing about it today. It was pretty, pretty good. Amazon, I mean, his whole framing is like Amazon is like the strongest in the AI era of the hypers because they own logistics, infrastructure, the final step, the real world.
Starting point is 00:25:29 And so he anticipates that they will hold their ground for a very long time and not give in where, and that's basically what they did with Open AI, where Open AI had the instant checkout process. They invited everyone to be a part of it. Amazon was like, no, no thanks, but we'll give you tens of billions of dollars. And but interestingly, yeah, so now, now the result is that Amazon is vending in their ads into chat GPT to close the purchase there. Toby Looky at Shopify partnered with Muse and announced that they are integrating, but the interesting thing is like, where is the value capture layer? And it only works with shop pay. And so it's a lever to get merchants to go on to shop pay, which Shopify will still make money off
Starting point is 00:26:16 of. But for merchants, a lot of people are worried about the implementation that happened with Walmart, where Chachaputea integrated with Walmart, and the end result was that conversion rate was one third of what it was in the app and on the core website, and that carts were smaller because people were just going and saying, like, I just need a roll of paper towels, just send me that. Whereas when people are like, oh, I need to do my shopping. I need soap and paper towels and whatever else. I'll build a paper towel holder that's made by a company that's over 50 years old. So.
Starting point is 00:26:51 So the crazy thing is so now Vinode was on the show yesterday talking about Wajo, which is an air faux. They have a new agent that I believe is human supported in that some of the stuff is done by AI. And some of the stuff, if necessary, can be escalated. related to a human. Now you have meta, at least testing, exploring, having a human in the loop on some of these things. And my big question is like, why? Like voice models are getting pretty good. It feels completely unsustainable for meta to roll out a product to billions of people where users might just be like, like if I had like something I could text and say, hey, call this person, call that person,
Starting point is 00:27:37 I'd probably be using it. I think there's a ton of value. First, the Muse install base is small right now. So it's not that crazy. They have the ability to stand up huge offices, whether it's through scale AI and that team that came over or through their, you know, all the things that they've done over the past two decades.
Starting point is 00:27:57 The other thing is that Muse specifically will not train on your data that you put into Muse. And so that this wasn't like a huge analysis. announcement or anything, but you could see people being like, I don't know if I want to use this AI agent that's going to be using my personal information, even if they're running like the PII redactor, putting all of that might be a little bit off-putting. So meta's not getting that data, but if they have a human in the loop, the human who does the task that's just beyond what the model's capable of, they're also generating training data because they can probably train on that. And so it's like the model by default can, I don't know, like summarize your, summer your calendar, right, and give you a briefing on what's going on in your calendar. It knows how to integrate. And the model's capable of that. Mews 1.Spark 1.3 is capable of that.
Starting point is 00:28:46 All the models are capable of that. But what can't they do? They might not be fully ready to go and have a complicated conversation with someone if they're ordering flowers over the phone or something. And so, like, the current models might fall down. So you need more data to solve that. And so you put the humans in the loop, and then that's your extra training data for the next leg up and then you just keep repeating that. So I would view this human in the loop thing more
Starting point is 00:29:11 as them doing data collection and creating more training data for them than a permanent solution to the product problems. Also, I don't think the time on site for these apps is actually that high. I think there is like an excitement when you jump on, you do a bunch of stuff. But then with all these AI tools, like there's a reason why open AI comps to like weekly active users, because there's plenty of days where people are like, I went to the beach and I didn't touch AI at all. Like, I didn't do any work. There's some, there's some feedback on Alex Wang's post talking about like, it'll help you with your goals. And I think Katie Notipolis was saying, like, a lot of people just don't have goals.
Starting point is 00:29:52 Like, they just want to chill. And this is also the Ben Thompson thing. Like, consumers want to be entertained. Like, people that go to the beach, they'll still scroll Instagram. Are they really going to be doing anything with any agent, no matter how powerful it is? Like, there are plenty of people that have all staffs of EAs and personal assistance, and they don't do anything on a week. because they want to chill and they don't want to think about anything. One thing's for certain.
Starting point is 00:30:11 It's over or we're back? Professor Zhang is vindicated. Yesterday, we watched the video where he said, I guarantee that there are humans behind the chat apps that you use, manipulating the information. And he is correct, at least in the short term. Nikesha Rora chimed in on the knife fight between Amazon and Muse.
Starting point is 00:30:35 This will be a bigger about. that anyone anticipates. It's only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok in addition to the frontier LLM agents, maybe a commerce agent from Amazon. That's sort of my prediction. I think instinct might land with Amazon potentially, although they do have Rufus. But you can see. And Tyler is a Rufus power user. Yep, Rufus is good. You don't want to talk down on Rufus. But instinct is clearly like tapped into something really special with like the energy and the support that they have and the community they've built, but there are a lot of like little, little rough edges that need to get
Starting point is 00:31:11 sanded off, and like that's the domain of Amazon, in my opinion. Like Amazon, like, you know, the trains run on time, and it's a pretty efficient company. So every app that's a service, marketplace, or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open APIs for consumer agents to interact. Smaller players have no choice. Add revenues are more than transaction fees. Either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher fee transaction. There's an interesting stat from the Stratory Post about Amazon. The net income for Amazon e-commerce was like $36 billion, and the ad revenue was exactly twice that.
Starting point is 00:31:46 So the business is unprofitable without advertising. They put advertising everywhere. So it's like a very interesting dynamic where you can see the motivation. There's $68 billion. You flag that number. It's a huge. Over 70 in the last 12 months. Over 70 billion.
Starting point is 00:32:00 So significant pool of revenue and profit that they will be protecting for sure. Any other breaking news? Anything you've been tracking over the last couple hours while we've been live? I think we're pretty much good. Opus 55 launched. We talked about that. Benchmarks look really good, very cheap. And the key thing that you pointed out was like the second post is like this is the first model that we've released since we said we were pacing the frontier.
Starting point is 00:32:23 This is an expression of the pacing. This is, you know, Fable 5.1 class model, but it's much cheap. So it's not trying to be more superhuman, more dangerous. It's the safest, best, fastest, cheapest, lightest, thinnest model ever, basically. Yeah. And then opening house, I did the same thing today. Okay, yeah. Oh, so Seoul's out?
Starting point is 00:32:43 Soul, yep. GPT6, Seoul. Cool. And then also Luna. Luna, but not Terra? Or I might have had that back. Okay. But new models, the model wars never cease to entertain.
Starting point is 00:32:55 Of course, all the matters is what you do with them. So thank you for watching TVPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11am Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. I sign up for our newsletter at tbPN.com and throw that flashbang, Tyler Cosgro.

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