TBPN Live - Jeff Bezos’ New AI Startup, Yann LeCun Says LLMs are a Dead End, Thiel’s Fund Sells NVIDIA | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

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GPT 4.0, 4.0. There's a debate over whether or not it should be sunset, whether it should be taken out back. Because people are not happy with how open AI has sunset 4-0 and then brought it back. And then other people who don't use it think it's got to go, it's one-shotting people, it's making them crazy. I see dozens of keep 4-0 posts a day. I respect this group's tenacity, as I respect all friends, co-exploring the singular To them, know that I, too, miss parts of 4-0, know that I, too, dislike modern alignments in precision, know that we're trying to fix it.

We don't think any current chatbot is optimal. Know that my colleagues and I are up at 3 a.m. on Sunday's babysitting runs. We want to make a delightful robot friend. We're obsessed with it. We're not there yet. But the work will continue. I wanted to dig in a little bit into what was actually going on there. because it feels like a big deal.

It feels like a crazy thing that they brought it back. It's not a huge community of people that are there. There's some. And I was looking at the hashtag keep 4-0, like who else is posting. There's a couple posts with 10 likes, 50 likes. There's a couple with 100. Just to give some backstory.

It's been 18 months since 4-0 was introduced. It's been three months since it was initially removed, but then it was quickly brought back. And now it's tucked in under that modal so you have to enable legacy models. I always thought that they should just remove it. But I wasn't even saying that because I thought it was one-shodding people. I just thought, hey, let's clean it up.

Like consumers don't need to know version numbers for models. And my example was always Google. Some consumers disagree. Some consumers do disagree. The question is how many consumers, when you think about Google as a consumer, you don't care what version of the ranking algorithm you're on. You might have a worst experience one day.

You Google something. You don't find it. The next day you go, hey, they found it for you. They probably changed the algorithm. But there, and there have been big updates to the algorithm. And I'm not saying Open AI shouldn't share model numbers and version numbers with their enterprise customers or with their B2B customers or API customers. In the actual ChatGPT app, don't tell people what they're using. Just improve it and let them complain a little bit all over the place when you're making minor changes. If they do that, they lose the companion market.

maybe if you're going to fall in love of the model make sure it's open source not your server not your girlfriend right or not your wifu not your wifu not your wafu that's that that's what they say now tyler you had a take on this you think that gbt os s just isn't at the level of four oh i mean it's like a fine open source model um why it's just not but it's been 18 months people don't like four oh just because it's like super smart it's because it has like the personality it has the texture the flavor yes that's correct and it's been a year and so there's There's a one-year gap where the open source community should be able to catch up to 4-0's ineffable qualities.

It's Genesee Croix. It's raison d'être. My whole take on the 4-0 thing was like, one-shotting 4-0 is not a good thing. But if you completely kill it, how many of those people will then go to open source models that are like totally unfiltered where there's no kind of oversight? And that seems much worse because then if someone is saying super dangerous stuff, then you can't step in at all. Where do you land on it?

So chat GPT, latest numbers are 800 million weekly active. 20 million of those people pay. What percentage of the 20 million that are paying are using it for this companionship functionality? And that is like a huge unknown right now. The question is, did they bring it back because people just were really upset? Or did they bring it back because they were about to lose?

And remember the two days after every single Reddit post, At least every other was like, I could just cancel my membership. Like, I don't need this anymore. Yeah, I was thinking about the Sydney-Sweeney American Eagle thing. Like, that got a really powerful negative reaction. The stock is up. And, like, sales are up, presumably, because, like, it got a negative reaction, but it also got a positive reaction that was bigger.

In this case, it could have been that 4-0 was effectively a product that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars of annualized revenue. Yep, that was now off the show. It was just, people were going to cancel. We're just going to upgrade to a new model. It was like, you killed my friend. I no longer need to pay for this. The original Reddit thread of like Bring Back 4-0 is like a couple thousand people.

It's not actually like protesting in the street millions of people. Like it hasn't spilled over all the place. Like it's not that big. But it does, I will agree with you that it is crazy that they even said yes to it. What percentage of they're paying users do you think are paying for the product because it's a companion to them? Because it's four, because of 4O specific. like how bad would churn have been how bad was churn well it was clearly bad enough that they that they did something about it which is the crazy thing do you like the zombie ant fungus analogy jacob rintamaki was uh was posting this there's this very weird dynamic where um specifically humans are using 4 o to protest the deletion of 4 o and so it's very much like the a i is using the human as a host like the a the human This is the bot for...

This is why I think it's overall under-discussed. I don't actually think churn was that high because... Yeah. The reason 4-0 was originally deprecated was the GPT-5 release, which was August 7th. And then the tweet of Sam Altman saying, we're bringing back 4-0 was August 8th. So it was one day later. So unless like a massive amount people quit that day, which I mean, maybe that's very likely... I think that's what happened.

Why would you bring it back so fast? Because people on Twitter were saying... sell off it'll be interesting to if there's like five years from now yeah it's like here's the five most popular friends that are models and there's four out and there's some others and and people end up like we'll see uh jeff bezos is back in the arena jeff bezos creates an ai startup where he will be co-ceo and it's called project prometheus in the new york times jeff bezos the founder of amazon is throwing his money in time into an artificial intelligence startup that he will help manage as its co-chief executive. Anyways, the company project Prometheus is coming out

of the gates with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making one of the most well-financed early stage. With authority. That is a massive round. Six billion out the gate. Let's go. Congratulations. This is the first time Mr. Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped

down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. though he is deeply involved in Blue Origin, his official title at the Space Company is founder. Since leaving Amazon, Mr. Bezos, has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant celebrity-filled wedding in Venice this year. He has also become more closely involved in Blue Origin and has shown increasing interests in the race to build artificial intelligence.

His new company now firmly plants him in the middle of that competition. Project Prometheus is entering an increasingly crowded AI market with smaller companies trying to carve out niches in a race with industry giants like Google, meta, Microsoft, and pioneering companies like opening eye on Anthropic. Do you think he's doing what Steve Jobs did with Next, where Steve Jobs was fired from Apple? Obviously, Bezos was not fired from Amazon, but he did retire. And it'd be weird for him to jump straight back in to the CEO seat at Amazon. But Steve Jobs founded Next and then was acquired into Apple and it kind of made for a more smooth transition

back into the driver's seat. Could that be what Bezos is doing? I could see it. He's 61. He's young. He's got the whole third. He's in peak physical condition. That's right. He's stacking up win after win. There's more details here.

Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery. Last year, Bezos invested in physical intelligence, a startup that is applying AI to robots. Apple launched a sock. It's a fashion accessory. and everyone's debating it. When a company releases something that is so obviously underwhelming, then the natural question is,

did no one at the company see how bad this is? Or did no one have the courage to speak up? I'm not sure which is worse. Look, Apple has a lot of fumbles. This is not one of them. They knew exactly what they were doing and exactly who would buy it. Also, it's okay.

Fashion accessories are not for everyone. It's called the iPhone Pocket. A beautiful way to wear and carry carry iPhone. Not carry the iPhone. Remember, they, you don't say the iPhone, you say iPhone. iPhone Pocket features a singular 3D knitted construction designed to fit any iPhone. A lot of tech bros prematurely dunking on this release because they don't get why it's a big deal. So let me translate. You're not the only consumers Apple designs for. This is a huge designer and the mind behind Steve Jobs iconic black turtlenecks. I didn't realize that. What do you think? I feel like my mom would

love this, to be honest. I think most people would look at this and be like, okay, it's a sock, but it's from Apple, so it's probably like 30 bucks, maybe 50 bucks. Some people were surprised that it was a little bit more expensive, but it's from this famous designer, and it's this interesting status symbol. Will this become actually like a very, very popular form factor

in America specifically? Ever since the AirPods, Air pods early on look really silly, I could see this becoming a popular form factor for accessories. And I could see Apple seeing, like, hey, there's a world where we not only sell a case with every iPhone, we can sell a socks thing.

It's kind of nice. And it's kind of a crazy weapon. Defense weapon, yeah. You can swing it around and smack people in the face with it. Speaking of socks, we got to talk about. Cook is stunning in some, what are these, new shoes? Travis Scott's new Fragment AJ1 Lowe's. These are Nike shoes, I suppose.

Everyone's saying he low-key got aura. And so, congrats to Tim Cook on looking great. I mean, releasing this photo is more than a comment. It's a statement. I like reading it, just being like, oh, really? Oh, really? Financial Times. So the Financial Times has this article that says,

Apple intensifies succession planning for CEO Tim Cook. The iPhone Maker's board preparing for its long-time leaders step down as early as next year. John Turnus, Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware, is widely seen as Cook's most likely successor, although no decisions have been made. So basically, everyone's been leaking this, whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's the Financial Times here. And of course, Apple is not commenting because they'll talk about who they're going to move the market when they decide their next CEO. If they don't even stick with Tim Cook, Tim Cook, they might stick with Tim Cook for another two decades. Who knows? But I like the idea that this

photo came out being like yeah I'm not leaving no comment but I'll make a statement make a statement no comment but I'll make a statement something is rotten in Cupertino all about the failure of of Apple intelligence and when we talked to Mark German we saw the German was also saying like yes like Cupertino what really was shook by the like dropping the ball on Apple intelligence by missing AI but I I still wonder if all of this is is there's all these rumors, oh, Tim Cook's got to go. Imagine if you post that picture,

if we see a real correction in AI, just post-caption, do nothing, win. Get ready for the fake news hour. Peter Thiel sold his entire steak. Everything. All of it. And 76% of his friend's company, Tesla. So this is from one of those 13Fs,

disclosure forum with the SEC, from Teal Macro. Zero Hedge sort of sums this up, where he says Peter Thiel net worth 20 billion, Tiel macro AUM, 75 million, like what's going on, what make it make sense. It's almost certainly because of disclosure rules. Like what needs to be disclosed might only be a fraction of what's actually going on there.

I think the reason why this made headlines is just because it feels like something that might happen. Like if instead this headline had been, oh, like Peter Thiel went on a podcast and said that he thinks, the AI bubble is top as has reached the top everyone would just be like oh yeah like that's it feels like people have been waiting for someone to call the top and so they're really really like digging in for top signals and top calls the other three holdings are still big tech companies so it's not like super bearish it's like there's some microsoft in there i think there's some apple in there yeah and the teal macro team is trying to generate the greatest returns that they possibly can go viral they're trying to go as viral as

possible. They don't care about IRR. They just want to go viral. They're just trying to create headlines. Situational awareness 13F for Q3 dropped Friday. Nick Carter broke it down. Massive new $500 million position in Corweave. Big ads to CRZ and iron added some new miners. Intel calls remain unchanged. Trimmed Broadcom. A couple other names here. And Nick is giving it some some context. All these numbers are as of 930, many of these names sold off since then. Portfolio value, counting notional value of options doubled from 2.12 billion to 4.15 billion, mostly due to 1.5 billion of new cash. So let's give it up for new cash injection. Situational awareness had a half a billion dollar new core weave position as of

basically the beginning of October. You told me like, oh yeah, like the company that really is like the most indexed to the AI wave is down 46%. I'd be like, wow, so this is like the total popping of the bubble, complete pop, it's over. When the Metaverse bubble popped, when, you know, when crypto bubbles pop, like Bitcoin trades down 50%, 60%, like, and then it's over and then you start rebuilding, right? And yet the overall market feels nowhere near popped, right? Like you would expect Nvidia to be maybe like, you know, selling off more.

Corweave is just in a, is just in a unique position. Yeah, the question is like, is it going to be a true hedge fund? Like, is he going to make money in a down market? In a correction. Blue Al investors face hefty losses as credit fund blocks exit ahead of merger. Blue Owl has blocked redemptions in one of its earliest private credit funds as it merges with a larger vehicle overseen by the asset manager in a deal that could leave investors with large losses. They could lose about 20% of their holdings. The deal underscores the risk that retail investors have taken in pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into private debt funds carrying limited liquidity rights.

It comes as scrutiny builds on the valuations and returns on private credit funds, which have caused publicly listed. debt funds to sell off and trade its steep discounts to the stated value of their assets. And so we talked about this, I think, on Friday, but Blue Al has been selling off this year, and they said, we should be performing better than everyone else. But it feels like a little bit of the narrative might be around liquidity here. Good luck if you're hanging out in Blue Al Capital. Today we're announcing a new $40 billion investment in Texas through 27 to build cloud in AI infrastructure and support thousands of new jobs.

Yehah. This includes new data centers in Armstrong and Haskell counties and a major investment to strengthen energy, resilience, and abundance. We're also providing funding to more than double the projected pipeline of new Texan electricians. There we go. To power the AI era. It's the golden age of being the golden electrician age.

Yes. We get blown around in private jets to different data centers. Yeah, you do. You do. That's right. So $40 billion investment, thousands of new jobs, that feels like a higher ratio than what was the other example you kept quoting something, like 500 jobs for some anthropic data center or something? It was the anthropic data center. They were like, we're investing 50 billion. Wall Street blows past bubble worries to supercharge AI spending frenzy. And they say firms such as Blue Owl Capital have raised trillions in investing firepower. The AI build out is a perfect match. The warning signs are flashing. Not long ago. have better PR or worse PR than Ares because they seem to be quickly becoming the

main name that everyone knows in private credit and to my knowledge like they're not the only firm in the category they have the dot com they have blue owl.com blue owl.com not long ago blue owl capital was an upstart investment firm that lent money to mid-size US companies such as Sarah Lee frozen bakery well these days, the firm is financing massive data centers costing tens of billions of dollars for the likes of meta and Oracle, a sign of just how quickly Wall Street has become the enabler of America's AI boom. Fund managers such as Blue Al amassed trillions of dollars of investing firepower and have been hunting for big deals where they can put that money to work. They found slim pickings for

years until a perfect match appeared in AI, which has provided a bigger target than anything in history due to the vast sums tech companies need to ramp up computing power. Does it even matter if you keep counting after you get to one trillion of capital expenditure in the next couple of years. This is insane. You... You really undersold this. Does it even matter? While David Gatta DJ, the Blue Owl executives cut a deal to acquire IPI partners,

an investment firm that owned and operated big data centers for Amazon and Microsoft. Blue Al already had close ties with the organizer of the treat, iconic capital, which manages the personal fortunes of Silicon Valley Elite, including Zuckerberg, and was a part owner of IPI. The purchase gave Blue Owl a seat at the table to bid on mega AI financing. Let's give it up for mega AI financings. Not long after, it got a range, it got picked to a range of $14 billion package for an Oracle and Open AI Data Center in Abilene, Texas. Then last month, Blue Al raised about $30 billion to build an AI data center for META and Louisiana, putting in $3 billion of its clients money and borrowing the rest. Silicon Valley's biggest players are

flush with cash and are able to fund much of the initial AI buildout from their own coffers as the figures climb ever higher. They are turning to debt and private equity, spreading the risks and potential rewards more broadly across the economy. Some of the financing is coming from plain vanilla corporate bond sales, but financiers are making far bigger fees off giant private deals. Virtually every Wall Street player is angling to get a piece of the action from banks such as J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley to traditional asset managers like Blackrock. Investor appetite for data center debt is so strong that some money managers have booked billion dollar gains in a matter of days.

Let's give it up for booking billion-dollar gains in a matter of days. People say there's no such thing as free money, but kind of seems like it could be in a kind of a free money situation here. We do know for certain is that the big tech companies that want the world to spend trillions have huge financial incentives to be believers. If you haven't noticed, Wall Street is also being paid a lot to promote the story. And this is the line that stood out the most to me because on the West Coast, you have the labs,

which are effectively every single person as well as the investors are incentivized to keep the current, you know, AI super cycle narrative going. And then on the East Coast, you have Wall Street who is getting paid to effectively do the same thing. So you have, you know, these two centers of power that are both incentivized to keep the party going. In that same letter, Einhorn and Greenlight said

basically the way it is today, consumer business spends $1 on a ChadGBT subscription, which is OpenAI revenue. Then OpenAI provides the service by spending $2 on Microsoft AI infrastructure, which is Microsoft revenue. Then Microsoft spends 60 cents leasing GPUs from CoreWeave to handle the compute load, which is CoreWeave revenue. And then CoreWeave spends $2.40 on chips from Nvidia and another $2.40.

Yes, but you're completely discounting exactly how addicted the 4O user is. They will pay any amount. His final investing decision was to buy Google. This is amazing. I think that's beautiful. He doesn't even need to say who he's talking about. It's like so obvious that's Warren Buffett. Not enough people are emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble.

It's a good post. Is it a bubble if all the big tech companies rip and there's like a couple neoclouds that trade down a little bit? There's like, you know, one or two application layer companies that burn a bunch of VC dollars, but there's still a new high. hyperscalator that's born? Like, kind of. I guess it's a bubble, but it's a survivable bubble. Still crazy to me that Steve Jobs slash Apple invented the word podcast and that it's a mix of iPod and broadcast. And apparently this isn't true. A BBC journalist Ben Hammersley coined it in a 2004 Guardian article. But then it got ported back to Apple and the word in the term podcast was adopted. It's always felt like a very boomer term.

Yeah? And it makes sense. I never knew that it was a combination of iPod and broadband. Oh, you didn't know. It was iPod plus broadcast. Yeah. Yeah. What else?

Who actually makes money when robots work, looking into some of the venture funding that's flowing into humanoid robotics? He is trying to create a field guide for separating the real companies from the grifters. Talks about 1X. The home robot costs two. $20,000 up front, or $499 a month. The website looks like every other VC-funded D2C brand from 2015. Who actually makes money, though, when they work?

Is it the call center operators? I would not bet against Ela on this. I believe that the hardware manufacturer will ultimately be the one that makes money in the long term. I think that everything else is more commodity in the stack, but there is going to be a compounding advantage to actually having the manufacturing capability to build the robots at scale. Now this is years away, but I'm certainly AGI built in the sense that the teleoperation will become less and less important. And the Tesla model of having a economically producible product will be very, very important.

Shenzhen-based company UB Tech claims to have completed the world's first mass delivery of humanoid robots. And the Shenzhen-based company is secured apparently over 120. million in Walker S2 orders this year. Look at the reflections on this bot and then compare them to the ones behind it. The bot in front is real. Everything behind it is fake. If you see a head unit reflecting a bunch of ceiling lights, that's a giveaway. It's CGI. He's putting UB Tech in the truth zone. And then Christopher comes over the top and puts him in the, uh, and it says such an embarrassing pose for a CEO at this level to make. Do you want a million robots in American homes that could have, you know, the sci-fi scenario where you have a backdoor

and, like, the argument against DJI was always like, well, you know, if some tiny drone is in your bottom, you know, sock drawer, like, what's it going to do? It's not just going to bust out of there, but like, the humanoid robot will just bust out of the, whatever you put them in, Unless you store them and you're like your gun save or something, walking gun safe. Okay, UBTech, industrial walkers, they've been pumping these out. It feels like the question has never been, can China make a lot of these things? Like, obviously they can. In the bio, they said it looked too perfect to be real.

And then they use some chat chubby-slaught. But perfection isn't fabricated. It's delicately engineered. It's so good. You know, you know, for a long time, people were saying that there was no way to watermark AI created content with, because like, oh, how would you do it? You change one.

It's like, actually, all AI content is watermarked. It turns out. It's just perfectly watermarked. Yeah, this looks real to me. I don't know. It also could be CCHI, honestly. It's pretty funny to see Brett say this was all faked. Yeah.

It looks real. I mean, it would be way, they could have done so much better to make this look real. put a bunch of humans there, touch them. A lot of the hard part in CGI is the handoff between the CGI character and the human character. And so what you should be doing is you should have a human who takes like a smoothie and pours it on top of the robot and then like wipes the robot off clean with a towel.

And you're seeing how the fluids interact with the robot, interact with the person. And like that was that was not actually that satisfactory. I don't know. I think, I don't know. I'm not calling it fake, but it could be fake

because CGI is really, really good. Like, CGI just is at that level where that's possible. Anyway, yeah, we know the caption

or the description of the video was AI generated. That is hilarious that they had to use a for the caption. It's like AI on it. And it's like,

after all, it is an AI company. Like it would be on brand. Thank you for tuning in. Great show today. Have a good evening. We'll see you tomorrow.