TBPN Live - Kling AI reaches 12M MAU, China's aging tech worker crisis, drama at ThinkingMachine, TBPN x CAA | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

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Kling.AI, the video generation video model, has been on a tear. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal showing some pretty staggering numbers. They hit 12 million monthly active users, and they generated more than 20 million in revenue just last year. I wanted to dig in and understand where this came from, the history of Kwaisho, the Chinese company behind it. There's a new farmer filling up the trough for everyone. Kling has hit 12 million MAUs, 20 million revenue in the last month. Now, they seem to be on the up and to the right curve. It's a pretty massive ramp.

The product launched 18 months ago. But Kling is not its own startup. It is a new project from Kaui Shoe Technology. This is a Chinese company. And the founders, I couldn't find a single project. John, I'm going to blow your mind right now. Please. Guess who worked at Kauishu?

It's been on the show. OK. I share a name with him. Wait, Connor Hayes? No. No. Jordan Schneider. Jordan Snyder worked at Kui Show?

Yes. No way. He just responded to the daily newsletter. Does he went off and said, I worked at Kwai Show. What a comeback. Tell all. Jordan, come get on the show.

You're welcome. Come hang out if you want to. I'll send him a now. It'd be great to hear more of the story from him. He might be the only person that we can get to go on the record about Kwai Show because the founders, I don't think they've ever done a podcast appearance. They haven't been, you know, certainly on like the Victory Lab podcast American Circuit, like many founders that get a company to this scale.

Quaisha was pretty old, especially for the AI. Boom. It launched in 2011 as a mobile app for creating and sharing gifts. This was before Vine and before Musically. They were sort of like a precursor all those, just by a year or two. So you could almost say that Jordan Schneider made his money in gifts.

I think so. I think he created TikTok, basically. So there's some similar threads. So Dom Hoffman, the founder of Vine, he worked at Yahoo before founding Vine. And Alex Zhu at Musically worked at eBay, and Microsoft, and I think SAP as well. And so both of those companies, they had like big tech experience.

Then they went and founded these companies. And the founders of Kwaishou, Suhua, and Cheng Ishao, also did the same. One of them worked at Google, one of them worked at Hewlett-Packard, and then they jumped into the social media boom that was going on in the early aughts, like in, or the late, I guess the late aughts, early 2010s. Is there a word for the period between 2010,

the teens? The tens? the tens, I don't know. But that era, like post Facebook, there was Foursquare, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap. They were just like a new one every year was popping up. And so they jump in on this,

and the mobile internet was expanding really rapidly in China at that time. There was a big boom. There were a bunch of big winners that came out of that era. Quichot hit 100 million DAU by 2013. So basically 18 months after they launch, and they actually pivoted in that 18 month timeline from gifts to videos.

And so once they had the new product dialed they ramped pretty quickly. Now there was a little bit of a slowdown between 2013 and 2019 because they didn't hit 200 million DAU until 2019 so they were sort of saturating then but they were on a fundraising tear the whole time. They raised $350 million from 10 cent in 2017. They integrated with WeChat to accelerate distribution and the company was worth around $18 billion by 2018 just seven years into the jury. So not bad. The Quiet Show IPO was a particular crazy moment for the company. So they raised 5.4 were billion dollars at the IPO and they were massively oversubscribed for that so they say hey we want to

raise five billion and a hundred and sixty five billion of demand shows up from the market so retail investors just went insane 165 billion of demand only five billion for sale and so the stock trades up a hundred and ninety two percent at the open and all of a sudden the company's worth 180 billion dollars and both of the founders are deca billionaires pretty sick that didn't last though there was a massive of sell-off. And there were a couple, there were a couple, like, speed bumps that Quay Show seemingly hit shortly after going public. So China had a big crackdown on, in regulation, on local tech companies. Bight Dance became much more dominant as a competitor and was, you know, had Quichow in their sites. And then the Quisho user growth just sort of slowed down. And so there were a couple misses on, you know, DAU, MAU growth. The metrics weren't looking as good. And so the investors said, hey, we're rotating to other things. They were pulling out. And so the stock traded down 80. percent within six months. So not great, but today the market caps around $40 billion. Like, it's still a very real business. This is all USDA. I converted everything. So 40 billion market cap, 20 billion revenue, 11 billion gross profit, net profit, 2.6 billion. So that's like a lot

of cash flow, a lot of net income to work with, certainly enough to do some training runs, start a Neo Lab or a video lab or, you know, take some new bets. That's exactly what they did. 2024, they launched the first version of Kling, and they did this just three months after opening AI demoed Sora. So it was kind of like the Chinese answer to Sora. Since then, they've updated Kling 30 times and carved out a nice little place on the grid of trade-offs around model performance and cost. For cinematic footage, people often recommend VO-3 still, but for Kling, it has some really strong characteristics in motion control and physics simulations. There's a number of places where Kling's been outperforming there. And then there's a number

of other sort of niche applications where Kling is really great. at 10 cents per second, pricing has been very attractive relative to some of the other options in the market. They've certainly come out as a frontier quality model at a very affordable price. Interestingly, Quichot claims that Kling is gross margin positive. And so now it's unclear. That doesn't include training. And we don't really, I mean, it's gross profits, so it doesn't include the 100 or so R&D people on the team. My question is like, what happens if they try and scale another order of magnitude? Will they be paying more for inference?

Will they be able to get those chips? Because there's still this big debate over how many Nvidia GPU should be able to be sent over to China. It honestly gets me excited about MSL dropping a video model because a lot of the same sort of like precursor elements in terms of like the training data in the ecosystem when you think about just the raw data in Reels. It could wind up being a model that's a little bit more opinionated. Maybe it has some mid-journey sprinkled in there. I think that the MSL, the pressure on MSL has been intense, and the initial vibes launch was not loved. But they certainly have the compute, they have the team now, they have the data.

Like they have all the key ingredients to a really successful video generation model launch. I can't wait to see META's next real launch here. They have so many advantages. They have the talent now. The pressure is immense, but they should be able to come out with something that's super competitive. Yeah, year-to-date, Quichos up 23%. So they've been on a run, and there's a lot of investor optimism about Quichos' potential to monetize AI. The company's AI-powered video and graphics generation capabilities will likely drive earnings over the next few years.

S&P Global Ratings analysts wrote in a recent note. That could lower content creation and advertising costs and boost content creation on Quisho short-form video, platform. The companies has the second largest independent short-form video platform after bite dances, Duyan, which is basically the Chinese version of TikTok. And so I, you know, is this going to be, you know, super important to the AI race in America? Probably not. Like, we're still living in a world where you have open AI, anthropic, Google, really be really battling it out. And then XAI is doing interesting stuff. MSL has interesting stuff. And then there's a couple of Neo Labs that are maybe doing interesting.

stuff. The Chinese labs haven't been putting a ton of pressure, but I think this is interesting because we're actually getting firm data on how these products are monetizing. Of course, there is another interesting, just sort of like nuanced narrative that I hadn't really noticed while I was digging into Quayshu. One is this China's aging tech workers issue, the curse of 35. They're firing unks over there. That's what's happening. They're firing the ux. You can't even be an uck. You truly can't. You truly can't. Discrimination against older employees, particularly apparent in sector where executives openly state a preference for youth. And so we- Different approach.

We've had back in force on, you know, in VC Twitter about, oh, should your team be really young and cracked, or should you get the experts in there? What's, you know, obviously in America that you cannot discriminate based on age. But that hasn't stopped plenty of people from opining about what the correct mix is, whether or not you should follow those rules. But there's an article in the Financial Times that sort of has some charts here about how big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. We can go through that. But let's read through a little bit of this China's aging tech workforce. The first hint, Lau Bai 34 received that his position at short video app Kwai show might be at risk is when a 35-year-old colleague was sacked. I was both shocked and

anxious. I realized that our situations were very similar and the same thing could soon happen to me, said Lao Bai, using his nickname to avoid repercussions from his former employer. Just months from his 35th birthday, the developer was dismissed, another victim of the group's reorganization known internally as limestone. Wow, they're giving code names to age discrimination. That's insane. Quichael is pushing out junior workers in their mid-30s. Laubai was told his termination was part of the company's overall redundancy program. The so-called curse of 35 has long-plagued workers across white-collar professions, with older staff widely perceived as being less willing to put up with long working hours because of responsibilities at home. As China's tech sector reels

from Beijing's crackdown, this article is from 2024, by the way, and economic slowdown. Tens of thousands of jobs have been cut over the past several months, and older workers are seen as particularly vulnerable. Technology companies have made no secret of favoring young and unmarried workers. Ageism in the tech sector is a big problem. There's a perception that older workers don't keep up with the latest technological developments. They don't have the energy to keep up the hard work and that they're too expensive. Thankfully, our very own John Coogan, who is, you're in our, you're very much keeping up with the latest technological developments. Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about this because you didn't just read about Kling, you studied

and you wrote about it. While China's labor law prohibits employers from discriminating on the grounds of attributes such as ethnicity, gender, and religion. It does not explicitly refer to age. Whoa. Between 20 and 30, most people are full of energy. You're more willing to march forward and sacrifice yourself for the company. But once you become a parent, your body starts aging. How are you going to keep up with the 996 schedule?

By Dance, which owns the video app, TikTok and e-commerce giant Pinduoo-Duo, have some of the youngest recruits among Chinese tech companies data suggests. The average age of their workers is just 27, according to the latest figures. The average age of the worker in China is 80 is 38, according to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. This trend has become only more entrenched with progressive waves of layoffs. And this is the chart that I wanted to show you. So big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. So this is 2021, 2022, and 2023 for Alibaba, Baidu, Quisho, and Tencent. And they're all downsizing across those three years. It's worth noting, I pulled up

MAG-7 employee counts and every single company in the MAG-7 has increased head count over that same period that we just showed. Yeah, yeah. There have been like periods of layoffs, but even when Mark Zuckerberg comes out and says, hey, we're laying off a thousand people in the Metaverse team and the Reality Labs team, it's like, well, he's adding tons of people to the AI teams and tons of people to the Instagram teams and threads teams and Facebook core and marketing and salespeople and events people. The whole organization is just growing so fast that one niche layoff is not really going to cause a multi-year trend. Back to the timeline. The messy drama that dealt a blow to one of AI's hottest startups. This is an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal.

After a relationship with a colleague, a Thinking Machine's co-founder had his role changed. Months later, he was fired after a contentious meeting. Miramaradi's meeting with her co-founders going off. Off the rails, Marotti, the chief executive of AI startup thinking machines lab, had shown up for work on Monday last week, expecting to have a one-on-one with Barrett Zof, her chief technology officer, according to people familiar with the matter. Last summer, she had learned that Zof was in a relationship with a colleague in the month since. She had expressed repeated concerns about his lack of productivity, according to the people. she was invited instead to an impromptu meeting with Zof, another co-founder, and a third employee. The three told her they disagreed with the direction of the company and that they were considering leaving.

They asked Zof to be given charge of all technical decision-making, according to the people. Marotti responded that Zof was already CTO and asked why he hadn't been doing his job for months. So they're clearly beefing. It's a funny request. It's a funny request. What was he doing a CTO if he didn't have full control? but I mean, obviously CEO can override all sorts of stuff, and there's other people around the table, and titles only mean so much.

There's soft power all over the place. So two days later, Zof was fired within hours. All three had signed offers to rejoin Open AI, the AI lab that they had ditched a year ago to join Marotti's fledgling startup. The departures are a sign of how the heated AI race that is consuming hundreds of billions of dollars and transforming the economy

is as much a battle for talent as technology for all the high-tech advancements, AI startups are sprinting to develop. They are ultimately at the mercy of the humans powering. So do you think this was a three-hour talent acquisition process? Do you think Open AI just looked at, check the timeline and said, hey, we got three people that are on the market.

Maybe we should hire them. It seemed like they were talking before. They entered the portal and then they immediately got the portal. The trade portal for sure. That's exactly what happened. No, I think very obvious that the conversations had been ongoing. It's very likely, I would assume, they had already agreed to terms. Yeah, it seemed like it.

Prior to the news going out. 20 people from Open AI left during the Thinking Machines Foundation. Addressing Zof's departure to Thinking Machines employees, Marotti said there had been multiple issues with his performance, trust, and conduct, according to an internal message viewed by the Wall Street Journal. Zof said she fired him after he exposed an impeachment. to take a job elsewhere. Thinking machines terminated my employment

only after it learned I would be leaving the company. Full stop. At no time, did thinking machines labs cite me on any performance reasons or unethical? John, I'm breaking up with you. No? No. You're fine. I'm bringing up with you. It does feel like a little bit of that going on. But yeah, there's a war for narrative

here between Barrett and Mira. Clearly. They didn't so he says thinking machines didn't cite any performance reasons or unethical conduct as part of the reason for the termination and any suggestion otherwise is false and defamatory, Zof said in a statement to the journal. The exits coupled with fellow co-founder Andrew Tulloch's decampment to Meta last fall leave thinking machines with just three of its original six founders. Marotti's issues with Zof started

over the summer when she began to suspect he was having a relationship with a colleague who, with whom he had lobbied to bring over from Open AI, according to people familiar with the situation. in responses to questions from the journal Zof said that many people at thinking machines wanted to hire the woman, including Maradi. At the time, Maradi was in the process of raising one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history. The company ultimately raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation when she confronted Zof about the possibility of an undisclosed relationship with a female employee who was junior to him at the company, but did not report to him. He initially denied it according to people familiar with this situation. By June, however, both Zof and the woman had told Maradi about the relationship which had begun when they were colleagues at Open AI. The woman then left the company and returned to Open AI, which is sort of a wrinkle in this.

Zof told his boss that he had been manipulated by the woman into a relationship, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after that conversation, he took a break from work. Okay, I got to, I generally think that the... Mira, she told me it was cuffing season. I didn't know what it meant, so I just... said, okay, I got cuffed. Is that what happened? Yeah, I mean, I think just saying, like, I was manipulated into becoming the significant other, you know, you got to take a little responsibility. You know, everyone is assuming that this is a romantic relationship. They never reported that this is a romantic relationship. They just said that he had a relationship with someone else, and it was

undisclosed. And I think that more companies need to be clear about the rules around disclosures of relationships. If you and Tyler start an esports team, for example, like you would have a relationship. You would be teammates on playing call of duty. And if you didn't disclose that to me, I would be, I would feel left out. I'd be like, why don't I, why am I not on the team? If I find out that Tyler and Scott are going off and drinking a bunch of athletic beers, athletic brews every night, you know, without me, that's a relationship. They're bros. And it wasn't disclosed. And it wasn't disclosed. And you might be very. angry. I might be angry. They didn't disclose. So I think relationship disclosures need to go beyond

romantic relationship disclosers. If you're if you're just broing out and broing down with people, that actually is kind of a real thing. Sometimes yeah, catching up Monday after the weekend, somebody's like, oh yeah, I was hanging with so-and-so on Saturday. I'm like, wait. Where was my invite? You guys hang out on Saturday? What? You didn't hit me? You didn't disclose that relationship? You guys went to Korean barbecue? Yeah. Oh, so you have a relationship where you go to Korean barbecue together. Okay. And you just didn't think to tell the rest of the company that. KBBQ. Yeah. I was going to say, I think there's, you know, I like to imagine there's some kind of like Shakespearean tragedy here, right? Yes. It's like the Montague's and the capitalists. That's

open AI and thing machine. Oh, yes. And it's these forbidden lovers. Yes. And can't be together. But now they are. They're united because everyone is an open AI. Even though, I mean, if you go to the journal and you say, I've been manipulated by that woman, who's now my colleague, because they both work at Open AI now, right? So that's odd. So the woman left the company, thinking machines, and returned to open AI. But they were both at Open AI. They both went to thinking machines, and then they both went back to Open AI.

I still think this is a company that would have a pretty meaningful valuation in an aqua hire context, right? Like if Amazon were to come and buy them, how much would Amazon pay to get John Schulman and Marrometi at Amazon? Should be able to clear the preft stack for sure. Yeah, by like a long shot. you would imagine. I wanted to look at this photo of Davos. It's AI generated, but it captures a good vibe. A whole bunch of private planes parked there.

That's not real. But I like the Kevin Kwok contextualized it anyway, saying this looks like Hoth Echo Base. Demis and Dario are apparently just broking out in Davos. I love it. Demis Hesabas's CEO of Google Deep Mind at Davos quote, when told that Dario Amade was here earlier today, His face lit up. Two minutes later, he was talking about a CERN-like collaboration for AI

once the labs are close to AGI. They're just stoked on each other. I'm on pretty good terms with pretty much all of the other leaders at the leading labs. I love Ilya, and we're good friends. You love it. Just some positivity hanging out at Davos. Demis said he thinks entry-level jobs and internships might fall away due to AI, sees consistency as the biggest problem with current agents,

advice for college graduates get incredibly proficient with these new tools AI agents. Yeah, we were debating this earlier. The role of a junior engineer is going away, but is it possible that it just changes? Like, what makes a senior engineer that much better with an AI tool that they don't need anyone else who can potentially use AI tools as well? how much of this is something where I mean to go back to like the

the Chinese young hiring boom there's an element where I'm sure there's companies where you have older software engineers who are more resistant to adopt AI technology and you'd actually be better off with a young junior person. Here's a tough question for you, Tyler. What are you fantastic at that AI is bad at?

walking around being physically embodied. Embodied. That's the last thing. So maybe that's like for China. It's like maybe the, you know, Silicon Valley has kind of found like pederasty from first principles. Maybe, you know, it's just a similar thing over there, right? There's actually a lot of value.

I think like so generally like I'm kind of, I've always gone between like is our jobs actually going to go away from this? Or are they just going to get like more fake? Are there just going to be no junior jobs in like five years? or are they just going to be like, you know, you're in the office because like it's like people like having other people in the office and stuff like this. I think I'm probably more in the camp of like you just don't need to hire new people. First of all, it's a pleasure to be on the gloom and doom panel. We're not going to be an extraordinary period.

As I said at the beginning, it's not preordained that it has a head badly. The end note of the 1920s, which was of course the Great Depression, Andrew. So let's take a step back and talk about. where we are right here right now. The area of recklessness is the spending of governments around the world, who are all, with little exception, all spending well beyond their means.

That's the recklessness of this moment in history. This is not a parallel to the 1920s in terms of the recklessness of the private capital markets. It's a story of the recklessness of government spending. Within the private sector, there's a huge question as to where AI will take us. And I was carefully taking notes and listening to what Larry has to say or to what Madame Legarde has to say, because this is one of the big issues of our moment. Will AI create the productivity acceleration that is honestly that is hoped for in Washington

and in the halls of government around the world as a ways to over-reactivity acceleration that is, honestly, to overcome the profit at spending that we're currently engaged in. Like the world, the world needs a savior. And the hope is that AI is the savior that we need for productivity. And the challenge with this is it is it may or may not be. We just don't know yet. Now, there's a tremendous amount of hype around AI.

And in some sense, the large AI companies need to create that hype to raise the time tens or actually hundreds of billions of dollars that are going into the field. You wouldn't be able to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll spend, and Larry can probably correct me of this, but roughly $600 billion this year in CAPEX for data centers in the United States.

I think it'd be larger. But does that mean that it's getting hyped up too much or the hype is required as a sales mechanism? Go ahead. Larry's backing you up, Tyler. All right, let's play the next video, which was the one I was originally talking about, which is talking about job loss. What AI has done is it has re-empowered the head of technology in every business in the United States,

and it has pushed budgetary resources into the hands of the chief technology officer. So what you're seeing across American business is actually the impact, of American businesses spending more on digitization writ large, of which AI is just one component. You know, as Dario Amadez says, half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will, you know, be gone in the next five years. Is it that kind of change?

Look, you know, put yourself in his shoes. How much money does the AI community need to raise over the next five years? So he's wrong about this, right? Demis doesn't need to raise. Davis doesn't need to raise. He spent the United States this year over half a trillion dollars. Google's doing this cash flow. over $500 billion.

Like that's true for every other lab lead except for Demets. You would expect Demets to be like, no. Unless you're going to make a promise, you're going to profoundly change the world. Yeah, but the question was about Daria. And the question is, where will AI land in productivity gains at the end of the day? In certain areas, we know it's going to be profound, whether it's call centers, whether it's helping to improve the productivity of software engineers. But in a number of white-collar jobs, there was a recent Harvard paper on this, they called it

AI workslaw, that it looks good, but if you sort of peel back the onion, the substance isn't there. This is, I mean, this was the, probably the story that got reported on the least out of Davos over the last 24 hours, but is arguably the most important. The most expensive car in the world, everyone wants to know. Of course, it is the car that Jensen bought his parents. So let's pull up this clip. I love it. My only regret was at the IPO, after the IPO. I wanted to buy my parents something nice. And so I sold Nvidia stock at a valuation of $300 million. The company was at a valuation of $300 million and I bought them a Mercedes S class. It is the most

expensive car in the world. Maybe a billion dollar car? I don't know if I have the math right there, but it seems like... Yeah, around 65K. It seems like the stock might be up 15,000 X. I don't know. I mean, it's definitely up a thousand X, right? Because it's, yeah, 300 million, 300 billion. And then you get another zero, so 10,000 X. I bought a TV with a Bitcoin.

Terrible. Not even 4K. Things in the trash now. It was like $1,000 back then. Open AI will unveil its first AI earbuds dubbed Sweet P in September this year, and shipments are expected to read. 40 to 50 million units in 2027. Makes a ton of sense.

You know, you're chatting with Open AI. You're chatting with ChatGBT. You got Johnny Ive on the team, former Apple, and you put something together that's you're always on AI assistant that you're chatting with. But 40 to 50 million units, that's a lot. The Amazon Echo in year two sold 11 million units. The Xbox Series X slash X, 16 million units in year two.

units in year two. The iPhone, the iPhone in year two, 17 million units. The Apple Watch did 20 million units in year two. The PS5 massive success, hugely anticipated product. The PS5 shipped 30 million units in year two. Air pods now, AirPods did do 50 million. If the chat GPT, OpenAI, earbuds dubbed Sweet P perform as well as AirPods, you could see 50. million units, but it's a tall order. From the goats. It's a very, very tall order. Consumer hardware.

We didn't even talk about CIA. We are officially signed with CIA. We went Hollywood mode. That's very exciting. Yeah, very excited. We're pleased to be partnered with them. We put up a trading card. We're very excited.

They're going to be helping us navigate. Yeah. The entertainment landscape. Yeah. Very excited. Yeah. Yeah, we went down. We took some head shots at CAAHQ.

also, you know, I like to think of the creative artist agency. Sort of the anthropic of agencies. Creative artists agency was formed by five agents. They were at WME. They were at William Morris Agency in 1975. Who you got? There's a dinner. You got Michael Ovitz, Michael Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer, and Roland Perkins and William Haber.

And they're at this dinner, and they decide to create their own agency. What happens? They're like, okay, we need some financing. We're going to start a rival agency. We're leaving WME. We're starting CIA. What happens before they can get financing? They all get fired.

They all get fired. Seriously, this is real. This is on the way you be here. It's like thinking machines dynamic. Yeah, no, it really is like AI lab talent wars all over again. Of course, CIA was incorporated in Delaware and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan. They rented a small office in Century City.

And within a week, they sold a game. show called Rime and Reason, The Little Rich Show, and the Jackson Five. An early plan was to form a medium-sized full-service agency, share proceeds equally and do without nameplaints on doors or formal titles or individual client lists with guidelines like be a team player and return phone calls promptly. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Is that the bomb? The bomb has been planted. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp, goodbye.