TBPN Live - OpenAI Responds to Meta Offers, Meta's Secret List, Apple Scores Big With 'F1' | Will Brown, Will O'Brien, Kylie Robison, Joshua Meier, John Glasgow, Tom Lee

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

(01:28:55) - Will Brown discusses Meta's recent aggressive recruitment of top AI talent, including former OpenAI researchers, to bolster its AI capabilities. He highlights Meta's strategic investments, such as the $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI, and the formation of the 'Superintelligence' team led by Alexandr Wang, aiming to advance artificial general intelligence (AGI). Brown also touches on the competitive landscape, noting Meta's substantial financial incentives to attract leading AI researchers and the broader implications for the AI industry. (01:59:25) - Will O'Brien, co-founder of Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering, discusses his company's development of autonomous surface and underwater vehicles designed to perform critical ocean tasks, such as seagrass restoration, at a fraction of the traditional cost. He explains how these vehicles can autonomously plant seagrass seeds, significantly accelerating restoration efforts compared to manual methods. O'Brien also highlights the broader applications of their technology, including maritime security and infrastructure projects, emphasizing the need for affordable, scalable solutions to address various challenges in ocean operations. (02:21:13) - Kylie Robison is a senior correspondent at WIRED, covering the business of artificial intelligence; she previously reported for The Verge, Fortune, and Business Insider. In the conversation, she discusses her recent reporting on OpenAI's decision not to release a research paper defining AGI, allegedly due to concerns over its Microsoft partnership, and the tension surrounding Meta's recruitment of OpenAI researchers, including a memo from OpenAI executive Mark Chen accusing Meta of "robbing our home." (02:31:32) - Joshua Meier, a leader in AI-driven drug discovery, discusses Chai Discovery's new foundation model, Chi2, which significantly improves antibody sequence generation, achieving success rates of up to 20%, thereby reducing the need for extensive lab testing. He highlights the potential of Chi2 to expedite drug development and enable the creation of novel therapies, emphasizing the importance of agility in the rapidly evolving biotech landscape. Meier also envisions a future where AI models can design personalized medicines, though he acknowledges the challenges in predicting the pace of technological advancements. (02:40:09) - John Glasgow, CEO and Founder of Campfire, discusses his journey from experiencing the limitations of legacy ERP systems firsthand to founding Campfire, an AI-native ERP platform designed to modernize finance and accounting processes. He highlights the company's recent $35 million Series A funding led by Accel, emphasizing plans to enhance product development and expand market reach. Glasgow also elaborates on Campfire's innovative use of AI to automate tasks, improve financial insights, and streamline operations for businesses of various sizes. (02:51:37) - 02:55:35 Tom Lee, founder of Fundstrat and Chief Investment Officer of Fundstrat Capital, has been appointed Chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies. In this role, he discusses BitMine's $250 million private placement aimed at adopting Ethereum (ETH) as its primary treasury reserve asset, highlighting the strategic importance of Ethereum's ecosystem, particularly in relation to the growth of stablecoins. Lee emphasizes that this move positions BitMine to leverage Ethereum's protocol-level activities, such as staking and decentralized finance mechanisms, to enhance the company's treasury operations. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnFollow 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

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday June 30th 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We got a great show for you today folks. It's summer. Every venture capitalist is on vacation. They're celebrating the fourth in France. We're not. Yes, literally everyone is abroad. But we're here in Hollywood, California, the future center of media and entertainment if we play our cards right. We're gonna take you through the five most important stories

in technology and business from our perspective, kicking it off with a dramatic, yeah, get that gasp ready because there's a dramatic story in Wired. Open AI leadership responds to Metta's offers. Someone has broken into our home. That's the title of the article. We'll be digging into it in the show.

It was written, but you could hear the pain in Mark Chen's voice. Friend of the show. I would call him a personal friend. He's a great guy. We've had people try to poach our team members. Yes. With, I wouldn't say similarly sized offers, but meaningful

offers. Meaningful offers. But yeah, I mean certainly a high stakes situation. People think of OpenAI as a $350 billion juggernaut, 90% market share in consumer AI. They're doing great. They are the steamroller, but you forget that Zuck's built different. He has a hundred billion dollars in free cash flow every year to play with.

And the vibe shifts from two weeks ago where everyone was like, oh, okay, Zuck acquired scale. And then, oh, he's got Nat and oh, he's got DG. And then Sam's like, well, they're not recruiting any of, they're not able to get any of our best people to, it feels like somebody has broken into our house and stolen something is very significant. So Bill Gurley has the post that defined the story. He says, the company that was already planning

to lose $7 billion this year, that's OpenAI, is reevaluating comp to be more aggressive. Put that in perspective and he's got the yee-haw cowboy hat emoji on, I love it. I love post-retirement Bill, he's just like, before he would be much more concerned about this, now he's got the cowboy hat on, he's just, he's just watching from the sidelines.

Riding into the sunset, you know? He was podcasting, riding in the sunset, talking about the drama. It's great, we're gonna have him on soon. Yeah, it'll be fun. I saw there was someone else posted that, and I thought this was accurate, people forget that Zuck yeeted like $20 billion. He's willing to lose tens of billions of dollars,

and he can lose. Oh, on this? On this, the Meta the meta quest 3s Xbox edition I don't think he had here I don't think he yeeted 20 billion on this I think it was worth every penny we're gonna be putting this to the test on the show today stay tuned Tyler Cosgrove our intern is gonna be trying to beat the first level of halo in virtual reality. Yeah but anyway OpenAI has incredible access to capital, but they're losing obscene amount of money. Meta has incredible access to capital

and can deploy it and still generate tens of billions of dollars of net income. Yes, and uniquely, Zuck has incredible control over the board and shareholders. And so he controls enough of the vote that he can't be, he's also just so big, but he can't be the subject of activist shareholder attacks saying, hey, we want earnings per share

to go up by a little bit more. We'd like our dividends to be a little bit bigger. He's in that early Bezos era where he has the full faith of the shareholders and also the legal control to actually go and spend tens of billions of dollars on a project that might prevent disruption, which is absolutely in the long term best interest of. He's not thinking quarter by quarter.

Exactly, he's fulfilling his fiduciary duty just on a different timeline. And so the only reason that an investor would be upset if they're like, yeah, well I just want the stock to pop this quarter but he can tell those people that I'm not I'm not building with you in mind so yeah it's a it's it's getting spicy it's a mark on mark violence Mark is the soccer today pull it up I'm sure I'm sure half a point the market loves it No clearly is that five billion? Yeah something like that I mean five billion that'll pay for what fifty researchers. That's exactly how many you need right? Yeah, the

Who is telling us the perfectly priced in yeah, yeah perfectly pristine? Nikita beer we got a trade deal baby trade deal Nikita beer, we got a trade deal, baby. Trade deal. Nikita Beer has joined X as the head of product. Market clearing order inbound. You probably know him from his viral social apps. He's been at, he's sold one to Discord. He's sold one to Facebook back in the day. Now, he didn't even have to sell one. He's just going directly to X.

He's going direct. He's joining as the head of product. He's cutting out the middle man, which were his startups. Basically. He says, X is the most important social network in the world. Fully agree. Fantastic app.

I'm obsessed. It's where we built this company. It's where internet culture originates and where the world's most influential people convene. Finding my community and building an audience on X has impacted my life more than any single thing. It's unlocked friendships, professional opportunities, and it's even where I met my girlfriend.

While I already spend every waking hour on this app, I'll now be spending that time helping others unlock the same value, and will certainly be leveraging the power of Grok to create hyper-relevant timelines and help people understand everything that's happening. Thanks, Elon Musk and the X team for inviting me to work on the product that I live and breathe.

Head of product, but also poster and residence, right? They lost Yepseen. Yes, they did. Or fired him. But they're bringing back a new poster and residence who's gonna be absolutely dominating the timeline. Yeah, and I think, I don't know, it's interesting, like Nikita's had success

iterating very quickly on product and developing viral apps. He's also spent enough time in large tech companies like Meta and Discord to probably be able to play, there's probably some overhead that still exists even in the leaner X. So I wouldn't be surprised that he's actually kind of the perfect person there. And then obviously the fact that he's so dominant on the Platform and obsessed with it and really he's a power user. That's probably exactly what you want ahead of product So I'm bullish you bring in the gong. You know why I have this out

Why do you have that out because the rumor is that X backed up the trunks truck? No way one Okay, I'm gonna hit the gong for Nikita hit the gong Congratulations to Nikita beer he's been on a generational run and it continues as X's head of product. I'm gonna start texting him now there's bugs yeah head of product that means I actually don't have that many bugs I've you know I everyone says that there's a ton of bugs I've been having great but there are a bunch of things that could be improved with the product, and so I'm sure he'll come up with some interesting ideas,

and it'll be a lot of fun to follow. Anyway, in other news, you gotta also ring the gong for Apple. Our boy Tim Cook, he pulled in, he paid for half of his annual salary just by selling a sponsorship in Apple's F1 movie for a fictional team, APXGP. Expensify paid an eight figure sum

to become the title sponsor. They also sold sponsorships to Shark Ninja, IWC, the Watch brand. They really built it out and it makes it look better. I think it makes it look better. It makes it look better because it wouldn't look legit. No, it looks super legit. Yeah, this was interesting.

I knew that I don't have a lot of insight into how entertainment companies sell sponsorships in shows. I know it's super prevalent, right? You'll see, okay, why is this character driving a Hyundai? It doesn't actually make sense in the context of their life, but clearly it's Hyundai. It's all over the place.

So sometimes, when I was running Soylent, there were people who'd come to us and just like they would just be like we had It on the set that day and we wanted to throw it in the fridge and so we did so you got a spot in this We were in a Super Bowl ad once because they needed to the cars in the Fast and Furious movie were driving through Times Square And they needed a they needed like some billboard in the background so they just put up an ad for our product, a virtual billboard. So sometimes it's like we need something, we need a product that we can clear. Like you know, Andrew Huberman is going to be fine with us, with us promoting, you know, Mateyina Yerba Matey on here.

But if we were at a really, really Hollywood level, like we would have, if we were going to drink like Monster or Red Bull. Well we're at a Hollywood level. I know, like if we were gonna drink Monster or Red Bull. Well, we're at a Hollywood level. I know, I know. But yes, we are in Hollywood. But there is a level above where you would have to get clearance to use the thing in the actual film. And so a lot of times it's like,

can we just get quick approval and not have to pay or not have to do any legal stuff? Other times it's more complicated where they're actually going out and selling it sounds like they sold this for this But anyway, and poly market of the day didn't just make money on the sponsorships Yeah, the box under it was it 140 million. It crushed it Blew it out poly market had it if you were walking they clocked it last week. Yeah It was the market was hasn't I guess it's still in the process of dissolving.

The core predictions were around like $55 million, I guess, was kind of the middle band here, $50 million, and it blew that out. I mean, F1 is popular. Have you seen the other F1 movies? Of course not. Why am I even asking? Ford versus Ferrari, you haven't seen that? Drive, you haven't seen that, right? No course not. Why am I even asking? Ford versus Ferrari? You haven't seen that. Drive? You haven't seen that, right? No. But big news, I saw my first

UFC event, so I'm catching up. Jordan's gonna see his first movie. I'm gonna see my first UFC event. It'll be great. John, yeah. I love it. We had a good crew. It was a lot of fun. UFC with Senra, Rob Moore. It's great. And we had a great time. John asked, who's playing tonight on Saturday? I said, well, John, I don't think they're gonna be playing. They're gonna be punching each other in the face. And the knockout on Saturday was spectacular. My wife was like, oh, you know how like when guys go watch the football game,

they like toss around the football beforehand? Like, are you guys gonna be like punching each other before you watch the punching? And I was wondering if you guys are gonna be like, yeah, let's just go like spar a little bit before we sit down and watch UFC. Let's roll. Maybe we should do that.

Next time. Anyway, this is actually massive news. Toby Lukey has summed it up well. So Tesla has the world's first autonomous delivery of a car. So this Tesla, I believe it's a Model Y, drove itself from the Gigafactory in Texas to its new owner's home 30 minutes away, crossing parking lots, highways,

and the city to reach its new owner. And Toby, look, he says, "'Put it on the front page of all the newspapers.'" Well, we printed it, it's in the front page of TVPN. What else do you need, Toby? Come on the front page of all the newspapers. Well, we printed it, it's in the front page of TVPN. What else do you need, Toby? Come on the show. No, this is significant. It's costly to get a car delivered.

Obviously, if you're getting a car delivered from hundreds of miles away, the gas fees are gonna be high, but it costs money. The other thing, you just got a car recently, and the shipper damaged the car while it was being shipped. It should just drain itself. Now it needs to be repaired. Yes.

And so I'm very interested in what this actually means for like structurally for the business of Tesla. We'll have to dig into this, but I wouldn't be surprised if like that, like so Tesla's famously like cut out the middleman of like dealerships. And I think that's really improved their margins. And I imagine that that delivery is not

an insignificant line item for Tesla right now. Like you order them, they have to put them on trucks, they have to deliver them, there's all this extra step and I feel like delivery fees are around a thousand bucks maybe, it depends on how far you're going, but like you have to have multiple people securing the car, traveling with it, it's not just. Every time I've bought a car-

Hundreds of dollars at least. Outside of a few hundred miles away, it ends up somewhere a thousand, two thousand dollars. And so, yeah, you assume that there's like a 50% margin tacked on that, and it's a high margin add-on. The other thing here is it's effectively passing on the delivery cost to the consumer,

because it's really just mileage, right? Yeah, mileage and energy, and then you get a half-charged car and you're like, okay, I got to charge it up. But who cares about that? Nobody cares about that. And so I wonder, I mean, this should be somewhat material. I just wonder how material. It might be like, okay, it drops their cogs by 0.001% but it certainly is exciting and you can imagine we're one step closer to push a button and buy a car and it just arrives, which is very very cool Yeah finger hovering over the button. I would But I'll be waiting for the

Naturally the naturally aspirated or v12 the aversion as soon as they have all that is coming. Yeah Anyway in other news or V12 version as soon as they roll that out. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. Anyway, in other news. Your naturally aspirated V12 Tesla's getting delivered. Yes. And it's just getting noise complaints along the way because AI's just joy riding it, pulling over to do burnouts.

I mean, have you heard Doug DeMiro's riff on electric cars? He says that they're technically naturally aspirated. They don't have turbo chargers. They don't have superchargers How are the batteries cooled? Naturally all the air flows through the car naturally. There's no turbochargers. Therefore it is a natural I mean, yeah, Xiaomi Xiaomi is not far right? I posted a picture today. Their new car is just almost a one-to-one copy Song way. Yeah, the news is... Apparently it's selling very well.

They've got over 200,000 non-refundable orders. Not just over 200,000. This is the electric SUV, the new Xiaomi. 289,000, and that's not just so far. That's in the first hour. Okay. That's a lot. Solid. Potentially... Well, just to show that we respect business. I'm gonna hit the size gone

Congratulations to the folks over at Xiaomi for ripping off the pro song way success so successfully That's on b3. Anyway The last top story we have today is from Luke Metro He says I know a 409 evaluator hates to see this coming because Robinhood has tokenized stocks and everything else. And so now there are private company stock tokens and they're shouting out open AI and SpaceX, but Luke Metro works at Anderil, obviously has some stock options and he's getting ready to trade them on Robinhood.

Who knows? In the pipeline, yeah. In the pipeline, I would imagine. Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, we had Ken from Republicon last week also building his own private company. He must have known that this was coming or something, or maybe there's some underlying market structure bill,

but this feels like it's a wave that everyone's doing it all at once, right? Part of it is that this administration has been extremely crypto-friendly. Seems like everything, not everything, but most things are fair game now. And so I think a lot of companies saw this coming and have just been racing to deliver new product experiences.

It is funny to think about, I guess, the SpaceX and OpenAI tokens are gonna be available to European Robinhood users only. And so it is funny to think about Europeans day trading OpenAI and SpaceX shares. I mean, could be the best place for them to earn yield. This is apparently rolling out on the Robinhood chain. So they're launching their own L2 with Arbitrum, and I'm interested to see this roll out. Yeah, they cleared an exchange of OpenAI tokens today, or OpenAI stock, like the first transaction's gone through.

Luke Metro had another funny post that was like, I just hope that my Andoril stock is valued like the Robinhood Degen retail trader valuation and not the price that founders pay Anyway, oh sorry we block in the camera anyway, let's go through some Some of the deep dives I want to I want to dig into that wired article that was burning up the timeline over The weekend and then we'll we'll read through some of the Wall Street Journal coverage of the list, AI's secret file of geniuses.

But first, we have our first intern challenge of the day. The first. Yeah, there might be many. Even when you finish this, Tyler, you're not safe. We purchased and received a MetaQuest 3S Xbox edition. Very nice foil, look at that foil. This is a nice product. We purchased and received a MetaQuest 3S Xbox edition. Very nice foil, look at that foil. This is a nice product. So this is the latest and greatest out of Meta

for their virtual reality headsets. And the challenge is to beat the first level of Halo, complete edition, Halo CE, this is Halo 1. Tyler, you've never played Halo at all? I've never played Halo. Okay, but you've played first person shooters? Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay, so you should be able to do it, you think?

Yeah, 100%. Okay, so I asked ChatGPT, Team Deathmatch. The speed run world record for Pillar of Autumn, which is the first level in the first Halo game, is like three minutes, but you have to cheat and go through the walls and stuff. An experienced player can do it in like 15 minutes.

First time person ever playing should be able to do it in between 20 and 30 minutes. So for this, let's give you an hour. If you can be under- An hour? I was thinking like 12 minutes. Okay, let's give you- Best of luck. Let's give you 45 minutes.

If you can do it in under 45 minutes, you will get to keep this. Let's go. OK. So can we get a timer started? Yeah, start the timer. So it is 11.20. Let's give you 40 minutes.

So if you can do it before noon. So go get it and start. OK, he's hustling he's hustling for good reason all right have fun Tyler so so the problem is that the level takes like five minutes but unboxing and setting that thing up I think is gonna take like 40 minutes so that's the real challenge but Tyler will be working on that during the during the show and good luck to him. Anyways, back to the timeline. A poster by the name of Toucan says, nerds is quoting, on the left is Ronaldo,

another post, Real Madrid spent 80 million to sign him from Man United. On the right is Jahyu, which I'm struggling to pronounce, Meta paid 100 million to sign him from Open AI. And Toucan says, nerds have client complaining that athletes are ever paid for decades Finally the nine-figure nerd trading market has emerged take that LeBron Jameson Well, you know if you're If you're on a hiring spree,

you gotta get everyone in your organization, corporate cards, head over to ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Anyway, let's dig into this OpenAI leadership. The OpenAI. This was, all this news was kind of coming out

over the weekend. There's no decency anymore. You can't even take a summer weekend in June off. You can't even send an email to a 3,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired. Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head to head with social giant

in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by Wired, came days after Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's super intelligence lab. I have a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home

and stolen something, Chen wrote. Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by I mean This makes sense. You like you need to you need to tell the troops that like, you know We're prepared to go on the counter-attack like we got attacked, but we're ready to go back What's interesting is like is like I don't think that I don't think that meta is necessarily gonna try and go eat Chatgy pts lunch like I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber, and he was saying like, you know, he was kind of reiterating like never bet against Zuck,

like he's working on an open source model, but a lot of it is more of this like B2B applied AI necessarily, than trying to go and disrupt chat GPT, because Google's already running that playbook. Like Mark can see that and see that like what happens when you're a trillion dollar company and you roll out

a basically a direct clone of the ChatGPT app, it's like yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a notional terms, like I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has like 100,000 users or 100 million users and like lots of five star reviews, but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of chat GPT And so when you pull someone off the street you say what do you use for AI they say chat They don't even say chat GPT anymore. Yeah, so dominant

And so I think Mark knows that he shouldn't necessarily try and go after that But he should be going after the next thing and the next next thing and have a model that he can yes pipe into all sorts of different features within the meta ecosystem, but yeah the crazy thing is there there's not It doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid of a talent raid of this magnitude, right? We covered Ken Griffin rating Enron, but it was after post the collapse. Yeah, right. Yeah Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox PARC in 1979 in the early 80s.

But it was kind of a downswing. Yeah, it wasn't anything of this magnitude, nor was it, hey, we're going to come in and just give you these nine figure off comp packages and things like that. Yeah, and it's very common for a startup to be able to pull people from the big legacy company that's kind of sclerotic. And we've seen a lot of people that were at Apple

or Microsoft or Xerox, and then they went to Google, and then they went to Meta, and then they went to OpenAI. I mean, Brett Taylor, who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI, was the CTO of Meta, and then they went to OpenAI. I mean, Brett Taylor, who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI, was the CTO of Meta. And it's like, okay, he clearly just wants to be in the hot thing, and he's a startup guy almost. And I believe he was at Google before, because he worked, yeah, he redid Google Maps.

And so the story of Brett Taylor is really the default, I think, for most startup people. It's like, he's early at Google, he works with Paul Bukite on Gmail, he works on Google Maps, then he goes over to Meta, CTO there, then he goes to OpenAI, Chairman of the Board there. And it's like, he's a startup guy,

and so he's always riding the new wave. You usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare. Yeah, one other, some other precedent here in 2011 in 2010 and 2011 Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google. Yeah, so Facebook had Crossed half a billion users. They were trained in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup And they went heavy into Google. So they went and got high performers from ads, search,

mobile on the Android side, and some of the social product people from Google+. And Zach did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went with these sort of heavy, heavy comp packages and was very successful. Google had to respond and increase comp in a number of different roles. Did they poach any designers,

any people that use figma.com? Any people that think bigger, build faster? Anyone that, you know, because Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. The web would be a different place if Figma had even existed back then. But fortunately, you can go to figma.com.

You can think bigger. And you can get started for free. You can build faster. Anyway, what do you think of the buzzword superintelligence? This whole, like they've really rebrand of it. You can build faster. And you can get started for free. Anyway, what do you think of the buzzword superintelligence? This whole, like they've really rebranded it. Is it a goal post shifting thing? I think it's smart. I think he poached the word superintelligence.

It's mine now. It's mine now. It's mine now. It's mine now. Because, you know, it used to be- And he's not saying the safe superintelligence team. He's just saying superintelligence. Reckless. Safe superintelligence. Re's not saying safe superintelligence team is just saying Reckless

Reckless superintelligence, I like that but it's funny because you know Everyone was focused on like AI as a buzzword then it was a GI then it would now it's superintelligence But like you know within our group like we all think super intelligence is kind of the old thing. Everyone, me and you, we know the secrets to this stuff. It's kind of already priced in. The real killers, they're focused on the next thing. You know what I'm talking about, right? Giga intelligence.

That's the one that people are getting, really? The real killers are like, yeah, well, AGI is basically here, Super intelligence is basically here, but giga intelligence, that's the one we're working on. Because we're gonna need a new buzzword because we're burning through buzzwords and increasing rate. And so we just steamrolled the Turing test,

completely blasted through AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here. But you got super intelligence, we're gonna solve this buzzword, we're gonna churn through this in a year or two, we gotta start working on giga intelligence now. This is the way.

Anyway. Start adopting it. Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, we've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.

Still, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. While I'll fight to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others. He wrote It's such a brutal Dynamic if you're mark Chen, yeah, if you're Sam because not everybody at open AI is getting poached but presumably

Zuck is working with all the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at open AI Who do we really want? Yep, and then going to them and making the maxed out offers. Meanwhile, you can't, like the team dynamic, if you have a few researchers on a team, and somebody gets, you know, somebody's potentially getting poached by Metta, and you say to retain them, you're like, OK, we're going to give you this sort of massive incremental grant,

and the other people on their team are going to be like, wait, well, is that my market value? I didn't go talk to Facebook, or I turned down, I never took the meeting, or whatever. So you should pay me the same thing too, right? I'm loyal, don't you wanna pay the lawyer? I'm a missionary. Yeah, I'm a missionary. Why are you paying the mercenaries more?

You should pay the missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries. Raph, for sure. Burdol. Anyway. Let me talk about. And the other thing is it creates this really nasty incentive to basically be like, oh yeah,

you maybe got hit up by a meta recruiter many months ago and you're gonna be like, yeah, I mean, they reached out to me and suddenly they're hovering around around you like being like alright. What's it gonna? Take you really don't want to lose you Yeah, it is a Yeah, I mean it's crazy game theory like every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory and then timing that timing that with yeah With this like summer break that I guess,

OpenAI was saying like, hey, everybody should take the week of the fourth off, or not the week of the fourth, but anyways, you wanted to say something more important. Well, I mean, if you want to see who your high performers are, just look in the linear, right? Linear is purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development,

streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. If Zuck were able to gain access to OpenAI's linear, it would be illegal, but it would also tell them a lot. Yeah, you don't want to do anything illegal, Zuck. You want to be on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work

out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program so the news comes as competition for For top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach offering 100 million dollar signing bonuses to some openAI staffers according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother Jack Altman.

So this $100 million signing bonus, this just got baked into the lexicon, but I was listening to Dylan Patel on Jordan Schneider's China Talk podcast. It's actually transistor radio, but it goes out on China Talk anyway. And Dylan Patel was saying that that might be a kind of a game of telephone a little bit

in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making $100 million over a number of years in stock based on appreciation, but he was very skeptical that anyone was getting 100 million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus. So I don't know how real that number is.

But it's certainly a sexy number. The Zurich team came out and said, the Zurich team explicitly said we didn't get it. But the way that he phrased it, it could have been more. Clearly we're getting something. No, I do think that the round numbers are upset are easy to latch on to like why is mom Donnie talking about billionaire specifically he doesn't have a problem

with 999 millionaires because like that that's not easy to grasp like people latch on to round numbers a hundred million is so much a billionaire is so much and it's easy to it's easy to quantify. And so the 100 million, if it was 80 million, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million. And so I don't know how real that is. Maybe that was thrown out as a total package, and then it got kind of telephoned into, well, it's basically a signing bonus because they got the deal on the, as soon as they signed,

but they do have some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some way. But there's a bunch of creative accounting that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like $100 million of value, which is not far off from, okay, what would it take? You know, Johnny Ive got a huge offer to go to OpenAI, and it was structured in an interesting way

with an acquisition, but he got... He's got a few points. Yeah, it was a few percentage points. And when you think about the scale of OpenAI and the scale of Johnny Ive's legacy, yeah, what would it take to get someone like that to join your... Founding designer. He's a founding designer, basically,

so it's a couple percentage points. So multiple sources at OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number to Wired. So I don't know because it kind of benefits like both sides to have that number out there, it's kind of unclear who would really want to confirm that and then what the nature of these things were. I don't know.

The other thing that's interesting though, the other thing that's interesting is if you're working at OpenAI, who would really want to confirm that and then what the nature of these things were. I don't know. I was just interested. The other thing that's interesting is if you're working at OpenAI, and let's say their top researchers have on average a hundred million dollars in OpenAI shares that they're the truly top people. And then you get an offer

that's like a $20 million signing bonus, but it's kind of paid out over time or they can claw it back if you don't stay past a certain date. And you're kind of looking at it and be like, OK, I'm already a centi and I'm getting an offer to go to a new team that I don't know if I'm going to like. And it's unclear.

The vision is not quite as clear at Metta. Right. I'm joining the super intelligence team. It's going to be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources. That's exciting. But it is a big switch if you're already happily investing out tens of millions of dollars. So it would make sense that these 20 million dollars, you know, if it's 20 million dollars, I can see that if it's a hundred million dollars for the top, top, top

people, it makes total sense. Yeah, I mean, like what was the, I mean, the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably like way over a hundred million dollars to him personally based on his ownership in that company which was acquired and so like that number doesn't feel impossible. I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it based on based on what Dylan was talking about. There's just enough precedent here that again going back to Zuck raiding Google in 2010-2011 he was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid-level engineers just because he was like, I need a really good ad product.

I want to make my ad product great. Yeah, I mean, have you seen the, why am I even asking this? Have you seen the Blackberry movie? Of course not. But in the Blackberry movie, there's this whole story about they go and they try and poach someone and then it was controversial because they like backdated some stock poach someone and then it was controversial because they backdated

some stock options for someone to basically give them more like cash but without having the initial impact of that cash, it's kind of interesting. But yeah, I mean to poach top talent, it's expensive. It kind of benefits both maybe, I mean I don't know, like on the meta side, do they want, does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up to $100 million out there?

Like maybe, because that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh wow, Mark is really taking this seriously. I should talk to Meta's recruiting team. I should actually hear them out. And then if they wind up coming back to me with a $50 million offer or a 10 million dollar offer like You know we can discuss that and I can see it and they can evaluate how much I'm worth they can make an offer

but At least it got the conversation started But I don't know there was also the theory that Sam Altman put that 100 million dollar number out in order to kind of like poison the well. Because if Mark comes to you and says, hey, you're a top AI researcher, come over here. And then the top AI researcher says, yeah, great, I hear $100 million is the going rate.

And Mark's like, no, no, no, that's like fake news that Sam was spreading. We're actually paying 15. Then you're like, oh,, I was hoping it was 100. But it kind of benefits both. Sam is one of the most Machiavellian people. Yeah, it could be like 40 chess on both sides, I don't know. Yeah.

Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort and has repeatedly, and most unsuccessfully, tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages, Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye

toward talent from OpenAI and Google. Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta, one source tells Wired. They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky's the limit Which is funny because yeah, of course like entropics like so missionary driven like it's gonna be very hard to go to entropic and research scientists and be like ads

Better ads they're like we're building God here. Yeah Anyway hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars not for not for entropic guys entropic guys are true believers. They don't care What's a hundred million dollars in a post scarcity world doesn't matter you want to be on the gonna be on this on the? On the post scarcity train Chins no is pretty it is so it is so telling though like How you how you like sort of like try to, you know, pinpoint like Zucks views on AI that he's like, I'm not even gonna bother with this. Not a culture fit to a GI pill.

Senator, we sell ads. Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax super intelligence, go to numeral HQ.com, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with super intelligence for sales tax superintelligence, go to numeralhq.com, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with superintelligence for sales tax. The official sales tax automation provider for Lucy. Yes, that's true.

Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous, exploding offers, just tell them to back off. It's not nice to pressure people

in potentially the most important decision. Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a C-suite executive. This is weird. Where's the end of this quote? That's odd. I'd like to be able to talk you through it. And I know all about their offers.

The remarks come as OpenAI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week. OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge. Let's give it up for OpenAI's grindset. It's really fantastic. Also extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4th.

I'm normally pretty anti-taking time off, but if you're gonna go really hard on a particular holiday, make it July 4th. Give a week off around July 4th, I love it. I was posting the over, I need a polymarket on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th. Do you think it'll happen?

I actually think there 100% should be a poly market on that. Right? It's kind of 50-50, right? He is definitely locked in, very busy, probably not a lot of time off. He knows from this that OpenAI is down this week, so that's probably really encouraging to be like, I want to go down this week. So that's probably like really encouraging to be like, I wanna go harder this week. They're off.

Yeah, my- At the same time- My advice for founders this week is- It's one of the greatest pieces of content he puts out. Think about how hard Zuck is going right now. Go harder. The week of July 4th. And just don't get outworked by him.

Yes. Just don't get outworked by Zuck this week. It's gonna be tough. He's in year 20. What excuses do you have? You're three months into your startup. Yeah, go harder. Go harder.

I love it. Yeah, Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation, another leader at the company wrote. If you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and want to support you. Well, OpenAI's leadership is taking Meta's efforts seriously.

Chen also said that the company is getting too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short-term comparison with the competition. The sentiment is backed by a former OpenAI staffer who worked closely with Altman and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements every few months. This was a really, this was key to their strategy, was like, oh Google. Always have a buzzy announcement ready

if the competition has anything. Just drop a absolute. Oh, Google I.O. is happening? Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called I.O. the day before or something like that? We're like, oh, Google's announcing the new Gemini. Let's just steamroll them in the timeline that 24 hours before.

Deepseek? I'd love to introduce you Deep Research. I mean, it's masterful. But that's the game you gotta play. That's the game on the field. I think he's being aggressive, but he's not doing anything wrong. He is up there with Elon in terms of creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough real product value

to justify the hype that was being sold six months ago basically. So like staying on the bleeding edge. And this is why the anti-tech people hate him and Elon so much, because they're like, it's overhyped. It's not useful. And then like a year later, it's like there's Tesla cars everywhere. The rockets are landing and like 90% of people are getting every day. Okay.

So it was real, but also he was over promising, but he delivered at a higher level than anyone in human history. And that's just like, it, those two things are in conflict. Someone said this, like, Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey, or whatever, P.T. Barnum. He's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot, a human in a suit acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing,

which is just, it just breaks people's brains Anyway, we need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to Compute a lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year into intelligence Chen wrote this is the main quest and it's important to remember that skirmishes with meta are the side quest last but not least I'll be around this week recharged and ready to go pound for pound DME anytime I love it he's ready he's fired up get him I love talking with Mark yeah that was a fun conversation also I mean guys in shape let's get him in the let's get him in the octagon with Zuck mark on mark violence let's see it I mean and if there was a pound for pound list for the top AI researcher in the world,

he's in the conversation. He's in the conversation. It's amazing. It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions, Altman wrote on Slack in response to Chen's message. Very grateful we have him as our leader.

I mean, these, it can't be overstated making these decisions, right? Yeah. One of your best people comes to you and says, hey, I'm really happy here at OpenAI. I have $80 million of stock. And I was just offered $150 over the next year. And it's highly liquid. Or over the next few years and it's highly, or over the next few years, it's highly liquid,

meaning that I can market sell it quarterly forever. And meanwhile, you're going through this for-profit conversion. Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all? I mean, obviously- What are you, I mean, like, if you want to, let's say you want to buy a $50 million house, and you have $100 million in illiquid open AI.

Is that gonna be hard at all? I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, private wealth management, are gonna be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares. You're only gonna have to put down 10%. But meanwhile, the company's failing to go through a for-profit conversion. Yeah, but I mean, so that a...

Satya's taken 20% off the top. I mean, that applies. That applies like a small haircut, I would say. I'm just saying, there is always, there's always gonna be a tension of somebody having massive wealth, but not having greenbacks. Yeah.

There's always gonna be that tension. Yeah. And people seeing that meta is one of the most liquid having greenbacks. There's always gonna be that tension. And people seeing that meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world can constantly trade in and out of it. And it's ultimately just, it's stable. I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com. Investing for those, take it seriously,

multi-asset investing industry leading yields fashion stocks Trusted by millions and who knows maybe they'll have open eyes soon anything's barely things possible you yeah We should we should you know Robin Hood has you know? The the tokens around private companies, maybe we should tokenize Nonprofits I want to be able to trade, you know, PETA. You know? Let me go long PETA.

Let me get some leverage on that. I want some levered options on PETA. Tyler right now. Let's get on the Tyler cam. How are we doing on time? I think I'm in the right mission. Oh, you did it? No way way 15 minutes left. Let's see it Okay, okay. I can't believe you got it set up so fast. That's amazing

Okay, you see he's sitting at he's sitting at 26 minutes so far All right. We'll have fun in there Tyler. Just look over. I just didn't realize he was on VR. It's amazing I think he's actually playing it This is crazy because my number one complaint with with the quest was that it just takes a long time to set up and I think That it all yeah, you you intentionally did this challenge. Yes made it seem like I'm gonna happily give away my my new VR Xbox. Yeah Thinking that over there's no way he could finish it in four minutes. But now he's speed running. Pillar of Autumn, it's happening. Anyway,

Swigs has the story. He's breaking it down. Yeah, some good highlights here. The Mark V Mark war has resulted in going from, oh, the good people don't leave, to someone has broken into our home and stolen something. One week company shut down, question mark, question mark. I mean, I was going back and forth here. I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic in that, hey, people already need a break.

We shouldn't have them walking around the office. The way they were writing it, it felt like this had been on the table for months because the company has been working really hard, launching a ton of stuff. It just seems like an odd choice to, if you're in the middle of this mark-a-view-mark war, that that would be what you choose to do, would be a one-week company shutdown. But I don't know, maybe. I'm not 100% that the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown. It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time.

Anyway, this third point is very interesting. Pivoting product launch calendar to AGI race, especially when Stargate comes online, Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online. And that should be a big, like the biggest cluster ever, unlock even more, maybe pre-training scale, but there's a question about how important that is, and maybe you can do more reinforcement learning

in a more distributed way. So I don't know. Also, like it's not exactly like, Zuck is GPU poor, so I don't know. I don't know how big of a deal it is the Stargate thing We'll see but number four For some reason meta is ignoring anthropic don't care about safety if this is true of course The anthropic point was very funny anyway. There's other posts in here that we should cover Anyway, there's other posts in here that we should cover. Satwik Singh says, what Sam never understood

was that Zuckerberg torched 20 billion over VR headsets with Nintendo Wii graphics and didn't even flinch. Didn't even flinch. You know what's so funny? Like those, the Nintendo Wii graphics thing, that was like three months. And then after that, he was doing that Lex interview in the metaverse, did you ever see that?

Where it's like, it is like photo real immediately. And we got a wild demo at Meta HQ of all the new products and we were blown away. I'm not even sure, I don't think we can say much more. I think you can talk about it in like the abstract. But yeah, I mean, none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics. But I mean, that one picture was like

iconic and kind of like it felt like oh this is kind of a step back in terms of well many more people saw that picture than actually use the product yeah and so yeah because there were plenty of there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics like the hero game for the for the quest when it came out was Robo Recall which looked super sci-fi and just looked awesome and it was it was great and There were a bunch of other games, but yes, I mean the point is is that like Mark is totally ready to spend 20 billion dollars on a big project if he thinks it's valuable and here He clearly does and so he's going after it

Anyway similar founder led Company that's building amazing AI stuff. Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. We've had Owen on the show before. He's been on a number one. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in bank offs.

Number one on G2. Ranking on G2, let's go. So if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn. I'm saying this, they're not saying this, but I'm gonna say this is the official the official AI cx tool of a at both AI safety and being a GI pill. Okay, it's anthropic uses

Really? No way. There we go. Okay Yeah, I'm sure Really we said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these Over their skis on this endorsement Official CX agent anyway rune had an interesting take here diving into the Why the these trade deals are so they're not trade deals, but these poachings, can be so damaging, and he's trying to put it

in broader consumer terms. We're gonna debate whether or not his point is well taken. He, of course, works at OpenAI and has for a number of years. Roon says, intellectual property, by default, is a market failure. Single, well-informed, talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions

of dollars of tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. The athlete metaphor is somewhat wrong. In industries where patents and such aren't viable, market participants will drastically under-invest in R&D efforts due to IP seepage, just like the I drink your milkshake milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights. There is a compelling pro-consumer case for non-competes. Interesting. Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non-competes.

Interesting. I mean, the immediate impact of non-competes in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Roon, which is interesting. The other question is. Yeah, it's interesting you'd have to move AI out of California. Oh, people would then, maybe.

Or they would choose to be there. I'm just saying if you really want to use non-competes, yeah, yeah, go where they can be enforced, right? Yes Historically, yeah, but as an AI researcher, you'd say I definitely don't want to leave, California Yeah, my question is like I've always been interested in like why can you know like the consumer packaged goods industry like I've always been interested in why can the consumer packaged goods industry patent a tab on a can for 25 years, and Walt Disney can own the shape of mouse ears for 80 years, but Google can't own the transformer for even a minute.

I get that it's some sort of fundamental discovery, but I've always been interested in how little IP works in technology. So that's interesting. Do you think it just is a byproduct of hacker culture and sort of like positive sum culture of Silicon Valley? Yeah, but you'd think that would change if there were tens of billions of dollars on

the table, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a culture of competition doesn't kill businesses. So I agree with you, and I'll give you an example so so pull to refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee like a Twitter UX UI developer built that

Built that user interaction and then Twitter had a patent on Lauren Brickter. Yes American soft software developer., best known for creating Poultry-D. Polter-Refresh, yeah. The Polter-Refresh interaction. So he created that design pattern, and then he had a patent on it. Twitter owned the patent, and Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said,

you know, we're not gonna enforce this. And then it got baked into Instagram, and it's now natively in iOS and it's in all of, it's basically like one button to include. If you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day. True, but now we've actually moved past that. We've moved into endless scroll

where you actually don't need, like if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh. You just keep scrolling to the bottom. So we're actually post-pull to refresh, and now we're in the endless scroll. But endless scroll, I believe, was developed by Pinterest, and they had a patent on it for a while, I think. It might be wrong here, but endless scroll was also

something that was not able to be owned, which is just odd to me. And then there's the other question of like, Coca-Cola's been able to keep the formula as a trade secret for like 100 years or something. And it's just odd that tech companies can't seem to do either. They can't keep the secrets.

You can have trade secrets, right? It's not like an open AI researcher can go over and say, here's a bunch of code, let's roll it out, right? Yep. It's basically the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company for a certain amount of time. Tasset value of knowing what works and what doesn't.

And so my like naive read on this is that if you had had a top tier open AI researcher at Meta during the Llama 4 build out, that researcher would have said, hey, don't focus on pre-training scale as much, we need to get a reasoning model out, and we need to focus on RL and post-training much more. Much more.

And when you talk to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about DeepSeq, and how DeepSeq was doing all these innovations and moving to floating point eight, smaller, basically smaller numbers storing the weights. And he was like, oh yeah, but OpenAI was doing that like two years ago, DeepSeq just open sourced it. And so it's like the world found out,

if you found out the best practices from DeepSeq because they open sourced it, you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been coaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier. So two things could be, could be happening here. One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay and try to recreate some of the magic and get a, you know, leading, a leading model or, or set of models out of it that he can use in a bunch of different ways

that we've discussed. Or none of this matters and Rune is baiting Zuck into just overpaying. This is like, yeah. The 40 chest is like, oh yeah, this is, they're getting everything. They're taking everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I don't necessarily believe that because I did talk to Rune like years ago and I was like, but like, is this gonna commoditize? Like, is the foundation model layer gonna commoditize? And he was like, the secret to open AI in many ways is like the tealian secrets. Like, they understand things at a lower level that other people just don't

and so that will compound and stay at advantage. And he hadn't even predicted the dominance of the consumer and the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end to consumer AI. That's incredibly valuable. But just on the research side, just on the research side, they can stay ahead just by understanding the secrets of what works and what doesn't.

But it's interesting. Anyway, let's tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the new, is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Next level. Next level.

It will, I mean, we have a light guest booking today, but we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. We can continue. We can go over to the Wall Street Journal because in the exchange section, there is a fantastic article related to this. It says, it's known as the list

and it's a secret file of geniuses. And I'm looking at this. It says, Mishka Bilenko, Yu Zhong, Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list, Lucas Byers on this, the new guy, says Jordy Hayes, John Coogan, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, a couple other folks, but you know, just the usual people that we know.

Anyway, it's known as the list, and it's a secret file of geniuses. Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals wanna hire them, even if it costs ungodly sums. We love ungodly sums. We should be ringing the gong more this episode.

All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about The List, a compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together. Lucas Byer works in multimodal vision research, which Tyler broke down for us. Can you imagine if Zach spun up

basically a hot or not style tool that just pins two researchers together and he makes other researchers just do the test and then just puts out a list of like these are the this is the the top 50 people. Yep So Lucas Byer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation of creation of awesomeness You're John very reddit code

awesomeness. Yujong specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers. Misha Bilenko is an expert in large-scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and hiking and skiing or as he puts it on his website, applying hill climbing search and gradient descent algorithms to real world domains. That's very cute. The recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They also have experience at places like OpenAI

in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their 20s and 30s and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power, and their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued.

The chief executives of TechGoliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial intelligence revolution. It is funny, it is funny. Some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs because how do you compete when, historically,

you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest. You could have come to them with a ridiculous, what would be very ridiculous for a VC, which is I will spin up a new company, ridiculous it happens but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways spin up a new company I'll give you 200 on a billion and you can take 10 million personally and secondary immediately yeah and that is no longer even that compelling of an offer if the odds of actually winning are low

and you just want the most access to compute and be traded. Absolute, absolute banger ripping. This was Tyler's handiwork. Oh, Tyler, how we doing? I'm in some kind of maze right now. Oh, no. You lost it. No, I lost already. I think he lost. It's past noon. I I'm in like some kind of maze right now

I think he lost It's past noon wait, whoa Ben what you got on the timer I've got four minutes still on the four minutes still okay Let's give another four minutes. You better finish this I'm surprised But I bet you I bet you if we roll the tape, it took him 30 minutes to set up. And he's actually on track. I bet he's going to finish the pillar of autumn to level in normal time, like 20 or 30 minutes. Because I only gave him 10 minutes for the setup. Mogged. Anyway.

This is the reality of pledging. Podcasting. Pledging to be a technology brother. Pledging to be a technology brother. Nobody is in this escalating arms race is chasing the prize recruits quite like Zuckerberg who has tried to raid Silicon Valley's top research labs, jangling $100 million dollar pay packages,

we're hearing it again, to a select few superstars in hopes of poaching them. The billionaire CEO of Metta wants them to join his company's new lab focused on super intelligence. One recruit who has spoken with Zuckerberg, who is personally coordinating his dream team of potential hires, describes the company's goal as nothing less than a transfusion

from the country's top AI labs. It's all it is. It's a transfusion. It's a blood transfusion. It's a blood transfusion. It is wild. Yeah, we gotta talk to some more VCs about how they're coping.

We got to get some coping VCs on here to hear them cope about. Yeah, yeah, it's actually a fine time to invest in AI. Hey, what do we got here, Tyler? I'm done. I'm done. You're done? No way. What's the clock?

What's the clock? 2 minutes, 45 seconds. Wow. No way he did it. Yeah, let's go. Oh, that's amazing. Let's go. Let's go. Wow. Congratulations, Tyler. two minutes 45 seconds wow no way did it did you even get to play your new he had unboxed it I did I wanted the unboxing to be part of the experience Wow you just ate your lunch John you did

congratulations okay so break it down how long did it actually take you to get set up and get the game running? Yeah, well, okay, for the first five minutes, there was just a software update. Okay, I see. That's what I was worried about. Yeah, and then I had to connect to my phone. There was the Meta Horizon app.

And then it was probably another couple minutes. I had to create a new Microsoft account and then get Xbox Game Pass. And then I wasn't sure which Halo it was, so it took me a minute or two there. And then I wasn't sure which halo it was. It took me like a minute or two there. Yeah. And then the first, like probably five or six minutes of playing the game was just cut. So it wouldn't let me skip. It's like the tutorial of how to play the game. And then finally, and then I just crushed through it. Okay.

So how long do you think it actually took you to go from like, I gave you the box to you were playing the game I actually have no idea. I mean I was pretty locked in. I don't know how long I was playing okay we should have had splits because because my my my big pushback on VR right now is that if you get an N64 or you get like the old if you if you got an Xbox for Christmas with Halo the DVD If you got an Xbox for Christmas with Halo the DVD, you would put that thing in, plug it into the TV, and you would be playing in two minutes.

It was so fast to get up and running. And I've always been upset with how many things you have to link it to your phone, take it off, log in, create a password, all of that I've always been really annoyed with. I think that they should make you do the account creation after the fact, after they let you get hooked on playing and be like, this is fun.

Okay, cool, yeah, now I wanna create a social profile cause I'm having fun. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, the app seems very unnecessary. I don't know what the app is for. Odd. Cause it wasn't like to sign in.

I still have to sign in on the, using the joysticks. I mean, at one point I had, I counted, I had like six different passwords that were relevant to play oculus games Because I had I had a pin code that was like you draw it. I had a Oculus password, but then oculus got rolled into meta and so I had a meta password But then I also had a Facebook password that was different and then I had like a pin for paying with things And it was just like so many different things. And, and it's not that hard when you're on your phone and you get one password and

you just kind of like auto fill passwords all day long and two factor codes. But when you're in VR, it's super hard to type everything out. So, wow, I'm very, very impressed that you pulled that off. I thought that that was going to be a failure. So congratulations. Enjoy it. So break down the experience of actually playing. Were you playing on a big, big 2d screen and you were sitting there in like a theater basically? Yeah. Yeah. So the screen was probably like six feet in front of me. It was like in front of this light. Um, it was like great experience.

Yeah. I didn't find it to be like, uh, like the refresh rate was like totally fine. I'm not motion sick at all. No screen door effect or anything. No, it was totally fine. And then, and then also break down. Um, so you, were you technically streaming the game over wifi? I believe so. I, I look, but I think it was like cloud gaming. Yeah. So I think, I think the, the actual Xbox, uh, like, like frame rendering is happening in the cloud and they're, and they're streaming that to you

and then rendering in VR and then the headset's just pinning that to the world, which is really, really cool. So I have this thesis and you'll have to play with the headset more and let me know if it plays out that I think that, you know, Polymer Lucky has that take that's like soldiers will be wearing VR headsets on a daily basis before consumers are because

the military can underwrite like a $5,000 VR headset and so he's betting on augmented reality glasses for the war fighter being the first real use case. I have this thesis that you know before people were using the iPhone for dedicated iPhone apps like TikTok and Uber, people were using it to make phone calls. It was a phone first. And I think that that will be basically a TV first and people will be playing traditional video games and watching traditional movies

before we get VR GTA 6. People will just be playing GTA 5. And so I think all the VR companies should focus on making the movie watching experience and the traditional video game experience like super, super smooth so that you just get in, you can actually chill in that thing for two hours, actually beat Halo.

Maybe, you know the whole game only takes three hours to beat, maybe you gotta be on the screen now. Okay gamers, let's get back to the news. Let's get back to the sleep scores How'd you sleep last night? Was Absolutely mugged no What happened?

Get a pod I got a 92 baby Hall you know the rule if I beat you I hit me with the Ashton Hall. You know the rule. If I beat you, I get that sound effect. Ashton Hall. Boom! 92. Go to eightsleep.com slash TBPN.

Get a pop-dog. I'm worried to think about how I would have slept if I didn't have an eightsleep. And you know, the only thing that I got penalized on was I went to bed too early. 9.30 and they're like, you don't usually go to bed at 9.30. And so I pulled it off.

I was penalized by screaming children in the middle of the night. Brutal. Inside the secretive world. Now we have some breaking news. Oh yeah. I'm gonna dive into this. So this morning Zuckerberg announced his super intelligence team.

We got 4,000 likes on this traded post? No way, Tyler! Oh, you're on a generational run today. Generational run today. New Xbox. That is amazing. Okay, wow, 4K likes. Okay. It's awesome. Back to the breaking news. Yeah, yeah, please, please.

So Zuckerberg sent a message this morning in a memo introducing the new super intelligence team. So we were just covering his list. He got seemingly a lot of people from his list. So Zuckerberg introduced Wang, who will be the company's chief AI officer and leader of MSL, as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman will co-lead the new lab with Wang with a focus on AI products and applied research.

Here's the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg's memo. It notably doesn't include the employees who joined from OpenAI Zurich office. This is Kylie Robinson's reporting over at Wired. So Trappit Bonsal pioneered RL on Chain of Thought and co-creator of O-Series models at OpenAI. Correct. Xuqiao Bi, co-creator of GPT-4 Voice Mode in O4 Mini, previously led multimodal pose training at OpenAI. Huawen Chang, co-creator of GPT-4 O's Image Generation and previously invented Mascot and Muse text to image architectures

at Google Research. G-Lin helped build 0304 Mini, GPT-4O, GPT-41, GPT-4.5, GPT-4O, ImageGen, and operator reasoning stack. Joel Pobar, inference at Anthropic, previously at Meta for 11 years at HHVM, Hackflow, Redex, Performance Tooling and Machine Learning. Jack Ray, pre-training tech lead for Gemini

and reasoning for Gemini 2.5, led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind. Hong Yu Ren, co-creator of GPT-4.0. And this just goes on and on and on, but the big takeaway here is that these seem to be some important people and not what Sam had originally messaged as none of our best people. Wow, that is a big.

But obviously things have changed since. I think we need some more trade deal posters, except it's not much of a trade deal, just full poaching. It's pretty crazy. No, this, there will, whenever, whoever writes the book on this era, Ashley Vance. Ashley Vance.

Obviously. Will have at least a chapter dedicated to this talent raid. Yep. This is pretty unprecedented. But yeah, I think the difference, the difference when when Facebook was raiding Google in 2010, it was just spread out over a much longer period of time. It wasn't, it wasn't, I mean this is unique because in that situation, Zuck was poaching from Google mm-hmm Zuck poaching from a company that still is like many people view as a startup right even though it's worth hundreds of billions so Yeah, that's pretty remarkable Turner Novak said is it true they poached Matthew McConaughey from Salesforce

Anyways so we could go back to this list, but clearly he made a list. He checked it twice, and he got a very meaningful number. It's time for Zok to head over to Bezel and get himself something to remember this moment by. Because his Bezel Concierge is available to source him any watch on the planet seriously any watch He could get a new Richard mill. He could get a new

Vacheron or a new Patek he has a cubitus Maybe needs to fill out the fill out the stable a little bit after this Pretty remarkable. Yeah, the other thing that's that's interesting here Daniel gross is not Anywhere in this memo. Oh interesting who was rumored is the full memo? listed or is it just like they just didn't include this because It's just wired reporting and they don't realize how big of a deal DG is I? I think I think they would have they would have included it Yeah, maybe maybe like the negotiation is still like ongoing like it is it is a more complex

situation because it's like a CEO leaving an active company and so It's not it's not like a full like free agent or acquisition or you know going from w2 to w2 It's it's a little bit more complicated than that so Fasting well the AI talent wars are the current thing and we have been enjoying following them. It's a great time to be an AI researcher. Even better time to be a podcaster. Yeah, incredible overnight success

for all these researchers. It's not like they spent 10 to 15 to 20 years grinding. Also in a field where people were like, oh, that will never happen. like this is crazy sci-fi This is not like going to ever be real like you just you're doing like complex math cute chat bot You doesn't work picture. No way. Yeah cute picture that makes a morphed hand. Yeah Look at that hand with six fingers

You bozo oh You're working on image gen. Yeah, why does that person have deep dream the thing that put dogs in every picture? Oh, yeah work, yeah, right Yeah, cat detector hot hot. What is it? Not hot dog. Yeah now it's the most valuable Technology in the world. Yeah, I'm super. I'm super interested in seeing like what they build obviously like It's going to be like a good model like we know that they're going to try and build like a Big good model. It's gonna be open source. Maybe it might not be maybe not

There's be like Mark Mark has a guy actually that he'll be open source. Maybe, it might not be. Maybe not. There's like Mark has a guarantee that he'll be open source forever. Actually the model is really good now. We're gonna charge for it. No, but I- No, but he could, he could. I mean, like, open source, yeah.

I mean, it could be closed source. It could be open source variations. It could be, you know, a chat driven product that directly competes with chat GPT. It could be something that just lives behind the scenes. He's gonna, yeah, yeah. It could be a tab. It could be a chat driven product that directly competes with ChatGPT, it could be something that just lives behind the scenes. It could be a tab, it could be a new tab. I actually like, I would like to own a piece of Search too.

I got a bunch of DAUs, they're searching stuff all the time. I kind of like that market. I think people might want to discover products that way. I think you could build a pretty good ad product on top of that. It is interesting though. I mean, it feels like LLMs right now are so single player and meta products are so social and communication

and entertainment oriented. Launching a consumer. And the social thing is like, it's right around the corner. It's right around the corner. Already I will, I will, I've done this with you where I will go and generate an oh three pro response, let it cook for 10 minutes, have some, have four Oh generate some charts or graphs or images off of it.

And I will just share the chat with you and then you can trace through the whole thing as you like. And that workflow back and forth is amazing. Ben Thompson wrote about it, through the whole thing as you like. And that workflow back and forth is amazing. Ben Thompson wrote about it, how he has a research assistant who isn't at the level of him in terms of analysis, but can ask a bunch of questions and then he can go back and see, okay, he asked this question slightly the wrong way, so he got slightly the wrong answer. Let me just continue chatting with the same interaction in GPT-4 or 4.0 and actually improve and get the answer that he wants.

So, it's fantastic. Are you about to hit the gong for something? There's like 20 researchers that just signed a meta. Do it. And I'm just going to do it. Why did you throw it? We're just experimenting here. Yeah, it's funny funny Dan Radcliffe in the chat says Every researcher hire I see I think of Jordy's tweet on companies doing NBA style trade deals opening I trading researchers for the entropic throwing in a couple 2026 waterloo grads

The only thing here is it's very one way so I called it, but I kind of didn't call it and that I called it, but I kind of didn't call it and that Zuck just just just absorbing you know he's not saying he's not turns out in tech everyone's in free agency Yeah at all times at all times Yes, there are no binding contracts that can keep someone at a company at a company for five years It would be yeah It would be very interesting if sports shifted to that model where there was no long-term contracts And you could just midseason be like oh, I guess Tom Brady's going to the Eagles I think say quite Barclays being traded

Mid game like at halftime and he switches teams because there's there's a team that paid more Like that would be possible. I guess like and that. And that's what we're going through here. I don't know, we'll have to get Tyler to give us a breakdown of these folks on tomorrow's show. Maybe we could go through these folks and talk about some of their history, what they've actually done, who's the most legit. I wonder how important the, oh, what's that called?

The Dunbar, is it Dunbar's number? No, I forget. There's a quantitative way to assess how powerful, why can't I, Jijkstra, Dickster's number? I forget. Benchpress? Yes, Benchpress. No, basically you look at the papers that they authored

and then you look at how many citations that paper has. And so if really great researchers are citing your research, then you are a great researcher, that type of thing. It's kind of like a six degrees of separation, like the Kevin Bacon thing. Anyway, should we go to Apple F1? It's also in the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, let's cover this journey, journal piece. Can Brad Pitt's F1 movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit? It did, it did. This is old news. Also, it's funny because the paper version says, Apple is now trying to make movies people actually watch. Did you see how brutal the written headline is

compared to the online one? So the online one is, can Brad Pitt's F1 movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit? Like, okay, that's like kind of shade at Apple, like they haven't really had a big screen hit, but then this one is just like, oh yeah, they haven't even been trying before, and now they're trying to make movies people actually watch.

Brutal. Well, you probably, if you're familiar with F1, you're probably familiar with it, from some billboard ads you saw. So if you're trying to run billboard ads, go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable seamless efficient ad buying crazy how so that the I was off earlier This is Apple's first box off it hit 55 point six million dollar debut. Yeah, and the polymarket had it there was under 43 million 43 to 47 to 51, 51 to 55, and then over 55 million. So it had it at 71% just about a week ago

and that ended up being true by half a million. So close but accurate. Oh, interesting. I thought it was like 140 million. What was that number? That's different I think I think I actually walked pretty well with the okay. Anyway, we'll get the details here So in the Wall Street Journal, it was so so it was domestic Oh

The domestic box office versus international. Yeah, those numbers. Okay. Well Ben Fritz and Joe Flint over at the Wall Street Journal have the story They say when the team behind this weekend's Brad Pitt movie f1 first pitched their idea around Hollywood Nearly every major entertainment company wanted in and a bidding war quickly erupted Then Apple big-footed them all Tech companies they love big-footing the tech giant agreed to spend nearly 250 million dollars more than two AI researchers Than more than any other studio thought the drama about an aging drivers last shot at glory was worth Said people with knowledge of the matter pit was paid more than 20 million standard

More than the 20 million dollar standard for a list movie stars and we'll get a cut of the film's revenue was paid more than 20 million standard, more than the 20 million dollar standard for A-list movie stars and will get a cut of the film's revenue if it's a hit. F1 is one of Apple's biggest entertainment bets since it leapt into Hollywood in 2019 and embodies the unusually lavish and meticulous approach to the business which has brought little commercial success. People who have worked at or with the company, say Apple executives crave hits,

but only want to produce content they believe reflects the high-end aspirational qualities of the iPhone and MacBook. There's little chance, in other words, that Apple would make a critically reviled blockbuster like a Minecraft movie. Yeah, I talked to a very successful Hollywood producer about this dynamic with Apple

that so much of being a movie studio is it's a hits driven business. You gotta slop it up sometimes. You gotta do the kids movie like Shrek. You gotta hallucinate a little bit. Yeah, Shrek is not an Oscar winning film, but it's a hugely valuable franchise. Yeah and so he was basically saying that Apple

had one hand tied behind its back because of the brand standard. And that it would only want to do things that had a polish and a prestige. And that if you're expensive. Expensive and if you're only doing like half of the surface area of what a movie studio can do you you're just gonna get eaten by Netflix that's gonna say like yeah let's put the reality show on this show let's do this let's try this let's try some prestige

yes try some stuff yeah yeah let's do love island whatever and Apple just wouldn't do that because it's not the brand but it seems like they're figuring it out and F1's a good example of that. So with sleek production values and strong reviews, F1 is exactly the kind of movie Apple wants. It was made by Top Gun Maverick director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Brookheimer and Apple executives have privately said

they hope it will be the land-based version of the airborne blockbuster, which grossed 1.5 billion in 2022 Wow you get up there that would be fantastic But pre-release surveys indicate f1 is struggling to generate interest among audiences beyond older men Its success or failure will be a referendum on Apple's ability to meld carefully curated and I got to go to be for carefully curated content with broad appeal after six years in which it hasn't released a single box office hit to date worldwide

box office of Apple Apple original films killers of the flower moon did not see that one twenty twenty, 160 million. Napoleon, that was an Apple movie? Oh, 221 million, I saw that, did you see that? People didn't like it, I thought it was pretty good. That was long, but it was fun. Argyle, 96 million, that one didn't do too well. Fly Me to the Moon, 2024, did 42 million.

You have not seen any of those, correct? Nope. Fantastic. F1 will be available. Clean sweep. It's okay. I haven't seen you have seed 724 who cares Teach their own f1 will be available on Apple TV The company's streaming service after its run on the big screen apples TV. Yeah, I mean to yes, you know I Knew this I knew this movie would be somewhat significant. I felt inclined to watch it.

And so knowing that it was releasing, or I thought it was releasing, I was like, okay, great, I'll watch it on Sunday. There's no HBO, I'll watch it on Sunday. Okay, and what happened? And it wasn't on Apple TV. It was at the movie theaters. And I didn't want to go to the yeah, it was at the movie theaters. Yep, and I didn't want to go to the allergic to movie theaters

What was the last time you were in a movie theater? Physically when we oh when we saw dune to Absolute squad. Yeah, we said this is the movie to take the boys to we got to do it It's hard. Maybe we got to do it This is a call to action for all the fans many podcasters are descending on Malibu for the month of July thing So maybe we'll it will get it done together so Yeah, and and Ben Thompson's been beating the drum on this this idea of like Taylor Swift understands windowing better than like Netflix executives Have you seen this thing? So basically like windowing is the concept that?

Netflix executives, have you seen this thing? So basically like windowing is the concept that when you have a valuable media property, you should monetize it at increasing rates of cost based on time. And so when Taylor Swift comes out with a new tour, you can first go and see it live in person at SoFi Stadium and take it sort of like $100, maybe more, like a couple hundred bucks. It's expensive to go see it live in person at SoFi Stadium and tickets are like $100, maybe more, like a couple hundred bucks.

It's expensive to go see it. Then months later, you can see the movie version of her tour in movie theaters, but it's not streaming. And so then you're paying $20 instead of $200. Then after a couple months of it being exclusively in theaters Then you can stream it for free if you're subscribed, so it's like let's call it like an average cost of like $2 So you went from like 200 bucks to see it live in person?

20 bucks to see it in the theaters two dollars equivalent to like stream it on Netflix for like you know 10% of your Netflix spend that month or whatever And then eventually it'll be like free on TV or whatever. It'll be even freer. Maybe she'll put it on YouTube. And so it's this very good way to price discriminate and get the maximum amount of value out of a piece of content. And Hollywood had been very good at this

for a very long time. Like you would come out in the movie theaters, then there'd be a big gap for like three months. You just couldn't see the movie at all, no matter what. It was like, you gotta go see it in the theater because if you don't see it now, you won't be able to see it for six months. Yeah. And then and then the DVD comes out or the Blu ray comes out and it's like exclusive just and

you have to buy it. And then and then after that it goes to blockbuster you can rent it. And then it goes on TV or HBO later and like it might not be it might be a year or two until you can actually go and see the movie for free and so Hollywood was really good at that and they were printing money and then Then you know the streamers came and disrupted all this and like the binge era started and you can just watch everything for free constantly um, but Ben thompson's point is that they kind of went too far and they started giving away

Things that people would actually go see in theaters for free on streaming and so even this the I think there's gonna be a lot of people who are like okay it's an Apple TV plus exclusive like how long do I have to wait to just watch it at home oh like two weeks like okay I'm not gonna go see it in theaters but if they window it hardcore and they say look yeah it'll be on Apple TV Plus in seven months, then people will be like, well, it's worth it for me to go see it now. Anyway.

Well, we have some notes in the chat. One, Michael Ginsburg says, community note, Shrek won two Oscars. Oh, yeah, dude. Owned. Owned. Okay. Owned, Shrek is not only a cult classic,

but it's an award-winning film. Wait, did it win Best Animated? No way. Because that's actually hard to believe. Fact check that, Tyler. I don't know. Or Best Music or something. And then Blake Dreier says, just got back from F1 IMAX

Incredible as a fan of the sport. Yeah, I think you got to see it. I think it's also the type of movie that you want to see. Jason Turner says, it wasn't a bad film. Cool. Nick Kotov says, it was just too long So I have one too long. How long is it two hours over two hours? Got me 90 minutes. Give me in get me out two hours 36 minutes. That's so long

Anyone that would put out content. Yes more than two hours a day is just completely Out of line and unhinged on we would never put out three to four hours This is a hot call in the kettle black situation, but we're doing it Yes, it's Shrek according to Michael says best animated feature and no adapted screen. Okay. Okay. I say corrected Let's give it up for sure. I really think Shrek meets the brand standard of Apple like no way, right? My point holds I don't think Apple would kill to be able to put out a film of that caliber you think so well the Wall Street Journal disagrees with you they say that they wouldn't put out the Minecraft movie anyway Apple TV plus has earned a reputation for content that excites

critics more than audiences including the Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro. Content that excites critics. Yeah. Apple TV. There's a lot of examples of that in media. There's a lot of tech media that's just for the insider, for the media folks. It's journo on journo content. Killer's the Flower Moon, Oscar's Best Picture winner,

CODA, literary adaptation, Pachinko and the spy drama slow horses. Yeah, I tried to watch slow horses pretty good It's it's few mainstream successes include sports comedy Ted lasso sci-fi workplace drama severance and straight to streaming film the George or the gorge We're into entertainment to tell great stories and we want it to be a great business as well. Says Tim Cook. He told variety an Apple TV plus spokeswoman, declined to comment. Analysts have questioned why Apple spends billions annually on a business so far field from its core consumer electronics operation, even if it's barely a blip for the company worth more than 3 trillion. The strategic value it brings is sufficiently mysterious for people not to talk

about it very much. Says Craig Moffat at Moffat Nathanson good buddy of Ben Thompson's Apple TV plus cost $10 a month and yeah So a lot of people think that the Apple TV plus like production team is to like take take Pressure off of the like 30% Apple tax discussion. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show Will is in the studio. Welcome back to TVPA. How are you doing? Congratulations on the trade deal. What super car did you buy? You got a Sheeran or you go F80.

I mean, we, we hear that the, the numbers are huge right now for folks like you. I mean, I'm taking a plane more. So like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People say, you know, fly, you know, we wanted flying cars. We got the fact that you would imply that will drives himself. It's offensive. I mean, yeah. Well, I wame over the first time recently, I'd like, I'd been to like SF,

but like I hadn't been around SF proper That much since the the way mo craze took off and so like that's been like the the car experience really just like sure It's not driving cars damn. Yeah, so are you in SF full-time now? Still back and forth New York. I'm like kind of slowly starting to spend more time in SF. It's on brand you're decentralized you're decentralized AI it's it's it's perfect fit perfect fit. Anyway did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline? A lot of stuff was happening on the timeline I did I mean I'm in New York right now I did some New York stuff on Saturday. But yeah, I mean, it's been it's been good. Lots of drama, intrigue, as usual. Trade deals. I know I've been tuning into

earlier. I know you guys have gone over all the major roster updates. But yeah, it's exciting times. Open AI open model soon, soon hopefully but not this week. Yeah. So yeah, I mean the first place I want to start with is the actual trade deals. Did it do any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting? Had they been on your radar? Have you met any of these folks? Can you give us more context on how, how academic are they?

How product oriented are they? It does, it feels like this is purely research, you know, beefing up of the research team and Metta kind of has product solved. Is that the right model to think about this? What, how can you characterize the shape of the team that Zucks building? Even there's thousands of really great software engineers

that work in AI. Sure, sure. And, but what, even kind of getting a sense of like, how many people was Zuck really going after? Was it 250, was it 100? The list that came out today is somewhere, I don't know, there's like 20 people on it, something like that.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great list. It's a lot of very senior researchers who know, who have been through some real product cycles. I think the goal is people who can bridge the gap from research to product. Because one thing Metta has a strength of, but I think doesn't translate in like this era is they have a lot of really good like academic researchers

like Yann LeCun's whole org has a lot of very talented, very capable researchers who write important papers, but it's the kind of stuff that doesn't really turn into exciting products. It's like more betting five or 10 years out, how do we wanna do things eventually, versus like going through a pre-training cycle turn into exciting products. It's like more betting five or 10 years out, how do we wanna do things eventually versus like going through a pre-training cycle

for a Gemini or a Claude or an OpenAI model. Like that has a different set of considerations. And so this to me looks like they want like 10, 15 great people who have been through those research to product cycles in terms of the model being the product and it seems like they probably like they got Alex and then supposedly Nat and or Daniel

to kind of handle a little more of the business side, but Product the business stuff. Yeah product, the business stuff. Yeah. It's a management role. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What, what is your take on Yann Lacoon right now? How should we think about his position in the AI world? There's, uh, I, you know, I see these memes of like, he's a non-believer. He doesn't believe in like super intelligence and like AI God He's a little more practical

It seems like he's been he's been right about some things in the sense that like we haven't had we're not feeling a fast Takeoff right now. So I think you got to give him some credit for that at the same time Like there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing on lacuna a little bit for not driving the product side of the business. It's one thing to say that, hey, we're not gonna go straight shot to AGI God, but then the downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're gonna be living in B2B SaaS world of AI implementation

and productization, then like go do that and like make sure that the models work really well for business. And so, uh, I don't know, what is your take? How would you, how would you describe Yann Lacoon in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to like a layman? Sure. Yeah. So I think people over index on thinking of Yann as the meta guy, like too much. Sure. I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone in the Llama org who was as visible as him

because he was not involved with Llama at all. Like fair fundamental layer research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Jan Lekoon's work is very academic. And it's really like, I think he's like, I think on one hand, he like is right in the sense of like, we don't have the full picture yet. Like we don't have full on AGI that can like do a human's job forever. And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is like, there's more work to do, there's more science to do.

It's not just productize the current set of techniques in terms of like the end of AI forever. But his goal is not to do the productization. Like he, like the org he's in at Meta is really isolated from product. He's there to kind of boost the reputation of the org academically, as well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more productive, but his job is not to like go train a business model, to train a model that is going to be used by businesses. And like, I think people like that org fair, the friends I have who are there, like are there because they essentially wanted to be a professor, but they want tech company resources and not to teach.

And that is essentially what that org is. Yeah. Does that lead to better recruiting on campus essentially? Like you can go get researchers because Yann LeCun can come do a really powerful lecture. Maybe, but I think that more is like the same way that Zuck did metaverse stuff. Zuck is very willing to make 10-year bets. Yeah.

And so that org for Meta is not about what product they release next quarter, it's what are our 10-year bets. Yeah. Okay, I want to- What about, sorry, yeah, you can go. So Meta shares just hit an all-time high. Really? So the stock's performing. I want what about so you can go meta shares just hitting all-time high really so the stocks the stocks

Performing I'm curious From your time at Morgan's But but generally up 5% over the last week what what how did Wall Street How did Wall Street generally process the meta AI story? Cause now, obviously at least the market seems generally excited. It may get to the point where we did with VR where people are like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, cool it on the metaverse.

Well, it's funny because you add all this up, even if the hundred million million offer number is real, it's like, okay, so now we're at $1 billion in spend. It's 5% of the Metaverse whole that was burning, and it's like, from a Wall Street perspective, you're like, I don't care about $1 billion, I care about $20 billion, because that was what was weighing on the stock

during the Metaverse buildup. But this is like, AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it upfront. And it seems like even though it's a big number, $100 million offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less. But I don't know. What do you think? Well, right. Yeah. I mean, I think the, I don't know the context fully of the a hundred million people with all these theories, but like the scale AI numbers we do know yeah and like that that's a big chunk of their like I don't know they don't do those every day yeah but they've done a handful in the past at that scale like whatsapp was 20 billion or something

like that and I mean it's hard to read into like the charts. Like I think people are generally like expecting that Meadow will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change, whether that is like justified or not. I mean, we'll see. Yeah, it was interesting. The product side is gonna be interesting because like yeah, they're not a b2b SAS company

well, so They're an entertainment company. Yeah, I think that then I don't I don't think that people are Are fully understand the potential of gen AI entertainment. Like it gets talked a lot around, oh, you're going to be able to generate, you know, an entire movie or generate video games or things like that. And I think that we haven't seen we've seen some fantastic examples so far, but nothing, nothing that that is. I think like George Hots was on our show and he was talking about how like basically, AI is going to be like having five CIA agents is I think like George Hotz was on our show and he was talking about how like basically AI

is gonna be like having five CIA agents follow you around all the time, convincing you to buy products. And like that is like one kind of dark bowl case for- Dark bowl case, yeah. Dark bowl case for Meta in the context of AI because it's like, it's possible that Facebook is already the best advertising product in human history.

Like period hands down, there's nothing better. And then could you make it like two, three times better? It's very possible. Yeah, I wanna push back on the B2B thing because yes, they don't sell B2B software, but I was thinking about it in this terms. Like if you were running a company where your entire, you only had one client and that client was Meta,

and you sold them CRM and infrastructure and LLMs to improve the back office and do censorship and reality checking and, and, uh, looking for bad words and looking for improper posts and recommendation algorithms. Like how much would that company be worth and how much revenue would they be making just from that one client? And I think it's in the billions because it's just such a large organization that it's potent. It's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI inside of Metta are

like it's a multi-billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that. I don't know. I think a company at Metta scale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most. Like they probably have some services that they're using, but like they like they could, they rebuild their own cloud, like cause they use AWS for a lot of stuff. Yeah. Ken, they're not a compute company though though and in terms of like platform stuff. Yeah, I

Feel like those companies once you hit a certain size and you just like have so many engineers that you want everything like Google Rewrites all their own stuff. Yeah Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. Um, and Can they is there another like a tale of end of that that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of her And entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that just I was just reminded of that you seen the Italian brainwrap videos Oh, yeah, love them. Yeah. Yeah, so like I know people it's like silly. It's stupid But there is something there in terms of this like communal Narrative storytelling with a level of

vibrancy that we haven't seen so far. It's like Looney Tunes. But people just like come up with these where you could imagine meta kind of eating a good chunk of the like video gen market if they have an answer to like the O3 where that becomes part of the platform, it ties into the whole metaverse thing of like creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends. But instead of like Instagram stories, it's like, OK, what's what's the evolution of stories? Yeah. Have you seen Higgs field?

No, I feel they I think it's an ex Snapchat team. Yeah. Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that we have seen the photo realistic But in the scent photo realistic, it looks like some photos not like full-time influencer Generated it after spending hours trying to create it and you can't tell that it's not real. And so it feels like It feels like meta integrating that kind of thing where it's like, yeah it'll be interesting to see how this actually plays out because everybody will be able to be a super tasteful creator or like generate these sort of unique styles and

I'm sure at that point it'll switch everybody will be like well, I only follow organic table influencers it'll switch everybody will be like well I only follow organic table influencers yeah I feel like they're AI integration so far have all been kind of weird like there's these like Instagram accounts you can chat with and then there was the whole meta AI home page disaster where old people were like leaking personal info without realizing it But yeah, I guess Facebook's always had that Yeah, I think it'll They'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that will have felt to get creative because they haven't

Like it's been a while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really stuck like yeah, it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a Studio Ghibli moment by you're like going. I was saying this. They should just pre render everyone's profile picture as a Ghibli. And just when you open the Instagram app, it's just like here. We did this for you. It would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost. But then it's just like you could share it and it's just like, here, we did this for you. It would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost,

but then it's just like, you could share it and it's just more virality around it. But I don't know. And even baking that down into a filter. No, it can't be so open AI branded now. They have to go with their new version. Yeah, I'm saying like an entirely new. But yeah, basically the filters in the Instagram app

should be like style transfer or like fully generative Instead of just like color grades. That's clearly the next thing and they should just and they should just do that but what do you think of Sam Altman's ability to get through this like he's had a series of exodus is and seemed to continue to march on the anthropic departures, then SSI and thinking machines, like XAI, like this is not the first time. It's not his first rodeo. It's not his first rodeo.

And so there's this whole narrative, like never bet against Zuck, he's been down on the metaverse, came back, he's been down on mobile with the HTML5 thing, and he came back from that, went native, and super dominant and bought Instagram, WhatsApp, super dominant in mobile. And so never bet against Zuck,

but then also maybe never bet against Sam, and maybe they both win and maybe the real loser is like, I don't know, some other company or something, I don't know. I think as long as OpenAI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, they have the center of gravity for the AI world, in the same way that no matter what Android ships people are not going to switch from their iPhones, like it's something that have to go very wrong for people to not see open AI as the winner, I think, or there's the kind of the default.

Or there's the kind of the default. Yeah, I mean, the other thing is the average chat GPT user is not waking up today being like, oh, I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers, right? They're just still using chat GPT as a Google replacement, or they're talking with it as a companion. So, yeah, I think the lead is still very, very real. And and I just and again, it's going to create opportunities for people to say, hey, I want to go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day. Right. And I do think it'll get to a point, especially with like 2025 into 26, where there's a lot of product stuff that people seem,

like I think we're early on products and we'll keep getting better versions of the same things in a way that's like kind of predictable. Like the image models will keep getting better, the agents will mess up less, but like we can already use those things and we can start building group of concepts around that. And the question is like, okay, what are the winning apps?

Like I imagine that like the real time, clearly kind of thing, some opening eyes gonna do their version of that at some point, other people probably will too. Like does that become modality that people really want live overview on their screen, on their phone? What's the way that people are gonna be interacting with AI generally?

Because a lot of those use cases, they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models way smarter at whatever. It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun engaging? There's a bunch of paths here going back to the Clueless thing where one Roy is like right about the UX and like ends the market. And the other option is like he's right about the UX, but like doesn't win the market. And then there's like, you know,

it's just not the right form factor or whatever. But any of, at least the first two outcomes are hilarious. And that Roy Lee ushers in the new paradigm of for engaging with language models. I'm curious any, is all the stuff around every B2B SaaS player descending on the sort of like single interface, like a chat interface that generates software, was that predictable to you?

Do you think that's part of a multi-year trend or is that just FOMO? I mean, like copilot was early. It was like 2020, 21, like the first GPT-3 copilot came out and like that was already one of the early like LLM applications that people were interested in at all. And then it took until Cursor for it to really like I think Cursor plus like 3.5 Sonnet was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. And it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more useful than a toy and like a thing that actually want to use day to day. And so I think that's one

path is like, and then the more background agent kind of things are like starting to take off now, which I imagine like those will get reliable enough that they're like useful for cranking stuff out They already are kind of depending on what you're doing Yeah, like yeah We're about halfway through the year What what are what are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking the open AI open source model could be one, whatever meta launches next, right?

I'm assuming they're gonna be dark until this new team can really cook and bring something great. Maybe they don't do anything this year but I would assume they come with something. What else are you tracking? Yeah, I mean, for me, the 03 release in ChatGPT was like a pretty game changer kind of thing,

where it was like, we saw with like deep research that like, okay, they kind of figured out how to make agents work, but it was also just like this one version of an agent, and 03, you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent, where it can like do some pretty complex stuff that was kind of new to see from, like the GeoGuessr thing was crazy. And having that as a vision of what AG and I starts to look like, I think is pretty cool. Of course, from the research open source

world, there was the DeepSeq as the RL craze taking off. But like, I mean, I work on RL, so I like obsess over it and like think about it a lot. But I do think we're really starting to see these recipes, at least in the broad strokes of like, okay, here's how the LM thing can go. We figure out what we want it to do. We give it some tools. We set up these environments. We figure out how to evaluate it.

And then we can just kind of like let it go. And these things get better at doing those things via trial and error. And so like, I like I think that is one way to kind of forecast where things are going is just like, what are the plausible use cases that people want to use all of this for? They want an agent to do x, y, z. And then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb? And I think like, you see a lot like like there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to

like sell their RFT service. There was the startups popping off. There was a machine that seems to be reinforcing packaging. And so like they're pushing this pretty hard. You're spending over $10 million like Palantir, OpenAI will also customize a model for you. So they have like a serious, heavy, hell like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have like a more,

like in the thousands of dollars service, where you are getting to essentially do fine tuning on Opor Mini. And that is a little more self-serve. But they're also like doing consulting around the forward deployed thing around that. Is that an important strategy for open AI to to kind of stay in the game against open source models like llama?

Yeah. But I think also against other like thinking machines, there was some report that this is a version of the strategy they're getting. It's like go to enterprises, talk to them about their problems, turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. And if the, like that's one potential roadmap towards just having more AI everywhere, is just having services whose job is to come in, whether or not it's fine doing it or not, just make them into agent-shaped tasks, where you can then optimize the model and have someone craft the model experience for you.

Because I think a lot of enterprises are still like, in the spot where they don't really like, there's, there's not, as you see by the talent war, there's just not that many people in the world, or in the market who really understand this stuff at a level where they can go make it happen. And so like the open source thing, on one hand, it's cool that you in theory can go do it, but it's also like there's not that many hands who can, who are equipped to like go make the thing happen.

Actually fine tune llama for whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We actually talked to a startup that's doing basically that like small models for specific business use cases, like, okay, you just have a ton of CSVs that need to be turned into JSON and we build UNLM that just does that or whatever Interesting how do you after the the scale news and then there's a bunch of players Popping up or you know everyone from Mercor to Labelbox To handshake a lot of different people competing for that market. How do you see that market evolving over the next one to two years?

I think there are certain people saying scale got out at the perfect time in many ways. But clearly there's a lot of at least gross revenue up for grabs right now in the near term. Yeah. I mean, I think like the broader sphere of like creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that curation is gonna be important, especially for these domain specific applications.

I think it's gonna be less like, oh, we just need more tokens and it's more about we need Curation of goals and objectives Because like tokens you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just like more internet tax or more like human written math solution examples and or more like human written math solution examples. And it doesn't scale super well. But the nice thing about the past specification

is you can kind of like pour in more compute without necessarily needing more data. It scales much better with compute. Whereas we don't really have like a great way of like spending a hundred X more compute per pre-sharing token other than make a giant model. Yeah. Do you think, uh, llama will stay open source for the foreseeable future? We'll see. I w it wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route where

like they are still, they still do open source. They still have the llama brand, but it isn't like their flagship thing where they start doing, whether it's for internal products or it's, they really want to show that they're the winner, um, releasing closed models, uh, via API or other services where, yeah, do they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model? I mean, you mentioned that they use AWS, so it'd be kind of awkward, right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much. I think that it'd be something that comes in a product.

Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Or maybe they partner with, like, you could see them partnering with someone like a core weave or Nvidia directly. Nvidia is hoping to get into the inference serving game, it sounds like. Yeah. Do you think, so one of Swix's takeaways from the Wired article was that, like one big development that's coming is

when Stargate comes online, OpenAI will have the largest single cluster for pre-training, but it feels like we might be at the end of that game will have the largest single cluster for pre-training. But it feels like we might be at the end of that game and we might be doing more compute intensive work in a distributed fashion. And so maybe having it all in one place is a little bit less relevant to just, oh, trump card, Stargate, boom, I win.

I have the best model by far. Um, how, how do you think about the impact of Stargate on like the AGI race? I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely going to do is take a pretty big model. I don't know if it'll be like quite as big as like a 4.5, but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's on the app. Like what does like an O five level of RL look like? Okay. See how good that is. See what new tasks that unlock.

Do that though, or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Cause I've heard like a lot of RL is like, you're generating, you're doing verifiable rewards, you're generating in a bunch of different data centers, you could do it completely distributed, and you don't necessarily need a Stargate to do that. You can do it distributed like it is very

inference heavy there is still like a lot of weight updating you have to sync the model across you have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers okay and it certainly makes it easier you sure it's easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre-training. But it's not like trivial. But I think like a lot of this is just data, people are building the data centers without necessarily knowing exactly what experiments they're gonna run.

They just know more stuff is coming. But also a lot of this is gonna be inference where like they wanna be able to do, like Meta has a ton of GPUs that they just use for Instagram ads. Recommendations. A lot of Stargate will probably be serving Ghibli. I mean that makes a ton of sense. I'm running into rate limits on literally everything. Google. It's like how do they run out of GPUs? They spend 60 billion on CapEx every year at least.

And O3 Pro too. I mean I know it's really pro too. I mean, I get timeouts on this stuff. Last question. I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI leveraging the TPU for inference or reporting to be starting to use it? Was that kind of- I mean, it makes sense that they are considering all options given the friction with Microsoft's Like they don't have a core cloud that they're super close with they're not like there's they need to

Both try to lower their cost for entrance As well like that maybe was a factor behind because the o3 had a big price drop that might have been to be related I don't know, pure speculation. But like Google has TPUs and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well, really fast. If OpenAI wants to compete at that level, they kind of have to consider all options.

Yep. Makes sense. Well, great day to have you pop on. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Knowing how things are unfolding will probably ping you to jump on again later this week. Stay ready. Great to have you, Will.

Cheers. Yeah. Bye. I'll be right back. And we got another Will coming in the studio. It's Will Day on TBPN. We got Will from Ulysses coming in. Not talking about AI, talking about the ocean,

talking about boats, talking about the gundo, military. Who knows what we'll talk about. But we will talk about the origin of his company. How you doing, Will? I'm good, John, how are you getting on? I'm great, good to have you on the show, finally. Would you mind kicking us off with just an introduction on yourself and your company?

Yeah, absolutely. My name is Will O'Brien, one of the founders of Ulysses. We are building autonomous vehicles to solve the most critical tasks in the oceans. So in practicality, what that looks like, we build an autonomous surface vehicle. It's a 30-foot vessel that launches and recovers swarms of autonomous underwater vehicle. It's a 30 foot vessel that launches and recovers swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles. These underwater vehicles can read as well as write. They can sense. They can take maps. They can take images and collect data, but they can also do physical manipulation as well. Robotics. They can do kind of whatever you want, whatever you want

to task them to. And we make both these vehicles probably about 10 times cheaper than anyone else in the world. So while some people are building maybe humanoid robots as a general purpose robotics platform for land, we're building the maritime equivalent to that humans are not evolved for for land and so are for the ocean. So we need we need something for that. So that's what about us.

We're based in San Francisco, as you can tell, I'm not an American. I'm Irish. And some of our founders are founding team are Irish and Scottish. And yeah, that's a bit about us. How'd you settle like, yeah, yeah. What was the inciting, like problems set? Like how, how'd you land on this industry to work on? Like what, what, what, what got you in the industry? Yeah. Good question. So about two years ago, when my co-founders, um, a crazy Scottish man called Jamie Wetterburn was on a search trip and, uh,

he got talking to a biologist working on this plant called seagrass. He'd never heard about seagrass before. I had never heard about seagrass really before despite growing up by the seaside and he became captivated by it. And then he, like any good autistic engineer does, he goes down a rabbit hole learning about it and telling all his friends about it and telling us about it. Seagrass is this wonder plant in the oceans that supports 20% of the world's fish stocks. It holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean as well.

Underneath it, it's 35 times better than rainforest removing carbon, but it wasn't in Finding Nemo, so nobody knows about it really. So we kind of discovered this and, you know, in learning about it, he realized like it's dying off all around the world and it's basically very time intensive and expensive to bring it back to restore it. And basically the methods people are doing to restore it

are manual. They're divers going down with their hands and they're manually planting seeds and takes a lot of time, takes a lot of money and it's not really working. And he kind of had this insight then that like, well, we've mechanized nearly every kind of form of large scale outdoor work on land. That really hasn't happened in the oceans yet. And nobody's built the tractor equivalent for the oceans. And that really like a lot of the kind of tasks

in the ocean, whether it be in this, you know, narrow, weird, wonderful domain of seagrass restoration, or in the world of defense, or in the commercial industry, if you're building infrastructure, we're still sending down tons of drivers to do like manual tasks that really just like make absolutely no sense. They're dangerous, they're still sending down tons of divers to do like manual tasks that really just like make absolutely no sense. They're dangerous. They're expensive. And so we kind of started in this like where the Sea Grass got very obsessed with that and had a very

successful kind of first year just doing autonomous Sea Grass restoration services for different governments around the world working with governments in Australia and the US. We did a million dollars in revenue last year and we're on track for over two this year. Congratulations. Yeah, I heard that. When I met Will and I heard this initial wedge, I was like, this is so fascinating, interesting. Find the most weird, obscure market

that no one would ever think of and just absolutely dominate it. That's awesome. And then use that to earn the right to do many other things. And I think I introduced Will to like 10 seed funds in like 30 minutes at one point, without getting the opt-in from Will.

It was like, people need to meet you. And then within a few days, people were committing. So, yeah, it's good to see you on the show, Will. I learned to scuba dive off the coast of Catalina Island. And when I was, I was like 15 when I was doing it and it was Had all this amazing tall California kelp and I went back Yeah, a couple years ago and you've heard the story. There's like an invasive kelp ski species that came over from Japan I believe on like a shipping container shipping

Tanker and it completely wiped it out and it looks completely different and I don't know if it's particularly important to Restore the original California kelp I imagine it probably is in some abstract sense But it was just a bummer as a scuba diver to be like it's not what I remember which was like swimming through this beautiful Forest it's just kind of these tumbleweeds now Yeah, it's mad. It's those fucking purple urchins. That's right. It's it's that's it what happens a big a big way of like that invasive species are transmitted in the ocean is like a ship will like bam, you know, be in Tokyo and in the port and then it'll fill up its

ballast so it'll pull in water. And when it's pulling in water, it'll take in fish or urchins in this instance and fill up and then it'll go out to sea and then it'll land in San Diego or San Francisco in the port and then it'll release them all. This happened as well with lionfish in the Caribbean in Miami and yeah those lionfish are nerdy. They're just like chewing up the coral everywhere. I went calling them once. I was in the Cayman Islands working there one summer and we were getting paid we were getting paid like spearfish. Yes. I've heard that.

Yeah. I mean, that is great. Yeah. That is the good side of the lionfish is that you can just hunt them relentlessly because no one cares about them because they're so invasive. And they're like pretty fun to shoot and you shoot them. And you can make leather wallets with them. Yeah. Yeah. I'm making lionfish leather wallets. And you're like, I'm actually, I'm hunting, but I'm saving the world.

Yeah. Yeah. But these are good examples. Yeah, it's like pigs in Texas. I mean, it's actually a problem, and it needs to be really dealt with, but as a consumer of hunting, it's fantastic. Oh, it's great. But yeah, these are good examples of tasks, again,

that are just like still today. It's like Irish dudes with spears going down and just like, yeah, realistically there aren't that many people that want to go spear fishing, lion fishing all day, every day, forever. Because the, the, like, yeah, a couple tourists doing it once the weekend is not going to do the job. So yeah, you need automation. Yeah. And like we, yeah. So that's the kind of, these are the types of, this is like, you know, the same platform that we've yeah so that's the kind of these are the types of this is like you know the same platform that we built for seagrass it's a service vehicles underwater

vehicle with a different robotic payload and a different model on board fine-tuned on finding urchins or finding linefish you could you know we could have like a service that just like solving this problem for someone. What's the origin of the name? Yeah, it was, there was kind of a few things. I mean, as most great ideas, it was conceived in the midst of drinking a rake of points. But we were, me and my co-founders were like, we were thinking about different names for the business. And then we were thinking about that 1997 animated movie called Treasure Planet, where these people go on this quest in the submarine to save the world. We looked it up and the submarine in that movie was called Ulysses.

Then, interestingly, when we got our first office in Dublin, just after we raised the pre-seed in October 23. We got our first office and to the left of us was the house that James Joyce grew up in. I'm sorry, Ulysses had the Irish connection as well, which is another reason we chose it. But to the left of us, there was a house that James Joyce grew up in. To the right of us was the House or the Museum of Liter, Ireland, where the first copy of Ulysses kept and in the, in the park opposite our street, just, there's a big, huge statue of James Joyce with a quote from Ulysses there. And that also like a bit of a week later, my mom found a photo of me at home next to like a picture or an extra, like a James Joyce quote and there's a Ulysses quote underneath it.

All this kind of happened in the same week. So it's kind of like, okay, we're keeping it now. Yeah. Because the nominative determinism here is that, I mean, the story of Ulysses Odysseus is like a 10 year grind and it's like absolutely miserable, like facing the Cyclops and getting enchanted by Cersei and the sirens. And like, I imagine that if things, if nominative determinism holds the sirens for you or you won't Be getting a quick buck in an aqua hire at meta anytime soon. You're gonna be at this for a very long time I'm rooting for you, and I think you will ultimately be successful, but buckle up

You're gonna go on an entrepreneurial journey if the name holds What uh? Who are your who are your biggest? Irish Irish tech Heroes what makes the Irish so so infatuated with technology I mean what makes our people so infatuated. I mean you guys are aware of the hibernian conspiracy of course as To I don't know what you guys have to say about your, the accusations that, you know, that Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hayes are at the core of this cabal of Irish people

in technology or Irish. We're never beating the allegations. Never beating the allegations. What about Paki McCormick? What about Molly O'Shea? What about all these people with Irish surnames? What are they doing? Why do they all suddenly have media programs?

Why do they all follow each other? Why does Apple domicile all the time? Why do they all follow each other? Why do they all follow each other? Why do they all follow each other? Why do they all follow each other? Why do they all are they doing? Why do they all suddenly have media programs? Why do they all follow each other? Why does Apple domicile all of their cash there? It's a good question.

Yeah. You think it's the Rothschilds running the money splice, actually the Polisons. Exactly. So actually, Satoshi Nakamoto, Nakamoto's actually an Irish name. There's the old father on Nakamoto. So there's all these connections here.

It goes deeper. It goes deeper. My favorite Irish technologist would probably be George Buhl, the inventor of Boolean algebra. Oh, there you go. The foundation for modern computers. Yeah, I didn't realize he was Irish. Deep cut. Yeah. And then modern ones.

Owen McCabe is a good friend as well. Big fan of Owen. I met him there doing at Intercom. It's very inspiring to see someone like that. Obviously the Colisons as well. But I feel the Colisons, everyone appreciates the Colisons. I don't think, I don't know if people appreciate the great business that the guys at Intercom are building.

And I know you had him on the show recently. We just partner with him. Yeah, he's a sponsor now. Huge, ring the bell, ring the bell. Yeah, yeah, you can have in your tinfoil hat conspiracy, there's definitely a line between us and Owen and then us and Intercom and Owen appeared on the show. He just happens to pay us through Stripe, you know.

Oh yeah, it's so weird. I had a random question for you that I'm sure you have strong opinions on. Every now and then I'll see a video that's off the coast of Chile and there's just fleets of fishing vehicles as far as the eye can see. What's going on down there? Is there any solution to it? I'm sure you've gotten asked that. Is your guys' tech something that could help address that?

It is, yeah. And we're speaking to some partners about kind of supporting on this problem right now. I think there's like two aspects to the problem. So yeah, like characterizing the problem. The Chinese are, you know, destroying many oceans around the world, particularly in countries where they basically just don't

have the money to monitor their seas and enforce marine protect areas and these sorts of things. So up and down the coastlines of South America, this is the single biggest thing that like South American navies are spending time on right now. West Africa as well is just being completely, the fisheries there are being completely decimated. In and around the Antarctic as well, there's massive krill populations and krill populations are this kind of foundational species for a lot of other marine life in the ocean. You take away the krill, which is the kind of bottom of the food chain, you know, it knocks all the way up to the whales. And then you lose the whales as well and nobody wants to lose the

whales. So that's kind of like characterizing the problem. Okay, the reason the problem exists is okay, two reasons. Natives that basically just can't cover enough area and get maritime domain awareness. They just can't, they don't have enough assets and that's part of the problem. And there's like a governance aspect to the problem as well. Right. So, okay, how does China get away with it? Well, the people responsible for looking after law on the high seas quite often is what you'd call the flag stage. So where the boat is registered, all these boats are registered Chinese. Chinese knows they use this as what you'd call like gray warfare. It's similar with the critical undersea infrastructure.

It's not really officially the Chinese state, but it may as well be because they're not like prosecuting on it. So on the technical side, I suppose like the problem here is like the, again, the paradigm of maritime operations is kind of, you know, is stuck and it's broken, right? You could probably characterize it and call it the heavy tech bottleneck. So basically any mission you want to do in the ocean has a few features around it. It generally relies on these expensive manned assets. So these could be airplanes like P3 Orions, or they can be expensive national security quarters, these big coast guard quarters, these 100-foot,

200-foot long vehicles. And these costs like tens of millions in capex. And then the running costs for them on a day is like tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to run daily. And then you use these things as a platform on which to put sensors or you use it like an unmanned system. And that's kind of like what it relies on. So it's like small numbers of very expensive assets,

whereas the way we're seeing autonomy going around the world, whether it be like self-driving, transfer networks like self-driving cars or drones in Ukraine, is like we're moving away from these small networks of exclusive vehicles to large networks of small autonomous vehicles, right?

So it's like going from buses and trains to like a network of Waymo's or Tesla robo taxis. You know, on the battlefield, it's moving away from fighter jets to like a bajillion near-ass drones. You know, it's like, this is like just the way we're going, but that hasn't really happened yet in the ocean. And the limiting factor, we think,

is that basically drones are still like crazy expensive in the ocean, all man systems are crazy expensive. Even if you want to buy, you know, the sexiest on-man service vehicle, you're still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater vehicles. You're spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. But we haven't had a DJI yet for the ocean, right? We haven't had someone that really completely collapsed costs to the degree that you can buy fleets instead of single units.

So again, that's kind of like what we're trying to position ourselves as is like this person who you can buy. If you're like the Argentinian Navy and your fisheries is just getting obliterated, you can buy like a swarm of surface and subsea vehicles to kind of solve the problem for the fraction of a cost you purchase a mandas for. That works 24 seven with zero op-exes

controlled over SCCOM. How much is the problem that these governments don't know something is happening or they know, but it's 30 boats that have showed up somewhere and they're just going to fish and basically decimate all life until they're maybe pushed away by a boat? I can see the technology angle of getting just like more coverage

and knowing more about what's happening in these different areas, but it feels like there needs to be more will from the government as well to just say like, we're not gonna let this happen. Yeah, I mean, the will is like certainly there. It's just they don't they don't have the budget on current assets like it like, you know, like some of these like if you want to buy more of these like, like boats that they would need or these planes that they need to like survey or get like

awareness on the area. These are like 10s of millions, hundreds of millions for some of these assets and the Argentine Navy just doesn't have that kind of money. These are like tens of millions, it's not hundreds of millions for some of these assets and the Argentinian Navy just doesn't have that kind of money. So they know that in general, there's a problem there, but they just don't have enough assets out there. I mean, it's crazy that like most of the Argentinian Air Force's time is now spent on looking for Chinese ships over their waters.

It's, so it's like, they just, yeah, they don't have the money. So yeah, you really don't need cheaper solutions for these types of folks. What other stories are you tracking or kind of problems globally that you think you're attacking? I want to hear about this big shipbuilding bill. How does the new budget fit in?

What are you tracking in DC? I know you're still an early stage company, but I imagine that the long term has to be figure out a way to get to program of record, work with the DOD, but break it down. How are you actually thinking about that? Because it feels like there's a lot of different applications. You got to stay dual use. You got to stay agile while you're building the underlying tech.

But what are you looking at in DC? Yeah. Like for us on the kind of the D side, there's kind of three plays that were always spinning, right? There's like the DC plays, there's the like operator or warfighter end user state, and then there's like the acquisition style teams, it's the met play. So we're always just like in constant dialogue and with like, you know, different members of these three, these bodies. So yeah, the most recent, you know, appropriation for defense is very interesting. There's many, many billions going to maritime unmanned systems, particularly surface vehicles

and underwater vehicles. I think there's a general recognition on the Hill right now that the Chinese are producing hundreds of ships per year, and the US is producing one ship per year. And that trying to beat them on shipbuilding is probably not feasible. We're not going to ramp up that production that quickly. We need to just play a different game. And I think they're seeing unmanned systems as the way to that. So yeah, just this week it was announced again, another 9 billion, you know,

a few months ago as well, there was another 4 billion allocated to this line item. So, yeah, they're the things that we're tracking. There's some existing program of records that are already set up that were, you know, in the kind of running to kind of challenge for and get a position on. And there's also talk of some new ones being set up for some of these newer categories of vehicles that haven't been developed yet. But yeah, out of the three plates that we're spinning right now, it's generally

that you do want to have a presence in DC at this early stage. It's not the main focus. The main focus is refining our product with the end user, understanding what their needs are, and building to spec. So that's our main focus is refining our product with the end user, understanding what their needs are and building the link to spec. And so that's kind of like our main focus right now. It's important to speak to some, some folks in Navy about that. And I was DHS and security and other other groups as well on this.

So they're kind of our main focus right now in that front. Probability P Atlantis. What's the probability that you guys find it? I think I think very high. I think it's probably very high. You think that Atlantis exists? Yes, I think there's like two very good candidates for Atlantis. There is one structure in Mauritania in modern modern day Mauritania called the ReCat structure. The ReCat structure is basically three concentric rings in the middle of the desert with salt deposits and between each of them it looks man-made.

You can see it from space. You can look up the ReCat structure or ICH. The only description we have of Atlantis is actually from Plato. Plato describes it as being this walled city full of gold built with the city hall being at the middle of three concentric rings. The rings were each filled with seawater. And modern day Mauritania is also where the richest man that ever lived existed. So there was this Mauritanian king who had more gold.

He would have been the first trillionaire. And so that's the gold part of it, the threeast rupture, the three rings of that part of it. And then there's also all these salt sprayations all the way from the coastline in West Africa to this location. So it's kind of the theory that there was this apocalyptic event about 11,500 years ago called the... related to the comet hitting the earth and Atlantis was there. There was a great flood and this city was lost. So that's one location.

The other one is in the Atlantic Ocean, which then would lead to some of the first survivors potentially leaving the Atlantis and going to Ireland to set up the next modern day civilization. Okay, okay, we're bringing it back. This is gonna be fantastic. Next time we're getting to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle.

But thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon, Will. Great having you on, Will. Thanks for having us, guys. Cheers. Bye. Really quickly, when we find Atlantis,

you know what we're doing? The cure for male loneliness, being called Lads. Lads, yeah. What are we doing? What's the first thing we're gonna do? The first thing, set up a wander. That's right. You gotta find your happy place.

Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel grand amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24 seven concierge service. It's a vacation, but better. A video dropping with Wander this week. We do. I cannot wait to release. But without further ado,

we are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. We're gonna bring in Kylie. Kylie did the reporting that we covered for Wired, covering the leaked, the leaked memo. Very cool. So let's bring her on in. There she is.

What's happening? Welcome to the stream. Hello. Hello, my first time. Thanks for having me. First of many, hopefully. How's the day going? You've been scooping, Scooping up a storm?

Yeah, it's been busy. Just that this morning and tweeting nonstop and now you guys. Fantastic. Awesome. So what did your weekend look like? What's like breakdown like a weekend of scoops? It's pushing a signal messenger to the max. weekend of scoops. It's pushing a signal messenger to the max. Well, it was Pride weekend here in San Francisco, so that wasn't fun to combine. I helped a friend move, and then I got the first scoop, and ran to Pride in Dolores, drank a bunch of White Claws, ran home,

slept for 12 hours, and my editor got a scoop. Started scooping again. Then we're scooping again, Monday, first thing in the morning, scooping again. Everything's been moving quickly. What was the first scoop and maybe like break that down? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I think that was Friday. I recorded on a research paper that's not being released at OpenAI because it talks about the definition of AGI and sources have said that allegedly managers were saying that the Microsoft deal and those negotiations were a reason for not releasing that paper. And it's really, really tense as the journal

and Reuters have reported those negotiations. Then Saturday, four OpenAI researchers went to Metta's new lab. Sunday, Mark Chen, an executive at OpenAI, sent out a memo saying they're basically, Meta's basically robbing our home. My editor published that one. And this morning, Mark Zuckerberg sent out a list of all his new hires. It's been fun. Huge. So we got to ask who's your source. Not you guys. You're not going on the record as you guys?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So yeah, I'm curious what you expect next in this saga. Do you expect? I mean, it clearly, OpenAI is not seeing Zuck announced his current list and being like, OK, we're safe now. We don't have to worry.

But at the same time, it's very possible that the worst is behind them. Yeah, my question, I talked to Will about this, was just like, were you surprised that the memo didn't lean more on the fact that this has happened like three or four times at OpenAI and they've gotten through it every time? I would be leaning on the fact that like, yeah,

Dario left, Elon started XAI. Thinking machines exists. SSI exists. We still have 90% penetration in consumer AI. Walk down the street, ask someone what they use for AI. They're not even gonna say open AI or chat GPT. They're just gonna say chat. And just leaning into that,

that hey, we are this compounding dominant force in consumer AI, this is the place that you wanna stay and be, as opposed to getting, I think, a little bit more in the weeds of the nature of the deal. It felt like an appeal, maybe not resharing the very element. Yeah, it was just very defensive. I don't know. And came across, I mean, they were clearly scared. Yeah, yeah, it seemed very focused on like the the the the actual dynamics of like how

how one of these offers comes together as opposed to just Yeah, just reiterating the strengths that like here you get to work on the consumer product in AI Yeah, it was like a lot of messaging around, please talk to us if you're getting offers versus let's rally. Let's ride. Let's ride. Yeah, I think a big part of it came over the weekends. These people are just, these executives

are scrambling to tell staff, for the love of God, do not talk to anyone at Meta and sign any offers. And they're going on this like weeklong break next week. So I think they were just trying to get ahead of that. But I think that your guys' argument, that's right. I think it's just like a very emotional, high stress time. They're trying to ship two very large models and Mark Zuckerberg is coming in calling employees directly and offering millions and millions and millions of dollars. So I think like their response is emotional and defensive

because it's like just so high stress, but that would have been a good tactic. And I don't doubt it's coming eventually. How solid do you think you are on the $100 million offer? That's been floated multiple times. And we were kind of digging through the game theory of it. Like in one way it benefits Sam to get that number out because if someone, if Mark tries to

poach someone for 50 they might be like, I've been hearing that everyone's getting 100. Like, come on. I was one of your top guys. I thought I was near the top of your list. And then, and then, you know, in some ways it benefits Mark because at Metta because if you're hearing about these hundred million dollar offers you might be more willing to take that preliminary phone call because you know that they are ready to put money where their mouth is. And so it kind of benefits both sides. Dylan Patel was on a podcast a couple of days ago talking about how they're not really sending a hundred million dollar wire with cash on day one, that there's earnouts to these structures and they can claw it back if you don't say. And so how much nuance do you think there is on that number specifically?

Because it's certainly headline grabbing. The Wall Street Journal, I mean, they put it in the special infographic right here. Because 100 million is a nice round number and it reads very well and it works in a headline. But I'm just wondering if you think if you think it's 100% real or 50 50 or there's more nuance to it. Yeah. So my take is the wall street journal, the New York times both printed that number and they have really, really rigorous editorial standards to get, get to print. So they must've seen something,

some high level sources that proved to them that that number is real. I for one have not seen that number. And for me, I would have to see an offer letter with that number, but knowing how tech salaries work, I for one have not seen that number. And for me, I would have to see an offer letter with that number. But knowing how tech salaries work, I don't think it's just like a wire transfer. It's going to be golden handcuffs. It's going to be over a certain amount of time.

And the information had a really good story breaking down researcher salaries. And just imagine if you came to OpenAI a couple of years ago at 80 billion, 40 billion valuation and what that is now, they don't really need all this crazy money from Metta, but it is attention grabbing, for sure. It's also just funny when you say $100 million for one person, it sounds like a lot,

but if you were to say, we're gonna spend $5 billion to put together a team that is super core to our entire business and win, it doesn't feel nearly as significant for a company that is a multi-trillion dollar company. So, let's jump. I'm looking at the WhatsApp acquisition price and number of employees. I'm pretty sure they paid more than $100 million per person. Because it was $19 billion, $4 billion in cash, $14 billion in Facebook shares,

which are probably worth like $120 billion now, because this is in 2014. And at the time, WhatsApp was a remarkably lean team with around 50 employees. So, I mean, not far off, I mean, what if they had... Slightly different comp though, just given that they were buying a product with millions nice? Slightly different comp, though, just given that they were buying a product with millions of users.

Totally. Yeah, the product's super valuable. But the researchers that can build the next model and bring llama to the frontier makes a lot of sense. What else should we dig into here? I think that was it. I don't know if you touched on this specifically, but any specific predictions about what comes next?

Or are you just waiting for one of your little birdies to send you a note? Well, if you're watching birdies, my signal is at kylie.01. I will be impressed if they get someone of Ilya's, Ilya Semskyber's capabilities. I think that the people who want to build superintelligence are true believers and you're giving them a value proposition of we will give you so

much money, but you're making superintelligence for Mark Zuckerberg. And I think that some of the best brains that really believe in AGI's is prosperous future or, you know, perhaps the end of humanity don't necessarily wanna do that for Mark Zuckerberg. So I will be impressed if he gets one of those minds. He still has about 50 people he wants to hire for this team. So it's just gonna keep coming. I think a lot of them are gonna continue coming from the top labs, but what the vision is,

what Mark's vision is, I'm waiting to see. So. What about, last question, What about Daniel Gross? It had been initially reported, but but he wasn't on that wasn't on the list that that you released earlier. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed that neither was the the team from Switzerland. I'm going to guess this is pure speculation for Switzerland. They have EU laws that make it strange to employ them right away. But for Daniel Gross, I'm not sure what happened. I saw that was reported by the information with Nat Friedman. I tried to be in touch with anyone who could tell me if Daniel's going, but he wasn't on the list. So I guess

we'll see. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you start getting some major offers. I could see the AI researcher space is heating up. The AI journalist might be the next domino to fall. So we're here to help talk you through any sort of offers that you might get from the journal.

You guys can take a percent. We'll work it out. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, great having you on. And yeah, excited to follow the rest of your reporting this week. Thanks, y'all.

Cheers. Bye. Next, y'all. Cheers. Bye. Next, we have Joshua. From Chai Discovery with a big launch this week. It's always tough to launch when the biggest trade deal in tech history is going down. Not even a trade deal, the biggest poaching. We keep calling it a trade deal.

It was not much on the other side of the trade. It was a non-consensual trade deal. It's more of like a draft. Stock is just drafting from the entire league. I take 12 of your best people for nothing. Yeah, he's kind of just building an all-star roster. It's like all-star weekend over at Metta this week. Anyway, Joshua, welcome to the stream.

How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Exc, Joshua, welcome to the stream. How you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here. Of course. It's great to have you. Kick us off with that. Great work, you know, launching on such a wild day

in tech history. But we are here. Is the time run really getting like completely steamrolled by this story or is it 50-50? I don't know, it feels like that. Maybe, maybe I'm just. I feel like there's also people on vacation and stuff. But break it down for us.

What is the big news? Well, the big news is we've just announced CHI2, which is our latest foundation model at CHI Discovery. CHI2 is actually allowing us to now generate antibody sequences with a success rate that's high enough for us to skip the usual high-throughput lab testing. This means that you can go take a target,

put that into our model, go generate a set of potential protein sequences, and then test them in the lab, and they tend to work with extremely high hit rates. Previous methods were like 0.1% or so, so you'd have to screen hundreds of thousands to potentially find something, but here the hit rates are actually upwards of 15%,

approaching 20% of success. Amazing. Break down some immediate applications of that tech across maybe different types of categories. You want to ask him about making more potent testosterone? Maybe we get to that next. Yeah, maybe that's the right spin out. TBP and incubation.

We said we would never incubate it. I think one thing that we're really passionate about is going after areas that are really hard to do today. So this allows us to do things faster and cheaper, potentially. But I think what's really going to be game changing is just opening up new kinds of biology that wasn't possible before. So we've got scientists that are like, you know, maybe working for years trying to enable

a certain class of drug program. And if we can use machine learning to jump to potential solutions, that could really just really kind of push up the bar of what people need to do. I think it's take a step back, like look at what happened with LLMs. Everyone has to be an AI company now to compete, right? What's that gonna look like in biotech where if you don't have access to a technology like this, and then you start to have these certain areas that are closed out to you,

like what is that gonna look like? So I think that that's something that we are really excited to figure out. Benchmark it to the LLM market. Do you see yourself taking more of an anthropic path or an open AI path? And what I mean by that is, or do you develop the drugs? Do you wind up being the front end to this and kind of being full stack? Or do you go more like B2B and you have a bunch of pharma companies or, you know, traditional biotech companies that are buying a product or service from you? Yeah, it's a great question.

I think if we take any lesson from the LLM market, it's that the winners are going to be the ones who are most agile. The technology is evolving at a faster clip than we ever expected. Our company goal for this entire year was to get to a 1% success rate on this task. And we're halfway into the year, and we're already past 15%.

When you have progress like that, it is really hard to predict how the market is going to evolve. And that's why I think just being flexible, making sure that we have the best technology, making sure that we have the best way to use that technology as well. It's not just throwing a model over the wall

and you get a drug. We really have to make the models work well for the specific applications where they're most important. And we also have to make them much easier to use. We have to get them into the right people's hands. There's a lot of scientists that if we can bring their creativity and ingenuity together with these new models, that's where the magic's going to happen. What's the state of the art in the actual impact of antibodies?

The last time I heard antibodies in the news was when Joe Rogan was taking monoclonal antibodies for COVID infection. Yeah. And that was one of those weird things where it felt like a very modern... Totally not controversial. Yeah, it felt like a very modern piece of science. And the narrative around him was that he was not adopting the modern science, but he was kind of on the cutting edge of that fork of the tech tree. And so is our monoclonal antibodies like the most, like the latest and greatest,

or are there other applications that are particularly interesting or just driving value? of the tech tree. And so is our monoclonal antibodies like the most, like the latest and greatest, or are there other applications that are particularly interesting or just driving value, even if there are indeed like the traditional way? Yeah, so about half of drug approvals these days are actually biologics protein drugs, so antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies are actually just one type. That's closer to what we've been exploring in this paper.

But I actually think what's going to happen is that people have now started to push beyond that. They're basically like by specifics are all the rage right now. That's basically you can think of it as two antibodies that are kind of stuck together. So you can actually go after multiple targets at the same time, or you can actually get like a more potent behavior for single target. You know, it's kind of just like two things in one. So if we can make, you know, the first, if we can make each one of those chains like easier to design, then, you know, bringing them together is gonna be gonna be even easier as well.

So I think it just like raises the bar for the kinds of therapies that you have to work on because it becomes easier to make those drugs. So that's a monoclonal antibodies are, they were really important in COVID, right? They can neutralize viruses. The way that people found them during COVID was actually went to patients who had COVID. They just like, you know, you would go and just

like take someone's blood, for example, and try to find antibodies that are in there, and then try to develop that into a therapy. But now we can just make it on the computer in 24 hours, and then go test it in the lab and have some results in a few weeks. So there's a lot more work to do to make sure that these molecules will actually work in the clinic and will work well in patients. We have early signs that they have drug-like properties, which is really nice to see, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us

in order to really bring that to production, if you will. There's still some more engineering that you might wanna do on the molecules that are coming out of the platform today. Yeah, what is your sci-fi vision for the state of drug development 50 years from now? And how would the FDA have to adapt regulations

to enable that? Because I can imagine my vision is like you come in to some type of doctor clinic setting. You have some set of conditions, and they're just sort of like auto-generating drugs on the fly, specifically to your current conditions, but that obviously wouldn't work in the current paradigm. Yeah, I mean, that would be the dream.

The North Star that we have for this space is something that we think of as like zero shot drug canonets. Right now, we have these zero shot proteins, right? So we specify a target. We get some protein that binds it. But the fact that this is possible makes us believe that someday we'll be able to actually just like have the models think about all the other properties

that we need for a drug. And it's possible that the first sequences that come out of the model will actually be good enough to eventually move into patients. And yeah, if you can do that, then you know, maybe the next stretch is like, can we actually do hyper personalized medicine, right? Maybe there's something where we take some sample from a patient, we figure out what exact target we need to go after, then we go and generate the drug. I mean, there's multiple leaps that need to happen. But I

can't predict what's going to happen 50 years from now. Like, honestly, I failed in predicting what's going to happen in six months. I thought you're gonna be at 1% Do you use alpha fold or is it just a separate tech that is kind of complementary but not in your direct supply chain? Yeah, the foundation models are built in house here. So we don't use alpha fold We actually can't use alpha fold. The latest one isn't available to company. So we built our own We have a state-of-the-art for predicting protein, protein structure and its interactions with molecules. We actually open source that. So we started the company a little over a year ago and then six months in, that was the first thing we did because you really need like an atomic level microscope if you're going to design drugs. That was our thesis when we got started. But we realized

that, you know, that kind of level of the technology we thought would get out there anyway. So we open source that. It's being used in most of the major pharmaceuticals today. I think the community has got a lot of engagement around that. But now the models are becoming even more complicated. So that's why we're starting to invest in not just the model layer,

but how we actually make those models useful. They're really starting to look more like pipelines. It's kind of like chat GPT 03. It's not just a single inference. There's actually a bunch of complex tricks that you need to run if you're gonna get the best results. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it right now. Very cool.

Well, congrats on the launch. I'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic. With the rate that you guys are moving, I'm sure you'll be back on in a couple of weeks. Thank you. Congrats you guys. See you and the whole team. Well, yeah, really appreciate it. Cheers Up next we have John from campfire coming on the show. Welcome to the stream I missed this you haven't been hitting the soundboard enough. I love it. Boom. Welcome to the stream How you doing John, can you hear us? Yes, I can thank you so much for having me on today

Fantastic. Do you want to kick it off with an introduction on yourself in the company? Absolutely. I'm the founder CEO at campfire We're based in San Francisco and I was a finance exec for about 15 years and just lived the pain. Thank you. Don't get me wrong. The unsung heroes. The unsung heroes. Never featured in the All Hands but we're working on changing that here and lived in spreadsheets my whole life and just helping. I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon but helping folks take all the transactional accounting, all the financial reporting and get it into software.

And so Campfire is the modern ERP for high growth companies to just help them move to an AI powered platform. And so that's what we do. How young were you when you realized you wanted to build the modern ERP? I would say it's not something you think of growing up. It's not like I'm sure kids I'm sure some ambitious kids these days think

I'm gonna build I'm gonna build the next-gen ERP, but You'd be surprised so going into white Combinator. There's about 4 companies that have gone through it, but they've probably had hundreds of thousands apply. They're like, you know, no one came to us and said we want to build a new ERP. They're like, you're, you're like the only one excited about the category. So I would say this was in 2020, 2021 when I really was feeling the pain at a midsize company that I'm like, this is the largest category in software, why is nobody disrupting it? And that was a critical moment for me. Give us a place in the next one.

Well, it's interesting because it's not gonna fit the, you need to have lived and breathed the problem to know what to build. And I think that YC has the sort of default type of founder that does that. Maybe they have a few years as an engineer or Palantir, or they were a product manager at Coinbase or something like that.

It's very different than being in the C-suite actually living and breathing and having that ability to go and figure out what to build. Give us the latest on the fundraising side. Yeah, we announced today Excel is leading our $35 million series ads. what to build. Give us the latest on the fundraising side. Yeah. We announced today, Excel is leading our $35 million series ads. Let's do it.

Here we go. Congratulations. I love it. Thank you. I want to talk, you said high growth. I remember I was running a company and there was a big debate over like, oh, like, you know, like, thank goodness

we don't need to implement Oracle we get to implement net suite and it was like still a lot of work It was a big big ERP and so it seems like the the playbook is is Start with high-growth startups be the first ERP and then scale into that and then eventually you'll be able to service the really, really large Fortune 500 companies. But it's fair to say that you're not ready to go into a Fortune 500 company today. Is that right? And how do you think about actually growing the business long term? You said it well. We're hiring on the sales team, so we would love to have you. But in all seriousness, we are not ready for the Fortune 500 yet. We do have customers with hundreds of millions in ARR that have ripped out SAP, they've ripped out NetSuite, they've ripped out everything below that.

So we are filling the pull-up market quickly. And one of the reasons for the raise is to go make us enterprise ready. And our customers are saying, I don't want to be in an ERP for a few years, right? I want to be on it for 10 plus. I talked to the CFO at a 10,000 employee company, still on NetSuite. They really scaled into a $100 billion plus market cap on NetSuite, and they bought it at 100 employees. How do we get them at 100 and scale with them to 10,000? And that's really where we're going. Yeah. Pretty sharp guy running the company over at Oracle. So it is a competitive market but it does seem like there's there's lots of pockets of opportunity because

the the I mean I remember just like the implementation bill for net suite was going to be like half a million dollars in consulting or something like that It was it was pretty staggering. How do you think about? pricing and getting a growth stage company to actually match the value that you're delivering with the money that you make? It's obviously great if you get a big contract up front and they're locked in for a long time and they're paying this massive implementation bill. There's real costs to you if you have to implement stuff.

How are you thinking about ramping a customer into a great profit center for you long-term? Yeah, first off, we've rethought the whole implementation process for the reasons you've stated. You tell your accounting team, we bought an ERP, everyone's ready to quit. Nobody wants to go through a one-year implementation. And so we've made it where you give us a log

into your old system, we go do all the work because everybody says, I just don't have time. Our team is way too lean to do that. So a lot of the switching costs to your point, a lot of it is just like dollars, but a lot of it is just time. So we have solved for both. But to your point on like, how do we get them into a profit center? We're just very focused on getting them in the door and making people super happy because we know like customers drive customers. Like referenceable and one of your sponsors, Ramp, has done a great job at driving referenceability and customer love has really been, I think,

the virality within the finance and accounting community has been a huge driver of their growth. And so we're focused on the same. How are you guys leveraging AI internally and then in the product itself? Never heard of it. Irrelevant. Don't need it.

Don't need it. If you can clarify what it stands for, I'm not familiar. Yeah, yeah. Don't need it. Built different. Yeah. We're doing it all by hand. Everything's in statements over here.

Yeah. I know. You know, I found, I forgot what it was, but Excel's if statement limit. I like over it. Oh excels if statement limit I like Erp you have to build an erp after you hit the limit on excel you just unlock a Like such an Adele just comes through the computer and says good you've broken out of the matrix welcome to the big leagues writes you a check

Our very first version of campfire was I built a three statement model that was I-framed into a login. And it was me on the back end running a three statement Google Sheets for customers. Wow. So you gotta start somewhere. But yeah, we're super excited about AI. So obviously one thing about us relative to the incumbents

is like we are investing and putting AI everywhere, but whether it's Meta winning the AI talent war or OpenAI, like we're always gonna be on the latest models and we're always gonna be multimodal. And so we're gonna be inheriting all of the amazing work of all of these amazing AI engineers. And we're of course building out our own proprietary AI models.

But the gap between us and the incumbents is growing every time a new model ships irrespective of vendor because we're always putting in the latest models. A few examples, customers are uploading their board minutes in the last meeting and saying take all of our every row and campfire of every financial data and come up with a story narrative for the next board meeting. And it's, it's reading the board minutes it's going through and it's like, here's the five things you should focus on based on all of it. On the accounting side, it's automating a lot of the accounting.

But we've built like a chat GPT for your finance and accounting data. It'll write to the ledger. It'll report for you. Customers are saying like, kind of feels like we got a promotion. I'm not in there doing formatting my Y and X axis anymore. You know, the charts are coming out through AI and that that's been exciting to me because I live that pain. Guys, I had a diligence report.

I had to build the day of my wedding. Because we were in a bad ERP. So, don't be me. Enjoy your wedding day. O'Reilly-Linkey-Halloran Last question for me in the news. Xero acquired the U.S., the American B2B payments company, Melio, for $3 billion. I think this was announced last week. Two and a half. Two and a half. Who's counting at this point? Can you explain to me what the rationale you think was behind that? Why, and Xero feels like a different tier of product,

not full ERP, more accounting suite for small businesses. Why would they need a payments product? Are you thinking about payments as a potential? Revenue generator in the future whether it's through Stripe or stable coins or maybe you're gonna buy and then payments firm at one point. I don't know Yeah, so I can go really deep on this one So as deep as you guys want to go, but I didn't voice to go We were an air company two hundred three thousand businesses. We were powering their invoicing globally in 150 countries

We competed with Melio. We were powering their invoicing globally in 150 countries. We competed with Melio. We sold the bill.com. Obviously they're a Titan and AP, a billion and AP revenue. And so I know Zero and Melio well. I'll say Zero was really looking to be stronger in the US market. They're very strong in Australia, New Zealand, very strong in Western Europe and other parts of the world. QuickBooks unsurprisingly given their headquarters is here is dominant in the U S Melio brings a strong footprint. QuickBooks also launched their own AP products and Zero needed a response to that and getting into the payments game, getting into APR in that solo

entrepreneur category where I came from at Invoice2Go is where Zero and Melio have a lot of strength. We don't compete with either at all. So we're really like a cut above. So no competitive angle for Campfire. But I think one that actually no one has really covered is Melio is very strong and indirect. So Fiserv and others, and this is public,

strong and indirect. So Fiserv and others, and this is public, Fiserv and others are selling Melio through their channel. So Clover and other systems are out. And so this is a new go-to-market that's becoming really popular. We saw Brex launch embedded, Bill is embedded. Embedded go-to-market is really a way to solve for really like efficient go to markets. And I think this is a new one for, for zero. That is a great play. That's really helpful. Thank you for that context. I appreciate it. I always liked having them break down their stuff and congratulations. Yeah. Congratulations. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Bye. Cheers, John.

Up next we have Tom Lee from bit mine the first new Treasury Crypto Treasury company this time on the New York Stock Exchange not the Nasdaq We're gonna talk to him about crypto really really going long stock exchange It is me. It's the New York of stock exchanges in many ways Totally the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple. Totally. If it was a stock exchange, it would be the New York Stock Exchange.

Very excited to talk to him. Yeah, so today they announced a $250 million private placement to implement buying Ethereum for their ETH treasury. Yes. The stock. ETH has been one of these. Was up 48% in the pre-market. Yes. So welcome to the stream. HowTH has been one of these 48% in the pre market. Yes.

So welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good. Good to meet you. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and some of the news today? Glad to. My name is Tom Lee. I'm the founder of Fundstrat, which is a research firm. And many of those might know me from that role where I periodically appear on CNBC and talk about markets. I'm also the chief investment officer of Fundstrat Capital, which is the asset manager. And we have an ETF called Granny Shots. That's 1.4 billion of assets now. And Fundstrat as a research firm has 300 hedge fund clients

and 10,000 RIAs. And today it was announced that I'm taking a role separately from Fundstrat as chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies technologies and the ticker is BM and are and that's to help the company transform its existing Treasury strategy to be one that is focused on aetherium What was the decision to go with aetherium? We've seen a lot of Bitcoin Treasury stories happening over the past year, I would say I I mean, even going back further with MicroStrategy, but Ethereum is one that we haven't seen that much yet.

Just before that, I just would highlight that Bitmine is up 679% today. So the market is excited about what you're doing. Congratulations. Back to John's question. Well, to me, one of the things that caught my eye is that stablecoins are the chat GPT of Bintech right now, because it's seen rapid adoption by consumers, merchants and banks, and now Visa and credit card providers.

It's because it really does have a log function benefit over traditional dollars or over the credit card system. And it's $250 billion today. Treasury Secretary Besant estimated or said it's reasonable it could go to two trillion. That's a 10x market, addressable market change, which means it's an exponential opportunity. Stablecoins have to transact on a layer one blockchain and the blockchain that is considered the biggest and the most secure and the most commonly used for stablecoins is Ethereum. So we saw an opportunity to say, listen, let's think about more tokenization.

Stablecoins is the chat GBT, but it's opening doors to other ways to tokenize assets. And so we thought it would make sense to do a treasury strategy around Ethereum. And it plays a role that the bigger we become, the more important we are to the Ethereum ecosystem. So I think we're actually playing a role in stabilizing Ethereum because we essentially act as a staking entity. And if we sort of think forward a few years, sorry if I'm rambling. Goldman and JP Morgan, as they get into the stablecoin business and Walmart and Amazon, they're going to realize that they need to really secure the layer one that they're operating on. So they want it to be a big blockchain, a lot of allidators, Ethereum is the biggest. And then the opportunity is that we're kind of like

the plumbing of what banks will look like in the future because they'll be staking Ethereum in their balance sheet or crypto in order to fund and operate their stable coin. Can you talk about the differences between the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ and what it means to be listed on one or the other? Yes. If you look at our press release, what we announced and we put prominently in headlines was New York Stock Exchange listed. And we listed all of our partners. The reason for that is that most people know me as a traditional finance world person that

also is trafficking in crypto. We've written about Bitcoin for eight years. We first recommended it when it was under a thousand to our clients, but it's been a slow road. This project, the Bitmine Immersion's treasury strategy, is really a convergence between traditional finance and crypto. That's where stablecoins are intersecting. The partners we brought on, Founders Fund, Pantera, Kraken, Falcon X, Galaxy Digital are companies that are really straddling the crossover world, and we want it to be on a prestigious exchange. Most of these treasury strategies are trading on the NASDAQ CM, which is like a sort of

a junior league of NASDAQ. We want it to be on something prestigious because we want our traditional clients to come in and say, look, Tom, if we're going to be interested in this treasury and learning about why this might be a new bank model, we don't want to be buying stocks that are on a bulletin board. So it was really important to be on a prestigious exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. So I think that that's a real, you know, one of the advantages of a bit mine immersion is that they invested the time to be uplisted. And so that they are on the New York Stock Exchange.

What is, is, is liquidity like different on the stock exchange versus like I mean as someone who's like younger and more I guess internet native like the idea of needing to buy a stock and stock exchanges a little bit foreign compared to just like self custody and crypto directly and then you have access to buy the major crypto currencies on pretty much any app in the app store these days. It feels very accessible, and yet in the past we've seen the ETF as a catalyst for price movements in the major L1s.

So talk to me about what's actually going on in the market and characterize some of the different buyers and market participants and why they choose one way to get exposure over another. Yes. Yeah, and so let's say I'll take it in two parts. The first is, like, in terms of a product to buy, as New York Stock Exchange listed stock,

which is what BMNR is, has market makers. It's almost like you have this invisible hand protecting price and the exchange will halt the stock. If it feels one-sided, that's really important because it protects investors. These treasury strategies need to get institutional investors to sort of back this and become essentially create a two-way market so people can combine and sell these with real little price erosion. Now the second part though is someone say, well, Tom, why didn't I just buy Ethereum,

ETF, or I'll just buy player one. And I think the Treasury the Ethereum Treasury strategy now there's another one which is sharp link which was led by Joe Lubin and consensus and that tickers SBET I think the Treasury strategies especially for Ethereum can actually deliver better returns for holders because let's say the metric for a treasury strategy is Ethereum per share. Now, if you buy an ETF, your Ethereum per share is going to always be fixed because you're just buying a unit of Ethereum. So you only benefit if Ethereum price goes up. Whereas a treasury strategy,

let's say has a Ethereum per share value, then there's three ways that price of that treasury stock goes up. One is that the company generates staking yield. So you're getting a little income. The second way that you benefit is if the company can capitalize on volatility, and Ethereum has twice the volatility of Bitcoin, which means the stock's twice as volatile. That means you're going to be able to fund

transactions like convertible instruments or sell stock in the open market and people are buying it for the liquidity and then you can increase the net asset value of Ethereum per share. So you're kind of like growing. Someone's actually, if you own a share of a treasury stock, someone's working to get you more Ethereum per share for every share you hold. So they're actually like growing it. And the third, of course, is the price of Ethereum goes up. And that's where I think it's really interesting because like Circle, which is the second largest stablecoin issuer, and it's been a, it's probably the most successful IPO in like several years, it trades at around 100 times enterprise value to EBITDA. So for every dollar of EBITDA, it's like $100 of market cap.

Ethereum has a network yield of four. So in other words, Ethereum's four times cheaper than Circle, even though Circle runs on Ethereum. So usually the more you get into the infrastructure layer, the higher the multiple is. That's why software has a higher multiple than a retailer. So that means like it, but if you just said Ethereum should be a 1% yield, then Ethereum should be like 12,000 per unit. And it's only like, you know, 2500 now. So I think that there's the third way is of course Ethereum could go up a lot. What do you see as kind of the important milestones in Ethereum over the next few years? We went

through kind of the NFT boom, we're now in the stable coin era. People have been still talking about store value. They're also starting to talk more about prediction markets. What is interesting to you about maybe crypto broadly over the next few years? Yeah, glad to. Well, you know, I'd say the story arcs that we see is one, the regulatory landscape has become very friendly for crypto. Huge deal. The second is that institutional fiat money, traditional, is getting into crypto.

95% of institutions don't own crypto, so that's a huge addressable market. But then there's technological innovation as you're pointing out and there's a lot addressable market. But then there's technological innovation as you're pointing out and there's a lot of great projects because of that. So Bitcoin, it's still our favorite layer one. But that to us is digital gold. It's really the best way to measure trust. And if it ever traded at the value of gold above ground value, it's over a million dollars. So we still see a lot of upside. Ethereum unique feature is the smart contract. And we know that the majority of real world assets, tokenized things, including tokenized dollars and tokenized real estate and equities, etc., they're actually being created on on the Ethereum, or created on

the Ethereum blockchain. So I think as the world starts to tokenize an experiment, and remember there's a lot more equities and real world assets to tokenize onto layer ones, then the other way is the traditional financial world is trying to equitize crypto, right, through ETFs. There's more to move into tokenizing on layer ones. And the third, of course, is things like solving some of the risks of AI, the whole idea of a decentralized blockchain. I mean, let's face it, there is a non-insignificant risk that AI is going to be malevolent. Like there'll be a catastrophe because every innovation has always led to a catastrophe in the short term.

Like consumer credit was a technical innovation on for consumer access to money. And nearly every country that rolled out a credit card whether it was Asia or Latin America had a credit crisis. And then in 2008, we had a mortgage innovation with a securitization of mortgages and it boomed for a while. But then we had the GFC. So I think AI is obviously gonna be innovative

and there's a lot of opportunities, but it's inevitably gonna lead to a catastrophe. And I think that's when decentralized blockchains are gonna be one answer to sort of managing the risk around AI. And so, I mean, I don't know if the tensor is a solution, but I can see something running off Ethereum and validators, you know, human validators is one way to. Interesting.

Yeah. Talk to LeBron about that. Any reactions to there's been a couple announcements in the last week. Republic came out creating their mirror tokens products Which are bringing private company stocks on chain and then Robin Hood had an announcement I believe it was this morning around bringing opening I SpaceX on chain Any any kind of predictions around

private company Assets coming on chain? I love all these experiments because they're trying to provide a hybrid form of liquidity to things that are illiquid. And so it makes sense. And the answer to that is it is a big deal that Republic and then Robinhood are doing this because you're going to create the probability of a more healthy market. This has to become a two-way market because if someone's just tokenizing assets but then very few people use it. What I mean by use it, someone may want to own it but someone might want to hedge something.

So i can open a token. Isn't just someone's long bed on opening i they might be invested in you know crock or something and then they need to hedge it by shorting the token like if you can create a two way market. If you can create a two-way market, then it's definitely going to work. But if the market is purely on like, let's just tokenize it, you buy it and hodl it, then it's going to have the same liquidity problem that it originally had. And then they might even trade it at discount. And then you create other risks because now you're putting it on a blockchain. So now you have the actual risk of the physical asset being missing and then the blockchain being broken

So I think it'll be important for two-way markets to develop around it There's cool Congratulations. Yeah, congratulations on the announcement and we're excited to follow along. Hopefully have you on again soon. Yeah, fantastic We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye Well, what else is going on? There's all of our ads. We are out of ads.

We need more sponsors. Put more on that soon, because we have a new one coming. There's a story on Apple weighing, from Mark Gurman, weighing using anthropic or open AI to power Siri in a major reversal. But let's save it for tomorrow. Save it for tomorrow. We do have some other news.

Cursor is now available on your phone and on the web. Spin off dozens of agents and review them later in your editor. Andrew says, I joined Cursor to build the future of coding. And yes, as of today, you can code from anywhere with a coding assistant on every web browser and phone. Very, very cool. We'll have to see how, we'll have to give Tyler over there in the VR headset

a challenge to find coding. He's back in, he's back in, there he is. What are you doing over there, Tyler? I'm just chilling in the metaverse. Oh yeah? Yeah. But what specifically are you doing? Are you? I'm not playing video games.

No? You're grinding? No, yeah. Yeah, yeah. How is the, now that you've had those headsets for a few hours, how- It's sick. Well, it's way. Yeah. How is the now that you've had this headset for a few hours out? It's sick. Well, it's way better So I have the quest to at home and I think it's just all the quest threes, but they have this like back strap I'm not sure. Yeah, I see it. It's way more comfortable. It's way more like I'm not it's like totally comfortable to wear this right now That's awesome. All right. So are you doing pass through? Are you using your computer? Yeah, I can see you guys. You can see me Yeah, how many using my computer.

How many fingers? Four. No way. He's got it. I'm using my computer. How many fingers? Two. Oh wow, I can see right through.

That's amazing. I didn't realize the password was that good. New challenge, don't take it off for 24 hours. Start now. Go on a date with it. Use Cluely with it. Yes. Yeah, I mean, this is the Cluely device right here.

We need a Cluely app in there. ASAP, ASAP for sure. Yeah, you show up there. Why don't you take off your MetaQuest 3S for the interview, actually? I'd prefer to leave it on. Anyway, there's some other good posts we should go through. Apparently Xfinity is allowing people to use Wi-Fi signals to detect motion in your home at no extra cost and

this five seconds account says, I apologize to all my local schizophrenic Schizophrenics, I owe you an apology. I wasn't really familiar with your game. Because it's like. You remember there was a super, there was a video that came out, it was probably a year ago, where somebody was showing how you can use Wi-Fi signals to like get it.

To detect people. Yeah, to get a very accurate map. Oh yeah. Like a 3D render of what's happening in space. Yeah. And people were. This is 160,000 lives. It was almost hard to believe.

And then now Xfinity for free no extra cost crazy crazy The concerning thing here is is Introducing this technology to more people they're gonna realize oh I can if they have if they're in an apartment building They're like oh I can spot see when my neighbors home or a thief could set up a Wi-Fi router outside of See when my neighbors home or a thief could set up a Wi-Fi router outside of somebody's home and Start mapping it see what what what's this person's schedule? We're gonna put this on an assault rifle and give the

Give the Special Forces wall hacks I bet there no no somebody was somebody who's saying the CIA and other law enforcement Groups use this already to understand when there's an active shooter scenario, understand where they are. The positioning of everything. We've got to fly on the set. Yeah, this is just going after you. But anyways.

In other news, Christoph Thulin Futurist says, I am developing an LLM benchmark test that I believe is truly the first of its kind. Very excited to launch this soon and hopefully partner with some of the Frontier Labs on it. Congratulations. We'd love to check it out when it goes live, Christoph. So thanks for the hard work.

You're going up against Arc AGI, so it's not easy. The benchmark battle is hot, but good luck to you. And Deleon reflects on the progress of AI. He says, imagine gathering Alan Turing of 1942, Marvin Minsky of 1992, and Nick Bostrom of 2012, and explaining to them that we have passed the Turing test several years ago, and yes, there are some changes to society,

but largely, day-to-day life is the same. Would be a funny conversation. It is crazy, the soft singularity is real. Everyone's feeling the soft singularity is real everyone's feeling the the soft acceleration Anyway any other I mean it's just like yeah, there's just like it Yeah, we beat the Turing test and now we're on to super intelligence and then eventually giga intelligence But that's a great place to end the show. Thanks for watching We will see you tomorrow leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify and have a great Monday

See you soon. See ya. Have a great evening