TBPN Live - Reverse Engineering 200 AI Startups, Nucleus Genomics Controversy, Drone Hunting | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

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Today on the show, we are talking about Claude Opus 4.5. The timeline was in turmoil over the weekend. People are settling into the idea that Gemini 3 might be good enough to actually pull some people away from ChatchipT as a daily driver. It certainly pulled Mark Benioff away from ChatGPT. He, of course, had partnerships. He was swearing on the timeline. Holy S-H-I-T. I've used Chat-G-T-E-T every day for three years.

I just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I'm not going back. Sleep is insane, reasoning, speed, images, video. Everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed again. I had a similar experience. I wound up basically daily driving Gemini. I didn't fully churn.

I didn't delete chat chute for my phone. It wasn't intentional. It was more like, I'm just curious. I really want to use banana pro. That definitely just sort of sucked me into the ecosystem. I know you've been a jemmy boy for a couple weeks. You look great in hindsight. You were early to this party.

I'm going to see way longer than that, months at this point. Yeah. There are some things that I do want them to improve in the consumer Gemini app because I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And I'm just not sure how monopolistic consumer AI will be. And that was a little bit of what my takeaway of this experience was. So basically, I switched over. I've been on Gemini on iOS for a while, mostly to access V-O-3.

V-O-3 was the moment when I was like, okay, they got something that nobody else has. I got a fork over $250 a month. Well, and then it switched. No, no, it was 1.25, and then it jumped to 250. V-O-3 is just a very special model that no one else had anything close to it. It was very accessible on your phone, and I enjoyed it. But I switched to daily driving Gemini on iOS as the main app that I go to for all the different knowledge retrieval requests. And the result was around 15 minutes per day in the app, and this is roughly the same as what I spent in chat GPT historic.

And there was a lot to like about the experience. So first, it felt like Gemini 3 does a better job size. the response. The question can be answered in one paragraph. It gives me one paragraph. If it can be answered in five little subheaders with little bullet points, it'll do that. If it needs more, more story, more history, it'll write more. In previous models in chat GPT, certainly, I felt like I was falling into the trap of no matter what question I would ask, I would get the two-page dissertation on it with the same structure because it was a little overfit on the format that it was delivering. Gemini III felt a little bit fresh there. It also felt

faster. Everyone's been saying it's so much faster. For the last couple months when I've been on chat GPT, because the model router gives me anxiety about like, oh, maybe I'm going to get routed to like the dumb model that's going to hallucinate, I'm just hammering GPT5 Pro because I'm on the $200 a month tier. And so because I'm on this $200 a month tier, I'm used to hitting GPT5 Pro, but then that always means I'm waiting 10 minutes. And so if I'm always waiting 10 minutes, And I go over to thinking and it's like, oh, it'll be one minute. Even if I'm on a different model, it's not as much reasoning. It feels faster.

And I feel like the level of confidence in the brand makes me feel that a Gemini 3 thinking query that does maybe less reasoning than a GPT5 Pro query will be at the same level of reliability. And you've pointed out to me something about when it's actually running, it does something psychologically that's really valuable. It says it's running a Google search. It just says we're searching Google. And you don't think about it because everyone, oh, searching the web. And I'm like, but I don't trust the web, but I trust Google because Google's had 25 years of building brand around trust on the web.

And then also Nanobanana Pro, very interesting, strong differentiator. It really does handle the complex images. We saw that with the farm. And it's been interesting to kind of throw a query. Like I wanted to understand anthropics model architectures. And I said, hey, summarize them all in an infographic. And it just perfectly explained how sonnet and opus all fit together nicely next to. other on the on the negative side of the of my Gemini app experience there were a few

rough edges so the first was with that multimodality everyone's been saying these models are multimodal they handle image text and video I don't know if it was just a UI issue but I was running into tons of problems where it wasn't feeling multimodal and what I mean by that is that I would go and I would and I would issue it a an image prompt create this infographic and then I would want to flip back into text and it would not be able to really it wouldn't be able to go seamlessly back to text mode. It would keep generating images.

And then vice versa would happen where I would kick off a text flow. And then I'd say, okay, I'm ready for you to turn this into a nanobanana thing. And it'd be like, oh, I can't, I can't really do that. Are you laughing about that because you think it's like a rookie mistake or something? Well, no, you always like, oh, it's not really multimodal. It's not really multimodal. Yeah, but there should not be a button. If there's a button, it's telling on itself.

Like, it is multimodal in the sense that like everything gets baked down into like tokens. True, true. I expect the models to be operating at a higher level of abstraction much earlier than I think they do. And so with the model picker, like I never liked that because the model should pick based on the text. I really like the router in chat GPT because I should be able to go to a person, which is what we're trying to recreate here, and say like, hey, I have you, I have a research project for you and I need you to spend 20 minutes on it. What I'm saying is that we are still in the pre-selected drop-down UI functionality of Gemini because I'm prompted to pick what I want to do. Do you want to do image, video, deep research, text before you go into the flow instead of just

saying, I'm having a conversation, oh, now is the time to generate an image? And it's like, yeah, sure, that's something I can do. Instead of being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you didn't ask to talk to the guy who can generate images. Like, that guy's over there. It's like, is it all one thing or is it not? And it's clearly not. My criticism is just that the Gemini app still has a lot of bugs. It just has bugs.

It just has bugs. It was also disconnecting for me for some reason. Yeah. For now, because, again, it's like, it's fast and smart. I was doing a search, and I had to, like, it was stuck in this limbo where it wasn't running the prompt, but it wouldn't let me run a new prompt. And I just had to basically rage quit and restart it and just copy and paste the prompt into a new box.

So, yeah, again, it's incredibly impressive. It's a great model. But at this point, it's just like opportunity to get more competitive on the product side. Yeah, I was noticing even like just straight up disconnection errors. Like I would submit a prompt. And then it felt like if I closed the app, it would get confused or something.

And I don't understand that because it's just sending a little bit attacked. Do you guys ever use the voice-to-voice, like the real-time audio thing on JetBT? No, I don't like that at all. You've never used it? I've used it a bunch. I've used all of them. But it's just not the preferred way of interact. Yeah, you were testing it out, Tyler,

by talking with it for like eight hours a day, right? Yeah, and you were on the x.xai one? Yeah, with Ani. Was that your name? Imagine running constantly. With a VR headset. With a VR headset. And a full immersive suit in a sensory deprivation tank?

Yeah. No, no, why do you bring it up? I actually, I've started using it, like, it's pretty good. The Gemini app launched almost two years ago, and there's still, like, rough edges in the UI, which I think is crazy. But it does seem like they have an opportunity to actually take some serious market share at this point. Like, they've caught up on many different values and, like, value props. My question was, I'm not the typical consumer. Like, I'm going to try every different app.

Like, I'll probably keep bouncing around. I don't know if consumers will do the same broadly. there's, it's very, very clear that chat GPD is just synonymous with AI and people are not like, oh, well, like, the new benchmarks, I got to like change my, you know, app. Like, no one's thinking like that. The fragility in the chat GPT monopoly aggregator thesis that I was picking up on was for the last year, there have been a lot of features and, and like, theses around different things that could create lock-in. So stuff like personalization or, or, you know, memory or or even like the chat functionality between what you've linked your custom instructions your yeah the the different like I think at this point I've synced chat GPT or off chat GPT with a number of different services I've given it even custom instructions just saying like hey cool it on the M dashes and I didn't miss any of that it made me think like maybe it's a little bit more fragile maybe

maybe there will be a little bit more of a duopoly there it won't be such a winner all-market, even though it has been, historically, it has been up to this date. Google has now added $2 trillion to its market cap over the past 20 months since the boob shirt guy asked Sergei Brin about woke Gemini images while having a foot-long subway cold-cut trio for lunch. What is this video? Let's play this. I have no idea what's going on here. You have my art? The back of, yeah. Okay.

I wasn't really expected to talk about this thing. You know, we definitely messed up on the image generation. And I think it was mostly due to just like not thorough testing. There's a crazy shirt to be wearing. I don't even know how you get in. know how you get into a meeting with someone as powerful and wealthy as Sergey Brin wearing that like you just wear you wear a jacket and you get in it's hot you take your jacket off you're just I was not expecting that that is

so insane that's very very funny it's a Bay Area thing John yeah it's not notable I mean this stocks jump 6% today Barron's put out a report today just saying the title is buy Google stock yep alphabet has been the clear AI winner, which is just funny because earlier this year, like, people weren't saying, people were saying they're the AI loser. Yeah. So Barron's is saying, actually, they have been, yeah, they have been the clear AI winner. Open AI's hardware division, says Mark German, built around Johnny Ives secretive startup, has ramped up the hiring of Apple engineers. The group has brought on about 40 new people in the last month or so, with many of them coming from

Apple's hardware group. Yeah, hearing that Schulte interview, I'm disappointed. I don't think we're getting ads from Anthropic anytime soon. I don't think we're going to get a mobile device. 40 people, that does not seem like cause for concern for Apple. I mean, I can't imagine how big their hardware group is, but it has to be, you know, in the thousands, I would imagine. Yeah, let's try to find out.

It's a huge organization. So Open AI is poaching left and right from Apple's hardware engineering group, hiring around 40 directors, managers, and engineers in the last month from nearly every relevant Apple department. Mark German says it's remarkable. So from what I've heard, this is Mark German, Apple is none too pleased about Open AIs poaching and some considerate a problem. The hires include key directors, a fairly senior designation, as well as managers and engineers, and they hail from a wide range of areas. Camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon device testing, and reliability industrial design, manufacturing, audio, smartwatches, vision pro development software.

They got one from every single, they sampled every single division, I suppose. I is estimating that Apple has between 15,000 and 20,000 hardware engineers in total. 15,000? That seems like a lot. I don't know. In other words, Open AI is picking up people from nearly every relevant department. It's remarkable, says Mark German. I wonder how the comp structured, how everything will come together on those teams. I mean, there's a lot of people from Apple who going over to Open AI, it's a Greenfield project. It's probably really fun, probably really exciting, probably not the most mercenary scenario. If you're working at Apple and you're excited about AI

and you've been there for the last three years watching all this progress happen at the application layer and the model layer and not being thrilled with the progress happening at the hardware layer, this is like a, yeah, just a wide open opportunity to be working right at that intersection of the models and the hardware. There's a lot of AI engineers who have made moves because they don't want to be a GPU poor company.

And it's weird because Apple's in this scenario where they're partnering with Gemini now. They're clearly going to survive. It's not a serious threat, at least not yet, maybe if this device is incredible. But right now, Apple looks pretty strong. From an AI perspective, it's got to be one of the worst gigs because you were in this sort of like openly hostile environment to LLMs, to scaling, to building large GPU cluster. And then, yeah, they're sort of playing catch up now, but they're certainly not calling up Oracle for, you know, a trillion dollars of compute. Sam Altman replied to one of our cards we put up on November 22nd. Sam Altman replied and said, cannot believe this was only two years ago.

Subjectively, subjectively feels like five. Yeah, what a turnaround to go from defenestrated to back in the, back in the seat and so much and have so much control over the organization. that you're able to raise at massive valuations, strike, broker all these deals, move the entire market, just a remarkable run. Yeah, and put on, put on such a masterclass in dealmaking that people are now sitting here being like, there's no way that this would be a $500 billion company

if Sam wasn't in the driver's seat. This is like a very like hacker news and turmoil segment, but I reverse engineer 200 AI startups, 146 are selling you repackaged, chat GPT, and Claude with new UI. Basically, the thesis of this article is that this fellow wrote a piece of code that looks at the marketing copy and says, what are they claiming, and then looks at the calls that happen when you actually interact with their AI feature. So if there's a chat bot on this particular startup's website and you are near chatting

with it, and you look in. into the trace that's happening in Chrome. Is it going to the startup server, or is it going to OpenAI server? Or is it going to Anthropics server? That's telling. And then there's also a little bit of API fingerprinting. Basically, Open AI has a specific pattern

of rate limiting, and it's exponential. So if you're spamming the Open AI API, according to a unique pattern, tell you, hey, you've sent too many messages, cool off for one minute. And then the next time you do it, cool off for two minutes. The next time, go off for four minutes, then eight minutes, then 16, right, and it gets exponentially longer.

The shape of that curve and the specific timings are unique to open AI. And so if I'm a startup and I have the exact same back off and timeout curve, well, then it's probably just open AI under the hood. At least that's the claim that's being made here. And so the finding in this article is that 73% had a significant gap between the claimed technology and the actual implementation. And so out of the 200 AI startups that this fellow analyzed, 54 companies either had accurate technical claims. They said, hey, we're using, like we have a custom AI model that we trained, and they did. Or they're transparent about their stack. They say, hey, this is a rapper.

Like, we're a rapper company. And so, you know, our AI is powered by ChatGPT. We're partnered with OpenAI. We're partnered with Anthropic or whatever. Now, 146 companies, that's 73%. It's a very cool study. But there's tracks with exactly, like I would guess that 73% of AI startups are just re-skinned. Yes.

And so 19% of the overall companies, the 38 that were analyzed in this study, found that the startup said they had in-house models, and it was actually fine-tuned public models. So this author claims that after posting this, seven founders reached out privately. Some were defensive. Some were grateful. They asked for help transitioning their marketing from proprietary eye to built with the best-in-class APIs. One VC reached out and said, like, I'd like you to audit my portfolio because I have been told that I was investing in companies that were training their own AI, and I made the investment on that assumption. And if I'm being lied to, then that's potentially, that's potentially securities fraud. I mean, I've seen pitches for companies that where they've said, like, proudly, like, you should invest in this because we're not training our own model.

It would actually be a mistake. And there's another company that's a competitor to us that is training their own model. And you don't want to invest in them. You want to invest in us because we're going to burn your dollars. Yeah, we're going to much better economics. Timeline is in turmoil over nucleus for IVF. And he put up a subway campaign that says IQ is 50% genetic. Height is 80% genetic.

I completely disagree with that one. It's entirely skill-based for me. The genes did not matter. I had to grind for this view, grind my growth plates. Have your best baby is what it says. And it says IVF done right in the subway all over New York City. I think it was intentionally trying to make some percentage of the population angry to drive enough energy and attention. I would call it rage bait.

So I would call it rage bait marketing, not necessarily rage bait product. level. But IVF as a category is a controversial category. It's much easier to wrap it in a campaign that will go viral for upsetting reasons. You can upset people and you can get a lot of attention from that. This is an example from Kath Koravec. She says, so eugenics is profitable now. And so being able to wrap something that is just a, you know, a scientific process that's been worked on for a long time. Seems to be somewhat friend.com inspired. And apparently they're not actually. they're not able to offer the service in New York. So it's really just an image of a controversial phrase on a New York subway is more likely to go viral. So you do it there because it looks like you're on the global stage. There's a high density of people that have a large following. Audience, yeah, following.

And so it's just the way to start a viral trend and own the moment. It's the reason why so many TikTokers are in Manhattan now doing stuff like man on the street stuff. It's just like it's it has more like aura almost. Every biotech founder should be seeing this and understanding how to get one-tenth the mind share of nucleus. I have a playbook for you below. A lot of people are like, I love the playbook. I don't love this example because the company is getting dragged.

I don't know if it's good or bad with the rage bait thing. I think usually it's a negative thing. But it's a big debate because Sishwan Mala posted a long essay all about the claims made by nucleus. Kian says everything loves. levied unto nucleus by Sichuan Mala is false, worse than false. It appears to be architected by a competitor that has repeatedly published misstatements and inaccuracies. Sichuan has compromised, but it gets worse.

Yeah, to be clear, no evidence has been provided that it was being levied by a competitor. Yes. That's purely an allegation that has no, there's no proof. Yes, yes, exactly. The thing here is it appears that the customer reviews are potentially fictitious. And if you're selling a service that allows people to pick their baby

and you're showing reviews from happy customers that may or may not be real people at all, that just feels deeply wrong. So I think that one of the first things that they could have done, I don't believe they have, is just say, like, no, our reviews are real. we used AI imagery because the real people didn't want their identity online tied to this service for privacy reasons. One of the core tensions in this industry is the fact that most companies

recognize they're working on an incredibly sensitive topic. They know the general population will need to be slowly and tactfully acclimated to the idea of advanced family planning. Nucleus is perceived as polluting the commons with their deliberately inflammatory marketing. Their virality comes at the cost of increased skepticism for the whole industry. A lot of folks were not very happy about that. Yeah, they also apparently, apparently they hired two people that had a non-competes for 18 months. Those people just immediately started on working on Nucleus. Nucleus claimed that they weren't competitive so that the non-compete didn't apply.

Anyways, very messy, very messy story. If I'm a potential customer of Nucleus at this point, and I see just these series of exchanges, I'm certainly going to wait and see how things evolve versus signing up to use this service. The latest nanobanana model has officially crossed the line. I no longer implicitly trust photos anymore. And sometimes I can't even definitively claim its AI now.

I totally agree. I saw this picture. And my first thought was like that's got to be AI specifically because I don't think Sam is just walking down the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the day. Yep. It's like probably terrible from a security standpoint. But it looks photorealistic.

If you put the photo into Gemini, Gemini will tell you, if you say, is this AI, Gemini will tell you, yes, according to the Synth ID, water molecule detection tool, this image was generated in whole or in part with Google AI. Of course, we've seen previous images where if you turn up the contrast and the saturation all the way, You can see kind of the rainbow, like zebra pattern, basically, that's embedded in there very subtly. But yeah, I mean, this is pretty, pretty photo reel.

And so, you know, stay safe out there. Joe, Wisenthall asked Nanobanana to create a really annoying LinkedIn profile. Zuno was talking about. And I couldn't tell, is this a real person? I have no idea because at this point, we're way past the touring test for images in the sense that this looks perfectly. edited, but this could also just be a straight-up a screenshot. I would need to fact-check this. I don't do small talk.

I do deep dives. My journey is a quantum leap through the liminal spaces of tech and spirituality. Chief visionary officer, TEDx speaker, professional storyteller, democratizing the metaverse one Dow at a time. Ten-X growth alchemist. What's up with Brian Johnson? He's starting a new protocol?

Is he going to Taco Bell Drive-through? Is this a real photo? Is this AI again? It has to be AI. a very funny, funny photo. This was my take was that, you know, if he's really changed by his journey, he must come out of it liking at least one fast food restaurant. And Alexis says, those shrooms spiritually healed him in a way that has him living moss now. The Live Moss tagline was really fantastic. Really good. Yeah. Guy who doesn't want to be old. It seems like we'll get age reversing tech right when I'll be old. How favorable. Guy who thinks it is different this time, but this time it's different.

This is insane past. Amy Gurley, huge congratulations to Bill Gurley for receiving the Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award. A remarkable honor for a remarkable Longhorn. Congratulations, Bill. Well, well, well, deserved. Congratulations. This, this made my day.

Everyone was, everyone was wondering if he was going to make it. Yeah, it was kind of the elephant in the room. It was a hugely hotly debated. There was, what, $10 million in liquidity betting on this, whether or not he would make it? million yeah it was sort of it was sort of the long horn in the room yeah yeah exactly it was it was a huge deal but he did it he pulled it off keller said that he's launched zipping points he can pick up packages and deliver them autonomously with the zip line autonomous drones this is the this is the private plane for your burrito folks it's arrived we're here we're in the future future plane the

flying car is here and it will deliver you chapolet in 15 minutes in four minutes while it's still warm. So here's a zip grabbing a package from one of our restaurant partners. It'll take so many cars off the road over the coming years. That's great news for environmentalists, for congestion, for anyone who wants to be able to really let it loose on the roads. If we're getting less congestion, maybe the speed limit goes up to 80 miles an hour, maybe 120, maybe 160. Maybe we get up to 200 and you can really let it loose. Well, you need to prove that you're at a certain address in order to get stuff delivered there because it's such a funny dimension to mess with people and just be like hey look on your lawn and there's just like a burrito a burrito just chilling

well people do that with pizzas right they prank call like a dozen pizzas delivered to this address all paying cash this is like a famous prank and then you show up and it's like I don't need all these pizzas I'm being pranked imagine how cool it will be to shoot one of these out of the sky to get a free meal, going hunting for your Chipotle Burrito. That, of course, is extremely cyberpunk and hilarious, but it will be massively illegal. We're regulated by the FAA, so the consequences are similar to shooting at a 737 as it's taking off from the airport. Not a good idea. Also, communities love the service. And I imagine he's not saying the details, but if you shoot at a 737 as it's taking off from an airport, I think you're going to jail for a long time. And I think

you will not just be able to shoot one of these out of the sky and pick up a free burrito with a 22. Thank you for supporting us, listening to this show. Wherever you listen, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be off on Wednesday and Thursday, no show Wednesday, no show Thursday, but we will be back on Friday for Black Friday, and we will be taking you on a whirlwind tour of the e-commerce world. We have some very exciting stuff planned for that. So we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.