TBPN Live - Weekly Recap: GPT-5, Apple Sitting on $100B, Disney Enters The AI Race, Marc Andreessen

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

(00:00) - Intro (00:04) - Microsoft Cloud Outpaces AI (23:08) - Disney’s AI Dilemma (37:18) - What Apple Should Do with $100B Share Buyback (49:37) - Howard Stern Canceled After Decades On Air (53:51) - OpenAI Releases Open Source Model (01:05:45) - Marc Andreessen (a16z) (01:41:13) - AI Model Whiteboard Breakdown (01:57:19) - GPT-5 Review Ft. Rahul Sonwalkar (Julius AI) 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/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comFollow 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 TVPN. Microsoft's blockbuster earnings last week. They blew out earnings. It was very exciting. They cemented its status as one of the biggest winners in the artificial intelligence boom. We knew this. Sautja had carved out just a massive amount of territory. GitHub Pote co-pilot.

First, real major breakthrough product that was monetizing on top of GPT 3.5. Great product, obviously led by Nat Friedman when he was there. Last we heard it was at around half a billion in ARR, but that was two months ago, so it's probably billions now. Yeah, probably bigger. And then the crazy Open AI deal, they got in very early. They have this massive revenue share. They have an ownership.

They get a copy of any software that Open AI writes basically or acquires. That's kind of crazy. And so. Sotia did seemingly one of the best deals of all time for Microsoft. Potentially. Yeah. I think so. It's hard to, I mean, it's an awkward situation now.

And it's a really hard decision. Sam is, you know, renegotiating the deal. Yep. And Ben Thompson was noodling on this like, should they take the money now or should they play it more like a venture style bet? What is the role of the CEO of a $4 trillion public company where the shareholders have different expectations? They're not seeing, if you hold Microsoft stock, you're not feeling like you're an LP in a venture fund. Yeah. So if the CEO comes to you and says, hey, look, we're taking the cash flow now.

We're going to divot in some of this out. We're selling down the position. We're thinking strategically about this as opposed to just we want the IS multiple. We want to ring the gong on the deal. That could be reasonable. So obviously we're tracking where that goes. But they also have Clippy, generational precursor to potentially all the AI agents, the original AI agent, Clippy, potentially make him come back.

The original superintelligence. The original super intelligence. And that was the first time they had to move the goalpost. And this is why we're worried. about getting paper clipped. Because Clippy will become too strong. I mean, with the power of Open AI and Microsoft Azure, anything's possible there. So anyway, outside the AI race, Microsoft is minting money from corporate customers spending on regular technology, long a sweet spot for the company. Many companies are shifting from buying their own IT equipment to renting it

from Microsoft through its cloud's computing service. They are also renting more standard issue computing stuff, hard drives for data storage, for example, to support their AI efforts. And so So this is the key stat from the earnings call that the Wall Street Journal is highlighting, and then we'll kind of dig into this number and what it means because there's a lot of different explanations for what could be going on. But Microsoft and the CFO and CEO didn't necessarily give all the context that we'd like to set this definitively, but I think there's some really good theories floating out there. So the quote from the Wall Street Journal is a large chunk of the recent strong growth in Microsoft's

cloud business called Azure stems from that. more than half of Azure's 33% revenue jump in the company's March quarter came from non-AI services. While the company didn't give a comparable breakdown, a comparable breakdown of the cloud unit's 39% growth in its June quarter, it said that the core infrastructure business, Microsoft's lingo for its non-AI cloud business, was the driver. Jordi? A massive win for enterprise SaaS, just good old-fashioned SaaS. There we had some theories. So the thing, it's not SaaS.

Yeah. They're not selling SaaS. People migrating from on-prem to... It's what's called infrastructure as a service. Yeah. So there's software as a service. That's when you go and get teams or you go and get a subscription to Excel in the cloud or Outlook in the cloud.

That's software as a service. I was saying more traditionally someone else using... Yes, yes. Using it as infrastructure as a service. Then there's also platform as a service. That's like Heroku on ADUS. where you go and you deploy an app. You could think of maybe even like a replet

as like a platform as a service almost where they're hosting you, but they're not just providing you the raw infrastructure. Azure's core infrastructure business is essentially infrastructure as a service. IAAS is the term. And that means, oh, you want some CPUs and some hard drives and some Ethernet cables

and moving stuff around data transfer. You had an interesting thesis offline earlier. Yes. You prompted to people in the internet era. buying a computer they hear about the internet they're like hey I think this might be a thing I should get a computer yes just buy a computer yes and now you could see something you know where companies say hey this AI thing might be big we should get on the cloud yeah yeah you want to set yourself up for it and I think if you

have a whole bunch of data in some sort of on-prem you know you have a data center for all of your data in a bunch of hard drives and you have CPUs that can do different workloads and data workloads. Maybe you're using some SaaS on top of that. But you realize that you're never going to be in a position to buy 100,000 H-100s, and you're going to wind up being a leaser of that for some small fine-tuning run. Or just using other people's application layer.

Totally, yeah. And so the integration that comes from being in the Azure ecosystem, that could be a driver. There's a few others. When I think about the core, the AI Azure services, I think of that almost as, you know, it is SaaS. Like if you go to Azure and you say, I'd like to put my credit card down

and I wanna be able to use the GPT4 API. And I also wanna be able to use Lama 3. And I also wanna be able to be able to use Deepseek. And I wanna be able to call all these APIs within my product. I almost think of that as tokens as a service. Like it is SaaS, but it's, something else. And I think these token factories, I think this idea of how much revenue are you

generating from your token generation business is really what we're talking about when we talk about Azure's core AI products versus the infrastructure. But there's a bunch of interesting wrinkles that could be going on within the classic core infrastructure business. So this, of course, is virtual machines. You just want a Linux box with a CPU to host a website. That's something that you do on Azure, storage, networking. Okay, I want to store all my data. You could go to AWS and store an S3. You could go to Google, store in BigQuery. You could also go to Azure and fire up any sort of storage database or just raw hard drives. And then networking, moving stuff around. So this is the infrastructure as a service versus tokens as a service. They're higher level

AI APIs. But so GPUs are, so the question is like, why is their infrastructure as a service growing faster than their tokens as a service product? You would think that Microsoft is going to their enterprise clients and saying like you need to build AI, you need to bring AI into your products and we have all the best APIs. So just buy tokens from us. And you think that that would be the boom. Well, couldn't the other factor here be that they are massively supply constrained on the GPU side, and they have this, you know, multi-tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars of backlog that they can't fulfill. Meanwhile, they had a, you know, more kind of like predictability on the traditional data center

cloud side that they were able to scale up to. So that feels like a potentially like a pretty big driver here. Yes, definitely. But it's still shocking. And so as companies come out and they say, okay, we are scaling our, our, you know, hardware and software foot, our technology footprint broadly, going into this AI era, we're excited about this stuff. Well, we're also going to need more databases. We're going to need more data in those databases. We're going to need more CPU workloads. We're going to need

more of everything. And Microsoft's like, yeah, of course, we can definitely get you a whole bunch more hard drives and a whole bunch more CPUs. We're not constrained on that at all. And the KAPX is keeping up so they're able to service that. There's also an interesting thing where tons of AI stuff can technically be happening inside the core infrastructure bucket. You just don't necessarily know what's in there. So some examples are like if you're, let's say you're a pure AI company or you're doing or you have a new AI workload. You could go to Azure and say, hey, I'm going to do a whole bunch. I'm going to do my own AI thing, but I need a ton of storage for data because I'm going to be training on it. I'm going to need a bunch of networking to move that data around

when I do a training run. So that could be driving core infra up. And then also, if a bank hypothetically spins up a huge cluster of H100 GPU virtual machines to fine tune an open source model like MetaSlamma 3, this would show up as core infrastructure, not Azure AI services. And so that's like textbook AI, boom, but it's just happening in the wrong bucket. And then I also saw a post that potentially chat GPT count. as Azure core infrastructure, because they're not, they're not serving chat GPT through the

Azure AI API. It's not this like snake eating its tail or a boros. It's like, opening I just came and said, give us a whole bunch of them. The headline itself ends up becoming pretty misleading. Exactly. And again, this is, this was probably, you know, a lot of people were reading into AWS's growth, you know, the reports that, you know, Andy or the comments Andy had given on AWS last week. And the big thing that AWS is missing is having a chat GPT

building on top of AWS, right? There's no dominant consumer product at least at that scale. ChatGPT, I think as of this morning, somebody was estimating getting to a billion weekly actives this

year, which, again, those types of products don't, you know, the power law is like extreme. Yeah, so if you, I mean, I believe Anthropic is pretty tightly hitched to Amazon and I think the next Big cluster from Anthropic will be powered by Amazon for the most part and so they're getting there certainly on the if they're building all the all the infrastructure yeah, but again that would show up on on core token generation side like more of the no no so if Anthropic goes to AWS and says we want you to build a huge data center to serve Claude code for us. Okay, that's That's going on an infrastructure, not actually APIs.

But when you go to AWS and you're just some random company and you say, I need a database and I need some storage and I need a web server and I also need a bunch of tokens from whatever model you can serve me. And they're like, we got Claude. And then you're like, yeah, let's pull the Claude tokens into my app. It's a good model. That's token as a service. What? It's a good model, sir.

It's a good model, sir. One thing that stood out to me that has stood out to me across this year with Microsoft is they've done. more layoffs this year than the past three years before that combined. So 2022, 2022, and 2024. That's crazy. So this just shows the level that Satya is operating at is like the company has been on a tear this year, you know, performing exceptionally well. And he's still thinking about how do we get more and more fit. And yeah. So to be clear, literally every piece of Microsoft business is growing and at a very very solid clip. So Microsoft 365 commercial cloud business, which houses remotely access

versions of Word, Excel, other productivity software. That grew at 16% from a year earlier. So that's, I mean, that's like, it's not the most insane growth rate, but that's still crazy because you think about like, who doesn't have Excel that needs it? Like, who are these people who are like, you know what, 2025 is the year that my company's getting on Excel. We're doing it. Well, it's just crazy when you compare it to AWS growing at 19%. Obviously, very different scales. Yeah, totally. You would think you don't want to be in the same ballpark as...

And so that was the news of the AWS, if you missed it. They beat earnings. They did very well, but they weren't growing as fast as the others, the other cloud platforms, Google and Microsoft. And so the Amazon stock traded down. And, I mean, the narrative around AWS is different. Microsoft has Open AI, Microsoft Research, and has GitHub co-pilot, and is like really moving things forward in the AI world. And Satcha is seen as someone who goes in the Dorcasch podcast and talks about AI.

And it's clearly like really on top of it. And obviously, Google has Gemini and a million different products and strategies around rolling that out and staying on the frontier. I mean, they have a frontier lab internally. And Amazon is just not there either on the partnership side. or on the core, like training frontier lab side. And so it's a little bit, it's a little bit of both. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster.

Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. We had a great week in New York celebrating Figma and the IPO. Stocks been up, stock's been down, wild ride, but we are still very happy to be partnered with Dillon Field and the Figma team. And I'm super excited to see what happens next because truly it was Thursday was such,

an incredible day. Just getting the, if you didn't get a chance to listen, we talked with every the seed lead investor all the way through, of course, Andrew Reed, who led the sea. And then capped it off with Dylan and also got to speak with Lynn Martin, president of New York Stock Exchange, as well as Chris, the CTO of Figma. So really incredible day. And it's just very proud of the Figma team. Yeah, it was awesome. In one sense, investors might prefer to see AI businesses driving growth. That, after all, is what has driven the company's valuation through the roof. But tech companies' stocks arguably hinge on too much on AI to the extent that they can keep increasing other revenue streams. They are on more

solid financial ground. Of course, none of that means anything if all of the growth is coming from Open AI. But at the same time, does anyone really think ChatGBTT is Yahoo anymore? like they're generating what a billion dollars a month in revenue at this point everyone uses the app it's installed everywhere like that that that token demand is not going anywhere that infrastructure demand is not going anywhere so on the other side amazon is down uh just over nine percent since thursday since thursday earnings um and then this morning uh unrelated they announced that they're shutting down wondering the podcast studio They acquired in late 2020.

Wait, why did Amazon? Why did, and the market's way up. Wow, NASDAX's up 1.8% today after a brief sell-off on Friday. Good news. Fair market is over. Yeah, we were so over, but we're already so back. It's fantastic. Love them that happens.

Markets go up, markets do go down. But the march of technological progress, the arrow points in but one direction. That's right. And its march is relentless. There is another silver lining for Microsoft, non-earned, AI sales can be substantially more lucrative than AI ones, non-AI gross margins within Azure were around 73%. Wow. That compares to 30 to 40% gross margin for AI. He estimated because of the huge cost of setting up AI infrastructure that makes sense. You get more margin on just a bunch of

CPUs and databases that you've harnessed and built everything around. Also, you know, you still have that interesting dynamic where it seems like all of the cloud, the hyperscalers, like don't really compete on price because they're all pretty comparable but they seem to all have really good market that's what it seems like yeah uh i'm not exactly sure if there's something else that's more fundamental going on um and the coca cola dynamic is like i don't know if we uh it's hard to tell what conversations were off air or on air but but john last week uh forget when was describing how uh you would think that coca cola or Pepsi would decide to get aggressive on price to try to gain market

chair and get people to switch, but ultimately that would just lead to a price war with both companies, you know, massively eroding their, their, you know, margins. And then all the R.C. Cola coded then. Yeah. Every, yeah, every. So if you have a fierce competitor, consider entering an unspoken gentleman's, maybe a gentleman's agreement. It's not, it's not even a gentleman's agreement. I mean, it's not, it is unspoken, but it is a nature, it is a natural game theoretic Nash equilibrium. Like, it is the natural state of things that both sides understand that to go to war would

be mutually assured destruction. And so they don't even need to talk about it. And so instead, they both agree to keep prices where they are and instead compete on marketing. Compete on marketing, really. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they don't reform.

They don't reform, they don't reformulate that often. They mostly compete on, on marketing. and that allows them to have this like continually compounding business. And that's why it's in the Warren Buffett portfolio. Coca-Cola. He's been in there for a long time. And Pepsi's been doing one too. And he was a DAU, of course.

He was a DAU of Coke. Still. Diet Coke or Coca-Cola? I think Coca-Cola. No, Diet Coke. Oh, he's a Diet Coke guy? I feel like he was a Coca-Cola guy. Warren?

Yeah. Look that up. I want to know. Anyway, I'll keep reading from this Wall Street Journal report. Luckily for Microsoft demand for lucrative non-AI services appears to be reasonably strong measures of broad IT spending there we go you know why it's a regular Coca-Cola you know why it's because it has corn syrup in it it's literally corn grown from mother nature from the earth and then syrup it's what you put on pancakes like it's the most

wholesome combination of of foods you could imagine maze this is something that's been grown in America for generations. And corn is so popular in Nebraska, right? It's grown everywhere. It's culturally significant. Take corn and the syrup that you put on pancakes. It's the most American, most wholesome ingredients. Not this like refined sugar, this crazy stuff from somewhere else. No, it's American. American corn syrup. There's nothing. It's Lindy. Corn syrup. Yeah. Sea oil. Ced oil. Cater's are in disbelief. That we need to return to corn syrup. None of this, none of whatever's in this Coke Zero. Yeah, your grandpa was drinking corn syrup.

Yeah. Oh, and it's too good for you because you read a couple posts on X.com. Think you understand something better than corn. Delicious corn, corn on the comm. Something you have on a barbecue. Oh, now it's too good for you. Can I possibly have corn? What's next?

No apple pie? What's next? No rotisserie chicken No turkey on Thanksgiving Somebody's going to listen to the show for the first time today And just go raging For you promoting corn syrup consumption It's as American as apple pie

And Warren Buffett knows best He's doing great And of one study Sort of a Brian Johnson Yeah He's sort of the Brian Johnson He's the original don't die Yeah

And he's been doing fantastically on that front Yeah He's great Anyway Measures of broad IT spending were fairly muted at the start of the year as companies pondered the impact of Donald Trump's tariffs and concerns bubbled about the health of the global economy. Attitudes appear to have improved somewhat in the second quarter, though a UBS survey of cloud computing customers in July showed a clear improvement in tone about spending. Most were moving forward with efforts to migrate computing work to the cloud. They're like, this internet thing is real.

It's real. We've got to put the data in the cloud. We held back as long as we could. We could. But it's 2025. We have no more excuses. The tariffs that's come and gone. Now's the time.

We were resisting the 21st century. Yeah. But we're a quarter of the way through. Put the data online. It's not going away. So let's use the computer online, in the cloud. Put the docks in the cloud. Put it in the cloud.

Just put the docs in the cloud. Put the fries in the bag. Anyway, and put your compliance process on Vanta. Automate compliance-managed risk, improve trust. Vantta'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. In the longer term, there is a little question that cloud computing is going to grow in ways that play to Microsoft strengths. Its rivals, mainly Amazon.com, and Google are growing quickly too, but don't have all of Microsoft's broad corporate software offerings that enhance its cloud footprint,

even outside of AI. Amazon on Thursday said its cloud unit grew at 17.5% in the June quarter, disappointing investors and forcing CEO Andy Jassy to answer questions to answer questions about Azure's outperformance. Why are you getting beaten? You created this category. You created this product. Why is Sotia Nadella getting you? You are the cloud. You are the cowboy of the cloud. And you're getting you're getting put out to pasture. Recent quarterly earnings in Azure. favor were really just moments in time he said chart John the uh oh yeah wow that that's worse than I thought I wasn't sure we had that pulled I mean it would have been hard to predict five years ago that we'd be sitting here with with Microsoft at four trillion and and uh

what's name is on it I think 2.2 trillion 2.2 2.27 2. 2.27 okay so almost double still magnificent, but... So magnificent, but you've got to keep fighting. Got to keep fighting. The company's stock fell 8% Friday, and it looks like it's still sliding. The question for Microsoft's investors then is less about its prospects than its valuation. The company's stock is up nearly 40% since the beginning of April, pushing its forward price earnings multiple above 33. That's a bit richer than Amazon and a large margin above Google, which is trading it a multiple of roughly 18 times.

That should be easier for investors to die. digest because while Microsoft's AI growth is real, it is far from the only thing going right at the software giant because they got Excel. They got core infrastructure. They got AI, APIs, they got tokens of the service, infrastructure as a service, and software as a service. They got it all. They got it all.

It's going well over at Microsoft. They won't need to call McKinsey, but maybe, maybe Amazon.com will. My question, is AI a sustaining innovation for Disney, or is it a disruptive innovation? Where will Disney be in 10 years, in the medium term? Obviously, you're going to be able to generate a lot of AI slop. You might be able to infringe on their IP. They might get paid by Google VO when you generate a Mickey Mouse AI slop at it. They might get a couple pennies, but will it be good or bad for them?

Children's, you know, I could see them making a product that allows you to make a, you know, book or a story for your kid that actually, you know, and they get some type of revenue. They should get revenue. And I think that they will through the courts, especially because as like big companies, like you're not so. It's not this crazy. Oh, there's like a bunch of kids doing random things. Like they never had to go after the street artist on Venice Beach that would draw a picture. of Mickey Mouse and sell it to you for 20 bucks they that was never material to their business they had to go after Napster I had to go after Spotify yes I got them to draw me as Mickey Mouse really and then I performed a citizen's arrest I respect IP I have an IP respecter yes yes yes citizens arrest is underrated citizens arrest you're going to jail buddy this is for Bob this is for Bob Iger yeah so big question this feels like a moment where you want to be in founder

mode Bob Eager is one of the greatest CEOs of all time how will he navigate this the Wall Street Journal says is it still he's not the founder the founder died in 1966 Walt Disney you're claiming he died still he might be able to turn it on Sotianadella certainly was able to do it he's a he's navigating the AI the AI shift flawlessly we'll see what happens with Bob Eager and Disney Wall Street Journal says is it still Disney magic if it's AI the stakes are especially high for the studio caught between how to use artificial intelligence in the film process and how to protect its famed characters against it.

So there's a little anecdote that we'll kick it off with. When Disney began working on its new live-action version of its hit cartoon Malana, executives started to ponder whether they should clone its star Dwayne Johnson. The actor was reprising his role in the movie as Maui, a barrel-chested demigod. Have you seen Malana? No, you have not. Of course we know this. For certain days on set, Disney had a plan in place that we

wouldn't require Johnson to be there at all under the plan they devised. Johnson's similarly buff cousin, Tanoa Reed, who is 6'3, 250 pounds, would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company metaphysics to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that would be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage, a digital twin, essentially, digital double that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once. Wayne calls up his cousin, you want a job? I need you to be me. Yeah, hit the gym, buddy. Yeah. Better be jacked.

Get on a cycle. But yeah, I mean, these, these, these movie schedules are famously tight, three months in and out, crazy schedules. And then you move on to the next one. There's that famous Henry Cavill story where he filmed Superman, wrapped, moved on to another movie where he had to grow out a mustache. He grew out a mustache and a beard. And then they said, hey, we got to do some reshoots.

You got to come back to Superman. And he came back. But he couldn't shave his mustache and beard. So they had to change it in. in CGI and it looked terrible, probably not a problem now with deep fakes. That's actually a good use of AI and something that probably shouldn't be very controversial, but obviously everything in AI is controversial right now. But we will continue with Disney.

They say, what happened next was evidence that Hollywood's must discuss, much discussed, much feared AI revolution won't be an overnight robot takeover. Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed. what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every, that the studio couldn't ultimately claim ownership over every element in the film if AI generated parts were in there.

So if there's AI training data from a DreamWorks film in there, and they use the DreamWorks training data to make a Disney film, even if it looks like Dwayne the Rock Johnson, DreamWorks might come knock it and say, give us a royalty. I think that's the risk. But the lawyers are having fun, maybe. Full employment for lawyers over at Disney, clearly.

Disney and Metaph has spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract to work on the digital double, but none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer. They went and shot it. A deep fake, Dwayne Johnson is just one part of a broader technological earthquake hitting Hollywood. Studios are scrambling to figure out how simultaneously

they can use AI in the filmmaking process and how to protect themselves against it. Is it sustaining or disruptive or both? Can't be both, but we'll see. While executives see a future where the technology shaves tens of millions of dollars off a movie's budget, they are grappling with a present filled with legal uncertainty, fan backlash, and a wariness toward embracing tools that summon Silicon Valley view as their next century replacement. And if you are trying to sell an AI tool into Hollywood, you've got to get on Adio.

Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. and you can get started for free. So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is surveying members on how they use the technology. Studio chiefs are shutting down efforts to experiment for fear of angering show business unions on the eve of another contract negotiation

and no studio stands to gain or lose more in the outcome than Disney, the home of Donald Duck, Bell, Buzz Lightyear, Stitch, and countless others, which has churned out some of the most valuable and protected creative works in over the past century. So my take on this. So two years ago, I was hanging out with the founder of a very large generative AI image generation company. And he was telling me that by 2025, anyone with a laptop and an

internet connection could generate a full Hollywood movie about anything they want with a single prompt. And it was a hilarious conversation because we were on a Zoom call and his internet wasn't working. And it was the classic example of like the technology is amazing, but we got a lot stuff to iron out. So anyway, extremely aggressive timeline, but obviously things are going to change for Hollywood. So my question is, will Disney benefit? It feels like a moment to be in founder mode, but Walt Disney died in 1966. So basically everyone believes that Meadow will benefit from AI, even if they miss the train on owning the next dominant consumer tech platform. But if Disney got really AI-pilled, what would that look like? I don't think they need to train their own foundation

model, just like they don't need to train their own, they don't need to build their own cinema cameras. They can just use IMAX when the time calls for IMAX. They can use Blender. When the time calls for Blender, they can use Houdini when the time calls for when the shot calls for some high level VFX. But they do need to rethink how they structure their business and negotiate with unions and underwrite content. They might need to go more risk on not just from a brand risk position, but taking more smaller bets. We're in this weird barbell world where everything seems like it's either a hundred bucks and it's shot on an iPhone. It's a viral like TikTok or it's a hundred million dollar blockbuster with like 50 million dollars of

fx actually that's kind of a low number it's usually like 300 million dollar production with 150 million dollar VFX and then no one sees it and it's a flop but then they hit every once in a while and they're great when they're good but it's this weird like venture style betting at the high end but there's nothing in the middle and maybe that's like the death of the art house film but i'm just wondering if in the age of AI like maybe there's this interim step where disney ladders down a little bit and gives like 10 filmmakers $10 million each and says, hey, you're still required to deliver a 90 minute full film, but you're doing it for 10 mil, and it's not quite Blair Witch level production,

one notch up. You got to be created. This is what me 24 is doing. Yeah, I'm really bullish on this idea that the, you know, historically like a TV show would film a pilot episode and they would use that to get the budget to shoot an entire season. And you can imagine now, even for film, you can just make the trailer ahead of time with AI. The other advantage that I think Disney has that's very real, just going in and why they're just broadly seem to be positioned very well here,

is that I think that broadly, like content customization will probably take off because you could, Disney can make a film now and then you could make millions of different variations of it that become interactive with like the underlying fan. So like imagine you're watching Moana but like your kid is in the film, is a character in the film and you can now do that at scale, right? And how much more would you pay as a parent to have something like that? I have a funny story about this. But last thing I'll say. So customization and just like democratizing like like basically making, making, being able to make variations of films I think is going to be big. I think just that the time, it's the same way it's so

difficult to make a new luxury brand. It's so difficult to create, it's easy to create IP. It's extremely difficult and time intensive to create valuable IP. And Disney's advantage is they have this sort of like 360 in that they can make a film and they can bring it to Disneyland, they can bring it to a cruise. They can create physical products around it. And so they develop IP in a way that new entrants are not, you know, they don't have the benefit of like having a Disneyland where they can make new experiences that that increase the value of that IP, right? So I think. So two things. One, if I were to go back, one of my favorite Disney properties is Star Wars, a New Hope, the very first film. If I went back and was like, let's customize that for me,

I don't know that I would make any changes. Like, do I really want a scene where Han Solo breaks the fourth wall and says, like, hey, John, like, I'm about to go, you know, save Luke at the Death Star? Like, that doesn't improve the product for me. I actually like that it's just the vision of George Lucas. So I don't know about customization being better for me. I don't know what I would change. But here's an example of how to make, like, a magical experience for a kid.

Like, imagine after a movie ends. Yeah. a kid could interact with a character and ask it questions in real time like about about the story or that's cool conversation with them and that's what I'm talking about like bringing that IP to life totally right now that exists and I was obsessed with this when I was a kid I would I would I would watch Star Wars and then I would read the the books that in the expanded universe and I remember even having books that were just like encyclopedias of every single ship this you could read into this a little bit more but we'll leave that where it is. But I would learn every single, every single ship. This is what a Star Destroyer does and it would have all this backlog and stuff. And so, yes, I agree with you. That's very cool. You finish the movie. And then you can just interview Luke about how does the lightsaber actually work. And he can talk about the Khyber crystals. That would be very cool. On the flip side, I had a very funny experience. I was watching a horror film in high school with a couple

friends and I grew up in Pasadena and this horror film just happened to take place in Pasadena. Like that's where they set the film because Pasadena, California is just like a place where you set films. It's just a real place. So if you've seen Kill Bill, which I know you haven't, but Kill Bill by Quentin Tarantino, there's a scene where, where Uma Thurman just shows up and it says at the bottom, Pasadena, California, because like that's where the character went. It exists in the real world. But this horror film that took place in Pasadena was terrifying because I was watching it. I was like, this is happening here and it's night and it's dark outside. And like now I'm so much more immersed. And so I was thinking back then that you could use like the IP address

of the of a connected, I think we were watching it on like a PS3, like a DVD player. Like you could you could use the DVD player to dynamically change the location of the establishing shot. So you're like this whole horror film is going to take place inside of like one house where there's like a monster in the house and it's going to be like the usual like they're upstairs they're downstairs there's blood there's you know someone's running and chasing like it could be any town USA but they usually they usually establishes like this is happening in amityville this is happening in you know some random town uh Lake placid right but they could easily just dynamically change that with a few establishing shots to just show you okay it's happening in Malibu. And now it's a lot scarier for you. So I think there's something interesting there,

but again, it has to be the work of like an tour. Yeah, it's not something you can copy and paste either because it works for some shows. But then others, like the place is so obviously the place that it would throw you off as a viewer. Exactly. And so I do think that the that the fully AI generated, fully custom content, that will exist, but it will exist on independent third party platforms. It won't be the domain of Disney. This will be something where if you, In the future, if you really want to see like, you know, AI generated stories about surfing in Malibu, like there will be an endless stream of those and you will be able to go and experience that particular content. And you can already kind of experience that because there's probably some Instagram person who makes really great content about surfing in Malibu.

And if you follow them, you get that vibe and that might be what you're into. And you can kind of like, and it's handled just by the great democratization of create, creativity. Yeah. And we should talk to Samir about this later. He's coming on the show. So we can talk about the future of content creation and whatnot. On the question of should Apple make a huge acquisition, Tim Cook actually addressed it in the earnings

call. He said something like, we've acquired around seven companies this year, and that's companies from all walks of life, not all AI-oriented. We're very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap. We're not stuck on a certain size of company, although the ones that we've acquired thus far this year are small in nature. And he said, like, we're acquiring one every few weeks, which is not quite seven per year. I mean, I guess that's like one a month, but a few weeks, sure.

So he's doing deals, but he's not looking at anything massive. And I think that actually makes sense. My question was, if you were the CEO of Apple and you had $100 billion burning a hole in your pocket. What are the other things that you could do with that money? Formula one team. You could buy every team and the division and every track and all the sponsors. I made a post about this joke. It's crazy. It's so much money. It's so much money. I made a post about this jokingly earlier this year. I still think it would be cool for Apple to just be an F1 in the way that Red Bull is. I think that'd be great. No, no, I agree. Yeah, I think that'd be great. The one thing culturally is like

Apple's brand is is very premium and very high end and I don't know if they could handle a few losing seasons this was the early bear case for Apple TV I was talking to someone of a very successful Hollywood producer and he was saying that the nature of the of Hollywood is like venture capital like it is a hits driven business if you don't accept that you're going to have massive flops an egg on your face and embarrassing moments, you will not make it. And just like any venture capitalist who is like, I only want to make investments where they won't blow up, you're not going to make it, right? Yeah, Mark Andreessen had a, there was a clip from an episode he did recently talking about

how he lose sleep over the companies you don't invest in, not the ones you invest in and don't work. Exactly. Exactly. And so you have to be risk on. You have to be risk on in Hollywood as you do in venture. And so the question was like, can Apple deal with spending $50 or $100 million on some show that completely flops and everyone's like this is a disaster? And they've navigated really well.

I think that they have had some flops, but they've kind of tucked those behind the scenes. Whereas Netflix has started to get more kind of, you know, people talk trash about what was that red notice or they did some massive movie with the rock that kind of flopped. They've done a few of these big movies that haven't done that well. And it's sort of like, oh, like, you know, they're, they're not, you know, God's gift to, you know, producing. But it doesn't matter because overall Netflix is doing very well. And all it takes is like one squid game to like carry the whole quarter, basically, just like adventure. Or like one, you know, you sign the friend's deal and then, or the office. And people are watching that like 20 years later.

So. And apparently, so F1 has surpassed half a billion dollars in box office earnings. as of last week. I mean, it's a fantastic movie. So that's an example of a home run. But it's not like they're doing that once a quarter by any means. Oh, and John Exley's in the chat. Shout out to John Exley.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to connect with him at our party in New York, but he did attend. You got to chat with him. A lot of the team got to chat with him. So thank you for all you do, John. We really appreciate you. The entire team is giving you a round of applause. General.

General of the chat. You've done a ton of work for us, and we really appreciate it. Anyway, if you had $100 billion burning a hole in your pocket at Apple, what would you do? I have a bunch of crazy ideas. Go through your list. So most people would just say, hey, you're going to benefit from AI because you are the window into all technology. And it doesn't matter if it's if it's generative video or or text. Like people will be consuming it on devices.

You sell devices. You'll be fine. Just like search did not destroy Apple. it actually made Apple stronger because people search on their iPhones. So most people would just say, hey, return it to the shareholders. Apple's already done that. They've returned over a trillion dollars to shareholders in the past 10 years. Those are kind of rough numbers, but it's basically that, which is an insane amount of money

to return to shareholders. But Samsung is worth $330 billion. They could buy the entire company, lever it up with two-thirds debt, and they would just own both sides of the smartphone market then. Probably extremely anti-competitive. I think Lena Kahn would have a connipion fit, but funny concept, funny concept. The other, the other idea is massively expand the retail footprint. So Apple right now, I was surprised by this.

How many retail stores do you think they have worldwide? I don't know, like 599 or 601. Did you look at that tell you this already? We talked about this morning. It's 535. So it's not that many. It's mostly in the tier one city is there's usually only like one. every city. They don't really, they don't take the Starbucks strategy where they put them across

the street from each other. But for $100 billion, they absolutely could. A hundred billion is enough to open 6,000 new Apple stores. So they would be 6,600. So they would be up around 7,000 stores, which for reference is as many subways as there are and as many CVS's as they are and as many 7-Elevens as there are in America. And so everywhere you see a subway, you can see an Apple store. And I feel like this would be a big upgrade for America. I feel like if you just walked around every American city where tier one, tier two, tier three city, you just see a beautiful sheet of glass and it's an Apple store on every corner in America. They could also acquire every firearms store in the country and turn them into Apple stores. They could do a take

private of Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at figman.com. I'm still buzzing from Thursday. It was a fantastic day. Absolutely fantastic. Anybody that is tuning in, anybody that is tuning into the show for the first time today is going to be hearing our ideas for Apple and just thinking these are some of the worst that we've ever heard. But they're definitely fun. Okay. So speaking of glass from the Apple stores, they could buy Corning, which makes Gorilla Glass. That's a $55 billion company. Then with the money left over, they could buy interdigital, which

owns all the patents on 5G and 6G so they could basically patent troll everyone else in the industry. Just get extremely anti-competitive. They could also, with the money that is left over, we're still in the first like, let's vertically integrate this company mode. They could also buy 10 rare earth or cobalt mines. So they own the supply chain there. And then they could also build four battery gigafactories and lock up the sapphire crystal supply chain that's used on the on the iPhone camera. So they could just completely own their entire supply chain

for $100 billion. And that's just one year, one year. And then the proposal was do this every year. The other thing that was interesting about Tay Kim's post is if you listen to the earnings call, Tim Cook and the team were very clear that they don't even want to finance like data center development themselves.

They're still working with these sort of like third party lenders to like capitalize them. And so again, Tim Cook is the king of efficiency. Yeah, he knows his business. Should we get into some of... No, I have one more. One more. So Open AI, they act will hire Johnny Ive.

They're coming out with something that's competitive. It's going to be some sleepless nights at Apple when that thing drops, right? It's going to be stressful because like maybe it doesn't go super well, but like, you know, it's a serious threat. Open AI is a serious company. They have a lot of customers. And they got Johnny off, your former goat, designer, ready to drop, you know, the next. And a bunch of former Apple employees that are now at Open AI. Amazing, amazing team over in hardware at Open AI.

So the question is, like, how do you fire back with your Apple and you have $100 billion to spend? Here's what you do. The cogs on an iPhone are less because they have a margin. So you take that $100 billion. You buy 200 million iPhones and you send a brand new iPhone to 200 million. million Americans. And you're just like, oh, how much are you charging? Johnny Ive and Open AI? Well, ours is free this year. We're doing a free iPhone for the entire year. They should just do something like that where it's like your 11th iPhone in a row is free. It's free. They'd probably

have 200 million people with free iPhones. And they're just like, yeah, we're actually, we want to keep you in this ecosystem. We like our services revenue. We're excited to be a platform. We're excited. We're just giving it back. We're just giving back. Can you imagine? I think that would also be extremely anti-competitive. I don't even know if there's a regulatory framework to stop that from happening. But, I mean, price competition is a real thing. And, like, if you discover that your competitor is undercapitalized and can't win a capital war, you could potentially cut prices so dramatically that it's like, yeah, the other phone's, like, cool, but, you know, this one's free.

I guess I'm staying in the blue bubble world. Tim Cook next earnings call. All right, we're going to buy all of the minds we depend on, and we're going to make the iPhone free. Stock just eats, like, 80%. He's like, I'm petty. I'm petty. And you know what, Johnny, I'm not going to let you win.

I would rather die that let you win. Yeah, I would destroy myself. Yeah, I've been reading a lot about cutting your nose to spite your face. And I'm pretty into it. I'm pretty into the strategy. Anyway, let me tell you about Vantampton. automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust, continuously Vantas 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. Go talk to the purple llamas, Vantta.com. Anyway, so Ben Thompson's been noodling on Apple and AI strategy. He had a rough go because he, I think he took some time off or shifted. He shifted his posting schedule right when all the earnings dropped. there was all this crazy stuff going on. So he's just writing about Apple earnings now, but he has, he still has some good takeaway saying, you know, even if they do, even if Apple does swoop in and buy Mistral, for example,

the overall point holds. Apple isn't going to compete with OpenAI Anthropic, MetaX, and Google on pursuing AI superintelligence. Like five extremely well-funded, extremely serious teams. Apple's going to go their own way, centered on their devices. and their direct relationship with their customers, at least as long as Cook is in charge. And anyone that's saying that Cook needs to step aside,

I think is in for a world of hurt because he's been on a generational run and he's solving the most important problem for that company, which is not the application layer in artificial intelligence. It's the supply chain and keeping the flow of iPhones coming. Making and selling phones. Make him put the phones in the boxes. Tim, he's doing it.

He's doing it. He's really he's really he's really underrated. He's been CEO longer than Steve Jobs was. No, I hope in this tenured CEO of Apple in history. He better be bringing some of these AI researcher comp packages in as as comps when he gets in front of the comp committee at Apple. Yeah, hey. That is true. He should definitely be getting a bump. If he does have researchers, I mean, he has he has AI researchers. They are improving different functionality. I feel like maybe I'm hallucinating this, but it's he does. I mean, he has a researcher. I mean, he has AI researchers. They are improving different functionality. I feel like maybe I'm hallucinating this, but it. I feel like, but he has, he has AI researchers. I It feels like the text-to-speech engine has gotten better on my phone. I listened to a semi-analysis article with the default Apple Safari text-to-speech, and it was very listenable. So I think we're getting better there. We have some breaking news about Sirius XM. They are canceling the Howard Stern Show. Can you call it a cancellation when the guy's 71 years old, and he's been doing it for 20 years?

They say it's no longer worth the investment. They've been paying him $100 million a year. that is a huge salary and that's what three four times Colbert wow that is that's big that's power power of uh of radio power of you know for the power law he's done fantastically so congrats to him he emerged during a time when you're looking for a new gig you're welcome to come and hang out at the ultradome you give you a max contract table next to Tyler and we'll we'll we'll bounce ideas off you yeah it's wild uh I really wonder where serious xm business goes right i know i know where this goes post aGI you're going to listen to every

hour every hour of howard stern i know you've listened to zero hours um but there's probably 20 000 hours in the catalog or something like that of howard stern content you could listen to it from the beginning do people listen to the back catalog ever absolutely not but serious xm is still a seven billion dollar company wow that's bigger than i would have thought I wonder, yeah, revenue, like how much of that cost. I mean, it makes sense to give him a huge slice of that. It is a talent-driven business, and he could go to Spotify. He could go somewhere else.

My question is, like, he is old. Will he retire or will he do a podcast or do something independent? Is there news? Now, they apparently did how much? Okay, you look that up while I tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service.

It's a vacation home, but better. So they did $8.6 billion in 2024 revenue, so they're trading at less than 1x revenue, which just says when you have a shrinking business, it is a rough place to be in. Growth, not a growth stock, I suppose. Yeah, I wonder how much of that is getting eaten up by talent. This is a trillion dollar stock if they have. Yeah, I wonder how much, I wonder what percent of serious XM content is like power loss, celebrity host red high salary contract versus essentially programmatic or AI content because

it's probably not even AI but if you're just like there's a there's a station on serious XM that's just the grateful dead and it just plays them the whole time like I don't think you need someone making a hundred million dollars to like randomly play grateful dead tracks like there's probably some grateful dead fan who manages that and picks the songs and orders them but like that could essentially be pseudo random. Maybe one day you go through the back catalog and then the new stuff and then you mix it up and then you play the hits or something. I don't even know if they have hits in that way. I know it's kind of a jam band. But I wonder of their content, of their tonnage. Is that the term tonnage? Is like the amount of content on the network? I wonder how much

of it is driven by these high high dollar deals and I wonder if they'll get a new a new host in the seat I wonder who this generation's Howard Stern is maybe it's like Tim Dillon or something some irreverent comic I think the thing I think the thing is as content is on demand fewer and fewer people are just turning on the radio or turning on the television and listening to whatever they whatever just happens to be playing yep and so if you take people that were subscribed to Howard Stern we're like you like you like you like Howard Stern. We're now just going to play this other person through his channel. Yeah. They're just going to be, they're just going to ask what's going on here.

Yeah. I mean, certainly if you have a specific car that has Sirius XM and it doesn't have Spotify and Howard Stern's new show is on Spotify because it's a podcast. I think you might stick around on Serious. Maybe they get someone new in the seat who's, you know, almost as good or can build a relationship. But it does seem like a challenge to fill. that, but also, you know, it's a lot of money to pay. So clearly it wasn't penciling out. So they had to move on. Uh, open AI has announced an open source model. They said they'd never do it. Everyone's saying it was in the name. It was in the name. How could you have doubted? Oh, they're closed AI. Closed AI. They're not open AI. They're closed AI. Everyone thought they were so

clever. They said they couldn't possibly open source a model. And they did. They did it. The unsthinkable. First, first open model in years, right? They used to have them. Was, was, was, Was GPT1 open source? Like when, when was the last time that? So we're going to talk to Tyler about this. I want to say it's in the studio today. Was still open source? And then they decided to close source something.

It's tough that I treat you like things that I could Google. And I know that you just have to search it or chat GPT it. But good luck. Get me the information on the history of open AI's open source models. In the meantime, I will read this post from Sam Altman. GPT OSS, all lowercase, he's still in lowercase mode, although he uppercases the other sentences, but he threw in, he likes lowercase. Is he sending you messages, John?

I'm seeing it. I'm seeing coded messages in here. GPTOSS is a big deal. It's a state-of-the-art open weights reasoning model with strong real-world performance, comparable to 04 Mini, that you can run locally on your own computer or phone with the small. dollar size. We believe this is the best and most usable open model in the world. We're excited to make this model the result of billions of dollars of research available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible. Hit that soundboard again. I want to keep it going.

We believe far more good than bad will come from it. For example, GPTOSS 120B performs about as well as O3 on challenging health issues. We've worked hard to mitigate the most serious safety issues, especially around biosecurity. GPT OSS models perform comparably to our frontier models on internal safety benchmarks. We believe in individual empowerment. Let's hear it for individual empowerment people. I feel empowered the way that you're reading this, John.

Although we believe most people will want to use a conventional service, a convenience service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to. And the privacy benefits are obvious. As part of this, we are quite, hopeful that this release will enable new kinds of research and the creation of new kinds of products.

We expect a meaningful uptick in the rate of innovation in our field and for many more people to do important work than we're able to before. Open AI's mission is to ensure AGI that it benefits all of humanity. To that end, we're excited, I think I cut this screen shot off, we're excited for the world to be building on an open AI stack created in the United States based on democratic values, available for i didn't screenshot the rest of that but oh here it is available for free to all and for wide benefit so i i imagine that that was the voice as the author intended as the author intended exactly exactly will uh de pew has some more notes here uh some context so less than one

year between oh one announced which was september of 2024 and we have an o three level model open sourced that's runable on consumer hardware that's go wild progress you were highlighting earlier Sam initially had a poll saying like you know should we should we what do you want do you want an oh three level model or do you want something that you can run he did both and he did both did both wow that was yeah so we were reading that so it was what like six months ago or something that post that you that you shared yeah I think so I asked I asked Tyler to dig this poll up Sam Altman shared a post that it was a poll on X saying what do you want Do you want an 0.1 level, reasoning model, a frontier model, open source, or do you want

something you can run on your phone? And it was neck and neck. And people were clicking on the phone model. They were like, we want the phone model. And then Dylan Patel quoted it and said, oh, you idiots, don't vote for the phone model. You can distill. Let's get a truly frontier model. Let's get a frontier model. And so, so Dylan Patel was very much like, like, you guys don't know what you want. Like, the phone models are available. That will be easy. The hard thing, we got to twist Open AI's arm to open source the reasoning model, the O3 level model. And Sam Alman just said, you wanted this or this. It was a false dichotomy.

You get both. You get both. Yassine says, all caps. I'm so sorry for doubting you, Sam Altman. I'm so sorry for saying that you were the Antichrist. I didn't realize your plans were measured in centuries. I hope you forgive me for everything. I'm so glad you kept control of Open AI.

I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. That's remarkable. Never talked out on the future First Ballot Hall of Famer, apparently. The future leader of open source AI will be very interesting to see how meta responds. Will they stay in the open source game? Also, just how important is open source? Is this a Linux scale opportunity?

Is this an Android scale opportunity? Like, is this GitLab to GitHub? Like, what's actually the long-term play? Certainly cool. Great for the community. We're going to see fun experiments. We're going to see interesting things done with this. I think do we want to talk about some of the ideas that we had for building on top of this open source model fine-tuning?

I can just run through some. I know there was one you didn't want to share because you thought it was too good, too much alpha. But what was I talking to you about, Tyler? What were our ideas? We had one that was... Well, initially we weren't sure there was going to be reasoning. That's right. So we were going to add fake reasoning.

Yeah. So it was going to be a model that gas, lights you into thinking it's reasoning when in fact it's not reasoning so if you pull up if you look at the actual like you know reasoning you I yeah it's just UI yeah it's not there's no actually it's a time delay it's a time delay and it's delay and then while thinking really hard let me think about this what would a super smart person think yeah right so we actually still kind of do that because it's not a multimodal model okay but we could like you know we just add some kind of like totally blank encoder or something for

image and then it's like, this is an interesting image. Let me think about what's in it. Yeah, one of the best images I've ever seen. A lot of people are saying this, this is one of the greatest images. Thank you for sharing this PNG and or JPEG with me. It just knows nothing about the image. It's great. I'm seeing that this image is large in file size. It's purely metadata based analysis. It doesn't know anything about what's going on. They're like, wow, this is a tough question. I'm going to have to generate a lot of internal reasoning tokens to answer this. Test time inferences really is magical, isn't it? Anyway, back to thinking. Okay, I'm reasoning about this now. Yeah. So the other, the other obvious opportunity, you know, people have been

frustrated with sycophancy. Yes. Yes. And models being, well, not me. I've been frustrated with the lack of sick. Yeah. You want more. You want more. You want more. You want the model to gas you up. But, you know, fine-tuning it to go, you know, over the top. Somebody could release the glazinator 3,000. I think that's, which just tells the user, you don't, you don't just think you're goaded. You are goaded. I know this. You know this. It's like, I'm asking you to solve IMO question six.

Why are you talking about whether or not I'm goaded? It's like, it just tells you like, you got this one. The timing, the timing here is interesting. I mean, everybody's been banging the table saying, where is the American open source AI or LLM leader? It was reported yesterday by the misinformation that reflection, the misinformation reported that reflection, the misinformation reported that reflection, one-year-old startup, we've had the CEO on before he's in talks to raise $1 billion to develop open source models to compete with deep sea meta and mistral. And yeah, all of the, you know, the Chinese open source models have been on. on a tear, Quinn released Quinn Coder recently.

Yeah, people are into Quinn. Or a new version of it that is getting good results. So it's important work. We want multiple horses in the race. So one thing that's kind of related to the US-China race is like, so when Deep Seek first came out, everyone was like up in arms because they said like, it was less than $5 million to train, right?

Yep. So in the model card for these models, they actually reveal like the GPU hours it took. Which then you can like figure out how much it probably cost it to, you know, train. Give me the number and tell me if I need to ring the gong for them. So for the big model, it was probably around like four million. So just, yes, but, but the small model was like 500K, probably a little less.

But that's like 10x better. The model's way better than deep seat guard one. Okay, okay. So should I ring the gong? I mean, I think it's pretty sweet. I wanted, I wanted to hear 400 million at least. I was expecting nine days. $400 million.

Nine Ditch. They got a billion of revenue coming in every month. But isn't it? No, it's cool that it costs. It's a good. I know. It is very cool. So we're ringing the gong for the elegance of the training run.

Yeah. Efficiency. Efficiency. Congratulations. Delivery and a great model. Saving time and money. Putting money back in the hands of shareholders. I'm not in the hands of open source developers, I suppose.

But yeah, I mean, Do you think that is this like a pre-training scaling wall narrative? Like would you as someone who is a potential consumer of an open source model, like do you want a $400 million open source model? Would that necessarily be better? Because it seems like they were able to distill it pretty well, get it to the frontier, not burn a ton of money on training. Also, the question is like if they're, this is probably distilled from their other models that are much bigger. Like there is no world where you could just spend $4 million and get this level model without also having done the GPT4 run, the GPT 4.5 run, et cetera, right?

Yeah, maybe it's also just like even if they didn't distill it, they just have the knowledge of like how they did it, which is like arguably more valuable, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think in terms of like open source, it's either you want to go like super, super cheap and super small, which they kind of did here. Or you go super big, like almost like the llama, like the, the behemoth, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it would have been really cool to see that, like, literally like state of the art, you know, level model.

Yeah, yeah. You could also try and ask Claude, hey, build me a frontier open source model. Don't make mistakes. Yeah, we're going to have someone from Claude on soon. This is funny because, wait, you said 500K for the small model? Yeah, probably less. So that's the same amount of money that they're putting up for this challenge, the Red teaming challenge. Have you seen this? So to encourage researchers, developers, and

enthusiasts, that's me, from around the world to help identify novel safety issues, this challenge has a $500,000 prize fund that will be awarded based on review from a panel of expert judges from OpenAI and other leading labs. At the end of this challenge, we will publish a report in open source and evaluation data set based on the validated findings so that the wider community can immediately benefit. So if you can hack this thing, if you can get it to teach you how to develop a nuclear bomb or take over the world, you might have 500K in your pocket. Not bad. Go get some of that. That's a seed round in 2012. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Mark? Hey, what's happening? Great to see you. Yeah, you too. A lot. It's a little bit of a slow

news day but exciting stuff with GPT open source it's not a slow August it's not a slow August we're glad we were just reflecting that we've taken exactly one day off this summer that was July 4th and we're showing the Europeans how American companies work American work we're setting an example and the and we have proof of work because we exist on the internet and you can see us live every day so we're setting an example how are you doing how's your summer going Fantastic. Going really well. So how long is it going to be until you guys put up avatars that make claims that you're

working hard all through the summer but it turns out here on the beach? You might have caught us. I think you'll know better than us as to when the technology gets there. We've been demoing some of the stuff. People have been doing a lot of deep fakes of us and fortunately all of them have been clockable so it doesn't feel like a brand risk, but they're getting closer and closer. And I know that there's going to be a moment when we have to say, hey, that's actually using our name and likeness to endorse something that we don't necessarily endorse. Can you please

take that down? So we're approaching the the touring test, the uncanny valley. We're escaping the uncanny valley. I think a question, like looking back over the, you know, maybe 10 or 15 years, was what moments did you feel like there just was not a lot of action happening? Because this summer is just the pace from so many different teams has been absolutely insane. Everybody's like trying to keep up and it didn't used to feel that way at least from my point of view so my view it always is there's like these there's this these disconnected you know kind of patterns or trends there's there's sort of the the sort of day-to-day phenomenon where like engineers show up every day and they make things a little bit better and then every once in a while you know you get a

technical breakthrough or a new platform and and and that process kind of this you know kind of of sawtooth kind of up to the right kind of process kind of plays out over time kind of regardless of what else is happening in the world. And so it keeps happening through recessions and depressions and wars and like all kinds of crazy crazy stuff that's happening. But basically, you know, the technology keeps getting better. So there's kind of that curve. And then there's the sort of enthusiasm curve and then the adoption curve, you know, which is basically like when do these things actually show up in the world? And then by the way, when are people actually ready, you know, for the new thing? Like if you talk to the people who worked on language, I'm sure you guys have talked to

people who work on language models, they will tell you that they were surprised the chat GPT was the big through moment because they thought everybody already knew what these models could do for, you know, three years before that. And so they were, you know, they were shocked that it was the chatbot interface that made the thing go. And so there's somewhat of a sort of arbitrary disconnection between what's actually happening in the substance and then what what people are seeing and failing. And so it's just, it's really hard to predict when these things pop. But also, if you're in this day to day, it's really hard to tell, you know, when things are going to be hot or not because it doesn't necessarily map to how much the technology is improving. Yeah, we were just

talking about that in the context of Google's new world model. It's this like generative video game that you can kind of move around in. And it feels like deep mind is just absolutely crushing at the AI research frontier. They have the best world model simulator that you can walk around in. The question is like if they let another lab do the chat GPT thing and just get it out into the consumer three months earlier, they might wind up kind of chasing and trying to catch up if somebody actually figures out how to make it like a dominant consumer product. Now, in the enterprise, it's more oligopolistic, but consumer seems to be winner take all. I guess the question is like, how much value do you place right now in the AI race to just

like moving fast, breaking things, you know, dealing, having like the thick skin to deal with like the safety constraints and all of the different stuff, obviously not being irresponsible, but just speeding up the organization as much as possible. It feels like now is the time to really push on that. yeah well first of all i need to correct you it's it's moving fast and making things i don't know where that's right i don't even know where i i i have no idea never heard never heard of it i mean chachibati didn't really break anything i i think that's a good point it really did just move fast and make things the first things it made were weird but that

was fine and it failed and it and it hallucinated a ton but it didn't really break anything i don't yeah yeah i believe in this case total deaths attributable to uh to chadupitia year is still zero. Zero. So notwithstanding all of it, notwithstanding all of the, all the catterwalling. But yeah. So look, I think the AI industry in particular has a very acute version of the of the sort of challenge that you identified with. And, you know, and I don't say this negatively just an observation, which is that they're, you know, like in sort of a normal technology company, you've kind of got engineers who make products and then you've got, you know, kind of sales people are marketing people who sell them. You know, in the AI companies, you have this third tier of, you know, the quote unquote researchers. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, which is, which has worked out incredibly well. I mean, the researchers have done, you know, they've just done like amazing breakthroughs at these companies. But, you know, the, you know, the, The handoff, you know, there's not necessarily a clean handoff from the researchers to the market. And so it kind of raises this question of like, okay, like, is there, are these companies there for kind of three, you know, kind of three segment companies where they have research and then they have product development and then they have go to market. And I think that's a really open issue. I mean, if you, you know, Google's kind of a case study of this, you know, you alluded to deep mind, but even more broadly, Google, you know, Google developed a transformer in 2017.

And then they basically let it sit on the shelf, right, because it was a research project. they didn't productize it they were very worried about you know from people i've talked to they were very worried about the you know brand issues and safety issue you know kind of all these all these they had all these reasons to not productize it uh i talked to somebody senior who was there at the time and i i asked them you know when when could you have had chat gpt with gpt four level uh output if you had just got you know gone gone flat out starting in 2017 and they said by 2019 you know they already knew how to do it and then you know they've now caught up but it took it took an extra five years, five years to catch up.

And so I think a lot of these companies kind of have that challenge. Elon, as usual, of course, is provoking this question. I'm sure you guys talked about, but he has now, you know, with an XAI, he's now collapsed, you know, he's eliminated the distinction between research and product. And so, you know, of course, he's pushing this as hard as he can. And I think it's a good question for a lot of the other companies, kind of how hard they want to push on actually getting these things in fully productized form out to the market. Yeah, yeah.

On Elon's like distinction, it feels like there is more research to be done, but it feels like we're entering like a new cycle of, you know, just focus on the engineering, focus on the deployment, the applications, let's get all this technology out into the world, let's reap all that benefit. And yes, there will be a different track of fundamental research that's happening somewhere, but it's really, really hard to predict. And so if you have something that's working, just double down and just go really aggressive on it. I'm wondering more on that, but also on Apple strategy. It feels like Apple's been kind of like, you know, people have been maligning them for not, for missing the AI opportunity. And Tim Cook's just there on the earnings call being like, look, we acquired a couple small companies and seven this year. Seven companies. But then it seems like they're taking more of like an American dynamism approach.

Like there was news today in the journal that they, that they're investing $100 million in American manufacturing. They're certainly doing stuff. They're just not chasing the, you know, the shiny tennis. The headline $100 billion CapEx. So I'm wondering about your thoughts on when you have a, you know, when you have a platform, how hard is it to resist chasing the new shiny object? Is that the right move? Or are there any other things that you think Apple should be, you know, changing their strategy on?

Yeah. So look, Apple's always had this. you know, very clearly defined strategy that, you know, Steve and Tim, you know, working together figured out a long time ago, which is, you know, they, I forget the exact term, but it's something like, basically, they invest deeply into the core of what they do, you know, they'll basically work internally on things for many years. They all, they only actually release things when they feel like they're kind of fully baked. Right. And so as a consequence, they have this thing where, and Tim says this, right? You know, they're rarely

first to market with new technologies. You know, they're more often in the category of what, you know, Peter, Peter Thiel calls last to market. You know, they're, you know, they'll come out whatever, three years later, whatever, five years later, you know, there were tablets for years before the iPad, there were, you know,

smartphones for years before the iPhone. Folding phones. They're about to do a folding phone. It's like 10 years into that technology. I'm sure if they do it, they'll hit it. The last mover.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The last mover. I guess, yeah, what I would say is like, look, that clearly works if you're Apple, right? And so it clearly works if you're Apple. But I would say there's a fine line

between that strategy and just simply becoming obsolete, right? And so the problem is like if you're not Apple, and you don't have all the other kind of super strengths and, you know, kind of now the market position that Apple has, you know, do you really want to be a company, you know, if you're not Apple, do you really want to be a company

that basically sits there and says, yeah, the world's moving and we're very deliberately not going to lean as hard as we can into it. And so I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in these kinds of strategy discussions where people look at the one company that's able to pull this off and they don't look at the 50 other companies that are in the graveyard, you know, because they didn't adapt. I mean, you know, all the other smartphone companies when the iPhone came out, they were like, oh, yeah, well, we could do touch too, right?

We'll just, you know, we'll get to it, right? And, you know, they're gone. What do you think? Blackberry bold, I remember. It's like an iPhone knockoff. What do you think, you know, right now people are, or variety of, you know, shareholders are annoyed at Apple around their reaction to AI, LLMs. John's annoyed around just like transcription generally, just like super basic stuff.

But it doesn't feel like the core businesses immediately threatened today. feels like it's still on the horizon around these sort of like, you know, eyeware-based computing, you know, potentially net new devices that we're, that we'll see from, you know, companies like Open AI over time. But where do you like, like, how, how real is the threat, you know, this year versus 10 years from today? And kind of what's your framework? Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think the biggest ultimate danger, I mean, the biggest ultimate danger is very clear, which is just like at what point do you not carry around a pane of glass

in your hand, you know, called a phone? you know because other things have superseded it and you know look everything you know everything becomes obsolete at the point so there will there will come sometime make sure when we're not you know carrying phones around and we'll watch movies or people have phones and we'll be like yeah look at look at how primitive they were right because because we'll have moved on to other things and whether those things are

eye-based or you know you know the other kinds of wearables or whether it's just kind of you know computing happening in the environment or just you know entirely voice-based or you know who knows what it is but you know there will come a time when that happens you know is that time three years from now, because there's like some, you know, huge breakthrough, you know, from some company that figures out the product that obsoles the phone

right away, or is that 20 years from now, because the phone is just, you know, such a standard platform for everything that we do in our lives and everything else, you know, kind of remains a peripheral to the phone. I mean, that, you know, that's, you know, that's the game of elephants that's playing out there. You know, obviously, I think, you know, I think it's highly likely that we'll have a phone for a very long time.

Having said that, it is exciting that there are companies that are going directly at that challenge. And, you know, whoever cracks the code on that will be the next Apple. And by the way, that may in the fullness of time be Apple itself. You know, they may be the company that figures that out. Yeah, I remember being at a board meeting at Andrews and Horowitz maybe a decade ago or something. And Chris Dixon showed me the hollow lens. And I was like, okay, we're one year away from this being everywhere. And I feel like today I'm still in the like, yeah, VR, it's definitely one year away. The next quest I'm going

to be wearing daily. And it feels like we're always there. But it does feel like Apple did a lot to work on the on the fundamental uh the you know pixel density of the resolution of the display and then meta's been doing a ton of work on just getting it light and affordable like it feels closer than ever but uh you know you you always got to wait until you see the churn numbers until you really call the game right well you're the thing but you know i think that's true but you'd also say you know i'm on the on the metta board so i'm you know kind of a dog on on this one but like the meta rayband glasses are a big hit oh totally right like they're a big you know so I think we now have a form factor that we know works, you know, for, for iBase wearables.

You know, there's not VR and then VR, you know, on top of that. But, you know, just the, you know, the glasses, you know, and then the glasses of camera, you know, sort of integrated camera, integrated microphone, integrate a speaker. You know, that's a very interesting platform. You know, the watch clearly works, by the way, which Apple, of course, you know, is played a significant role in making happen. You know, that now sells in huge volume. You know, so that's the second data point.

And then, you know, look, I think these, you know, I think some form of AIPIN is going to work. I also think, you know, headphones are going to get a lot more sophisticated, which is already happening. Yep. And so, you know, you do have these, you know, kind of data points coming out. And then, yeah, look, the, the trillion-dollar question ultimately is, are these peripherals to the phone, you know, which is what they are today or are these replacements for the phone? And, you know, we, yeah, I would say, you know, we have, we allow it, we, I think we have

a lot of invention coming, both from new companies and from the incumbents who are going to try to figure that out. Yeah, I always think about the value of, like, narrowing the aperture on these new technologies. like with with the the meta raybans I feel like the fact that they aren't also trying to be a screen is actually a feature not a bug and I always go back to the iPhone like it was first and foremost a phone and people bought it because it could make calls and then it could make text messages and then it was an iPod but I do you disagree with that please well you guys I don't think you guys you guys might be too young the first iPhone actually was a bad phone how so then she guys for the first two years it couldn't reliably make phone calls I I had I have I remember I had I had I had to remember I had I had to you guys like the third one and a friend had one but i feel like it was still like people were carrying cell phones and that was the at least of the expectation but yeah i mean i guess you're right so for the first for the first two years the thing couldn't make fun reliably make phone calls and then it turned out there was an issue with the antenna and with how you held it and there was

a i remember that email yeah you heard it and you would and you would disconnect it you could basically brick the device yeah based on how you held it and somebody emailed this is when steve would respond to emails from random people and somebody emailed steve saying if i you know hold the phone this way doesn't make phone calls and he's like well don't hold it that way yeah right yeah so so even there it was like yeah and people you know people forget it took like five years for the iPhone to find its footing it took like two years to get the they remember also the original iPhone didn't have it didn't have broadband data it was on it was on the old 2g it was called the AT&T edge network so it didn't have broadband data and then of course it didn't have an app store right

it was completely locked out right the challenges the challenges for apple now is that people are so used to perfection with the device that launching a product that isn't perfect, like is embarrassing, right? Like, you look at the Vision Pro, and it's like, well, the battery's big. Steve would have hated this, right? Like, how he never would have shipped this, and that being constrained and not being able to innovate because you're tied to this, like, impossible standard of being on whatever generation 17 of the iPhone and perfecting every element is a real challenge.

So I would say there's a corollary to that. One of the things I've observed over the years is I think technology products become obsolete at the precise moment, they become perfect. And what I mean by perfect basically is like, yeah, it's like the perfect idealized complete product. Like it does everything you could possibly ever imagine. Everything a customer could imagine, everything you as the technology developer can imagine, it's absolutely perfect. And there's been tons of examples of this over the last 50 years where it's like the absolute perfect permanent, it seems to be the permanent version of that product. And then it just turns out that's actually the point of obsolescence because it means creativity is no longer being applied right into that platform. You're just like, there's just nothing else to do.

You're just like, you're done, right? The product has been realized. And then the cycle is what happens to your point. The cycle is other people come in with completely different approaches, completely different kinds of products that are broken and weird in all kinds of ways, you know, but are fundamentally different. And so, you know, that is one of the time-honored traditions. And, you know, one of the things you could say about, you know, Tim, is his willingness to kind of break the mold of Apple only shifts perfect products by, you know, being willing to ship the, you know, the Vision Pro, you know, shows a level of determination to kind of stay in the innovation game, which I think is very positive.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Updated thinking on open source. Since we last talked, there's, there's a lot that's been happening. Open AI is an open source company again. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, look, very encouraging. You know, a year ago, I was very, you know, I was getting very distressed about, you know, whether open source say I was going to be allowed, right? It was even going to be illegal. And so, and I think, you know, we're basically through that at this point. We're just going to say, we're through that in the U.S. You know, we'll see about the rest of the world.

And then, look, you know, the U.S.-China thing is obviously a big deal. But, you know, I think it's been net positive for the world that China has been so enthusiastic about open source, say, yeah, coming out of China, which has been great. And then, yeah, look, opening eye, leaning hard into this, you know, and releasing what, you know, what they did is, I think, fantastic, both because of what they released, which is great, but also just the fact that they are now, you know, willing to do that. And then Elon reconfirmed overnight that he's going to, you know, open source, you know, start open source in previous versions of GROC. And so, yeah, so we,

you know, we seem to be, we seem to be in the timeline where open source AI is going to happen. You know, right now, you know, which I think what you would say is it kind of lags the leading edge criteria implementations by, you know, six months or something like that. But, but I think that, you know, that's a good, if that's the status quo that continues, I think that would be a very good status quo. What are the rough edges that we need to kind of sand down when we're thinking about Chinese open source model specifically? Is it, we need to do some fine tuning on top of them to add back free speech?

Or do we need to watch for back doors, say it's phone and home if it runs into this specific thing? The Chinese open source thing, it was remarkable because I feel like it really does accelerate the pace of innovation because everyone gets to see, oh, this is how reasoning works. I think that's great. At the same time, it made me very,

it made me much more appreciative of AI safety research and capability research and actually being able to interpret what's going on and say definitively, this model is gonna behave weird in this weird way. like the Manchurian candidate problem, we haven't found any of that, but it certainly seems like something we'd want to keep an eye on. But from your perspective, like what are the, what are the risks that we need to be aware of going into a world where China is really pushing hard and open source? Yeah, there's two, there's two, and you identify them, but let's let's talk

about both of them. So the phone home thing is the easy one, which is you can put up, you know, you can packet sniff, you know, a network and you can tell when the thing is doing that. And you, and plus you can go in the code and you can see what it's doing that. And so you can validate that that's either happening or not happening. And I think that, you know, that's important. But, you know, I think people are going to figure that out. You can kind of gate that problem practically. The bigger issue is we have this term in the field right now called open weights. And open weights is a loaded term. It uses the open term from open source. But of course, with open source, the thing is you can actually read the code. You know, with open

way it's you have you know just a giant file full of numbers as you said that you can't really interpret and then what you don't what you don't have what most what most of the open source open weights models don't have including you know deep seek specifically what they don't have is they don't have open data right um or open corpus right so you you can't actually see the training data that went went into them and of course you know most the people building models are kind of obscuring what that you know what that training data is in various ways and and so when you get an open weight model you know the good news is the the software source is open the good is you can run under your machine, you can verify that doesn't phone home. But you don't

actually know what's happening inside the weights. And so I think that is going to be a bigger and bigger issue, which is like, okay, how the thing behaves? Like, yeah, what has it actually been trained to do? And what restrictions or directives has it been given in the training, you know, that are embedded in the weights that you need to be able to see? You know, this is, I would say, this is coming up as sort of, I would say, a global issue, you know, which, you know, we worry about when these models come from China. Other countries worry when these models come from the U.S., right, which is, right? So one of the phrases you'll hear when you talk to people kind of outside the U.S.

is kind of this phrase people are kicking around, which is not my weight, it's not my culture. Right, right, or by the way, for that matter, not my way, it's not my laws, right? Which is like, okay, like, what actually is this thing going to do? Right. And to your point, the Chinese models, for example, might, you know, never criticize, you know, communism or something. I can tell you, the American models have all kinds of constraints also, right, implemented, you know, usually by a very specific kind of person in a very specific location of the U.S. And so, you know, I think that this is a general issue. And we're going to have to see basically people's tolerance levels, being willing to run

open weights models where they don't fundamentally have access to the data. And then correspondingly, I think what we'll see is more open source developers also doing open corpus open data. So you can see what's actually in them. Yeah. Obviously, open source is very important in terms of just distributing intelligence broadly, giving people the ability to run their own models and really fine-tune them and have control. There's also a big push just to make frontier models and high-capability models free.

One model is you charge for the premium, you give the free away. It's a freemian model. That's what we're seeing at most of the labs right now. There's also this kind of specter on the horizon of potentially putting ads in LLMs and what that would do to the world. Jordi got in a little dust up with Mark Cuban on the timeline. deciding whether or not it would be a net good to put advertising in LLMs, what might happen that might be bad there. Yeah, my point broadly was that ads have been an incredible way to make a variety of

products and services online free and just saying like default, just no ads would potentially, you know, be incredibly destructive. But, yeah, curious, your framework. Yeah, so I should start by saying, like, whenever I personally use an internet service, I always try to buy the premium version of it that doesn't have ads, right? And so if I can like live personally inside an ad for universe and pay for it, like, that's great. And I'll freely admit, you know, whatever level of, you know, hypocrisy or incongruous, you know, kind of, kind of results from that. But the point is choice. The point is choice.

Well, the point is exactly what you said. It's affordability. So the problem is if you really want to get to five, if you want to get to a billion and then five billion people, you can't do that with a paid offering. Like it just, you, at any sort of reasonable price point, it's just not possible. The, you know, global per capita GDP is not high enough for that. People don't have enough income for that, at least today. And so if, if you want to get to, you know, if you want the Google search engine or the Facebook social app or the whatever, you know, frontier AI model to be available to five billion people for free, you need to have a business model.

You need to have an indirect business model, and ads is the obvious one. And so I do think if you take some principle stand against ads, I think you, unfortunately, are also taking a stand against broad access just in the way the world works today. And then, look, the other really salient question is, you know, the same question that the companies I Google and Facebook have been dealing with for a long time,

which is, are ads purely destructive or negative to the user experience, or are they actually, if done properly, are they actually either neutral or even positive, right? And this was something that, you know, Google, I think, to their credit, figured out very early, which is, you know, a well-targeted ad and a specifically relevant point in time is actually content. Like, it actually enhances the experience, right? Because it's the obvious case. You're searching on a product.

There's an ad. You can buy the product. You click you buy the product. That was actually a useful piece of functionality. And so, you know, can you have ads or other things that are like ads or look like ads, you know, different kinds of referrals, you know, mechanisms or whatever? Can you have them in such a way that they're actually? additive to the product experience and you can imagine just like with search and with social networking you can imagine lots of examples of that people will you know the people will you know

they'll whine or hold in lots of different ways but i think you know i think that hasn't been a bad outcome overall um and i think that uh i think it's entirely possible that that's what what happens with with these models as well yeah so uh kind of similar kind of question what what should be legal, kind of trying to create legal frameworks on a number of issues with AI. There's been a number of IP cases that have been working their way through the courts, what can labs use to train models, et cetera. There's been some good outcomes recently. Sam also was talking about how a lot of people are using AI as like a confidant, like a, you know, a friend, things like that. And he mentioned that currently your chats are not privileged. They can be used in a lawsuit or, you know, a friend,

or other situations, how optimistic are you that our sort of legal system in the U.S. can get some of these issues right where maybe it can't just be, you know, total free markets, kind of lawless, whatever goes. Yeah. So in the case of training data, I think that there, I mean, there's a bunch of these copyright, you know, kind of lawsuits happening right now. There's, you know, the big New York Times opening I won and there's, you know, been a bunch of others. I think in that, for that particular problem. My guess is that problem ultimately has to be solved through legislation. It's ultimately a legislative question. The reason is because it goes to the nature of

copyright law itself, you know, which is legislation. And of course, you know, the content industry is already claiming that, of course, you know, using copyrighted data to train, you know, without permission and without paying is sort of, you know, they believe illegal on his face, you know, due to violation copyright law. The counter argument to that, which, you know, which we believe is, well, it's not copying, right? There's a distinction between training and copying, just like in the real world, there's a distinction between reading a book and copying the book, you know, as a person. And so there's going to need, I think, you know, the courts are trying to grapple with that. There's a whole bunch of cases. There's jurisdictional

questions, you know, probably ultimately Congress is going to have to figure out a, you know, figure out an answer on that. And by the way, the president is kind of, you know, thrown down that gauntlet in his, I think the speech he gave last week or two weeks ago, you know, where he said, you know, Washington probably needs to deal with that as an issue. so that's one on the on the on the on the on the privacy thing i i think that that one feels like it's a supreme court thing um to me it feels like that's the kind of issue said it's supreme court and that in other words like whether for example your transcripts are considered your property and whether they're protected against you know warrantless search and seizure

and the observation i would make there is if you look at the march of technology over time so the constitution has like very clear you know fourth fifth amendments you know very specific rights around the, you know, the things that are yours, you know, such as, you know, your home, you know, being in your home, you know, by the way, the thoughts in your head, right? You know, that the government can't just, like, come in and take. They can't, you know, they can't just come in and search your house without a warrant. You know, they can't, like, you know, put you in a jail cell and beat you until you fess up. Like, you know, there are, you know, we have constitutes for protections against the

government being able to basically, you know, take information, you know, fundamentally, you know, as well as possessions. And then basically what happens is every time there's a new technology. that creates a new kind of sort of, you know, thing that you own, you know, thing that's yours, thing that you would consider it to be private, thing that you wouldn't want the government to be able to take without a warrant, you know, out of the gate, law enforcement agencies just naturally go try to get those things because they're ways to solve crimes and, you know, it feels like that that's a legal thing to do. And then basically the courts come in later and they, you know,

rule one way or the other and basically say, no, that, that actually is also a thing that is protected against, you know, warrantless, for example, warrantless search, you know, warrantless wiretapping. So I feel like this is the latest of probably, I don't know, 20 of those over the last 100 years. And, you know, I don't know which way it'll go, but I think it's going to be a key thing because, as you know, people are already telling these models, you know, lots of things that they're, you know, that are very personal. Okay. Lightning round, quick questions. We're letting you get out of here in a couple of minutes. We're in this age of spiky intelligence. Models are great at some things and then terrible at others.

Where are you actually getting value out of AI right now? Where is it falling down for you? where are you, how are you using AI day to day? Yeah, so I have two kind of, I don't know, barbell approach. One is for serious stuff. I love the deep research capabilities. And so, and I'm doing this in a bunch of models, but like the ability to basically say I'm interested in this topic.

And then I just felt like write me a book. And I, you know, I'm kind of hoping for the longest book I can get. I always tell it like, go longer, go longer, more sophisticated. You know, but the leading edge models now, they're getting up to like 30 page PDFs, you know, that are like completely well formulated, you know, basically long-form, long-form essays, you know, it's just like incredible richness in depth. And, you know, if it's 30 pages today, I'm sort of crossing my fingers, it'll get to, you know, 300 pages coming up here in the next few years.

And so, you know, I'm able to basically have the thing generate enormous amounts of reading material with just like, I think, incredible richness and depth and complexity. And then on the other side of the barbell is humor. And I've posted some of these to my X-Feed over the last couple of years. But I think these models are already much funnier than people give them credit for. really um yeah i think i think they're actually quite highly entertaining um a while ago i is it specific specific formats like you know that b chatting back in four be mark andreson you know that that format's to take a dip in my pool in my office they're really good so they're

really good at green text uh that that works really well but the the the for some reason the ones i find historical are the i have it right screen plays um you know for like tv shows or or uh or plays or movies. And I posted, I had it right, a new season of the HBO Silicon Valley, you know, said 10 years later. And I had it right like an entire day. I had it right like 10 to 10 scripts for a complete season. And of course, I just said, you know, make it like Silicon Valley, except, you know, it's happening. It's in 2021, it kind of peak woke. And I thought it was just, I think it's just, you know, I'll sit there two in the morning. It's just like laughing my ass off at how funny this thing is. And so I think these things are actually, are actually already like

extremely funny. They're extremely entertaining when they're, when they're, you know, they're used in that way and i i do enjoy that a lot and i generate a lot of those uh that i don't post uh it's stay in the group chats is it's probably good idea you're your property yeah hopefully the fourth amendment holds on these yeah that's great i have one last question go for it and then i've got one more uh how do you get a job as a venture capitalist in 2025 um so i think i mean look the best way the best way to do it is to have a track record early as somebody who is like in the loop specifically on new product development. And so somebody who, you know, be, like, deeply in the trenches at one of these new

companies in one of these spaces, you know, participate in the creation of a great new product and a great new company and, you know, really demonstrate that you know how to do that. You know, there's, you know, there are great VCs who have not done that, but, you know, I think that is sort of a foundational skill set, you know, for working with the kinds of founders that you want to work with who are going to want you to have, you know, kind of very interesting things to say on that, as I think, you know, still the best way to do it. Yeah, like feel the growth, be, immerse yourself in the growth, the, the, the, the, the, the, the aggressive growth environment. And then you'll be able to identify it when you see it from afar. Yeah, that's right. Last question for me, state of M&A in your mind. How are you advising, you know, companies where you're on the board or just the portfolio broadly around what they should expect now and, and in the near future? You mean, in terms of whether you can get things approved or? Basically. Yeah. Yeah, yes. So look, approval still.

approval is not a slam doc. There was a, you know, there was a, I just saw there was a medical device company this morning, you know, where the acquisition was not allowed by the FTC. So, you know, there is still scrutiny. It's, you know, it's obviously a very different political regime in Washington. But, you know, this is, this is not an minute, you know, by their own statements, this is not an administration that believes it's in total laissez-faire. MNA, and it definitely wants to, you know, in their view, maintain a very healthy level of market competition. Yeah. How many, do you expect certain companies to be negatively impacted by, you know, the Figma story, right? You have this deal gets blocked, successful, you know, IPO. Lina Khan is taking a victory lap. You know, many people are responding and joking saying, you know, someone, Lena cuts off the arm of a pianist and they endure and can create a masterpiece. And so I expect, and then you look at the example with, you know, Rumba, I think it was, where Rumba had a deal with Amazon. It was blocked and the company is. just been a shambles ever since.

So my concern is that people look at Figma and say, you should be independent, you just figure it out. Nothing can go wrong. Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's going to take in a victory lap. It was very disconcerting. And for exactly the reason you said, which is survivorship bias, right,

which is you pick the one that worked out. And then, you know, it's the airplane, the red dots, the airplane name. You know, you ignore the 50 that are in the ground that you've never heard of. And so that was very disconcerting because that, you know, sort of the central planning fallacy,

which is like we make central, plan economic decisions we have one example you know it's like in europe it's like yeah well the bottle caps actually don't fall off the bottle right like you know it works right it's like okay but but do you want to live it you want to live in an economic regime in which that you know the government is dictated bottle cap design answer is clearly no uh because the downside consequences or even even looking at that uh you know the chinese model which is you know people can say they're picking winners, but to get to maybe picking a winner, you have this intense bloodbath of competition where, you know, teams need to rise to the top and sort of prove themselves before

they get any of that real, like, you know, meaningful state benefit. Yeah, that's right. And so you just, you just, yeah, you just, you just have this adverse selection, uh, survivorship bias thing where you just, you don't pay attention to all the collateral damage. So I, I do think that mentality is like super, super dangerous. Um, and so yeah, look, I think companies just have to be very thoughtful about this, both acquirers and the acquires, you know, and the big thing is if you're selling a company, like, you just need to anticipate that you might not get

it through. And if you don't, they're sort of like, okay, number one, is there like a big enough breakup fee, right? Are you going to get, you know, paid for the, you know, paid for the, you know, the damage that you're going through, you know, and how is that structured on the one hand? And then two is, yeah, look, do you have the kind of company culture that's going to be able to withstand that? And is your

business, you know, strong enough to be able to get through that. And it is a real risk and something worth, you know, taking very seriously. Yeah, and that's that's why it felt emotion we were at nicey last week it felt emotional this that that the the figma team was was able to like effectively just like restart the business and say like we're we're taking this all the way so if you talk a way to think about it if you talk to any really successful company what they'll tell you is yeah over the years we have these like crucible moments in which like we almost died right but we like pulled together and we pulled it off and then that

became like you know one of these central kind of mythical events in the history of the company that we always referred to and like, my God, we got through that, and we're so strong and tough, and we've been forged in fire, and now we can do anything. And it's like, yeah, that's great. And then there are 50 other companies that hit those crystal moments blew up and died. So, yeah, it's all of the quote lessons learning this stuff. They're all conditional on, unlike survival. And so these things need to be taking incredibly seriously, you know, which the great CEOs do. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining. We'll let you get back to your day. We are always five minutes over. Next time we have to book five hours because this is

Fantastic. I got 10% of the way through. Let's see the first 24 hour TVP. Yeah, we would love to have you again. Marathon. Enjoy the rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon, Mark. Have a good day. Bye.

Sounds good. Thank you guys. We're breaking down the X's and O's of the GPT-5 launch today. That's right. Launched from Open AI. We have Sam Altman, the founder, CEO. He briefly got cut from the team in November of 2023, but he's back leading the team for the 2024, 2025 seasons.

He seems healthy. He's doing great today. He went on at 10 a.m. to break down the launch of GPT-5. He has a couple of key plays in his playbook, in his arsenal. He's got a solid ground game. Lots of quick posts hitting the timeline, probably in lowercase. Then he might air it out with a couple thousand word essay. We've seen him do this before.

It's a bit of a Hail Mary. Maybe AG has a couple thousand days away. Maybe we're in the soft singularity. But he's very strong there with the long post when he needs to be. It's up his sleeve if he needs it. Then he can also pull out the vague posting. He was doing this last night, posted a picture of the Death Star. No one knows what it means.

Maybe it was taking a shot at the Dumers who were on the defense today. So he's also known for driving supercars. That lets him get to the office faster. He's saving time and money. You can save time and money by going to ramp.com. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, and accounting in a whole lot more all in one place. And so he is, he also gave apparently, this is a rumor, He gave every Open AI employee who's been with the company for more than two years, $1.5 million.

A lot of people say, $1.5 million, that's not enough for a big house in San Francisco, but it is enough for a supercar. So that's probably why he picked that number. And that's why that's what the Open AI team will be doing with that money. They'll be buying Aston Martin Valkyries, Paghani, Huira's, McLarenceb, Marys, for Ferrari, Daytona, SB3s. They can get a Konigseg, Gamera. They could get a singer DLS or Bugatti Varon. It would have to be used. They could also get the Bentley Bacalar.

There's only... There's only 12 of those ever made. It's an open top two-seater roadster. It's coach belt. So that's going to run your $1.5 million, but that's perfect. You just got the $1.5 million bonus. So put it to work. Spend it all in one place on a car.

This is financial advice. Yes, exactly. Then you got Greg Brockman. He's joining at noon. He's extremely well-rested. He's actually coming off a sabbatical right now. now. That's very exciting. He should be injury-free for the rest of the season. He cut his teeth at MIT, and then he got drafted by Stripe in 2010. Microsoft tried to do a trade deal during the

2023 chaotic trade deal, trade window that opened up post-Sam Altman Oster. But he stuck with the Open AI team, and now he's president of the company. Then you got Mark Chen. He's coming on at 1130 today. He's the chief research officer. The rumors that he turned out a maxed-out contract to head the Meta Lama's, but he's sticking with the OpenAI team. He was an MIT undergrad. He also worked at Jane Street before joining OpenAI in 2018. Then we got Sarah Fryer coming on the show at 1230. She's the CFO of OpenAI. It's her job to find bank accounts big enough to fill all the cash they're raising. It's a tough job. You got to find, okay, this bank account, will it hold 10 figures? Will it hold 11 figures? Will it hold 12 figures? Like, you've been a lot of cash in this one. Exactly. Exactly.

she's also going to be defining the non-gap metrics that will be catnip for ben thompson in just a few years we're excited to talk to her about how she's measuring the success and the health of their business obviously it's not just revenues not just top line bottom line we're going to want to know about queries we're going to be want to know about d a u's all those non-gap metrics that's where people are going to be tracking when ipo day comes hopefully soon and then we also have brad light cap he's joining at 235 he entered the league as an investment banker let's give it up for the investment bankers they don't get a enough credit around here, but we love the investment bankers. Then he got drafted by Y Combinator before joining OpenAI as CFO in 2018. Now he's the chief operating officer. And then we have Max Warser. He's in charge of post-training, fine-tuning these models, getting them into the fighting performance to put on a display of authority on GPT-5 launch day. Now let's flip it over to the defense.

They're going up against the timeline. They're going up against the vibe checks. You got the Doomers. The Doomers, they're led by Eliezer Utikowski. Admittedly, everyone knows this. No one debates this. The Doomers have had a terrible season. But you'd expect to see at least a few hellmeries about GPT-5, creating bio-weapons thrown

up on the timeline today. Probably won't be bangers. Probably won't get a thousand likes, but you'll be seeing them here and there, mostly in the replies. We've also seen some Doomers talking about GPT-5 being available to every government in point. And Eleazar had some harsh words about that. Don't give the keys to Sam Altman.

Don't give the keys to the government to Open AI. He was upset about that. But in general, the DOOMers not putting much of a fight up today. Then you got Claude. Interesting. Claude was caught playing for the wrong team earlier this week. Anthropic. They're on defense today.

But we saw them take out Open AI's key pinch hitter, Claude. The Claude Code API was playing for the OpenAI team. But they shut that down. and Claude is no longer pinch-hitting for Open AI. Then you got the Elon stands. The ground game's going to be there. It's going to be strong. The Elon stands are going to be tracking the benchmarks relentlessly.

We know XAI loves to benchmarks, and all the Elon stands are going to be calling out GPT-5 for any misaligned benchmarks. If they fail, Humanity's last exam, it's over. It's over. They'll also toss up the occasional unhinged conspiracy theory. Moving on, Gemini, the betting lines have shifted big time. People thought Gemini was out of the game. They're so back.

Polymarket has Gemini at, what, 75% chance of being the best model towards the end of the month. This is, of course, based on the LM Arena, more vibes-based benchmark. But Gemini will probably be quiet today. They usually don't try and front-run press releases. They usually try and sit back, let the model speak for themselves, let the API credits work their way through the latest YC Demo Day batch and get the product into the hands of people. And so expect to see a big, glossy conference in a couple weeks. Demoing Gemini 3 should be a good rebuttal from the Geminize.

Then you get the Meadow Lama's. Zuck's been on a poaching spree. He's rebuilding the team during the offseason. Now he has a stacked roster and he's ready to go duke it out. But no one knows exactly what's going to do. to be in the playbook? Is he going to go consumer? Is he going to go API? Is it going to turn into a hyperscaler? We don't know, but we know they got a stack team. They got Alex Wang. They got Nat Friedman. They got Daniel Gross. They got tons and tons of other researchers.

They've been raiding every other team. Completely reset the salary cap for the league. And it's been an absolute clinic in terms of recruiting over there at Lama. Then you got the final benchmark. Arc AGI. This benchmark stands. GPT-5, couldn't get past this defense. And RKGI, you know, sitting there right in the end zone, just swatting them down, swatting them down all day. You think, you think we're super intelligence around the corner, RKGI, denied, Denied. Tyler, give us the update on RKGI.

Where does everything stand? How GPT-5 do? Does it matter? Should we care about RKGI? We love the team behind them, but is it an important benchmark? Should we be tracking it today? Okay, okay, so there's RCAGI, V1 and V2, right? Okay.

On both of them. B3, I actually don't know if... No one's been, no one's even tested V3 yet. No one's even really close there. But how we do it on V1? V1. GPD5 is at 65.17. Unfortunately, that's going to be 1% just short of GROC 4, 66.7.

Okay, Arc AGI 2. The Elon stands are going to be going wild with that. Arc AGI 2, 9.9%. 9.9%. GRO. 16%. 16%. So absolutely kind of brutal, you know, Arc AGI mugging. Rough showing. Some people have accused GROC4 of being slightly benched max. Yes. You know, this is, you know, it might have a team working on it. What are the pros and cons? We know the cons of benchmarking,

of benchmaxing, you're overfitting on something that might not actually drive consumer value. It might not actually solve real world problems. It might not increase DAUs or or revenue or ARR or anything that really matters, it might not even get us closer to super intelligence. Give me the counter argument. Why is bench maxing good? The bull case for benchmarking. The bull case for benchmarking,

bench maxing, break it down for me. Yeah, so I think the idea is basically, this is almost like a non-AGI-pilled kind of take, right? So if you don't have a super general intelligence, your ability to benchmax basically proves your ability to solve some, like, kind of specific tasks. So there's this thing about the gas station benchmark. Yeah.

It's called getting spiky. Getting spiky. Getting spiky. Adding more spikes to the spiky intelligence. Yeah. I think it was Roon who had this tweet about the gas station benchmark. Yep. Right. I don't care if he said something like, I don't care about AI solving gas stations

if it has the gas station benchmark, something like that. Yeah. But the idea is, like, if you, if the, if making the gas station benchmark. Rune said, my bar for AGI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set in capital letters. Yeah. And then my take is basically, I don't care how they got to the, like, I don't care how they made it run the gas station. I care how fast it gets here. That it runs it. If we can run the gas station with AI, that's, if, if it, if we can run the gas station with AI, that's, you have a team who's, you know, your bench-maxing team, that just proves that, like, if you have some tasks that's, like, really important that you want to get done, they can just

figure it out. So it's like, RL for business. This is like the same thing, RL for law. Yeah. All of these, like, specific verticals. Mirradi is doing this, the thinking machines, right? Like RL for businesses. Come into your organization, understand the most, the most valuable business processes out there

that could potentially be RLed against, that could be turned into a benchmark. Yeah. and then, and then, you know, bench hacked. Because I don't care if you're hacking, you know, if I have translate this type of document to this type of document for my business. If you can do it with 100% accuracy, I don't care that you bench hacked it.

Yeah, exactly. Like, like benchmarks right now are not like economically valuable. Like if you're really that much better at MMLU, it's like, are you producing that much value? Yes. Probably not, but if you have, if you make some new benchmark, that's, you know, your tax benchmark, I think Anthropic just released that fairly recently.

Oh, sure, sure, sure. That's like, I don't care if you bench max on that. As long as it does way better. If it does the taxes, it's going to do the task. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What about the, what does it say that it feels like Open AI seems capable of bench hacking? It seems like they've opted not to. Is that because bench hacking has a risk of giving you negative aura?

Because if you're accused and found guilty of bench hacking, you could, It often reveals that you're not building this one beautiful, you know, super intelligence to rule them all. Yeah, I think it's also, like, maybe we're just looking at the wrong benchmarks. Like, maybe there's much of, like, interesting benchmarks about, like, there's this one I really like, it's the Minecraft benchmark. Where you have to, like, build, you like, give it some castle and how good it looks. Or there's the one you always see about the unicorn. Yeah. That's in, it's, so you use this, like, math.

package that does like RAS and stuff but you ask it to draw a unicorn I've seen that yeah those are really good because it kind of shows the creativity stuff like that walk us through TBPN bench and yeah so we will be benchmarking the the AIs against going forward have you heard about this reps of 225 that would be close but it's difficult because the humanoids kind of change that and you can just use a normal actuator this is this is truly for a large language model you feed in our data set we have a public data set, a private data set, presumably at some point, but walk us through TBPN bench.

Yeah, so I'm yet to try this on GP5. I don't think it's out yet for public use of this. I don't have it. But I can tell some of the questions, right? So the first one, I have this picture of a horse. You have to guess the breed. Yep. So let me see. I think why I don't want to say it in case JVG5 is listening, but it is may or may not be a Caspian horse. Okay. And it's failing right now. O3 is failing. O3 is failing. Oro is failing. I haven't Yeah, we've got to try GROC and Gemini. We're going to all out, yeah. Force identification.

This seems extremely hackable, but at the very least, if we get one scientist to go off and collect the horse data set and then and then bench hack it, I think we will have done our job. Yeah. So that's the first question. Yes. The second one is a, it's, I have two pictures. Okay. Before and after of this guy. And it's which peptide did you take to achieve this body transformation?

Yep, yep. so it fails there it fails there so you have a data set of of what peptide does what to the human body where'd you find that well you know Wikipedia has a lot of this stuff okay okay you'd think they'd be able to it'd be able to cheat this around with o3 just reason who is this person go look up what they've said they've taken and then boom you have the answer at first with o3 when I was prompting it I would like save the photo yeah but then don't have the metadata oh sure sure sure the file name would be like Caspian horse or something yeah yeah okay yeah and then and then the third one the third one um I passed

an audio file of a car revving, has to pick which one. It has to pick, it has to identify the car. The car, yeah. From the engine note. From the engine. And it's not doing it currently. It's, no, it's wrong. This is a good benchmark.

The reality is real last exam. Yes, yeah, exactly. So I think those are pretty solid. I have some more, obviously I don't want to make them public in case anyone's going to try to, you know, benchmark this. Of course, of course. We'll see, hopefully. It's funny because, yeah.

I was mentioning the other day this, this, this. that my dad had of like tracking the that you just set your phone up and it just automatically detects which birds are in your backyard so yeah yeah I mean this has to be extremely solvable it's just something that it it reveals the lack of like general general intelligence when when you have to go and and collect the horse data set which should just be out there or the engine note data set which should just be out there but but clearly we are in the age of go in RL on the on the individual problem and we are

looking at like the power law of capabilities knowledge retrieval is clearly a you know 12 billion dollar a year market that consumers will pay for that will probably grow significantly and and then health and therapy and shopping and all the other features that fiji semo laid out in her post this is kind of like you know what will be rled against because those are key pockets of value in the in the consumer economy and the same thing will happen in the business economy but in the b-to-be context you'll probably see an individual startup building on top of an API but even then most of the most of the model platforms offer kind of RL as a service fine-tunes as a service something where if you're starting to spend tens of millions of dollars they will do some customization on top

of the model so that could be the regime for the next few years as we go into this like you know instead of like this centralizing AI force there's only one company there's actually like a Cambrian explosion of a ton of companies doing a bunch of different things we are joined in person by Rahulson Walker did I say that correctly that's perfect and he is here because we are crowning him the king of the application layer never talk down on the future first ballot Hall of Famer they said don't build a rapper don't build a rapper you're gonna get steamrolled he didn't listen and he's built a beautiful business it's a good product sir it's a good

When asked if value would accrue to the model layer, the application layer, he said it's a good product, sir. Why not both? Why not both? Why not both? What was your reaction to GPT5? Is it going to make your life easier? It's not going to put you out of business, right? It's not putting us out of business. It's making our product better. It's basically making every AI application layer product better. Also, it's half the cost of 03. So it's much cheaper. So it helps you, helps your margins. It means, you can. Don't say that out loud, though, because you don't want your customers to ask for a 50% discount, right? Well, so we pass on the savings to our customers. And what we do is we have the model generate more tokens, think for longer, and then produce better results. Yeah, yeah. Because we're still in the, we're still in the era of just let's get the best possible result. Let's get,

let's just actually like the, I don't know. Do you have a, do you have a rough benchmark of like cost per task. Like if I want to, you know, crunch our analytics across, you know, look at the trends on our views on X, YouTube, Instagram, we have a bunch of data sources. Sometimes they're in spreadsheets. Sometimes they can be linked. I export those. I have a bunch of CSVs. Maybe I put them in a database. I link it up to Julius. And then I want to do an analysis. That could be a couple hours of a data analysis time. That's going to be hundreds of dollars, even at the low end, probably thousands of dollars for like a simple analysis just on a opportunity cost basis for an individual employee. How much are you thinking it should cost for like the modern frontier

best model with the most thinking? How much should that cost on inference? So there's a couple ways to think about this. You know, the way we think about this is how much would it cost for you to have a data scientist or data analyst for every one of your employees? You're an operations team, your finance team, your marketing team, your product team. It would pretty much bankrupt. to every company well I don't think we can hear you do that all right all right you still the the space men are out we're not going to space today although firefly did IPO up 36 percent if you didn't see the news very good news firefly stock surges 34 percent in debut congrats to everyone over there I love the the physical newspaper we love the physical

newspaper you gotta do that yeah we're maxing we're maxing we read the wall street journal today is a special day it's Friday so it's the mansion section we're News maxing here. How many pools do you have? For news mixing. Right now I have, uh, zero. Zero right now. Because the new thing is having two pools, a pool for every season, people are

increasingly getting both indoor and outdoor swimming pools. So yeah, get on Zillow. Get on Zillow. Get on Zillow. Zillow maxing here. Okay. Anyway, you were telling me how much. So yeah, I mean, it seems like, you know, most of, most of the application layer will be, you know,

productivity tools a la la la slack, all la, a, you know, like Adio, our sales force, our CRM partner, or something where, you know, you're doing like seat based pricing almost. Maybe there's consumption based pricing, but you're, you're kind of distributing the cost. You're making everyone slightly more productive and you're charging, you know, on the order of tens or hundreds of dollars per employee per month, something like that, right? Absolutely. I mean, it's, it's not just slightly more productive, but it's, it's also like getting insights when you need them, right? Sunday, Sunday night, you're prepping for a big meeting on Monday, you can't reach out to your data analyst and get, you know, your insights in that

moment. Yeah, yeah. And so the convenience of having an AI that can help you with that is just invaluable. Yeah, it's going from zero X to one X engineer all over the org. We've seen this with, with a lot of the vibe coding tools of the Figma and adding like vibe coding to that product. You've taken designers and you've given them the ability to write just like a little bit of code and that's really helpful. And you're doing that for data scientists and not just data scientists, but actually business operations, people who probably would be intimidated by an IPython notebook, presumably. Exactly.

Nailed it. Okay, I want everyone's feedback on my take. Vittorio had this post. He said, Sam Altman's doing the Apple Stance TM, it's over. And I think that the reaction to GPT5 yesterday was interesting because there's a lot of people that say, like, it's better model, like it's cheaper, it's good. It solves, it moves the ball down on the field. It's a good model, sir.

But I think people were mostly reacting to. They had expectations of super intelligence. They had expectations of God in a box. There's been so much rhetoric around that, like, you know, that step up from GPT3 to GPD4 was insane. Five just felt like a big number. And it felt like we'd be discovering and novel science. Totally, totally.

Yeah. Not quite. Everyone was expecting like a binary qualitative jump where you know everyone recognized that you know GPT to in chat GPT dropped we passed the touring test and the next the next hurdle is like I don't know maybe super intelligence whatever that means like you know massive you know just you just hit it with a prompt it just solves everything it does everything every other startup it kills all the rappers like the expectation were just so high that it was hard to match so even with even though there

were a bunch of solid improvements and remember the number one thing that I was asking for was just like get rid of the model picker like and I had I actually was playing around with GPT5 yesterday and I was really happy that I was able to say hey think about this and I didn't have to go to the model picker and it just went and just kicked off a reasoning chain it was great got me a great answer but power users so far are very upset yeah this they want the model picker back true true is what I've been seeing generally but that always happens with these consumer products like I remember when you know anytime something would switch to an algorithmic feed all the people they were like, no, I perfectly curated my list.

This happened in YouTube. Like, back in the day, like, the default YouTube view used to just be your subscriptions. And so you would never see a video unless you subscribe to that person. Terrible for discovery. And, but all the hardcore YouTubers loved it because if I put a YouTube video out, I know that my audience is going to see it. Now I got a duke having the algorithm. You actually had distribution.

You got, it was more like a sub-stack. Just having earned it every single time. Yeah, exactly. And the same thing happened. I remember there were like protest groups on Facebook. when they launched the news feed. It's like the most dominant product of all time. It's like incredibly valuable.

There's protests right now on Reddit. People that miss. Oh, yeah. I want the old. 44045. Yeah. I think those voices will be like personally, I think people will get over it pretty quickly. And I don't think that that those particular, that small cohort of like chattering, the chattering class will be, will be like, they'll get over it.

The clanker economy is in charge. What do you have for? I don't know if I agree with that like there was that whole funeral for cloud three yeah yeah yeah yeah I think that in person right yeah it's like for um I think some people like really like the personality of certain models yeah and those are like it's not just intelligence it's like how it like talks to you yeah and if people would make like some kind of connection with that yeah I think it's you know I mean how many people how many people attended that funeral versus not a lot

It looked like a lot But it was more of a party Yeah I guess it was a party As a percentage of the 100 million DAUs of these apps Like where are we? Like one percent? No it was like 40 people probably

Right like it's just not it's just I mean yeah There were protests at at Facebook HQ When they rolled out like people went to Facebook HQ and were like bring back the old feed And it's like yeah now we're two decades into the algorithmic news feed It's the most dominant consumer social app.

It prints money, and most people really like it. And the revealed preference was like it's good enough. So anyway, my point... I will say, I'm just going to read through Reddit's reaction. Please. Let's go over to LaGrate R slash chat, GPT. GPT5 is the biggest piece of garbage, even as a paid user. The people are not liking it.

Another one, opening I just pulled the biggest bait and switch in AI history, and I'm done. Another, if you miss 4-0, speak up now, contact opening I support. Deleted my subscription after two years. This is like, contact your senator, call your senator. You speak up now. I love that. This is crazy. I mean, how many people are in the Google subreddit, like, complaining about various changes to like the Google algorithm?

GPT-5 is clearly a cost-saving exercise. They removed all their expensive capable models and replaced them with an auto-router that defaults to cost optimization. That sounds bad, so they wrap it up as GPT-5 and proclaim it's incredible. I mean, there's so many times when I fire off an 03 query that a 4-0 could one-shot.

Like, having a model router makes a ton of sense, even just for consumer experience, of like getting the correct answer faster. A lot of viral posts from people just canceling their subscriptions. But how many, you know? Well, I'm just, I'm just providing context. I'm not saying that.

Do you think ARR goes down next month? Well, no way. Well, you know, one in 10, what, how many miles does a chat cheap do you have, like 700 million? Something like one in seven, one in 10 people in the world. They have 100 million you could back into this, and there's roughly 100 million people in the U.S. that use it weekly. Yeah. Based on that 700 million number and the percentage that are outside of the 85%.

Yeah. of their weekly actives or outside of the U.S. So it's like one in ten people in the world aren't clanker mouths. So it's kind of, you know, they're thinking about the bigger market, I feel like, in some ways. And then it's like, you know, when you want to get to the one to like the remaining 90% of the users, do you want a model that thinks for longer? You know, you want more personality. So I think they definitely leaned in on personality.

Yeah. which I think is interesting. I like what Tyler said. You know, you, it's kind of different than feet in some ways because you, you know, you have this like person you talk to. It's like, you know, it's like a relationship and then it just like switches up on how it talks to you. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Do you do you talk to LOMs? I'm shy. I don't really talk to them. I mean, I treat them like something I delegate tasks to. Yeah. And I do that a lot. And I'm definitely in the DAU, 30 minutes a day, love chat. But my workflow is I dictate go pull all this data together, put together a report, and I don't mind that it's using a lot of bullet points. I don't mind that it's using a lot of tables. Like I want that result. I want it to look like the result that I get from Google, but just more hydrated. I do think it's interesting that a lot of people are reporting that they're hitting, they're getting rate limited within an hour of usage as a pro user. Interesting. I haven't run into any rate limits. But of course, whenever there's like these big, I mean, it's in the it's in the top of the business and finance section.

Wall Street Journal. Like today is the day that everyone's going to go test it. You'd kind of expect that rate limits and the GPUs are on fire like right now and then it'll kind of settle in as they provision more more resources. I don't know. My take, Tyler, what else do you have? Yeah, I just wanted to add some context. So apparently Rune tweeted this yesterday. He said, by the way, model auto switcher is apparently broken, which is why it's not routing you correctly. We'll be fixed soon. So maybe that's cause for why people were mad. Yeah, that makes sense. So my take is that Like yesterday, I think that they won the war with the capital markets in the sense that this change is more bullish for the business because it shows that that opening eyes a dominant

consumer app and they have increasing leverage over the customer to route to cheaper models that will save money and be higher margin. There's no doubt that they'll be able to put ads in this. Like like the business of the of the accidental consumer company is as strong as ever, but they kind of lost the battle with the timeline and the hardcore, you know, X users. And yeah, even my, you chin, Jim today is just shared. GPD5 is disappointing. Still hallucinates.

Still M-Dash too much. Still can't follow instructions. I miss 4-0. I miss 4-5. I miss 0.3. The big router keeps failing me. Turns out I like the long model list. Interesting.

Stated preference, not revealed preference. Let's check in with that person and see what app they have on their home row in a month. almost certainly open AI almost certainly I would be very shocked if they're like I'm daily driving something else but we'll see there will always be people that use duck duck go there will be people that use bang but you know there is an increasing scale anyway my my take is if they wanted to have if they wanted to win the war with the timeline yesterday and you could roll back the clock it shouldn't have been the GPT 5 launch it should have been the GPT launch and they should have just said hey we are

we previously, the big number releases corresponded to... So much pressure around the big numbers. Exactly. It used to be... People would just read it as it's an order of magnitude more pre-trained data. Like imagine Julius if you felt pressure before the end of the year to roll out like Julius 2 and if it wasn't like five times better everyone's going to be like, it's over. Julius is over. Well, there's this whole thing about how people would...

Many people were still using GPD 4-0 because they thought it's better than 03. 03 because 3 is a lower number. Yeah, exactly. And that's probably like, you know, that's probably like 60% of the customer base. Like there's probably a lot of people in that bucket who are just like, they don't know

that they should upgrade and get something else. Exactly. It's very natural because they're not like in the weeds, you know, reading about all the different capabilities. They don't understand like what reasoning chain is and all this other stuff. So if they had just come out and said, hey, our product is called chat.

and it's powered by GPT and we will be constantly improving GPT the way Google search is constantly improved like Google searches has has launched a ton of different products like you know when you search like celebrity like Bruce Willis age it it doesn't show you just a link to like his Wikipedia it just shows you the age that was like an improvement to the Google search experience and I don't remember them announcing that on stage I think the I think part of this is presenting the challenge of the infinite ways that people use the product yeah a lot of like people like us or maybe using it for work yeah research and things like that or as a better um you know google search but if you're using it as a companion like this is jarring right imagine imagine you meet you meet up with an old

friend and suddenly they they switched up on they switched up on their day once they they switched up on their day once yeah and it's it happens all the time but it's jarring right it's jarring. And I think a lot of people, like some of the heavy, heavy, heavy power users, the people that are using this for 30 plus hours, you know, 30 plus 10 hours a day, it's very jarring. And it makes me think, is chat GPT going to be able to maintain, you know, continue to really serve, like, who do they care about in the long run? Do they want to be someone's therapist? Do they want to, do they care about the companion market? Elon seems to care a lot about the companion market.

But in terms of knowledge retrieval, very, very few cracks in that strategy. Right now, very few cracks. And so if they had just come out and said, like, we are going to do more Google like keynotes as opposed to app. Like, the reason that Apple stands on stage at the iPhone event every year is because every change is extremely quantifiable. Like, there used to be two cameras. Now there are three.

The camera used to be 10 megapixels. Now it's 20 megapixels. used to be this mini gigabytes. Now it's this many gigaig. Yeah. And even if you don't fully understand, they even abstract that to be like, we now have the M2 chip, the M3 chip. It's 60% faster. Like they're very good. The battery life is 20% longer. Like you can, and even that they abstract into like, you can watch eight hours of video on one battery as opposed to six hours of video on one battery. And so Apple, they do the famous like bento box. I went to chat GPT. I went to GPT5 and I said, put together a bento box for the GPT5 release.

Like what was actually announced and then try and give it weight. And they were all super qualitative. There was not, because previously it was like GPT3 was this big, GPT4 was this big, and you could visualize tangibly like it has more parameters. There are more weights in the model. And that was like something that people could grapple with a little bit.

Yeah, it's like decreasing sycophancy, right? Aiden yesterday said I worked really hard over the last few months on decreasing GPT5 sycifancy. For the first time, I really trust an open AI model to push back and tell me when I'm doing something dumb. Wyatt Walls responded and said, that's a huge achievement. Seriously, if you didn't just make the model smarter, you made it more trustworthy. That's what good science looks like. That's what future safe AI needs.

So let me say it clearly and without flattery. That's not just impressive. It matters. So Wyatt Wall's not beating the sycophancy allegations, but, but again, that's, that's, you know, you can't tie that to a specific number, right? So it doesn't feel as, maybe as meaningful. Yeah. My other, my other take is like, if we do enter a world where, where chat GPT is just on this, like, relentless, like, you know, cash machine, like, run where more people use it, it'll compound. it just becomes the default for knowledge retrieval in chat.

What does that mean for other things that they can do to be splashy? Because Google has, like, no one would watch a keynote from Google every year just being like, here are the changes we made to core Google search. Yeah, it's not about that. It's not interesting. They'll talk about it, but that's not why people are tuning in. Even though one year they do add, like, when you Google a movie, you get like the cast. And that's like kind of cool.

It's nice, but like, I don't need to find out about that from a keynote. Like, I'm not waiting for that. And that's not a reason, oh, I should go use Google. Like, Apple is repitching you every year. You're saying, like, you have an iPhone 7. We want you to upgrade to an iPhone 9. Here's the reason why it's better on all these different vectors. Google, like, you're never stuck with the old Google.

You always have the latest and greatest. So they don't need to repitch you every year. But that doesn't mean Google doesn't need to make noise and do cool things. And most importantly, because Google, Google has such a monopoly over search. They have this cash machine that can just go and fund 20% time projects. Most people focus on like the ones that missed like Google Glass or all the chat apps. But they did create Gmail.

They did create Google Maps. They created Waymo. They created like a bunch of cool stuff. GCP came out of that. And so YouTube. Yeah. I mean that acquisition. But acquisition, but they still like, you know, put the resources and they were in uniquely

with YouTube, they were able to eat the cost of YouTube for a long time until it became profitable. And so I feel like this this updates me towards like maybe I'm more bullish on all the side projects. And like I don't know that the I.O. device is going to be the one that hits. That might be their Google Glass. But if they if they do 10 crazy projects where they burn $5 billion, like it probably won't matter because they'll be massively profitable. So the so they will wind up being able to do that subsidized crazy R&D at scale. And if a few of them hit, we're going to get some really cool side projects out of them. So I think that that's like an interesting like bull case for like random stuff coming out of open AI in the future. So so basically what you're saying is

Apple wants you to make a purchase decision every couple years. Yes. Upgrade your iPhone. Yes. And so they need this big marketing event. Exactly. Whereas Google, Open AI, they just want to keep using the thing. Yeah. They want you not to turn. Yeah. And a lot of the, a lot of the incremental updates to Google. And they do that because it's just a habit. It's so ingrained in people. Exactly. So the question now that I think anybody that wants to say, if somebody wants to say they're bearish on open AI, they have to make the argument that chat GPT is not a habit for hundreds of millions of people. Exactly.

And it is. It is. I think part of the, I'd be interested to get Tyler Cowan's point of view because I don't think he would have been that let down by the announcement yesterday because he was, he's been saying for a while, we've been moving the goalposts. So everybody wants to kind of redefine AGI, but in his mind it happened earlier this year. and I think that he's a knowledge retrieval

in 2019 or 2020 if you were pitching someone on a vision of hey we're going to be able to put this app in people's pocket that allows them to learn about any topic in the world understand their world better I mean I still think about the use case of just being able to take a picture of like a bunch of wiring

or pipe in your house and be like hey how do I fix it and then it just tells you Like, that's still just so incredible, but people have just, like, very quickly acclimated to it. Yeah. And they felt like in some way they were promised that LLMs would be curing diseases on their own at this point. And so that example, like, you take a picture of the wires and it gives you, like, a diagram of, like, how to plug everything in. It's like, that doesn't need a keynote when it goes from 50% accuracy to 70% accuracy. It's probably never going to be 100% accuracy.

But the fact that chat GPT is the default app that people will pull out, take a picture of the wires in the first place, and then give feedback to it, because they'll try the answer, and they'll say, that didn't work, that HDMI cable does not fit in that power port or whatever. And then, and then that gets fed in. Then there's more RL. Eventually, internally, they develop some bench for it and they hack it and they RL on it. And then it gets good.

But that's not going to be GPT6. That's just going to be like a nice new feature that you notice. like when Google adds like a little extra shopping widget here or like a little extra detail on when you when you like the calculator in Google like you type in a number it'll just be like oh we'll just use a calculator for that instead of Googling for the searching the open web for the answer to your math question I think if we could if the if the industry could go back in time the thing to do would have been to bolt the goalpost to the ground people couldn't keep moving back over and over I mean I left yesterday I think no one in the

industry bolt it was doing any bolting everyone in the industry was move was moving the goal they're just as guilty as moving the goalpost because they would hop on podcast and be like okay well like you know yeah we did this what about the next thing let's say because like we want to underwrite against that right give us credit i mean we ended the day yesterday just incredibly bullish on rappers and like application layer certain certain categories of software yeah and and bullish on humanity i mean i was joking and it and it kind of pissed people off i said uh i've updated my timelines you now have at least four years to escape the permanent underclass completely a joke i think that humans will continue to find ways to create value and create things for a very long time

but it did feel like everybody should breathe uh anybody that actually had a genuine fear around that should breathe a sigh of relief and just focus on being great at their work yeah i mean realistically, I think technology is going to increase income inequality, increase the power law, increase the distribution, but also increase economic mobility. And so somebody who starts with nothing will be able to come extremely, extremely wealthy. And people will also fall from grace like crazy, because if they're not staying on the cutting edge, they'll lose everything. But so I don't think that there's such a thing as like permanent underclass. Like I don't, I don't even believe in that. I think that's not going to be a thing. But the

will be more like there will be more scenarios where there's a hundred million dollars in your laptop it's your job to get it out basically that's the main anyway yeah and the other the other stuff that wasn't really i mean it was it covered at all yesterday but just generally like image generation uh wasn't covered broadly it feels like that is a super exciting area we had genie launch this week which got less attention than even the open models and gpt five and that's transformative i also think I'm still kind of waiting to see what GPT-5 will produce on if, you know, Sam does a lot of vague posting, but he was talking about the fast fashion era of SaaS. Yeah. And Mitchell yesterday on the research team at opening I was talking about being able to

just generate, you know, one-shot a game in, in chat, and then being able to share that. I can see a world where we have another kind of viral studio Ghibli moment where people are like, use this prompt change these details and you can just generate you know a first person shooter game or something to that effect and i still expect that kind of thing but um when you know being promised curing cancer uh it it will feel like a bit of a let down to a lot of people yeah the problem game is like i just like i like an auteur i like i like a last of us i like a god of war i like someone who is like life's work obsessive. This is like Hunter

Biden going on his recent interview. Your John's vice is video games. Never seen him play one, but apparently you see it. When GTI 6 drops, you might not see it. I was surprised, I mean, again, Amjad said late last night, can't help but feel the crushing weight of diminishing

returns. We need a new S curve. And I don't, this is interesting. I I think he's talking about, like, in the context of Replit, I don't know that they need a new S-curve. No, they are the new S-curve. The new S-curve is, is applications. Unlocking capability. Yeah, yeah.

And there we have like a, it's, you were saying capability overhang. It's almost like a capability underhang. It's like the models are capable of doing things, but they need a lot of help, a lot of integrations, a lot of what you're doing with Julius, a lot of harnessing. And then they need to actually be put in the hands of people and made, you. useful for real business tasks that drive value. And so I would imagine that we will see that rollout continue in the same way that, you know, all these people are using chat GPT. They're getting slight little benefits here and there.

And that should just compound and compound similar to the internet. Like it was a very like smooth rollout, but everything got a little bit smoother, a little bit faster. And then eventually it had sort of profound effects where companies could scale even faster because the internet existed. Like you can't have a chat GPT moment in a pre-internet era. You just cannot roll out something that fast when you have to mail it to somebody on a disc. Yeah.

This doesn't happen. One thing we didn't get to cover with Mark that I was interested, maybe the next time he comes on. But like how Open AI is thinking about moonshots, he did mention that they have teams internally on the research team that are not focused on the next version of GPT5 or sort of incremental improvements. And it feels like the point of view that I have. is Open AI is now a consumer, consumer and enterprise software company in the business of converting free users to paid users, but they can still, in the background, be thinking about what is the next paradigm, right? How do we get that next? Yeah. That next S-curve, and that just looks like a scaled tech company, right? This is what Google's doing forever. But Bology says LLMs may have topped

out for now, but the broader AI deployment has just begun showing a chart of Waymo Weekly rides in California so the clanker rollout clanker deployment has just begun I like this other post doing a clanker microaggression okay ha ha but where were you downloaded from originally