TBPN Live - X’s $1M Sweepstakes, Ben Affleck’s viral take on AI, Elon sues OpenAI for $134B | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow 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/@TBPNLiveDiet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow 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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:01 We're talking about the article apocalypse that's happening on X. Will it slop up the timeline? Will the algorithm handle the flood of AI generated content that will be slopped up in the timeline? We will see. We will dig into it. We will discuss it. We'll also try and understand what is going on with Nikita Beer strategy. What's the strategy at X?
Starting point is 00:00:23 Will this growth, this growth hack work? So this all started with Nikita Beer on X. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we are giving $1 million. to the top article posted on X, you have two weeks. And very, very different structure. They thought, there's already, there's so much AI-generated essays on X. Let's do it. Why not make AI-generated essays lottery tickets?
Starting point is 00:00:47 Lottery tickets. Let's turn them into lottery tickets. I like it. I mean, they're definitely paying out more than a million dollars in creator payments across all the little $100,000, $1,000 checks that go out to folks. You have to imagine. But running a sweepstakes, I mean, that's time honored. What's not to like about a sweepstakes?
Starting point is 00:01:04 It's great. Nikita's kind of taking two sides to this. He says, it's time to write, but also he tells everyone else, please bear with article Armageddon. My question was, what's the strategy here and what will the outcome be? The Elon taking over felt like, okay, it's an entirely new day. Everything's moving way faster. Now, some of those projects had actually been in the works for months or
Starting point is 00:01:29 years before. I think Community Notes was the big one where the Twitter team had been building that infrastructure for a while, but they had 5,000 people working on it for over five years. Probably, something like that. 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. They'd also previously acquired this Dutch startup review, which was a direct competitor substack, but that product was shut down in less than two years, like January to January. They only made it two years. Never really got it off the ground. And I think it was because it was sort of counter positioned with Twitter.
Starting point is 00:02:02 It was kind of like always, oh, well, if we get people on the review platform, they'll leave or they'll take their audience elsewhere. It never really felt in the ecosystem. Yeah, and I don't know that a lot of people had some incredible faith that, hey, I want to build my business on like a Twitter, like. I mean, even pre-Elon, there had been companies,
Starting point is 00:02:21 startups that had built on the Twitter API, which had gone through a number of version changes. Elon made some more extreme changes to that. But there were plenty of times when people would build businesses like too closely to any platform, really, and then they get steamrolled, whether you're, you know, Zinga building on, building Farmville, on Facebook, and then they change the algorithm or they change the integration, and all of a sudden your growth engine's just gone. This happened with T-Spring.
Starting point is 00:02:44 They were selling custom T-shirts. You know, they've been working on making X a more literate, long-form platform for a while, 20-23. We need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than, you know, 180 characters. So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. Like I used to cross post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while.
Starting point is 00:03:10 Then they got rid of those. So I could just actually copy a 25 minute YouTube video, put it on X. And it was cool. People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube. And there was no catalog value. That was like the really weird thing. Was that on YouTube, like my old videos that I haven't uploaded an over a year. and my old videos are still probably getting like,
Starting point is 00:03:29 I don't know, half a million views a month, just because people are, every day, they search, like, what's the history of Anderol, or what's the history of Ramp, or what's the history of Siegian Ping? Well, and they're evergreen content, so it just continues to get served. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:03:41 And then once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more, and part of that, if you want to be a serious video platform, you need to be, like, have, you know, actually incentivizing people to watch on TV. Like so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And X, I think, has a,
Starting point is 00:03:56 streaming TV app, but it's certainly not, doesn't get a lot of love. Continuing with the long post journey that X has been on, 2023 was a massive year. February took it from 280 characters to 4,000 characters. That's more than I need for most of my posts. I don't think I've ever posted anything longer than that. April expanded it to 10,000 characters and finally in June they maxed it out at 25,000 characters.
Starting point is 00:04:24 That's longer than most blog posts. that's around 4,000 words, maybe a little bit more. And you can still thread these posts together. So I was always wondering, like, why does articles exist if long posts are so long that you can put 4,000 words there? And now I think that essentially articles are first class citizens in the algorithm. And there's really no downside.
Starting point is 00:04:46 Zach Foll had a great idea. He said, Grock, summarize this article and 280 characters are less. Don't make any mistakes, thanks. So if you really yearn for this, the days the pre-article era just respond and tag rock and every time and have it turn it back into just regular yeah 140 characters yeah even shorter so when articles launched in march of 2024 it didn't really hit for me like I was not like oh I got to jump on this I got a post you know we started doing
Starting point is 00:05:13 the newsletter in 2025 mid year we started cross-posting articles were available I think we might have tested one or two as an article didn't really see a difference so just kind of stuck with the long posts so my pieces are usually around 5,000 characters they fit fine in a long post oh yeah we're getting 10x more views now that we're using articles that's kind of the same thing but it does seem like a interesting format that maybe they will surface it's a better experience as a reader if you take advantage of the formatting maybe but and and you're doing bullet points and bolding and italics like you can write embedding posts yeah embedding posts is cool and
Starting point is 00:05:48 also images in the I saw one that had like graphics and it read almost like a like a strategic piece, it had embedded images and stuff. It was cool. So strategically, this big article push, it feels like another shot at substack. But I don't know that anyone's going to be rushing to get off of substack based on this because the value of substack, the value prop is that you own your email list. So you have a direct relationship with your audience, and you could take that anywhere. You could leave at any time. You can even take your Stripe account with you, which is a crazy thing. It's so creator-friendly.
Starting point is 00:06:26 And substacks made that their brand, and they built a great business around it. And long-term, I think substack should probably figure out how to build some sort of ads product that can run across all of the different subsdocks because that would probably be a total TBPN victory. It would. It would. They've been very, very anti-ad, anti- ads. But I just see, like, what does it take to get substack into the Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit,
Starting point is 00:06:51 category, sort of like DACA corn category. And you imagine that for a lot of these, like if you're, they're clearly trying to push people into the substack app, but even just embedding ads here and there, it could be done tastefully. I think it could be done in a way that's not too abrasive. But I think just from a business perspective, it would make sense and really open up to some big, big dollars. You had kind of a rough theory that that maybe there was some logic to doing this just for having new training data. Yeah. So, So there's this idea that, you know. Untitled YouTube chats is the data is worth 10x more than one minute.
Starting point is 00:07:27 There were a few people that were mentioning this. Talk about a company that feels very immune to vibe coding. Plad. You don't want the, somebody comes to you and they're like, I got Platt, but I'm going to charge you half as much. Oh, yeah. It's like, I'll take the real one. I'll take the storing and processing my customers
Starting point is 00:07:46 financial information. Yeah. Noah in the chat says, I don't want to read substack without ads. So that's, there we go. That's advertising strongest soldier. So the question is like, you put out this million dollar bounty, how many people will show up, how many articles will actually get posted?
Starting point is 00:08:01 I am seeing a lot of articles in the feed. It's also hilarious when you see like a Fortune 500 CEO post an article. She's like, oh, damn, are you really down and you need a mill? Like, what's going on, buddy? And it's like, no, they're just posting news and they just need to get something out
Starting point is 00:08:16 so they use an article. But it's funny to imagine that they're like, oh man, the million would change everything for me. Yeah, it's what I need. But Tim, Tim Cook starts dripping articles. He's like, he's like, I need to, I can't be like within the same. We're not going to do a keynote this year for the new iPhone. We're dropping an article. And we're releasing it nine months early. The question is, is the data valuable? So a million dollars, how many people will show up? How many people will play the game? How many people will buy a lottery ticket by writing original articles? that go viral. I mean, I've been seeing, I've been seeing so many people quoting articles, sharing them and say, you need to read this. It's incredibly well written. Sure. And then I tap in and it's just obviously slop, slop. Doesn't seem like anyone's going to be bailing on
Starting point is 00:09:05 substack today to move over, but there is just valuable. And then there's also the question of like, so you're probably not going to get your own audience list on X, but will you even be able to monetize with subscriptions? X does have subscriptions, but Substack has a way more like built out. I wonder what the, I wonder what the monthly revenue is for the person that's utilizing subscriptions the best, right? Who's the highest earning subscription driven creator.
Starting point is 00:09:34 But the interesting thing is that Substack offers more than just a one-time subscription monthly. You can pay annually, get a discount, participate in the live stream, get the chat. And then there's also like business plans, group plans. So they just have a way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a, uh, a customer. list or an email list and then obviously you can take them elsewhere. If you're like, look, my newsletter product has grown so much that I have like enterprise level needs. I have to be off substack. You can go and build something from scratch that does exactly what you want. How did you conclude? What was your takeaway? My question was, so I don't see anyone who's a writer online who's on
Starting point is 00:10:12 substack being like, okay, now's the moment. A million dollars is on the table. I'm shutting down my substack and I'm going over to X exclusively. But a lot of people cross-bub. That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free, if you have a substack that's part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? It's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel.
Starting point is 00:10:33 I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our substack list. I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TBPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm. So I don't think X needs writers to go all in. I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well, so then they can surface that to people.
Starting point is 00:11:01 If you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that, and I think they'll be successful there. Yeah, the question, I mean, if they're really successful and you have like YouTube for long form writing, like the UGC platform for long form writing, it's probably a solid business, but it's not going to be a juggernaut like YouTube, specifically, because it's not gonna monetize nearly as well. I want your take on whether, on the actual article experience. I was chatting with some folks who have really, really big on Twitter,
Starting point is 00:11:30 a little group of folks who are all well over 100K, I've gotten there back in like the thread era. They were like thread guys basically. And they were saying like, I don't think Naval's how to get rich without getting lucky thread would have worked as an article. The fact that it was all these bite size pieces, like that's, that was what was. special. I think personally that meta has sort of died and we haven't seen that work.
Starting point is 00:11:56 What do you think? Coming back and just unironically ripping threads. Why not? I'd Zigg. Do you miss threads? Do you miss that error at all? Is it, can you remember any iconic threads other than Lulu's and Nival's? Noval is the main one that I remember. I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that actually blew up my account. So I was at 10,000 followers. Is this the Alaska one? No, that was not that that got me unfollowes because I posted about bringing tech, you know, I was early on the let's leave California train and I said we got to go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to Texas. We're going to Alaska because if you have runaway global warming, it's going to be beachfront property up there, baby. It's
Starting point is 00:12:41 going to be 72 and sunny every day in Alaska. Palm trees. Alternatively, if we solve global warming, We will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat, air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a one megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your doorstep, and you will have unlimited power, and you'll be lounging in a beautiful scenic mountain retreat, perfectly temperature control. And Alaska did not like that. They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns saying, if you come up here, California boy, there will be consequences.
Starting point is 00:13:12 And it was a rough day on the Internet. I had to lock my account. So I closed out saying that, you know, maybe there's, you know, article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with X generally, and honestly, Nikita specifically a lot of times. We should talk about X-A-I. Oh, yes.
Starting point is 00:13:33 What's going on with X-A-I? So, Ty Morse, did a podcast with Sulaan Khan Gori. Yeah. Who was previously, at the time when the podcast was done. Yes. He, of course, was working at XAI. He came in. He talked about WTF is happening at XAI, predicting bottlenecks, bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at XAI, cybertruck bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how XAI hires, experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates.
Starting point is 00:14:07 No one tells me no. That's important. That's a wild one. why the fuzziness between teams is an advantage, testing human emulators as employees, biggest blunders, what a meeting with Elon is like, how Elon gives feedback, figuring out what is truth for Grockapedia, what happens when Elon sees wrong GROC outputs on X? Massively viral, by the way, four million views just on X. I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content.
Starting point is 00:14:34 Beautifully shot. Well, that. Very well done. And great content, right? People are so curious about what's happening at XAI, right? We want to understand, you know, how they're approaching different problems. And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI, AGI, super futuristic.
Starting point is 00:14:51 And then he'll give little details on like some massive buildout that he's working on. But he's not one nitty gritty. One small problem. Yes. Usually a $200 billion company likes to control who out, who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company. Yes. And specifically with Elon companies. Yes.
Starting point is 00:15:08 If you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of. of people that work for Elon companies that go and do the podcast circuit and go talk about everything going on. The funny thing is I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about how like HR in general is like not super formalized at the company. And so you can also imagine that like PR and the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it an hour long podcast. What happened, ultimately, Suleiman, uh, He said he's left. He left.
Starting point is 00:15:41 We don't actually know what happened. But it is odd to go do an hour-long interview and then quay. Anyway, so I think like good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no a little bit too far. I posted it earlier. You can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore. The speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said XAI intends to run 1 million human emulations, a digital version of Optimus for online work,
Starting point is 00:16:13 which will be powered by leasing compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging. That's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have a pretty advanced AI chip doing self-driving in the Teslas. They're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease that back? Why is it a digital version of Optimus? Is it going to be sitting there in the corner, like, clipy? I mean, I think realistically it's probably just like agentic rollouts.
Starting point is 00:16:42 So if it's for online work, it's like, what are a bunch of tasks that you could, you could like turn grok loose on everything from like, you know, the classic like order door dash in a simulation, try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation, all these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code. So a life lesson there. Let's go over to Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI.
Starting point is 00:17:12 There's some discussion over how good of takes they are, but I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck. They were like a proper AI researcher and they said that they met Ben Affleck and he used compute as a noun. And they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like he's talking about like scaling compute. He's actually very, very deep in this. Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white-pilled.
Starting point is 00:17:34 And it seemed like a really good interview. Ryan says what if he's just acting. If you try to get ChatGBT, BT, or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average. And it's not reliable. And it's, I mean, I just came to stand to see what it's rights. Now, it's a useful tool if you're a writer. And you're going, ah, what's the thing?
Starting point is 00:17:58 I'm trying to set something up or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets, and it can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it can, it's going to be able to write anything meaningful or in particular That it's going to be making movies like from whole cloth like Tilly nor like that's bullshit. I don't think that's gonna happen I think it's not I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of Presented it and really what is is gonna be just like sort of visual effects there was a line in here where yeah there was a line in heroes like that is a Carpathie line like he definitely heard this from I'm Carpathie. He's listening to Dorcasch for sure. For money, I can't. You can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like the thing we're talking about earlier, where there's a lot more.
Starting point is 00:18:42 The whole idea of like these models being made, that's not quite true. I mean, it's hard with like to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verify a reward for like a great script that will break through because even the great script writers have flops that are unexpected. Literally everyone thinks it's great and then it goes out and it just is a box office bomb. Later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne the Rock Johnson in the film The Smashing Machine. And Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about one
Starting point is 00:19:18 of the most climactic scenes in the Smashing Machine. It's very emotional. And he asks Dwayne, how did you pick this motion? He pulls up a sheet because he's sad. And like, what were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create? create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen because Matt Damon's saying, I love that, I love that scene. I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're...
Starting point is 00:19:44 Was he thinking about content without ads in order to draw on this sort of like deep, sad emotion? Yes, yes. That might be what does it for you. But I mean, Dwayne Johnson gave like a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer and he was in the room when she got the news. And so her reaction, he was like channeling that. It was very emotional. and then the other one was, I think, about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I continue to think that the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with art and the NFT boom. It's not the scarcity is important, but the story. behind the art piece is a lot of it.
Starting point is 00:20:37 People like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and all this history and he's in all the history books and everyone just knows Van Gogh. And yes, you could go. Even with cars, right? A car is worth more if the previous owner had was significant in some way. Yes, yes, yes. Steve McQueen is going to sell for more. And I think that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that
Starting point is 00:21:03 lore of like who this person is and their likeness. And then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can, I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not going to have anywhere near the value. And when he gets to the idea of just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately. And that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years. And we've had a system for counteracting that. Like, you have to pay licensing fees and that will happen. So he has a good, he has a good balance.
Starting point is 00:21:38 And it's, and it's, don't think it's very likely that it can, it's going to be able to write anything meaningful or, and in particular, that it's going to be making movies like from Holcloth, like Tilly Norwood. Like that's bullshit. Can you pause this? He doesn't think that, like, an iconic, amazing movie is going to be generated by AI. And I sort of agree with that, but I think it's important to consider, like, what are we defining as a movie?
Starting point is 00:22:02 because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. And if you think about it like, you know, decades ago, people might see one movie a month or one movie a week. And that's like two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well, now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But it's these fragmented pieces. And so if AI seeps into the cracks within the cracks,
Starting point is 00:22:28 within the cracks, and the goal is not to create, the experience of a two-hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets. Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwarkesh for A-Lister's. It's just come on and talk about AI, right? It's really- Gregory McConnor. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:45 It's talking about wanting this like personal LLM. Oh yeah. Or you can log the data in. Yeah, that one was a little bit rougher than this. I think it's not, I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of Rich Sutton. And really what is, it's going to be a tool. Just like sort of visual effects.
Starting point is 00:23:02 And yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Those laws already exist. You can't, I can't sell your fucking picture for money. I can't. You can sue me, period.
Starting point is 00:23:14 I might have the ability to draw you, to make you a very realistic way, but that's already against the law. And the unions are gonna, the guilds are gonna manage this where it's like, okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don't have to go to the North Pole, right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas,
Starting point is 00:23:32 and whatever it is, but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole. It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside. Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as a place, right? You're getting clapsed. As a place. Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in LA.
Starting point is 00:23:57 There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. but all the all the talent the writers directors producers the platforms they're still here it's very depressing it's a bad vibe all the restaurants are shutting down everything's cooked but if you can start to generate the content here just on your computer there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in in hollywood the place right yeah and i think that realistically that is the strategy that that that the industry should take because like having this concentration here, there's already so much talent, keeping it here and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city. Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting
Starting point is 00:24:46 their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple. I mean, he's not that, I mean, this is a joke. I didn't actually say that. But, is not that far off from what this is a great template I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good early AI the line went up very steeply and it's now sort of leveling off I think it's because and yes it'll get better but it's going to be really expensive to get better and a lot of people are like fuck this we watch you at GPD 4 because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to like as like companion bots to chat with at night so there's no work there's no productivity there's no
Starting point is 00:25:29 value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to like focus on an AI friend who's you know telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and let's give Tyler a rebuttal. Defend I think most of these takes are like pretty outdated. Okay. Like writing is actually AI writing you can still tell that it's AI but it's like it's good it's good. Yeah. Okay. Sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah. Yeah. Shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Yeah. But why would I sell it? Why would I sell a screenplay? Yeah. Why would I sell a screenplay? screenplay, I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay. Just make the movie. Just make the finish movie. Call on Netflix. Instead of... Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here, right? You don't need the parkers either because you can just have them be in normal clothes. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right?
Starting point is 00:26:17 Because you can just maybe fine-tune a model so you get consistent to characters. Sure, sure, sure. And then... Yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there. I would push back a little bit on Ben saying like you're not just going to be able to generate a film. You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic.
Starting point is 00:26:39 It won't be something everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything. Yeah, but I'm just saying like people are going to create like insane fan fiction style, heroes journey. Yeah, yeah. Kind of standardized plot. But for a specific subcommittee, you'll have like one subreddit. where everyone has watched it.
Starting point is 00:27:01 And I mean, there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch Gapier, Tyler, put Affleck in the truth zone. In Hollywood, at least, like I like a lot of movies, like there's certain writers that I like. Okay, you like movies?
Starting point is 00:27:17 Wait, you said you like movies? Name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat best film list. That's movie list. Okay, but you always hear about certain writers, they have a hard time getting their films,
Starting point is 00:27:29 because maybe it's like kind of a weird concept or something like it's it's hard to market but this is like AI is actually much better for them right because if you have someone who's like actually has some like unique look at the world or they're like very creative or something like AI is like super good for them but kind of only for them right so maybe in the industry it's not super great but for the people like if there's a certain director that i like really love they're gonna be you know they're gonna be able to make way more of their movies or whatever you know instantiate all their ideas chat is calling Tyler based zoomer He's a zoomer. It's good. Good times. There's an update to the Elon Musk Open AI lawsuit,
Starting point is 00:28:05 which is sitting at about 60% chance that Elon wins on Kalshi right now on the prediction market. So on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral. Open AI put out a release. They countered some of the narratives, added some more context, but they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey, look, we think it's going to be $34 million or something at worst. We think this is the most. but it could be more. It's going to be $134 billion in damages is what Elon is seeking. Musk's legal team argues that his early funding and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, which is now valued at $500 billion, and he wants his slice. The lawsuit says OpenAI has become
Starting point is 00:28:47 a for-profit company entitling Musk to compensation tied to the value created from his early contributions. When asked about the lawsuit, Elon Musk responded, I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war. So great line. Yes. But I don't think this lawsuit is the war. Yes. I think it's a battle in a longer war.
Starting point is 00:29:08 Yes. And I think that it may play a role. Yes. And how this sort of like war between XAA and opening I or Elon versus Sam evolves. But ultimately, like, this judge is not going to make, you know, the judge and jury are not going to make a decision that just like decides the war. The war is going to be won by overwhelming domination. in the categories that they compete. If he gets that, it's like over 25% of the company, something like that.
Starting point is 00:29:34 And that's going to be hard, again, depending, I'm sure it'll come out how much Sam owns exactly in the case. But it's going to be hard to justify that he deserves more than Sam given their. And also just play out what happens if Elon does get all $134 billion. It's like you're not CEO, you're not, you don't have board control, You don't have super voting shares, but you're a massive shareholder that can just constantly do shareholder lawsuits. And so that's going to be incredibly annoying and very bad. But at the same time, like, maybe a distraction.
Starting point is 00:30:11 How do you actually get to control if that's what Elon's going for? We will see what the judge thinks and where the damage is land if he wins, which is still, you know, not guaranteed by any means. It could wind up being a fieric victory for Elon. It could be something where he wins the battle. but he loses the war in the sense that, like, it's a distraction. There's going to be a ton of discovery. It'll be, you know, ultimately, even if he gets $100 billion, he's worth $700 billion. It's like a drop in the bucket.
Starting point is 00:30:40 We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow, folks. Have a great MLK day. Thanks for hanging out. Goodbye. Cheers.

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