TBPN - Microsoft, Meta, & Tesla Earnings, Google DeepMind's Project Genie, SpaceX & xAI Merger | Anton Osika, Christian Garrett & Delian Asparouhov, Eric Seufert, Kevin Weil, Mehul Nariyawala

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(02:23) - Apple Acquires Audio AI Startup Q.AI (12:05) - Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla Earnings (25:37) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (36:27) - SpaceX & xAI Merger (41:02) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:23) - Google DeepMind's Project Genie (01:06:51) - Chrome Debuts "Agentic Browsing" (01:10:41) - TikTok Uninstalls Surge 150% (01:15:21) - Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, an AI-powered platform enabling users to build applications through natural language prompts, discusses the company's rapid growth, including reaching 300 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) within two months. He highlights how Lovable empowers non-technical users to create and deploy software solutions, citing examples like a restaurant owner developing an AI phone-answering system and a pet owner generating AI-crafted dog portraits for sale. Osika emphasizes the platform's focus on simplicity and security, aiming to democratize software development and unlock human creativity. (01:44:48) - Christian Garrett & Delian Asparouhov is a venture capitalist and co-founder of The Hill & Valley Forum, a bipartisan community bridging Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., to address national security challenges through technology. In the transcript, he discusses the upcoming third annual Daytime Forum, emphasizing its focus on strengthening ties between the technology sector and government, expanding into industries like biotechnology, and increasing international participation to foster collaboration with U.S. allies. He also highlights the forum's evolution into a platform for developing and endorsing joint policies that align public and private sector incentives for national benefit. (02:00:03) - Eric Seufert is a mobile growth strategist and analyst best known for his writing on advertising, user acquisition, and platform economics. He runs Mobile Dev Memo, a widely read industry blog, is the author of Freemium Economics, and previously led user acquisition at Rovio, where he worked on scaling mobile games in a post-IDFA world. (02:36:46) - Kevin Weil, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer, discusses the transformative impact of AI on scientific research, highlighting how advanced models like GPT-5.2 are now capable of solving complex, open problems in mathematics and other scientific fields. He emphasizes the importance of integrating AI into scientists' daily workflows through tools like Prism, which enhance scientific writing and collaboration. Weil envisions a future where AI accelerates scientific discovery by automating routine tasks and enabling researchers to focus on more complex challenges. (02:55:26) - Mehul Nariyawala, co-founder of Matic, discusses the company's recent $60 million funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures, the challenges and insights gained from various pricing models for their autonomous home robots, and the strategic focus on building consumer trust and data collection through their initial product to pave the way for future advancements in home robotics. (03:06:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlOkta - https://www.okta.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. Today is Thursday, January 29th, 2026. We are live in the TVPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.

Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more. They got Super Bowl ads, too, in just a few days. We're counting down the days to the Ramp Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for it. Also, not the Super Bowl. Counting down the days. Yeah, I learned a fun fact.

I think I put it in here. Apparently, they had a Super Bowl back in 2001. Okay. Have you heard of this? Tell me more. So I got followed by this account that's called 2001 Live. 2001 Live. It's 25 years ago live.

It's a cool account. And in here, they flash back to like what was happening, you know, 25 years ago. Every day they post what happened 25 years ago. It's a kind of cool account. It followed me. I followed it a while ago, but it followed me. And I saw a post in here that said 25 years ago. years ago, they did a Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida. The Baltimore Ravens beat the New York Giants

34 to 7. This is the Ravens' first Super Bowl title. I guess people are not happy about that? I don't know. But anyway, very excited for the Super Bowl. In other news, let's run through the linear lineup. Pull it up. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And we have a fantastic show. We have Anton from lovable coming in studio in the old person. Then we got Christian and Delian from Hill and Valley breaking down what's going to happen at the Hill and Valley Conference in just

a few weeks. And then we got Eric Superinator. We need a nickname. No, we love Eric of course from mobile dev memo, Herakley's Capital and he's coming on at one. We're going to talk about ads, chat GPT ads, how is the whole lot going. Also, obviously earnings makes a ton of sense. And then Kevin from

Open AI is coming on again returning to talk about science. In science. AI and science. And if we're seeing a clawed bot type moment, feeling the AGI in science, what we should be looking for there in 2026. In other AI news, of course, we will go into earnings and whatnot today. If you're tracking earnings, make sure to head over to public.com investing for those to take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

So in the news today, Apple said this morning that it has acquired Q.AI, an Israeli startup working on AI technology for audio. Apple didn't disclose the terms. The company was backed by Matter Venture Partners, Kleiner, Spark, Exor, and GV. So, nice little lineup and great outcome. The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly $2 billion, so pretty meaningful deal.

Apple is not known for really paying up on a lot of different M&A that they're kind of folding in to their roadmap. We had Mark Kerman on yesterday talking about how Apple uses M&A effectively to accelerate their roadmap. So according to Reuters, Apple did not say how it will use QAI's technology, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio and challenging environments. QAI last year filed a patent to use facial skin micro-movements to detect words, mouthed, or spoken.

This is, this is, we've seen a couple startups that are, you know, doing like the whisper, like, what do they call it? It's like telepathy almost. It's, it tracks your, your mouth movement so you can just, and then it like will track. Yeah, crazy. So facial skin micro movements will be used to identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators. Crazy. Very sci-fi. QAIs, 100 employees, including the CEO and co-founders, will join Apple. So the founders, Avid Mizell founded three-dimensional sensing firm Prime Sense and sold it to Apple in 2013.

Absolute dogs. They're doing it again. The Prime Sense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its iPhone and toward facial recognition technology. So Misell said joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we've created. So very, very wild to be going back to Apple for a second time. And pop quiz for Tyler, why does Apple acquire companies? I mean, why questions are usually pretty open. Okay, good answer.

But Mark German told us, why does Apple acquire companies to accelerate the roadmap? Accelerate the roadmap. Yes. And it's funny because I asked him like, why are we going to hear Tim Cook say that? And he was like, oh, because earnings. But we're basically hearing them say it today with this surprise acquisition. That's obviously the line from Apple. And it makes sense.

This is something that is uniquely acceleratable because of the Apple hardware ecosystem. They can deploy this through AirPods. They can deploy this through the phones, just like they did with Face ID. If you have that technology and you're like, oh, well, in order to log into your computer with your face, you're going to need a third-party device that you plug into USB. No one's going to do that. But if you're just like, yeah, it's going to get baked into the hardware. We have the patents.

And haven't you been wanting them to make more moves in specifically audio and transcription for a while? I've been like an audio interface bull forever. Like since I worked at a startup that competed with Siri in 2010 or something like that. It was actually a good outcome. I didn't get an equity because I was just an intern. But it was actually a great outcome. They sold to Dragon, naturally speaking, and everyone made a bunch of money. Siri, there we go.

But Siri was like the hot kid on the block back then. And Siri came out of Stanford, so they were much closer to Coupentino. These guys came out at MIT. Very similar natural speech recognition, you know, machine learning pipelines for understanding speech, doing dictation. Their main platform was BlackBerry because BlackBerry was really, really big. They had a BlackBerry App Store. They did a deal so that you would get like pre-installed. so you get a big check from RIM.

They did a very interesting out-of-home campaign where they bought billboards right outside of Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry's headquarters, because they were advertising. Yes, AdQuick didn't exist then, but they should have used AdQuick. They, because they were basically, they only had one customer, effectively.

I mean, they had every customer that could go buy the app, but then all the other apps that were on either Google and Android quickly rolled out competitive features with Google Assistant, Siri got acquired, and so it was very clear that Apple was not going to be a really fertile ground, playground for them. And so they needed to get sort of like the attention of the Blackberry execs. And so they put up a billboard right outside their headquarters. I still like as a strategy.

I think it's very fun. But yes, I've been very bullish on this. I was thinking back then that, you know, people get their wisdom teeth out. This is very weird in cyberpunk, but if you got your wisdom teeth out, you could potentially like create, like add a, like a port for storing a microphone. Tyler, do you have any of these? I should have got that. Yeah, exactly, because a lot of people get them out, and then you could just put a port there

and you could insert basically the tip of an AirPods, very, very small device that you would charge and then you put it in, and then when you're whispering, you can just hear, it can only hear that and it goes dictation straight to your phone. Obviously, that's unnecessary because you can, you know, do bone induction, You can also just have an AirPod in and just talk out loud and not care what people think. There's those crazy muffled things you've seen that where you put on the headphones and then it puts like a cover over your mouth so you can talk in public. Oh, yeah. It's silent around you.

Canter says, I want my iPhone to unlock only if I silently mouth the words open sesame. Think could be in the future. I was wondering about... That would actually be nice if there was some other element. You still have this like wearing sunglasses, trying to unlock your phone. Some pairs of sunglasses I have, it one-shots it. Others, it's like, you know, pretty annoying. I was wondering about the quality of whisper transcription these days.

Like, if I just open up Whisper on the chat GPT app, put my phone in my pocket and just talk, can it just hear through my pants pocket and just dictate perfectly now? because AI is so good at transcription that it can be really muffled. You can have music playing in the background and talk to whisper, and it just won't. Yeah, it just won't mess up. So there is a world where you don't actually need

like a separate pin. You just have something anywhere on everybody, and it knows, okay, this is what John sounds like. Let's kill all the background noise. Let's kill all the other people talking. Let's isolate that with AI. It seems pretty, pretty good for that. Anyway, let me tell you about Lambda.

Lambda is the super, intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. One more thing on this QAI acquisition. They're using, going back to their patent, using facial skin micro movements to assess emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators. You could imagine where a world in the future where you have Apple smart glasses that effectively have, like, health monitoring because it's tracking respiration, heart rate, all these different things,

and just basically integrating the features you're getting from the Apple Watch today. But I wonder what it's really unlocking that the watch can't do. There's always the question when you pitch a new device. It's like, well, your phone does have a camera on it, so you're not, like the smart glasses aren't the first camera. Yeah, but it's a new device, but it's a Lindy form factor, right?

True, true. Like this is something we've talked about in the past. It's like the new hardware that's taken off is an existing form factor. It's like headphones, eyewear, you have watches, right? Creating these pendant things so far hasn't hit, right? No, it's fair. I just think, like, on the heart rate issue specifically, there was an app before the Apple Watch existed where you could put your finger over the camera of the iPhone. And it would use the light, the flashlight.

which was right next to the camera at that point, to light up your finger. So your finger would turn red. And then it would take the sensor data from the camera and measure the pulses of the red and give you your heart rate just from touching your camera. It's pretty cool. It was completely outside of the Apple ecosystem,

just an app that you can download or pay for. And so the phone can take your heart rate. The watch can take your heart rate. If you give me glasses and you say, those glasses can also take your heart rate. I'm like, I got enough heart rate measurement. I can also just go like this and estimate it. There's a bunch of ways to know that your heart rate's spiking.

Maybe tracking it's indifferent, but it feels like they need to go farther. And the real opportunity is something more around audio interfaces, link it to Siri, have more ways to triangulate what the person's trying to say, what they're saying in a noisy environment, whether they're trying to be quiet and you still want to isolate what they're saying, having a back and forth, reducing latency. all of those things are very critical to success in that category. Anyway, we are going to be in San Francisco on February 3rd next week for Cisco's AI Summit. It's bringing together leaders from Nvidia, Open AI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live stream and we'll be there for a gig in stream. Did the fireworks get longer? I think so.

I think they got longer today. There's a lot to celebrate, John. Let's go into Microsoft. Microsoft. So Microsoft shares have taken a dive as data center spending overshadows earning surge. Let's give some numbers here. So Microsoft's Q4 revenue was $81.3 billion, which was higher than the consensus estimate of $80.23 billion. So they're making money. There's no lack of demand for Microsoft services. Q3, 2025 revenue, was $77.1 billion, up almost 5%. And year over year. your growth was 17% for Microsoft as a whole. But the stock sold off by 12% and Microsoft is now just a tiny little 3.15 trillion dollar company. Not bad, but... Yeah, it's still only down, what, 6% over the past five days?

Yeah, it was a rise and stuff. Yeah, I mean, people have been excited about the Open AI investment, which did show up in earnings. So Open AI owns roughly 27% of the new for-profit entity. Sorry, Microsoft. Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI's new for-profit entity, and that value was actually reflected in Microsoft's earnings. And, of course, more importantly, the GPT models are truly frontier. Like we've seen it again and again.

There's like this horse race over this model's better at this thing, this bottle's better today, but it's just very clear that OpenAI is on the frontier and in the conversation for pretty much every application possible. And so you can just imagine you take GPD 5.2 Pro, you vend that into knowledge work pipelines for Microsoft users. That sounds really useful. They aren't behind on coding. We've heard great stories about how Codex is a great model.

Maybe it's a little slow. Maybe they need to speed it up. But people are having a lot of luck with codex. And so you can imagine that Microsoft is capable of integrating codex into all sorts of different pieces of the Microsoft empire to create agentic workflows. And then they also have a deal with Anthropic. They also made an investment. So they are multi-model, multi-platform. But the problem is that Microsoft seems to be constrained on the data center side.

So the CFO, Amy Hood, said on the Microsoft earnings call that limited availability of artificial intelligence hardware is affecting how quickly Microsoft's cloud business can grow. And it's capping at Azure's revenue potential. Not good. They need to take another trip to Abilene. they need to build more data centers. But it's tricky. It takes time. And right now, maybe it's just a data center capacity issue.

What's next? Is it going to be an energy bottleneck? Is it going to be a chip bottleneck? These are stories that we're tracking. Ben Thompson is starting to sound the alarm bells around TSM capacity constraints. And what is TSM doing on the CAPEX front? Are they investing enough? Are they at risk of holding the bag?

if AI stalls out? Are they taking enough risk so that if the AI boom continues, that they can continue to deliver and ramp up? Or will Samsung and Intel need to step up and will companies like Microsoft need to put pressure on those companies? That's another point of debate. Yeah, so David in the chat is referencing this, but basically, obviously, it's amazing that Microsoft owns such a big slug of OpenAI.

That's great, but the challenge is so much of their backlog is OpenAI. and they're actually getting less credit for that, right? The same way that Oracle had gotten punished for it. Now it's Microsoft's chance to actually get punished. And Microsoft, if you actually zoom out a little bit and just look at the last six months, down 17% in the last six months and down 4% over the last year. So it's funny, like in a year

where it feels like the last year, Satya and Microsoft have just been on this insane run. they've fully, you know, round-tripped. Totally, totally, yeah. Before we move on to META, let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use to keep their apps working. So META also reported earnings yesterday.

59.9 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2025, beating expectations of 58.5. Revenue's up 16% from Q3 of last year, which was 51.24, the kind of companies growing its revenue, 21% year over year. That's higher than Microsoft's 17% topline growth. Stock pop 10% after hours, and the market cap is now $1.84 trillion. So Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the earnings call in 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program. That should be obvious. So many acquisitions, so many hires, so much, so many experiments, so many different So many different strategies and discussions and changing of the guard and restructurings, layoffs and reality labs.

It's the compute desk. There's been so many stories about meta, really rethinking their AI platform, re-architecting the foundations of it. So he continued to say, over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products. Very excited for that. He says, he's, I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly. importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory we're on.

And I think that we all have high expectations. I don't think anyone's expecting them to jump way, way out in front of everyone else. But they can just be in the conversation with deep mind, anthropic, open AI. I think that will quell a lot of the concern. That, but also what are they doing with them? Yeah, the implementation is really, I think that matters more. Really, really important, yeah. Because you look at, this is why I'm excited to talk to Eric later today.

Yeah. But you look at meta's business and the way in which Gen. AI can accelerate everything from generating more content on the platform to having better ads to better targeting, all these things, right? And not to mention like where they can just vend it in at the product level, right? The product level stuff is tricky. Yeah. I mean, like I've bumped into meta AI in Instagram many times. And you do get reasonable natural language responses, but it clearly still has the knowledge cut off.

It's not searching the web as effectively. It's not pulling together. It doesn't feel completely native to the platform. Like if you go into meta-a-I in Instagram and you ask it to go and hunt around in Instagram for a specific creator or reel based on some clues, it doesn't feel. it doesn't feel like it has the hooks to really go in and understand, okay, based on what you've watched and what I've showed you in the past, this is probably what you're thinking of. That is sort of a superpower where, you know, there's so many times when you're on the timeline and you're like, I saw this post, I didn't bookmark it, didn't like it, what was it?

And you want the search products to be empowered magically. What are you laughing at? What are you thinking? You're going to flashbang me? Yeah, close. Continue. Anyway, I think that there's the basic case of they got to get an LLM that's frontier that's, you know, has the big model smell, fun to talk to good vibes. Then they need video and audio models that are rock solid.

And then they do need to vent those in. I think just having an API or just having a place where people can generate, you know, photoreal videos or even things like SORA where it has the, aesthetics and pacing and cuts of an Instagram reel, that doesn't feel like it's enough. It feels like to really empower like the Instagram creator, it needs to be built into the platform like the captions are or those like, you know, the face filters on Snapchat that started there, like augmented reality stuff, replacing backgrounds, just letting people still bring what's personal to them, their family, their experiences. their car, but take a couple photos of their car and turn it into a really, really awesome drone

shot of them driving their car. I've seen a lot of really sweet edits where people will fly a drone over a car. Then they'll have a first person GoPro on their chest while they're driving their car, and then they'll use AI to interpolate between the drone shot and their first person view. Because they can't actually, like if you have a multi-million dollar Hollywood budget, You actually can fly the drone into the car, have someone sitting in the car, they grab the drone, and then they hook it on a crane and the crane takes it out and does a different shot with it. But that's like a multi-million dollar experts, tons of equipment. There's all these crazy things where someone will be on a steady cam, on a cherry picker, this crane comes down, then they start walking into it.

You can do these really elaborate shots. But with AI, you can interpolate and make those transitions. And so even just like AI power transitions would be a really, really cool thing to bring to it. Yeah, not to mention they own Manus now, which is a fantastic product team. They've built some great agents. You can imagine them integrating like basically like prompts to short form video, right, where you can just describe the video that you want to make, insert real, like basically like generate B-roll for this, pull footage from around the internet, whatever.

And so there's so many things that they can do. And again, they've just been using meta-AI as a sandbox for the most part. but I'm just excited for them to start shipping across. The remixing thing is so underrated because there's a lot of people, the number of people that have like true inspiration for new formats is pretty low. People always do the stitches. Yeah, think about the remix functionality. If you see a funny video and you can just like basically do a character swap in there.

Exactly. And it's like that's a new music content that's going to be shared and a bunch of people engage with. Tyler, what's your take on meta's new plan? for 2026. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think the image and video models are much more important to get right than the LLM, mainly just because like it seems like very natural them to bend it into everything compared to Open AI or Google who are like right now finding it out in image or in video.

So it seems like if they can kind of do really well, you can get Open AI and Google out of that, raise basically. And then the LM, it's like it's unclear what the actual like use case will be in the short term. Eventually you want some cool like, you know, Claude bought some. style agent somehow vended in, but it's unclear how that's going to work out. So I think in the short term, I'm very excited on the media model. Yeah, I mean, I really like that model of like the LLM going around and just like seeping into the cracks of all the different product experiences, but in these like really

subtle ways. Like YouTube now has AI generated summaries on videos and you can chat with a video. So if you're watching a someone build a PC, you can ask Gemini, on YouTube, hey, just print out the exact list of parts that the person used to build the PC. And there might be a parts list at the end of the video. There might be a parts list that's randomly mentioned throughout. Sometimes a creator might actually link to a real parts list, but Gemini allows you to scrape the transcript and then just get that however you want and then transform it or, you know, add prices to all of it

or see if it's available in Japan because I'm in Japan, all these interesting things. And I can imagine on Instagram being able to go to a post that has like thousands of comments, and just say, hey, I want the LLM to kind of summarize the sentiment. Like what are the facts, like, you know, people were debating whether or not this is AI. Is there a consensus or people were adding context? What was the key context that people were adding? There's a lot of posts that are basically like rage bait or clickbait where it's unclear what's going on in the video. And so you go to the comments and people are like, I don't get it or like they put up that sign like, context needed please, right?

And so you can kind of do that way. Yeah, but I feel like that stuff can just like, I'd rather just have that be in the comments. the recommendation algorithm. Like sorted in the comments? If everyone in the comments is saying this is clickbait, just don't put it in my recommendation algorithm. Right? It's like also on X, there's GROC.

On every post you can ask GROC, I don't think I've ever used that. You've never used that. I like never. I find the little like, you know, where you add a little bit of AI here and there, I like basically never use anything. Maybe that's just, you know.

I'm a fan. I do see posts where there's, there's, you know, a list of companies that someone's talking about. Oh, here are all the cool companies that I like and I can click and just get a little summary of each company, and I don't need to pull it out, go to a different model. I don't know.

I feel like once a day, GROC will share context on something that is actually valuable. Yeah, totally, totally. Like, in general, I haven't. Yeah, somebody added it. Somebody added it. Like, I remember Eric Sufert yesterday was responding to something, somebody who is basically saying, like,

shareholders voted against the Tesla XAI investment. Yeah. And then obviously they went ahead with it. And Eric responded, and he was like, Hey, was this real? And then Grock just shared kind of the history on it. And it's like somebody else could have shared that and provided the context, but yeah, I can do it instantly. Just helpful to have a little bit extra context there. App Lovin, profitable advertising made easy with axon.aI.

Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. Suspended cap says, I got a really respect Zuck willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell yeah. Yeah. I mean, the Cappex is crazy. So, Meta's edited $200 billion in revenue in 2025. That's so huge. So much revenue.

It's a lot of ads. But now they're going to plow $135 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. New York Times said $1.15. But either way, it's like more than half of the revenues. I think posts like this are funny. And I think you can definitely agree that META has not shipped a super compelling, you know, AI product yet, even though. Meta vibes has traction, not necessarily in our world, but certainly has some traction. But you have to, like, this is the guy that owns the world's largest trough, or one of the world's

largest troughs, right? And so he has, he knows that it's working. He knows he can see the future, right? He has all the data. He knows that people say they don't like AI content, but in reality they actually do. They engage with it. They watch it. They make it.

The engagement must be growing exponentially, even though it's very small. It started at a base of zero, and then you got Harry Potter Balenciaga. And now you have 10 videos a week that are going. So I look at this different than some of the metaverse bets just because Zuck is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Gen AI. And so it's totally warranted to say, like, hey, we should invest an obscene amount of money in this. This is clearly the future. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways that no matter how you play out the AI future, meta is a beneficiary of that.

So it makes sense that they're investing so heavily. But it is a like a remarkable shift in the financial structure of the business. If you think if you go back to thinking of previous years, spending more than half of revenue on CAPEX feels like a lot for a software company, right? It's like high margin and whatnot. Anyway, vibe.com where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertised on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on meta. Let's talk about Tesla.

Tesla reported revenue at 24.9 billion. And this beat the consensus estimate just slightly. Consensus was 24.78 billion. But down 11.4% from the previous quarter when revenue was 28.1 and 3% decline year over year. And Tesla's down 2% this morning. There was also a 61% drop in profit. and they're shuttering the high-end models of production, so they're stopping producing Model S's and Model X's,

which I think the Model S and Model X features will be sort of rolled into trim levels. Like we've already heard about the... So I was debating Jorady about this earlier. I thought that the Model Y and the Model X were the same length. The Model X is, in fact, almost a foot longer, so it is a bigger vehicle. They both have the option to have three rows.

they both have very similar specs, but the Model X is bigger. But in China, we've heard that they're working on the Model Y, L, which is a long wheelbase version that will be, I believe, longer than the Model X. So you have the ability to get a big Model Y, and then they're already doing different trim levels with long range, plaid. So if you take the plaid badge and you put that on the Model YL, and then you add different specs, and you say, oh, I want to spec my model Y, with goal wing doors, maybe all of a sudden you're back in Model X territory and you're dropping 100K.

But there's just no, there's no denying that the Model S and X sales have slowed. And there's a whole bunch more competition at the high-end EV market from Lucid, Rivian. And so Elon is fully thinking about what's next. He broke out subscriptions for autopilot, self-driving for the first time. He was talking a huge amount about cybercabs and robo-taxies. He's making that cash investment in XAI. And of course, he's really focused on optimist humanoid robots. And it seems like he could be scaling up production there very, very quickly.

And so analysts... A million subs of full self-driving. Yeah, not bad. And it's what, 89? I'd actually don't know. I think... You can look at that. I think I remember it's $89 a month.

Yeah. But analysts, how much is it? I guess $49 a month for vehicles with an... enhanced autopilot. There are a few tiers, but yeah, I mean, if you if you build up the subscription. What is it? How much is it? I think it's a hundred. 100 a month? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you got a billion dollars a year coming in from that. Not bad. And of course, very high margin because you don't need to manufacture it. Analyst thought Tesla was going to be cash flow negative for the quarter, but they actually

were positive. They generated $1.4 billion in free cash flow, and this was down just 30%. So there's plenty of cash to keep the aggressive investments going. especially as Elon shifts the business towards autonomy. He's not shy about making the change aggressively. He said, we would expect over time to make far more cybercabs than all of our other vehicles combined. So he's fully, fully going all in on me. Yeah, it's a little, I think it's a little jarring for some people

just because historically car companies have thrived by creating the perfect car in each category for every different consumer. And Elon is basically saying, actually, I know, I know what you want, and I'm going to give you it. Yeah. It's, you know, you don't need that many options. Yeah.

You're going to be able, like you said, to just leverage a different trim levels. Yep. And spec out the car to satisfy it. And probably, you know, I do think over time, like less and less trim levels, and then eventually it's just cybercabs and no one's buying cars anymore. If it really goes that way. I think this rollout will be slow. I mean, the original rollout of the electric car was 20 years, right?

For Tesla to actually get to saturation where you're seeing electric cars all over the roads. It'll probably be the same with, people giving up their cars and going all in on, I only drive, I only use Waymo and Tesla cybercab or maybe I just use one. But Elon's certainly thinking in decades and not afraid to cut an entire business line that is still popular with a lot of people. I mean, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was seeing the praises of his Tesla Model X and how much he loves that and how he would never get a Y because the X is so much more premium. Everything about it's better. It costs a lot of money when he bought it. Still loves it. But, you know, Elon's

thinking to the future. Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next level of ad coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I love that sound. I know. I know you do. Tesla also announced a $2 billion investment into X-AI. Yeah. Didn't they, they just did 20. Is this part of the 20, I wonder? I don't know. But yeah, so there was a non-binding Tesla shareholder vote on authorizing an investment in XI that failed, although 1.06 billion votes were in favor, versus 960 million against. Absentations, abstentions. Like abstaining.

Yeah. Not opposed to one or the other. Counted as no under Tesla bylaws leading to rejection. So they had run this as a vote, got rejected, but Elon said, we're doing it anyways. Doing it live. Let's go to some timeline reactions. Yeah, pull up this.

I don't know where you want to start, but take him has a good one if you want to start there with Microsoft. I wanted to pull up this video of Optimus learning it has to make up for S-slash-X sales after they were canceled. Oh, yeah, this is such a crazy video. Taking off the VR headset and just smash it.

I love it. This is really a Tesla, Optimus, isn't it? At the same time, like, The motion is remarkable, and the force with which the optimist just smashes a water bottle open is crazy. It's amazing. This thing is going to be super powerful. The insurance business that will be built around having a humanoid in your home is going to be remarkable. Remarkable.

You're also going to need to secure these things. So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. This was one of the standout moments of the earnings call for me. me. Elon and Tesla are transitioning their Fremont facility to make Optimus, and they plan to scale that facility up to be able to make a million, a million of these things a year

on a relatively near-term time horizon. So very, very significant. He talked about how the robot would be able to basically learn on the job. It's going to be able to do a number of valuable tasks. And yeah, I think, I mean, the big question for me is like, what is... Will they have ads? That's the big question for me. Will they have an ad supported?

You have the Tesla walking around your house, and it sees you pull out some sort of random credit card. And it's like, are you not on ramp? Like, what's going on here? Or it sees you, like, having, like, eating vegetables and they're like... Sure, would you like a smoothie from athletic greens? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But, yeah, we'll see.

So the question I have is at what point will humanoids actually be, like, R-O-I? positive for consumers in the home or even just everyday businesses. And I would just judge that based on like, okay, you're buying this thing up front. Maybe a business finances it. Maybe somebody finances or they just pay cash. But is it valuable enough to actually replace a human? Because you're competing with the optimist is going to be competing with jobs that are maybe like 40, 50, 60K a year, like somewhere in that range. Yeah.

And so that's a pretty high bar to clear. Totally. So we'll see. Yeah. And the risk reward calculation of, okay, you have this thing, it has cameras and audio, it's on all the time, is it safe? If it falls over, is it going to crush my dog or hurt someone or smash something? Even just like doing the dishes, we've seen some incredible demos of humanoid robots

doing the dishes. But you have to imagine that every once in a while it's going to break a dish. if it's breaking dishes at 10 times the rate of humans. Like it needs to be superhuman at not breaking dishes because if it smashes the wine glass while it's doing the dishes, that's, and can I clean that up? Is it going to be able to do that on day one?

There will be, you know, like a slow ramp of people feeling like, okay, it's good enough, I'm getting a lot of value. Obviously there'll be a lot of novelty. There's already a lot of novelty. The optimist is deployed in most of the Tesla showrooms. Some breaking news from Reuters. 21 minutes ago. Exclusive Musk's XAI and merger talks with XAI

ahead of planned IPO. SpaceX and XAI? SpaceX and XAI ahead of planned IPO. OK. So this was something that we obviously were talking about predicting months ago at this point. But so no huge surprise here. This always felt like it made sense.

I'll read through the article. I don't know how much context it actually has. So they're in discussions ahead of a blockbuster IPO plan for later this year. The combination would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites, and X social media platform, and the Grok AI chat bot under one roof. Imagine owning X, the internet's dive bar, and space in one ticker. I mean, the company's launched like a couple years apart, I think like 2007 and 2005 or something.

Like flashing back to 2007, 2010, I mean like, yeah, Twitter, and that's, company that hasn't successfully launched anything, they're going to be part of the same company one day. That is a wild future. Yeah, I am curious to see if they end up at some point just spinning X the social platform out again. Like, does it really need to live? I don't think so. I think, I think Musk holding companies just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And it all goes together into one because there's a lot of efficiencies there. Sean Puri from My First Million had a post about this, how he thinks Elon should IPO his personal holding company. So you get stakes in everything that he has stakes in. And he was proposing it like

a Berkshire type structure. But instead of Berkshire Hathaway, it would be like Musk holdings or something, or Musk's initials. I think a lot of people would be buyers of that. But it'll be interesting to see the S-1's getting more complicated by the day as the investment banks prepare for the June IPO for SpaceX now. Is June the... That's the target. But it's late in June. It's June 29th or 19th or something. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, we'll see. I mean, expected this to happen. Yeah. I think it builds a, you know, again, some people will be frustrated with the narrative, the data centers in space narrative. Yeah. But, uh, no, it's real.

It's real. We saw this sort of like, sort of organized narrative shift around SpaceX being the data centers in space play. Yeah. That was the bridge. Like, without that, it didn't make any sense. And then once, if you can get behind, okay, data is centers in space is maybe possible. Maybe you want some on land to.

Yeah. Then it starts to make sense that the merger fits a little bit more. The other interesting data centers in space thing, X-AI, SpaceX thing. I just, I don't know. There is a fair, like, odd history of, of, of, telecom companies owning media companies. So Comcast NBC, Universal, right? Comcast was the other of that.

History, rhyming. And so there is this world where you have the pipes and then you need something to push through the pipes. And so you own a media company that pushes content through that pipe. And it sort of rhymes, right? It's like you have Starlink, internet connections, and then you need something to go over those.

internet connection, so X, the social network pipes over those. If you squint, it's not the craziest thing. The other interesting thing that I want to do, or we should talk to some of the folks who have done some of this data center in space analysis is how powerful are the Starlink satellites right now? Like, they have some onboard compute. They don't have, you know, Nvidia GPUs. They don't have whole racks in space, but they probably have some compute just to run

the network. And I'm wondering, like, in terms of energy draw, are they one order of magnitude off, two orders of magnitude off? Like, how underpowered are the current Starlink satellites? Because that could be an indicator of, okay, well, they need to scale them up by this much. They need to add this capability. They need to do X, Y, or Z. Really quickly, 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagined human technology interaction with 11 Speaking of 11 labs, 11 labs is the new sponsor of Audi F1. Yes. John, you sent me a picture the other day of Audi out, I think, testing.

And you were like, it's insane that they don't have an 11 Labs logo on there. Exactly. No, the sponsors were looking pretty sparse, but they're just adding them kind of in real time. So it's fun to roll them out. Super, super exciting and exciting. I love the Audi, the new Audi livery. It looks very unique. MKBHD responded to the news that Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and Model X and said, oh, Roadster is so cooked.

Elon just responded a little bit ago, said new Roadster will be incredible. And MKBHD is in the process of getting community noted. Elon said on the earnings call they were aiming to unveil in April and production will commence in 12 to 18 months. The shareholder deck notes the register is in design development. then Lars, VP of Vehicle Engineering said the roadster was definitely in development. So it will be pretty funny to be in like, you know, something that hopefully will look like a hype, look and feel like a hypercar. Yes. But then you're just self-driving and traffic.

It's like effectively, like, depending on like pricing, it's not going to be like priced. I think I'm hoping it looks like a hypercar, but prices like, you know, a turbo S or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, I think the secret to success. is probably $200 to $300,000, but it looks like a cyber car or cyber truck hurricane, like low to the ground, super insane performance, self-driving, but it has like entirely new aesthetics that turn heads. Like the cyber truck is kind of, what was he saying on Joe Rogan? He was talking, he was like, wasn't he alluding to the register potentially being able

to take flight? Yes. That's exactly it. Yes. And, and, And we were debating with Doug J. Murrow from Cars and Bids and his own YouTube channel. What does the definition of fly mean? Like, we've seen the Xiaomi car jump. It can jump over a pothole. It can jump a couple inches off. There's that Mercedes Maibach GLS that can bounce. So what does fly really mean?

Fly a foot, fly 10 feet. I don't think anyone's expecting that in the next year it will just actually take off and fly. you from L.A. to San Francisco or something. That would be... Never bet against C-L. I mean, I would want that so badly. But there are a lot of other cool things that we could do. I think the one that I, it wasn't the one that I predicted, like, basically it, you'll be able to pull up to a parking spot and it will be able to use, like, fans or something like that to, like, lift off the ground and slide into a parking spot or some, it'll have some, like, gimmicky... It'll shoot the battery out so hard that it sends... the car. Shoes the battery down,

which pushes the car up into the air, and thus. And then you, there's an ejector seat. You will be flying. The car will not be flying. Who knows? Insane.

Hopefully it's available on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI. Rounding.

Rounding. Sorry, really quickly. Tyler, I mean, this is about the question of, like, can you run GPUs on Starlink? Yes. So, like, a current satellite, if you're looking at the V2 mini satellite,

the peak power draw is like around like 3,000 watts. Okay. So if you're running an H-100, right? So this is, I mean, maybe a couple years old, it's only like 700. So you can actually put it, you could put a few H-100s on a star like right now. Wait, wait, wait, sorry, sorry.

300 watts currently. And an H-100... 3,000. Oh, okay. Yeah, you could put a couple H-100s in theory. But you wouldn't be able to do anything else, but like... Yeah, I mean, like three H-100s is like not useful really at all for like any...

for serving any big model, but. Yeah. But we're not for orders, magnitude, off, from doing something. I mean, you can do inference on just a laptop, right? And that doesn't have the power draw anywhere near an H-100 rack. Granted, it's going to be slow. It's not going to be functional. But, like, we are in the ballpark.

Somebody just going to put, somebody should put a Mac Mini on a weather balloon? The first. You really could. First Space Data Center. Have you ever seen those trends of, like, we sent X to space? It's like a proven viral format on YouTube. I think someone sent pizza to space. People send like a piano to space and it plays a song.

Basically, YouTubers figured out that you could get a weather balloon that you could just buy for like, I don't know, not that much money and just release it and it would just fly up, up, up, up. And then you would reach the sky and you would take pictures and time lapse photos or video automatically. You can get a weather balloon,

a 22-foot scientific weather balloon on eBay for 220 bucks. What should we send to space? It's kind of played out, but maybe, yeah, garlic bread to space. Bobby, thank you. Yeah, the garlic bread went to space. I don't know why. I don't know why. But, yeah, the sending multibot to space, multi-bot to space on a, on a, yeah, I also, I don't know if you can get Starlink working in space.

I think, I mean, ideally, Tyler, what if we got a handful of weather balloons and we sent you up there with a. Then I could, I could parachute. Yeah. That Red Bull video. Yeah, yeah. Just one shot it. Just do it. Just one shot it.

Last thing on Elon, looking at prediction market on Calci, when will Elon become a trillionaire? He's got a 65% chance before 2027, just in time for the midterms. It's not like that will be used. It's not like that will be used against him at all. There's still a chance that it takes the pressure off the billionaires

because they're like, oh, there's a new thing we've got to focus on. Like, no one's focused on the millionaires right now. billionaires, start ganging up on Elon? Hey, let's actually just do a trillionaire tax. This old billion, why are we focused on billionaires? Why? Why? Waste of time.

Waste of time. Let's just narrow it down to trillionaires. Just a trillionaire tax. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Where else do we want to go? Do we want to go more reactions to earnings?

There's a whole bunch of other stuff in here. Yeah. Microsoft is on sale, according to Jay Catsby, because Joe Wisenthal said, incredible day, according to Barclays, Alexander Altman. Microsoft has lost $441 billion of market cap today, marking it the second largest drop ever since Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion after DeepSeek. Wow. Yeah, it's the worst day for Microsoft since 2020, since like the COVID sell-off. Absolutely remarkable.

But, I mean, I don't fully get it. It seems like Microsoft is very well positioned. I mean, maybe they're facing the same implementation question as meta, but it seems like they have all the key ingredients. I mean, they don't have, they certainly don't have like the crazy team that Zuck just went and poached, but they got open AI. They have the partnership. And so they have access to the models where in a way that meta does not. And so meta does need to build the team to build the competitive models. Yeah.

We're sell-offs in Microsoft history, the Crash VIII, then in 2000. then April, 24th, 15%. 30% in one day in 87. We don't know how to create sell-offs like that anymore. Hopefully we don't. Famous last words. Everything candles down 40% teach you a lesson.

Yeah. This is some, this is an interesting history here. Well, Microsoft is unfazed. When you look at it this way, it is truly, you know, the, what, 15th worst sell-off in, in Microsoft history, I think they're going to get through it.

But not, but Stan disagrees. Stan says, it's over. Thanks for playing. To zero likes? How did this even get, I'm going to like this. We're going to like it. Good, Stan. I don't agree, but very funny post.

Andrew Curran is sharing a post from the information. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are all ponying up. Let's give it up for talks. 60 billion, as much as 60 billion. We don't know what kind of talks they are. Are they early? Medium. Medium.

Late stage talks. Dance talks. Intense. Intense. Preliminary talks. There's lots of different talks. But this is on top of the 30 billion that SoftBank is in talks for, which means that the 100 billion target for the next round is already almost met.

And of course, this is going to go back to, is this circular, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. It feels like the source. circular, the circularity narrative, we're just at a scale where if you want to raise $100 billion, like, who are you going to? Who would be okay? Like, it's, it's governments and the hyperscalers. Like, there just aren't that many funds that are saying, like, yeah, I'd love to lead a hundred billion dollar round. I don't have the money. Like, it's just, it's just impossible. They're tapped out. Like, yeah, all the, all the traditional financial players are very much tapped out. And so, let's go to,

Go to company marketcap.com. Well, we pull that up. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create codeback prototypes. Okay, so at the $830 billion that this round is being discussed at, J.P. Morgan is worth slightly more, $832 billion.

But then below that, Open AI will be valued more than Samsung. 10 cent, Visa, Exxon, Mobile, ASML, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Costco. A lot of them. Yeah, you start being able to add up some of the biggest companies in the world and still not be worth more than. Zero hedge had some extra context. Q3, 2025, meta crashes on surging CAPEX forecast. Q4 2025, Medasores on surging CAPX forecast. Let's go.

Research and Invest pushed back, though. Said no, it soars on growth, acceleration, guide, KAPEX held it back, or could have opened, or it could have opened it around 880, and it's because of the profit. A lot of people are chiming in. So we'll talk to- Bucco has continuously had great calls on META.

I remember very distinctly when he shared multiple times over a few-day period. Meta will start touching 600, and you need to develop the mental fortitude to buy, even though everything, even though everything in your mind will be telling you not to do it. Just hit the button. Suspecting cap says, I got to really respect Zuck, willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still, on CAPEX, when they still haven't just delivered a single compelling AI product.

Hell yeah. But Pithia Cap chimes in and says the ads are the compelling AI product. And this has been the under-discussed narrative with their CAP-X. They do break it out. And for a long time, you know, 50% of CAPEX, more than 50% of CAPEX was going towards core AI, just workloads for Instagram Reels, recommendations, add recommendations, running the core product. Different, I mean, there is a specific chip for YouTube.

Like there's CAPX that goes into just running YouTube, just running Instagram. And so it's, it's, you know, not all AI, but it'll be interesting to see how that shifts, how much of this is, okay, this is generative AI workloads going forward. Is it more than 50% of this new boost in California? Brother Joe Wisenthall shares one of the best headlines that I've ever seen, which is Blackstone Nears Deal to become New World's largest shareholder. Just in general? No. New World is a company.

Oh, okay. Blackstone is in advance talks to become the single largest shareholder of New World Development Company, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would see one of Hong Kong's richest family, families relinquished, control of a major asset. Under the proposed deal, the U.S. company would be able to restructure the embattled developer. A new world could continue to try to offload assets to shore up liquidity. The family of Hong Kong tycoon, Henry Chung, currently holds about a 45% stake in New World. We need to bring the word tycoon to the west coast. Sam Altman is an AI tycoon.

Tycoon is good. We should do a list of the top tycoons. Jensen is a chip tycoon. Yeah, tycoon's a good one. Satya is an enterprise tycoon. We had tycoons during the railroad barons. It turned into a bit of a pejorative, but I think we can turn it down. I turn it around. I think we can turn it around.

It's such a fun word. Why should it be negative? Yeah, it sounds like Yahoo or like, you know, it feels like you're wearing a cowboy hat on a horse. You're a tycoon. That's right. You're running all over the economy. You're a tycoon.

Cowboy hat on a horse. Yeah, you love it. Well, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose the database built for flexibility and scale. With best in class, embedding models, and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? We have to talk about...

Jeannie. The genie is out of the lamp. Logan says, introducing Project Genie, a frontier world model product powered by Genie 3 and available to G1 Ultra users in the U.S. starting today. Are you a G1 ultra user? This morning.

We were playing around with this this morning. It is absolutely wild. You can basically prompt an entire world. It instantly turns into effectively a simple video game. Yeah. And you can create some really funny scenarios. And we will show you.

They added the jump button. They added the jump button. You get to pick if it's third person or I guess, if you don't check that, it's first person. But sometimes you, even if you do check, even if you don't check that, you can still wind up in a third person game if it's obviously a third person request. They need to add this, the crouch button. They need to add the crouch button.

Crouch button next. And then the flashbang button probably. Whoa. Yeah, you're jumping. This is so, it's so fast. I mean, the previous Jeannie launch was still called Jeannie 3, right? Well, no, I mean, yes. This is not like a new product.

This is just making it public. Yes. So I think it was in August when Jeannie 3 was like originally released. But it was basically just the paper. Sure. There were some demos. But no one could use it. So, so cool.

Yeah. I mean, it feels like more directable than V-O-3. in some ways, and it's certainly more stable as you move around. Well, it's just way cooler, too, because it's a world you can move around in. It's not like, it's not like F-O-3 where you're just creating a video. Yeah, the memory is really good, too. Oh, you can upload an image. You can upload an image.

That's, I mean, get ready to play dinosaurs and kids. Do you have the clip of us driving? So we got access. We generated some now. It's in such high demand that you might not be able to generate these worlds for yourself immediately. There might be some rate limits going on. I'm sure the GPUs are on fire. It is going to be Jeannie 3-day on the timeline for sure. People are going to get crazy creative with this. Do you have John's first prompt? You can't access the videos? No, because, oh no, we didn't download them.

No, because I think I think the site is being overloaded so much. Shame. It was just earlier to say that I'm Hey, hey, Tyler, take some responsibility. Take some ownership. You're 21 years old now. Take some ownership. You could have downloaded the video. As the show goes on, I'll try to make a new one. Yeah. I mean, yeah, this is a good point by Noah in the chat. Wait, can we just take a GTA6 leak and generate the game so we don't have to keep waiting? Pretty much.

Like, first, I mean, it's incredible that even a product at Google scale, they knew that there was going to be demand that they are, like, seeing rate limits. That's wild and incredibly bullish for AI and shows that there's so much more demand. And we need more chips and energy and data centers and GPUs, obviously. But on the flip side, we are going to move the goalposts. This is a GI, but it's not sufficient AGI because my definition is not just the jump button. I want mechanics. I want, we generated a video of my Bach driving on the Nureberg ring. It was remarkably high fidelity.

It was a little sluggish, but that might just be the driving dynamics. Oh, you think it was the driver. Tyler, Tyler could not keep this thing on the road. There was a body roll. I was like, just put it in a straight line, Tyler. Yes. But I want, I want, I'm waiting. I'm moving the goalpost because I want, uh, Jeannie 3 or Jeannie 4 to be able to generate

game mechanics. If I say I'm racing on the Nureberg ring, I want a track timer. I want to be able to stop, change my tires. I want to be able to get a refuel overtakes. I want overlays. I want boost pedals. I want DRS. I want DRS.

I want shifting. I want the whole forza simulation. the whole, I want, what's the one that people actually use for the simulators? I forget what it's called. Acetocorosa. I want to be able to generate acetocorca in two seconds. So mechanics are clearly next. This is obviously in the process.

Tyler said six months. We'll see. So pull up this video from you in six months. You'll have full games. Move it. Move it. Move it. We're moving the golf post.

There we go. Pull up this video from Ethan Mollock. He had early access to Genie 3 world modeling, hugely forward in modeling physics, but some issues remain. Here is a bit of an otter airline pilot with a duck on its head walking through a Rothko-inspired airport and an otter and a wingsuit flying through a city of Gothic Tower.

So this is why, this video is why we have two trillion dollars of CAPEX for AI. We just simply, before I, AI, we would need, you know, a team of, you know, advanced motion graphics artists to work for, you know. You could probably vibe code something like this in Unreal Engine in a day if you were, if you were strong. John, don't try to pop the bubble. You could. I like the wingsuit, though. This is fun. In a Gothic tower, it looks sort of like a Harry Potter world. Wow, it's really a full city of Gothic, Gothic towers. Yeah, and so I like the thing that's wild. is that it takes 20 seconds to go from idea to this world.

Yeah, super cool. So super, super cool. And you're just going to see this like unlimited, like the people are going to go and just generate Mario and you'll just be like, well, I could just download Mario. Like it's not like I'm okay with that. It's like when you go to, you know, mid-journey and you say make me a picture of a dog or nanobanana and it's just like, that's just a picture of a dog. You just find a picture of a dog.

What's cool is when it's like your dog in your house doing the specific mechanic that you wanted, and it's a reenactment from a film that you're friends that you're in love with, and it's your mechanic, and you're creating this unique thing, and you're mixing together these interesting ideas. We're going to see a ton of cool stuff like that. Okay, so Tyler took full ownership and he turned it around. Okay, well we made a new video. While we pull that up, let me tell you about Plaid.

Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. All right, look at this. Oh, yeah, this is, wait, this is a new one? This is a new one. I just made this. The original was not two-tone.

Yeah, this is a new, I just made this. Look at you barely keeping it on the road. It's really hard to stay on the road. It's really hard. It's a skill issue. You got to. So if you zoom in on this, the license plate does look a little AI generated.

There are some artifacts, but at this, at this distance, this looks, this looks. And he hit the apex on the next turn. This looks photo real. Can he hit the apex? getting in the apics. The body roll. You're actually going pretty fast.

You're getting some speed on this thing. I think I fall off. I get up to the ground. Oh, no. Oh, no. Wait, what happened to the... Oh, no, you're destroying the side rail. How did you get on the other side of the side rail?

Ian says, dude looks at kneebreed. Yeah, crazy timing. Tyler turns 21 and he can't even keep a car. Wow. That was very... I don't see any happy dads over there. Dude looks in knee braided. Yeah, but...

It does like when it was working. So earlier, I think there were just too many people using it. But this took like maybe 15 seconds. That's remarkable. First it like makes an image and then you can edit it. And then from there you can make the actual world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like a minute long.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, incredible. Josh Woodward has another clip he shared. Nanobanana Pro. He's the VP at Google Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio. Nanobanana Plus Project Genie Low Poly, Cowboy Dreams. They've been fulfilled. Let's take a look at what Josh Woodward over at Google built with Genie 3.

So he takes the image. He's generated with nanobanana Pro, drops it in, summarizes the environment, summarizes. And it's interesting seeing like what does prompt engineering look like in this, in this, like how, what type of prompt do you want to put in? Because I think we just put in like two words. We put in like Nürberg ring, track Germany. What happens if you add a little bit more there? How far can you push this current state of the art?

The horse can jump. AGI achieved. AGI achieved. Do you think this is bullish for platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that have the existing network and they can integrate world models so that the players that are already a part of these ecosystems and these economies can generate new worlds quickly, generate new games, new characters, et cetera?

Or is it as these world models get better, do they become a bigger threat because anybody can just, I'm sure there's infrastructure providers that can say like, yeah, we're going to handle everything from account creation to in-game currency to think like that. Yeah, I mean, definitely competitive in the long term. In the medium term, like super good for prototyping and communication. And this is a key flow to, okay, you have an idea and you don't just want to, you know, generate a basic image of the game that you're trying to build.

you generate a demo, a prototype, and then you go from here into, okay, let's wire it up in Unreal Engine or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever we want to do. And then you have the full game. I think Roblox and Fortnite will prove that they have real network effects. Yeah.

And it's going to still make sense to create new games within these existing ecosystems. Yeah, yeah. But it is a very different architecture if you... But yeah, I don't know. I don't know how it would interact. If you're in Roblox and then you want to go into a fully generated experience, like the persistence doesn't exist You're not in necessarily the same world just building like multiplayer capabilities in here seems very difficult

That seems like a real research challenge. Yeah, I think broadly like the world model like world labs Seems much more easy to integrate at least in the short term to something like Roblox Because I mean this is literally just like generating frames on the fly. You're not actually making a You know 3D like rendering but it seems like it would be useful for training data as well. Lots of opportunities there. Well, speaking of training data, let me tell you about label box. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data.

Label box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI labs. Well set, John. There are a lot of those. Google DeepMind created this short film. AI is going to disrupt Hollywood sooner than most might expect. It's their short film. Dear Upstairs Neighbor, it's previewing at, Sundance Festival. It's a story about noisy neighbors, but behind the scenes, it's about solving a huge challenge and generative AI control.

Developed by Pixar alumni on an Academy Award winner, researchers and engineers, here's how it came together, says Deep Mind. And there's a community note on here. Let's see what they said. The quoted video explains that the short film was driven through human-made art with AI assisting and speeding up the process. O.P. is engaging in being. Poor chubby. Always getting community noted. We've seen a number of these. I think that's like, at a certain point, some people assume that things are happening. But, you know, the point still holds that, you know, this is disruptive.

Who knows if it's completely disrupting. There's certainly, I mean, there's demand for movies that are shot on film still. So how quickly will all this roll out? But if you have a vision these days for, you know, an animated movie, you should just go try and make it at least. You have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency with a pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a script might just get sent back in the mail room. So I don't know.

I could imagine this in like the prototyping, the storyboarding phase really, really taking off. Staying in Google land. Addie Osmani over at Google Cloud shared some big changes to Gemini in Chrome, agentic browsing with auto browse, Nana Banana, and more. Let's pull up this video. You can see it here. It's a huge day for tech news today. So much earnings.

I mean, all week. All week. All week. There's been a lot of stuff. But the other stuff was like plant. The Claudebot stuff earlier was not. Is there audio on here? Can we play this audio as well?

Let's see. Let's see. This is Gemini in Chrome, agentic browsing with auto-brows, Nanobanine and more. Does it work? Let's see. New state-of-the-art model for in-context image transformation.

And traditionally, if you wanted to see how furniture would look in a room, you'd have to download a photo, upload it to an editor, and hope for the best. Here with Nanobanati, you just point Gemini to an image already on your screen. Oh, Tyler. The prompt to show me in this room with light. AI in every feature, you actually like downloading the images and round-tripping them. That's your preferred workflow.

And every consumer is just like you, right, Tyler? Right? Stunned and decided. All right. Head in with the flashbang. Oh, no. No, no. Growing flashbang.

Surprised? There's now big changes to Gemini in Chrome. We got flashing lights over here now. Okay, but this is still like making the product from like a very like AI first view. It's not just like taking the normal thing and then just adding one extra AI button. I mean, I'm not a product manager at meta, but you have to imagine that there's little features like this

that can seep their way into Facebook and Instagram where you see a photo of, like, you see a photo of a restaurant. And you're like, I think that'd be great for a team off site. Let me just not download the photo and put me, you and Jordy at the dinner table at the restaurant, you know, envisioning what we're like. I just hit share and then I say, hey, put, you know, put the group chat that we're in on Instagram DMs in this photo.

That'll be funny. It'll be, it'll be more inspiring for them to be like, yeah, we should go to dinner there. Right. That's like a fun, delightful thing. Yeah. The feature in the video that actually got shown. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if that should actually live.

Like, so in that example, you're looking at an apartment online and you're in your browser being like make it look like Kelly Wersler. Yeah, yeah. styled it. Yeah. And it adds a bunch of furniture. Should that live at the browser level, or should it just live in Zillow or Redfin or Compass, right? Yeah.

It's kind of a question on where the OS layer. I know what you're going to say. You're like the OS layer or your OS Pilled now, right? No, I mean, in this case, I feel like it should be like actually in redfin and you should be able to cycle through a bunch of different interior design. We have seen that every single layer of the stack is adding AI features. from top to bottom. Interesting context here from Compound 248.

Google with an absolutely murderous response to OpenAI's app was browser. Highly strategic for Google. Launching a browser was a mistake by Samma and the Open AI team. Open AI was never going to gain big browser share, but launching gave Google the needed cover to launch its Chrome AI embedding without violating antitrust because now it's a competitive response. Would they have had? I can't.

It's hard for me to believe that Google would. be allowed to add AI features? I don't necessarily buy that. But it's an interesting take. And, you know, it's one position. Google's using its browser incumbency as a distribution and learning angle for AI is going to be exceedingly powerful. If you allow it, the browser is going to learn from everything you do online,

creating differentiation for its position for its position as a personal AI. Well, big day today. We're not getting any fines from the chat because we're both suited up. Yes. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. I like that. Thanks for,

things we're holding us account. Turbo puffer. Serverless vector in full tech surge, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. There's so much new. TikTok uninstalls surge 150% after apps U.S.

takeover. That is a crazy surge. Okay, yeah. So there's a new king of the app store. It's called upscrolled. Yes. It is a TikTok Instagram clone. Clown.

Okay. competitor. just getting off the ground. But I guess, yeah, people, I think people had the perception that TikTok was immediately censoring a bunch of different topics, political topics, and then just aside,

upscroll, like, use that as an opportunity to say, like, hey, we're the alternative. Yeah. It was interesting because I know people were tracking the TikTok changing ownership. Is TikTok going to get banned? There were a lot of TikTok creators that took that as an opportunity to diversify, to reach.

reels and shorts. And it just became obvious that you should be a multi-platform creator around that time. But I wasn't aware that the TikTok community was going to be tracking like when the servers actually shifted over to Oracle. It feels a little wonky and not something that would go super viral. Yeah, but people notice for his videos stop being served. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there was an outage and that certainly drove deletious.

And Sean highlighted something. Yeah, but again, to be clear, it's like there is a base level of TikTok on installs, and then that surged 150%. That doesn't mean that they're declining by 50% or anything like that. Like, there's still new installs happen. They're calling upscrolled. Yes. The rumble of TikTok.

Really? The rumble of TikTok. Sean Frank says, TikTok views are down. People are blaming the new owners. I think this is just proof that TikTok was botting views the whole time. Your 100,000 view video is probably. reaching 25,000 real people. So no surprise here for me. I always felt like it was always obvious that there were very real people on TikTok. I know people that went over to TikTok, they'd start

making videos about startups, they'd start getting real inbound from people on LinkedIn. Yeah, totally. So very clearly it was always a bunch of real people there. But TikTok had every incentive to just bought all the views because what happens if somebody's getting way more views on TikTok versus Instagram, they're going to lean in. They're going to say, like, I have more followers on TikTok. I should be creating content there, and that created a flywheel. And so you can imagine, as things shifted over,

who knows, right? Like the new, basically the new product. Yeah. I mean, I, they had some system that was. I like different formats. I liked Vine back in the day. At one point, I did set up a TikTok and I uploaded like two or three videos. I was just trying to see like what it felt like to use that platform.

And I noticed even though I came to the platform with zero followers, the three or two or three videos that I uploaded immediately got 500 views each. And I thought that the model was you get more of an opportunity to like sort of audition your content in the algorithm. And then if it works, it can blow up very quickly. And I think that that's somewhat true. Like when I started my YouTube channel, the first videos that I put up got a hundred views. And for like a year, if I broke a thousand views of video, I was like, this is a

Amazing. Like crazy. You're really grinding in security. Yeah. But on TikTok, you post and you immediately get 500. And I've talked to some folks years ago who would set up a new TikTok account for a brand. And they would launch one video that was so polished and so designed to go viral. Like they'd blow up a car and they'd spent all this money shooting this.

And they would actually just, they knew that it would go viral and it just immediately go out, even though it's a fresh account. And there were no followers. Because they just knew it was good content. It would get shared. TikTok would audition it to like 100 people. Yeah, remember when TikTok launched, it was a period where it was so difficult to grow on Instagram.

Yeah. Like, there was a huge challenge. If you're a new creator, you'd go on Instagram and be really frustrated because your stuff just wasn't getting shared with people that didn't already follow you. Totally. There's some comments under here.

There's last thing on the TikTok front, Turner Novak commented, maybe they were views from Chinese users, which are gone now. It also could be international users. Remember, there's like, if you have any of the news, US app under US ownership, is it getting shared with international users that are using

other versions of TikTok? Yeah. Unclear. Well, let's bring in our first guest of the show. Anton from Lovable while he comes on. I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses. Welcome back to the show.

Welcome to the TVP and Ultradome. Thanks for taking the time to come and hang out with us. West Coast, West Coast Tour. It's cool to be here in person. Thank you. It's been more than six months, but it feels like much more, a shit ton has changed. My side, the business is doing better than ever. I can imagine every time I see a post about you, from you, there's a new biggest number. How is growth going? Is it still accelerating? How's the business doing?

We are doing great on the growth side. We hit 300 million there are two months after our 200 miles. person. But more interesting to me is the builders are doing real things. I was on the airport from San Francisco here and Adam at owner.com who helps tens of thousands of restaurants. He was like super excited and raving about he had built out a new product line over the weekend in eight hours where he was solving a new problem where all the customers were saying like we keep getting this phone calls. It's not always someone picking up and he built an AI who answers the voice the phone for the restaurants. And it was all working, you could configure it

just like you were training a human, and he was now building it, releasing it next with his team. And we're seeing all of these new opportunities to where people who use lovable as their technical co-founder and build businesses. And maybe you saw, I was super shocked when someone's shipping AI generated dog pictures in frames, she pet owners, and they were making $300,000 per month.

I'm building that out without any technical. How are they actually doing that? Obviously, I think maybe you can describe, like, the technical co-founder process of building a new application that someone takes payment, but then I want to know about the top of funnel for that, too. Yeah, part of, I mean, I always saw Loveable's growth as millions of people out in the world that historically were just perpetually searching for a technical co-founder.

Problem is a lot of people that are technical have a bunch of, of great ideas. They don't necessarily need an idea guy. And so there's all this like sort of pent-up, creative, entrepreneurial energy that just never really goes anywhere because somebody doesn't take the time to actually learn to code and they never find that right partner. Yeah, that's what we're seeing. And our mission is about human creativity, which is very fun to empower. But it's not just new businesses. There is a lot of companies, and I keep hearing from how they build out AI applications and agents using level. And once you get into it, especially if you look back compared to six months ago,

this feels like to me when I use it, there's no limit almost of what you can do. And the thing where we're lovable, what I'm hearing is that it's a bit unique, is that there are a lot of tools that are coming from from kind of developers and then more people keep using them. We started with the non-technical people. And that makes it just super simple, but it still has the same capabilities that more sophisticated users are looking for. are looking for it in the same.

How are you thinking about working with companies like owner that I'm not super familiar with owner? We've got to have Adam, the founder on, but my understanding it's somewhat of like a system of record for a restaurant owner. Is that right? And so in theory, he could also offer lovable as like an integration so that individual businesses that are using owner can expand kind of and just build products that they themselves want, not necessarily have to rely on owner.

Is that right? Are you seeing opportunities like that with other companies? I think we have these partnership programs, and that's a good idea. I'm going to bring that back to them to talk to Adam specifically. But what we see is... Theoretically, somebody is on an owner. They have a feature that there's a feature that they want that's not being offered, and they can just build it.

They don't even have to request the feature. I mean, that's what the future looks like. And what we've seen is that lovable is first used by a communication medium. There are a lot of people that have stopped using Google slides and PowerPoint, and now they just prompted away because it looks so nice. And I think it's a better medium than the animated videos you were talking about previously. But then now a lot of companies, and us is one of those, we're switching out SaaS providers to using tools that we build ourselves.

And we connect, we tell Lovable, can you connect these two different applications, tools, internal tools that we built and add AI in between of those. And that, I think, is more of the future of how companies are going to be run. Okay, let's talk about kind of vibe coding debt and tech debt, because we've gone through this where we'll build a product. We built like a guest directory, very simple product that would basically, every time an episode would get published. Yeah.

We had an app that would effectively scrape the episode, figure out who is a guest, link everything out, and publish it. it. And it was built in a day by one of our interns last summer. And then he had to spend like the entire summer just like maintaining it and like shipping incremental update. So are you seeing any changes on that front? Like obviously if it's easier to make products, maybe it's easier to maintain them. But I think the concern is like if you've created, you know, 200 different SaaS tools and internal tools as part of your organization, then you end up spending, really valuable resources at the company,

you know, human labor time, just kind of maintaining these systems and making sure they keep running. Can I talk a bit about the recent updates we did yesterday, Loveable? So there's a much more advanced planning mode that helps asking you or your intern questions about what it is that you're trying to achieve.

And that makes the AI be able to find a better solution that doesn't need that type of maintenance. And that's one of the many improvements that we shipped yesterday. And another big one is... So basically, like, if you vibe code poorly or if you prompt poorly, you're adding a bunch of kind of like vibe coding debt. And if you spend a little bit more time, like, prompting...

Yeah, I think people should just move fast and not be like, oh, I have to think through this, so it's maintainable. It should move really fast. They get something that works and that's, like, useful. But then you should sit down and you should reconsider talking to... lovable and asking, should I restart from the beginning?

I'm having these problems with the maintenance. Should I just be keeping shipping incremental updates, or is there something else that could actually solve this on a deeper level? And keep having that conversation and be creative in terms of what could be the right solution for this. Because the systems are, they're extremely intelligent now, and they're just getting more and more intelligent. So that should be your status quo. Explain your situation so that which the AI doesn't know.

and then it will help guide you through what's the best platform. Yeah, it feels like the solution to vibe coding is more vibe coding or more code, right? But the question... She says the vibe coding dealer. Yeah, he's like, actually, you need more. But I believe that. I believe that. But I think the interesting question is the shift to mobile.

And I want to know how you're thinking about that transition, because if you go in vibe code and application, and you sit down, you really think about it, you work with the tool to plan and test, and you're giving feedback and you spend, you know, a full day or a couple hours, and you got it in a good spot. But then there's like that one little, oh, actually this button isn't quite working. Can you just go check out?

It doesn't work in this scenario. That lines up just being normally like you text a developer, you slack them. How are you thinking about like long-term integration with end users who might not be jumping into the tool themselves and might not even be, you know, have the time to actually sit down in vibe code? I think the future of how teams operate is, of course, changing. And I think there should be someone who is ultimately responsible for the quality of the application. It might not be you, even though you can throw in ideas of changes,

and then someone looks at it before it goes out to your customers. So that's a high level, I think, about it. There is a lot of new capabilities that we are looking at to make sure that quality is always maintained. And we, over the last nine months, we've been super focused on security, which is this, like, if you're putting something in production, that should be your first priority. And there's a lot built-in that makes applications secure from the ground up in how we approach. Yeah, the challenge right now is if you have a hit product, you could go to 100 million users in 48 hours. We saw this. What was the company that was like Palantir for dating?

They really go that big. that's insane. No, no, they went the T-Dating app. Remember this one? Oh, yeah. They went. They don't call it to be a dating app really good scale. But yeah, they have security issue. Went to the top of the chart. They didn't use lovable. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. But, but yeah, the founder was just kind of bug coding going along. I think you had some team members too. Yeah, sure, but like clearly they were moving very quickly and some mistakes were made. Yeah. What it was, has anything changed in your mindset about the level that you, you know, you want to operate at or integrate with versus being a web app with cloud hosting, operating

into the browser level, into the OS level, launching a dedicated app on a phone or on a Mac, or command line tools. How are you thinking about the different unlocks that you get at different levels? Yeah, great question. So first of all, I use lovable on the phone all the time, And it's really like a good mobile experience, which is why we are seeing usage there. I know that a lot of entrepreneurs, they're building out complete work OS systems. I talked to Guinness Paltrow yesterday,

they're building a lovable brain that accumulates all the information that they need is running their company. And what that gets some more capabilities from is that it connects to your local file system. And it can connect to, I mean, in the future, I don't know exactly what the mobile device is going to look like, but it's going to, the AI has to have context on everything you do on your phone for it to be fully unlocked, all the capabilities unlocked.

And that's something we're looking at, exactly how does that future look like as we're building towards the best interface for humans to use technology and use AI. Because that's the vision we're on. Yeah. How do you think about the tradeoffs between, consumer and enterprise, obviously you can use it to make something that replaces a slide deck, just communication, external marketing materials, landing pages. You can also use it for building an internal tool and just spin something up internally to a company that's never going outside. Both are very interesting markets. Do you want to serve both? Do you think that there's a value

to focusing on one over the other? Yeah, great question. So Lovable started out from the early AI adopters. And that's where we're seeing now growth in all directions because people love how there's maybe some Swedish design sensibility. Things just works. And we put a lot of hard engineering in making it simple. And one of the directions is spreading is in the enterprise. People come to the work and they show, look how much we can get done using lovable at work.

So now we have all of these required features for enterprises, S-C-I-M and so on. And specifically, I'll tell you an example of a really large company. They have 80,000 plus real estate agents globally, dozens of countries, hundreds of websites. They had the offer to re-platform all of these websites because there's always his pain for marketers changing website. And the VP of Marketing there, that would take a year. The VP of Marketing found lovable, and he was like, wow, I can just build one of those websites in a few minutes. And then they sat down and they looked at how can these are websites for individual homes? For so different brands.

Brands or real estate agents across different deals. And then over three weeks, they re-platform. They saved $2 million on a solution, which was part paying for AI chatbots on the website. And their chief innovation officer just says, like, this is the biggest change that their company has experienced in how fast they can move, how they could be. build out an AI chatbot just by prompting lavable. And that's a large company. And that's them building product lines that are facing their end customers. What they're seeing even more volume of is, of course, internal applications.

And applicant tracking systems built from the ground up by the people who are using those applicant tracking systems with AI, with thousands of people being served. How are you thinking about headcount planning, specifically on the engineering side? Yes, it's a good question. I was at the Anthropical office, and I think they're hiring a lot of people just like we are doing. Because what you're actually seeing is that

if you use AI correctly as a business, which is one of my personal top goals or the entire company's top goal out of three goals, is us learning how to use AI as productively as possible. And that means that each human has more output, if you do that really well.

And as we are learning that, figuring that out, we're putting that into the product and giving our users all the best practices in how to connect all the internal tools that your company is running on and share context across everything you're doing. When you're doing research on a podcast, you should all be able to just ask an AI, what question should I ask Anton? And all of that infrastructure, all of that tooling, you should be able to build on lovable or just get someone else tool and copy it into your workspace.

How much do you guys pay attention to job descriptions at various companies in terms of understanding market pull? I could imagine people, companies that wouldn't necessarily hire software engineers saying, like, we want engineers that can use lovable and other relevant tools. Because I think one of the interesting things that we're trying to understand from just kind of understanding, like, how we'll see job growth in some areas, maybe job reduction in other areas, is, I think people are underestimating how many companies there will just be a net new role where somebody or multiple people are creating and maintaining software that the company is creating. And we're an example of that, right? Historically, a media company, like if you had a fledgling media company, we brought Tyler on last, I think like Q1 of last year.

We'd only been in market for a handful of months. And normally if somebody was building a media company and they were telling me they were hiring, or a podcast, right, and they were telling me they were hiring a software engineer, in their second quarter in business, I'd be like, dude, you should focus on like a million other things, right? Just make good content. But in our case, we realize, hey, we can build quite a lot of internal tooling for what we're doing to make the show better. And so I think we're going to see a lot of job growth from companies that, again, wouldn't normally hire anybody internally doing software engineering. It's a good question.

I don't look at external other people's job offers. my background is in physics, so I just break things down into like what is it, what are the governing principles for making a team work really well, and people, humans working well together and getting output as a company. And what I'm seeing is that you want the team of people who, they don't have to be software engineers, but they're very curious and they get it, they get new things, understand them very quickly. And that's one of the things that we're fundamentally highly highly high. for. I mean, I can take another example because I love, I'm so inspired every time I meet

someone who has, like, we've changed their lives, who's lovable. So it's a guy who, Alan, he built a healthcare AI staffing company. In five months, there is a million dollars in ARR. And he couldn't have been able to build something like this. And then. Yeah, there's so many niche labor marketplaces. These were, they used to be like more popular like venture-backed businesses. And then a lot of VC's figured out like, hey, you can build a great business here, but you end up kind of capping out. There's some software component to do with like matching and kind of booking, payments, stuff like that. But ultimately, a lot of these businesses should just remain like somewhat niche, right? You could have a $10 million your business doing staffing and have it,

you know, like the people running it, right? You have a lean team. But now, but historically it was a challenge because there was a number of companies that would build like out of the box, like market place software, but usually they were like it was, you had to do so much work to like actually adapt the software that it was kind of this tradeoff of like, do I build it in-house? Do I use some? People used to abuse WordPress like crazy. They'd build a whole social network on WordPress or try and modify it with e-commerce stuff. And it would take a year and millions of dollars to build something that now it takes the

weekend. How do you, how do you lead the team around dealing with competition? And you know, every, you guys are now competing with pretty much every company in the whole world, it seems like, you know, from hyperscalers, right, that are building vibe coding tools to other startups. Like, what's your philosophy around dealing with competition? Just kind of like emotionally, like in the organization. Yeah. I mean, first of all, what we're seeing is that people who come back to lovable and compare it with other tools.

They say, like, wow, this is such a wonderful. simpler experience that works better for them. It's more capable in many, many dimensions. So that just gives us a lot of belief in what we're doing. And the way we think about it is to not look at what others are doing. It's just to look at what do our customers want us to do. And being very grounded in that. Have you banned the competition Slack channel?

Because it would literally be every day. It's like, hey, we have a new venture back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's a sign that, it's a sign that... But yeah, we fundamentally, to say, we're building the best product based on first principles. What we think is the best way to do these things. And it often means not adding new features, adding new capabilities, but thinking very long term,

how is this whole experience going to be for us humans as we interact with superintelligence, basically, in the future. And that's what we're driving us. Building that product is the motivator for everyone. What about international expansion? You're obviously in Europe here already. Are you opening offices and other continents? Yeah, we haven't announced more offices than Stockholm

and then a great go-to-market team. Have any to announce? What's that? I can't come back. We have more announcements. But we have people hired, a few people are hired remotely, including here in the US in various cities. So that's what it's like.

But we're getting a lot of value of being in-premise. person, people who were very long-term thinking, very, very bought into the mission that were on based in Stockholm. How do you think about retention? There's so many amazing tools that come out. Like, I remember those lens, magic avatars. Everyone had to take their photo and do the Studio Ghibli precursor, like a year earlier, the style transfer on their image. And then people sort of, like, they tried it, and then they churned out. But at the same time, like website builders have incredibly low churn because once you build your website, even if you're not using the tool

every day, you're using it as hosting and you might be jumping, be jumping back in to make changes. How are you thinking about the different retention dynamics, the different cohorts, how are things looking? We're seeing very, very healthy retention. We're like, oh, net dollar retentioning has been more than 100%. There we go. But we're also, of course, seeing some AI tourists that are just trying a lot. Yeah, yeah, they must exist and they just top by.

and then they move on to something else. Yeah. And what we're doing is that we're splitting up the different segments and seeing what are the jobs to be done for the other segments that we could do better. And fundamentally what we're noticing is that for most things we're adding, which is about making the whole experience to do more things, more seamless, like more capabilities, more seamless,

without making it more complex experience. That's helping the attention across the board for everyone. And less of a point solution, less of, yeah, I use that for slides this week, but then there's a new one over there. I've got to try the new thing, more of like actually run your entire business, build a new business on this, and then stay with that for a long time. That makes a ton of sense. What about recommendations for other software products, databases? I've seen a bunch of charts where the default recommendation for Suburbase, for example, is just climbing like crazy because it's recommended by... by you and by a back end and by a number of the models.

What does that, does that business evolve into an affiliate model? Do you have, do you have demand from your customers to educate them about the different tradeoffs when they're building, when they're picking something, or do you want all of that to be abstracted away so that the end user doesn't even know what a database is, for example? And database is just one example. There's a million things that you probably plug in with, right? This is a great question. we have some really good product integrations

and you mentioned SuperBase is one of them and we are recovering more and more I have payments, email and communications we want more of those amazing partnerships I think like there shouldn't be any limits of those integrations you should be able to ask lovable to get cleaning for your podcast studio

or whatever and that shouldn't be done by us it should be a partnership where we're currently just making more of those partnerships successful. And there are multiple companies that have been seen the absolute majority of their growth coming from us, actually. Sure. But then at some point, we need to let our users get the best product integration,

if there are many ones. I feel like other companies should be a little bit worried if the majority of their growth is coming from you guys, given that the whole purpose of the company is to make it easy to build software. and eventually you guys will just naturally do some of those things. I mean, the integrations, I'm happy to not do them. We want to focus on the interface, the app creation layer,

and then underneath there needs to be a lot of things that connect to very technically challenging systems to build the infrastructure and so on, that we don't need to put our efforts into building. So we want to do a lot more partnership this year. Yeah, makes sense. Talk about the dynamics between lovable, and all the different labs. I'm sure that you have very open dialogue with them around

just like integrating with new tools, getting previews of models, all that kind of thing. And I'm sure part of why you're on the West Coast is just to spend time with the different teams. Yeah, those relationships are really good. We are fundamentally listening to the users more than them. We're building for the 99% while they're like, please listen to your users less.

You really want to... No, I'm kidding. Yeah, no. And what... They have to spend so much of their focus on the strategy on, like, building these models and making, like, pumps, squeezing out more and more juice from those models.

And we're in this place, which is very favorable for the end users, where we're not tied to a specific model. We use a combination at level of different models, and that serves... That gives a better user experience in the end with the trade of speed. and the height quality for each specific task. How did you and the team react to Claudebot?

Was there any kind of new kind of user paradigms that you were inspired by anything to take away and kind of integrate? I mean, we had Peter on the show Tuesday a couple days ago and he was very open. Like he's just like in it. He's clearly not in it to make money. Like he's in it for the love of the game

and just kind of we asked him, you know, do you think that people will clone what you're doing? or copy it or build on top of it. And he was like, yeah, I do. That's cool. So kind of unexpected answer, but I'm curious if there's anything that you thought was particularly interesting

that you can bring back to lovable. Yes. I love Peter. I'm happy you had him on the show. I think me and many people in the team have been building our own versions of this personal assistance that you just talked to, I mean, record audio to. Talk on your phone.

Yeah, in my case on my computer. And then what we're, of course, thinking about, which is like the other top goal for this year, is to provide the best workspace, or the best way to collaborate as a team. And that, of course, a big part of that is being able to talk to an agent that has access to all of your different tools that you're building with lovable

and can pull out the data when you need it. And I think, I'm very happy about this open source project in particular getting a lot of traction. It's between my roots as well. Yeah, it feels like it's just waking everyone up to what's possible. It was real like feeling the AGI moment generally. And maybe not everyone reaches for open source and all that's entailed with that. But it's sort of just like a new call to action for everyone to try new tools.

So overall, good, very bullish. Twitter likes this, completely new things that you can try out. In the end, what users want is something. that's simple and that's very, very trusted, high security, high reliability. And when you're building your strategy like us, that's what we're focusing on. What is it that most people want? And what's the sustaining product that you want to build? What social platform is most important to lovable's growth at the moment?

I think, I'm not sure if my team likes to be sharing data here, but Twitter and LinkedIn is the ones I know are the big ones. And we're also seeing Instagram. Yeah, because I feel like products when they actually go mainstream, like going mainstream looks like going over to Instagram and these other platforms. It feels like beyond a niche, which I think of LinkedIn and X as. But yeah, I mean, it's a big community. So it makes a ton of sense, especially with some of the larger enterprises that you're working

away at the business side. That makes a ton of sense. What does the front top of funnel look like and growth function look like? Is there a flywheel where someone business? builds and then shares and then, I imagine that there's links built with Loveable in the footer, but is that a real engine of growth or is our advertising? Like what's driving growth overall at the high level? Yeah.

And so we're seeing about 300 million visits to Loveable applications per month. Okay. So that is a real effect. People are like, oh, this is this great website. And most of the time that leading to conversion is that you're just talking to the person. Like, oh, yeah, you built it with Lovable. Sure. And that is a part of the biggest channel, which is just word of mouth.

And that continues to be like absolutely. They see something cool, even if it's just a small demo. Even if they're not paying for that business, they see it. And they're like, I want to do that. But for me or my. Yeah, they hear, I mean, they hear about us from the friend. Sure. Or they see about us on the internet.

Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I'm looking at investing more into growth, of course. And then I think Instagram and, getting growth marketing really, really strong. It could be the next big channel. Super Bowl's coming up. It's not too late to throw something together. Maybe next year. Anything?

Maybe next year. We'll see. Oh, we'll see. It's not a now. It's not a now. It's not a now. I'm breaking. Awesome.

Thank you so much. You're coming on the show. This is fantastic. Have a great time. Have a great rest of your trip. We really appreciate you coming by. And we will tell you about fin.a.i. The number one AI agent for customer service.

If you want AI to handle your customer support, Go to fin.AI. And up next, we have... I'm expecting a Super Bowl ad. I want a Super Bowl ad. They could do some really fun stuff. I mean, even some of the customer testimonials would be great. Even if they go with something more...

They should build the entire ad in lovable. Dog food, the product. We have Christian Garrett and Delian Asperuhov in the Restream Waiting Room. We will bring them in. So the TBPN Ultradown. Delian, Christian. How are you doing? How are you feeling?

There they are. What's going on? Ready to go, baby. Live from New York. You guys look fantastic. Good to see the boys. Good to see you. Thank you, guys.

Take us through the news, break it down for us. This is year four, correct? Year five. Year five. Whoa. Third year of doing the daytime forum. So we started it back in the day just as like a small dinner series. And then three years ago kind of experimented with daytime forum.

That went great. And then this could be our third time doing it. Okay. What's special about this time? Who's on the lineup? I'll start. I'll start. I mean, obviously the 250th is,

It's great timing for us to have another event here. We're very excited about that. I think the key focus this year outside of continuing to build on what the forum has always been about, which is building bridges between technology and government, the technology sector and government, is going to be increased focus not just on technological leadership, but industrial leadership. And then as well as looking at having leadership among our allies. So I think this year you'll see a bigger expansion of the industries where technology is having an impact and playing a critical role. and you'll see leaders from companies that are leaders in those industries,

and you'll also see a lot of folks coming from abroad and participating as well. And so I think you're just seeing that the relationship of the bridge between technology and government is actually a key framework for building deep relations between the U.S. and our allies, as well as building deep relationships and strengthening other industries. And we didn't say it, but March 24th, Washington, D.C., for now we've only announced some of the private, you know, basically speakers. We haven't announced any of the Gov speakers yet, but it's folks like Trey Stevens from Anderall Founders Fund,

Vinode Coastla from Coastal Adventures, Brad Lightcap from OpenAI, Sham Sankar from Palantir, a bunch more that we'll start to basically release. But yeah, what I like about this year is we're also going to start to expand themes a little bit. There's going to be a strong, basically, biotechnology, you know, sort of focus and some folks, both within the administration, within private industry, talking about basically how we need to make sure that we don't lose that entire, like, supply chain and industry to China, the same way that we have with, like, consumer electronics or humanoids. You're starting to see some, like, early science towards that. And there will even be some joint policy put out that HVF will be, you know,

of endorsing. And so what's been cool is as the like form has been around for several years, where we're now not just like acting as a gathering place, but it's even a place for people to start to think about, you know, not just meeting, but even like publishing policy together that align sort of like private public incentives in a way that is like best for the nation. And then throughout all this, you know, like I said, we started this five years ago, obviously under the Biden administration, continuing to maintain, I think, you know, sort of true bipartisanship. You know, Vinod Coastal obviously has a certain set of, you know, sort of thoughts about, you know, sort of policies, regulations, et cetera. I may not necessarily agree with all of them.

We try to throughout both the, you know, sort of forum, the events that we host, everything is pretty consistently, you know, sort of even and across the aisle. And we try and stick with, you know, sort of centrists on, you know, both sides that can actually, you know, sort of reach across the aisle and, you know, produce productive policy together. Yeah, you know, you won't see a ton of the, you know, sort of extremists from either, you know, either party there. That's great.

I noticed Young Liu from Foxcon is attending. Interesting company, obviously everyone's very familiar. Do you think there's going to be more energy about let's bring more Foxconn manufacturing to America or just startups trying to work with Foxcon. There was this leak that OpenAI might be working with Foxcon. To make sweet pee. Sweet pea earbuds. And it feels like more and more companies as they think about hardware, they're going to be

wanting to establish relationship with Foxcon. That's sort of the beauty of this, at least from the business side. What's interesting about Foxcon? Why is he important to the conference? Well, I think, first off, you know, you have Foxconn, Qualcomm. You'll have some other names that will be announced across these other kind of categories of companies that have maybe been in industries that weren't viewed as technology industries, but now increasingly you are. And I think a lot of leaders that are coming there are really just representing a trend that you've seen, which is, once again, technology industry is a great way to build deepening relationships and partnerships with our allies. And to your point, it works both ways, right?

Yes, you'll see just like TSMC who's made a huge investment in the state of Arizona, and you're seeing that from other companies. as well here domestically, you're also seeing companies abroad continue to invest in other countries and scale there through partnerships like these. An example in another country, you know, we've seen Androl, for example, invest heavily, and Andrews is a portfolio company for Founders Fund and 137 for us respectively. Androse invest heavily in countries like the UK, Australia, and Japan, just recently opening their office there. Japan is another country as well as many others like South Korea and Europe that are increasingly opening their doors to become manufacturing. for the re-endosition here in the U.S. as well as supporting their own re-endutization efforts.

And I think you're going to have to see many companies like Foxcom play a critical role as the West tries to shift off of reliance on Chinese capacity across critical industries. We, as much as possible, obviously, try to make it to that it's sort of bipartisan from the elected officials and sort of Congress. But we do try to as much as possible, whichever administration basically is in office, try to reflect some of their priorities. And what you've obviously seen under this administration is, you know, them leaning into making sure that our allies are

contributing their fair share, but also reestablishing their own re-industrialization efforts. And so I think a significant theme of this year's forum is going to be having a lot more international presence and there to both sort of learn from how the U.S. is reindustrializing, but also partner with some of these companies to bring those

technologies locally, partner with some of their local primes and re-industrialization efforts to accelerate those. In some ways, these trends that you're seeing in the U.S., the United States is much better off if France, if Germany, if the United Kingdom, if Australia, of Japan, are mimicking basically those same technological patterns. And so that's definitely going to be a major topic of this year's forum.

Yeah, I know you haven't announced the government attendees, but is there a desire to have international leaders attend as well? Is this going to be the next Davos in a couple of years? Or do you want to keep it focused on domestic policymakers, U.S. policymakers, senators, representatives? I mean, obviously, the event being in D.C. and the core focus is on the technology sector, the government sector in the U.S.

But the event's always been international. You know, from the beginnings, we've had foreign ambassadors from other countries attend. We had the VP of Taiwan speak multiple times. I think you will see a lot more international leadership attend as well. I think it's reflective to DeLion's point that this really is about the West being successful and, you know, the concept of it's not U.S. alone, right?

And so I think, yes, you will see that represented. Most of the leadership, of course, is still going to be heavily domestic, right? And so leaders from Congress, leaders from the administration, et cetera. But you will definitely see a lot more leadership from countries abroad and our allies. And that's going to be very exciting. And that's going to be from the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and Europe.

You'll see, like, in the long term, I think the way that this will always break down is it'll probably be like 85%, 90% domestic focus. But there will always be like a twinge of international. And so I think that's what it's been probably historically on the attendees side of things. And this year for the first time, there will be a few more sort of like internationally focused panels. but it's not going to, I think, quite go to Davos level, which is like a global elite in some ways. This is always going to be primarily sort of United States focus with a twinge of international.

What are all the ways that people can participate, you know, watch from home, be a part of it, whether as a sponsor or all that stuff? Yeah, so the event is invite only to participate during the day in Washington, D.C., but, you know, it is going to be about 1,000 people, so it's a relatively, you know, sort of broad audience that will be, you know, sort of bringing in there. We'll also be live streaming all the panels on our YouTube and X accounts.

And then there will be a couple of media groups that are live streaming from there, some traditional ones like Bloomberg and some super exciting novel ones like TVPN on site there. So there'll be a variety of different live streams to tune into that I think will give you a feel of the event, both the official panels as well as obviously the side conversations that you guys will be doing. Yeah, that's great. What is the business structure of Hill and Valley now? Is it its own nonprofit? We are officially a 501c3.

Okay. So this is the first year ever. We are welcome to the board of the Hillen Valley Forum Foundation. Yeah. 501C3. Are you guys just being memetic with OpenAI? Are you considering a for-profit conversion? Because I feel like the ads, really, we could do a lot with each other here.

There's a lot more to be announced, like Delian said. So just stay tuned. Yeah. But we do have full-time staff, which is really exciting. That's cool. Yeah, you know, Chris and I were starting to get a little too stretched in between both of us having too many jobs. So it is nice finally at the time.

And we lost the key leader as well. So we really stretched that. Yeah, I believe now the youngest undersecretary in the United States history. And most handsome. And most handsome. God damn. Some of those photos on the official Twitter. The most looks max.

Woo. God damn. Oh, I would I look like that. Yeah, yeah, it's true. So, yeah, so. So, yeah, talk to talk more broadly about the 2026 calendar, 2027 calendar. People know the annual event in D.C.

There was that one-off event with All In. There was a special Hill and Valley sort of collab. Is there a plan to do a quarterly series, have other dinners go off the hill and have something in the Valley? What are you thinking? I think it's something that we're open to opportunistically. It's not something we're committed to or it's part of the plan. We very much are focused on the main event every year.

But absolutely, you know, we actually just did something recently with FII, who is also a good incredible job. Their conferences right after the Hillen Valley, so I recommend most people, which a lot of us are, will end up flying straight to that right after. And Rich O.T. has done an incredible job at really gathering a lot of world leaders and running an incredible event in Saudi. And they've done events globally. We did a collab there and brought a lot of Silicon Valley leadership. You know, Ruth Porat from Google attended, Sri Ram, right from the White House in the administration, attended and spoke, and a bunch of other folks. And so I think, you know, we will look at these opportunities where we can try to help bring more of really Silicon Valley to these.

other events internationally, particularly when it aligns with countries that are our allies and their focus on building deep bridges between technology and government. And so I think you'll see some of those maybe internationally or potentially, obviously, domestically the one-off event with the All-In guys with Jake Kowt Chmoth and Freiburg and Sachs obviously in his role organizing that along with Jacob. That was incredible. We would love to do more things like this. Just opportunistic.

So if it happens multiple times in New Year, great. If it doesn't happen, also great. I think one of the ambitions that I have for the event is starting to become, you you know, sort of more deep in particular, there's sectors, like, you know, this year very intentionally trying to go, you know, sort of deeper into biotech. I could imagine eventually where, you know, you have the marquee event, you know, on a particular day of the week, but there may be some, like, subsector tracks,

you know, over time where we do, like, Hill and Valley, BioTech, Hill and Valley, you know, industrialization, Hill and Valley Rare Earths, and those are maybe, like, subtracks. And again, with the goal of this being, like, I don't want to just gather people for gathering people's sake. Like, maybe that's what they do in Davos, but, like, you know, the goal is, like, I would like to actually make sure that, like, I thought you were, I thought your whole brand was I'm the networking guy.

Here's 20, here's a 20 point thread on how to how to network. Yeah, yeah, this is a mastermind, right? We should remand this is a mastermind. Neither of us were at Dallas. Yeah, okay, okay. Look, my favorite type of venture investing to do is just follow the heat. That is how you generate. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You just identify the heat and invest into the hottest deals and other people have marketed up. You just got to market up even faster at higher prices and chase momentum. Well, speaking of exciting deals, Bridget Menler. was on the show yesterday. The chat, we just want to relay this. The chat is pulling for a Bridgett Mendler, attendance, a speaking, and invite, something like that. We'd love to see her there. Bridges, Bridges has been there. Oh, fantastic. A lot of fun. Kevin Whale also, I have to shout him out. He's been a veteran. I know he's coming on later. He's been, he's attended every single forum. Wow. And it's been an

incredible partner for us. And obviously now, you know, alongside opening out, I've been great partners. And so, you know, the stuff that he's working on on science, by the way, is awesome. I'm very glad he gets to talk about that later. So, you know, Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's actually a veteran. So, um, we need to find a poll for someone that has not attended before. Okay. I know. What I like is like, there's some pretty, we have like a just a really solid veteran squad.

It's like Alex Carp been there every single year. I've been there every single year. I've been there every single year. I think, um, I think what's nice. That's a big deal for Trey. I know. Yeah. Trey's hard to, uh, yeah.

He's busy. It's not easy. I just peer pressured him a lot this year. Thank you. So, you know, got him up there. Yeah, you mentioned a bunch of different categories. Is energy top of mind. you, how are you thinking about all the work that's going on?

We see a lot of energy or a lot of excitement around nuclear, been tracking a little bit less in solar, but who are you interested in what conversations are you excited about in energy? Yeah, I think there'll be like two major areas that you'll see energy come up at the forum. The first is there is going to be like a nuclear, you know, sort of focus panel. I haven't announced those, you know, sort of, you know, panelists yet, but, you know, let's just say there may be one that's a general. Yep. As one of the panelists, and then other one, I think where you'll see an angle on it is a little bit in relation to basically like to build out of the physical infrastructure behind AI and how much of, you know,

energy is the limitation there. So those be kind of the two, you know, topic areas that we focus on there. And again, with both those, trying to make sure that by the time we get to the forum, there's particular, you know, sort of policy and things there are coming out of those panels that aren't just discussions, but, you know, ideally legislation that's going to be passed. So we always try and make sure the forum is in a week where both Senate and the House are in session. And so, you know, in some ways Congress basically chooses the dates of the forum, more so than we do.

But as much as possible, I'll try and make it to that, you know, sort of policy immediately, you know, sort of comes out of it. And sometimes we would also react live, right? You know, in one of the forums years, it was the, you know, the main event was the day before the TikTok CEO's basically, you know, what's called briefing in front of Congress. And so obviously there's a lot of discussion, you know, to that year and, you know, policy per person recommendations from that, you know, sort of group around, you know, what needs to be done with TikTok. Yeah, Dress code. I mean, you'll dress code. Should people wear different colored shoes, Delian, suit?

What do you guys recommend? T-shirt and jeans? There you go. It is DC, so, you know, probably not full Silicon Valley casual, maybe more business casual, or suit and tie, definitely. No, it's the best dressed. It's the best dressed event in tech. On the tech circuit, it's the best dressed. It's fantastic.

Yeah, we were last year. We were not the best dressed people in church. It is the best dressed event in tech. It is fantastic. I have been told that my head of, the head of comms at Hillen Valley is unhappy with the fact that I keep wearing the same damn gray suit every single year. And so I was just taking me shopping. you know, later today to get. Hey, hey, well, it's also the, you also

wore the shirt last time you came on the show. I don't know, I actually wear this specific quarter zip every single time I'm on TVPN. I know, because it's the green, it's a green, it's a green. I make sure that it's washed every single week so that I make sure that I can wear from TV. Fantastic. Well, we appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Can't wait for it. It's going to be there. And congrats on the list. Everyone will be staying tuned. Cheers. To the new guests. See you there. See you later. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about ACTA. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with ACTA. And up next, we have Eric Sufert from Heracles Media. He's been on the show before from Mobile Dev Memo, if you're not familiar. He got us absolutely fired up about advertising. We're huge fans of him.

We're huge fans of advertising. And he's in the stream waiting room. So we will bring him in to the TBPN Ultram. Eric Sufer, how are you doing? Good to see you. How's going, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping back on. We've been following the chat chitiepT, ads, roll out the story.

You've had a ton of great analysis. We've talked about it a little bit on the show. But we wanted to hear it from you and dive way deeper. So maybe you could set the table for us on what the launch is looking like right now, what the product is looking like, what your expectations were. Just maybe begin at the beginning of this saga for the ads in chat chach. Well, the saga begins where chat GPT begins. We all knew we were going to end up here.

We all knew ads were coming. I mean, I wrote a piece May 2025. I said, obviously, chat GPT will monetize with ads. Why did I feel so confident in that? Because they had just hired Fiji Simo. She is kind of known for having led the mobile newsfeed ads product to Facebook. That's obviously been one of the most successful ads businesses in the history of mankind. And so it seemed natural that they would bring, given them.

the domain expertise they had acquired that they would bring ads to bear for chat. And they have. Now, the launch looks like the launch of Netflix ads, right? And if it remains that way, it probably doesn't bode well for the business, but I think they're going to evolve it over time. And what they've said now or what's come out,

the information has had a lot of good reporting on this. They're charging on a CPM basis, which is not standard for kind of direct response ads. It's more of like a brand advertising formulation. But so it's $60 CPM, which is exactly what you. Netflix came out of the gate charging. They're asking for commitments of less than a million dollars. So this is clearly like a testing phase. And they're going to offer very little in a way of measurement or targeting. So this feels like a very sort of primitive MVP. But, you know, the question is,

like, how quickly can they evolve it into something that looks more like the Facebook ads platform? So what do you think, like what do you think got us to this place where you get Fiji Simo? she's done this before. She has massive connections and skill set, but it still takes, you know, eight months to roll something out that feels not as mature as something else. Is it a talent issue? Are there other regulatory concerns or do they need to worry about certain edge cases that people might not be aware of? Or is it specifically strategic to actually, is there some secret reason why they're taking this approach? So here's my hypothesis, right? And so it's not just about, you know, Fiji Simo, she's the CEO of apps, but they acquired Statsig, which is, you know,

staffed by a lot of ex-meta people. That was an experimentation platform. That's the exact kind of talent that you'd want to ingest into a company if you're going to roll out an ass platform, which needs to be aggressively experimented on. Here's what I think happened. I think, you know, chat cheap, so OpenAI kind of evolved over time. It was a research lab. Then, you know, obviously they've had the drama around trying to pivot into a for-profit corporation. My guess is the investors wanted them to bring in somebody that was a little bit more sensitive to, you know, the commercial sensitivities, right? And so, you know, Fiji, CMO would be a very good fit for that profile. They brought her in. And my sense was there probably was a little bit of animosity internally towards the idea of this being an ads, an ads driven business, right? Primarily an ads driven business, which I think it ultimately will be. Only like two years ago, Sam said, I look at ads as like a failure state for... Yeah. And then he started pivoting the rhetoric and started saying, well, I like some of the Instagram ads.

When they're targeted well, they're actually delightful. And in the right context, they can be good. And he was coming around to the three of our worldview, which is that advertising is great. But he did have to message that externally. And then obviously had a whole bunch of work to do messaging it internally. And maybe that's why there was a little bit less energy internally to really push towards that. That makes a lot of sense. Well, he may have been the one that was message too. He may not have been the one controlling the message there. He may have been the one that was message too.

We need ads because ads are inevitable. It's not that ads are great. Ads are inevitable. If you want to reach what I call humanity scale, ads are inevitable. If you want to monetize that at the scale, it can be at its total potential, you need ads. That's how you do it. And so he may have been the one that was convinced. and bringing someone external in who had been there, done that,

may have been part of an investor strategy. But putting aside my hypothesis, look, I think this has the potential to be an incredibly successful initiative. The question is, how quickly can they pivot into something that looks like the meta model, right? So if you look at it right now, it's, you know, and I think, look, to everything you just said, mirrors what happened at Netflix. For years, Netflix said we would never do ads.

Ads are offensive. They're in the front. They're in front to my sensibilities, as it can be. consumer. That's what the leadership said. And then one day they weren't, right? The exact same thing happened with Open AI. And all in. Six months? All in. Yeah. Don't forget all in. All in was anti-ad and we we begged them. We begged them. We beg them. And now, you know, I think they made the decision independently, of course, but they're running ads now. They always come around. I've been I've been banging the drum for for since May of 2025. Yeah. But I think the question is, is it six months,

is it 12 months? Is it 18 months to get something that looks like meta ads, right? And that means targeting, right, based on behavioral profiles. That means measurement. That means allowing, that means explaining to advertisers the sort of impact of what that you've delivered on their behalf. And that means like a whole lot of tech that needs to be built out, right? And that means, you know, creative optimization, all these things. Just conversion optimized advertising is very different from what they're offering. And is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is 18 months to get there? That's a big question. Right. But that'll determine the success. And if you say, look, this mirrors what Netflix did, well, that's not really a playbook that you

want to draw inspiration from, right? I mean, they had to pivot. They had to do a hard pivot. I mean, the ads here has been alive for three years. They did $1.5 billion in 2025, right? So, you know, it's not a significant chunk of the revenue yet. I think it could be a much larger chunk of the revenue, but Netflix has other concerns, right? They've got quality concerns. They've got, you know, consumer sentiment concerns where they can't just like fully embrace ads. I don't think chat EBT is limited in that way. Yeah, yeah. Take me back to the, that initial launch of Netflix. You said similar CPM, $60. per thousand views. But what was the response like, like, were there any advertisers that were like,

yes, this is great. I got my money's worth. It worked out. Was it just vague and unattributable? My perception is like great performance marketers are always excited to try new channels, especially a channel that's driving high intent traffic, right? So if you tell a performance marketer, hey, I've got a billion users and I'm going to let you advertise to them, they're going to be excited no matter what the general setup is because they just want to get in there with a test budget and like you'll talk to marketers and at a certain scale they'll they're like yeah let's try 100k here let's try 100k there it's just like you're just kind of throwing around money and then you're going to double down on on what really works right for the initial rollout this is

how you launch an ads platform don't get me wrong this is how you launch an ads platform that's what I'm talking about six months versus 12 months this is how you do it this is how you bootstrap the data this is how you get people onboarded this is how you get feedback you have to launch it like this There's no other way. You can't launch a conversion optimized ads platform because by definition, you don't have any conversions data yet. Right? Now, that's another reason why I think they launched instant checkout. I think instant checkout is a stalking horse. I think that's a method of gathering conversion data that they can use to then target against with ads.

I think that was the whole purpose of that. I don't think that was seen as a long-term revenue opportunity. I think that was seen as a way to bootstrap the data. But this is how you launch in an ads platform. I mean, it's got to evolve into a conversion optimized adge platform, but you can't be that at the start. You can't intuit the settings. You can't intuit the tuning that you need to implement to make this work. But the question is, how long does it take them to get there?

Right? And so that, you know, that will just see. But my sense is they've got the DNA. They, you know, the information report, they have 700X meta employees. Like, essentially everyone at meta is working on ads, whether they're working, you know, as an account rep or they're working as an ML engineer. They're all sort of rowing in that direction. Yeah.

What's been your reaction to instant checkout? out. There's been a lot of debate on the fee structure. Some people saying, no retailer can afford this. We were pushing back on that. In a number of different cases, there's plenty of brands where you say, like, would you spend, like, 4% of AOV to acquire a customer? I can also see the other side of it. A concern that I have is, like, you know, you're running an ad on a meta platform to find a customer. The customer then goes to Chatsubit, if that's where they're searching for products. And then the brand is effectively paying twice to actually find the customer, drive them, get them interested, and then at the bottom of the funnel, they're paying another 4% fee. That feels like not great,

but what's been your reaction? Yeah, so I was in the former camp. I said that that's not a, that's not a workable fee. Let me come back to that, though, because you asked a question about what happened when Netflix offered ads. They had too many advertisers sign up. They had too many. They were supply constraint, not demand constraint. They had to return money. I think that's exactly why Open AI is saying, no, look, we're setting an upper limit on this. A million is the max. because they won't have enough people to advertise too. This is just a way to test it out and to start scaling it. The problem Netflix made was they never act.

So the problem that Netflix had from day one was they had the partnership with Microsoft with Zanders. They were using external tech to run the ads, right? Zander is an ad platform. And so that's the problem. They couldn't implement custom placements. They couldn't do a lot of measurement stuff. They couldn't do a lot of targeting stuff because they weren't operating the actual pipes,

the actual plumbing that was delivering the ads. There's a lot of like data issues, just access to data issues. That's not what Open AI is doing here. Open AI is starting out by building our own tech. And Netflix, by the way, pivoted to that. But they pivoted to that very late. That's why I think the ad initiative at Netflix was not successful and hasn't really delivered that much revenue.

But going back to the 4% fee, first of all, here's what I think is going to happen. I think you're going to drop that to zero or very low. It'll be tiny because I think the whole point of this is to just drive conversions. And the whole thing is like when you see performance in ChatGPD as a retailer who's just basically paying for the conversions essentially with that. the fee, you're going to want to actually advertise against that. You're going to want to control it because you have no control if it's just surfaced based on what ChachyPT believes is relevant. And at some point, you're going to have too many retailers to place into a single

placement, so you're going to have to mediate that by bids. So ultimately, I think this gives way in the main, this gives way to advertising. But whether the 4% is sustainable or not actually comes down to how you view what those purchases are, because it's not user acquisition. You're not acquiring a user. If you were, then you'd compare that to. LTV, but since it's not user acquisition, you're not acquiring that user as a sort of like with a long-term relationship in mind. You're essentially trading a percentage of the checkout for the checkout, but that user doesn't interface with you, right? And in a lot of, in a lot of terms. So there's not going to be no, there's not going to be passed through to the underlying

vendor you're saying? Like, I mean, look, you're the merchant of record, right? And you get their information because you have to fulfill the order. But chat, GPT, or OpenAI specifically says, the terms that you can't use or email address for like remarketing, right? And Amazon says this too. So I think is you're not capturing the customer. You're just getting, you're giving 4% for that one-off transaction, but you have no control over whether you reach that customer again, whether that customer is brought into your orbit. That's very, that's a very different proposition from advertising to someone and acquiring a customer. You acquire that customer, you get a whole stream of opportunities to remark it to them. If you're just, you know, trading 4%

for the transaction, that's all you get. So it's not actually customer acquisition. If you think about 4% per transaction, Now, consider that if you thought about the people talked about, you know, when that number came out, they talked about, well, some people spend, you know, 50%, 60% on Facebook ads. Why is that different? Because that's over the life cycle of that customer, not for the world of transaction. Or even just, or even one time they pay for the customer one time and then they come back, you know, 15 more times or they end up subscribing and they've actually owned the customer relationship. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And think, you know, think about it also this way. You know, that 4% that might be all the margin you're getting as an e-commerce effort, you know, as e-commerce, you know, operator, right? And the thing is, that's not preventing you from advertising.

That's not saying, okay, you could save your entire advertising, but you're going to still have to advertise everywhere. This is going to be a tiny sliver of your orders that you're not in control up. You can't control it. This could be lumpy. This could be up one month down the next, right? You can't control that. You're going to have to continue to advertise. Now, you have no idea, to your point, whether this is cannibalizing purchases that would have happened from the people that you advertise on other platforms, right? So this ends up just being a cost, a drag, probably on your advertising expanse or elsewhere. Can you explain attribution and the evolution of Netflix's ad product? Because if I'm sitting on my couch watching a movie and I see an ad and I go to my phone, it feels really

disconnected. Even in a pre-ATT world, it feels extremely hard. How do they do attribution? How good can this get? And then with chat GPT, what's the upper bound on attribution for open AI, given that we are in a post-ATT world? Upper bound is basically what you see with Facebook because it's going to be direct response. It's going to be click-based, right? With Netflix, it's a little different. So with CTV, the way that companies do measurement and attribution in CTV is traditionally they set up what's called a clean room. So I set up this environment, it's a centralized environment. I push all the ad interaction data that I have. So basically when I know I showed an ad to someone, I push all the data into this clean room. A lot of times it's, you know, it's IP address and device information. And then the

advertiser pushes that information into the clean room and I match it up. That's this attribution for CTV traditionally. Now, there's other ways to do it. There's other ways to do measurement that's just totally probabilistic. This is like medium mixed modeling and stuff like that. But with attribution when you want to use that term, traditionally it's done with a clean room like that. So I'm just like linking the data sets together based on some key. A lot of times it's the IP address. But if you think about clicks, like clicks out, right? So that's like I'm viewing. I'm on second screen. I can look at time. Like there's time elements. You look at temporal elements to do attribution. But if I'm clicking out, I've got the click, right? I've got the click. And so that carries

a lot of information. I can still look at temporal aspects of that, but I can do a lot with the IP address too. And so that's, you know, if you look at a Cappy, that's what Cappy is. A Cappy is just a way to get this data on the back end. So it bypasses the apps, you know, it bypasses the mobile device. It bypasses the browser. So there's no way for, you know, Apple to interfere with that with ITP or ATT. And so you're able to get, you know, it's still probabilistic in that way if you consider, you the decay of the validity of the IP address over time to induce probabilistic measurement. But that's traditionally how it's done in a pixel as well. But I mean, that's what OpenAI has at its disposal. It's got the CAPE and the pixel because it's going to be click-based. So there's a

high degree of fidelity that'll come with the measurement there, the attribution. That's way higher than what you can do with CTV? What do you think the prospects are for the number of companies that are trying to build LLM ad networks? I got pitched at least if you're few companies that were, you know, maybe a year or so ago saying like, hey, LMs are going to be free, they're going to insert ads, we're going to build this kind of network to serve ads across a bunch of different apps. I was super bearish on those, specifically just because I thought that OpenAI would want to own the full stack. Obviously, Google would own the full stack, and I think we're heading towards, you know, an oligopoly of sorts in consumer AI and where's the scale really going

come from, but any kind of takes on that front? Well, there'll be a long tail of agents that are going to want to monetize with advertising. So I think there might be space for an ad network to exist that services them. I don't know why that wouldn't be an existing ad network. I don't know why that wouldn't be just sort of DSP. I don't know why that wouldn't be the trade desk to say. But yeah, I mean, I think there's probably an opportunity to monetize some of those long tails of agents with with ads. but if you think about like a chatche, of course they're going to build their own. I would have, you know, perplexity is apparently restarting its ads initiative. I think these companies, it would be silly to not build their own.

I mean, you want to have that ad stack so you can make everything bespoke, right? And maximally perform it, right? If we look at meta earnings, I mean, that's exactly what delivered that big beat. And I think what people forget about the prospects of this sort of like AI enablement with advertising in digital advertising is that these effects compounded over time, especially when you're talking about direct response-based ad platforms, right? So, like, with meta, I've been banging this drum since Q1, 2025. These effects compound. Like, people point to like, oh, 3.5% or 5% or whatever increasing click-the rates

or increasing conversion rates from Androma or from Gem or from lattice. Who cares? These are tiny. No, but first of all, that's every quarter they're noting these performance improvements, but also they compound over time. If I'm targeting 90% a 90-day recoup on my ad investment and, you know, 120% a 110% row ads. What am I doing after 120 days? I'm reinvesting 10010% in advertising on your channel. And so if you're giving me 3.5% 5% bumps every quarter, that's just going to end up

getting reinvested. That's why we're seeing the growth reaccelerate. Growth is re-accelerating going into Q1, 2026. That's amazing. That's why Facebook was up 10% last night because growth is re-accelerating. They're going to see growth rates they haven't seen since the post-ATT doldrums. That's incredible. That's incredible growth. And anybody who doubted the CAPEX going historically has to accept that reality now. And they did. They did yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, uh, people like the, the criticism is like, Zuck is being so balzy with the CAPX. Specifically on Gen. A.I. On Gen. I specifically. And the criticism is like,

hasn't launched a hit Gen A.I product yet. Our take earlier on the show was like, look, this guy is serving more Gen A.I content than almost anyone on Earth. Even if he doesn't have like a breakout net new product. His product has massive tailwinds because of all this. Like he's in a perfect position to decide, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to be, you know, one of the biggest spenders in this category and plan, you know, however many years out in advance. They're making more money on AI than anybody except for Google. Look, the idea that they're not, they're not utilizing generative AI. Have you seen the ads on Facebook? Those are all generative. There was a revolt. There was an advertiser revolt. There was a scandal recently because

Meadow was being too aggressive with the ads generation. The idea that they're not implementing generative AI is absurd. I mean, first of all, generative AI is not just what you see in the output. I mean, they talked about pairing LLMs with ad ranking. That's really fascinating cutting edge research in advertising. Using LLM to sort of give you feedback on the ad, does this resonate? Is this something that someone would click on? Like, pretend you're this demographic.

There's already research that shows that that has a really beneficial impact on advertising. It's not just like what you see in your feed. also the stuff that you see in your feed is generated. The idea that they're not utilizing generative AI in advertising, that's absurd. You can see it. Just go on Facebook right now. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to move on to other companies, but I want to have one more question about

opening eye. Do you think that there's any sort of risk to push back of like the creepy ads, like being too well targeted? Facebook went through that with like the T-shirts that said your name on them, basically in like your whole career path. Yeah. My assumption is that eventually, like, you're only getting ads that were specifically generated for you. Like, this idea of, like, historically, you'd have, you know, one ad that a brand would make and they'd run it at the Super Bowl.

They're like, we're going to send this to all of America. And then eventually with, you know, on platforms like meta, I would assume that every ad is, like a one-off generated. And it knows exactly how to position a product, what color, what environment to put it in. And it'll be insane that we used to have ads that we'd make one piece of, creative and then run it to like 10 million people because it was like good and it's like no this will all just niche niche niche niche niche down more and more. Yeah, what do you think? Look, I mean, it's like the idea that everyone would see the same feed when they opened up

Facebook is absurd now, right? I mean, like, look, if people truly hated creepy ads, Facebook user numbers wouldn't, you know, monotonically increase every quarter, right? and, you know, Europeans would be lining up to buy the subscription in Europe. And in fact, only 1% of users in Europe has taken that offer, right? Is that an offer to eliminate? Is that like an ad-free, like, meta offer? Is that what you're talking about?

Because I know they're talking about rolling out this. So they've got the less personalized ads option in Europe as a result of the DMA compliance. So they have three options. They have a full-on subscription, no ads. They've got the less personalized ads, and they get the normal experience. 1% of people opted into the subscription. Like, people hate ads. They just hate them less than every other monetization model, right?

People love ads. If you look at, you know, demonstrated behavior, people love ads. People love access to free tools. People love access to sort of like endless, endless capacity, right? You start capacity constraining things or you start putting up paywalls, you know, obviously by definition those are going to get used less, right? Or, you know, most likely by definition. And so the thing is like the idea that like ChachyPT is going to run into this problem,

that's unique to chat bot. I just don't buy that. And first of all, maybe they will, because maybe they'll design this the wrong way, but I give them the benefit of the doubt. I think they can do it in the right way. And one way to do it, it's to just not tether the ad at all to the chatbot context. You could just say, look, this is a display ad for what we know you're in market for based on Capi, based on the pixel. And we're going to make sure it has nothing to do with what you're talking to the chatbot about. So you never have to even question whether the chatbot has your best interest at heart. That's a very easy way to sidestep that problem, but I think they've got very skilled people there. They know exactly

what that trap is and they're going to avoid it. Do you think we're going to get ads in Siri in the next 24 months? No, just because of Apple's, because of the optics of Apple doing that, and I think Apple would probably love to do that. I think there's probably people inside Apple that are pitching that, but they won't because it's not in alignment with their optics around advertising. But, but nonetheless, Apple is also increasing. We were talking, like I think people will be normalized to ads in the Apple products. They obviously are in the App Store today. German was talking about ads in Apple Maps coming in the near future. And then I think from that point, if people are starting to use Siri as a search engine, there will be ads eventually. It will just be to be able

to serve ads like basically natively in the UI to iPhone consumers will just be too tempting. They got to do ads in the alarm clock app. I want to wake up to a digital. I want to wake up to a different ad every day. Get out of bed and start buying. Get online. It's time to check out. Yeah. Morning to night. You should be consuming. I don't know, maybe. I think Maps podcast for sure, but the thing is, like, I wrote this piece when Apple insurance ATT, I said Apple robbed the mob's bank. I said, look, this is just an opportunity for them to shift some of the budget that's going to meta into their own ads ecosystem. They did that because they expanded their Apple search ads. they just doubled the number of impressions per search.

They've got two placements now in Apple search ads, and they're also blurring the lines between ads and organic results there. So the idea that Apple hates ads, I think, is mistaken. I think what Apple needs to do is they need to sort of walk this tightrope of appearing to hate ads while also benefiting from ads because they are such a, you know, an accretive sort of margin expansive way to make money. So Maps for sure, I think podcast is another like prime. a piece of real estate for ads to be inserted into. I don't know about Siri. That feels like

maybe a little bit too on the nose, but who knows? What about Gemini? What was your reaction to Demis talking about ads in Gemini? That makes total sense, because they're already monetizing Gemini with ads. They're doing it with AI overviews in AI mode. They're monetizing ads and AI overviews at parity with search. Why would they rush to put ads in Gemini, the chatbot? Keep in mind, Gemini's two things. Gemini's the family of models and Gemini's the chatbot. Why monetize with ads in Gemini, the chatbot? You never need to. You could just drive adoption of that.

They're already monetizing Gemini, the family of models, through AI overviews in AI mode. AI overviews reaches 2 billion people a month. That's the biggest single LLM output ad surface that exists. They're already monetizing Gemini through there. Yeah. And is that product just, what's the shape of that product? Is that just the exact same as just branded keyword search?

Google, like, is there, are there anything different or any learnings from the, uh, the ads in AI search overviews or AI powered search? So AI mode is essentially the chat bot. AI overviews is the, is the results that's basically takes up now the whole above the fold on Google search. But it's better. It's better than search. You know why? Because the whole point with search is, I want this to be one shot. I want to type in my keyword and I want to get the best possible result in that first list of results. And if I don't, then I think your product is bad. Right. And so, Google is incentivized to make sure that there was one click, and that's it. So you get one chance to show ads. With AI overviews, the whole point is to then prompt further queries, right? So you get a

bunch of opportunities to show ads, right? So if that's monetizing at parity, it's probably also driving impressions up. I think that's a much better ad surface area than traditional search. Yeah. How should startups, business owners be thinking about TikTok under new ownership? TikTok is funny because they're going all in on commerce again, it seems. Like they had a really big kind of Black Friday, you know, whatever event, you know, revenue pop, revenue spike. But, you know, they seemingly were walking back the TikTok commerce opportunity. Now they seem to me leading into it.

I'm not quite sure what to expect there. I think, you know, TikTok, I think they were in a little bit of the stasis for a while just because of the uncertainty around what was going to happen with the spinout. My sense is now that they have the certainty, they'll probably lean into where they feel like their best position. And that might be commerce now that meta has completely abandoned it. But I think like I just don't think that that's the right approach. I don't think Western audiences really appreciate that as much as just the ads driven model. And so, you know, the pure play ads driven model.

So we'll see if that ends up working for them. But yeah, I mean, I think TikTok, you know, if meta can do what they did to snap with TikTok, they're going to be in a pretty difficult position. and they may have to just adapt in ways that meta won't, and that would be leaning into commerce more heavily. Yeah, I always assumed maybe naively that they would lean out from commerce because it seemed like it was just a money pit. They were just lighting money on fire, and the new owners would say, like, okay, we just bought this.

We have to pass back 50% of our revenue to bite dance. Like the whole economic model of the business seems like super upside down. Let's just serve ads and try to run the business lean and maintain the user base. But leaning into commerce just feels like, I don't know, there's so many brands that I've heard about over the last 12 months that are scaling into the hundreds of millions of revenue, and it's almost all on TikTok shop,

and it just feels like that was basically subsidized by ByteDance for a long time, and will the new owners want to subsidize these brands that are driving real volume, but ultimately, I don't know if they would be able to stand on their own two feet. Yeah, I mean, they did walk it back. I mean, they did two rounds of layoffs in the commerce division.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about, one thing you have to remember about TikTok and the bite dance and the whole, like, the parameters of this deal is that they're still licensing the algorithm. Right. So, like, I think that impacted the kind of the valuation and that may impact some of these other economics. But, yeah, I mean, I just feel like they may be, they may be sense that that's an area where meta retreated and so that's where they could potentially flourish. But it was odd because they did walk. back and now they seem to be you know embracing it again yeah uh what's your current thinking about

the netflix warner brothers deal um it's uh it it feels like we're in a lull it's moving forward but uh would be interested to yeah i'm also interested just how do you think about you know paramounts prospects as an app ad platform without all of that IP yeah yeah well so it's it's interesting so like the thing is like the IP is so so important right so like that one of the aspects that I found really interesting about the Netflix deal was that they essentially valued WB games at zero. Right? So WB games makes, remember they're big hit games, it makes their Game of Thrones game on mobile and they've got Mortal Kombat games and a lot of different console games, Batman Arkham. And at one point it was for sale in the multi-billions price range, right? And so Netflix essentially

evaluated at zero. Why? Because ultimately there'd have to be like an IP licensing agreement that allowed them to continue to monetize those games, right? So I think the same is probably true on the IP side, generally with WB. My sense is like what this indicates to me is like, you know, and this was just, I mean, this was said explicitly in the earnings call. It's like, you know, we're going to pay for content one way or the other and like we need this high end IP, right? And like, you know, if you look at, I mean, everyone saw the Joe Rogan clip with Matt Damon

and Ben Affleck talking about like Netflix makes us restate the plot of the movie like every couple minutes in dialogue because if people don't hear it explicitly, they just lose interest you guys are on their phones. Like you wonder, okay, well, is that a result of like people's attention spans, you know, declining? Or is that just because of stuff you're pumping out, isn't that interesting? And people are not really paying attention because they're kind of bored, right? And so I think maybe it's the latter. And so if you bring in a bunch of top-notch IP, maybe that keeps people more engaged.

And then, hey, maybe that boosts the ad CPMs or, you know, and ultimately boost subscription numbers. But my sense is, like, they're going to pay for content one with the other. and like, you know, maybe just buying a lot of it in bulk at once is the best way to do that. What else are you tracking this week across earnings, you know, Microsoft and Tesla? I don't know if you follow those stories, but what else is interesting you this week? Well, we got Apple. Yeah. Right now.

Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, you had a German on yesterday and, you know, he's just always an amazing. wealth of leaks. That's pretty impressive that he's able to get those. Apple's pretty buttoned down. But yeah, I mean, I think just the AI story there is kind of embarrassing. And, you know, like I wrote this piece of while back, Apple has besieged on all fronts. And I was talking about, like, look, if you look at AI, if you look at some of the threats to ATT and Europe, you know, there's a lot of issues that they face. I think, you know, one of the big questions for me, when they announced to deal with Google to use Gemini for Apple Intelligence, which among other use cases include Siri,

was how they would just manage the privacy aspects of that, because they were so adamant, right? They talked about the private cloud compute. They were so adamant that when we do this, we're doing it the Apple way, we're doing it the privacy-centric way. And then they do the privacy-washing thing, which is just then to partner with Google and allow them to do all the dirty work of sourcing the data,

right, sourcing the data to train the model, right? or of just monetizing with ads, and they just get a cut on the back end. And in this case, Apple's paying, but at some point, Google will be paying for penetration into iOS and the exposure. And I think, you know, that's just a question of like, is that really the reason?

Is that part of the reason why they never invested here because they couldn't really do it in the Apple privacy-centric way? And if you want someone, you know, if you understand that the dirty work of sourcing this data in ways that maybe are not completely above board or just monetizing with ads, I mean, Apple makes so much money from advertising. just don't do it directly, right? They do it through the partnership with Google. Now they're

going to be making money through AI interactions, but they're not actually the ones training the models and sourcing the data in ways that could be questioned, right? So I think that maybe plays a part in it, and I think maybe when you get to a point where all this can be done on device, right, when the device is actually powerful enough to service most of these use cases, maybe you have smaller models. You don't have like foundational models, but you have smaller models that can all run on device, and maybe Apple will be more interested in that. But I mean, like, you have to look at the AI thing is either it was a massive whiff, which seems to be what German's take was, or it was just a sense of like, look, this is actually going to be really difficult for us

to reconcile with our brand imagery and the sort of messaging that we've, you know, we've relied on for years and years, like, you know, privacy that's Apple. Maybe we'll just outsource this in the same way that we outsource search, right, and advertising to Google until we're able to all process everything on device and ensure that we can maintain that messaging. Yeah. I mean, my take is like, I agree with the whiff narrative, but also it does feel like there's the seeds of a rebuild between this new acquisition that they're doing. They're starting to open the pocketbook a little bit.

The hardware really is best in class. We saw that with, you know, the Mac Mini Boom to some degree. People are excited about the Silicon, Apple Silicon. And then just the partnership with Gemini. Like, they're going to have access to something in frontier so they can start to vend it into different places. but it's just on Apple's timelines, which have been slow lately. So, yeah. Yeah, but the iPhone Air was a flop, right?

I mean, we'll see what happens with the foldable. But, like, I mean, I think they are facing, you know, obviously the replacement cycle is really long. I think one thing that's like kind of under-discussed is like I wrote this piece of while back, like years ago, where I said, you know, what are the implications of a billion iPhones? And this is well before there were a billion iPhones circulation. And my point was the implications are that a lot of those are in the developing world,

right? They're secondhand, third hand iPhone devices. And that's kind of like there's this strange dilemma that Apple faces. Like the more powerful the devices get, obviously the longer you can go without replacing them. Right? Because the demands of Spotify aren't changing. The demands of Facebook and Instagram aren't changing from like a hardware perspective, right? And so the question is like how how central can you make AI to the core use case, which is a lot more compute intensive if you do everything on device, how central can you make that to instigate a need to replace the device more frequently, right? Not just like the, because the power of the device at some point doesn't even matter. Like, okay, you tell me like the compute capacity of the next iPhone is 10x what I have

now. Okay, well, are the demands of Spotify 10X? Because that's the, that's the only app I use for hours and hours every day. Right. And so that's kind of the question. And so it's like if all of that functionality can sort of like percolate down to like the iPhone seven, right? And no one really sees a difference in sort of like the in sort of like lifestyle between like the brand new iPhone and the iPhone 7 with their only using Instagram and Spotify. How do you actually convince people to upgrade on every cycle? Right? Because keep in mind like that as that sort of install base that like iOS install base grows, most of that's going to be through like secondhand. Yeah. Yeah, Germin, it was interesting yesterday. He shared that a lot of Apple's advantage on the

hardware side in AI is because of the self-driving push. The car that ultimately failed allowed them to do the R&D that is now being rolled out of devices. Apple had a huge quarter beat estimates on the revenue side by $4 billion with China specifically and up after hours. The other news that's kind of interesting, I'd be curious, before you leave, Eric. chat chbtee is retiring 4-0 as of today yeah that's interesting putting putting it to bed i'm sure that'll make a lot of people mad but simpler process for them yeah well yeah but they also launched go yeah right which is the sort of like lower price point um uh subscription tier so my sense is like you know if you're trying to push people to adopt that which i think they are you maybe have to

give her to some like the the older models that the free tier relied on well thank you so much for taking the time to join. This is all the blast. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Eric, come back on soon. Thanks for us to see you. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And I'm also going to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security.

Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And without further ado, we have Kevin Wheel from Open AI the chief product officer in the mainstream waiting room. Hey, what's up, guys. How are you doing?

Good to see you. I'm good. It's good to see you again. Thanks for having me on. It's been a minute. Yeah, what's new with you? Since we've had you on the show, you've changed duties, you've changed focus, like, reintroduce yourself, I guess.

Yeah, by the way, I love that we are talking about science today. I think we need to bring more of this kind of coverage to science and get people excited about science because, you know, there are a few more important factors in all of our lives. And AI is going to, is in the process of fundamentally changing science. So yeah. Yeah, what, what is your focus? Because science and health can mean a bunch of things. It can mean D to C, you know, advice. And, you know, one of the ways to cure cancer is just to get a lot of people to stop smoking cigarettes. That's something they could learn by shot you be smoking. And it makes a very convincing case for why you should not. And maybe it helps you not smoke. At the same time,

there's researchers that are going to spend decades developing cancer drugs, getting them through FDA approvals. There's a whole bunch of different ways that, you know, even Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and Excel helped the previous generation of biotech companies. You can imagine LLM's vending in there. And then you can imagine the fully automated AI scientist. What's been your focus? Where do you think, where do you think we're going to see the most progress in 26? Yeah. The mission of our team is to accelerate science. And the reason that we are starting to do this now, I mean, it's obviously been something that open eye cares about a lot. But when you go back, a couple years, we were all amazed that GPT, you know, 3.5, 4, whatever, could do well on the SAT.

And then you start seeing it solve graduate level problems. And then it does okay on math competitions. And then you fast forward a bit and our model can win a gold medal at the IMO at the top, you know, math competition in the world. And now we're seeing it solve open problems in mathematics. So things that humans have not solved, suddenly AI models are contributing solutions to. And it's not everything. It's not every open problem. Science is not as far from done, right? But the fact that AI models can now contribute at the frontier of science and actually push beyond where humans have gone before is incredibly exciting. Because if you can replicate that across math, physics, biology, chemistry, material science, and you can do the next, say, 30 years of science in five years instead. If we can be doing, you know, the science of the 2050s in 2030,

the world is a better place. Yeah. And the models are there now. And so this is a huge focus for us. So yeah, talk a little bit more about your work specifically because not to like discredit you, but I feel like this part of the magic of these large AI models is that you get a lot of this stuff for free. Like oftentimes you don't need a specific SAT model. You just build an amazing model. And learns how to code and also learns how to write poetry and tell jokes and it can do some science too. So how are you working on fine-tuning? Is there a reinforcement learning project? Is there specific compute allocated towards this? You have a team. Are you listening to certain customers? Yeah, I imagine my guess was just working really closely with customers, understanding,

making sure they're not just signing up for chat, GBT, off the shelf and using it, but actually, you know, building a bunch of specific functionality for them and innovating on the products. Yeah, yeah. How do you think about that? Yeah, well, it's not about building offshoot models. This is still about improving our core models, but there is, if you think about science, science has a huge surface area, right? So you want, there's a lot that we can teach models at the frontier. There's work that we can do to make our models even better at performing frontier science.

and that crosses from pre-training into post-training and reinforcement learning. And so we get to solve frontier problems in science to make our models better. There's also a whole lot of work that we can do on the tooling front. You know, scientists use a lot of different tools, and you want to bring those to bear so that the model is using the same kind of advanced scientific tooling that scientists are, because then it can be an even greater force multiplier for the work they do. So there's a whole bunch that we're doing on the pure model front. That's not the only thing, though, because I think if there's anything that we've learned

from the way that AI has completely revolutionized coding over the last year is it's two things. It's great models, and it's also integrating AI into the environment where engineers operate, right? You don't spend your time going to chat GPT and copying and pasting back and forth. you use codex in your IDE. And bringing the model into the environment where you're working is a huge part. That's why we launched Prism yesterday. The idea is, or I guess on Tuesday, but the idea is to bring great models that can help with AI into the workflows that scientists are using every day. In this case, Prism is about scientific writing and collaboration.

And if you can help people communicate their ideas faster, if they can use AI to express the research, that they've done, collaborate with other scientists, that's its own form of acceleration. So we both want to make model smarter and we want to bring AI into the environments that scientists are operating in day to day. Both of those are parts of accelerating science. So talk about some of the integrations. ChatGBTGPT at one point just got access to a Python Ripple and could sort of write code and execute it in the, in the query for just a GPT5 Pro query. but chat GPT also has an integration to Gmail and there's a like some sort of business development relationship.

What is your, as you're bringing more tools to bear in the scientific workflow, is there some sort of balancing act? Do you just need to integrate with everything? How do you think about actually wiring up and like unhobbling the models? Yeah, I think it's about both a handful, a set of tools that we think are going to be broadly useful that we can integrate ourselves. As an example, if you're in the process of trying to solve a hard scientific problem,

you need to solve a differential equation. The models are actually smart enough these days that they can solve a differential equation just by reasoning through it. But you also can integrate a computer algebra system, a system that will deterministically and very quickly solve differential equations. Why not let the model use that?

And go back to doing what it does best, which is reasoning broadly about how to solve hard problems. So you have that, you have like protein databases in biology. You have so many tools like this. And I think it'll be important because I might be a scientist studying, you know, the evolutionary biology of snails, and I might have my own set of tools that I use, or maybe small models that I've trained,

they're good at doing very specific things. So it'll be both about us teaching the models to use certain tools that will be broadly helpful and enabling scientists to bring their own, tools to bear so that the models can very deftly adopt them into the process. What does a chat chabit moment look like for Prism within the scientific community? Ooh, that's a good question. You know, I think it's going to be a more, I think it's going to be a more like process of incremental compounding where you've got a product that helps people work and operate faster. You've got models that are going to be increasingly useful. And we're going to

see kind of two, you know, exponentials, if you will. One is just the exponential that the models are on and their ability to help any scientists who's adopted them do what they do faster, right? To aid in their thinking, I was just talking to a scientist earlier today who called GPT 5.2 a metal detector for hypotheses. So he's thinking about, he's got so many different ideas in his head. You can only run so many experiments. You only have so much time. And he uses GPT-5 as a thought partner in helping him hone in on the most valuable ways to test his ideas. So you've got that exponential. And then there's a separate one that comes from scientists beginning to adopt these tools, because a lot of scientists still haven't adopted them. And the more that they do, the more that they individually move faster,

and the more that the entire field of science accelerates. So there's a lot to be excited about here. A couple weeks ago, we talked to Andrew from Cerebrus, and I was asking him about where wafer scale computing is most exciting to him. And he actually cited science as a particularly valuable place. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on the value of speed or the value of different chip architectures in the scientific workload.

I was kind of coming to it like, well, you know, developing drugs takes a long time. It's probably fine if the model goes off and cooks for an hour. But he was sort of pushing back on that. And I'm wondering how you think about the different parameters. Obviously, we're on exponential with intelligence and capabilities, but there's also latency and usability and flavor. And there's so many other knobs that are being turned as the models progress

and as the projects progress. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about scientific problems in particular is that when you're solving the hardest frontier science problems, you need to do a lot of thinking. If these problems were easy, really smart humans would have solved them long ago. And so the kinds of problems that are left often involve the model thinking not for five minutes or 20 minutes, which would be a long time if you're inside chat, GPT, but maybe an hour, two hours, 12 hours, two days. Yeah. And that is where we're going. Yeah.

And if you have really fast inference that can take that two-day rollout and turn it into a six-hour rollout or an hour thing only takes 10 minutes, then again, that just is more opportunity for you as a scientist to maybe instead of testing two hypotheses, you're testing 20 in the same period of time. Again, it's acceleration. Yeah. To go back to the chat GPT moment, how are you thinking about, actually seeding your work into the scientific community.

Because there's one angle where it's just chat GPT.com, it sort of goes viral, everyone's playing with it. That's part of what the chat GPT moment was, was just anyone with a web browser could use it. At the same time, there's only so many real scientists. A lot of them are in labs or in academic institutions, and I could imagine you doing partnerships or deals or anything to actually get something deployed into the most elite scientific environments.

Have you thought about the different tradeoffs there? One of the cool things is we're seeing so much organic adoption. You go on Twitter these days as you do. And every day I feel like I'm seeing new examples where someone will say, you know what, I just solved this problem with GPT5. Or I gave this problem to my grad student and they were busy. It took them too long. I just, you know, I wanted to make more progress.

I just gave it to GPT5 and now I have a solution. And so there's this incredible organic adoption because, of course, when other people see that, other scientists see that, they go, oh, wait a minute, you know, and maybe the last time they tried the models was a year ago when they weren't at a place that they were going to really meaningfully contribute to scientific research. They could help with other things, but they weren't going to help with your hardest problems. Now they can. And so there's this groundswell of scientists that are adopted.

GPD 5.2 especially, I think, has been kind of an inflection point. So it's exciting to see and there's a lot happening, you know, even without us, with people just discovering this and talking about it. Yeah, a lot of people experience that with like Andre Carpathie's journey, with vibe coding and a lot of people are like, okay, yeah, like if it's good enough for him, I got to jump back in. It's funny, that man is an incredible communicator. Yeah, yeah, really. What's the update on how forward-thinking labs are thinking about integrating with a product like Prism? Ideally, there's a future where a scientist could be at home, have an idea. Maybe they're working in pharma or something in biology, and they can just start running.

You can imagine somebody starting to run an experiment just based on a prompt. And then somewhere in the physical world, there's actual, you know, the biological process is actually happening. how much progress is there on that front? Yeah, I'm super excited about the world of robotic labs. I think it is 100% likely to be the future that we're moving towards. Because you can do so much more in parallel, again, to the idea of accelerating science and moving faster, the world where you can have a hypothesis, maybe that you've honed with, you know, back and forth with chat GPT, in this case, it may also be running simulations, you know, take,

if you're doing something like fusion where you want to do heavy simulation before you run an experiment because your experiments are expensive, then you have the model thinking, running a fusion simulation, looking at the results of that, refining its thinking, running another fusion simulation, and you do as much with the compute that you have in advance so that when you do something in the real world, it's like that much more likely to be successful. you can look at the same thing with respect to biology. There's no reason at this point that you need to have grad students, you know, pipetting one thing into another thing.

The idea I think like a scientist in a lab coat could easily fade away where they're just like in a normal office, you know? Or at the very least doing the kinds of things that are incredibly hard for models for robots to replicate. But there's a lot of science that can be, totally automated and the idea of robotic labs that are, you know, 24-7 online that you can scale in parallel as far as, you know, you can make it efficient. And you have models thinking, you know, reasoning for two days to find the most efficient experiments to run, maybe running

simulations to test that. And then once they get to a good point, passing that to a robotic lab, which can experiment in parallel at high volume, the results pass back into a model, which reasons about the results and then goes out and runs a different set of experiments. You know, you're doing reinforcement learning with a loop through the real world. And that is absolutely... Our robotic labs, something that Open AI would ever do, or is that best suited for an external partner? How do you think about that point of the stack? I think it'll be both. We want to partner broadly with scientists that have their own labs that are already doing anything. Like I said, science is an extremely broad, has huge amounts of surface area. There's no way that we can do

even a tiny fraction of all of science. And I think there will be a lot of opportunity for us to learn from things like robotic labs to make sure that we're working really well with those scientists. So I think it will be both. Can you clarify the business model? There was some confusion about how this might be monetized in the future. Poor Sarah Friar. She keeps kidding. I'm pulling for ads in science. I want a pill that I take. It helps me lose weight, but then I wind up loving Ford F-150s. I'm willing to take that trade. Ad-supported medicines. That's what we need. But no, what are you actually thinking? Is anything changing? This is why I love you guys. We're your strongest defenders. Whatever you do. Yeah. Sarah said something, when Sarah was talking about,

oh, maybe there are ways to like monetize IP. Yeah. She was speaking specifically. to the idea of us doing partnerships with large companies, you know, pharma companies, people like that, where there would be a specific partnership that was developed with the idea of sharing royalties in the future was not meant at all about a normal. Somebody signing up for a. And this already happens with the OpenAI Investment Fund. There's startups that take capital from OpenAI. They build something on top of ChatGBT or GPT APIs. And like I think most people inside sort of understood that, but thanks for clarifying. So in general, most people will just be on sort of some sort of like API consumption-based pricing or subscription fee.

Well, no, that's mostly the normal. The nice thing about Prism is you log in with your chat GPT account. So you just bring your existing chat chit-t account along with you. This is not, you know, there are not a billion scientists in the world. This is not an effort to like build a brand new business model. This is about accelerating science because I think it's one of the most impactful and mission-oriented things we could possibly do. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Give us the update on Detachment 201.

How's it going? Are you sold? Oh, it's been a blast. You've been working out a lot. It's been an absolute blast. I've been in D.C. to various bases, things like that. I think it is massively important that we bring Silicon Valley and D.C. closer together because we have an incredible tech community.

We have a country and a set of values that are worth defending. And, you know, it's a dangerous world out there. the more that we can do to, you know, to strengthen what we are and what we do, the better. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to talk to us. Very fascinating stuff. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, guys.

It's good to see you again. Good to see you, Kevin. We'll talk to you soon, Kevin. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling.

monitoring and security. Up next. The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And yes, we do have a surprise guest who wasn't on the lineup, but he's joining. We have Mahal. Dhramatic.

What's going on? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. The robotics mastermind. You're going to love this. The other, I think it was two nights ago, my youngest. one and a half walked in the other room. And I was pretty quick to chase after her, you know,

because she's just very, very active. She can destroy a lot of things. And I go in the other room, and she has the, like, you know, soap dispenser of the mattock, and she has it fully vertical trying to drink out of it. And I was so appreciative of your design because nothing came out. Wow. That's awesome.

But I was so worried for a second because it looked like she was just trying to chug. No, that could end up very massive, potentially harmful. Who knows? Anyways, so excited to have you back on. We've been loving our Maddo. Thanks for having. And I know you have some big updates. Yeah.

What's new in you? Well, we just announced today that we've raised $60 million in the next round. So led by, yeah. Led by who? led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Vic Miller who is joining our board and we've had

thank you and we've had some amazing investment Gavin Baker at Tridis Antonio Garcia Zed Valor a bunch of other joining on their own so it's great and then for us this is sort of the output of the product we've built and shipped yeah I don't think this would have happened

without us shipping so that's been the good part of it that it's not about the demo it's based on real product, real usage, real customers Real robots, thousands of them. Real robots. Out in the real world, doing real work. Yeah. We've dead starting jumping.

We've shipped more than 6,000 now and have cleaned about 110 million square feet. There you go. Which results in 80,000 miles travel, so part of it. That's amazing. That's wild. Talk to us about pricing and willingness to pay. Obviously, with modern AI robotics, everything that you're doing, you're creating more value. for the customer.

Correct. I mean, the sales show people are willing to pay more than the previous generation, which I feel was like more of a three-digit price point. And we were talking about like, will people really pay $50,000 for a humanoid? A hundred thousand? That feels like a big jump. But what are you seeing in terms of just willingness to pay for robotic processes amongst consumers?

So a great question. We actually launched first time in April of 2020. No one cared. But we started as a robotics as a service. Yeah. And we tried to launch it as a subscription and that was like an organ rejection. That didn't work at all. So people are definitely not interested in paying yet another subscription.

That's another one thing we learned. Then we priced it at about $1,500 plus subscription as an attachment in November 2023 and learned again that that didn't work as well. That was the price point at which a lot of people weren't yet convinced that at least the robot a vacuum or this could do a job. So we really took that feedback to heart and then eventually priced it much, much lower introductory price about $9.95. And now it's because of tariff,

we've had to raise it a little bit. But really, what we learned, and this was our thesis to day one, that if you take a step back and think about it, there is literally zero ubiquitous consumer electronics device priced higher than $2,000. Beyond $2,000, it's prosumer, or you pay for cars, right?

There is literally nothing. I mean, my everything broke. So, yeah, that's why, that's why. Yeah, that's why I think the humanoid robot rollout is going to be just really brutal because you're trying to get adoption of a new product that is still very much, like, going to be in an R&D phase. And you're asking people to pay car money. But counterpoint piggyback rides, you could take it to work. You replace your car.

You hop on the back. It's a car that can clean your house. It's a car that can do the dishes. I'm hopping on the back. Give me a piggyback ride to work. And then while I'm working, you're going to go around and clean. Do all sorts of stuff. Well, AGI is coming.

Maybe it will just do the work for you. Maybe we'll go there. There will be too human eyes on TV if you. No more commutes, but you will need a clean house. So you will buy amatic robot in the future. That's exactly right. Well, I mean, talk about the AGI process, the process and the models. We're seeing like incredible advancement.

all over image video models, reasoning models, agents. Are you seeing just natural improvements to the performance of your fleet? Is that just something that rolls out for free? Are you doing your own training runs? What have you learned or integrated from the progress in just fundamental AI research over the past year? That's a great question. We started with this idea that AI is coming and AI would make progress.

and that has always been part of it. And we are taking advantage of VLMs and SAM3 and all the open source model that are available to us. But at the same time, one of the things that we had realized on day one that at least when it comes to home, getting data given the privacy that consumers want, especially at this price point, was going to be a challenge. So we knew that just like Tesla stole the car,

collected data, and now was moving on to a ton. and robotics in the same exact way. The robotic vacuum was our wedge. That's the way we wanted to get inside home, earn customers trust, build a brand, and also a data wedge. And we knew that if we build it the right way by doing everything on the device and earn customers trust,

they will share data. And that's actually one of the most interesting thing, that the long tail with which we actually need, all that data is coming in, and customers are willingly sending it to us. And they are curating it for us as well, because we know this data is actually error-oriented. So that's incredibly helpful.

And if you take a step back and think about it, even for humanoid, if you had a humanoid in your home, you don't want it to step onto that dog poop or cat vomit or get tangled up in wires or ruck tassels or maybe squeeze your or break your kids' toys or dolls, right? So every single thing that we do actually directly leads into it. So our thought was always that instead of sort of building a humanoid in day one, let's grow a robot. Let's grow Rosie the robot and we'll solve perception

for us just using floor cleaning space and then we can worry about manipulation and kind of think about what would kid be able to do it between five to 10 year and can we enable that sort of functionality and make product useful. It's also kind of insane to think about like the actual reality of a humanoid using a regular vacuum, you know, just like dragging around a vacuum or using a Dyson. It's like, is that really the most efficient way to like, clean of floors to have this huge robot, like human-sized robots. Actually, it was in that movie by Centennial Man. I remember that with Robin Williams, and he was using the regular newspaper,

and he was doing it. And we're like, wait, that doesn't make sense. Like, you know, do you, like, we have this humanoid, really amazing, intelligent robot, but our appliances never changed. So there was always this idea that it has to evolve in both the days. Yeah. Any traction or plans on the enterprise side? I'm thinking like hotel rooms.

They need to be incredibly efficient. Every minute that someone is in there is a minute they couldn't be somewhere else. Do you have plans there or is that just a total distraction? At the moment, hardware that we've built is really just for homes. I did put one in hair salon and it works fine. We did put some in hotels and everything. So perception and algorithms-wise, it is working across the board. We do have people using it in their daycare centers,

churches, schools. Animal Hospital is another one that we've seen use cases. So there is an opportunity there, but I think that would require a little bit of a hard way tweak. And then we just have to question, is it really about savings time, which is really what we want to do, or is it about just saving costs? And if it's saving costs, then it may not be as interesting of a problem. But if it turns out that it's a labor shortage oriented one, then we really need to go and look into it. What about lawnmowers? lawnmowers is something we want to stay inside home for a while

okay okay okay what am I advertising the difference the reason lawnmower think about it it's like you guys would make it a fantastic lawnmower but I've never once thought like in between when the like the landscapers come to my house I've never once thought like I wish my grass was just like a little bit shorter today

like because they're just coming every week whereas in the home it's like your house can always be cleaner Yeah, every day, every day. What about an ad-supported tier? It says, hey, I'm on linoleum. Why don't you upgrade to Hardwood? We'd love to connect you with this local contractor. Have you considered NordVPN?

I see you're spilling a lot of vegetables on the floor. Why not athletic green? We've been talking to Eric Sue for too long today. He got us thinking on ads and everything. What's a plan for this year? Like, you just scale, sell a lot more robots? Do you need to be in Best Buy and, and do it? detail distribution at some point?

What do you do? Not at the moment. Luckily for us, at the moment, we're still supply constraints. So we would keep selling and doing build-to-order model that allows us to keep working capital low. And the goal is really to scale,

we scale about 20x last year, selling from 300 to 6,000 robots now. Thank you. And try to go another 10 to 20x this year. That's the goal at the moment. And there is a second product in the work. I won't be able to go into much detail. yet, but there will be some exciting stuff.

We tried to guess it, and all of our guesses were way off. A robot that you can take a piggyback. But now it's supported robots. He's like, no, you guys are not even close. Anyway, thank you so much. Congratulations. Great to get the update. Always great to have you on the show.

Yeah, I love, I love, and we appreciate the product. You know, we talk about robots a lot on the show. This is a good one. We love a robot company with a fleet. Yeah. With a real fleet out there. And I think the aliens joining today telling them that we're still growing without advertisement, although we will need some at some point.

We will. Yes. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Great to get up. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash.

Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. The other news today is, of course, that rare metals are absolutely spiking. Gold's up 4%. Silver's up 7%. Copper's up 10%, Platinum's up 7%, palladium's up 5%. Oil is up 4%. Guy Giger Capital says, don't worry, Powell said it means nothing. And he has a photo that looks very worried. We're all a little bit. We will be monitoring that.

It is an odd, you know, dislocation in the market. Boring business is posting a meme saying realizing that our collective retirements now depend on whether digital gold, created by an anonymous founder goes up or down. Is that Bitcoin is referring to? Wait. No, so retirement accounts will be able to do directly buy financial assets. This is from the CLEE? From the SEC chair. Now is the right time to open 401K retirement market in crypto. And so more, more push into that. One update, some more updates on the Apple numbers, Apple earnings.

Mark German says, massive Apple revenue beat $144 billion in overall revenue, $85 billion in iPhone revenue, $25.5 billion, China revenue and $30 billion in services revenue. Tim Cook gets to keep his job. Obviously, obviously a joke. And we can close out. We got to do some of these timeline posts. Yeah, well, let's pull up this video.

Okay, let's pull up. AI is going to take your job? What job? This is great. We will pull this up while I tell you about graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams. on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster.

And I pull this up. And let's go to AI. Check in with the job market. Just drinking driving is the entire job. Double heat. I've seen this meme template. I have not seen this exact video, but the jump in that car, you have to be going so fast. This makes me want to buy a beater so bad.

And just drift it? Just wait for a rainy day. Drifting is next up on the bucket list. You got to learn how to drift like. that. Maybe stay off the bottle. Maybe stay off the bottle, but maybe close down a road somewhere. Yeah.

Delicious tacos with a fantastic post says AI CEOs are like if Henry Ford said these cars are going to run over all of your children. They're getting... I appreciated this one just going back to, you know, the where's our AI Steve Jobs. Yeah. You know, we can't have every lab founder saying that everyone's going to lose their job and, you know, AI is going to, you know, kill everyone on a long

enough time horizon. I do think Dario has done, like, a reasonably good job if you're, like, pretty tapped in, right? He has this great essay. Wait, I'm... All watched over by machines of loving grace. Yes, yes, yes. I feel like he's not that public yet.

Like, he's starting to do a little bit of a press tour right now. Yeah. But I think if he was more in the public eye, I think he could be that person, definitely. I mean, Demis has also done a fantastic job in... and is one person that's, like, not really highlighted with those questions. But, I mean, this delicious talk I suppose, like, Dario's definitely in this crowd. Because, you know, he is talking about job displacement.

I guess his more recent essay was about the catastrophic risks. Yeah. Which are important. And it's good that he is talking about, but it is a very different, it's a different world than other innovations. Jeremy, yeah. Fon says the best way to evaluate a VC is by picking the one with the least bad podcast. forced to go on. Of course, if you raise from a VC, you're probably going on their podcast. Just face it, you may as well pick the one with the best podcast. Buckle up.

There are some good... The Jocko Willink Venture Capital Fund. That's what you got to do. You got to do Jock's pod. That would be amazing. GPD-5, apparently serving it is profitable. According to Epoch AI, gross margins were around 45% making inference look profitable. But after accounting for the cost of operations, open and I likely incurred a loss, of course. They have a huge staff. There's a lot of the CAPEX. There's all sorts of different stuff.

But just on the actual inference, this confirmed what a lot of people were saying yesterday about just comparing the open source models to the private models. Inference gross margins seem healthy, which is, of course, good news. We went on Colin and Samir's show. We did. To talk about TBPN and media. And John Palmer didn't just listen. He studied.

And he had a great take here. He said, on the Colin and Samir show, John Coogan laid out a barbell thesis and media. Value either accrues to the platforms or the individual personalities, platforms being YouTube, Spotify, X, et cetera, or the individual people creating the content. He says, I'm guessing that software is headed to the same place.

Value goes to the platforms with monopoly distribution, Google, Stripe, can think of, you know, system of records, et cetera, or the individual vibe coders shipping one-man businesses at a thousand-x lower cost. Not much value in between. What happened to the media business is now having a new software

when production costs drop, 1,000x. Remember, to make a show like this, historic and distribute it historically, we would have needed to be on a major television network. Now we can do it with a tiny fraction of the cost. And restream. And restream, of course. But anyways, interesting take

and I think we'll certainly see some of this play out. Gary Vaynerchuk rebranded his agency for enterprise clients. Chuck. Chuck Media. He's just reinvented himself so many times. He was Gary Vaynerchuk, I think that's his full name. Then he was Gary Vayner or Vayner Media and then Gary Vee and now just Chuck, which is very interesting. I've talked to some people who have worked with them.

Oh, wait, this is a different agency. Oh, interesting. Vaynerchuk's small business agency, the Sasha should. group is being repositioned for enterprise clients as Chuck Media. I think that's separate from VaynerMedia, which is its own thing. Fascinating. In other news, Tree Hacks at Stanford is looking for new judges. If you have experience building a notable project, building a major company, you're a journalist, a

creator, et cetera. Please reach out to, I'm going to not pronounce that. Thijs coding dev. He's a 19 year old CS Stanford. And I was thinking about this, like hackathons were huge in, I don't know, 2010, 2015. And then they sort of fell off or just became sort of like background noise. Like they would happen, but nothing was that exciting.

And this feels like the best time to go to a hackathon because people are going to be vibe coding like truly fully functional products. And there's something at the pressure of the meeting bunch of people, spending two days, you know, staying up all night grinding. it's really, really fun. I don't know if hackathons have necessarily declined. Like when I was at school, the hackathons were like massive. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess just the novelty wore off and they just became background noise. Yeah, that's right. But it's got to be the best time ever. I remember the first hackathon I went to, it was like, oh, cool, like Twilio exists. So you can like build something to text you. And now it's like, okay, like you can use agents to just code you everything.

And the pool of people, the first hackathon I went to, I didn't really know programming at all. I learned a bunch. It was able to build some things, but it took a long time. And by the end of the hackathon, you sort of just had a landing page that barely worked. Now you can definitely leave with a fully fledged product if you lock in for two days at a long hackathon. Unicorn valuation, potentially. For what? Oh, yeah, for the company, for sure.

And, yeah, this seems like a lot of fun. So, head over three hacks. I have to get, we both have to get on with Sydney. Oh, we do. Okay. So. Well, we will have to talk about sticker packs tomorrow. We can talk about this for a second.

Plant the bottom. Talk about it. From, Dom, founder of Fast, the payments company, launched a new company called Stickier. And I was super confused because he's selling stickers with the TBPN logo. This is very weird. And, uh. It's supposed to be a way to like short overhyped startups. But you're just buying stickers with other people.

It's very questionable where this will go. But we'll have to check it out more in the future. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you. Goodbye. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.