TBPN - Netflix vs Youtube, Saudi Arabia’s liquidity crunch, Tether’s gold pivot | Diet TBPN
Episode Date: January 29, 2026Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I wrote about Netflix.
There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Stratory and Netflix co-CEO
CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Stratory interview.
And they go back, the only mention of AI in like an hour-long interview or something,
it's just two little exchanges.
Ben Thompson says, is AI slop going to save you?
If it overwhelms the UGC platforms, and basically it's like you're a refuge, so this is
actual, this is real. And Greg Peters just says, I think it's credible. I don't know if that's the
reality. So I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible
possibility. It's like, maybe that's a bold case. It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been
trading down over the last couple months, but in general, it's up, I think it's 4X up since the
launch of chat GPT. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue, how will
AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood. I mean, I was, I was
reflecting on the Avengers. I just remember seeing, I think he was even in one of the first ones,
the whole, the whole CGI process for Thanos. He has this like very distinct large chin.
So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos. He is a maugger. He is this huge chin.
It's actually like he's kind of like the OG. I don't know. It looks like chin implants. It's kind of
crazy, but it has these like cracks in it. It has this like very distinct look, Thanos.
And normally the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face and then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face.
It tracks all the points. So when you smile, like it sees that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling.
And then that facial movement is transferred. So they're recording the lines. They're acting it out. They're giving their facial performance.
and then that's transferred, all the little subtleties of how their eyebrows move,
all of that is transferred to the CGI character.
It can look a little flat, though.
So what they did with this is they still have all the points on the face,
but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face
into a higher-res model.
Yes, don't read that.
Don't read that.
Don't read that.
But it is a good point.
So all of those are tracking markers.
And then the question is, like, you have a much,
higher resolution, CGI model, if you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting
all the detail of what a human face actually looks like in the way it moves. And so digital domain,
which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight-up
machine learning pipeline, like they used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model. It wasn't, you know, an
L-LM, but they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots,
to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen.
And I don't know if you remember 2018, the movies, obviously you didn't see any of these movies,
but I don't remember like AI backlash.
My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed.
But truly, like, I mean, people did make the, oh, it's too CGI, the explosion, they're too crazy,
it's too over the top.
But in general, people weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of two.
Everyone was just like this is a CGI epic.
This is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie.
Like, we're fine with all this.
And there wasn't backlash to that.
And I don't think that there would be backlash
to this type of like AI tool.
Now, obviously, Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property.
But the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry.
And it will continue to be used.
Interestingly, I talked to Jason Carmen about...
The Carminator.
The Carminator.
about using AI tools and filmmaking,
because he's obviously making movies
and doing VFX and stuff.
And I was like, certainly,
if you need to rotoscope out a background,
so rotoscoping is where you are basically using,
you're cutting out a subject from the background,
and then just doing like a background replacement.
That's an example of rotoscoping.
But it's over motion, so it's moving.
So you need to track the hand here,
move it over here, track it again, track it again,
and it can be very, very time-consuming.
Typically, this is offshore to like a BPO, and then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it, and they have some software this use.
But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one shot.
He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver.
He wanted to deliver in 4K.
And so he went to a team.
I think he paid a fortune.
They did it.
And when they rotoscope ahead, they actually, like, draw new hairs on to, like, kind of create this.
It's very, like, artisanal still.
But obviously, AI can rotoscope.
You see it in the cap cut edits and whatnot.
Where's the rotoscoping NeoLab?
It's actually runway.
We've had Christobal on the show, and pre-ChatGBT, Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool
where you could basically load up a video, put a couple dots on what you wanted to keep,
and then add and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like,
cancel all this out and it would sort of use that as like an intuition for the model to to drop out the background. And you could and you could do a really, really clear like cut this person out of this video just in runway. And now that's available in Capcut and edits. And that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where you know you'll see the F1 driver like standing up and then it'll like it'll drop out the background and cut in a different background. And then the F1 driver drops out. And it's like this very like schizo edit. It's really. It's really.
really cool technique.
Yeah, you can see is this runway, is editing tool?
So it basically draws a mask around it.
You just highlight what do you want to actually run a scope.
This is an example of like motion, adding motion to video,
but like you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste.
So I don't think Netflix should take a hard line stance on AI broadly because they want
to use AI tools.
Obviously they've been using AI for recommendations forever.
The original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine-like.
learning models and that's how you open up Netflix and says we think this would be good for you
based on what you watched and it is much more nuanced than just if you like you know k-pop demon hunters
we're going to recommend squid game next like and so many of these wrote tasks will be AI enabled
and they already are and there's not going to be I don't think there'll be a crazy pushback here
although it's possible that there's some sort of you know comms mishap especially if a director
comes out and is like we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any
AI but there's a VFX house that when the motion capture stage did use AI to up res
motion capture data like you could see AI being used in mat painting for the background and the
director doesn't even know because they just said like yeah the background just make the forest a
little bit busier and they think that they're hand painting it after that they were using
CGI and 3D modeling it now they're using AI and that sneaks in and then all of a sudden
they face some backlash. I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that that big of a deal.
The bigger question is like, how does Netflix position itself against YouTube and the UGC platform?
So Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI. And I liked his stance.
He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything. We're going to let you use AI tools right in the Shorts Creator.
We have V-O-3. We're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this.
and the algorithm will sort out if you like it.
And if you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop,
the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff.
But for the people that like that, they will be served it.
It is sort of a balancing act.
And there's definitely this like stated preference for like,
I don't want any AI on my platform.
Now, how real is that?
We'll see.
Yeah.
And what we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision.
The decision that's bigger than just like,
are we going to sort of lean into AI or not,
will just really be, do we have, does Netflix ever lean into UBC, right?
They've been signing some bigger podcasts and they obviously work with independent media
companies, but there's a very big difference between just allowing people to, like,
will they ever have an upload button?
It feels like no.
And I feel like that could end up being their advantage.
We're part of what has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody
could go and put YouTube, you know, upload a video, anybody could be a creator.
And I think like as the amount of content that gets created, 10, 100 X,
thousand X's because of AI.
Netflix could be this like refuge where you're like,
okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process.
I know that this isn't just a total free-for-all.
Yeah, yeah.
The upload button is probably a bigger deal than like AI on Netflix.
Exactly.
I think that's a very good thesis.
YouTube has been on an absolute tear.
In terms of watch time on TVs, according to Nielsen,
YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the US for nearly three years.
And so this has been the backbone of the case for like,
let Netflix buy Warner Brothers,
even though they'll get HBO Max,
like you're merging to seemingly big streaming platforms,
but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube.
So, but the bigger question is like,
there's the gap between Netflix and YouTube.
And at the start back in,
Netflix is almost 30 years old, YouTube's over 20 at this point.
Back in 2005, like these were seen as like wildly different platforms.
One was DVDs in the mail and the other one was like a video
of a guy going to the zoo.
on his on his like VHS camera.
They felt extremely separate,
and they felt extremely separate for years and years and years.
Now they are starting to converge,
especially around video podcasts, I feel like.
I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom
in video podcasting.
The podcast was, I think, invented by Apple or core.
Yeah, when I started doing any work with YouTube channels
and podcasts back in the day,
there wasn't a lot of overlap.
It was very clearly, like,
these were just different types of creators.
Totally.
And then there was a big shift.
It was like, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table.
Yeah, I'm not uploading to YouTube.
And that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.
Totally, totally.
Yeah, there was the pivot to video.
And then Spotify went really big into video podcasting.
They went on it.
I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Eck really did around podcasting.
So seven years ago in 2019, they acquired three companies,
Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parley.
Anchor's more of like a product.
Parkast had a bunch of...
Yeah, Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast.
Yep, yep.
They knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast wanted to distribute it everywhere,
but they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well.
So that did very well.
And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people.
Interesting the timing.
Apparently there was somebody sending a chart.
There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.
Oh, yeah.
You saw that chart.
Jeremy shared this with us.
And it actually fully retraced to now there's like sub,
sub 50,000 a year.
That feels like you would really have to,
maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is.
But either way, there was, if you look at the chart,
it looks like there was like an insane bull market in podcasts and then a huge correction.
Yeah, it does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID.
I mean, we talked to the folks that acquired about that.
And they said that during COVID, they saw a huge spike in people just going for walks,
throwing on AirPods.
All of that sort of hit around the same time.
AirPods were getting to mass adoption.
So we were just throwing on podcasts constantly.
And it really, really grew.
There is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough of YouTube getting sloppier by the day,
that Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two.
So I think of Netflix and YouTube is starting out extremely separate.
then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience.
And I mean, Portnoy and Bill Simmons both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?
Yeah, isn't there deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix?
Exactly.
The audio is still elsewhere.
Why do you remember that?
Because Portnoy drilled it into your head.
He said, if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix,
video, Netflix, barstool video, Netflix.
And it's true.
Like that and so I would think of bar stool like if I'm trying to watch a barstool YouTube video or a podcast
I would just go to YouTube now Netflix is getting into that so so the gap between Netflix and and YouTube is getting like pretty narrow like they're they're becoming competitors
But there's this question on the AI issue do they diverge more and is that valuable
The pure AI feeds like SOR and meta they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts the struggle will be
to create like unifying conversations around particular pieces of content
that are AI generated, I still feel like the K-pop Demon Hunters moment, the Squid Game
moment, the Alex Honnold, Taipei 101 moment, these live events, these like key things that
everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the Warner
Brothers acquisition. People still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place
there, that's way easier than, well, I did, I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero,
but my superhero is different than your superhero.
And so if I wear a T-shirt with that superhero on it,
you're like, what is that?
It's an AI Slop Man?
I'm not a fan of that.
I like Batman.
It's almost better to think about Netflix,
less as being AI-free and more about being UGC-free.
They're paying for curation and a quality bar
that's backed up by a brand that's going on 30 years in the business.
The AI tools will come.
Some fully AI-generated content will come,
but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team.
And I think that that's important for a lot of viewers.
Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?
Yes.
Let's talk about Saudi Arabia.
What's going on in the Middle East?
According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital,
turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families
as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances
and fund the next phase of the Crown Prince's economic overhaul.
I saw this headline and was deeply concerned.
I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole buildout?
Like, we were kind of counting on you guys to be, you know, quite liquid while the rest of us are over here in America are levering up.
So some seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze.
They're also raising from, they've been raising, tried to raise money from the Qataris.
Okay.
They apparently asked for something like $10 billion from the Qataris in the UAE.
Qataris threw in 10b.
Allegedly the UAE did not.
And there was frustration around that.
I thought you were going to say, the Qataris threw in 10B,
and Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it.
Time to re-up.
So as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered
about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month
to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities.
At the summit, which also included others from the private sector,
the $1 trillion wealth fund, called for more,
collaboration on deals. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up
outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses. Local families are being sought
after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom.
Years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have
challenged the Gulf Nations ability to bankroll expansive projects planned under the $2 trillion
dollar vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the
2029 Asian winter games and the government had previously paired back spending on
other elements of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a winter
game. That seems extremely expensive to host a winter games in Saudi Arabia if that's
what's going on. Don't they have some mountains? They have mountains there? I don't know.
Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing,
including a rare loan deal. Now a range of local entities have begun to
sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control
assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The number of family offices in the Middle East in
2019, 250, 2024, 290. Now we're up to 310, and the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices.
There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable. These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy
and close to 95% of private businesses in the kingdom are family owned. Interesting. They're not doing
A lot of IPOs over there.
Of these, many groups are only just starting
to form family offices as they grow in size
and look to formalize strategies to help spread
the wealth across multiple generations.
That makes both established a new family offices
a prime target for more investment.
They're naturally looking to diversify
and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched
the surface.
In addition, more complex areas of finance
are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention
of family offices.
That includes private credit and industry
and its infancy in the kingdom,
as overstretched banks struggle to meet more
explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment.
Not expansive. Not expanding, exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals,
businesses, and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi diversification agenda.
But they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.
You're bearish on the US dollar, the token used to buy AI products.
That's really good.
Yes.
The US dollars all over the place.
Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal hoard.
I did not see this.
This is interesting.
There are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland.
So many.
I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many.
The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used.
One of them, though, is a hive of activity.
Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high-security vaults.
high-security vault owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings S.A., which is now the world's largest
known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states.
Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold
market.
The embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds who shared distrust in government debt
is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never before seen highs above 5,200 now.
It was 5,000 yesterday on the cover.
of the journal. Gold is on an absolute tear. And yet relatively little is known about its inner
workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading Boolean
Bank HSBC Holdings last year, the industry was a buzz about gossip, whether, about where they would
head next. Few guessed that the answer was Tether. Chief Executive Paolo Adorno described the company's
role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's
geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative.
to the dollar. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold,
while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. We are soon becoming basically
one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the
original crypto narrative, right? E-Gold, even before Bitcoin. Was E-Gold actually gold back?
I think that was the whole pitch. It was trying to be digital gold. And I don't think it ever really
got adoption. It was very early. Late 90-year-old. Tether has a scale now.
They also launched their U.S. focused stable coin this week to compete with U.S.D.C.
The new token is known by its ticker, U.S.AT.
Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tethers' mainstay,
186 billion USDT stable coin will do the same for the new coin as its designated reserve
custodian and preferred primary dealer.
So U.S.A.T. is already available for trading as of yesterday.
It'd be interesting if, like, at what point does USDT depeg upward if gold keeps ripping, right?
I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of tether?
I think that's not what the product is.
I think, like, the tether stock would own the treasury.
Sure.
But historically, when you saw a stable coin, like, DPEG, it was based on concerns around the reserve.
Yeah, but I think that the contract is that they will never,
give you more than a dollar.
So it would-
No, I know, I know.
But I'm just saying, like,
stranger things have happened in crypto where...
No, it's always been a very profitable company.
So certainly bullish for them.
So Tether makes his money from its dollar stable coin
that is the giant of the sector
with $186 billion in circulation.
The company takes in real dollars in exchange
for that USDT token and invest them in treasuries
or other assets such as gold,
raking in billions in interest in trading profits.
Processing the physical metal is crucial.
So much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker in Switzerland, guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors.
And he says, it's a James Bond kind of place.
It's crazy.
That's a great quote to give Bloomberg.
If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy.
The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint.
who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases
last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much
larger rush from investors into gold, with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more
than 150, 1,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market. Do you think
you know, the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold? We'll see. I think a lot of prices are still
down pretty dramatically.
Because the tariffs.
In the 2020, 2021 era.
I mean, you've got to be a little bit
scared right now if you're in the
business of manufacturing
cold watches and other precious
metals just given that
your input costs are going.
I'm sure they have like one or
you could imagine one or two years worth
of supply.
So they're not, they can be somewhat
insulated. But
prices will go up
or at least costs will go up. Yeah. I heard a very
funny, very funny interview with an actor who's talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex and
he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you? Yeah. And he's saying that like,
this is Army, Army. I think it's Army Hammer. And he's saying, it's like, it's such a
situation, such a funny situation, but he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of the
building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you, someone shows up with a helicopter and they're going to save
a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is. And they know that that's,
valuable but if you're not going to have time to be like no it's an FP
your it's a it's a Potec you know it's like let me explain high horology here's here's
here's the term beyond your market prices yeah yeah exactly it's like gold
Rolex is a store of value it's always going to trade and now it's probably
going to trade even higher Paula says sf escape room called the permanent underclass
and it's just a room with a laptop and Claude code installed
funny have you ever done an escape room no I have never once in my life thought that
that would be fun nor thought that I this is how I want to kill time yeah it's like
an hour well if you're good you get out faster right yeah have you are you in I'm not
into them but I've done them and they're fun sometimes it depends on like if it's a
well structured one but I like puzzles like it's fun it's like fun puzzle like figure out
But you can very quickly get caught in like just like overthinking what's going on and being like, oh, it must be some like complex math thing.
And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like press this lever instead of like analyze the situation or something.
Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out?
I imagine there's only take a picture.
There's probably only is it like a series of rooms?
Yeah, well usually you start in one room.
They're all different.
But oftentimes you'll start in one room and then you'll there'll be a series of puzzles, lock.
and keys and whatnot and then oftentimes like you'll unlock something and then
you'll progress to another room and then you'll progress to a third room and
then you'll finally get out of like a series room because it's a lot of like
they're pretty easy to set up in sort of like a defunct office space or like you
know storefront that's just kind of like you know going in between it's like
the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate anyone can come in and just say like
oh we'll be in there for like a couple months it's not super permanent the
build that's pretty simple it's mostly just like some some wall
and decorations and like some creativity on the puzzle side.
Tray says can you guys put Tyler in an escape room
and see if he gets out before the show ends?
I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room.
I think most of them aim for like 45 minutes.
Well, maybe we need to make one.
Have you done one, Tyler?
I've not.
Are you interested in it?
You're a speed cuber, so, you know.
Yeah, I mean, it could be fun.
I don't know.
I'm kind of in the Jordic Camp.
When they came out, there was definitely like a boom
in like, in escape.
Bobby and the chat says escape room would be a good bench
for AI. Certainly a humanoid. Let's click over to rewatching the interview with the
Claudebot creator, Peter Steinberger. So in November, yeah, I don't know, you know,
know, I wake up every day, I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool?
And then they was like, okay, I want to check with my computer on WhatsApp. Because, because if my
agents are not running, and then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them.
I want to like do little prompts.
Yeah.
So I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message,
calls the cloud code, and then returns what cloud code returns, one shot.
Yeah.
And it took like one hour and it worked.
I was like, well, okay, that's kind of cool.
But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image.
Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to
to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster.
Just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want.
So I had to get at images. And then I was on the trip in Marrakesh with like a weekend birthday
trip. And I found myself using this like way more than I saw it. But not for not for programming.
It's more like hey, they're like restaurants because it had Google in it and it could figure
stuff and it's like especially when you're on the go it's like super useful and then and I
wasn't thinking I was just sending it a voice message you know but I didn't build that there was no
support for voice messages in there so so the reading indicator came and I'm like I'm really curious
what's not what's happening now and then after 10 seconds my agent replied as if nothing happened
I'm like how do you have did you do that and it replied yeah you sent me you sent me a message
but there was only a link to a file with no file ending so I looked at the file header
I found out that it's opals so I used ffmpeg on your Mac to convert it to wave and then I wanted
to use this but but didn't have it installed and there was an install error but then I looked around
and found the open-Ei key in your environment so I sent it via curl to open the i got the
translation back and then I don't respond it that was like the moment where like wow
yeah yeah it's like that's where it clicked these things are like
damn smart resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power.
The reason that I feel like that is such a powerful moment and I'm glad that he shared it is
if you're talking with a model and you give it a task and then it just hits a dead end.
It's just incredibly like that's sort of like people are very used to that right now.
It's not that it needs to be that way but it's just kind of like the steady state.
Yeah people are used to and okay I know what the models can do.
That's effectively the agent having real agency.
That makes it an agent.
It's saying, like, well, I didn't know how to do this, or I was confused,
and I tried a number of things until I did what you want it.
And that's, like, what you want out of, it's what you want out of a team member, right?
If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task,
they don't just try one thing and come back or just say, like,
I actually can't handle this because the file type is wrong.
Convert it, figure it out.
Yeah.
What was your reaction to it?
Yeah, I mean, it's, like, pretty insane.
Definitely it definitely raised my you know chance of permanent underclass
You know it's making me a little worried so where do we move the goalposts now? Yeah, I'm so I'm so what what's what you want happen
I know you're on I I know there's gonna be something that you're unhappy with about AI
But you can't be satisfied me yeah me yeah
Permanently dissatisfied well part of it's a bit oh yeah I know obviously but I have to provide like an alternative
Of course of course opinion but of course we have the goal post yes and we have been sitting in
one place, but I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product,
an entire, you know, this novel experience that is taken the world by storm.
And how much, how much did we know they only spent, you know, a few months on it?
How much did they actually, how many people actually worked on it?
And what was their total?
How much did they spend in total on tokens, right?
Because they're spending some with code.
You can sort of see that from the GitHub commits, right?
probably for some sort of average.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can do that.
I mean, just based off that it's like, okay, $51,000 on $250 billion tokens.
And a lot of those tokens are probably using CloudBot to do things, right?
Not just building it, right?
Yeah, I mean, that was over how many months.
Like, those tokens were not just on CloudBod.
But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions.
Like, it's pretty accessible.
I don't know.
We need to find a new AGI benchmark.
Okay, so I think one of the main takeaways I have from this is just
that big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing, right?
Maxxum companies are not going to talk to each other. You're not going to get OpenAI in WhatsApp, stuff like this.
So it really reinforces the idea of. But do you think they would go so far as to say,
we are not going to allow you to navigate our applications using something like...
I mean, that's literally happening with, like, the New York Times does not allow Open AI to browse it with a box.
But it's different having your...
local device being effectively used by
no it is the computer just using itself at the same time if open a i
has the chat ch pt app right now if you go to the chat gpte website and you say
hey uh i'm a subscriber to the new york times and uh there's an article in the business section
that i want you to summarize for me here's a link can you open the link and uh turn into some bullet
points for me it'll just say like no no i can't go over there like they said don't go i'm not going now
Now if I download the chat GPT app and it's able to run that and maybe the New York Times can't block it,
the New York Times still has the ability to sue open AI and like be a headache.
Users are basically going to demand, I agree.
If my data, I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud, I want to be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into, even if I'm not physically present with the device.
I agree.
So I just think it's going to be a really, really, really tough argument.
for some of these larger companies to say you can't, you can only access your data if you are
physically moving the mouse yourself. I don't know. Like, how do you actually enforce this?
Is Google Drive going to say you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting
in front of your computer actually using it? If you like really grind it out, you can kind of
always get around this stuff. And so like the only, only real solution is to have like actual, I think,
deals between these like different companies.
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