TBPN - OpenAI DevDay | Sam Altman, Alexander Embiricos, Andrew Ambrosino, Peter Steinberger, Tibo Sottiaux, Kath Korevec, Casey Neistat

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

(09:00) - Sam Altman discusses how increasingly capable AI agents can simplify work and daily life while fostering an open ecosystem for developers. He also addresses OpenAI’s startup cultu...re, expanding computing infrastructure, simplified model selection, rapid experimentation, and the unresolved scientific challenge of aligning superintelligent AI. (25:17) - Alexander Embiricos, an OpenAI product leader, discusses “dots,” proactive AI agents designed to act as personal delegates across workplace tools. He explains how personal and specialist dots can autonomously handle tasks, support individuals and enterprises, and make advanced AI more accessible through flexible interfaces and integrations. (41:54) - Andrew Ambrosino discusses leading OpenAI’s Codex desktop and Space teams and unifying Codex’s agentic capabilities with ChatGPT. He highlights cloud and local-machine integration, collaborative AI workspaces, dynamic interfaces, faster models, and OpenAI’s iterative, feedback-driven product development. (54:27) - Peter Steinberger discusses founding OpenClaw and pioneering personal AI agents that can proactively operate computers, use tools, and coordinate complex tasks. He explores agent-driven software development, changing online services, and a future where AI reshapes operating systems, commerce, and human workflows. (01:16:22) - Tibo Sottiaux discusses his work leading AI agent development at OpenAI, including Dots, Codex, and advances in computer use. He explains how persistent agents can learn users’ preferences, securely perform specialized organizational tasks, share long-term memory, and automatically balance speed, cost, and reasoning effort. (01:33:41) - Kath Korevec discusses her work as an OpenAI product manager for ChatGPT Sites, which reached 10 million sites within three months of launch. She highlights personal and professional uses, collaborative features within Spaces, new integrations and plugins, and plans to expand access to free users. (01:41:50) - Casey Neistat discusses his perspective as a filmmaker, YouTube pioneer, and ModRetro executive on retro technology, AI-assisted creativity, and the value of simple, purpose-built devices. He argues that AI will democratize game and video creation while human taste, expertise, and curation remain essential amid a growing flood of content. TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. We are live from OpenAI Dev Day 2026. That's right. We're very excited. Beautiful day. You're beautiful day in San Francisco. We don't get up here nearly enough, but what a fantastic day to be here.
Starting point is 00:00:15 A bunch of interesting launches, bunch of guests from Open A.I. Joining us, we have Sam Altman joining us in just about 10 minutes. A bunch of friends here. Amazing opportunity. If you're here, walk in the background. You can get a screenshot of it. We'll get a little picture together. I see Jeff from Stripe over here hanging out.
Starting point is 00:00:33 We're live, Jeff. We're talking about you. Great to see you. Come in the background. This is Mr. Agentic Payments over here. That's true. Captain Agentic Payments. We're live.
Starting point is 00:00:45 Jeff, you're live. We're live. We just started. Anyways, we'll get back to the show. There we go. Anyways, having a lot of fun here. Yeah. Great group.
Starting point is 00:00:54 Before we get into a bunch of great guests, we should talk about the news. Anything going on? Well, there's ramp. Time is money, save both. These use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Always a good chance to tell people about Ramp. The headline on DevDay, just to kind of set the table, 2,500 attendees, it's been four years in a row now.
Starting point is 00:01:13 20 launches today. I think the number might be higher, depending on how you slice them up. And the big numbers that they put on stage, Chachapit is now used by more than 1.2 billion people every week. Over 35 million people billed with ChachapT working Codex every week. And the big launch was personal AI agents, dots, but also chat GPT spaces, GPT 6.1 sole, and a bunch of other stuff around sites, codex, and work that we will get into. But let's take people through some of the other stories that we should cover.
Starting point is 00:01:44 I'm sure we'll be covering this more tomorrow as well. We start with the oral loss, John. You want to go straight there? Let's get straight into it. There's some unfortunate news. The aura IPO seems to be taken up. pause or a bit of a slowdown. Yeah, the headline is Smart Ringmaker or a delays IPO due to market uncertainty.
Starting point is 00:02:08 Joe Wisenthal isn't really buying it. He says the S&P 500 is up 12% this year and companies are delaying their IPOs due to market conditions. I saw some commentary on this saying that their IPO is oversubscribed by 4.4x. That sounds great. The historical average is I think like 2.5x, something like that. So why'd they pull it? That's confusing. I talked to some of other folks who said, no, in more recent eras,
Starting point is 00:02:34 you've seen IPOs go out of 10x over-s subscribed, 15x over-s subscribed. I think Figma was something like 30 or 40. It was a crazy, crazy multiple, yeah. And also, I believe this IPO was going to be pure secondary. Yeah, it's not like they need the cash. Yeah, and so it was more of like a marketing and excitement, a key moment for the company. It wasn't a necessary financing round right now. so they can pull back and keep building.
Starting point is 00:03:00 So on one hand, amazing product, have managed to have relatively little competition in the ring category despite much broader competition of wearables. It seems like it's a great business. I think investors generally are going to be a little apprehensive to own a name that is in any other decade was at scale, but now it feels like subscale relative to some of the other actions. in the market.
Starting point is 00:03:29 And so I'm sure they'll be back. But, yeah, unfortunate news. Are there any rumors of direct competition from the bigger companies, like Apple or Madder? I don't know. This always felt like something that Apple should have bought. Totally. Or competed with. I mean, a lot of times they didn't buy Pebble.
Starting point is 00:03:44 They just launched the Apple Watch, but they did very well in that category. Yeah. But maybe it's just some scale. But in many ways, like it feels like it would be so much, make a lot more sense than, let's say, like, a beats by Dre to just, like, fit in to the whole Apple. ecosystem right away. It almost doesn't need to be even re-skinned, right? It feels like it fits into the ecosystem already.
Starting point is 00:04:07 Also, they are facing a bunch of competition from ring makers and device makers that are more AI forward, like they have a microphone on them, but that feels like an easy adaption. Very unclear if people actually really need or want that. Oh, true, true. You think that's why they're moving slower on it? Is that they... Well, I don't think, I think a lot of people, I think if they came out and said we're adding a microphone to your ring, a lot of people would be like you're getting, you're
Starting point is 00:04:27 collecting enough of my data. Sure, sure. I don't need a microphone to be healthy. You already have my heart rate and blood. But yeah, some other commentary here over on X says the NASDAQ hit an all-time high seven days ago. So basically saying like, look, it's probably less market uncertainty and more of a disconnect between what investors would pay and where they want to price.
Starting point is 00:04:46 They were looking to raise as much as $2.2 billion in the IPO, which had drawn about four times as many orders as there were shares available, or is the highest profile firm today to delay its offering? And they list out a couple others. market, meanwhile, has broadly held up over the past few weeks, despite the 10-year Treasury yields reaching their highest levels since 2007 now. It's up more today. There's a quote here from Joe Saluzi. I wouldn't say we're in a market that's scary, so this is a bit surprising. This isn't a market I would be scared of if I was IPA. I can handle the market uncertainty.
Starting point is 00:05:22 This guy's just like, I don't know what they got, what they're fearing. No, but again, there's always a price that they're clear, and clearly they'd rather, you know, the bankers and the team would rather sit it out and just get it done at their price when they're ready. So for Rerunner and Lifeline, we're going to offer 36.5 million shares, Oro is planning to sell 13.5 million shares. And so those venture funds will have to wait to recycle the capital, I suppose. In other news, Long Lake competed their acquisition of Amex. global business travel. How much do they pay? 6.3 billion.
Starting point is 00:06:00 And they have like thousands of employees now or something? Up to 30,000 employees across the company. Never, never have done a, like a riff at any of the companies. They're actually growing headcount. So again, more data that shows if you're actually applying AI well, you can actually grow your payroll. Sure. Yeah, the other big story, at least in the AI world, is that AMD sets $8 billion.
Starting point is 00:06:25 deal for AI research company. Of course, AMD bought World Labs, the Neo Lab, I suppose, is the term from Fay-Fei Lee. AMD agreed to acquire artificial intelligence research firm, World Labs, an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion, an acquisition that reflects chipmaker's ambitions to control more of the AI stack. AMD, a semiconductor company that recently touched a trillion dollar valuation, said the deal would bring leading AI. research and development talent and help the company develop better AI hardware, software, and systems, especially for the growing field of physical AI and robotics. Big moment.
Starting point is 00:07:06 Yeah. Big moment for Faye Faye and the whole team. I think it's very, I'm super excited to see what they do at AMD. I wonder how much they'll continue to focus on exactly what they've been doing to date. Massive moment for Andreessen Horowitz, another, you know, multi-billion-dollar acquisition. Rangel had to fill out the apology form. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He filled out the apology form. Credit to him. But yeah, big, big moment. And yeah, it was always, Faye and the team are incredibly impressive. It always felt it was still, no matter how much I got explained, this sort of like
Starting point is 00:07:45 near-term strategy, I never understood exactly how it would translate into billions of dollars of revenue today. I mean, yeah, people would say, training data, you simulate a world and then the robot can interact with it, and that's synthetic data for training humanoids or any robotic system. The more near-term one was you could sort of see the progression of world models to a point where you could create a video game on the fly and have all of the generation and all of the world creation happen on the fly with just a new technology and you would see companies potentially license that technology like people pay Unreal Engine to host or develop their games on top of.
Starting point is 00:08:28 There was something that was happening there with consistency. Google has a product as well. But yeah, there still hasn't been that like chat GPT moment for adoption of world models, really. Yeah, and you can imagine this is like a future facing bet. Yeah. As in, hey, let's make it a much bigger play into robotics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, chensing.
Starting point is 00:08:51 Yeah. I mean, Jensen's been doing some more stuff with world models. Here he is. Open source. We have Sam Altman joining for the third time. Welcome to the show. Man of the hour. Good to see you. Congratulations. We're going to have you throw that headset on. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having. How is Dev Day 2026 ago?
Starting point is 00:09:07 People seem very happy. I think they are. What were you doing 20 years ago? John knows. No, I was like working on a little startup. I didn't loop launch 20 years ago basically today. That's incredible if that's accurate. Yeah, I think September of 2006 was the launch. And I was thinking about it because as we enter the moment of personal agents, like a lot of there's obviously work applications,
Starting point is 00:09:35 but a lot of the demos that I've seen people talk about are things that feel aligned to the original looped vision. It's like if my friends are in town, let's plan a barbecue, let's order the food, let's go to the restaurant, let's get the reservation. And I'm wondering, is this a full circle moment for you? It's interesting. It didn't feel like that until right when you said it. Okay.
Starting point is 00:09:52 Now I guess it sort of is. Yeah. And I'm wondering how you have been using dots, how you think this will actually instantiate itself into people's lives. It's so easy to lean into the work side. But this feels like a reinvigorating moment for Open AI as a consumer company. Look, sadly, all I do these days is work. So I mostly have been using it. And I hang out with my family.
Starting point is 00:10:14 This is really the only two. But I have mostly been using it for work. And it is amazing for that. And I feel like it has gotten me. back my attention and time and ability to explore and do new things. And I love it for that. Yeah. I have not yet figured out how to like go use this to have more fun in my personal life.
Starting point is 00:10:31 Sure. I'm inspired to go do that. But yeah, you're optimistic that people will ultimately do that. I feel like, you know, open AI has been called like the accidental consumer company. Yeah. And at the same time, the vision seems to be like actually get AI in the hands of people. And maybe let's not end up in a future where that means every, working 24-7, right?
Starting point is 00:10:51 100%. I think the world's always confused when we talk about AI about whether we want or worried people are going to have to work too much or too little. But I think it's great to give people more time to hang out with their kids, do their hobbies, work on creative new projects. I think most people actually want that,
Starting point is 00:11:08 and I really feel it with thoughts. So, yeah, I think people are going to get that. Yeah. What has the last, I mean, the last time we talked was a couple months ago, or maybe more than six months ago on the show, it's been a wild time. Like a lot of things have gone right, it seems.
Starting point is 00:11:26 There's some numbers that leaked today, but it seems like some things change. How do you tell the story of the last six months or so? I mean, I think the answer is it's all just one jagged exponential that keeps going and probably the next six months will be even crazier. The technology has been capable for a while. It's clearly gotten much more capable. but it takes a while for technology like this to diffuse through society.
Starting point is 00:11:54 And I think in the last six months, people are using it much more. And now with these sort of always-on agents, I think people will again go through a period where they're like, wow, I can really use this in all kinds of ways. And this is like a significant new thing in my life that's helping me. Yeah. So is this a moment to sort of like pay down the capability overhang right now? You know, when you were talking about how, you know, you can use this to, like, do the stuff that we were talking, thinking about 20 years ago and, like, book a restaurant and, you know, coordinate with my friends.
Starting point is 00:12:27 I was kind of, like, laughing at my head because I was like, yes, you can do that, but it can also, like, solve the greatest unsolved that problems. And so the delta in capability between, you know, some of the stuff we're talking about now and what these models are so smart can do is just going to take us a while to figure all that out. Yeah. What have you learned this year about the sequence of the sequence of a little? events. I was shocked by if you had told me that there was going to be hugging face and then Navier Stokes and then after that I saw the first person said I used Chachapita to book me a haircut. I would have not predicted that those things happen in that order. I maybe would have predicted that they all happen in the future. But I would have predicted we get the haircut first.
Starting point is 00:13:06 And I'm wondering if you've learned anything about not just predicting the future, but the sequence of events. I mean, one of the obvious things is just people, want their lives to be a little easier. Yeah. And actually, I think more people are interested in just their lives being a little bit less hectic, a little easier than they are in whatever Navier Stokes can do for them. Or at least their direct experience. Totally.
Starting point is 00:13:29 So, but I think the cool thing about this is that models that are this capable are going to be applied to make people's lives better in big and small ways in ways that we can't even really imagine today. And, you know, I think the fact that we all talk about haircuts and booking haircuts is like a, it's a failure of imagination, but the way it gets corrected is all these people here. Sure. Like, as I've had a little bit of time today to talk to what people are building here, like,
Starting point is 00:13:54 I am amazed at the creative spirit of what people are building for each other with this technology. And I think it's been, I think it's been one of the greatest surprises of the last six months is seen, like, just how far people are pushing the developer tools to build this amazing new stuff. Yeah. Talk about some of the new functionality, being able to log in with chat. and basically bring compute with you anywhere across the internet. Because to me, that was, there was a bunch of great moments earlier,
Starting point is 00:14:24 but to me the moment that stood out is imagining as an independent developer that has been sort of held back by their ability to scale cool products because, hey, I can't just start losing $20,000 today serving free users. I think it's so important to build an open ecosystem here. And we want people to take, well, to bring whatever they want into chat, GBT, run other apps there, but also to take their subscription and go use it elsewhere.
Starting point is 00:14:48 And any harness you want, any service you want, like this is, I have been disappointed to see other companies with AI subscriptions go in the other direction. Like, this is a thing you buy, and you should be able to take it with you anywhere, and you should be able to go use all of the wonderful things these people are building. And I think we're going to push that much further.
Starting point is 00:15:05 How do you think about the potential transition from opening eyes products being very pole-focused, as I mean, like, the app is there, unless I come to it with a question with a prompt, it doesn't do anything to a world where my dot might message me and then you get into how much is it messaging me, how much is it pulling me in, what are the retention? There's a lot of potential risks of that, right?
Starting point is 00:15:34 Yeah, I mean, there's clearly ways that people could misuse or growth hack the fact that AIs can, you know, ping you a lot. Yeah. I'm sure we'll see some companies get that wrong. We're going to try very hard to not do that. But my own experience over the last few weeks is I actually want more. Like, I think we've tuned the dial a little too conservatively for now. And the fact that everything my dot sends me is something I want means,
Starting point is 00:16:00 I think there's something still left on the table. But I can easily see how this goes wrong on the other direction, and we'll have to figure out we're going to navigate that. Yeah, I'll often open chat, GPT, and realize there's, like, a very important email that I need to respond to. And like I didn't, it somehow like got mixed up and then you're like, you kind of wish it pinged you. Yeah. What can you say any advice for, let's say, public company CEOs that want to maintain a startup's culture at scale? Because that's something like, you know, opening eyes still a private company.
Starting point is 00:16:32 But the impression of seeing how this company works is that it's not just like, yeah, we act like a startup at scale. Like it's actually like that. It's like incredibly scrappy. It's very small groups of people trying to do the impossible on impossible timelines, and something that you're doing is working because it allows this incredible velocity. It's not just the models. Someone said to me a few days ago that joined open AISO went recently and had been a big, kind of slowish public company before, was that the key is to have the work and expectations
Starting point is 00:17:06 per person go up over time. And the way that big companies go wrong is there's too many people with not enough to do, and they kind of like fight each other over like these fake levels of work. And if everybody is really busy with real impact and there's the amount of work per person and stuff to do per person keeps increasing, then you can fight the like slow drag and politics of the big company. On the flip side of that,
Starting point is 00:17:29 I feel like there's a lot of companies that are going through sort of a slopification and they're fighting slop grenades. I've wondered if the correct KPI is maybe we should be, all be producing the same amount of words in our emails. And it's okay if AI is involved, but you don't just want to take every text message and turn it into a 20-page document, right? We fight super hard against the slop grenade.
Starting point is 00:17:56 Yeah. And the many slop grenades. And I think just like very strong cultural norms that if you are writing something and then you are having ChatGBT-GBT-G-T expand it and then somebody else is going to have a chat-GBT-Summarize it back to your bullet points, the right answer is to just send the bullet points.
Starting point is 00:18:12 Yeah, I've told some people just send me the prompt, and I can expand it myself in my mind sometimes. How are you thinking about compute these days? There's so many different battles and different markets across consumer and enterprise. What is the plan for the next couple of years? To build a lot more compute. One thing that Open AI has that doesn't get as much attention
Starting point is 00:18:33 is our chip program, which will start to come online in the first half of 2027, and will scale a lot in future years. I think gives us a huge, inference advantage for whatever like watts we can find in the world. And given the growth and demand we are seeing across consumer, developer enterprise, really everywhere, and to say nothing of like people are going to love dots and then they're going to say, well, can I have 10 dots or 20 dots or 100 dots or whatever. We will have to make more efficient models, more efficient chips, and figure out how to build
Starting point is 00:19:04 a lot more infrastructure. How do you see the user experience across the different models, the different cost and speed, parameters being vended to the actual end user. Is that something you want to maintain forever because developers love hearing about 6.1 sole in ultra-fast mode? Or are there consumers, you know, I noticed Dots doesn't have a model picker. I think people are really tired of the model picker
Starting point is 00:19:29 and the like model, you know, what, like this model, that model. Like we want to find a way to really simplify that. Like the dream is that there is a single model and it kind of makes great decisions for you. and you can maybe turn a speed dial when you really need it and cost dial when you don't. But, you know, we're talking about like models
Starting point is 00:19:49 that can book haircuts versus solve Navier Stokes. I think this model should be able to figure out a lot of the trade-offs and we should be able to do a good job with routing. I think we'll always offer choice to developers. Sometimes you want to drive a Ferrari to the grocery store. Sometimes you do. So I think we'll always offer that choice, but most of the time you don't. Most of the time it's the minivan to the grocery store
Starting point is 00:20:09 and the Ferrari to track. and the model should like be able to make that smoother. Yeah. Do you feel like you have more or less clarity around the future than you did a decade ago? Because again, I always encourage people to look back at your blog in the sort of 2015-2016 era because there was a bunch of things that you and other people that were writing at the time just like pretty much nailed entirely. And I go through life now knowing that there's people out there that have like very accurate predictions
Starting point is 00:20:39 around the future, and sometimes there's an incentive to share, sometimes there isn't, but how do you think about your own forecasting ability? It's nice of you to say that. There's plenty of things I was wrong about, too. Like, you know, I try to leave the wrong predictions up, obviously. But I think the important point is, like,
Starting point is 00:20:57 you get some things right, something's wrong. I think we'll be very right about some things. I think we'll be very right that intelligence continues. I think we'll be very right about the rate of scientific discovery. I think we'll be very right about how people, kind of are going to have the same things that they care about and drives in their lives 10 years from now they have from today. And even with this amazing intelligence,
Starting point is 00:21:17 a lot of parts of life are going to stay the same. But then a lot of the details in kind of what order science goes in or whether it's, you know, haircuts or hugging face or Navier Stokes first, I'm sure we'll be wrong about it. It feels like that the leadership skill, or basically having the mentality of a venture investor and somebody that's made a bunch of very long-term bets makes people very well suited for today in the sense that having that openness to,
Starting point is 00:21:44 if I get three things out of 10 right and I get them really right, then that's great. Like, it sort of pays for all the other bets. One of the things that I think is coolest about this new generation of people building with AI is you can try something so quickly and so cheaply that if you have, if you are a developer and you have 30 ideas, the canonical advice that was correct two years ago is pick one input all of your effort into it because you can't build 30 things. You can now build all 30 things and you can get people to use them all. And then you can work more on the ones that work.
Starting point is 00:22:15 So I think this mindset of lots of ideas, quick feedback and be open to a lot of things not working is great for this new era of how people build. I have one more question that we want to get you to hit the gong. On alignment, you've been deep in the weeds, I'm sure. There was a debate I saw. Is it an engineering problem? Is it a science problem? Is there a different frame of mind that we should be. approaching alignment with?
Starting point is 00:22:40 I think it's like all of those things, but it's certainly incorrect to talk about this only as an engineering problem. Anyone who says we have solved the science of alignment, I believe is wrong in a very dangerous way. Like we need to make more research progress. I assume we will. We have been great at making this research progress.
Starting point is 00:22:57 And of course, there's a lot of engineering work to do too. You know, we need to continue to figure out how to build better sandboxes and better monitoring tools. But eventually, if we are going to create models that are like much, much smarter than all of us, we have to actually solve the science of alignment. Have we considered moving away from the term sandbox? Because I have a five-year-old, if I put him in a sandbox,
Starting point is 00:23:18 he's not going to stay there. I think we might need a new turn. I could, unfortunately, just stay in the sandbox. Oh, okay, okay. So maybe, yeah, but, you know. Different alignment. But yes, no, I think it's not. I think it's not.
Starting point is 00:23:27 Hold this up, John. Okay. How do I do this? Just however you want, just with bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. There you go. With authority.
Starting point is 00:23:36 Thanks for having me on. to sign this as big as possible. Big signature right there on the gong. Thank you. This is going in the Museum of Business at the TBPN Ultradome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great dev day.
Starting point is 00:23:51 We will move on to our next guest. We have a few more hopping on the show. We have Alexander Ambarikos jumping on in just a minute. We will sit with him on all things, Codex. We need a slop grenade button. Being able to... All right, that's Ben in the chat. That's great.
Starting point is 00:24:11 We could sort of simulate that. If we have a remote, you know, remote guest on, we could say, hey, check out, I have an idea. I have an idea. I have an idea for you. What do you think of this? And then you throw, like, a six-page PDF. Oh, okay. I was thinking a slop grenade would be, like, you go full back to Nickelodeon slime.
Starting point is 00:24:28 And when you push the button, it just slams Tyler with it. And he just keeps covered in a slop. I think that's the one we got to go. I don't know if it's... Oh, wow. Look at a look over here. Get mom. A crowd chasing Sam around.
Starting point is 00:24:42 They want more tokens. You've got to be careful with this sign gong. Yes. Oh, yeah, that's a hot commodity. Over in Washington, CNBC reporter was trying and failing to interview tech CEOs at the White House. Alex Karp just took the microphone out of his hand and started asking them his own questions. Interesting. No, he's literally, they're doing a man on the street interview.
Starting point is 00:25:07 and just, just carp took the wheel. That's great. Well, there's more stories. We'll get to those in just a few minutes, but let's bring on Alexander. There is. Welcome to the show. We're going to have you throw that headset on.
Starting point is 00:25:20 Do you need anything to drink? This is a warmer water. Okay. Well, welcome. Welcome back to the show. Always great to see you. How is this Dev Day for you? I mean, apart from the outage, excellent.
Starting point is 00:25:31 Okay. Yeah. Wait, outage, global outage going on? Yeah, yeah. We had a bit of an outage. During the demos, like, you know, I haven't, like, deeply read up and what exactly happened,
Starting point is 00:25:43 but, like, because we launched 6.1 Saul, and just immediately got hammered. Yeah. We did that. Oh, yeah. That's a lesson. That's like the meta-connect last year. Baws accidentally set off, like, the key word.
Starting point is 00:25:56 The keyword. And so it's sent, like, the wake word. The wake word, but every device in the whole space started going off and then crashed everything. Yeah. Positive framing is a champagne problem. But broadly, this definitely. day, I'm so excited.
Starting point is 00:26:08 Like when I joined the company, like a little over two years ago, like this moment is the moment I've been looking forward to the entire time. Okay. You know, like we had this chat, we invented that paradigm. It was awesome, informational, couldn't do things for you. Okay. Then we had coding agents, agents that could do things. Awesome, that's the next level. But you still have to like really babysit it and figure out like what am I going to ask
Starting point is 00:26:27 this agent to do? Yeah. So we're finally the stage where I can go to someone and say, hey, if you want to do something manually, do it with Codex. Yep. If you want to delegate it, sure. Go use a dot. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:37 Right? And this dot, it has your back. It figures out how to help you. It just helps you get so much more value out of this. So for me, like I've been looking forward to this for your. Yeah. Does it feel like... Yeah, it's the same, it's the same dynamic of like if you had a bunch of, if you basically
Starting point is 00:26:50 had a bunch of people on your team that would just sort of flag information but then not take any action, they're like, hey, this thing is happening. Okay. You're like, okay. Why don't you do something about it? I like that, but I would actually say like codex is actually more like a principal engineer, but who doesn't like... like initially, unless you tell them exactly to do it,
Starting point is 00:27:08 doesn't read like linear or like doesn't check slack. And so the super smart principal engineer, but you know, you have to make sure you sort of give it the right instructions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas a dot, it's like you have that principal engineer because your dot has its own computer, it can do anything that you can do on a computer in the cloud.
Starting point is 00:27:24 It can also connect to your computer. So if you have a really awesome local codec setup, it can actually go use that. Except that, it has its own identity in Slack. And so it's available wherever you talk. And I don't know if you guys have seen this, But for anyone listening, the way that dots show up in Slack isn't just like a random name like Wisp. We tried that.
Starting point is 00:27:41 We had agents with random names. And then one knew what was going on. It was a bit confusing. Sure. But they show up with like your username. So like I'm AE. It's like AE dash dot in Slack. And so you have all these people and their delegates just doing stuff together.
Starting point is 00:27:52 Yeah. You know, principal engineer level capability. Yeah. Or if you're not an engineer, just like, you know, maximum capability. Yeah. I mean, the demo that I saw just randomly through a friend was like we were looking for Sam Altman's headshot. And we were able to delegate that to a dot that was able to go find a, like, a file in a file system that's easy. But just that little retrieval would be a couple clicks on a web browser. And now it's just a... Not even a couple clicks. It's like searching around. Yeah. Sometimes it's like, yeah, digging through stuff. And so, yeah, it feels like we're hitting this inflection point of like leaving just the developer workflows and getting into like everyone's workflows.
Starting point is 00:28:28 Totally. And you always had the pro, like the prosumer of the enterprise who was like, oh yeah, they're a sales rep. but they also use Codex, and now it's like, there is a product that's approachable for everyone. Are you, it feels like there's the expansion of territory that's happening within businesses. And then there's also like different types of businesses that are able to actually get a great value. Started with software development firms
Starting point is 00:28:51 and software companies. Are video game developers the next leg up? Like, who are you seeing here at Dev Day that you're like, oh, I, I haven't actually talked to that many of your, of that, many folks in your industry. And maybe the progress in Astra is flowing through. I mean, that's what my experience was.
Starting point is 00:29:13 I was modeling stuff in Blender. I haven't touched 3D rendering for a long time. And I'm building video games and stuff. And I saw that, okay, this is, we've crossed this. The spike of intelligence has spiked beyond what's relevant in this particular category. And I'm wondering where else you're seeing it. What's been the most visceral to you? So I agree that, like, I think for video games, like with the stuff we've been seeing,
Starting point is 00:29:34 people make with Astra. Yeah. Absolutely awesome. And so therefore, because dots run on Astra, we've just seen people having dots just like autonomy building like really fun games and stuff. So that's awesome and I agree with that. But actually I think the audience that I'm the most excited for to like get even more capability is maybe like solopreneurs or like small business owners.
Starting point is 00:29:53 Actually, because you know that's where you're doing absolutely everything that your business needs. And so you're just like swamped with all the stuff incoming. And that's where having a dot that just like has your back and is like managing all this stuff for you. Doing the work that maybe you could have done before with Astro, but it was just like a lot of work to figure out that that work even needed doing is helpful. So I've heard, obviously, a lot of great anecdotes
Starting point is 00:30:13 from engineers, like people waking up in the morning to kudos from their team because their team was collaborating with the Dodd and to help them out. It's like, good job for having a dot that did this, which is so fun. But we also have a lot of great anecdotes from like people in completely other areas. So like, you know, running the launch,
Starting point is 00:30:31 like dots going around realizing that, oh, this thing about the product change so we need to go update the blog or like, you know, your travel plans for this conference have changed. So let me just like organize things for you. Walk me through the specialist dots. Like is that a more of like a mental framing for the user to let them know that this capability is there? Is their actual like the harness matters narrative where you do want to go to that particular dot? Or is it because I can imagine as a solo entrepreneur, it's just valuable to say, okay, I at least have like one arrow in the quiver for
Starting point is 00:31:06 legal, one arrow in the quiver for finance, et cetera. But also these models are pretty general. And the G and AGI sort of leads you to throw, you know, Codex, Astra, Ultra at every problem. So how do you think about coaching people through that dynamic? Yeah. I mean, so there's two things going on here. So we've got dots. Yeah. And we've got specialist dots. And the reason we're leading with dots first, it's like just very related to our mission, right? Sure. Liverative benefits of AI to all humanity. And you know, when I think about product,
Starting point is 00:31:36 I want that to be palpable. Like I want every person to have direct access to something that is empowering them, extending them, helping them move faster. And so those are dots. And those dots, you know, each person has one. You'll have more in the future. And it works, you know, extending you.
Starting point is 00:31:49 So using your connectors, for instance, right? So that's great. But when you think about how you like scale the amount to which this capability is deployed within enterprise, there's actually a shift that we're starting to see happening, that these are a part of, right? One of those shifts is like moving from local work
Starting point is 00:32:04 on someone's computer to moving work in the cloud. Sure. Right? And so Specialist Dots have their own computer, just like dots. The other shift is actually moving away from working with like an individual's identity to moving with an IT managed, centrally governed, well-controlled identity.
Starting point is 00:32:17 And we actually had an announcement going out today about how we're working with Microsoft on that as well. And so if you are a team or an organization, and you have a specific type of like functional work that you would like accelerate the whole whole team with, that's where you deploy a specialist dot. So it could be something like procurement or accounting. Those are some of the early places we've seen a lot of success.
Starting point is 00:32:36 But ultimately broadly, we see that it'll be useful in many more functions and departments. Personally, I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm just like too much of a normie, but I feel like this is the frame of mind that I want to be. And obviously there's like the merge where the AI becomes you. And if I want to send you a message, it comes from me, but the AI is like puppeteering me. And I actually prefer the idea of like, I have an assistant and they are their own entity,
Starting point is 00:33:02 and they have their own phone number and email eventually, and I can share information with them and they are on my team, but I am still me. And I think that that is something that I would bet on that being relatable to a lot. Totally. Yeah. I don't know. I actually made some like pretty funny mistakes as we're building this product that we had to like roll back. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:20 And so like, okay, I totally agree with what you said and then I'll tell you about the mistake. Someone like asked your dot. What is he writing about me from a performance? performance reporter. Well, no, that actually, there's a lot of layers of defense that's not going to make that information. But no, it's more like what we realized is that, again, there's this kind of like this bifurcation, right?
Starting point is 00:33:37 Like, I want my dots to augment me, and so maybe I want to collaborate on an email, and then I'm good. I just did that from within the chat GPT app, and then I had sent, right? And that should just look like me, but I approve that email to be sent. And I made a mistake about that well, I'll tell you about.
Starting point is 00:33:49 And then on the other hand, you know, we had for a while all these agents just sort of acting, sort of as us, sending messages as us was like sent by chat, and it was like fine, but it kind of like started to get noisy. Yep. And so that's when we kind of iterated our way towards, no, we're going to have like a strongly separate identity.
Starting point is 00:34:05 They're going to look different. Yeah. We've got these characters. We're going to have like a name that like clearly is like owner dash bot. Yeah. Right. And that just like clarified everything that was going on in communication. Totally.
Starting point is 00:34:17 So it's awesome. And I love the idea of like, look, sometimes the amount of back and forth and compute that's going to be dedicated to some negotiation, if we're trying to find even just a time to get lunch, they might be, our dots might be going back for a long time, but it's not going to ever be like, you opened your messages to me, and it's a flood of messages because they were going back and forth. It happened below the fold, and then you can, you know, you can abstract that away as much as you need to. Agreed. Very cool.
Starting point is 00:34:44 I'm going to set up a dot where every time I get like a startup pitch deck that's just clearly AI generated, it'll generate a playable video game. Oh, okay. go through the deck in the form of like, you know. It's really a thing you could do. No, I know. I'm joking, but it's actually. So here's an interesting thing about space, right, and sites,
Starting point is 00:35:06 which is like a lot of the tools that we used to do work today are optimized for human authoring. Okay, so what I mean by that is like, you know, like think documents, right? Like you go into a document and it's like you can type into it, right? And the way that your document can look is like pretty simple. It's like text, right? And like, yeah, various document editors have like fancy ways for you to go in
Starting point is 00:35:23 and move the images around and stuff, but it all generally kind of sucks. Because the tool is well designed for humans. I think those tools are good, even though they're a little inflexible. But now that we have dots and we're collaborating with them, we have AI, like HTML authoring is basically free. Right?
Starting point is 00:35:39 And so I love how space incorporates HTML visualization. So you could just be like, hey, build me this artifact that I can click around or literally put a game in the dock or whatever in the page. And it's super interactive. And I think this is like sort of the paradigm ship
Starting point is 00:35:52 that we're starting to do. How do you think about the road to and the benefits of actual direct integrations? Because at the end of the day, if I have some service that I want to interact with, like there are APIs, there's ways, there's computer use at this point. Like everything is somewhat connected.
Starting point is 00:36:09 What's the benefit of actually directly engaging with Open AI doing a proper connection? What are the benefits? What are the costs? Well, I mean, there's a few layers here. I think it starts with, yeah, now that our agents can use the same tools that we use, i.e. computers, then there's kind of this baseline, right? Like, your agent, if you want it to and allow it to, they can go to anything.
Starting point is 00:36:33 And I do want to emphasize that, like, dots have many layers of, like, safety protections. And one of them is custom rules, right? So if you're a company and you want to limit what exactly dots can do with various tools, like, there's a very easy affordance for you to go in and do that. Okay, so that's your baseline, right? The next layer that I think we could talk about is like connectors. And mostly it's just like, it makes things faster. It lets your product be a little bit more opinionated, just to improve the experience for everyone. Yeah. The other form of integration that I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but
Starting point is 00:36:58 that I'm really excited about is plugin extensions. So, you know, we've long had this idea that like you or there's actually a fun debate in this industry, right? Which is like to what extent should UI be generated just in time for the user? And we're doing a lot of interesting work here and there's like some cool stuff coming out soon around that. But my opinion is that for UI that I'm going to click around in, I generally want to to be somewhat predictable, so I know where the button is.
Starting point is 00:37:23 I can achieve mastery over this tool. But we don't want to be the only people deciding that. We want other people to be able to build their own UIs for our users. And so something super cool is that now if you're a chat HPT user, you can install a plugin that is a plugin extension that actually renders like custom UI, custom pages, just in the chat GPT app. So if you're a developer listening to this,
Starting point is 00:37:42 you have the ability to go reach your customers directly. And the meetings plugin that we just launched today is an example of this. It's like a fully arm's length plugin integration. Yeah. So I feel the same way about on-the-fly UI generation, custom UI. I'm excited about that. At the same time, I can sit here and talk to somebody who's extremely bullish on voice interfaces,
Starting point is 00:38:02 and they think that everything should be vended over conversational voice interface. And I feel like opening eyes kept enough irons in the fire across all these different paradigms. Is there attention there? Is that deliberate? Is there an idea that to reach everyone to hit 1.2 billion Mao, wow, like you don't, you don't want to actually go all in and narrow. You need to meet people where they are across multiple modalities. Yeah, I would say so.
Starting point is 00:38:29 Like, there's something Tebow said earlier today. It's like, at some point, it's about the active intelligence and the interface stops mattering. Yeah. And, you know, my, my, like, slight way of reframing, that would be like, it's like, the interface should just be whatever you want. Yeah. Right?
Starting point is 00:38:40 So, like, I'm a product manager. So I spend a lot of my day in Slack. And so I mostly talk to my dot in Slack. Oh, sure. Right. But then when I'm commuting, like, I was coming in today. I knew I was going to have a bunch of conversations. I was just talking to my dot, like, about the day.
Starting point is 00:38:51 And what I used to be prepared for was, like, grilling me on some hard questions. Yeah. You know, Holly earlier, the demo, the keynote today was talking about how, like, actually, the anecdote was kind of me. Like, I saw her in this phone booth all the time, and I was going to give her some feedback. And, like, why are you in so many meetings? Like, shouldn't we be, like, not in meetings? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:39:05 And then she's like, no, I'm talking to my dot. And I realized this. And I'm like, wow, this is crazy. We've, like, unearthed a completely new paradigm. Yeah. But going back to your thing about irons in the fire, like, I think that some of these things are kind of emergent. Like I really love talking to my dot over voice. But the way that that happened is the voice team that was working on dots did an amazing job.
Starting point is 00:39:28 But it was kind of like we combined these two capabilities. And because both irons were very hot, they combined really well. But if you had started from scratch, I don't think we would have gotten to such a great outcome. Yeah, yeah. What? I've noticed that I don't think people here have this problem. But as I was thinking about, you remember this viral video that's got a Jim from Charleston AI. Did you see this?
Starting point is 00:39:50 Ooh, you might have to refresh my memory. Basically, he has a retail store in Charleston. Physical store that's called Charleston. You can walk in and he'll teach you like how to use codex and attribute you work. Yeah. And I've just noticed this thing where normal people outside of the tech industry don't just know that you can ask the AI can you do this thing. Yeah. And it's like it feels like as there's 20 new launches today and it feels like the biggest bottleneck
Starting point is 00:40:13 is like effective product marketing to the sort of long tail of users on how to use these different tools. Because when somebody asked me, hey, can I do this thing with Chatchabit? I say, well, have you asked Chatchabit that? Like, it'll sort of explain the general capability set and then maybe like even prompt you on how to prompt it, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:40:33 But it feels like outside of San Francisco, that's like the biggest bottleneck to like adoption and diffusion is just people not realizing that the best teacher for the thing is not even necessarily a YouTube video about it. It's like being able to go back and forth. Well, I mean, two things on that. First, thanks for having me on the show. You know, this is marketing.
Starting point is 00:40:49 The second point, though, I think, is at least when I hear that, you know, I think this is actually a product problem as well. Yeah. Like, if the product, I mean, it's so powerful, right? These open-ended sort of chat interfaces, you can ask whatever you want. But it's hard to realize that you can try that. Like, I find that very understandable.
Starting point is 00:41:07 And so that's part of why I'm so excited about dots in this era of active intelligence is that, well, maybe I don't have to realize that I can ask for help for finding the headshot. It'll just notice that someone was urgently asking me for the headshot, and so it might just go ahead and proactively research, like, where is the headshot? And they come to me like, hey, someone asked you for the headshot.
Starting point is 00:41:28 I happen to know where the headshot is already. Do you want me to send it? Yep. Right? And so I think we were about to achieve this step function change in how much value people are getting from existing models. Like God is built on GPD6 Astra, and yet it's going to unlock so much value for people.
Starting point is 00:41:42 Yeah, I know. It's an exciting time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Have a great rest of your dev day. And we will move on to our next guest, Andrew Ambrino, is coming on from Open AI. We will bring him on, have him throw on this headset and introduce himself. Because I believe this is your first time on the show, correct? This is my first time.
Starting point is 00:42:01 Welcome. Welcome. Good to me. Thank you. Give us a little tour of your day-to-day, your role. Introduce yourself for everyone. So since the original code, I've led that team who runs desktop from the Codex app to now.
Starting point is 00:42:15 And I've also picked up leading the space team. Okay. You needed some more on your plate. Yeah. It wasn't enough, man. Yeah. Desktop was solved. Give us an overview of your experience with like the merge, putting everything together.
Starting point is 00:42:30 There's been so many hard decisions, so many band-aids to rip off, I feel like. What's it actually been like? What's gone well? What do you wish you could redo? This is my merged shirt. Okay. Yeah. Maybe introduce the idea of the merge. because there is that Sam Altman blog post
Starting point is 00:42:44 from a decade ago about the merge, and that's a different thing. That's a different thing. Well, there's been a series of merges. Okay. Should we merge them all together? We should merge the merges. Okay.
Starting point is 00:42:55 We split, we merge. Do that eventually. No, I mean, we had this great app with Codex, and we had ChatGBTBT that served a billion users. Yep. And we needed to find a way to join these two worlds and bring the agentic side of Codex in this app into ChatT with ChatT work.
Starting point is 00:43:09 Yep. Of course, when we launched it originally, there was still a like, still a lot of things that didn't match up. And so we've been working on merging those. We had two great merges today that are a little bit under the radar, actually. OK.
Starting point is 00:43:20 One of them is that we completely rewrote chatGPt.com in the last five weeks to be the Codex app. Wait, your pin tweet. Yes. It says I'm going dark for six weeks or something like that, right? That's what this was? Yeah. OK, now we know.
Starting point is 00:43:36 So now we've got the same codex desktop experience you're used to the chat GPT desktop experience. is now chatGBT.com. Okay, got it. And then the second merge that we've done is now by default, chat GPU work on the desktop. Yes. Works on the cloud.
Starting point is 00:43:50 Okay. And still has access to your local machine. So you've got these threads everywhere. Yes. Codex cloud we launched today. What that means is like by default, you will be able to do something that needs a file system that needs some localish compute even though it's in the cloud.
Starting point is 00:44:04 You won't have that fit, you won't have that tension between like, am I just in a chat GPT thread that's sort of like short-lived versus, I got to go to my computer. Now, by default, you have more cloud access. Yes, one of the things that we really like about all of our new products today, whether that's the dots, the Codex Cloud, chat chiptipt work, all of this stuff is running in the cloud and has access to your local machine if it needs it. So if you've got files in your local machine,
Starting point is 00:44:29 if you're logged into all your browsers on your local machine, the whole system, we are working on this merge. And we are next working on the toggle merges as well. Yeah. So question for you. for you. How do you balance trusting your own instinct around product decisions? Because obviously you would never make a big product decision that you thought was going to lead to a worse experience with like real-time user feedback around how things were. Because people, you know, we were just
Starting point is 00:44:58 talking with Andrew, like the people build up like a habit around different flows and different ways that the product can be oriented. And then they sort of get build an attachment to it. And so even if it needs to change, it can be, it can be jarring. But you guys are sort of like drinking from the fire hose of user feedback every single day. And whether you're taking, like, going offline for five or six weeks or whatever you did, I'm sure you're getting tags and comments and messages constantly being like, do this, do that,
Starting point is 00:45:24 do this, do that. Lots of tags, yeah. I think when it comes down to it, we want to put these capabilities into people's hands. And so it becomes obvious that even if for whatever reason we can't make it, you know, we can't bring chat and work together quite yet, What we knew was that what we were getting out of Codex
Starting point is 00:45:43 had to be brought to everybody. And now we feel similarly with space, with dots, all of this stuff. We try to put the capabilities into people's hands. We dog fooded extensively internally, so we've got thousands of people who rely on the stuff to do every part of their job. So we get good feedback loop there.
Starting point is 00:46:01 But it's all a work in progress. The stuff is moving incredibly quickly, as you know. Lots of tags on X all the time, and we love that. Can you walk me through how there's this culture of like side project, what was the side quest was the buzzword. Sometimes they get killed off. No more side quest. No more side quest, but sometimes they get brought back. Like all the computer use stuff that's going on.
Starting point is 00:46:26 Huge like leap forward out of nowhere, but you go back two years ago. I remember operator. Right. That was like, was it a side quest or was it really important work to do because it set you up for this moment? And I'm wondering if there's prehistory for any of the new products today, like space or anything else that you've touched on where you've like, oh, yeah, like actually we revisited some work we did previously in a product. It wasn't quite there. The model got better. We were ready to launch.
Starting point is 00:46:53 I think most of the stuff that we released today is like a take five. Yeah. Even just of things that we did internally. There were so many variations of dots that we saw internally played around with somewhere local, somewhere cloud. There were so many variations of the stuff that we used. Space has gone through a number of iterations. We had part of chat called Canvas that we had up for a while. That's right.
Starting point is 00:47:17 We've had a lot of internal knowledge-based products. So we've gone through the revs on that. Codex Cloud is obviously a full 2.0. The original Codex was Cloud. Then we got into a local agent era. And now we're back putting the full local agent on cloud environment. So I think everything that you see today is one of those operator stories or operator to Atlas to Codex, right?
Starting point is 00:47:39 Yeah. Sometimes I think that the models are changing so fast that it's hard to get the product timing on these things exactly right to the model when the model is best at it. Yeah. So sometimes we're slightly too early, slightly, right? But I think the stuff that we have out today feels magical. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:58 So tell us more about space. What is the vision, especially for where that product goes, how it fits into just a typical person's workflow in the modern era. Yeah, we find ourselves bouncing around between applications all day. Of course. We're in the Codex desktop app, chat chattipeteet desktop app,
Starting point is 00:48:18 all sorts of documents. We're sharing things across Slack. And so we wanted to make something that felt very agent-native and felt like a way to collaborate with other teammates. Their dots as well, right? Something that you can kind of curate this set of teamwork that you're tagging each other in, you're able to use it in a way that feels like an extension
Starting point is 00:48:40 of Chat ChbT. And so this is really the entry of Codex and Chat ChbT into a multiplayer, more collaborative era. And so we're gonna do a lot more here. How do you think about actually, like the balance between how heavy your hand is on the instantiation of UI on the fly? Like I noticed this weird thing just happened randomly
Starting point is 00:49:02 and just, just, I guess, I believe default chap GPT, I was asking, like, is it a particularly hot summer? And it pulled historical weather data from my local weather station, and it created this chart, and when I would scroll over it, it had haptic feedback, where the phone would vibrate. And I was like, is that someone at OpenAI being like, we should put haptics in this thing? Or did the model do that? And then if I love that, am I able to sort of productize that within my organization to be like, the way we do charts at this company, there's haptic feedback.
Starting point is 00:49:36 How does this flow from what you get for free versus what you put your finger on the scale list versus what an individual user might want as a pattern? That's kind of what I'm. I am very passionate about this subject. And I think a few months ago with Codex, we brought this visualized skill that kind of makes you eye on the fly. It can either be a full game, right? In space, you can make a chess game and play it with other people if they have
Starting point is 00:50:02 access to the page. Sure. That's kind of crazy. Finally. Finally. The people are asking for it. It's like we're split on this decision. Let's play chess for it. I think the one that you were describing. Let me know when I can 1V1 someone in Rust. MW2. Out the box. Well, in the dot computer actually has a few games preloaded onto it.
Starting point is 00:50:23 Oh, okay. Which is kind of fun. The dot can play solitary. You can watch it. Sure. You want to use tokenball. I just set it off just to play if I just want it to entertain itself and play in the background, I can do that too, even if I'm not there. Yeah. I've had Codex play Slade Aspire from start to finish.
Starting point is 00:50:39 I think the one that you're talking about with the weather, that one is an extra challenge because you can't have your instant chat model writing a full web app every time. Sure. Right? And so this is the one that we've worked on a lot. Okay.
Starting point is 00:50:51 It's, you know, the research is finally kind of there to make it feel excellent. Yeah, yeah. But then, of course, like eventually that gets flowed back to the model. the models get faster. I mean, we saw the, what is it, eight times faster is ultra fast. Yep.
Starting point is 00:51:08 How do you think that that will change workflows for enterprises? Like, I mean, I think there was like a little bit of a groan at the pricing, but Tyler was just like, time is money. It is. I want to hit this all day long. How do you think people are responding to like the speed tradeoffs? Is that like a new core skill for people in understanding how to size, how to size workloads and actually get the... get the... Allocate resources.
Starting point is 00:51:33 Or is this something that it should be abstracted? It is quickly being abstracted. I like to say time is money saved both. Okay, there we go. Fantastic. Off the cuff. It's a great line. No, I think, you know, UltraFast has been one of those things that, for us,
Starting point is 00:51:49 like, you just, you can't go back, right? There's, it's, you know, it's not exactly the same as intelligence doing something that quickly, but it sure feels like it. Totally. You know. Especially when we're... we do these dynamic UI things, right? You're working in a page with your dot.
Starting point is 00:52:05 You tag it in and you say, hey, can you drop interactive chart of our Dow growth over time, right? And it's just, it's there. It's like you're doing like a whiteboard session, but you can do it with all the live data from your business. Right, and it goes off and it does the research and your data sources, it writes the little app for you, and then you can just say like, hey, share this with my team, right?
Starting point is 00:52:27 Yeah. That feels so good with UltraFast. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. What else is, what else are you working on specifically to onboarding? We were just talking about like the boom of solopreneurs. Like who is the core demo that you find the earliest adopter? What industries are on the cusp of getting online? We were just talking about the like the 3D modeling capabilities,
Starting point is 00:52:58 feels like what we saw in, you know, vibe-coded SaaS products coming to the video game world. But what are you seeing on the horizon in terms of companies and developers here today that might stick out to you as somebody who wasn't here a couple years ago, but is now? It's hard to say. I mean, I feel like it's just really taken off. I don't know if you've seen the chart from Open AI internally, too, which is just basically, you know, engineering was here, research is here, and every other one is, like, quickly following in sync.
Starting point is 00:53:29 Yeah. I think there's just some of the things that you do together, like pulling data. Yeah. You know, researching things in Slack, planning events together. Sure. I mean, this entire dev day is planned using coding agents. Yeah, of course, of course. They don't look like coding agents anymore, but under the hood, they are.
Starting point is 00:53:46 Yeah. So I think we're seeing really just a lot of everything. Yeah. How many weeks will you be out of a lock-in until the next six-week lock-ins? I think, yeah. You're going right back. That's a great question. Repend the tweet? I think tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:53:59 Okay, tomorrow. I'm going to do another lock-in for six weeks and we'll see what's at the end of that. Well, that's fantastic. I can't wait. Anything else, Jordy? No, this is great. Thank you so much for coming on this show. Thank you both.
Starting point is 00:54:10 This is fantastic. It must be. It really is. Luck out there. All right, thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Up next, we have Peter Steinberger returning to TBPN, founder of OpenClaw.
Starting point is 00:54:24 Welcome back to the show. It's been too long. I don't think really much has happened since then either. Other way. Flip it around. There you go. We're live. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:38 How's life? Have you ever been on a roller coaster that just doesn't stop? Like I feel like at some point I see the ups and downs. I'm like, yay! And it's still exciting. Yeah. Is the roller coaster more wild online with the chattering class or internally with what you're working on? I think I built up a little bit of a... How do you call it?
Starting point is 00:55:05 A shell. Yeah. That's good. There's always too much chat online and some of it is amazing. Some of it's just like, oh, you just, you know so little. Yeah, totally, totally. But I cannot stay away from it. It's just too addictive. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:55:22 So let's go... It's definitely a new skill set. Yeah. Like having a... Having a... Surviving online? Yeah. I'm sure you don't know nothing about that. Yeah, it's the same thing.
Starting point is 00:55:34 No, but it's actually insane how angry people get and how emotional people get about, like, software and just various software products, right? And you've been on the receiving end of like, again, that full roller coaster, right? Where it's pretty surreal. The last time you're on the show was just like you were calling in from, I think.
Starting point is 00:55:57 Were you still calling in from Europe maybe? Yeah. But then I think you almost immediately flew over here and you've probably been here ever since. It took a little bit. I had some London detours. We have a cool office there from OpenEI. And now I'm hearing this crazy AITown.
Starting point is 00:56:13 Yeah. I'd like to go back because I think there's so much of your previous work that leads into the announcements today, the moment in AI broadly, personal agents obviously, Can you just retell us the story of like, where did the idea for OpenClaw come from? Like what was the initial spark? Like what you started there?
Starting point is 00:56:35 My spark is annoyance. Annoyance. Yeah. Like I do something, you talk about emotions. I also have emotions. It doesn't mean my computer, it doesn't work as faster as well as I would. I get annoying. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:56:45 But now in this day and age, you don't have, you can use the annoyance. Yeah. And just like, let's fix it. Yeah. And then the fact that I couldn't really just talk. to my computer that annoyed me. It's like, this is so, it's all felt so crafty, isn't there a better way?
Starting point is 00:57:02 And then I just explored those better ways. And I keep exploring those better ways. I talked about it inside, like, my whole thesis is that whatever workflow we think we have right now, it's already outdated. We cannot catch up with the models. Just think about like how much new things you can do because now Luna is like too cheap to meter.
Starting point is 00:57:22 Now you have ultra-fast. It's like, wait, so I don't have to do things 50 terminal windows because I can actually stay in focus. It completely changes things again, you know? And it's like, we can't keep up building. Yeah. What do you think as you look back on the boom of OpenClaug, what do you think the key ingredients were?
Starting point is 00:57:42 Was it the connectors? Was it the connections? Was it being able to communicate to your computer from anywhere? I think I just showed people a different way. Yeah. How do I use AI? And so many were stuck in this world. Oh, it can.
Starting point is 00:57:55 can summarize my email no can like install stuff on your computer or like buy things for you or like do whatever you want that you can do in your computer if you just only give it the right tools yeah and I I packaged it in a way that was weird and interesting and also felt a little bit different you know instead of like giving you a wall of text it felt a little bit more like lobsterish humanish Like, it was interesting. It showed people a new way. And it had some unique ideas.
Starting point is 00:58:30 Like, what about if you could actually just be proactive. Yeah. Even though some of it was like token burning, but some of it was genuinely cool. It surprised people. So I think to stay in age, it's all about ideas and imagination. Yeah. Where do you think?
Starting point is 00:58:47 It was such an amazing moment because it felt like the sort of hacker culture that this entire town was built on, like exploded again. Yeah. People getting back in the hardware. The main thing is like, you know, you kicked off an entirely new paradigm. You set like the whole industry on fire in many ways. Everyone started using it, seeing it, and then immediately thinking, how do we make this like commercially viable to be able to scale from hackers that are buying Mac minis into something that everyday people can use? And I feel like I'm in, in some
Starting point is 00:59:24 ways it's surprising that it, given how good the models are, that it took another six months to actually get to this moment right now where there's more excitement than ever around personal agents. Like in some ways, like you saw this, the roller coaster, right? You saw this curve of excitement and then, hey, this maybe isn't ready for like a billion people to use. And then now we're back to the point of like, okay. Isn't that a classical Gardner hype cycle?
Starting point is 00:59:45 Yeah. And I honestly, I wish it would have been less hype. Sure. It was, it was kind of like this roller coaster where like, yeah, and then like it gives you like, holy fuck, you know? So I, definitely we had like a massive hype cycle with like inflated things, what Open Club would do for you. Oh yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:08 Completely beside of what he could actually do. And then you had all these insane stories. And then of course people tried it. Like, no, it doesn't quite work like this. Yeah. Because there's still limitations. Models were not as good. The software was not as good.
Starting point is 01:00:26 Of course. Everything's still hard. Everything is still hard. And people were expecting this perfect magical thing that one guy slopped in the basement. The ultimate slop grid. No, it was really a slop grid for you. You threw it over to San Francisco.
Starting point is 01:00:45 Yeah, you were the one of the first people to come out and just be like, yeah, it's all. It's so vibe-coded. And you were unabashed at about it. And it's like, that comes with a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses. But like here is the thing. And, you know, it's free. Like, you can go and make, you can make your own decisions.
Starting point is 01:00:59 You can go rewrite the whole thing yourself one line at a time if you want. And people did many, many, many times. Yeah, yeah, exactly. How do you think the, like, Open AI and Chat ChitpT is an interesting position because you have Chat ChachapT threads. You have Chat ChachapT work in the cloud, Codex, Cloud, Codex in your desktop. There's like a few different ways to interact with this. And I'm wondering if you have a vision for like what the next year looks like with like how much people are getting into devices, their own hardware versus
Starting point is 01:01:30 versus things like the cloud just eating more and more things. Like we went through the boom of the open web. Then everything went to social networks and and Instagram profiles. And I'm wondering if you think there's like a pendulum that's swinging or if you have any sort of mental model for where the early adopter or the early consumer will be in a year? I mean, the current situation with chat and work. Yeah. Of course, it's a compromise.
Starting point is 01:01:54 Yeah. It is, and I learned just a hard way. It is very hard to take people from where they are and introduce them into something new. Sure. It's not annoying these people or like confusing these people. So, sometimes you have to make compromises. Is this going to be the final form?
Starting point is 01:02:12 Hell no. Like, there's people working on something that's way cleaner. Yeah. What I don't really know yet is if we will be in a future that is mostly your agent, or if it's going to be whole army. I'm seeing both approaches. I'm more in the first team, but I can also totally see the second team. And then all these are like how your personal and your team agents interact.
Starting point is 01:02:40 There's still a lot of questions that I don't think the industry has fully figured out. Yeah. Yeah, I always comp it back to how human or how. how human organizations have worked, right? So like, you have a big company with thousands of people. You might task one person, hey, we have this general goal. You figure out how to exactly define it and what it should look like. But then hundreds of people might work on it,
Starting point is 01:03:01 but then you don't have hundreds of people report back, all back. Kind of replicate those hierarchies and maybe your agent, oh, this is something really complicated. Let me spawn an agent that manages this and then it manages these little sub-agent. There's so many ideas. There's like, I am playing with a lot of them. You know, what really excites me these days is how do we build software in the future and how do we work better with agents? So, like, what I just had so much fun with the last few months is moving all of my team to one place.
Starting point is 01:03:31 And everybody was freaking out. What you mean? You're like, you're like, we were so embarrassed on like how everyone is talking to their agents. It felt so private. Oh, interesting. And they're like, I got a pushback. And then like, we did it anyhow. and then everybody felt embarrassed for a day,
Starting point is 01:03:49 and now everybody's learning so much. It's like, because we all have a mental model on how we use agents, and it is very different because that was not something we shared. Are you sharing your code sessions? I'm sure you have some really interesting questions. Yeah. I've actually wanted that back in the deep research era,
Starting point is 01:04:08 I would see Tyler Cowan talk about how he was getting a bunch of value for economic research, and I was like, I would love for him just to be able to click on, share the prompt and the result because I might never think to ask that question. And we've never really developed a pattern around, oh, yeah, it's totally normal to just go on Twitter and share a link to a chat GPT transcript. Occasionally you'll see what the GROC responses. They like to take credit. Yeah, they like to take credit for it.
Starting point is 01:04:34 It's like it's good content. You did the research. It did the research you thought of the question. Where are you going through, you know, the first kind of era with open clause? and then now this personal agent boom, where have you seen a bunch of agent, like personal agent activity and you're actually like,
Starting point is 01:04:54 I don't think that that will be a paradigm. So for example, like shopping is a good example. Like a lot of shopping with agents right now is like walking up to the front of a store and asking a person outside of the store like, hey, I think I want to get this thing. And then they can you give me some information on it? And then maybe they go in and they come back.
Starting point is 01:05:13 And it's this sort of like strange dynamic where maybe at some points it just makes sense to go into the store and see all the information as the... And so there's like every single one of these, you know, big debate around restaurant reservations in the last 48 hours as well, right? And so it's like, where are these areas where you've seen some activity
Starting point is 01:05:32 and you're like, it doesn't even make sense to like really focus on that from a product standpoint? There's so many companies that want to own the experience. And I don't want to talk to your agent. I want my agent to be able to use your system in the way it thinks its best. But then they push their own agent and they block my agent and I just go somewhere else.
Starting point is 01:05:53 Ultimately, we don't see how they will play out, but let me use my agent. I like my agent. Make your service good so my agent can use it. Now we have like the agent wars, I feel. Like, there's big companies that block their website. The agent wars. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:06:12 Fucking agent wars. Here's an example. So shopping, going back to shopping, there's all these, let's say, like, companies that make sneakers, right, that are super desirable and there's more demand than supply. Well, they've had bots trying to block other bots forever, and now people are just going and they want a generic pair of sneakers. It's the same thing. They're getting blocked, right? And even, like, an agent that is sufficiently aligned to the user is going to, you can just set it. Hey, when this thing drops, go and make sure that we're the first person to buy it.
Starting point is 01:06:43 And yet that's the thing that the companies have been trying to block for... Well, if you cling on to your old ways without re-syncing how else we could do it, maybe you have to re-sync some system. Maybe the who clicks fast enough is no longer the right way. I don't know, I bought like the steam machine and there was just like a window of a week where you could register and then date the lottery. You know, that doesn't matter if my agent clicks in 0.1 seconds or as a human click in one hour. Everyone gets the same chance.
Starting point is 01:07:10 So there's a lot of ways where we just need to re-sync. how he did since in the past because it no longer makes sense. Yeah. And instead, do you want to block my agent? Oh, then I buy something else. Yeah. How do you think about agents going outbound, becoming more proactive? Everything from OpenClaught of Chad GPD has been very user-prompted.
Starting point is 01:07:31 I come to ChatGPT. I ask a question. Otherwise, it doesn't do anything. It just sits there. Really. But it feels like we're about to enter more proactive. I'm already seeing it in Chat-GPT. It'll recommend some prompts. And you can imagine the future where I'm more in the response category.
Starting point is 01:07:49 I want an agent that's always thinking. It should be thinking about this interview right now. And then maybe I have a hidden... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you'll meet proxy. Yeah, you're the meat proxy. It is also really hard to do. Yeah, it's a design problem, right?
Starting point is 01:08:06 Yeah, not just it's also a hardware problem. Sure. Like, give us more chips. Yeah, incredible amount of influence. You want... Looking at everything on your calendar and saying, you have an interview, so I went and did a deep research. Here's what John likes to talk about.
Starting point is 01:08:19 Here's what Jordy talks about. And they did all this, they put it together, put it in a video and an audio, and they gave it to you in every single way. It's a game. I want Astra 6 Ultrafast thinking about my day. And not just looping. If everyone would do that, I would just not work today.
Starting point is 01:08:33 This is the country of geniuses in a Rumba. So to decide where to go next. Down the stairs. Yep, exactly. It's deploying an incredible amount of super intelligence to solve the most mundane things. But it does feel like that is maybe the natural flow, which is in the shopping analogy,
Starting point is 01:08:51 like the credit card permeated shopping. And it took a pretty complicated dance of, are you writing a check? Who are you? Write the check. Pay with cash. I give you the change, et cetera, to just tap the card.
Starting point is 01:09:04 And there's another world where the inventory and sizing is checked behind the scenes all through my agent, talking to your agent. And I think any worldview that assumes that only one side of the interaction will be agent-mediated is mistaken. I think that if there might be a world where in the future, our agents have talked to each other for the equivalent of a million years to prep us. But I don't think there's any world where my agent is spamming you with tons and tons of emails and you're flooded and you don't have anything. You don't have any defenses. The Asian war.
Starting point is 01:09:38 And I'll fight AI with the AI. Exactly. The agent war will happen below. below the fold and we will both be blissfully ignorant of the trench warfare that's going on. I mean, if anything, it's keep being interesting. Yes. Like nothing slowing down. Yes.
Starting point is 01:09:53 I kind of dig that we finally arrived in this world where so many people cannot try agents. Yeah. But also, there's too many people that just, we build all these super intelligent things, but we're not really good at explaining people what they can actually do. No, totally. There's still a lot of work. Yeah. What are you tinkering with these days?
Starting point is 01:10:16 I feel like a lot of people are getting the hardware bug, the robotics bug, the video game bug, 3D rendering. I went back into Blender for the first time in years. Are there any new, like, I mean, I imagine everything blends together, but are there any areas that have interested you because of the model advances? You're like, oh, I want to go check that out, build a robot. robotic arm that paints or build a video game or something like that. Robotic is definitely something I bought some stuff and I'll play more.
Starting point is 01:10:50 But I'm really too very interested in as the models get better, how much more can we move up the stack? So you just, you say before about this, like agents building hierarchies. Yeah. Like how can I, how can I build this? I want to build an agent that creates those hierarchies almost on demand. Sure. Like if I tell the agent, hey, rewrite Postgres in Rust. I don't know.
Starting point is 01:11:16 Like, okay. You should pick out, it's like, oh, like, is Peter okay? Yeah. And maybe also, okay, he's serious? How can we plan this? What structure does it need to be created on the line? And also over what timeline? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:11:30 Because maybe you want postgres rewritten in Rust and you want to use it. Maybe you want it now. Now. But maybe you want it, of course, you want it now. But maybe you want it in a couple months. And so it's like, okay. Well, you're going to throw it. on the back burner, cook on it for a while.
Starting point is 01:11:42 I mean, I've noticed this where there's certain things where I'm like, oh, this is actually something I'd like to play with tomorrow. I'll set a goal and run it overnight. And if it's rendering something, it's sitting there, it's fine. And then other times it's fast mode. Let's get it done. I was very unapologetic on trusting the models.
Starting point is 01:11:59 Yeah. And where people, to the point where people were mocking me, oh, this will never work, it's slop. Look where it got me. Yeah. And yes, it's slop, but also yes, we're going to make it and the models will keep improving. And then slowly people are waking up.
Starting point is 01:12:15 And we moved from this world where, of course, you look at every line of code like, we scroll through it. And it's not stopping. It's not stopping. There's still so much of how we do all those things around this that need re-syncing. And I just find that super interesting.
Starting point is 01:12:32 How do you think about your personal workflow? Sam earlier was saying, historically you would want to think of 30 ideas. ideas and maybe whittle it down to one and just work on that for a few months. It feels like the success of OpenClaw came because you shipped 30 things in 60 days. But are you still trying to do that internally where you're just building, again, silly little kind of projects just to see what's possible to almost generate more robust ideas that you can then invest more time in?
Starting point is 01:13:04 These days I kind of get annoyed if I can change software with a prompt. I got so used to having all the tools myself that now I'm kind of annoyed at the operating system. You know, because it's feel like it's the last frontier. That's why I started shifting more to us. Hey, Linux is not actually cool. Yes. Because yeah, there's like a lot of problems,
Starting point is 01:13:22 but I like problems. And it's all text-based problems. And my agent just goes down and reach the kernel and can't compile the kernel. And now my webcam works. And then that gets me excited. Like, oh wow, I can I literally own the stack and there's nothing we cannot fix anymore.
Starting point is 01:13:39 Like, everything's fixable. Nothing is still hard, but nothing's impossible. Yeah. I could rub my own OS. Maybe it's so hard, but like, let's see, there's enough tokens and advances. That ridiculous thing will not be that ridiculous anymore in the future. Well, yeah, it's interesting too,
Starting point is 01:13:55 because the agent actually becomes the operating system in many ways. I grew up using Mac computers and never had like a Windows PC at home ever, my whole life. Wow. I'm very blessed. Very blessed. Very blessed. But I got a, I got a, like a sim racing rig, right?
Starting point is 01:14:15 And so I have a PC for the first time. I'm like, I don't know how to do anything on this thing. But you just set up codex with the computer use. You just talk to it. You just talk to it. You tell it what you want to do. It just doesn't. I build a little ESP device and has display issues.
Starting point is 01:14:29 So I glued my webcam to the display. And the codex rip overnight. it fixed the display driver. That's so crazy. You know, all I need to do is think about ways how your agent can do the best work. That's so fast. Close the loop.
Starting point is 01:14:39 And then the problem was I also told her to fix audio and then I was waking up, hello ESP. Hello ESP. The whole night. Because it took so long for it to figure out that the volume was down on the other thing. Well, eventually learned. That's so funny.
Starting point is 01:14:52 That's so funny. Yeah, that's amazing. Are you, you said you put the team together, but that was digitally, correct? you said you put all the, the whole team is now sharing what they're, what they're prompting their agents. But physically, what's your day to day look like? How much time are you in San Francisco? Oh, I'm here. I'm here.
Starting point is 01:15:15 Okay. And I, yeah, maybe basically have two teams. Yeah. I do a lot of work on the foundation side. Sure, sure. We pushed it forward. And then there's a lot of, a lot of things inside open year where we tried new ideas. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:15:27 There's a lot of, hey, we tried this. How can we make this into something? that's a one-pe product. Yeah. So there's some cross-pollination. I take some ideas back as well, because I like to play with them. So I don't if you disagree on ideas,
Starting point is 01:15:41 not everything works in that scale to that scale. You know, it's a very different way, how you need to build things. Yeah. But it's kind of cool. So yeah, I have a lot of jobs. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming out on the show.
Starting point is 01:15:56 Thank you. What a year. Thanks for having me. See you next year, hopefully. Hopefully sooner than that. We'd love to chat with you again. Up next, we have Tebow, the CEO of the Reset Company of California. San Francisco.
Starting point is 01:16:09 Yes. The master of resets coming on the show. Tebow, here we go, taking a photo. Can we pan over to them? I don't think so. Tebow, thank you so much for coming on the show. How you doing? Man of the hour.
Starting point is 01:16:22 It's happening. We're going to have you throw that headset on. The microphone goes on the left. I think you got it right. There we go. I wish you brought the button. Oh, he already pushed it today. I know.
Starting point is 01:16:33 It was a one-time use. Single use. Yes, but the physical button is a great manifestation of all the hard work. How is Dev Day going? What are your reactions? The vibes are awesome in person. Yeah. Yeah, I feel everyone I talked to here seems super excited. Maybe not about the things that I thought they would be most excited about.
Starting point is 01:16:53 Mostly ecosystem and us opening up like sign-in with chat chagip-t. That we can talk about things. That was the thing that stood up. You know, we had it on a, on a stream. green and I stood up and just started laughing. You actually did. Like, you know, I'm watching my team play, you know. But to me, that was a standout thing because even having Peter on just now, like, Peter
Starting point is 01:17:15 didn't have the ability to offer massive amounts of compute to the world. And so he made a bunch of product decisions because of that, right? The, you know, local, local approach, things like that. And now if you're a developer and you have product experiences that you want to deliver to customers, you can do it. that in a way that will be much, much more cost efficient. Yeah, so maybe reset on that experience. Explain what actually was announced today,
Starting point is 01:17:40 and then we'll go into the discussion. Sure. But just briefly on that Peter part, I think, like, the great thing is you can now focus on like building great product. You know, instead of like fixing like on, how do I make the token economics make sense? Sure.
Starting point is 01:17:54 Yeah, a lot of things were announced. Like maybe even like too many things. Yeah, that was my, I mean, I always, I always, I always default. default when I'm talking to, you know, 70-some, you know, portfolio companies, when they're like, we're going to launch this fund raise and this thing all in the same day. I'm like, just break it up, launch it, you know, spread it out over two weeks. But in some ways, seeing this live, I was like, okay, it actually makes sense. It's fun to have this moment where all these things and it creates
Starting point is 01:18:19 this, like, pressure around the team to deliver. So the thing I'm most excited about, because it has changed the way I work so much, and I can't wait to see what people do it is, like obviously dots. Yeah. where I think this is just a new way of packaging, a lot of the things that we were seeing working before, like very long-running, agent-tictasic. The configuration that we have, the agent never stops.
Starting point is 01:18:45 Occasionally it sleeps, but it's always online, always doing proactive research, thinking about your goals, thinking about your preferences, and then you just steer it live, just, you would give feedback to anyone else, you just give your thought a little bit of feedback. It learns. And so the more you interact with it,
Starting point is 01:19:02 and the more you teach it about your preferences, the better a job it does. And at some point, a couple days in, you're like, wow, you know, just like, I can't really quite imagine doing work without this thing. So it becomes, like, super delightful. But it's something that you need to invest a little bit of time in. Do you think developers are already, do you think developers are more in a mindset to adopt dots
Starting point is 01:19:22 or more excited about sort of diffusing AI throughout their organizations to parts of the organization that may have not be, like not they haven't onboarded workflows onto codex necessarily because it's been like intimidating is that part of the next leg up here yeah I think democratizing and they're figuring out like what is the natural way to interact with these things you know if you're like oh yeah you know like fire up codex into terminal it's like yeah it's capable of editing documents and it's capable of creating slides and yeah there were some incredible marketers and finance people that we're doing that But there is value to wrapping things up nicely, right?
Starting point is 01:20:04 Yeah, and then also making sure that it's safe and it's secure right out of the box. Yeah. That configuration is like really minimal. Yeah. It does something useful, you know, within the first five minutes. Yeah. And you don't have to be super technical, but just kind of still feel like the power of it, right? You know, it's like, and that's what we're doing with dots.
Starting point is 01:20:23 And then in the future, you know, we'll ship a lot of this, the same technology and the capabilities, like, you know, right in chat GPT as well. for 1.2 billion users. But really it's about getting to the essence of how much can you simplify, really? Yeah. Talk about the current state of the difference between the model and the harness. It feels like this year we went through the whole narrative
Starting point is 01:20:46 of the harness really matters. And I'm interested in the lessons from both the harness matters and specifically codex as a harness in dots. How much translated, how much similar lineage is there or is it possible we're even in a different regime and I'm using the wrong metaphor? It's like this interesting tension between the model and the harness and you know you always build the harness a little bit ahead of the capabilities of the model in order to make up for it and then the next generation of models kind of catch us up to that and then you have to delete part
Starting point is 01:21:22 of your harness because it's actually holding it back. Yep. And so this like it's very playful and dynamic. It's a dance. Yeah, it's a dance, right? This beautiful dance of the model of the harness. The codex harness is used to power dots. So like the same open source harness that we have. And then we also use it to power the agents API.
Starting point is 01:21:43 Got it. We have, which is like, you know, managed agents. And a lot of effort is going into this harness to just make it very efficient, safe, secure. And so I would say, like, right now, that's most of the benefits that you get from this harness. It's like just really a hardened thing. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:21:58 And then on the complexity of the tools, it's like, you know, we're like just really, just really minimizing that because the current generation of models just like so, so good. And is that how I should think about the specialist dots as sort of fine-tuned harnesses for certain workflows? What is the mental model to sort of deploy those specialist dots across an organization?
Starting point is 01:22:21 We have a lot of specialist dots at the OpenEye, and the difference is that you use the existing systems within your company in order to provision the identity and then the access and the machine. So we have them running on Mac minis. Okay. So we provisioned them like exactly like employees. Like we meant like a new little identity.
Starting point is 01:22:40 And then it's like it's got this I am and the roles. And so we have like very good security story there. And then we give them like a very premium machine as well because the model is incredibly capable under the hood. Like you know, dots are like beyond PhD level, right? and if you look at Astra, it's just like incredibly capable at like computer use. Yep. So your Dodge can just like use a computer just like you would.
Starting point is 01:23:04 And so by giving them like premium hardware as well as like it just even increases their capabilities further. And so we have these set up and inside of opening I to do all sorts of things including procurement, for example. Sure. Yeah. On computer use, can you help me understand the levers that are being pulled to speed up computer use? I noticed a jump between 5-5 and Astra. But I wasn't exactly sure whether the speed-up was coming from like a fast mode or the actual model or the harness. Like what are the levers? Like what scaling law are we following to when I, I mean, I was demoing it with a video game like Slantaspire just because it's visual and I can watch it work and I know how fast I can click.
Starting point is 01:23:49 And I'm interested to know like when actually we keep joking about it like playing Call of Duty. And we're like, well, it's clearly not there yet, but are we, is it a 10x speed increase every year? Like, how do you even, like, what are the levers that go into it? You're going to accidentally create an aim bot for every single video game ever created? Maybe, but how much of that is happening in the harness and the model both? Like, how do you even think about understanding the progress in computer use speed? I do think we have seen a 10x for one year speed up. And it's not that we made the model sample faster.
Starting point is 01:24:22 Okay. Obviously fast and ultra-fast plays a role if you want to go even faster, but that is not what we improved in terms of computer use. It's both the harness and the model. So when you think about the model, it's like, how much does it need to think before it can take the next action reliably? Yeah. That's one element that we really improved.
Starting point is 01:24:41 The other one is that we take safety super seriously. So we don't just click around and let the primary agent do things. Like we have a second agent, which we call auto review, or internally we call it Guardian. which watches over this primary agent is like actually, oh, wait a second, you're entering, you know, this sensitive information on this website. Like this domain is not quite right. You know, you should stop that action. And so it intervenes there.
Starting point is 01:25:04 So we also made this auto review model faster. Yeah. And then the harness, because we had Astra, Tadjel talked about this. Like we were able to kind of use Astra at scale in order to improve the performance of the harness. Sure. Do more things in parallel, you know, remove little stalls. And then just really innovate there as well. It's all open source, so you can go and dig and figure out exactly which techniques we used.
Starting point is 01:25:27 And then combined all of this together, then we got this 10X speed up. Yeah. Next year is the 10-year anniversary of the first OpenAI Dota competition. I think it was one-on-one, and then they did the Dota 5 a couple years later. And my big question and prediction is, will a stock open AI model with computer use be able to beat that original model? And it's going to be close because it's got to be actions per minute. It's not just the reasoning. I think if you were able to pause the game and cook on a really, a really advanced model,
Starting point is 01:26:04 you'd be able to get there. But the computer use is like the final thing. And I think that's going to be pretty magical. Yeah, if you look at Ultra Fast today on Astra, it's 300 tokens per second. Okay. So. And maybe I'm going to go demo it today. It's not quite that, you know, one token is one action.
Starting point is 01:26:21 Yeah. It's more going to be like you need 20 tokens to make one action, right? So you're going to have 30 actions per second, which is a decent amount. And then it's all like how smart is the model? Like, you know, can it actually reason about long-term strategy and movement and all the past actions? And what we're seeing is that currently we announced as well, Decisions API. We further tune the constraints so that you can make decisions extremely fast. so you can make one decision roughly every 200 milliseconds.
Starting point is 01:26:53 Yeah. So speed is just like, we're just progressing way faster that even I had anticipated six months ago. Yeah. And I think we'll see like, you know, definitely like real time, real time actions within next year and like beating that original model. Yeah. So, so, so, yeah, I mean, I love those announcements.
Starting point is 01:27:13 They're always really interesting. So many different models and speeds and cost tradeoffs and paradeo. charts and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, how much do you want users to actually understand that, internalize that, become experts there versus just wait a little bit and it'll be entirely delegated to the harness or to the company even or the product? I'm just wondering how long we stay in this regime of understanding the model picker because there's some real value that comes from being able to, you know, think, okay, we need this, we need this chart, but we need it right now. So I'm going to, you know, but that could just be in the prompt. Like, go to your
Starting point is 01:27:56 dot and say, hey, I need a best estimate of revenue for my business right now. Or, hey, look, I need you to go reconcile the books. So get it to me by Monday. Yes. The way that you think about it feels exactly right. Humans don't have a knob, right? So you just tell it in natural language. You're like, I need this right now. I need this tomorrow or you have $100 in order to achieve this goal. I'm trying a big party. I want to spend $50 bucks. It's like good luck.
Starting point is 01:28:26 But the model should just adapt and like the system should adapt and you know configure exactly like how many resources it should use in order to achieve your goal. And that's what we're working towards. With dots in a way we already simplify things massively, there's no model picker. Like your dot is just there. It's available 24-7. You can text it. It modulates its effort depending.
Starting point is 01:28:46 on the ask and it might not be perfect is also why we're announcing it at Dev Day we want to build it with the community and like we're learning with the pro users but eventually it will be so good that you will kind of be shocked that we had a model picker yeah ever yeah yeah how are you spending how are you allocating your time because I imagine you're sleeping like four hours a night but the other 20 hours in a month yeah the other yeah whatever the other 20 hours a day how much time are you spending on like recruiting and like who are you actually looking for there. The team is firing on all cylinders. You want to make sure when you're adding
Starting point is 01:29:21 people, they're speeding up the team versus slowing you down, but recruiting versus everything else on your plate. Yeah, I spent a decent amount of recruiting, but I tried to do more than one thing at once, right? So, for example, I might talk to an exciting candidate and have a really fun conversation about an idea that I think, you know, either the team is already pursuing or, you know, something new and speculative that we're thinking about. And it's like, I'm, kind of trying to see like what this other person is also, you know, how they would kind of handle it, you know, if they were on the team. And so it's not that I'm, you know, actually kind of wasting my time in an interview and doing anything boring there. I'm like actively thinking about the work and already stimulating them being part of the team.
Starting point is 01:30:05 Yeah. Which then also is interesting to myself. Like, you know, as it evolves my thinking. Sometimes in, you know, quite novel ways. So I would say like interacting with other people and like, you know, I'm always looking for great new candidates to join the team. team, I would say is like 20% of my time. How do you think about the longer term ramifications of memory and going deeper with a particular agent and system? Because there's this interesting thing where right now, Open AI has business relationships,
Starting point is 01:30:38 and there are some companies that have gone all in. And at the same time, there are individuals who have gone all in on Codex and have complex. complex workflows and there's more memory there. But there is a world that I could imagine where if somebody shows up on my team and they're doing their work and I noticed that they're searching the internet using Bing, I'm probably not going to say, hey, look, this is a Google organization. But I would say, okay, we use Gmail, not Outlook. You're on this particular email system.
Starting point is 01:31:07 And there's some sort of interaction there that feels like, are we going to, are we going to be more in the regime of you have your agent, your tooling, and you, you, and I'm hiring you to work with me and you bring all of whatever tools you use? Or is there going to be a regime where, hey, you're joining a particular shop, like a rail shop, you're right in rails, you're right in Ruby, or this is a Python shop,
Starting point is 01:31:31 so I need to get up to speed on that. Have you thought about where this goes in the longer term? Yeah, it also, again, it feels like the way that you're thinking about it feels very natural. So just like humans, you know, you don't want to just like re-explain the same thing over and over again. and if you're a real shop,
Starting point is 01:31:47 you hired a person and you're like, hey, you understand we're a real shop, here's the documentation, learn how we do things over here and then try your best to do it. If you don't get it quite right, I'll provide your feedback. And so this is very much the same
Starting point is 01:32:02 that we're thinking about it for dots and agents in general. Space is like a shared memory system that you maintain across your organization. You have your own notes, but you also have collective notes. And so, for example, you could just write in there like, hey, you know, we're a rail shop.
Starting point is 01:32:17 Yeah. Like, here are the things that you need to know about. And then, you know, the first thing that it does just like just goes in and read about it. And then memory system is something that we have quite perfected and are continuing to innovate on. Like with the ability to stay, you know, I have coherent memory over very, very long periods of time. So you don't want to give feedback today and then learn that, you know, two weeks later is just like, you know, kind of like completely forgotten about it. and just like, you know, painting the house blue again. Like, I really don't like that color.
Starting point is 01:32:46 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating interaction of all these things. But thank you so much for coming and breaking it down. Yeah, I wish we had more time. I think that the intensity around your ex-account is something that, like, I think very, very, very few people at companies at any point in modern history have had to deal with. Like, I actually, but as I've, as we've got, gone through this year just like seeing how much, just how much attention is focused on the next
Starting point is 01:33:17 thing that you post and then what you have to go through to actually balance all of that feedback in real time and understand where am I right, where were we off and then adapt. It's been incredible to watch. So good. Good luck out there. Congratulations. Congratulations. That's good. We'll see. Maybe the dots been running the account.
Starting point is 01:33:34 Yeah. That's the big reveal. Thank you so much coming on the show. Up next, we have Kath Korovac coming on to the show. So, Kath, welcome to TBPN. Thank you so much for taking the time. It's a little windy. A little windy.
Starting point is 01:33:49 Do whatever you need to to get adjusted, take a seat. Great to have you. Great to have you. Thank you for having me. Big day. I didn't expect a hug from the man. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:34:00 That's great. For those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little about your role at OpenAAA. Yeah, I'm a product manager. I work on GPT sites, chat GPT sites. Yeah. What has the traction been with sites? Oh, it's been huge.
Starting point is 01:34:16 Yeah. So let's see. I don't know what I'm approved to say, but I think I can say. I think I have a doc here. We want the number. Whatever went out. 10 million sites. 10 million. Okay.
Starting point is 01:34:24 Grated in under three months since launch. Yeah, so we launched three months ago. I'm responsible for like 45 of those. I make them for everything. I love them. Oh, amazing. I love sites. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:34:33 The wildest use case is like looking at, John was like looking at a bunch of different products online and just instantly building this wild. This was like a couple months ago. Yeah, it was specifically, I would take, I was looking for a house, I would take a Zillow listing, send the link to Codex and say, go and download all the photos,
Starting point is 01:34:56 restile them with images, and then put it together in a site where you can swipe left to right to see if this house went through a remodel, would it look better? And then styling it in the way that, based on your reference. okay this house is this this this style of architecture from this year this would be a faithful
Starting point is 01:35:16 you know evolution of this it wouldn't just you know change the architectural style and then I'd made so many sites that I told it to make a meta site to like put all them together of course you did like an atlas I've got a prompt to do this oh yeah and and I mean I have a couple but I'll send it to you yeah yeah and like how to organize it all yeah no it's amazing because that's like that's when you know you've like hit the limit yeah yeah yeah when you actually have to organize this. So did you tell it of what your preferences were?
Starting point is 01:35:45 Yeah, yeah. Specifically, John has like very specific taste. So if he was going to go through a remodel, wants it to look at specific ways. Yeah. The image model takes that into account and nails it within the context of that space. But it was so helpful because a lot of times
Starting point is 01:36:01 you'll see a house that went through a remodel and it prices higher and then a house that's pre-remodel. It's lower price and you're like, okay, well, if you equalize these And Zillow has a feature for this that lets you sort of like redecorate a little bit on some houses that list, but not all of them. And so this was a nice way to just style. And then I could just pass it around to like family members and show them. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:36:20 So did it show you? There's more real estate question than it is. Okay. Let's go real estate. We got a home mansion section. We can talk cars if you want. We get whatever you want. This is the show.
Starting point is 01:36:30 We don't only talk about AI. But I'm curious if it could do something. And maybe you weren't like asking it to do this. Yeah. But you know like when you go through a remodel, your home value either like goes up or goes down based on what you're doing. So if you're like, I'm going to add a white kitchen or if you add a pool, your home value goes down when you think like, oh, pool is like fancy.
Starting point is 01:36:49 So it did all of that. It looked at price per square footage for remodel homes in the particular neighborhood, block by block, finding comps, building all the comp sheets, and then figuring out, okay, what is the realistic building cost for specific things, creating itemized list of how much you'd spent on architect versus raw materials? And then would you have the, the, the, the, the, gap to support that based on like a 10-year holding period basically. So it did all of them.
Starting point is 01:37:14 Truly personal super intelligence because five years ago, the amount of experts and like, okay, I don't have time to build the website, so I need someone else to like build this thing. Yeah. I need to be able to like compare contract. Yeah. And my end conclusion was just like it's just going to speed up the economy because more people will be doing like the remodels, more people will be buying stuff because
Starting point is 01:37:34 they'll have more confidence in these things. It was, yeah, it was a delightful experience. This is why we built sites. Yes. Okay. So we built it for work related stuff, for sure, but also people use it for personal use cases. I do. I just built a site.
Starting point is 01:37:50 I don't want to have to go. I like tinkering with hardware. Sure. I want to have like, do you guys know the skylight? It's like a family. Oh, yeah. Organizer. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:38:00 Calendar. Yeah. I don't want to go and buy it. I'm sure it's like a fantastic product. Sure. Yeah. But I don't want to buy it. I want to build it myself.
Starting point is 01:38:05 Okay. You mean the picture frames that cycle through image. It's specifically links to calendar. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, but they have their own software and everything that's like specific for families. Yep. So I don't want to do that, so I'm building one with Cheshapiti sites. Oh, and then sites is the background basically.
Starting point is 01:38:19 Yeah, and we just launched plugins in sites today, and so I can like hook it up to my calendar. Yeah. And then with a prompt you can iterate on it and say, okay, I want to change the color. We're going with this theme, it's Christmas, make it a Christmas theme. Yeah, exactly. And I can like hook up to my kids calendar. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:38:34 Yeah. I think it's really good for, yeah, on the fly UI, like, I was discussing, particularly potential guests throughout the rest of the year, had basically deep research pull a bunch of potential people that are, you know, one step away from guests we've had on the show. But instead of just giving me a big long list, I was like, just built me a website where I can thumbs up, thumbs down, share it with the team. Very easy. How does that interface with space? How do you see these products linked? Is there going to be another merge? Everything's merging all the time. Oh, there's always a merge. There's always a merge. There's always a merge and then an unmerged and then toggle is everywhere. This is the life. So sites are in space. Okay. And that's a very intentional. are a very, they're a very collaborative place. And you can add editors to your site. You can add co-editors, co-authors, et cetera. And it's a very rich environment to work in.
Starting point is 01:39:19 You can build a site, you can share it with somebody else. We have a lot of people at Open AI who are doing, like, we have, our IT team is using this to manage, like, where everybody is in the world. And they're sharing those sites with other people, like, around the world who are like boots on the ground, managing security. And so they want to see, like, they want to see, like,
Starting point is 01:39:37 okay, who's flying in today? Is there an event happening? Is there, like, how was the weather? Is there a weather event? Like, all of that stuff. Yeah. And so they'll add co-editors, co-authors, everything to their site to manage it. Inside Space is what's cool is that you can, you have all of your artifacts right there available for everybody.
Starting point is 01:39:56 So you'll see us kind of like cross-referencing stuff, making stuff inside space more and more interchangeable. And so you'll be able to like inside pages, be able to reference sites and vice versa. and slides are launching soon. A lot of people are making slides with sites. You'll be able to put those into spaces really easily. So it's... What's the timeline for this to be available to anyone? Like, is there, if you go far enough in the future,
Starting point is 01:40:27 can somebody on a free chat chbtee plan create a website? Oh yes, yeah. So we are very, very interested in making it available to everybody. We have to figure out like infrastructure, how to price it appropriately, et cetera. We just launched three months ago, so we're still kind of learning, but we are also working with the consumer.
Starting point is 01:40:46 Ad supported. Ad supported. Oh, there you go. Your site will have ads all over it, banner ads for everything you do. That's still free. You know, a big use case is e-com. Yeah, okay.
Starting point is 01:40:57 So we could do it. Sure, sure, sure. There's a lot here that we could. I want to go back to the Angel Fire world. I don't know if you remember that. But it was free web hosting, and you'd have these banner ads, crazy display ads all over that you couldn't remove. I'm hoping we can get away from the ad.
Starting point is 01:41:15 Well, we'll have to disagree on that because we are huge fans of advertising. And so we'll. I love it. It's like, it's like, if people are like, oh, this meeting could have been an email. And I'm going to be like, well, your text to me, John, could have been a website. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, we're basically there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:41:33 Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations to watch. The progress. million. 10 million sites. 10 billion. There's going to be more websites per person. So we'll take that headset off. We'll hand it to our next guest.
Starting point is 01:41:47 Ben, thank you so much for hopping on. And I believe we're ready for our next guest. We have none other than Casey. Nice stat. Casey, welcome to the show. Good to see you. How you doing? Has that been on the table?
Starting point is 01:42:00 This has been on the table. It's been trying to take it out. Yes. It survives. Why don't you introduce this? What is this thing? Oh, you have. Funny you should ask.
Starting point is 01:42:08 Funny you should ask. No, so this is the, this is the first chromatic transparent, custom chromatic that we made at Model of row. I love this styling, yeah. For this event today. Okay, yeah. We made, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say the number, we made 8,000 of them. Wow.
Starting point is 01:42:23 To make sure every attendee could leave with them. Fantastic. Leave with one. Yeah. I will say that breaking news. Yes. This was announced on stage by Sam like an hour and a half ago. Yes.
Starting point is 01:42:35 There's one currently on eBay for four thousand. for 4,000. I was going to ask you. They got a trade in the aftermarket. Yeah. Arbitrage. A lot of people are like, I'm going to wait to get home to flip this.
Starting point is 01:42:46 No, not some enterprising attendee today. Yeah. Who saw an opportunity and just got in there and saved it. Boom. But the specific integration, of course, Codex, vibe coding, the idea that you can create a custom game that runs on here. Is that the idea?
Starting point is 01:43:03 Yeah, you know, like, what we do at Mod Retro, The reason why we're like focused on retro gaming is it's about like the love and the fun of the game. Yeah. Mine came with Tetris. It was fantastic. I rarely take Tetris out of mine. Yeah, exactly. It's my anti-Tetrus cartridge stays in.
Starting point is 01:43:19 It is catharsis for it. Yeah. I did buy a crazy cartridge that had like some modern technology had like 400 games on there. And that was really cool. But, you know. That sounds super unofficial. Yeah, it was. Nauty.
Starting point is 01:43:34 But what this is and what this is. What it is today is. Nauti, nothing. I don't know if I get trouble for buying it. I think the person should have sold it, maybe. We built a custom plug-in for Codex, and it enables you to sort of vibe-code game. Yes. What's special about it is that you're not constricted to playing that an emulator on your laptop,
Starting point is 01:43:53 but you can flash it to this cartridge immediately. Yep. It's amazing. And I think, like, the best way of framing it is, like, Torrin, our CEO, and his 5-year-old, vibe-coded a game, and then he was able to flash it in a hand. and the chromatic kiddo. They have him playing it right away. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:44:08 And it's something that like leans into the constraints. Like you see, I've seen a bunch of demos that are like, oh, this new model's so powerful. I just gave it one prompt and it made a triple A call of duty GTA six video game and I'm like, okay, let's uh, let's calm down. You made a 30 second video of something that actually looks kind of janky and probably doesn't have anywhere near the breadth of GTA six. Just yet.
Starting point is 01:44:32 We'll get there, but for now this is the sweet spot. Like, I know that you can actually deliver something that's fun and entertaining and full feature to not buggy when you're constrained to this screen and just these buttons. And you're not trying to do. Also, the exciting thing is having a Tam of one, right? Like, there's so many great ideas. And when I say that, I'm not saying the product, but I'm saying, like, there are great games where for a five-year-old, like, heat, they will be the only person that appreciates this game. Yes. And it's combining different parts of their interests into something that would never have commercial.
Starting point is 01:45:05 commercial appeal can never get shipped or made. Totally. And now it can. And I think that's been sort of the story of every single category of AI use case where you can now make things that, like again, the example you were giving 10 minutes ago. Yeah. It's like you would never spend the money or the time to make this comparison website only for yourself on the fly. Yes. And now you can't.
Starting point is 01:45:26 Yeah. Exactly. I think it constraints is a great characterization because I think it dovetails with like what our mission is at Mod Retro, which is like embracing. those constraints, which amplifies, like, the Y part. You know, like, we launched the M64, which is our Nintendo 64 console. We released that a month and a half ago. And doing incredibly well, but so much of the feedback we see is from, like, old people like me, 45, I was 15 when Nintendo 64 came out, introducing it to their kids.
Starting point is 01:45:55 Yeah, of course. So you get a dad or you get a mom with their little ones, and it forces you because of those constraints, like physically sit with my kids and play Mario Car. Yeah. And when I think of that versus like when we catch our daughter, she's not allowed to play Roblox, but when we catch her in her bedroom, like hiding in the closet, by herself with her iPad, six inches from her place playing Roblox. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:46:16 This just feels so antithetical to that because it is about like the social aspect. It's about the camaraderie. It's about the fun. Yeah. And I think like that's what today in this partnership was emblematic of. It's like you can create something that's fun and they can say check this out. Yeah. It's so funny that like I think a lot of, we're all parents here.
Starting point is 01:46:34 and I think a lot of parents are going through this, like, I just want the same experience that I had for my kids. And then there's literally a company that's like, yeah, you can do that. It's such a simple value problem. It's a funny, it's a funny, like, philosophical exploration. Because there's a part of it, which is like, is it just our old man nostalgia? Yeah. And, you know, Palmer, our founder, has like a really current response to that, which is no.
Starting point is 01:47:00 Yeah. It was just better. Yeah. It was better than. And I think about that. Because, like, you know, we bought our daughter this summer a point and shoot camera. Sure. And it was like the biggest fucking deal for her.
Starting point is 01:47:10 Yeah, yeah. And, like, she has a camera on her iPad, but having a point and shoot camera, this single purpose device and then so much to her. Yeah. And I think that we're starting to see, like, technology start to go for full circle. Yeah. Like, we have these stupid little black rectangles of doom that live in our pockets that you can do everything on. Yeah. But there's something about whether it's like a wired headphone, point and shoot camera, a device that you have to physically put a cartridge.
Starting point is 01:47:34 to play a singular game. Yeah, I think it's about the relationship between the person and the technology and I feel like we've gotten so far away from that with the rate of innovation getting away from us. Yeah, yeah. I didn't mean to go so deep. No, no, no, I completely agree with that.
Starting point is 01:47:49 No, I mean, I've spent, I mean, every, I'll text John like twice a month, maybe every week, where I'm like, everything that's good hasn't changed in 60 years, right? And in many ways, like, having, like, machine intelligence is the only thing, really, that I feel like has been super meaningful that's changed in that period. But when it comes to stuff specifically in the physical world, everything that's good has existed for a long time. Old restaurants, old hotels. Yeah, cars got worse, you know.
Starting point is 01:48:23 Yeah. A bunch of things, you know, homes got worse, all these different things. It's only paper rolls or paper towel holders. Is that you're always an example? Well, yeah, that's probably. He wants a paper towel holder invented in the 1960s. Yeah, I've got one that has a Wi-Fi connection. Oh, okay.
Starting point is 01:48:38 You're on the opposite. It sends me alerts when I get low on toilet. No, but the cool thing is it feels like I really do think that all, I do think all the hardware that we use is going to, like, change dramatically in a way over the next 10 years that it didn't in the last 10 years. And part of why I think that is is because you have thousands of super smart people working on these new paradigms and form factors, but then you also have the software changing
Starting point is 01:49:06 in the first time we had Peter from OpenClaw on, and he was just saying, like, he's now getting frustrated with the OS. It's not just the things that are happening as part of the, are on top of the operating system. He's like, he wants to go all the way because there's things that can just make more sense when you can generate an operating system almost on the flight. Yeah, I think it's holistic.
Starting point is 01:49:26 I think there's room for everything, but I think what's been caught up in this, like, title wave of innovation that I felt has sort of hit like a really aggressive inflection point in the last 10 to 15 years is that it sort of consumed everything. And I feel like we've kind of reached this plateau. We're able to pause and identify little areas where like, no, no, no, that doesn't need that kind of innovation. I think back to like if I'm, if I feel allowing me to be romantic about it.
Starting point is 01:49:54 Like I got, I think for my 10th birthday, I got one of those yellow Sony walk And I fucking treasured this thing. It meant the world to me. It was my most prized possession. I took showers as a kid, but I would take a bath just so I could listen to music in the bathtub because I had a walkman that could get wet. And I think about that now and it's like technically, Spotify is better than having Led Zeppelin cassette. It's better in every way technically. But Spotify will never mean to me what that device meant to me.
Starting point is 01:50:26 And I think this romanticization of technology. is something we've drifted away from. And the change in medium changed the message. You used to need to listen to a whole album. Yeah, for me it was the iPod shuffle. Like having... Which one? The little white one? The clip one. The clip one.
Starting point is 01:50:44 Like to me, to me that was the pinnacle of technology as a kid because I had this thing that was like a quarter. You could like throw it up and down. And yet it was so powerful because music is so emotional. And like it felt like it could take you on a whole journey, be as entertaining as watching a movie, just playing songs. And you never knew what song was coming next. Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 01:51:04 Part of the romance. It was like gambling, gambling with audio. Like, you know, slot machine every time you press, skip. And I think we're going to see, I feel it now, but this is my world that I live in. I think we're going to see this sort of looking back. Like I run across the Brooklyn Bridge seven days a week unless I wake up in San Francisco. Sure. And what's interesting that I've noticed in last five years is it would, you see.
Starting point is 01:51:29 always be people's iPhones. And now the amount of people I see with these antiquated 10-year-old point-and-shoot cameras. And they do, and it's sort of a flex. Yeah, of course. They're using this camera that is objectively a lower-quality camera that's what's on their phone. Yeah. Yet it says something about them.
Starting point is 01:51:44 Totally. In some ways, New York City is probably getting captured on film more now. Sure. Then when film cameras were like the only way to actually take a photo. Yeah. Because the diffusion, like historically it probably wasn't like, you know, thousands of people spread across the city at all times getting every single angle.
Starting point is 01:52:03 And yet now that actually is what's happening. Wisconsin. Yeah, my favorite 35 millimeter point in shoes, this Olympus. Okay. Okay, it was 150 bucks when it came out in the aughts. Yeah. And they stopped making it whatever 15 years ago. Every time I'd break one, I'd just buy it off eBay for 50 bucks.
Starting point is 01:52:19 Sure. I noticed a couple years ago that they weren't 50 anymore. They're like 100. Oh, wow. Okay, then it was like 200. My wife asked me for one for her birthday, and I went to buy it was $400. dollars. You got a corn to the market.
Starting point is 01:52:29 And now they're almost unavailable. And I think it's akin to like what we see with classic cars. Like people appreciate what these things were. I mean, that's what makes me so excited about Maure Retro is. Palmer's, yeah, Palmer's T's something. He can't say anything, but Palmer's T's like, I don't like connected TVs. I don't like music. And I don't like cameras.
Starting point is 01:52:52 And I'm like, yes, like the connected TV's got to go. I have a thing of like every. the frustration that I have with, hopefully this isn't just my issue and I'm not updating the software or something. Let us here. Let us here. But the level to which like modern TVs,
Starting point is 01:53:10 the software degrades to the point where you're like, okay, like I'm going to click. I'm going to click and I click too many times and now I've got to go. Have you followed along with this LG controversy? Yeah. Okay. Break it down for those who have it.
Starting point is 01:53:22 Okay, the TLDR is that the most modern LG TV. They have the best panels. The best panels, yeah. O-led, it's amazing. The most expensive. A couple of hackers. They have a YouTube channel. I apologize.
Starting point is 01:53:34 I don't remember the name. They deserve a plug. Yeah. But they broke down all of the software, and they determined that the microphone that was intended for, like, change it to HBO, is actually listening all the time. So much so. Then when it wasn't network, when it wasn't connected to the network,
Starting point is 01:53:49 it would store the audio files locally. And then when it reconnected, it would upload it. I watched that, and I was like, fuck, this is what Palmer's going on about. desire to make a dumb TV. And then I realized in my bedroom, where I sleep with my wife, most nights, some nights I'm in the guest, you know, marriage. We have that fucking LGBT. I know.
Starting point is 01:54:10 I have one too. So I unplug it from the wall now when I walk into the bedroom. And it's just like. But you remember how fast, how snappy old TVs were? Yeah, you just press a button. It was just instant. How snappy? I'm 45.
Starting point is 01:54:22 For me, it was one of the physical dial with a long wire that immediate. Yeah, yeah. Immediate, immediate. We've got to go back to wired remotes. Yeah. I'll be the first one to buy that. Yeah, I remember sort of some of my frustrations with the, one of the meta-quests was that I found out that I had seven passwords because I had a keypad, a code, a meta-password,
Starting point is 01:54:48 Instagram, pay Facebook password, and Oculus VR password. And I showed this whole process of like what it takes to just take it and then play. a game and it was like 15 minutes and then and then I play and then I just found a video of somebody turning out and it's 64 and you just thing it's the same thing playing the game you're playing the game it's ridiculous our Samsung TV yeah in the other in the guest yes in the dog house yeah in the dog house in order for me to download Netflix I have to sign into Samsung I don't have a Samsung now I would I don't want one I just don't watch you're doing it is just so much they ask so much they ask so much of
Starting point is 01:55:27 I know. And it's not better for the customer. No, it's terrible. I just want to suck that data from you to sell you more ads. It's terrible. It's terrible. Flipping over to the creator economy, the creator side of things. I have this idea that with the advances in vibe coding,
Starting point is 01:55:45 there is an opportunity basically for someone to make a game every single day for mod retro or any platform, web games, and that muscle of doing something small, every day would compound. I don't know that they would become the next GTA 6, but they would become something. And I'm wondering how you think about creativity and daily rituals, new platforms,
Starting point is 01:56:09 in a time of rapidly decreasing cost to create whatever it is. Yeah, I have a super cynical perspective on it and a wildly optimistic. Okay. So the optimistic one is like, what is it, a million monkeys at a million typewriters and they'll eventually type out all of Shakespeare.
Starting point is 01:56:26 Shakespeare, yeah. I think that's, there's a, there's a, math says that's going to happen. Yeah. There was vibe coding games for. So you were the monkey on YouTube that type Shakespeare. Correct. Yeah. But I didn't have vibe coding.
Starting point is 01:56:39 No. And I didn't have AI video. No. And when you did have gopros and Canon 5 TVs and I movie. And YouTube. You didn't need to shoot on film with R.E. I just kept uploading. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:56:50 And then like the line that that I share that often shocks people is I was, I think very successful on YouTube, very successful. And after seven, after seven years of a very successful presence on YouTube, I had 280,000 subscribers. And then I started the daily blog. I started, I was the monkey that never left the time. The final monkey. 18 months later, I had 10 million.
Starting point is 01:57:18 Yeah, it's crazy. And I think if I had maintained that cadence, if the top of the funnel hadn't become more accessible, if the cameras hadn't gotten cheaper, if I hadn't gotten faster at editing because the technology enabled. that inflection point would not have happened. Sure. So I am, yes, I am the original monkey at the hypewriter. But I think now, especially what AI is doing,
Starting point is 01:57:37 it's something that is much more complete. And when people shit on AI video, and when I say people, I mean me. Yeah. I think it's gonna get to a point where there's gonna be something that's made on AI that's 100% AI that's undeniably good. And it's just gonna sort of force people to be like,
Starting point is 01:57:55 oh, I hated it because it was made with AI. It does a really good fucking movie. Yeah. And eventually that negativity is going to start to wane. It will be sort of undeniable. Sure. There's some cynicism in there. I also think that that will enable, especially when it comes to things like gaming.
Starting point is 01:58:09 Yeah. Creating software. Yeah. It's just when you open the top of the funnel that wide, the amount of shit being made increases. Yeah. But so does the amount of quality stuff being made. Yeah. So I am highly optimistic that there are going to be these diamonds along a sea of coal, lumps of coal.
Starting point is 01:58:25 Yeah. that will have real impact. Yeah. It would be meaningful. I would also... Yeah, when I think back, like, I used to work on little, like, iPhone games.
Starting point is 01:58:35 And I remember when I was, like, trying to just make Pong, right? It was, like, I was just trying to make the most simple, possible game. The amount of, like, frustration where you go from, like, you know, it's exhilarating because you're making progress and then you get, like, stuck on something.
Starting point is 01:58:50 And I was probably, like, 11 or something at the time. Then you get stuck on something for, like, two hours, and it's like pure pain and you're like, how do I figure out how to get through? And then you get through.
Starting point is 01:58:59 And part of that is like very, part of that is like extremely positive and like worthwhile lessons around like hitting blockers and pushing through. But the amazing thing with AI is like just being able to bust through those like much faster
Starting point is 01:59:11 and compound those learnings and do an individual person doing 10 times as much in the same period of time. And it's hard not to be excited about it. It's like a monkey with 10 hands. That's the best of now. analogy for a...
Starting point is 01:59:25 We have to keep this monkey analogy. Yes. Well, on the video side, the thing that I've been, I think naturally, everyone went from like, oh, okay, I'm reading way more AI-generated text, and that was over basically the last two years. And now it's getting harder and harder to tell. And we even know people that produce a lot of AI written content, but they've figured out ways to make it not pangrammable, at least obviously. And now I've just noticed like way more... Way more like AI video, which is like working for me on some niche, like where I'm like trying to learn specifically about a topic.
Starting point is 02:00:04 But then, but I keep getting hung up on this idea of like, did the person that published that owns the account, did they actually review this video? Because I think that that's where the, like I'm looking. Yeah, yeah. Is there actual curation? Is there someone saying? because specifically I'm thinking of there's an account on Instagram that does like sim sim racing like tutorials lessons or whatever and so they're putting out like probably 20 videos a day on different topics and a lot of it feels like generally right but but the where where it will
Starting point is 02:00:41 break down is like if if you just if the AI is effectively like reading an online forum and then just piping it into video and then that advice is like expired almost yeah you're you're just describing the modern news cycle. Yeah. Like that is what, you know, Instagram, TikTok, and, you know, X news is. It's a variant of what you're describing.
Starting point is 02:01:02 Firehomes. So why there's so much, the noise to signal ratio has just gotten so convoluted and difficult to navigate. I don't know, maybe like a more acute example of something like that is like, my favorite genre on YouTube
Starting point is 02:01:14 is short, esoteric World War II documentaries. Sure. There's a guy. My favorite YouTuber on the planet is Mark Felton. I love that guy. You know this guy. That's why I fall.
Starting point is 02:01:25 I fall asleep to that kind of class. Me too. Every day, when I get my sandwich at lunch and I sit in my office by myself, I watch one of his stuff. Like a 50-year-old British historian. He is an objectively terrible filmmaker who makes these single best videos. It's just him narrating it over whatever images he could find. I watch that and then I also watch these 100% AI generated that clearly have a human editorial oversight because they're factually correct. Very well done.
Starting point is 02:01:52 have all of the YouTube AI notifications all over them. And it doesn't bother me. Yeah. It doesn't bother me because it feels like I'm reading something with visuals that are simply there to support it. It's, I'm very conscious that these are artificially generated images. They're just meant to sort of visualize what something looked like that wasn't actually captured. And for me, like those are the fissures. Yeah. I'm seeing as someone who's like an anti, who's a purist when it comes to filmmaking. Sure, sure. Yet I'm willing to tolerate that. And I think that delta is That's why I don't. I never, like, AI content is already here.
Starting point is 02:02:28 It's happening. There's going to be 10,000 times more of it in probably two years. But I haven't been afraid because when I think about my favorite creators and where I'm actually spending attention today, it's like the guy that you're just talking about, Mark Felton. There's another guy named H.I. Sutton, who's just obsessed with, like, naval warfare. Yes. And just nerds out about it.
Starting point is 02:02:50 I'm a subscriber. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I figured. But, like, he'll just basically press record and he has a presentation, like, slides. Yeah, yeah. He's going through. And he's narrating it. He's like, I don't use AI.
Starting point is 02:03:00 I just sort of sit here and talk. And it's, like, incredibly captivating and interesting because you're listening to somebody, like, the world expert on the topic who maybe uses AI to learn about some stuff now, like off air. But then he's just narrating it as a human. And there's just, I'm always going to have time in my day for the H.I. Sutton's of the world. Yeah. Look, it's a proliferation of podcasts on YouTube. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:03:25 Like, if I'm watching something, when I edit my own videos, like I will debate a single frame, a 24th of a second. Does this fuck up my timing? Sure. Yet then I'll click play and watch a three-hour podcast, which is just some dude talking for three hours because I care about the subject matter. And I think this is like the extraordinary range
Starting point is 02:03:43 in people's appetite for what they're willing to give their attention to. And the idea that there isn't room in there for AI content I think is misguided at best. Last question. What shirt are you wearing under that jacket? Well, I would like to, I do have a plug today. This isn't to sell anything because these aren't for sale. There we go.
Starting point is 02:04:05 Our former intern at Mod Retro Jeremy, who's now, his title on his business card is Special Operations. I'm not sure we knew what else to give him as a title when we put him on payroll. He designed this latest Mod Retro merch. Yeah, so everyone watching can screenshot it and as a fun game, try and identify each of these letters because they each come from a different piece of a game. Which one got us hung up this morning? I think the T we were going, or you knew the T. I identified the M, the O, the D.
Starting point is 02:04:41 I think I might have missed the E, the R. You knew the O, and I was off on the 64, but I was directionally correct. So, no spoilers, but plenty of teasers. Go figure it out. Compliments to Jeremy. Head over to Mod Retro. Get yourself a chromatic and start. Turn the t-shirt into a playable game.
Starting point is 02:05:00 Yes, yes. I'd download it. I'd flash it on to my card. Well, that's our show, folks. Thank you for tuning into TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11 am Pacific Sharp back in the TVPN Ultradome in Hollywood. And have a fantastic. I see a wild.
Starting point is 02:05:17 I see a wild. over here oh we gotta go see him you know uh there's he and Elon and Dario and Sam agree on a lot of stuff they do they do well we will see you tomorrow goodbye cheers folks fantastic

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