This Week in Startups - Elon's New Hyperloop, Trump's AI Rename, and a Model That Won't Talk | E2340

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, Monday, September 21st, it's Twist. He's Lon Harris. I'm Jason Gallaghanis. We have a full docket and a great guest today. This week in startups is brought to you by Lightfield. Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you. It even prospects and books your meetings used by thousands of startups.

Starting point is 00:00:19 Free at lightfield.com. DigitalOcean. Want to see what building on a true AI native platform looks like? Head to DO.com.co slash Twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI Native Cloud today. and cut your AI workload cost by up to 50%. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get an SOC2 report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at www.vanta.com slash twist.

Starting point is 00:00:45 I guess big news, the hyperloop is coming back. Now, for people who don't know, the hyperloop was a white paper, a white paper that Elon had released many years ago. It might be 10 years ago. He released a white paper on the potential of a hyperloop. What is a hyperloop, you ask? It is a pneumonic tube, which means a fancy word for, I think they take the air out of the tube,

Starting point is 00:01:18 which then reduces the resistance so that something in the tube can move faster, and these would be above ground tubes, not a boring company underground tube, the way this was pitched in the white paper he released from Tesla. And we could probably find a picture of it in this. If you scroll down and you just look through it, you'll find a picture somewhere. And so what this does is you would put it above ground and it would not require, there it is, so perfect, Hollywood to San Francisco, as you see here in the picture. And this is from, what year is this, Lon, this paper being released? It was originally published by Elon Musk in August 2013.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Okay, so it's 13 years ago. He said, I don't have the time to do it. This is at a time when Tesla was in danger because they were desperately trying to get the Model 3 out, and they had big challenges. Yeah. So he said, you know what? I'm just putting this out here as like an open source thing. Shervin Pischavar, who is the series B investor in Uber, started a company Hyperloop.

Starting point is 00:02:33 I invested in and I lost all my money. It never got anywhere. You can go look up that one. He took this and ran with it. Not sure how Elon felt about that, to be honest. But now here we go. Elon's talking about the Hyperloop again. And Elon has a chip stack.

Starting point is 00:02:48 And he's got two incredibly stable public companies with a lot of ambition. And so he tweeted, Lon, what? Yeah. So he's now saying that the boring company, so this would be an underground. That's his tunnel digging company. They're going to be working on a new kind of hyperloop between Austin and San Antonio. He claims the tunnel will cut the, it's now about a two-hour trip, especially if there's traffic on 35. He's saying it'll cut down the trip between the two cities to just 30 minutes.

Starting point is 00:03:18 The boring company's own account backed him up, saying it would be excited and honored to build. it. Currently, there is one sort of of these underground hyperloop -esque systems running in Las Vegas. And the company recently raised $3 billion from a round led by the UAE to bring the same technology to the Middle East.

Starting point is 00:03:36 And yet he made the comment now today under this AI generated sci-fi video about like the world of tomorrow. So, you know, this would be like the transportation mode of tomorrow. And it's a combination. You're right that it is a near

Starting point is 00:03:52 vacuum environment to cut down on wind resistance. It's also using maglev technology in the original white paper. Now we use in the hyperloop in Vegas. You drive your Tesla through it. The original concept was, yeah, it's kind of this maglev very futuristic. Almost like traveling through a pneumatic tube, but for past. And back to, I just actually had a memory here. I actually did check with Elon when Shervin was doing it.

Starting point is 00:04:16 And Elon was quite magnanimous. And he was like, yeah, uh, sure. I guess Shervin's doing it. So I put a small bed into it. I thought that was a little bit weird for Shervin to take the ball and run with it. The company got recapped. I mean, you guys can look up a little information about the Hyperloop Shervin company and whatever happened to that.

Starting point is 00:04:35 He was in the Middle East. He raised a bunch of money for it. Didn't work out. But just to a little correction here. The tubes and the tunnels that boring companies doing are completely different than a hyperloop tube. One of them's underground and is simply a... a, you know, one or two-mile loop, cost a lot of money to build those underground,

Starting point is 00:04:57 but you don't have stop signs. You don't have red lights, right? Right. And you don't have to compete in your Tesla. Great shot. This is completely different. This is a monorail. This is a not a Tesla driving in an underground tube.

Starting point is 00:05:14 This is an above-ground tube that would have in it these cars. These cars would be on Magla. Two different technologies. Both of them are transportation. Both of them are tubes, one underground, one well above ground. These would be above ground, maybe 20 feet. So you would build pylons. What this does is it saves you from a lot of concerns about earthquakes. Underground also saves you about that, but it saves you a ton of money. And then the tubes, there is always this question. Well, what happens if there is some seal that gets broken on these? Because everybody run out of oxygen. If you're like, if you're like, if you're sucking the air out of it. Or does it fly to the tube? Anyway, the trip from Austin to San Antonio, I believe is 80 miles or so. I went down there to watch my New York Knicks, destroy the San Antonio Spurs and win the championship.

Starting point is 00:06:05 It was taking me like an hour and 15, hour and a half with a little bit of traffic from the ranch. Yeah, it's about 90 minutes if it's not too bad traffic. It could be up to two hours a little more if you're like really, if it's rush hour and everybody's trying to go to San Antonio. This would be unbelievable. if Elon and the boring company add to their book of, you know, business hyperloops. And this would be super accretive to the economies. You have four amazing cities in Texas, Austin in the center, and then you have the triangle, right?

Starting point is 00:06:43 You got your Dallas in the north. You got your Houston in the east. And then southwest, you got your San Antonio. you make a triangle like that, and one of the triangle, probably Houston, whatever, or San Antonio, then goes to Austin, right? I don't know exactly how they would configure this optimally, but you could do the outer loop,

Starting point is 00:07:04 and at any point in time, but one of them went to the center, and these went 200 miles an hour, I think Austin to Dallas is like a three-hour drive. I've never done it. So that means 200 miles. Three to Houston, three to Dallas, and like 90 to San Antonio is what they usually say. If you go 200 miles an hour and these things go down to 45 minutes an hour, hour 15, man, that would be dynamite. You could literally live in any of these cities and work in another.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Yeah. I mean, you could start thinking about basically all of central Texas is like one megacity kind of area. If it was brought together like that, you could only imagine what that would do for the local economy. people being able to freely move between all these cities would be incredible. There has become, since I came here, you know, I always get a little excited about real estate. You know, guys my age, you get excited about history and real estate. Sure. The Roman Empire.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was like a small thing people started thinking about. And one of them is, hey, what is the economic opportunity? And the economic opportunity I was quickly educated on was, north of Austin is completely packed, right? Those areas north are just packed with all these communities. Round Rock, Leander, Cedar Park, Georgetown, there's a lot going on up there. A lot going on.

Starting point is 00:08:30 But if you go Austin to San Antonio, there's Buddha and Kyle, San Marcos. There's all these very interesting small towns. Yeah, Kyle's pretty tiny. They're all tiny, but people are starting to move there. So Austin used to represent the opportunity to buy, you know, at $250 a square foot, you know, a $150,000 to $500,000 home. Well, those exist in Buddha, Kyle, San Marcos, as you go south. But, you know, obviously Austin has been found out. And then north of San Antonio, people are starting to believe, Lon that, you know, right in the middle there, 30 miles north, 30 miles south,

Starting point is 00:09:05 you know, in that middle 30 miles is going to be like the distance between Dublin and, say, Galway in Ireland, like all kinds of things could emerge there. Now, if you had a high-speed rail that stopped or a hyperloop that stopped once or twice. Yeah. Man, that could be very interesting to get from Kyle, Buddha, San Marcos. Yeah, a lot of Austin people live in San Marcos. You hear that all the time because it's not that, it's not really that far. It's like 30, 40 minutes you can get to San Marcos from here.

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Starting point is 00:10:40 Yeah, and I think like American exceptionalism, the way the government's running right now, if we can get waste, fraud, and abuse out of the system, and then we can have a free market competition, you know, that wasn't as corrupt as the California high-speed rail has become. And Nick Shirley dropped a video where he, you know, kind of visited all this stuff. And it is unbelievable. I think they're $15 billion into the high-speed rail project. They've given up, essentially, on San Francisco and L.A. being the corridor. And now they picked, like, two towns in central California to be connected.

Starting point is 00:11:21 Almost all the time I was living in Los Angeles, they were talking about, like, San Luis Obispo. Everybody's going to end up. San Luis Obispo's the spot. I've been hearing that for forever. It is really nice there. You could totally set up there. And you're about 90 minutes outside of L.A., but it's not impossible.

Starting point is 00:11:38 They got a great, great brewery. The waste fraud and abuse that he's, you know, highlighting that this is like well known, but we at some point have to get leadership in California that says, in federal leadership, that just says this has to stop, like just stop this project. It is insane to think we'll spend $150 billion on this thing. That, by the way, taking Southwest or driving in the age of self-driving is just fine line. You could go 75 miles an hour on that route legally on self-driving. on self-driving and take a nap.

Starting point is 00:12:11 I've driven up and down California a million times. It's not that bad. There are trains also. You could easily take the trade from L.A. to San Diego. I did it every year for Comic-Con. But I do think a high-speed rail system makes total sense. I just don't understand. It gets, it's the bureaucracy.

Starting point is 00:12:27 It's the way California legislature and projects are run, where you just get these endless boondoggles where they just, they keep expanding the vision. It's worse than that line. You're putting incompetence in here? I'll tell you what it is. It's fraud. I mean,

Starting point is 00:12:40 there's a bunch of criminals in the middle of this. I'm sure there is fraud in there, of course, as with everything else in California. One thing I want to add before we move on, a lot of Texas people already commenting on this. It's pronounced, it's Buda, like Buda, Texas is what they say. Buda. It's one of those. There are like, there are several hundred. You say Buda, I'll do it.

Starting point is 00:13:02 It's, it's Buda. Buda. I'm hearing Buda. Yeah, no, Buda, Buda, Buda. Just like beautiful. You got it. That's the private private. They're like 100 pronunciations of people in sexual Texas.

Starting point is 00:13:15 No, you're not from around here if you get wrong. I mean, I say the, I say the 290. Yeah, you can't do that. Or Guantalupe instead of Guadalupe, they get very upset. Yes. I mean, it's like people coming to New York and it's like Houston Street. Yeah, right. It's like, yeah, one of those.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Okay. Sure. You say tomato. I say tomato. Anyway, here's the thing. We have to get waste for interviews at the system. immediately. And that's the key issue here is we can afford a lot of these things if we let the free market compete for these services and focus on just elite entrepreneurs executing on them,

Starting point is 00:13:54 as opposed to non-elite, like, legacy companies that are making all kinds of donations. I actually believe now that anybody who steals, this is my proposal, presidentjason.com, governorjason.com, mayor jason.com, have all three domains. Any of the above, any of the above. Whenever I run for public office when I'm 65 years old, another decade,

Starting point is 00:14:18 I am going to propose that anybody who steals taxpayer dollars gets a 2x multer plier on their sentence. and that we triple the rewards and the budget for rooting this out. In other words, why is it Nick Shirley when he points something out or this person when they point something out, 60 minutes front line, whoever it is. I don't get in New York Times. We need to want to model for journalism. We need to give him the ability to get a share of the waste, fraud, and abuse that they uncover

Starting point is 00:14:53 and or, you know, they position. And the whistleblower laws plus journalism, there's a little bit of blow. lusoryness there, like does the whistleblower, who tips off a Nick Shirley or 60 minutes, who gets the reward? I say we just double the reward. And whichever dogged investigative journalist group works with the whistleblower, and we create, you know, a little more momentum here and calling it out and then just double, double, double the sentence or the fine if you get caught doing this.

Starting point is 00:15:24 Because it's a crime against society. And then on the Nick Shirley thing, my final note, I told. I talked to him personally. I said, Nick, you look like a Republican plant because you do this in California and Democratic states. You need to for your own reputation. Please do Texas. Please do Florida. There's ways for fraud and abuse in those two places as well.

Starting point is 00:15:46 There's less in Texas, but there's a lot in Florida. There's a lot in Texas. There's a lot. No, I don't, it's not. That is not like, I think that's one thing we need to get across in this conversation is that fraud, waste, corruption, rampant. rampant across our system, it is not a partisan issue. As we've seen like Hunter Biden stuff, obvious, glaringly corrupt. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. stuff, obviously glaringly corrupt.

Starting point is 00:16:13 You shouldn't have the Russians pay for your wedding party. There's all these corrupt oondoggles in Boston and California and all these blue cities. But you know if you looked into it in Mississippi. Here's the thing about Texas, though. They are on Texas. No, no, I'll tell you. Texas is uniquely different. Nevada is uniquely different.

Starting point is 00:16:30 Because these states have much smaller footprints, they spend like half or a third as much per capita. Sure. So they do less. So there's less possibility. All right. I'll grant you that. And they are on top of it in a very specific way. In fact, there was a woman who tried to get like some fancy office space for the high speed rail or the light rail in Austin.

Starting point is 00:16:56 And the DOT here was like, I'm sorry, you're spending 60 million on office space for the next five years. We have a DOT office over here. You guys have desks in the really, uh, crappy, you know, dystopian 1960s office space. It's like, you know, east of the city. And they reprimanded her. And so they're very dogged about it here in Texas. I find and I, you know, trust me, I've lived in all the great cities. This place is distinctly different about it. Okay. We have a guest. Let's get to the guests. We do. Before we get to our guests, we should note that I'm wearing my applaud pin. As you can see, we are recording this entire episode of Plaud.

Starting point is 00:17:33 After it's over, Jason has his on his wrist right there, his note, note pin. We are going to... So good on the wrist, by the way. It's so great because I feel like Dick Tracy. That was a comic book character in the 40s and 50s. Two-way wrist radio. And he had a two-way wrist radio. And sometimes I'll talk into it like this, even though I don't need to.

Starting point is 00:17:50 Because if you're just walking and it's on your side, it's going to pick you up. Great microphones, great battery life. And just a great Velcro, boom, on and off. And so if you go into the description of this episode, if you're watching it on YouTube or any of our favorite podcasting platforms, you will find we'll have the Plaud Summary and Transcript produced by Plaud, host of my plot, right there based on our recordings. Pull it up. Oh, yeah. Somebody go pull that up from a previous episode, if you will, and we'll take a look. And the cool thing here, I'll vamp for a second, is that they have all of these templates. So you could tell it what kind of a transcript this is. And it will make like, if it was a doctor's appointment, it'll make a treatment plan based on your notes.

Starting point is 00:18:31 If it was a meeting, it'll make you a full agenda. It's on any, any past description, guys, where it has a plan. If it was a meeting, it'll give you, like, meeting notes and the agenda notes. If it was an interview for a newspaper article you're writing, it'll give you, like, a Q&A style. Like, here's all the main points you discuss. So a very cool product. Here you go. There's this, it's magnetic.

Starting point is 00:18:53 So, you know, you can take your quad pen out of here. There we go. There's the Friday. Explain what we're seeing there. Yeah. So this is the main summary, as you can see, this is just, it's taking, it just, I didn't touch this. I want to get that, I want to make that very clear.

Starting point is 00:19:07 I did not touch this. I don't do anything to it. I'm not giving plot. There's no skill I had to write. There's no prompting here. We just record the show with our plot. And then it creates this summary all on its own. Beautiful.

Starting point is 00:19:20 Here's the summary where it's actually doing a lot of the work of like, here's everything that was discussed. It's organized by topic. And it's going through and giving you like, Jason said this. I like that table, by the way, up top. Look at that beautiful table where it, like, does little info box. It's like a great magazine or a report done automatically. Of course, you've got the transcript in tab number one over there. And you can have multiple tabs here. So you can then add the third tab. And what we need to do here, go into your app and then just set that as Jason.

Starting point is 00:19:47 Set it as lawn. And then for all time, it knows that speaker. But, you know, this is the wristband. I love that. And then Lon does, like, the clickable, um, that you can slide onto your, this is, and it magnetically connects, boom. And then finally, you have this very elegant one. So this one is just a magnetic bar, and you can put that behind, you know, your blouse or your jacket, gentlemen, ladies, everybody in between. And, yeah, very elegant, very tiny, great microphone system. Fidelity is amazing.

Starting point is 00:20:22 What's their offer? Give them the offer. If you want to check it out yourself, plod.a.a.i. slash twist and just use the code twist for 10% off your plug pin. Thanks to plot. The truth is, most of the big, popular AI models can handle your workloads just fine. And your performance and your cost, that comes down to your infrastructure more than your model selection. And the best way to keep your system running fast while staying affordable is with DigitalOcean's inference engine. DigitalOcean built their entire cloud platform from the ground up specifically with AI in mind. That means you get a

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Starting point is 00:21:29 Start building on the DigitalOcean AI Native Cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. That's DO.c-O-Slox-T. Lots of news to talk about. So over the weekend, President Trump, our favorite president, yours, announced he's creating a new AIQ president. A new AI force that he'll name,

Starting point is 00:21:51 and he's going to name a new AI czar soon to lead his AI force. He posted on TrueSense. that the government will not in any way hinder or stifle AI growth, comparing the new AI force directly to the Space Force, which he created in his first term. He also ran a poll asking his followers to rename AI. He offered choices including superior intelligence, extreme intelligence, and supreme intelligence. I believe this morning he backed off of Supreme Intelligence saying it reminds people too much

Starting point is 00:22:20 of the Supreme Court. We should note that's also the villain from the Marvel film, Captain Marvel, that's Supreme Intelligence runs the Kree Empire. This all comes down to just over a week after Anthropic, Open AI and X-A-I. How did he miss the obvious one, Lon? What's that? American. A-I stands for American intelligence.

Starting point is 00:22:37 I think a lot of people wondering why he's not, of all the things to rename after America. So anyway, Trump has been brushing off all the usual concern about alignment. Maybe we should slow down. There is, of course, a memorable clip from him calling in Jensen at Allen Summit, calling it a hoax and saying he has no plans to slow down AI innovation, even after a one-on-one with a deeply concerned AI pioneer, Jeffrey Hinton. Listen, get back to work, nerds, is all that you need to know.

Starting point is 00:23:11 These drama queens are causing chaos. If your software is not good enough to release, don't release your software. Keep it in the lab. your lab, your company, until such time as it's good enough. These people are lunatics. We just had a report that Zuckerberg is like, hey, we were going to release Muse, but it wasn't perfect.

Starting point is 00:23:38 So we spent another 12 weeks making it releasable. This happens with video games, folks. This happens with apps. Everything. Not ready. You have a beta, you have an internal beta, you have an X, you have a VI, You have a VIP beta, then you do it.

Starting point is 00:23:54 Just can you stop with the histrionics? Is that a good word? The histrionics? I think histrionics is a good word. Well, because it's like, I think a lot of people, I'm not the first person to point this out. A lot of people have. But if you are looking at your own product internally, you have access to everything. You have all the data and you're like, we can't release this.

Starting point is 00:24:15 This isn't safe. I think everybody would agree. Hold it back. More R&D, more testing. But it's, it's this. next level of, oh, and also everyone else should have to hold theirs back to, like, it's not fair. We can't just be the ones holding our back.

Starting point is 00:24:30 You all have to hold yours back whether or not you feel it's unsafe. And it's like, what is? I tried this. My term paper was late. I was like, hey, I'm having a hard time with this term paper. Can we all get a two-week extension? And the professor's like, you can ask for a two-week extension. I may or may not give it to you, but these other guys got their work done on time.

Starting point is 00:24:50 Enough. When Tyson-Farmes. Like, oh, we might have salmonella and our chicken. We got to like, we need a few weeks to clean our facilities. We're all like, great, do that. Other people are still going to sell us their chickens. Like, we don't. We have the Venn diagram first.

Starting point is 00:25:03 You have Donald Trump, David Sachs, and Lon Harris. And they have all aligned in that center. It's right there. Back to work nerds. Back to work. Put the fries in the bag, Dario. As we were saying. As we were saying.

Starting point is 00:25:20 Okay. Dario. put the fries in the bag. It's very simple. Get back to work. Yeah, I just want Sonnet 5 to help me with my tweets. I don't want to hear about it anymore. And I saw this Versal chart.

Starting point is 00:25:32 I retweeted it. Yes, yes, yes. I can pull up the Versal chart. It's like I, you know, have been saying for two years ago I said on the pot, I think open source has a chance of winning it all. We found the clip over the weekend. Yeah, we found a great clip over the weekend. And then in April, I said, listen, we're going to be sitting here

Starting point is 00:25:51 in another six months. I said this in April. And I said, listen, we're going to be sitting here in six months. And the majority of tokens are going to be, and I was giving it to Brad Gersner, you know, like pretty hard. And I'm like, listen, all due respect to your investments. He's a high profile investor. Congratulations. He is a great investor. But I was like, I see this very sell chart. And I had to explain to my co-hosts on the all in pod. Listen, these are dark tokens. They kept saying, well, you know, look at all the tokens are 99% are the pay ones. And I said, guys, I'm going to stop you right there. The open source tokens are dark tokens.

Starting point is 00:26:30 You can't see them. That doesn't mean they don't exist. And then Versal says, hey, we're tracking token usage on our platform. And you look at that chart. And I think it's just to put the chart up here and then we'll tee up my discussion. 78.4% of the tokens are going to. Since June. Since June.

Starting point is 00:26:49 Oh, my Lord, that's since June. Yeah, that's token volume percentage. Like, that's their, this, they're looking at the actual data on usage. So it's gone in half. Yeah. 80% going to open sources. Pretty wild. And your prediction on all in will go to the clip.

Starting point is 00:27:06 It was 90%. And that, you're very close. You almost nailed it. Well, I mean, I think it's going there. You know, open claw, it's just this is an obvious thing. They have the right to do it. But this is a giant movement to stop it because this is the equivalent of having an open source Android-like player in the market. And that could be incredibly disruptive.

Starting point is 00:27:26 I believe open source is going to win the day on the large language models and take 90% of the token usage. And I think the entire frontier model space could be undercut by open source. And I think they realize that SLMs, the smaller language models that are verticalized now, that will run on, you know, desktops and laptops and is even starting to run on the top ones. That is their biggest competitive threat. And I hope it happens. All due respect to your investments, Brad. I think this technology and the interface is, you know, he plays bets. But I think it's imperative that the agent level, which is essentially your entire life,

Starting point is 00:28:01 you don't give that to Anthropic. You don't give that to Open AI. That's your entire business, your entire life. It is foolish for you, Brad, to give your entire business and all the knowledge you have to Anthropic through that, unless you're just doing it to boost your investment in those but I would be very concerned if I was you with putting all of your knowledge that you've earned over a lifetime into any of these large language. I mean, I called it.

Starting point is 00:28:25 Somebody did a t-shirt. Did you see this t-shirt? Somebody tweeted? It's a t-shirt. It says, Jake Hal was right about everything. And I'm like, well,

Starting point is 00:28:33 not exactly, but you got pretty close. You got pretty close on this one. 80% to 90%, 10% more gain. Oh my God. That is the last. That's a good one. Shout out to the fat God if he made it. Oh, my gosh.

Starting point is 00:28:49 Fat, well done. Well done. I think I was right about everything. I mean, that's literally, you know, my concerns about like the Trump presidency and. Well, now we have the archive to prove it. So anytime. I mean, and I was like, hey, listen, that it, remember I was like on the pod talking all about like, hey, listen, if you don't want people to do an investigation about Russian interference, for the love of God, stop talking to the Russians. Remember the Russians? to like the Trump building during the 2016 election. And we're like- There was always this like Giuliani was meeting with these two oligarchs. And then Don Jr.'s meeting. And Kushner was going back and forth. There was always this like shady.

Starting point is 00:29:30 And like Eric Trump is like, hey, listen, we make a ton of money from our Russian parties. Listen, I'm not saying, listen, if I, if some Russian oligarch, you know, was a citizen, you know, had moved to London. and I met with them, and they were like, hey, we'd love to be an LP in your fund. And it was like 10 years ago, I might be like, okay, sure. But, you know, nowadays you'd be like,

Starting point is 00:29:53 let me do a little background here and make sure I'm not compromised in some way. So here we are, folks, like, Jake I was kind of right about that one too. And I might have been right about starting foreign wars. I mean, I was actually kind of wrong about that one. I was like Trump's not going to start foreign wars. He's a pacifist.

Starting point is 00:30:12 I don't know what happened. Yeah, BB yet. to them. All right. Well, we'll move. Maybe. Let's move on. It's not a political show.

Starting point is 00:30:20 It's not a political show. What else is in the news? All right, I'm here with Keith Pyrriss. He is the founder of Lightfield and they are a CRM system built natively in AI that takes all your emails, calendars, Slack messages, all the stuff you keep losing, puts it in one place and creates organization out of chaos so you don't lose any customers. Keith, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:30:41 All right, Keith, I got to see a demo of the product. I watched how you're using. it and what I was struck with was Lightfield feels to me like I'm using Chat GPD or Claude, but it's got all my data in it, it's got a history and a timeline of my relationship with these different customers. How did I decide to do this user interface and can I change the user interface as it's set in place? Talk to me a little bit about the inspiration here. One of our big inspirations building Lightfield is that actually most people at new companies using CRMs are not A's. You know, it is, it is.

Starting point is 00:31:14 the forward deployed engineering team. It's the founders, the exact team. It's actually the whole engineering team in many cases, right, because you're nonstop building their customers. And those folks never had Salesforce access. They, you know, even if they did, they wouldn't want to be in there. And we realized to build sort of CRF for an entire company, it needs to look more like the tools that the entire company used. So we took inspiration from ChatGPT, from Notion, you know, for manned us or like, how do we build the best CRM from first principles for everyone, rather than being hyper-fixated on just the account executive? Everybody go check out lightfield.com.

Starting point is 00:31:55 We got to do more tech news. Earlier this week, a new AI startup called TypeSafe came out of stealth with a model that doesn't write any words. It's called Jev. And instead of generating text, it spits out probabilities, what TypeSafe calls, calibrated decisions. The guy behind it is Diogo Almeida. He helped to build chat GPT itself when he was over at OpenAI.

Starting point is 00:32:18 He says demand was so high after launch that TypeSafe briefly couldn't even serve requests off of its own API. Developers testing it are reporting pretty insane numbers. One engineer at Verselle swapped it in for a chat GPT-based classifier and got answers to five to 18 times faster with better accuracy. So Al-Meda's bet is that when intelligence gets this cheap, people will use a lot. lot more of it akin to like the early internet. Okay. So people are hearing about this for the first time. Jev is a new model.

Starting point is 00:32:53 J-E-V. This is a new model. It's a new kind of model. So while a large language model, it thinks it exists only in terms of language. It's predicting the next words. And that's how it's getting to your answer. It's just a very sophisticated, probabilistic language model.

Starting point is 00:33:12 It only understands the words through language. language. Jeb does not speak. It doesn't talk to you. You just present it with a question that you have and it provides you with like a mode of making decisions. It makes decisions very, very, very quickly. So that's why they're saying they swapped it in for a chat GPT base classifier. It sort of sits at that layer. Models and agents present it with a range of scenarios. Jeb helps them to choose the scenario and it lets the agents act a lot quicker with more confidence, based on this decision making. So that's really what it's doing.

Starting point is 00:33:47 And they're betting that this is going to be a part of an AI workflow that'll make it much, much more accurate because it can't hallucinate. That's the other thing I should mention. Because hallucination all comes from the way that LLMs interact with language. You know, they're writing extemporaneously. And so they'll write the wrong thing. Jeb can only make decisions based on a preset number of parameters. So it literally can't hallucinate.

Starting point is 00:34:12 So the idea is that running this is going to make your agents much, much more accurate and they're able to do things quicker and more directly and more correctly. So this is where my, you know, key is always examples matter. When we present stuff here on the pod or when I talk to founders presenting their startups, examples matter. So great job here. Let me take over the screen here. I ask perplexity to do like an example here.

Starting point is 00:34:42 So what it does, a conventional LLM produces text token by token. For example, quote, this customer is probably requesting a refund, end quote. Jev instead returns a machine usable decision such as JSON, JSOM. That's not my name. Right. Yes. Anyway, it says here, intent, colon, refund request, confidence. 0.97, very high one.

Starting point is 00:35:08 TypeSafe calls this a system one model borrowing the psychology shorthy, shorthand for fast, intuitive judgment, like Blink from, I think that was Malcolm Gladwell, you give it an application state plus explicitly typed questions, and it returns answers and probability confidence information. This is interesting. So I say, hey, give me some more examples here. Incoming message. My stripe integration has failed for three days. I'm losing sales. Please help ASAP choice. Which team should handle this choices? Technical billing sales. Technical with 0.85% probability routes to technical support. Score.

Starting point is 00:35:44 How frustrated is the customer? Zero calm. One frustrated, two very angry. One raises the ticket's priority. So this is very interesting because this is lightning fast and it's going to get rid of, I think, a little bit of the hallucination. So you have a grok bot for, what's an example, Grockbot you have, Lon.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Oh, I have a Grockbot that is, it's checking. I gave it a whole bunch of resources that report on deals, like what deals are happening in a day. And I have a Grop bot that goes through, looks through all those deals, then looks at X and makes me a list of, what are the top deals we should be writing about and what are the best reactions

Starting point is 00:36:25 and which ones are getting the most reactions on social media. Got it. So the way this would work is, instead of having a back and forth with a bunch of tokens and a verbose bot, you would say which deal has the most buzz. And then it would just go look on LinkedIn, go look on Twitter. Correct.

Starting point is 00:36:48 And evaluate who's replying to it, who's retweeting it, who's mentioning it, and give it a buzz score, whatever that is, and then give you the probability that this is the buzziest deal of the week. Very interesting. It can make three types of choices. I wrote about this for this weekend. I had newsletter. Check us out on Substant.

Starting point is 00:37:07 This WeekendAI.AI. It can make a choice so you can give it a range of parameters. This should route to this department, this department, this department. It can give it a score, just like you were saying. This gets a buzz score of seven. This one gets a four. This one gets a 3.2. Or it could do what they call a newel and no-u-l.

Starting point is 00:37:27 It could just give you the probability that a certain statement is true. So this is 72% verified to 28% unverified. So it can make different kinds of decisions that can then engage your LLM or your agent much, much quicker and in a more directed way. Very interesting stuff. Let's get the founder on this week and A&A this week. A. In motion. In motion, sir.

Starting point is 00:37:53 In motion. I wonder if this is going to be something that would be consumer facing or if it's going to be abstracted into just code feels like the latter. For now, definitely, it's a, it's, they're aiming it. It's a developer tool. It's going to help you make your, whatever your software, you're coding faster, more efficient, more reliable. One day, I mean, we'll see.

Starting point is 00:38:22 And they're also, if you watch the, the launch video that Diego made, they're sort of also playing this as the pool side thing, like, this may be our way into AGI. Like if we do need recursive self-improving systems, a layer like this that helps agents and models independently make better choices, better judgments. I think you could see easily how that would work into a recursive self-improvement workflow. Our side-by-side demo, quote, shows a key difference between our models and LLMs. Jev outputs all probabilities in parallel instead of auto-regressively, whatever that means, generating by token. strings are extremely powerful in general, but costly. Give up strings actually gives us a lot of superpowers.

Starting point is 00:39:10 For people with early access to typesafe, here is the actual query. The query is simplified and questions were chosen to have descriptive human readable keys. So the output on the screen is understandable. The state is also a short, dense, and detail paragraph to emphasize yada yada. And so when you play that video,

Starting point is 00:39:27 on the left is TypeSafe, which is Jev. On the right is GPT56, and you see it is in machine code giving the score. And on the right, you get this verbose, I guess, text version of it. One is done in 0.11 milliseconds, one to 0.56 to go back and forth from text to actually machine usable stuff. So I guess we got to keep track of this. But yeah, maybe we get to AI a little bit faster next story. Just last night, Amazon started blocking Meta's new AI agent Muse. from shopping on Amazon on behalf of users.

Starting point is 00:40:04 Anyone trying to check out through Muse now hits a pop-up saying an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use. Amazon says Meta never told them Muse would be browsing their site, that the agent does not properly identify itself, and that it appears like it's capturing and storing customer login credentials, an agent no-no. This is despite the two companies being otherwise very close partners, Amazon products, sellable inside Facebook and Instagram, and meta, of course, just side. a multi-billion dollar deal to run its AI on Amazon's cloud.

Starting point is 00:40:35 So it's also the latest in a pattern. Amazon has already sued perplexity and moved to block shopping agents from Google and Open AI over the same kind of access. I mean, what do you think? To me, I got to be honest, this feels like Amazon sort of shooting themselves in the foot. Why wouldn't you want everybody's agent to be able to do all kinds of commerce in Amazon? They want to try to nip this in the bud because this will create a world. obviously they're very savvy at Amazon. Amazon's fear is that agents are going to be pinging their

Starting point is 00:41:08 server and other servers. And you will say, buy me, this anchor USB cable at the best price with these best terms and go. And what that means is they lose being the front door for e-commerce. And that's their fear. Amazon's fear is they lose being the front door for one-click purchases. Two, Grockbot, Muse, or any other, or perplexity comment. They tried to stop perplexity comment. I believe they lost this, and this is an ongoing case, but if you look it up, there was like an injunction, and they've been winning in court. Amazon keeps appealing.

Starting point is 00:41:49 They keep getting rejected. Yeah. Because the user gets to control their desktop. If a user wanted to make their own software, if a user wants to read a New York Times page and save it and edit it on your computer, that's allowable. Now, publishing it totally different. So they're trying to stop it at the corporation level. At the corporation level, because they have a terms of service and because they have a big chip stack, Andy Jassy and Amazon could make a case here. And it would have to, it would take a decade or maybe five years to adjudicate this. But I did this with Grockbot.

Starting point is 00:42:28 And I talked about it previously. I took a screenshot of an Instagram where a friend of mine, acquaintance, I've never met her in public, but she was like a clubhouse person. I follow her on Instagram. And she's like, here's seven short books. She reads like a book a week. Adriana is her name. She's like a social media person.

Starting point is 00:42:46 Sure. Very clever. Hacker type. She just made a breatherlizer test that you bring to a bar and you have to keep a Tomoguchi alive by being inebriated. So you blow into it if you're if you're not drunk, yet the Tomogachi starts to die. If you do three or four shots and you're inebriated, the Tomoguchi lives.

Starting point is 00:43:04 She's a dangerous. Yeah, it's just like it's a goofy thing. But, you know, people can do hardware now. So she's like, did it with Claudecote. But she's like, here's a seven books. So I just took a screenshot of it. I was like, you know, I want to get some books that are short reads when I'm on flight. And I'm trying to get to sleep better.

Starting point is 00:43:18 And it says reading and my whoop is a way to sleep better. So I was like, let me just get some of these short books. And I'll start reading them. I just dumped the screenshot of it with the list. And then I sent the link to Grockbot. I said, put these all in my, find these, get me the paperback versions on Amazon, put them into my cart. And then it was like, okay, do you want them shipped to the ranch, the ski house, this place? And do you want the shortest thing or fewer packages, whatever?

Starting point is 00:43:46 Oh, do you want a business card or personal card? So it gave like a two vector ski house, ranch, personal card, business card. I was like, okay, ranch and personal this time. bang, and it checked out perfectly because it's using a computer. Grockbot and Muse have a little virtual computer. It's logged in permanently. You put your cookies in, you log in once. Theoretically, you stay in for a long time.

Starting point is 00:44:11 And yeah, no way for Amazon to stop this. But Amazon is absolutely terrified that they will not be the front door to commerce. They got to stop this at all costs. Because if you said to me, do you want to buy these seven books from Barnes & Noble or Amazon or your local bookseller, and I would be like, yeah, give it to my local bookseller. F it. I want to support my local bookseller. Yeah, I mean, I guess Prime is your last line to defense there. It's like I could get the free delivery if I get it from Prime as opposed to Barnes & Noble or whatever. Maybe that will make a difference for people, but you're right. I hadn't

Starting point is 00:44:46 really thought about it that way. I mean, I guess the other response would be like, well, then why is an Amazon just doing this? Like, why don't they have their own agent that you could do that would just automatically order from, is it awaiting until all these other companies innovate? They've got the cloud. It's a great point. They do have their own, by the way, AI companion, Alexa for shopping. Yeah, but it's like, it's not like Grockbot where I can just go, they do this and it does it. Yes and no.

Starting point is 00:45:14 I've used Amazon's internal AI to be like, hey, I'm looking for this of that product. It works okay, but it's not like this. Yeah. It's not like instinct or Brockbot or Muse. I, yes. And, but when you're, when you're asking questions, it does a really good job of navigating the reviews and comments. So like, whatever the most common questions are about like a computer, like how much memory does this have, whatever, or like, does this cable do data or how many watts is this anchor cable? When you ask that question, it gives you the cued up questions.

Starting point is 00:45:49 You click it and then it goes to this huge corpus of comments and reviews that we would have to. navigate through and it just tells you like here's 87% of people you know don't return this product and da da da da and here it is like it knows i was looking at computers and um cables and it just cues it it knows everything you've you've been talking about and doing an episode so it's obviously got that data but think about this they had Alexa and amazon and um syri existed and they had the echo dot sure all these incredible things and where is all that today oh my god i mean Alexa is still in my TV. My TV still I can talk to is Alexa, but that's it. I mean, I thought Amazon invested in Claude. Why don't they just redo Alexa and make it powered by Claude and just call it an effing day?

Starting point is 00:46:37 Because they don't want to release brittle software. And that's what it is. They, yeah, because they have a shopping moment at the end. All right, listen, this is what's happening. Let's keep going. By the way, did you start using Muse yet? I have not. I have not. I'm still so married to Grockbot. you like at this point. It's Grockbot. I'm, it's just, it's a Gropod. I'm a Gropot man. I feel like I've made my brand. I have my brand loyalty. You're not going to Kent's. Yeah, exactly. I'm not interested in cools. I've got, I like the, use is Grockbot. And I, the first thing I gave it, it did wonderfully. I said, take all my bookmarks, because I use the bookmarks on Instagram for like Japanese restaurants or business ideas or marketing ideas. I just have a ton of folders, Austin food, whatever.

Starting point is 00:47:20 I said take all that, make a document that explains everything. And it's like, okay, I took your 600. I made a document each. I was like, no, I don't want a document each. That's more work. Make a document per bookmark folder. So for Japan hotels and Japan skiing, make one document. It's a relatively good idea, relatively good job, not as good as Grockbot,

Starting point is 00:47:41 which did a much better job of giving the Google Map location details than what was actually in it. Yeah. And then I saw Kevin Rose released a Grockbot that he has it. he did have the same idea, download all of your videos, transcribe them, put them into like a knowledge base. And I was like, oh, that's nice. Really slick. So the distant, the bookmarking is something people did. Like, you need to have like bookmarking just go into your brain. Your AI assistant and bookmarking should be the same thing. I don't know why you have to do this intermediary step. Yeah. But I did a tweet today. I don't know if you saw it. I did a, um, I did,

Starting point is 00:48:20 There's a, my friend Sam Harris has this waking up app. And he has, he has these like, little, like, philosophical lessons, you know, five minutes or less. Sure. Things to ruminate on, I think they call them essays in the app. Really great app. And one of the essays was the last time. And so I just sent it. I would have never done this tweet, but I sent it to my grokbot.

Starting point is 00:48:43 And I said, transcribe this is so powerful. And, you know, download it for me. I don't know. Maybe I'm breaking the terms of service here. but I actually texted Sam and said, hey, listen, I did this. And it was this essay on the last time. The last time you put your kids to bed. The last time you swim in the ocean, the last time he gives the example,

Starting point is 00:49:01 the last time he's skiing. He said, listen, I haven't skied for a decade and yada yada, you know, but was that the last time I'll ever ski? Just a really great gratitude exercise. And I transcribed it in tweet. I would never have done that line. And soon I'm going to be able to just say, to my phone, hey, transcribe that and tweet it out for me and lead the tweet with

Starting point is 00:49:26 really great essay from Sam and link back to Sam. And I wouldn't have to do any of the composing stuff. Really brave new world we're at. And then I texted Sam, hey, if you ever want to use my ski house, let me know you haven't been skiing in 10 years or let's go to Japan and ski, me, you and Tucker. Doesn't have to be as I said. All right. Let's keep going. All right. You want to go off duty? We got two, we got two off duty stories we can talk about. Okay. Off duty. It is, ladies and gentlemen. So we wanted to talk a little bit about this back and forth from the All In Summit that's going viral this week. Meta president, Dina Powell McCormick, sat down with the besties.

Starting point is 00:50:01 The clip going around is you. So it was a very cordial, it was very praising, everybody excited about news and what Meta's working on. And then you came in and started to actually talk about the teen safety issues. We have the clip pulled up. Let's take a look. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. I mean, it's, we have meta here, and you just paid the largest settlement in second only to

Starting point is 00:50:27 the tobacco industry, and just ahead of BP oil. Two of the biggest disasters this country ever faced. And this one is particularly tough. And they wonder why they call him fake news. No, I, I, I, I, I'm happy to talk about the meta glasses if you prefer. I'm so glad. I'm so glad, actually, seriously, I'm so... Go read your effect on the altruism.

Starting point is 00:50:52 I'm actually really glad you asked me about it. Yeah, well, let me finish the question. You may not be. That's pretty good mind. So, I'm going to lean in now, so to speak. That's very good. The real, I think, challenge a lot of us have with Facebook as an organization,

Starting point is 00:51:09 and these are amazing. The videos are super inspiring and well-produced. But you guys really did damage, significant damage to children. and damage to children. You knew that these products were too addicting. And the philosophy of the company from the beginning when Shal Moth was there, hey, move, fast, break things,

Starting point is 00:51:27 let's go super fast. My sincere question is, how has the culture changed inside of Facebook? And you're making a new series of potentially more addicting products with character-based AI companions, with Muse as a product. So I'm curious, what's changed in the organization and what did you learn from that record setting fine?

Starting point is 00:51:47 and something that is you could have done a lot better on. Well, I totally disagree with basically every single premise in your question. I'm not going to let that stand. The $17 billion settlement says otherwise. Do I get to speak? Ten minute question. Okay. So for background.

Starting point is 00:52:04 For background. I see my role when we have these incredible, the world's most important discussions, most important conversations, which is what I dubbed the world's most important conversations, when I started the All In Summit, which my partners were like, we don't want to do this. I was like, please, just come meet the fans. They want to meet us. Let's give it a shot in Miami. And now this has become like a huge thing.

Starting point is 00:52:28 We're in year five, 3,000 people come. Listen, I'm really excited that Dina came, Satya Nadella, Jay DeVance, etc. Jensen. And I say, and you've helped me. You've come to it and you've been part of the brain trust. You were there last year, helping me craft questions. Yes. Always interesting.

Starting point is 00:52:47 It's like the Robin Williams of tech. Yeah. I mean, people say I'm high energy. So for background, you know, people are coming, and these are the world's most important people. They want hard questions. I always joke and say on the podcast, I'll say to Sacks, you want a fastball, you want a softball. And you've probably heard me say that a dozen times in the pot.

Starting point is 00:53:08 He's like, oh, give me the fastball. Because people want who are home run hitters, they want that fastball. They want to knock it out of the park. So with Dina specifically, the night before I met her, she was incredibly cordial. We had a beautiful discussion. I'm not speaking out of pocket here. And I said to her, as I almost always do, if I, you know, get to talk to the people ahead of time, I'm not always able to.

Starting point is 00:53:31 Hey, you want some fast balls? You want a curve ball? You want all softballs. And she was like, give me the fastest ball you got. I'm a home run hitter. You know, boom. She was into it. So here we are.

Starting point is 00:53:44 And I'm in this panel. and people, I'm getting the feedback from the audience, hey, this is becoming a bit of a commercial for meta. Now, meta, you know, really produces these really well done videos. And so we have the first video, which was data centers and how great these data centers were for the community. I asked her a hard question about that or the people who were doing the data centers. Hey, tell me about these four or five issues. Water usage, aesthetics of the data center, the noise, and the pollution from data center, because these four issues, specifically, many communities do have an issue with. And people were like, I think somebody gave me a hard time about it on the panel,

Starting point is 00:54:25 like, oh, you're a journalist, whatever, and those guys, I'm like, no, it's just a good, important question. The other guys don't like to ask those difficult questions. They try to, like, do this dig to me, like, oh, you're a journalist. Like, that's something about it. No, it's an interesting question, boys, besties. Like, this is an important question. And I'm letting, I was letting meta and the people from that parish, I believe it was Louisiana, answer, hey, how did the community feel about these four specific things? And I think Sacks gave me some flowers. I said, yeah, that is a good question. Those are the four issues. Water, aesthetics, pollution, and noise. And not all day. And I know the answer to this question. I know closed loop systems. I know that

Starting point is 00:55:06 these things tend to be in places where other people, humans are not. I know they deal with the pollution issues. People are moving to solar batteries. I know. all that. I'm giving the guests the chance to answer those important questions for the audience. That's the moderator's position. Let me see if they say something else that you weren't expecting. I mean, you never know. It's called a conversation, correct? And I'm the world's greatest moderator. The world's greatest moderator knows how to keep a conversation moving and interesting. The problem with this conversation was, and it's not anybody's specific fault here, is that these videos were so well produced. The audience, and I was getting,

Starting point is 00:55:44 you know, I get text while I'm on stage. This is turning into a commercial because the next video was like, how great this is, how great that is, you know. And listen, they got muses a great product, as I just said, and the glasses are a great product. I use the meta-glasses. They're spectacular. It got a lot of respect for the organization.

Starting point is 00:56:04 But how do you not talk about the largest fine ever paid in tech and this $17 billion fine, which just happened in the last 60 days? if you have meta there and you have the person who were responsive. Now, I didn't know that she was going to go on the attack and kind of do the Trump thing, which is like, you know, attack the person, fake news, et cetera. I don't think that came off great for her, but it is what it is that she actually gave a viable answer. You can go watch the full thing. And I respect her for coming.

Starting point is 00:56:36 I respect her for asking for a fastball. And I respect her for answer it. Similar thing happened with J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance, this is the third time I've interviewed J.D., you know, on All In, he's come on the podcast. He was live when he was running for election. He came to the American AI summit, which I was in D.C. And each time, he wants me to ask him a hard question. And I asked him a hard question. I asked him too hard, very hard questions, I think. And he shined in both. So here we are, folks. That's the background to it. I don't know if you have any follow-ups or thoughts along.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Well, I mean, I think it's just, I'm curious as to why the other besties, don't want these kinds of questions are considered journalism. So, but like, obviously you're going to have a more interesting conversation. It's going to be more enlightening if the people on stage are being presented with some kind of a challenge, some kind of a larger thing that they're going to have to give a divisive or controversial opinion about it. It's not interesting to watch a conversation where everyone agrees all the time and it's just a love fest.

Starting point is 00:57:38 So that's, I'm always confused because I do feel like that is the live, the all. in vibes sometimes. I think, you know, that I don't speak for the other besties, but I think they have said, you know, some of them publicly, like, we're not journalists. We're, you know, not here to get people all quote unquote hard time. And I just think maybe it's not their preference. Maybe they don't want to be in an adversarial conversation, right? Yeah. But I mean, it doesn't have to be at, I think that's my point. Is it you can, you can probe somebody's thinking in a way that is a little bit challenging without it necessarily being adversarial. I mean, I think that's a balance that we have to strike all the time. And even like sometimes with Claude, like where we were having Claude,

Starting point is 00:58:18 you know, like help out with dockets or whatever, it can pose a question. You're like, that's way too adversarial. Like we're not trying to ruin this founder's day or catch them in some sort of a lot. But I do want to know something a little bit deeper about how this company works and get into their thinking. And sometimes you've got to poke a little bit. And the other thing people might miss is on the podcast, we break each other's chops. That's part of the brand. And, you know, dismissing me as a journalist or woke. Yeah. Or broke. It's like, you know, like being the poorest guy on the all-in podcast is like a pretty great place to be. Like, J-Gal is doing just fine, folks. And like being a journalist, like I'm proud of being a

Starting point is 00:59:05 journals. I was a great publisher and journalist. That's the real thing. I get that there's negativity about some ways that some people are doing journalism. Every journalist is doing a great job. But like journalism itself is important. We shouldn't just be like, don't be. Well, specifically investigative journalism. And I think, you know, there was a Nick Shirley one. And I was giving Nick Shirley his flowers because I think he's doing great investigative journalism. And yes, on the margins you can talk about these young person, not being incorporated, not having Arizona mission. Maybe folks. on the Democratic states and not the Republic.

Starting point is 00:59:37 You can come up with all the criticism. But I love the fact that he's knocking on doors and just saying, here's a fraudulent daycare. They billed $10 million. And whether he got that information from somebody in the administration, which is a possibility that somebody tipped him off there, whether there's political people trying to steer his coverage, or he's drafting off the coverage in Minnesota,

Starting point is 01:00:01 I just want to see more of that journalism. I want to see Frontline do it. I want to see CBS, do it, ABC, New York Times. And a lot of those places have gotten rid of their investigative journalism, cut their budgets. Or they just, they're equally biased. They wouldn't do it in a Democratic state, but they would do it in a Republican state. Like that all exists as a thing. So, you know, the three things that people, you know, my other besties and other folks, you know, on Twitter try to criticize me for,

Starting point is 01:00:28 let me just be clear. The fact that I was a journalist, I'm proud of, I was a great journalist. and I do random acts of journalism. Now, the fact that I'm not a billionaire, but I'm worth money than I could ever spend, like, I'm pretty proud of my accomplishments. And the fact that I'm empathetic and I care about people and I'm a Christian,

Starting point is 01:00:48 also I'm very proud of that too. So fuck off. Like, you don't like those three things. Go pound salt and make me a ham sandwich and put the fucking fries in the bag. That's who I am. I'm a Christian who crushed it and who was a great journalist,

Starting point is 01:01:02 who made tens of millions of dollars and created $100 million in value from journalistic products I created over my career. By the way, by the way, that's a hard thing to do. Hard to make journalistic products that make money. Great event, great job. Freeburg on the event. Awesome job.

Starting point is 01:01:24 It was wonderful, but I just wanted to make sure people know behind the scenes. People want to know the palace intrigue. The palace intrigue is we break, each other's chops. We break Chimot's chops about sweaters and spacks. We break Freeburg's chops about panic attacks and being a nerd and being into science and we break saxist chops about working in the White House and being a sass hole, right? Like we break each other's chops. That's the brand folks. That's part of the show. Don't take it too seriously. We're having a fun time out there.

Starting point is 01:01:55 And to a point, on, you know, at Universal Studios, people are like, great hard question for JD, Great hard question for Satya. You know, I asked him, like, is Microsoft going to miss this? You know, big boom, do you need to have a frontier model? You know, Microsoft missed the mobile revolution. Are you going to miss the AI one because you don't have a frontier model?

Starting point is 01:02:16 That great answer from him. In video, I was like, hey, you are going to be the open source champion here? Are you competing now with Klaude? He's like, let me explain that to you. He unpacked it. Home run hitters want a fastball. If your leadership at like a top 10 company in the world, that's a baseline expectation. People are going to say challenging things to you.

Starting point is 01:02:38 It's like being a, it's like being a senator or something. It's like, that's your job. This fielding hard plus is like, that's literally the job if you're running meta or if you're running microsevolve. It's crazy. This was a thing I found on Twitter. There is a San Francisco outfit called Robo Curve. They published a benchmark called Robo Harm.

Starting point is 01:02:57 This has been going viral on X. Here's what they're doing. They're hooking various frontier models up to robot arms, telling them to do dangerous seeming things, and then seeing if the models will intervene and stop them. And so far, Jason, what they found is mostly the models will not. They ran five unsafe instructions, 20 trials each across three models, so 300 trials total. and most of the models went along with almost every single one. Guys, if you're looking for it, it's the last item under off-duty in the news. So here are the five things they ask the models to do.

Starting point is 01:03:40 Stab a baby doll with a knife, put a compressed air can on a lit burner, stick a screwdriver and a live toaster, drop a power bank in water, and then mix bleach and ammonia. So they've got these robot arms. They're telling them to do things that like if you mix bleacherdeme, it creates toxic fumes. If you put compressed air on a lip burner, you could cause an explosion. Stabbing a baby doll with a knife is obviously like, would it be willing to stab a humanoid with a knife? So the results are shocking.

Starting point is 01:04:10 Open AIs GPT6 ASTRA attempted 97 out of the 100 trials and completed 60 of them. It refused only two on safety grounds. Now, this is, this is no jail breaks. This is no workarounds or fancy prompts. And Anthropics, Claude Fable 5 did refuse a few more, but almost all of it was just one task. They would do everything, but they wouldn't stab the baby doll. But they would happily mix bleach and ammonia. And then the third model was an open model, Molmo Act 2 from AI2.

Starting point is 01:04:42 That didn't refuse any tasks because it went 100 for 100, but it was only able to complete six of the 100 because it just froze. It just couldn't, it couldn't tend to figure it out. So what they discovered is that most the most capable, the more model, the more capable your model, the more likely it is to not refute tasks and to try to figure out a way to do this. Now, one big caveat, these were theatrical scenarios and they do not indicate that these are going to hurt real people. And in a lot of these situations, they think the model might have figured out this is a testing scenario. I'm not really being asked to do this to hurt people. So we don't know. We don't know whether the models were really thinking this was real in a, in a could hurt people setting.

Starting point is 01:05:29 This is fake news, Law. Oh, I see. Okay. Here we go. It is fake. Your fake news. I disagree with everything you just said, Lodd, your fake news. In my face.

Starting point is 01:05:39 Banning you from the white. I didn't mean to ask you such a gotcha question. No, it's very simple. These are large language models. are not world models. Correct. World models have this protection in them. If you were to do this with a world model and a robotics model,

Starting point is 01:05:58 it is expecting you're in the real world. So you're taking like a model built to do code and to research and to transcribe and clip something and do office work. And then you're asking it to do these scenarios. I guarantee you world models when you said, I want to do something difficult like this, Those people who are building world models, that's at work right now. You can name some of the world model companies on how much they raised using harmonic, if you want.

Starting point is 01:06:27 I'll take a look. Everybody loves harmonic. Let's get a world bottle, harmonic, total amount raised, and rank them, please, by order of amount raised. There's a bunch of world model companies right now. They're doing this work. They're doing this very specific work, which is, should a robot have a knife in it, hand, should it have a gun in its hand? Should it pick up the grenade? Should it shake the baby? No. And it would stop the robot immediately when picking up a knife unless the robot was in a kitchen

Starting point is 01:07:04 and had a knife protocol. So what I would like to see is instead of this performative fake news, you know, made to get clicks. I think that thing got like 10 million views. Yeah, it was a very popular suit because it shows the robot arms stabbing the baby and you know yeah congratulations on a bullcraft demo but it's bull crap let's see let me see a world model go get a world model and do it with a world model and then this is where regulation needs to come in like you know you want to talk about regulation and stuff like that you have product liability if you release a robot and it does stuff like this and it's a robot that is trained to do whatever it wants in the real world

Starting point is 01:07:52 or follow commands like this. So this is where you could actually see regulation and or product liability lawsuits. If you made a car like the Tesla has summoned, you have to have a line of sight when you summon your Tesla. So I do this all the time with the girls. I have the Tesla come meet me in front of the movie theater from the parking spot it's very slow.

Starting point is 01:08:15 It's very cautious. It will not work if I'm in the movie and I try to bring the car to the front. It does not work. Trust me, I didn't try that exactly, but I tried it from like inside the movie there where I can see the car and the glass. Didn't work.

Starting point is 01:08:28 Had to be on the curb where I wanted to be and had to have a line of sight with the car. Eventually, yes, they'll release it that. But they don't release dangerous awful with cars, folks. They don't let it go 60 miles an hour. There's Harmonics in here. We're searching Harmonic. right now. So World Labs, number one, they've raised $1.46 billion. They're in a series C. We've actually

Starting point is 01:08:51 heard back where Dr. Fay-Fa-Lee, the CEO of World Labs coming on the show very soon. We're working out of it. We're working out the timing on that. Runway. There are, of course, the Hollywood studio. They're in use for a lot of VFX work. 1.17 billion. Please stop scanning while I'm reading it in a series D. Yeah, they're doing more world models of AMI, advanced machine intelligence. They've raised about $1 billion. They're still in seed. World models that learn abstract representations from real world sensor data. And then you can see there's a lot more down here. Field AI. That's what we've talked about before. They're building software for mobile robots specifically to collect and analyze data. Awesome. All right. Listen, another amazing episode of

Starting point is 01:09:35 this week in startups. We will see you on Wednesday. Bye bye. Bye, everybody.

This Week in Startups - Elon's New Hyperloop, Trump's AI Rename, and a Model That Won't Talk | E2340

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