This Week in Startups - Getty to sue Stability AI, $MSFT to incorporate OpenAI into Azure + new climate startups | E1659

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

First up, Molly and Jason cover a bunch of news happening in the world of AI, Getty Images is preparing to sue Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI (8:47), Meta is partnering with Shutterstock to train its AI models, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the company will integrate OpenAI’s software into Azure - it’s cloud computing platform - and ALL it’s other products. (36:07) Then, we cover two new sustainability startups! Mill is a company started by former Nest co-founders making an automated compostability trash can. (55:12) And Sollum is building AI-enabled LED lighting solutions for indoor farming. (1:06:35) (0:00) M+J kick off the show. (2:47) Molly and Jason catch up after their long weekend (7:23) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (8:47) Getty Images prepares a lawsuit against Stability AI (12:54) Data and data integrity (17:55) AgeTech Collaborative - Find out more and apply at https://agetechcollaborative.org/twist (19:30) The similarities between AI and the music industry (34:31) AgeTech Collaborative - Find out more and apply at https://agetechcollaborative.org/twist (36:07) Microsoft announces that they will integrate AI into all their products + more on round-tripping (49:50) Blockchain versus AI (55:12) SOTD: Mill (1:06:35) SOTD: Sollum Technologies FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, we are back on a Tuesday. Thanks to my guy, Andrew Gadsdaki, of Acquire.com for joining yesterday. If you missed that episode, I know some people were out, volunteering and taking the day off like we did and observing MLK Day. If you miss that episode, it's really worth going backwards a day because a lot of our founders are in the process of doing M&A because maybe funding's not available and it's time to get some returns for you, your team, your investment. investors, no shame in the game. If you got to sell your company, do it right. And this is a great, great episode for you to go backwards and listen to yesterday's. But today, tons of news, Molly.

Yeah, exactly. We're back with a bang. Twist going up on a Tuesday. I'm sorry, I didn't want to do it, but the way you said it, I just had to. Okay, we got a bunch of generative AI news. Of course, Getty preparing to sue stable diffusion creator, stability AI, meta, partnering with shutter stock to train its AI, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, announcing that, that Microsoft will integrate OpenAAS software into Azure.

It's cloud computing platform. We're going to kind of cover the debate, the controversy, the potential. It's a good conversation. It's a great conversation. Then we do some startups, and we have a long, thoughtful talk about hardware startups. We got a pair of hardware startups today announcing funding and products. One of them is building an AI-enabled lighting a rig and solution for indoor farming. Super important, depending on the crop you're growing.

optimize that. And then, Mill is a startup by the former Nesco founders, making an automated compostability trash, which is super interesting. And Molly and I, we're both enamored with that. But we talk about the lessons for other startup

founders around hardware. Yeah, definitely. And P.S., bring me your climate software companies. Absolutely. Scalible, please. High margin businesses. Hello, ones. I'm here for you. I'm here for you. It is going to be a great show.

So stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use Offer Code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And age tech collaborative. Startups, your go-to market team is waiting. Age Tech Collaborative's putting edge accelerator program connects you with investors,

test beds, like-minded innovators, and industry expertise. They're taking Age Tech to the next level. Join them at agtechcollaborative.org slash twist. Okay, everybody, it is not Monday. It's Tuesday. It's that Tuesday that feels like January is the most stutter start month, isn't it? like you're kind of like you're starting to creep back but like people aren't totally at work and then there's like the post holiday sickness and then there's the random three day weekend just

when you were starting to get a rhythm like I find January very frustrating I'm just like trying to get back into it yeah but you're not quite there and then like now my kid's sick and it's like oh yeah and I'm still sick I'm you're sick I was had that my daughter's got sick a week ago and I got sick like at the end of the week I was sick all weekend but you know I'm looking out my window over here and I see sunlight. And so the rains have stopped and the sun has come back out today. So thank the Lord. I was thinking about this like sick thing. And my wife's like, oh my God, you need to take a day off. And I was like, do I? Because I have like a tickle in my throat. You may hear me cough, maybe during the show, which I find terrible

during podcast, by the way. My advice to other podcast hosts for my listening pleasure is do not show up with a scratchy throat. But for me, I have to be here. You really don't. We could have called in, Sonny. We had a plan.

Do I sound bad? Do you hear it in my voice? You don't sound bad. What I hate is if you did sound bad, I would have been like, get the hell off my Zoom. Because it is sort of just like, like there's a lot of work you can do

when you're sick. But if you sound like crap, nobody wants to hear that. And I feel like there's a tendency for people to just be like, it's fine. I know I'm like, eh,

When I can tell the person's in pain from their sore throat, I'm just talking about sore throats for people in our profession. If I sense you're in pain, it makes it painful for me to listen to the podcast, and I want to change the podcast. Right. No matter how good the conversation is, if you have that raspy,

I can tell you're having a hard time speaking, I actually have changed the podcast when I've heard. I have to. Don't do it, right? Yeah. I mean, this is a performance. Right? We don't want to give people 70 or 80%

Like when you sound like crap, it's just not that I think is like a hard line. If you sound bad, don't do it. Well, I mean, and here's an opportunity for AI. Like, touch up my appearance is happening right now.

We don't need makeup on podcasts anymore. I used to have makeup artists come to the studio when we did live tapings because the HD was so unforgiving. But on Zoom, touch up my appearance at 30, 40, 50% is the same as makeup. So makeup artists,

I used to spend $10,000 a year on this podcast on makeup artist. It was $100 every time my guests came in. Then it became like $200 inflation. And the show used to be two or three, two guests a week maybe. So it was $400 a week, 50 weeks a year. Yeah, it was even more. Yeah, maybe $20,000 a year. And so we had a makeup line item.

No more because of technology. Now, if we can make ourselves look a little bit better here on the margins with the touch-up, why can't we do that with somebody who has a cough or tickle in that throat in audio. I wonder for the producers if there is a filter for a raspy voice. I was thinking, Molly, one of the benefits of remote work is I can work when I'm sick.

Yeah. Which maybe is a sickness in itself. A little bit, a little bit. It's, well, it depends, right?

Because there are definitely times when you are too sick to, like, get dressed and shower and commute and you don't, you'd be infecting other people if you were like on a bus or Bart or something and it's like that's really real but you might not be too sick to work like it's pretty rare and even if I'm too sick to talk for example like couldn't be on the pot it's pretty rare for me to be too sick to like email I think the last time I can think of in the last 10 or 15 years that I was legitimately too sick to do anything was COVID where I just was like oh yeah I can

only sleep like I couldn't even watch TV it was too much input it was awful but yeah I don't know I mean it's true. Like, you can power, but it, it does make me wonder if then does the sickness last longer?

Because you should just be resting. I don't know. I don't know of resting how much that actually helps. But I'm always incredibly frustrated the only thing that helps. Four and five times when I'm sick that I don't want to get people contagious

and I wouldn't have gone to an office. I still would like to get worked on. And I would work from home. And now that everybody's working from home, it works just fine. So anyway, that's interesting. But if you sound like crap tomorrow,

just keep an eye on it. or an ear on it, if you will. Yeah. Ha-ha. Listen, if you want to be an entrepreneur or you want to do a side project, Squarespace is an amazing place for you to start. Why? Well, it's the platform where you can build or sell anything.

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Thank you. On behalf of all the startups, capital allocators, and tech enthusiasts who listen to this podcast for being our longest running partner. It means the world to us. Squarespace.com slash twist. Use the promo code twist, please. All right. I think I predicted for the last year that there would be a ton of lawsuits.

I did not predict they would happen this quickly, but there is a clip of me a year ago talking with you about Dolly where I said, if you're a photographer, I encourage you to call Getty if you sold them your photographs and to say, what are you doing about our IP being exploited? How am I being paid for this AI training to call, you know, your stock photography? this is going to remove the need for stock photography in the world or stock illustrations. And this morning I saw across the news headlines and the wires that that's exactly what's happened. Getty images is suing the creators of the AI art tool stable diffusion for scraping its content, saying that stability AI, the tool in question on lawfully scrape millions of images from its site.

It is being described as a significant escalation in the kind of, as you predict, the long-incoming copyright battles between copyright holders and some of these tools. The AI firm is arguing that the amalgamation of data for products like stable diffusion is covered under the fair use doctrine. However, there are some glaring signs here, including an analysis of the stable diffusion's data set, which found that it contained a large amount of content from Getty images, that is watermarked. And that when...

Oops. Exactly. And that there are examples of images, and this is amazing, that have the watermark right on them. Well, wait. So stable diffusion created images and the AI produced the Getty watermark. Because clearly those images are in the data set. Right. And so when Stable Defugia, you know, it was like, oh, give me a look at two misshapen trolls playing football, one with a freakishly long arm.

I don't know. This is just what I'm looking at here. Then it was like, okay, cool. Here you go. And then included in that image because clearly this is the origin, the dataset, is the Getty watermark. Now, that feels like a pretty easy. to have solved ahead of time. If you were trying to steal,

and that would show a ton of intent, what this shows is they did not have the intent to steal because they didn't try to cover it up, right? Cover up is greater than the crime. I think they were not thoughtful, and they didn't consult lawyers when they created this technology. Any lawyer would tell you,

this is a derivative work, and I'm not a lawyer, and I told you this, and that you're infringing on the creator's rights, to monetize their content in the future and in future mediums. So when you make something, you have the right to it not only in the mediums that exist, but in future mediums, etc. So this is a serious violation. It will result in a settlement of millions of dollars, I predict.

We may not get that settlement. It may be done quietly. But yeah, they're going to have to remove all of this. and this would be the equivalent of like, I stole your design. Like, I took a design of a dress or something from Gucci. And I stole the design of the dress and I included the Gucci logo on it, right? Like, you know the person's guilty, right?

When you're selling the purses that you stole it. It's just a straight up knockoff. Well, and this is a, this is an interesting, this is just such an interesting. And I want to do a small correction here. The lawsuit has not. officially been filed. Getty has commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London.

So it might be a little bit of a linguistic difference, but just to be as specific as possible here, which Getty was, which clearly the stable diffusion folks were not. So this gets to a couple things. Data and data integrity and data cleaning. So like there's the saying garbage in, garbage out. And in this case, what we're seeing is copyright in, copyright out. It should have been a fairly trivial task to. filter watermarked images out of your data.

So I do that like almost every like for the last couple of years, I've done this presentation about data to graduating, the graduating class of Notre Dame's data science school. And they offer like a master's. And literally one of the things I say to them is like, hey, FYI for the first few years of your career as a data scientist, you're going to be a janitor. Because cleaning data is the key to providing usable data to models.

And yeah. So obviously, whoever trained this AI did not or could not be bothered to just filter out images that are watermarked. Like, that is the most basic level of care. And it makes me, like, very worried about what is going into these models on every level, right? Whether it's like, I don't know, massive troves of racism or stolen or per semen. personally identifiable information. It's like, okay, what are the datasets that these things are being trained on? Who's in charge of cleaning them up, even the tiniest bid?

You left watermarked materials in there? I mean, it's pretty crazy. Like, where did they source their, and this is my citations, as we've been talking about the last couple of months. And I'm saying, like, where are the citations in chat GPT? And Google's putting them in. So Google identified this issue. The disruptive new companies part of, and this is a bigger startup lesson, part of being

a new startup is to move fast, break things, and to beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission. So as offended as I am, as a content producer, or as offended as you might be, I'm not sure the degree to which you find this offensive. I suppose people in the content business always find it a little bit. Yeah. I think if you're in the content business, you find it offensive. It's waterberg. I mean, for God's saying. Yes. And so this is stealing. This would be like taking your photo library off of your phone and then creating this AI based on your personal photos. These are another group of people's private IP. They own this. This is stolen material. Let's call it what it is. They train their AI on content. They stole from another party

who does commerce with it. Now, what this says is, as a startup, you should break the rules. Let me explain. I am not encouraging you to this, but this is what we've learned in commerce and in industries. Go ahead and break the rules because what has, how much money has stability, stable diffusion or stability AI? One of them is the open source product, one's the commercial, right?

So this company, how much money have they raised on doing this stolen material demonstration? At least the most recent raise appears to have been $101 million. That was in 2022. And I think they raised before. that. Oh, and they're valued at a billion dollars plus money. Okay, so you have a billion dollar valuation. You had a hundred million dollars in cash at a minimum. Who knows what else this happened? Yeah. Pays for a lot of lawyers. Pays for a lot of settlements. Right. So,

message to the market, if you're Airbnb, if you're Lyft or Uber, uh, whoever you are and you're doing things in the world, go ahead and break the rules, raise the money. And, and I'm not saying I agree with this or endorse it. So don't clip this in a funny way. Yeah, hundred Gators. I'm telling you what capitalism has learned. And has told us this. Has trained. The data that founders have been trained on. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So I am not endorsing wholesale stealing of other people's IP to raise at a high valuation

and then go spend that money on lawsuits and settlements after the fact. But the fact is, Gettie images deserve that $100 million investment. the majority of what was just demonstrated by Stability AI was based on, if it was based on their work, what we will learn, the second order impact of this is the people who should own this business are the people who own the content and the IPA. And they should go take the Stability AI open source project. They should go higher and steal away people from Stability AI. and they should make a product that creates images on the fly when you have a subscription to Getty

images, which people do, and it should then pay royalties to the original source material. And Getty should then make sure that they have permission to do so. Hey, everybody, it's time for a special interview with an old friend of mine, Rick Robinson. He is the GM of Age Tech Collaborative, which is brought to you by our friends at AARP, which I think, correct me if I'm not, at 52 as of last week, am I able to be an AARP now? You are welcome to join. Oh man, you and I got old.

What happened? This is amazing. You guys are really excited about engaging the startup community in building technology for folks who are getting up there in age. Yeah, it's really exciting for us developing the H-Tac collaborative to try to put a focus on what we call H-Tech. And you might be wondering, like, what is H-Tec? Well, it's the intersection of longevity and technology, really.

These are health tech companies. These are fintech companies. These are wellness companies. Essentially, it's going to be almost every company because the market 50 plus is becoming so enormous that they can't be ignored. And then you've got a lot of people who are supporting that market who can be any age. It's kind of a white space because not a lot of product developers and marketers and startups and investors have put a lot of focus on this.

But it's huge and it's growing. In fact, it's around $8.5 trillion in terms of economic value in the U.S. right now. All right. Thanks, Rick. When you're selling into the 50-plus market, having a relationship with AARP gives you a bunch of credibility. Of course, in the meantime, you can go learn more about the AgeTech Collaborative at AgeTech Collaborative. And join us later in the program and you hear more about the Age Tech Collaborative and how they help innovative startups succeed. So I have a little bit of a hot take around this because there are a couple of other lawsuits and a partnership. which are taking on. Well, okay.

So as context for my take, GitHub, I'm sorry, another lawsuit has been filed against GitHub's co-pilot, which is sort of the code creation tool. Yes. There's an announcement that Meta

and Shutterstock have partnered so that meta can train its AI on shutterstock's catalog of images. And so Shutterstock is going to make some money here. But what I would say is no matter how this shake

out and I think you're right that there will be a lot of lawsuits. Getty didn't create any of this stuff it don'ts. Neither did Shutterstock. Like, creators are going to get screwed once again. This is exactly reminiscent of the digital music wars back in the day. And in fact, Getty's CEO likened this whole thing to Napster and Spotify and saying, well, Napster was just stealing, but Spotify negotiated these deals. And so Spotify figured out a legal way to do this and that's what we want these AI tools to do. And they probably will. And there will be a shutter. Sutterstock model. And then Shutterstock will make money and Getty will make money. So when I was in

college, I covered the Unabomber arrest for my school newspaper. Like I was there on the mountain when they brought him down. There was a team of four of us, three photographers and myself. And a white Bronco like mysteriously came down. And we were like, well, that's weird. What's that car about? And so our two of our photographers were like, we're going to follow it. And I was like, great, go, do it. So they follow this Bronco all the way from Lincoln, Montana, this little town, to Helena, and they proceed to get the first photo of Ted Kaczynski post arrest. Wow.

A couple of college kids. Good yet. At which point they start getting calls from Getty and companies like them. And the AP being like, you have to give this to us for free, otherwise you'll be dead to us in this industry. And Getty being like, we're going to offer you the lowest possible amount that we possibly can and da-da-da-da. And they negotiated a whole thing and it was great. and I think they got college paid for, and it was awesome. I think they ended up selling the photo to Getty.

But when that photo ends up in the AI output and Getty gets a royalty, they will not. So like I just, this is a really bummer to take. Well, they sold the image. But the content aggregators, sure. They signed the contract knowingly selling all rights to the photo for all time in perpetuity. Yes. And every artist who signs with a record deal because. they want to get famous, signs away the bulk of their potential.

Like, I'm just saying, I don't. They get royalties. There's a royalty structure. And the labels and the royalties are tiny. And look at what artists have to say about what they get paid from Spotify and YouTube. I'm just saying the creators are going to get screwed again. Like these aggregators of images will make the bulk of the money. If people sign a contract and they have an attorney, I would say that's, you know,

much different magnitude in terms of getting screwed than having somebody steal your content, obviously, right? Yeah, sure. I'm just saying, like, if you look at where the money is going to flow, it will be the exact same thing as a musician saying we're making pennies off of Spotify streams. Yeah, I mean, that is true. I'm under no illusions that we're standing up for the like little guy here. We're standing up for Getty and Shutterstock and the people who have the money to come along and say like, I know you're like a starving artist and you'll do anything you can sign this

contract. And they do. I'm not, I'm not so sure. I mean, the value of taking a picture. But that's because you're like an Uber capitalist. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a trade. I'm not, I'm putting aside what happened like, you know, decades ago when music. musicians didn't have representation or photographers didn't have representation. But there is a value, you know, to the content that they provide. And if they sell the rights away and they had representation, hopefully they had good representation, you know, I have less of a problem with it. And, you know, the value of certain things in society.

Yeah. What's that? I'm just saying that's my hot take. Yeah, no, no, I get it. I always look at like, did the person have representation? like did these people who sold their images or just a professional photographer have it? And then there's another thing that's happening.

Usually no, but maybe. Yeah, I mean, and a lot of times people get screwed on their first record deal and they screw the record label on the second or they, you know, they don't get, like we talked about last week, with, you know, getting $5 million for your first picture and then getting 15 or 20 or making a back end of $75 million on the second and then you have them over a barrel because you're Robert Darnie Jr. How do they do Iron Man without you, right?

The whole franchise is, you know, based upon you. So, but really, you know, the other hot take here is, I think, it's, if we believe this is going to be a commodity, this technology, right? And they're based on open source projects, which you can fork. And I think Sam Waltman kind of said that last week when you went to that thing that this would be commodified in some way. Kind of, yeah. And there are many projects working on it. You know, I think the choice will be either stability chat GPT and. Facebook and other Google, other places,

if they want this technology, they will do partnerships with those companies or those companies will embed it in theirs. Those companies used to, if you remember, they would partner with content people would partner with Yahoo to host their content. And then eventually like, wait a second,

I can put up my own website. So this will be part of the process. I think the next shoot-a-drop will be, somebody will create software to sell to the Gettys of the world, to make their own derivative products. They'll sell that content. And then Wikipedia will make their own AI tool

to write content based on what's in the Wikipedia already. Would that mean that somebody created the tool to, like that middleware layer? Like, here's how to turn your data into a chat GPT? Like, wasn't that sort of the original goal of something like OpenAI was to open source the technology to do that? Before they flipped it, to screw the bag. And I think that was like one of the things that stable diffusion said,

too, right? Well, stable diffusion is based on an open source project. Stability AI, right. Stability AI is based on the open source. So it's the WordPress of that. And here's the other rub. Eventually, this stuff will make it to the desktop. And what you do on your desktop is your business

and isn't subject to the same rules as another company providing services. So if you load a webpage to your computer and you take the ads out, and you do that on your computer, and you don't republish it, or you cut and paste some content and you make a document with, you know, the hundred stories on, you know, Superman that you found in the New York Times. You're allowed to do that for personal use.

You can do all kinds of things that break copyright law, that would be breaking copyright law in a commercial venue when you're doing it privately. So here's another possibility. I have my own version of Stability, AI or Chat GPD running on my computer. it downloads sources of information, and it makes that content on my computer. I'm not paying anybody to do it. They're not profiting from it. I'm just doing it personally.

Number one, people will not know that you did it. And number two, so just practically, it's kind of hard to enforce. Number two, it's just one person. So how is it causing a problem, you know, for, you know, the original copyright owner? And so that would be the equivalent of making your own remix of a song in the privacy of your own home

and playing it for yourself. These tools are so powerful. I get the sense that eventually you'll be doing this on your personal computer. And then I think that's very hard. Well, and we have not updated. I mean, I've been ranting about copyright and intellectual property laws for 20 years.

Yeah. We are not prepared for this conversation. Like fair use remains somewhat uncodified. and it sort of argues that if it's a derivative work, it should be fine. Like, the reason Gettie is likely to be successful in the short term is because there are freaking watermarks on the images that Dahlia is producing, right? So, like, the data, the lack of care with the data is incontrovertible. They took images that are incontrovertibly owned and put them in their data set. However, fair use does provide for derivative work.

So in the absence of codifying that really, really specifically into law, which we never really have, everybody just kind of guesses at what a derivative work is. But that that is the stuff that's going to have to be worked out as we enter the era of AI because there will be lawsuits that are lost, but there will be lawsuits that are won by Gettys and shutterstocks and whatever because derivative works is pretty vague. And that's why like when you declare like, you know, when you're always like, like this is it. This is going to be the lawsuits and everybody's going to lose and whatever. I'm like, not all of them are going to lose because derivative works is protected. Yeah. It's just that we don't know what that means yet. I have extensive experience in this.

And what I will say is, what did I just say about 20 years? I have a lot of experience in this. What I'll say is it's what has been codified is a test, which is to be interpreted by a judge and a jury. Now, that test very rarely gets applauded. because the chances of winning when you're doing something commercial are so low that people settle.

And so the history of this is that it never goes to the mat. It gets settled long before that because it favors the content producer so much in a commercial arrangement. So if something was non-commercial, then there's very little reason for a lawsuit to be brought because there's no money to be made or lost.

And so where you see this is in reaction videos and on YouTube. So YouTube, you know, has been an amazing proven ground of not having to go to court to mitigate or to reconcile these debates, right, to manage them. And what typically happens is if money is turned. on or off, if monetization is on or off on the video becomes a deciding factor. When you're using our content, if you were to take this discussion and to make a reaction video to it, and depending on how much you use, the percentage used, you can kind of short-circuit the entire discussion simply based on if monetization is on or off.

That's the key. And so here, and then the further test of it's going to. Is it going to make it impossible for that person or impact that person's ability to make money in the future? So it's a four-part test. You can read about it on the Wikipedia. It's pretty straightforward. But in practicality, if you use other people's content on YouTube, the fair use comes in when it's educational, the percentage you're using, and if you're monetizing it. And what you can see now, if you're watching it, is all of the ways that people have figured out how to play huge chunks of that movie, Megan, that we were talking about in the pre-show, I think.

by saying that it's a reaction. Right. So what I'm saying is, this has yet to be everything, yes, to everything you said, this has yet to be litigated to the mat. Because in most cases,

what you had is a giant, right? Like you had the MPAA or Sony or Getty coming and saying, you infringed my copyright and people were like, I'm tiny,

I'm settling. or they just took it down. Now you have Godzilla versus Mothra and you have an area of the law that is still unsettled. So you got Open AI on the one hand, right, or stable diffusion on the one hand, you've got a company, you've got chat GPT, you've got a company that's worth $29 billion now today

coming up against Getty or coming up against all of these copyright holders. And what I'm saying is this is going to go to the man now. and this area of law is still not totally codified. Fair use is still somewhat vague, vague enough that I think we're going to see this fight, and I don't think it's a slam dunk. Yeah, I'll disagree.

I think all these companies are going to fold. I think they're not going to be able to... No, no, I just, yeah. You think Open AI is going to fold? Like, they're just going to be like that. 100%. They will move towards only scanning data that they have access to,

and they'll get permission, and they'll pay licensing fees and just like Napster, because I heard this exact argument, like Napster had a lot of money and the music industry was ruthless about it. Same thing with YouTube.

But now the information they have access to is the entire internet. Like once you turn on Google and connect one of these things to search and the repository of human history, like how do you stop that? With lawsuits. Lawsuits become the backstop.

And once people see the possibility of the existential basically demise of their business, which YouTube did, that's, I mean, they would have been an independent company had they not had those lawsuits. Those lawsuits force you to settle and you will lose them. I think that it's, I don't, I don't think it's that the law isn't codified. It's that the law is designed to not give a bright line so that there's less abuse and so that the market works it out. I think that's why it's like that. But it also depends on which market you're in. I think this might be filed in the UK for a reason. They may have started there

because they know they're going to win there. And they know content protectors, just like people will jury shop here in the United States and they know California juries are super anti-capitalist and Texas ones and Delaware ones are super pro capitalist. Yeah. And so on the plus side, if that happens, then the data sets that the AI is trained on will be necessarily way smaller, which could extend the life of humanity. So, win, win, win. Also, it will just takes longer for them to get smarter than us and kill us. So, I think there is a question is, you know, would the results be as impressive? Exactly. They didn't have these proprietary data sets. I 100% think that limiting the size of the data sets will make the AI,

guy's dumber. Yep. And that's a win for us. So I just talked myself into the lawsuit side. Yay! Let's go. It is unprecedented. That's for sure. The scale of this. Hey, everybody. It's time for a special interview with an old friend of mine, Rick Robinson. He is the GM of Age Tech Collaborative, which is brought to you by our friends at AARP. So how does the collaborative work? How do you help companies and investors kind of access these companies and these markets? So essentially what we do is we look for companies, we incubate them, we invest in them, and then we bring them into this new environment we call the H-Tech Collaborative Community. So yes, we have pitch competitions that we run throughout the year themed and some of them

are open mic style. And it's a way for us to source and find great early stage companies, usually pre-series A. We invite some of them into our accelerator program, which is extremely high-touch, eight weeks four times a year, where we bring in aging experts. We help get them best prepared to deliver their product or service to the market. And as I mentioned, we often invest in these companies. And then they graduate into the H-TEC collaborative community, which is an online platform that makes up an ecosystem that we're developing that includes, of course, the startups, investors, test bed organizations, enterprises, and business services,

all in this one online environment where they can support and, and draw from one another. Great. So there's an online community. People can go visit. They can go visit that at agtechcollaborative.org slash twist. Agetech collaborative.org slash twist. And so if you want to build in that market, if you want to sell into that market, if you want to invest in that market, this is a great way for you to partner with AARP, correct?

Absolutely. Yep. But, you know, the technology is real. And now we've proven that it has some value. And so Microsoft seems to be the primary beneficiary of all this in terms of taking these research projects and actually getting them to consumers as a finished product, correct? Or at least out loud, which I think is interesting. So the news today is Microsoft CEO announcing at Davos that the company will integrate open AI capabilities into all of its existing products and said it will give customers access to build on top of open AI software. the thing that you just said about, you know,

take all of Wikipedia's information and turn it into a chat GPT. In theory, that is a bit of what Microsoft is doing, and it's doing that through Azure. It's a cloud computing platform. It means businesses will soon be able to use OpenAI's models in their own apps, and those tools include GPT3 and a half, Codex, and Dolly. We have, and I asked our producers, just pull a little bit of information on what some of the other big competitors

are doing, because Microsoft, like, appears to be the leader here. And it could be true and it could be because they're the ones integrating the fastest. Like if you look about, if you look, you know, we know that Google has been working on AI that's so advanced that one of its own scientists thinks it's sentient. And we know that meta, I think even Brad Gersoner has described them as like effectively a huge AI company that's like gotten really distracted by VR. They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in AI and so have Google with the deep mind. So Microsoft is taking the opportunity to leap out.

ahead. But I think the rest of the year is going to start getting a lot more interesting as some of these companies that maybe have been building behind the wall. Yeah. Like, let those monsters out in the open. I'm really into the monster movie analogy for all this today. Yeah. I mean, if this becomes like IBM Watson, which is fascinating to think that like six or

seven years ago, IBM realized like AI was going to be the future, having tools available. And they provided it to a lot of startups. They were very active. They sponsored a lot of our events. They were really active in providing Watson to startups, and they were just a little bit early. And now here we see it, Open AI has essentially given Azure their own Watson. And since some of these things are open source projects, if you look at the top 10 most active open source projects right now, most followed, most edits, all that kind of stuff, participation. The majority are in the AI machine learning.

space. So I think that this is going to be the future, just like cloud computing for storage, you know, or CPU and for CDN content delivery networks. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to, people are even like LTE, you know, broadband availability. Like this is such a, this is going to be the layer of a vast majority or a huge explosion in products and services. And whose revenue this is then becomes the issue that we've been talking about with round tripping. around tripping when one big company invests in another company, and then that other company gives them money back. According to reports,

the revenue being booked by the work being done by chat GPT is Microsoft Cloud revenue. And so I think that that is now become codified to use the word from the previous discussion. We're now getting some feedback. on that. So you have like Microsoft paying OpenAI to license this or investing in OpenAI, but then you have

Open AI hosted on Azure, and that revenue is going towards Microsoft. So these like round-tripping cloud deals I think is going to result

in some serious SEC scrutiny, or just some scrutiny, just to make sure it's clean. because, just to put a finer point on it, what might be happening here, and again, we don't know, but what might be happening here is that Microsoft is paying OpenAI

to license the OpenAI software for Azure, and that 75% of that profit then goes back to Microsoft because Open AI then has to pay to use Azure's cloud computing to perform each function. Well, OpenAI The question is Open AI has compute cost

Right? A lot. We've heard this like $0.7.7. So they pay whatever it is. And then Microsoft gets 75% of Microsoft of Open AIS profits. Sorry, that was to close the loop,

if you will. Yeah. So this weird investment deal combined with the fact of where is open AI hosting and where are they spending $3 million a day, three million dollars a day,

reportedly. So if they're spending $3 million a day on Azure, that means they're shipping $3 million from their bank account to Microsoft's bank. And Microsoft is licensing chat GPT software and investing in the company and getting some of their profits.

75%. So if, but there's no profits right now, but eventually there will be profits. Right. So this is just one of these co-mingling of money going back and forth that makes one wonder, you know, if you were to,

This is the, I'll give the least charitable and the most charitable interpretation. The least charitable is chat GPT is a massive compute resource, addictive product that could drive cloud revenue at Microsoft through the roof, which would drive their valuation at a multiple of that. And that might be incredibly high profits for Microsoft. So chat GPD, this is the worst interpretation. Chat GPT created something to goose Microsoft's earnings. Microsoft then invested in chat GPD on terms that none of us can understand. A $29 billion valuation for a company that's losing, I guess, a billion dollars a year? So why would they do that?

Well, it's obvious in the explanation. The most charitable would be got to be hosted somewhere. And if they hosted it on AWS, it would be the same cost. And Microsoft invests in companies and people buy software from each other. So here's the 20 other companies. Microsoft has invested in a bot. And yeah. Microsoft has, I mean, the middle ground interpretation is that Microsoft has made a lot of investments to beef up its Azure offering.

So the, right, like I sort of feel like the middle ground here is, yeah, definitely, and they want to make some money off of Open AI. But the ultimate goal is what Satya Nadella announced today, which is integrate these tools into Azure. So make a little money from Open AI spending money on Azure, sure. Make some money from Open AI, whatever it becomes as a company. But fundamentally, goose the product offering that is Microsoft Azure so that you can catch up with the company. competition and keep making money in the biggest money-making space that exists in computing right now. Yeah, that would be a kind interpretation. Yeah.

Well, I think people are extremely jealous. That's just like the business, right? Isn't that just the business interpretation? Like, make Azure irresistible. And if you happen to make a little incremental awesome on the side, beefing up the offering is great. Yeah. The problem comes in when money is, you know, making a circle, right? And that's where account gets get involved and say, is this.

Are you increasing the velocity of this just to, you know, increase the value of both organizations in a non-organic way? And, you know, I don't know how you prove that. Yeah. Because it does get too, like what's the intent. Is there like a little birdie that made you suspicious? Do you have some like inside reason to question? No, I mean, is the talk of the industry. I mean, there's a number of people.

I think there's a number of factors that play here. the non-traditional structure and the flip-flopping of open AI from a nonprofit to a for-profit, then raising money on an insane valuation, then spending all this money on Azure Cloud. And I think then there's a whole level of jealousy of Sam Altman and the team over there for creating something that's worth $29 billion after presenting it as a nonprofit. Yeah. And raising all this nonprofit money, or maybe there's some resentment. I'm just hearing this constant nonstop back channel of why is this what happened here to go from a nonprofit to a for profit and then what's happening with this weird deal structure. So whenever you see a weird deal structure, everybody in Silicon Valley is like what's going on for good reason.

Yeah. For really good reason because there were some weird deal structures going on in crypto too, right? So I think right now there's just a heightened sense or people's and listen, I'm not saying that there's anything funny going on. here. I suspect there's not. Overwhelming. I do think there's a heightened Theranos, FTX climate right now. And if you present a really odd set of facts to the market, the market is going to be like, well, that feels more like this bucket of weird things that we've seen occur as opposed to

standard deal structure. It doesn't feel like a standard deal structure. It's not a standard deal structure. Yeah. That's a great explanation and good insider. Because it's inside or. And the back channel is jealousy. Non-standard deals are a reason for a red flag.

And certainly, yes, there's a lot of jealousy. And I think also just maybe some disappointment, right? When you set, whenever you set something up and say, like, this is going to be, this is going to be the thing to save humanity. And then you see everybody like running toward developing it as fast as possible, humanity be damned. And you literally have Sam Altman saying, the worst case here is lights out for all of us.

Yeah. It's like, isn't that? But so you're just doing that, though, and cashing out? It does seem like this is the negative back channel is that this is a bag securing maneuver. Right, right. And so, but again, I think people are highly jealous of Sam Altman because he's brilliant and he's made a lot of money. And, you know, this seems to be like the next Uber or the next Google or the next Facebook or the next Airbnb, right? It's certainly an valuation trending in that direction.

Well, let's go back quickly to the Satya Nadella genius, the goat factor of this, which is that as a reminder of what's at stake and why Microsoft wants to juice Azure, the product and has been doing whatever they can to do that over the years. AWS is Amazon's entire profit center. It's cloud computing business. It breaks even on e-commerce, right? The only lose money, I think, on e-commerce now. It's like flat at best.

And then there was some analysis that can. came out recently that was like, actually, I think Amazon's retail business might be like terrible. Microsoft is profitable in multiple areas. So they're able to lose money on Azure, aka make investments to make it better. But it does give them a serious advantage to beef up that offering and say, I mean, who wouldn't want to flip to Azure if all of a sudden it's like, yeah, it can do all the, it's got chat GPT built in. Like, oh, okay, I'll take that for my startup. Yeah, I mean, this is the classic your margin.

is my opportunity moment. So Google's revenue comes from search. Microsoft doesn't need to be profitable on Bing. They can be profitable in Office and the Windows franchises and their software platforms. Google launched their version of Office with Google Docs. And then you also have Amazon makes their money from their profit center is obviously cloud. So yeah, this is the crazy like risk board, you know, like the board game risk. you know, like where you can be aggressive in certain parts of the game and other parts of the game, you can be conservative and be defensive.

I think it all becomes a commodity real quick. I think it's going to be like storage. Which honestly, I mean, if Sam Altman is as smart as he is being given credit for, then he clearly saw that coming and maybe that's why he decided to secure the bag. It's like, now would be the time to sell. Get the bag now. This might be the peak moment to sell before it becomes commoditized. And if it's open source, yeah, like, you know. Why buy this if it's open source and you could fork it?

Boy, does this make Google look smart for buying DeepMind when they did in 2014? Right. And incompetent for not getting more of the product out there to the public. They really have lost the PR race here. They really need to let the DeepMind people start releasing stuff. And that, I mean, there have been a couple, like, I mean, that whole arena of Google's business has just been a mess, right? Like, you know, they keep firing ethicists and then. They had obviously that big drama with Blake Le Moynes, the AI scientist,

data scientists who said it was sentient and then got fired. And like a lot of weird stuff has happened in Google's AI division. And maybe that's why they have failed to capitalize with like a consumer facing product. But it's certainly they might not be behind technologically. But from a commercialization standpoint, they definitely are. Yeah. And Facebook's got, uh, I mean, this is now, I think, think going to be the dialogue for the next three or four years is forget about crypto and web

three. I mean, use case matters is another thing I take away from all this. I was out over the weekend and somebody said to me, Jake Howell was a very prominent billionaire venture capitalist, said, I remember at dinner with you six or seven years ago. We were at this thing. And you said, 99% of these crypto things are grifts run by incompetence and everybody attacked you. And you held your ground. He said, it's the bravest thing I've ever seen. And you turned out to be 100% right. And I said, you want to know why that is? And he said, yeah, actually, I would like to know why you saw that. And I said, it's very simple. That wasn't an estimate. I had met with 100 companies. Exactly. And I wrote down a piece of paper, which one

ones I thought were frauds and which ones I thought were real. Yeah. The number was actually 99. I was reporting a statistic. You thought I was being hyperbolic. And it was a fact. And he said, is that true? I said, it wasn't exactly like a hundred on the nose.

I had literally met, though, with hundreds of companies, certainly over 100, over a number of years, you know, two or three years and had them on the pod. And it was clear to me that 90, high 90 percentage were absolute. incompetence and or grifters. And I think that's what we're seeing now, which is the reason I thought those things were not real was because when I said, show me the use case, explain to me what the user does and how does this save them time, save them money. And it's one of the great luxuries of my life of being an outsider.

I was an outsider in journalism. I had to create my own magazine, really, to get published. And I made my own way into the tech business. I didn't go to Stanford or Harvard or, you know, MIT. And I made my own way into venture capital, right? All three aspects of my career, I was an outsider coming in. I never came to it with some assumption that, like, I understood it. So I always just asked very basic questions.

And the very basic question you have to ask yourself is like, well, what can I do with this? Right. When you ask what you can do with Dolly and chat GPT, you can't stop thinking of use cases. Right. You can't stop seeing TikToks where somebody says, I took this book review and I took these five book reviews. I asked it to make me a review of a book.

Then I took it and made an image, a series of images with Dolly and then I exported it and put voiceover technology on it. And I made a YouTube video and then I wrote a script to make me a hundred of these a day. So now I can publish my own reviews of books and summaries of books and publish them to YouTube and make money off of it.

And you're like, okay, yeah. And that's just one level. Last week we killed law school. Law school, right, yes. Like literally. Lawyers. Last week, we got rid of the first year of law school. We were like, find me all the case law on this and show me the most winning strategies for beating a parking ticket.

We did it in our chat. Tell us, remember we were doing like how many subscribers do Verizon and, you know, T-Mobile have for their wireless networks and, you know, and asking these research questions. And we're like, okay, yeah, we now have like a producer chat, GBT. Right. That can do some research for us. And so not only did we come up with a bunch of use cases, but we came up with a bunch of use cases that have revenue slash money savings attached to this. Yes. Yes, that have economic impact.

We came up with products. Yes. Like, it's two questions. It's what can you use this for? Yes. And how does it make money? And so far with AI, we've been able to answer that question or save money, right? We've been able to answer that question almost every time that we have come up with something.

Whereas for all of those years, I remember. I remember being at like collision in 2015 or something and asking God to explain the blockchain and being like, uh-huh. Great. I think I understand what you're saying from a technology perspective, but like what's that for and how's it? You know, like none of those questions could ever be answered. Yeah. I mean, the immutability of it and the proof of work, proof of stake, all the stuff. It was like very interesting with very little use case.

Yeah. I'm like, oh, for voting. And I'm like, you mean like if I wrote on a piece of paper, like who I voted for for president and you had a copy of it? and I signed it? Yeah, like that. And it's like, okay, how's that different than the piece of paper that I signed that was digitized? It's immutable. It's immutable.

Well, yeah. And it's like, well, that's a really fancy word. That means you can't change it. And it's like, okay, I can't change my signature on the paper either. So what are we talking about here? Yeah. Your best question, Jason, was when people would be talking about like an immutable, decentralized Twitter and you're like, what if someone posts like child porn or something?

And they're like, do you really want that? Oh. Well, you know, the algorithm would probably just put it to the bottom, but it'll be there forever. Like, oh. Okay. Revenge more. Doxing. Yeah, okay, great.

Awesome. Maybe not immutable solutions for everything, maybe. Yeah. There's an immutable website that can never be taken down with everybody's stolen photo rolls, camera rolls. Like, great. What a contribution to society you've made. Yeah. You know, I saw this, you know, hardware companies are hard.

But I saw one today and I was like, I'm so rooting for this company. I'll buy it. I would never invest in the company, but I love it. You know, this is like the song of hardware. You just want it so badly to work. Yeah. So the second bubble of 2023, sustainable startup of the day. Yeah.

Here we go. I mean, it really is too. It's super interesting. Actually, that was the last anecdote I have from that event. And seeing Sam Altman speak was that someone asked him, you know, you said it's a great time to start a company. Like my friend really wants to start a company. What should he do? And Altman was like, probably like an AI company. And I like scampered right up to him after. And I was like, climate tech, starting climate tech company. Like one or the other, right? Be intentional. There's going to be a lot of money for both. But like both of them are solving real problems that aren't going to go away. And I was like, you don't have to do nuclear fusion or carbon capture. We need software. Like we need measurement. We need all of this stuff. But it turns out we also do need smart.

Trash cans. Turns out. We have this interesting press release. We don't know that much about funding or anything like that, but we know that there has been a release about a new product from the co-founder of Nest, Matt Rogers, who founded Nest with Tony Fidel back in 2010. Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion in 2014. And in 2020, Matt went on to co-found another startup called Mill Industries.

with a guy named Harry Tannenbaum. And they just released Mills' own home device, which is a smart trash bin that decreases food waste. And it doesn't even just decrease it. It like compost it. It will dry the food out, neutralize the odor with charcoal, grind food scraps overnight. And then when the bin is full,

they mail you a box and you send the waste back to the company and they use it to feed chickens. Like, this is crazy. Yeah, there's a video. It's circular composting. There's a video. on the website that I looked at this morning when I saw I come across the producer chat. And what's clever about this garbage can is that it's more like a compactor.

So they're calling it a garbage can, like a compost garbage can. It's not that. This is a very sophisticated mechanical appliance. This is more like an appliance. Yeah. And so here's what this appliance does is. What happens in the video is you dump in a bunch of, you know, banana peels. You have your egg salad sandwich is the example they use.

And they show an egg salad sandwich being made. You throw the shells in, you cut off the crust, you put it all in there. There's a grinder that looks like an ice chopping machine. My dad had one of these in his bar. He'd like to have chopped ice. And so I would take the buckets of ice, put it through the ice grinder, and had little spikes. And it would just rip it up. And then we'd have shaved ice.

And he put the pine glasses in the ice. It was very nice to have a frosted pint. And so as you're seeing in the video, in the middle of the night, I guess. It will grind everything. And it grinds it so finely. And I guess it gets rid of the smell because it's sealed and has charcoal, that it takes up less space. And unlike a compactor, which pushes it together, because this is banana peels and whatever, it grinds it. And then I guess it compresses it in some way.

And then you put it in a box and ship it to farms. Yeah. Then they take that milled product and they let chickens. eat it to make more eggs. It's not not simple. You know, like let's... Oh, it's not simple. This is genius.

Yeah. You have to, you do pay a monthly fee that includes the kitchen bin. It's $33 a month or $396 a year. If you actually, if you choose the monthly payments, the service is $45 a month and the bin costs $75. They have a reservation system now for the bin. It has to be plugged in. You have to download an app so it can be connected to Wi-Fi. And then they're still working through, I will say, though, I mean, I have like a little compost dealy that I got at IKEA because not very many cities have this.

We have curbside compost pickup and green bin pickup, which is great. Hardly any cities, I think, have that. This, you average, you, the average household will empty the bin every two to three weeks, which is amazing. They're not quite, yeah. Like, you could just be putting scraps in this thing for two to three weeks. That's amazing. but they are still work quote working through the necessary scientific and regulatory processes to establish a safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient that we can distribute commercially.

So they're a couple steps away from making sure that they can feed this to chickens. However, amazing. Just as a composting thing, that's amazing. You could just, if you have a backyard, like a compost pile, you could just throw it in the compost pile, depending on how finally they grind this stuff. Or if you even have a compost bin, you could put it in there every two to three weeks. Like, I would be stoked about this.

Even if even pre-chicken feed, this is freaking amazing. Yeah, I've never seen anybody come up with the idea of putting a grinder that shreds the stuff and makes it into like, you know, basically sawdust. That seems to be the cool part of this. So congratulations. I think it's going to be great. It's pretty amazing. And like, it's a pretty shock.

like the amount of, you know, if you think like when we interviewed John Doer, he talked about thinking in gigaton terms, like food waste is a gigaton level solution. If they can figure out how to turn this into compost that actually sequesters carbon and all of that or even feed chickens or whatever, like that's a major impact. Not to mention just making life a little bit more awesome. Yeah, I mean, I wonder also when you use your trash compactor, I'm sorry, food, what do they call the thing in your sink that spins the food? Garbage disposal.

I guess is that a garbage disposal? There's some other word for it, but yeah, that's what I called. It's a word for it. I forgot what the name of that thing. Is that we all have in our sinks here in California? We never had them in New York. They were illegal in New York City. And those... I'm really distracted by producer Brian who lives in Canada, who calls it a garburetor.

It's a garbage, yeah. Is that a thing? Is that a thing? Is that a thing you call it in Canada? I've never heard that word before. Anyway, garbage disposal. It's ripping apart, you know, your eggshells. And we will put fruit in there or banana pills or whatever. I think you can put a pretty decent lemon peels or whatever. You know, that in and of itself, I think puts all those nutrients eventually into the ocean to be eaten by fish, I think. I think so.

But yeah, I guess it is called a garboreator. But this would then- It's called a garboreate. Food waste accounts for 8 to 10% of human greenhouse gas emissions every year. Like, this is the stuff that gives you like. Like an individual. Composting is a huge part of solving for that because it means that you reuse waste instead of have waste go to like landfill and be trucked somewhere and be this like big huge mess. So it makes it smaller.

It has a circularity aspect. The food itself is not wasted. It's not rotting in landfill. It fills and like off gassing. So yeah. There's a reason why. It doesn't fix it all. But composting is considered like a very large part of that food waste equation.

Yeah. And if it doesn't have to be shipped anywhere, that clearly helps. and there's a reason why when you have these giant landfills, you see seagulls by the thousands over them as they're picking it apart to try to find food. So yeah, better to just use it to feed more chickens. And keep it out of landfill. Landfill is like a big. Landfill is a problem. I think in my austerity, my next-

You should get some chickens. Eggs are really expensive now. I think that's kind of my next step in austerity measures is actually, wow, thinking about that because of some influenza or something. that happened. Eggs went up to $5 a dozen, I heard, or something like that? Flu. Avian flu, yeah. That, which is significant, I think, because I think we're paying three bucks a dozen eggs or something, two or three bucks. Somebody is, high quality. Somebody posted paying like $22 for 18 eggs. It's like eggs. Oh, yeah, organic funds, good eggs, yeah. Yeah. You get the $5 dollar eggs already.

But yes, the average wholesale price of a dozen eggs in California was over $7. in January. Wow. 50 cents an egg. And I was at Costco yesterday, no eggs. Costco did not have any eggs. Zero. Crazy. Because the cheap ones are like, you know, there's like a run on the cheap ones. I love the idea of people being more independent and having chickens on their property. In the peninsula in Silicon Valley, many people has more of, I think, a status object. have chicken coops. Is that popular in the East Bay as well? Yeah, yeah.

Chickens are big. Totally. Backyard chickens. It's a thing. NPR chickens are just... Backyard. Oh, NPR chickens is hilarious. It's hilarious.

It's like a virtue signaling chickens. That's so funny. The interesting thing about the virtual signaling chickens is we have a neighbor who has a coop and they can't keep up with their egg consumption. So every couple of months, they will literally, ring our bell and like their kids will just drop off two dozen eggs. Totally. And I, decentralization is the future.

I think it's a very cool idea is to have more. I would have chickens if I could. I have an HOA. Oh. Yeah. Well, yeah. Chickens, actually,

that would be a really cool idea, too, is if you do have an HOA and you do have 30, 40 homes in your homeowners association to put a common chicken coop and let people have access to it in them. Community chickens. Community chickens. Oh, my God, I love it. Well, community-backed NPR chickens. Right.

Community-backed NPR chickens. Exactly. Everybody has a mug and a tote bag, and you carry your chicken feed in your tote bag. The problem with this startup is, I know they're going for subscriptions here is if this works, somebody in China is going to just copy it and knock it off and make a better version and just sell you a $50, amazing compost grinding. and you're just going to throw it into your compost and you're not going to go through sending it back for chicken feed or whatever. I mean, I got to say, the thing they need to nail in order to beat that coming competition

is the chicken feed part because that's a huge revenue stream. If they can actually get through all the hurdles to turn this into legit chicken feed or any other kind of, you know, if they can make it an agricultural feedstock, then people will pay them to come and get it. But yeah, if it's just the trash can grinding up my food and compacting it. Hell, yeah, I would pay a lot of money for that,

but like, probably not every month. I bet you there's one that exists already. I bet you there's a trash man you can buy right now that does this. Matt, we're going to need you to come on the show and explain to us why this is going to be so awesome and why you can't be beat, why you can't be beat. Yeah, well done. Is there another startup of the day?

We have another startup of the day, actually, also literally accidentally in the sustainability space because bubble. But the other one, and I'm just amazed by this is solemn technologies, S-O-L-L-U-M, like the sun, Solum, is making moves in the greenhouse produce space. This is a, like, growing, this also is a growing part of the climate conversation because as, like, areas warm or are constantly flooded or are constantly in drought or, you know, so hot you can't grow stuff, figuring out alternative sources for agriculture

is super important. And so this company, Solim technology, has just raised $30 million. including a $25 million check from a single private equity firm, idealist capital that supports entrepreneurs going after energy transition and decarbonization. And I love this because it's basically grow lights. It's grow house lights, but apparently they've figured out some technology that makes the lights, they can just remotely mimic perfectly the sun.

Like they're powered by AI to reproduce the full spectrum of the sun's natural light. they have Sun as a Service, which unfortunately spells Sunass. Yes, Sass, Sunass. Yeah, you know that was coming. So that was kind of a maybe a naming miss there. But it's a cloud platform powered by AI. This is actually merging the two bubbles with a dedicated support team of engineers, technicians, and agronomists.

And then this support that includes installation maintenance. And they claim their solution saves 40% on energy, produces better taste. They've been able to like apparently increase productivity of certain crops by 40% like strawberries, which are, you know, obviously not a year-round crop in various places and can get super expensive and are hard to grow. And it's like modern greenhousing.

Fascinating. Using AI to make the lights more efficient. You know, that's something they do in solar, right? I think you had somebody on who was making technology to move the solar panels to capture the sun, right? And so this is kind of the reverse of that, using software to optimize the sun on the plants. And then eventually, this will become full cycle. You'll be figuring out through AI and machine learning over time.

So this is where the reinforcement learning that I think Shamath was talking about a whole bunch on the last all in. The learning part of this, well, what if you could take what the lights are doing with the eventual bounty? So, hey, we went for it and we increased the lighting 20%. Okay, did that increase? Was that energy worth it? And it's like, actually, it turns out, eh, we got 3% more robust strawberries. This crop had 3% more strawberries and they were 1% better, but they didn't taste as good. Or it wasn't worth, the squeeze wasn't worth the juice.

And I just love that expression, the squeeze and the juice. Is the squeeze worth the juice here? And I don't know if it is, you know. And that's what AI is going to teach us is optimization. Yeah. Whether it's for our bodies. Oh, what did I say? Is the juice worth the juice?

Sorry, I'm sick, guys. So my voice may not be hard, but my logic is broken. I like it. I like it. I mean, either way it works because the squeeze is like a lot of work. And it's like a lot of juice really worth it? But is the juice worth the squeezes is what we're talking about here. And so, you know, that's going to be awesome.

And it might be some crops. each crop might be different. If you're doing like a strain of cannabis, which is what these lighting systems, the reason a lot of investment went into these lighting systems was for crops that were worth a lot of money. And so whenever we saw this technology, any kind of smart growth technology,

it was for the most expensive things. The two most expensive things I've seen are berries and weed. I don't know which crop is actually more expensive. I don't know either, but that's so funny because yes, exactly. It might be. But it could be your Girl Scout cookies. I don't know. It could be your OG Kush, whatever.

Could be the more important one. But, you know, it's interesting. We were talking about that bin. You know Vitamix? Yeah. You know Vitamix? Yeah. The juicer or whatever.

The juicer. Yeah. The world's best blender. Yeah. The world's best blender. It's like every chef uses a Vitamix. It costs 300, 400, 400 bucks. I've had the same one for over a decade.

They're hell of nice. Smoothies in it, whatever. Check this out. That's Vitamix. Vitamix has a problem. called the food cycler. What's a food cycler you ask? Well, if you scroll down to the videos,

and you just press play on the video, and you fast forward to just a wee bit, what you'll see is everybody in your household goes to the food cycller, and when you're scraping your plates, instead of putting it down there, you will see they put a bunch of stuff in there. And once they dump the stuff in there,

it turns on, and what does it do? It turns it into soddies, just like the garbage guy. Sorry to be a kill joy. To be fair, thermostats existed when Nest came out. Sure.

And what happened? Nest took over, right? Better form factor, more functionality. Like, you can still build a better mouse trap. And presumably that's what this company. However, I'm totally buying this vitamin mix composter thing.

This is amazing. I'm looking at it right now. I want this. Yeah, I'm looking, when I do the Amazon reviews, there are, if you go down to the bottom, instead of doing the one from Vitamix, if you scroll down, there's a review and demo of it from like a consumer. And they put like paper towels in it. If you go down to the bottom, yeah, the first one on the left there.

Yeah. DIY life. I put paper towels in my compost. The output quite nicely. It's a good looking machine. but what it does is it actually part of this process is heating it apparently.

So you dry it, I guess, to get the moisture out so you're not just making a slop. So you dry it and look at that. I just put your coffee grounds in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I guess because it dries it and look at you putting paper towels in it as well. So she's wiping down the table here, and I'll describe

for people watching. So she just put paper towels in there, eggshells, coffee grinds, the whole bit. And then when you look at what the output looks like, again, It looks like sawdust, and then to top off the consumer review here, they take it, and I guess the heat's the key part, because I guess hot air is blowing out of it. She takes it and dumps it into her pots to make, I guess, fertilizer out of it. Yeah. Pretty dope.

Dude. I kind of want that now. I'm going to buy this. Sorry, I just question 200 bucks for watching the show. $322. That's expensive. That's expensive. That's expensive.

Yeah, this should be a $99 version of this. But that's the same as the one, the new one. That doesn't make, but without a monthly fee. That's one year of the new one, but no monthly fee. I was assuming the new one didn't have a price up front. So this is one year of the new one, I guess. Dang. So this is an existing product category that we were not aware of.

Yeah. This is exciting. Yeah. I think the key is the key part. I could get this for just $26. $83 a month for 12 months, interest free. Oh, yeah. Are you getting over your skis, Molly?

Don't buy now, compost later. Buy now, compost later. No, I will only buy it. Compost now pay later. Squeeze that juice. Damn, that's cool. Well, congratulations to both of these hardware companies. Yes.

And let's save the planet. Let's do it. Let's do this. I'm not big on the waste thing. You know, I think I don't know that this is a great investment category for venture capitalist, but I think it's a great category for humanity. I've been so obsessed over the last year or two with austerity measures and waste. And really just the less waste we have per household is just so significant.

That's why I think making the cold brew coffee instead of me ordering all of those packaging, I really want to find a great sparkling water. This is the one I haven't solved. The sparkling water I have from, what's the one everybody uses? We push the top down. Soda stream. Soda stream. Everybody hates Soda stream.

It doesn't come out good. It's too much work. Yeah. I want a tap. A soda stream tap. Like I have a hot water tap. It has to be convenient. So I want to be able to have, just like when you would go to an ice cream shop in the day

and they would just pull the, you know, sparkling water from a tap. I want a tap. This exists. This definitely exists. I know I look this up. this, but I think it's very expensive. I see it at restaurants. Like, I just want to leave my tap and then under my sink,

have a giant CO2 thing. And I see hackers are making this, um, themselves. So you can buy, you know, but there's no. I, yeah. I got a whole, I got a whole situation that the DIY guy made that's like a,

it's like a, it's like a huge stainless steel canister filled with carbon dioxide with it. Yeah. And I mean, it works. But there's a company called, Groh, G-R-O-H-E, G-H-E,

and they make water filter kitchen taps that include carbonation. Ah. So it would be expensive I'm looking for. Up front, but it's exactly what you're looking for.

I want it for it and I want it to have carbonation. Fantastic. Look at that. It's good looking too. See, I think you have to make this very easy for people. If you want people to

do this stuff. It has to be easier than ordering from Instacart or Amazon. And this is definitely easier. It's just, so it starts at $2,900. So it takes you a lot of LaCroix orders to recoup your money. Yeah, that sounds like it's going to take years. Yeah. If we're spending 200 a month or 100 or 200 or 200 months on the planet. Actually, maybe it's not. I mean, 100 bucks a month on cans. If this cut it at half, 50 bucks a month you would need to have 60 months to pay for it or something. That's not terrible. Yeah, but you have to buy a lot of things where you still have to buy carbon dioxide,

like you have to buy the tanks and stuff, I would assume. That's why I put it at half, like savings of 50. Oh, half. Sorry, yes, you did say that. If we were spending 100 on cans, they saved us $50 a month on cans or something for the equivalent with the, to maintain it. Oh, my God.

And don't forget, the value of smug is infinite. Yeah, this is, uh, yeah, the, this is the NPR. carbonator. Yes. Yes. Carbonator for you and per virtual signaling. I mean,

I came up with a new one. Tweeted the other day and I was like, thank you for saying this because I think this all the time. There was a tweet that was like, I don't really understand why virtue signaling is like a bad thing. Like every one of us has virtues. Why wouldn't we signal them? Absolutely.

Yeah. I don't really understand. You know, it's sort of like, yeah, actually, good point. Yeah.

It's when you're fake. It's when you're lying about your virtues. Yes. But like, when it's greenwashing. That's just hypocrisy. We already have a word for that. Yeah.

I mean, if I was using, you know, the food cycler, but then I had my thermostat on 82 in the winter and 56 in the summer, I had this new idea. I came up with a new system because I was hacking my nest. And it's called Put on a sweater. It's a new plug-in. Is it an app? Hold on a sweater.com. No, it's just me yelling at the rest of my family, who are, walking around in shorts in the winter and a t-shirt or a tank top and they're putting the

heat on 78 and then I have to tell the four ladies I live with put on a sweater or if you wear socks and pants then maybe we don't have to keep the heat at 78 that is one so one weird thing about the Bay Area that people probably don't realize and that when I moved here I was like why am I freezing all the time in my new town that I live in, like, always cold? It's that, like, no one as a matter of just cultural competency, and I don't even know where it came from, the heat never goes above 68. Like, I almost innately believe that my thermostat is not capable of going above 68. I'm in a bickram yoga class here.

I know, you're really hard. Ladies. No wonder you're sick. Get dressed. Here's an idea. Get dressed. It's not August. You're wearing.

The equivalent of a bathing suit. Put on pants, wear socks, a t-shirt and a sweater. I'm not saying you have to wear a jacket in the house, but you could put a sweater on, and we could keep the heat at 76 or 68. Hoodies are in. Hoodies are the look right now. Come on, people. Ridiculous.

All right. What a great show, and we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.