This Week in Startups - IRL to shut down after faking 19M users, ZIRP fraud, Databricks acquires MosaicML for $1.3B | E1768

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

This Week in Startups is presented by: Notion just launched Notion Projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Try it for free today at notion.com/twist. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com/TWIST to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply Fin can’t burn its mouth on hot pizza. Or wave at someone who wasn’t waving at them. Fin can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. Meet Fin. A breakthrough AI bot by Intercom – ready to join your support team today. Visit https://intercom.com/fin * Today’s show: Jason is joined by Vinny Lingham to break down IRL shutting down after faking 95% of users (1:12), ZIRP fraud (12:59), Databricks acquiring MosaicML for $1.3B, and some AI demos! (1:02:31) * Check out Waitroom: https://waitroom.com/ Follow Vinny: https://twitter.com/vinnylingham * Time stamps: (0:00) Vinny joins Jason (1:12) IRL's 19M fake users (5:45) Twitter bots and the fake account problem (11:50) Notion - Try it for free today at https://notion.com/twist (12:59) Diligence in early-stage startups (20:59) Databricks acquires MosaicML for $1.3B (27:02) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at ⁠https://linkedin.com/twist (33:09) Testing Google’s new generative search (37:47) Fin - Try Fin, Intercom's new AI customer support chatbot, at ⁠https://intercom.com/fin⁠ (38:31) Testing generative search on the most expensive steaks in Los Angeles (41:56) Vinny's thoughts on Toxic Wealth and the Titan tragedy (53:34) DeepMind CEO says Gemini is more capable than ChatGPT (1:02:31) Vinny demos Colorize and Replika * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

You didn't buy the $1,000 steak. Did you have any... I mean, come on. Maybe he wants. When he's not there, do they send somebody out who looks like him? No. To do the whole thing with the salt down their arm?

Do they do that? Or is only he allowed to run salt down his grimy arm. Yeah. They all do that. They all do the salt thing. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God. This week in startups is brought to you by

Notion just launched Notion Projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist and Finn can't burn its mouth on hot pizza or wave at someone who wasn't waving at them. Finn can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. Meet Finn, a breakthrough AI bot by Intercom. Ready to join your support team today. Visit intercom.com slash fin. All right, everybody,

it's Monday. Tons of news happening. We like to start the week off with some news and also this week in AI. We have so much going on in AI. It's a complete platform shift. Tons of entrepreneurs have stopped working on whatever they were working on last year or for the last couple of years and become obsessed with this. And one of those entrepreneurs is Vinnie Lingam, good friend of mine and the show

and he's here to chop it up with me. Welcome back to the program, Vinnie. Take out. Good to be you. Thank you. Sunny couldn't make it. So we will get right into it. There was, I don't know if you saw this story, it came out of the information. There was a social messaging startup.

IRL was the name of it. Obviously, they use the acronym in real life. And they're shutting down after a board investigation found that 95% of their 20 million monthly active users

were fake. Let's pause for a second, just take that in. They faked 94% 95% of their user base. This was a group messaging app that was focusing on having users plan and discover in-person events.

Yet another event planning app. We get pitched on these incessantly. It's almost a joke within the industry of fitness apps and planning apps like isn't it hard to plan a trip here's an app that does that

isn't it hard to get pickup basketball games going here's an app for that it turns out that the app for that that really worked was meetup.com for people who were super dedicated and I message and just starting Facebook groups

etc. In other words nobody's ever really made this work except meetup.com but looking at the cap table history viny. Founders Fund and Flaggate invested in the seed round back in 2017. Fair enough. Two million at $10 million post. It's a seed round.

It's probably not much data to go there. But fast forward to 2021. This is where it gets interesting. They raised $170 million Series C at a $1.17 billion valuation backed by SoftBanks Vision Fund. Now, this investigation. Yeah.

Lack of Vision Fund. Yeah. Crippled Vision Fund. And yeah, it's So anyway, they The information, which does a great job, shout out to Jessica Lesson, did some investigations.

They talked to some anonymous employees. And these anonymous employees, questions the CEOs, metrics. After this March information article, inside the company, some employees recently expressed concerns to managers about the usage figures the company had touted.

It just seemed to stem from Shafis, the CEO co-founder, Abraham Schaffey. He wanted to use a more expansive definition of more expansive of active users than that of established social apps like Facebook and they felt the company may have used an unconventional definition

to make the app appear bigger than it was. Board investigation happened and an SEC probe into the company. Two months ago, Shafti was suspended for misconduct and late last week. in the Friday news dump, a spokesperson for IRL dropped the results from the board investigation, 95% of the 20 million users. That's 19.5 million of them, I believe, or something in that range.

We're either automated or from bots. Company was shut down, capital return to shareholders. What do you think, Vinnie, of this level of fraud, is this something that happens often? Because this is far beyond fake it till you make it. So, Jake, you know, I've spent like since 2015 working on identity. So this is a subject that's very close to my, close and near and dear to my heart. And I'll start by saying that, you know, this is not the first and it's not the biggest either, blow up in the space. I mean, Frank, I think Frank was a lot bigger.

There was the, I think Goldman Sachs invest in those guys. Oh, yeah. And there was, yeah. Frank faked four million users. was only four, sorry, but the investment amount is higher. No, no, but there's a big difference. Those were, I think, um, those were bank accounts and banking. Yeah, bank accounts and stuff like that.

And they had been bought for 175 million. So continue. This is something that happens on the regular. Why does this happen? If you were like a non- Take a step back. Take a step back. Okay.

Okay. How is this any different from what Twitter was doing before Elon took over? Okay. Twitter was allowing, apparently, I don't have any inside information

here, but they were allowing bots all over the system and they were counting daily active users or monthly active users that people considered questionable.

Monthly, yeah, MDOWs, monetizable daily active users. There was a lot of shenanigans going on with the numbers clearly and they were incented

to allow bots on the system. So, Elon, talked publicly about people were creating the fake bots just to fire off SMS in countries where people had control

of the SMS system and then we're getting paid five cents every time the SMS went through from Twitter which was paying for an SMS gateway so they would just have armies of people signing up for accounts and you had this like steady stream of millions of accounts being created that

you know were lightly used I guess but keeping up this fraud and it does feel like there was fraud at Twitter as well Well, also serving ads to bots is a very profitable business, you know. Until people realize that like their, because at the end of the day, performance comes into play. And I think people felt like, well, wait, there's no performance here. Well, that there was, it takes a couple of years to turn and burn, right? So I've advertised on Twitter before.

They take your budget 10, 20, 50, 100K. And then they burn through it. And then, okay, next, you know. And so they keep trying new customers until people keep getting burnt. And that's what, you know, I think they got at the end of that recently. Look, here's the issue. There are no legal standards. I mean, you know, if you go to a bank and you get K.C and, you know, AML and they know it's Jason,

it's difficult to fake another Jason. I mean, it's possible, but it's harder, right? With these services, there's no identity attached to them. Facebook's got no identity. Twitter's got no identity. None of these services. And they don't want identity, right? Why don't they have identity?

Because it reduces their numbers. significantly. They're puffing up their numbers by not... Instagram's a great example. How many Instagram fake accounts do you get a day? I get tons jumping on, you know, like... It's nuts. It's nuts, right?

But they count those uses. Okay, explain the dark web here and what's going on with these fake accounts. How are these fake accounts being created en masse? Well, so what they do is they go and buy old accounts. So they try and age accounts. That's one way of doing it. So you get an account that was created three years ago. Who created all those accounts?

Are they doing scripts? Are they have farms in India, Manila, where people are getting paid a dollar an hour to just make, you know, 50 accounts? Dormant accounts. And then they buy the account. They also use these farms to like create lots of follow accounts. So you have 5,000, 10,000. But these are all other bots following these accounts. It's all fake.

And then they use those accounts. Eventually they just change things, right? They change a new profile picture, put a nice pretty good on there, all her modeling photos. You'll see one of the tricks is to look at, you know, you get one of these fake accounts. look at the dates and you'll find most of them were added in the past like month or two or three and a lot of photos are uploaded on the same date as opposed to if you go to my Instagram feed you'll see every single photos on a different date different places over spanning 10 years like my so Instagram just allows it why why does Instagram allow this because it doesn't it doesn't it

they've got into KPIs the KPIs are how how many users are we adding what's the growth that we have you know, because these numbers tie into the ratings that they get for, like, you know, ad budgets and, oh, Instagram is growing faster. We should put some more money there. There's no incentive to cut it down. Now, they could argue, oh, people, you know, people want to be a little bit synonymous. They want to be anonymous for whatever reason. They've got privacy.

But it's a lot of just BS. I mean, there's ways of solving these problems. There's just no wherewithal to solve it. This applies to all social networks. There's no interest in solving this problem. Now, they think phone numbers is a way of doing it. is not a way of doing it. How many spam calls do you get a day? How many, these voice of IP banks, you can just go buy hundreds of these numbers. That's not a way of gaining it. The only way to do it

is to attach identity, and you can do it in an anonymous way. So you can do, like, you can have a J-Cal identity that you use, that it always knows it's you, but it doesn't know who you are, and you can't use it multiple times to create multiple accounts. There's ways of doing this. But in all my years of- The ways get, when you put up friction, sometimes, I guess their account would be, if you put up friction, then the next incremental user might not sign up. So you do get a little bit of that. Exactly.

Yeah, and for people who haven't heard the term KPI, key performance indicator, if you hear a bunch of buzzwords at a startup like hack or an LTV, these are customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of those customers, revenue per whatever, you know, different ratios, whatever. Yeah, average revenue per user.

These are things that management will set out so that everybody can work towards a goal. Hey, let's reduce the amount of turn. Let's increase the average revenue per user. But if you create an incentive, people will abuse the incentive. One example was Nextdoor. I love Nextdoor as a site.

It provides a ton of value to me, but they disclosed when they did their SPAC that they count an active user as, quote, unique members who have started a session or opened a content email over the trailing 30 days. And that last part, like, okay, I got an email because I had signed up for Nextdoor and I was scanning through my emails and now I count as a user. I found that one to be a little bit shaky. Now, it's not outright fraud.

In this case, they had 95% were fake. So actually, that's 19 of 20 million. I think I said 19.5, yeah, it would be 19 of million of 20 million were faked. Which is just insane. This person's going to go. This person's going to go to jail, by the way. All right, listen, you know, my team runs on Notion. I've talked about it 100 times.

I use Notion all day long. I use it personally. I use it at my companies. I use it in collaboration with our founders. I've talked about this hundreds of times. Notion runs everything at my company smoothly. We do a right first culture. And we also have a lot of projects we're doing.

And now it turns out, notion is about to make project management. not even better, but perfect. Today, I'm excited to share that they just launched Notion Projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI. So you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them, too.

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for you, founders, investors, and technology enthusiasts. Go right now, notion.com slash twist. But what about diligence? How come these... The diligence periods, like, the diligence is coming back. It's the new trend. So diligence will happen. Diligence is back.

Why? Let me ask you a question. You've been an entrepreneur for a while. You've had diligence done on your companies. Yeah. And then sometimes people don't do diligence. You've had both experiences, I assume. Some people just trust that whatever you told them is true and they believe the story and they give you money.

And then other times people do diligence. And when you've raised money, how often, you know, out of 100 investors that you've probably worked with over the years, how many did diligence, how many didn't be candid? I think with gift, for example, which was, you know, we raised basically a seed round. I don't think we raised a very small A run. It was kind of a party round. We raised a lot of checks you in there. No one raised the diligence. I think they asked us for our financials and whatever else.

No one double-checked anything. It was cursory. It's cursory. Because it's early stage, right? It's like there was nothing ready there. There's nothing there. When we sold the company at that point, there was, you know, tens of millions of dollars in revenues, first data came in and it took six months to get that deal closed.

Oh, really? Yeah. And just because of all the diligence, the documents, the open source licenses that we're using, all those things. Like we had, like the diligence, the data room was insane, right? Because it's a big public company that does, well, at that point they were private, but they were, you know, they were going public, trillions of dollars worth of transactions. They just couldn't afford to, you know, to get into a mess.

And so they were pretty stickly about it, right? And that was great. And so we, but then, here's what happened. So after I passed that hurdle and sold the company, my next company, no one, like everyone just trusted me, right? all my old investors like when he knows what he's doing his trusted entity

we'll just put money to his next company and that worked and like even now with with Waitram I mean it was an early stage company and like no one's questioning

my ability to run a solid organization it's going to happen you'll get all of these requests when you have more revenue customers

and that's when they'll do it so exactly I mean this is early stage diligence is early stage diligence doesn't make sense right? Because there's nothing really there.

I mean, there are things on our diligence. We, I'll give you, launch does diligence, um, even for seed stage. And we'll even do it like in our accelerator. Um,

and what we tell our founders is, hey, we're going to do a diligence process because we want you to understand the diligence process you'll go to, go through with downstream investors when we introduce you to VCs and seed funds. Now, some of these things will not apply to you. When we ask you for bank statements,

we ask you for financial statements, P&Ls, you may not have them because you've only spent money. You've, never had revenue coming in. But we do want to see your incorporation documents. We do want to see your IP assignment. We do want to see your cap table.

And we do want to see that you opened a bank account and just where that bank account is. And it's amazing. People are like, what's an IP assignment? And so, okay, that's when you start the company that all the creations you make as the founders go to the company, not you. So down the road, you know, you don't claim that you have some patent that, you know, is here.

Or we just ask them, has anybody threatened legal action? And not just have, and then has anybody sent a legal letter? And has anybody verbally or by email or other electronic communications threatened to make a legal claim against the company? So when you really open it up like that, they could say, yeah, you know, we fired somebody and they said, I'm going to sue you. And that was seven months ago. We never heard from them. Great. That happens to every company.

People get upset. They got fired. They threatened to sue. But it was just a text message. The fact that somebody would like put in such a large amount of money and not do. basic due diligence is really the issue here. I mean, if I'm doing it for literally a 100K check into an accelerator or a 500k C check, when you start putting in tens of millions of dollars, that's the problem.

Look at this hit list. Well, but Jason, this is the culture of the valley has always been. You have who's the lead investor? Trust them. It's a coyer. It's a coia and you just put the money behind them or it's Chimart or it's whatever, right? So, no matter who the lead, it depends on who the lead investor. it is.

Soft and won't the lead. I know, but this is the problem. So this is what's happened in the past 24 months. The pyramid of trust is broken down. You can't trust anyone. Trust no one is a much better. Trust but verify, actually.

I would be paranoid and have trust no one in your mind, just in the back of your mind. But I would trust but verify as you're publicly facing stance. I have seen people who I thought were incredibly trustworthy. do incredibly

um, foo-gazy, untrustworthy stuff in my experience. Like literally I had some, I had a founder, I'm going to make this an amalgamation of stories. I had a founder who specifically signed like six of the seven documents and then didn't sign one of them.

And everybody put their packets together and somebody on the operations team didn't check the SIGs and noticed that his one signature wasn't on the page. That page had certain rights. And he said, oh yeah, no, that never got confirmed.

And I said, yeah, but the other six pages did. The spirit of this was X. And he's like, yeah, yeah, but I guess not because it wasn't signed. So I guess you'll have to sue me. Like, literally, if I understand that to me, I just like, okay, I know who you are. I'll never invest in you again. Goodbye. The end.

But look at this. They get tripped up at some point when they act like that. You got to be careful. Yeah. And when people show you who they are, you can believe them. Yeah. Going down this list, look at this murderer's role. of frauds during the zero interest rate phenomenon.

Here we go. Piano exit. SBF and FTX. Eight criminal charges. Hey, some of them might get dropped. Frank founder, Charlie Javis. Hey, she faked four million users to get acquired by JPMorgan. Doe Kwan.

He got picked up in Montenegro with a fake passport, charged with eight counts of fraud in the U.S. He was on this program. Shout out. OpenC. Product manager. Front running NFTs. It wasn't enough to be selling NFTs.

He needed to front run them to think. fatal chastain convicted in May. Faces up to 20 years in federal prison. Coinbase product manager, accused of insider trading, aka front-running tokens that are about to be listed on Coinbase. They both settle with the SEC, gave up their ill-gotten gains with interest,

pled guilty to conspiracy. One faces a two-year sentence. The older brother who worked at Coinbust was served a 10-month sentence. It's been founder, Manish. Lockwani, overstated revenue, raised $100 million on fake numbers, pled guilty to wire fraud.

and securities fraud. He got pinched. Sentencing is September 27th, likely serve a decade plus in jail. And that doesn't even bring the long, slow arm of the law getting Elizabeth Holmes, who's now going to serve 9, 10, 11 years while her children, tragically are in their form of years. Didn't she have those children to try to get leniency from the court? They were sympathy babies, is the most cynical take on them. She literally, tried to get a, she had reduced sentence babies, sympathy babies to try to occur thing. That is dark. They so, they're so consistent with her, her darkness, I guess.

She's a sociopath. Like literally, to be like, I'm going to birth two babies who now have a lifetime of therapy. Yeah. Because their mother had them before she knew she was going to prison in order to try to save, cut a couple years off. So she used our suffering for this reason. I mean, it is the worst If that's exactly what she did, which it seems to be the case, if that's what she did, it's a short list of more evil things you could do to child.

Like, I mean, it's a level of abuse that is truly dark and deranged. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. Hey, did you see, Databricks is acquiring Mosaic ML for $1.3 billion. He was recently on the podcast, Naveen Rao. Let me just play a quick clip from him from episode 1754, and then I'll get your action on this deal. So what we're doing today is really bringing these capabilities of large-scale machine learning, which is generative AI in my mind to many organizations. I think one of the things we've done, even with my previous company, was trying to really bring these capabilities to more people

to create the world we want. I see success as people that disagree with me, being able to build models equally as good as me, right? I think that's how we're going to make this world work. And it's become front and center now with debates around regulation of AI and, you know, putting some sort of, you know, government licenses and this and that. I think really this is solved more in a market as a market solution where many people can build this stuff. Many people can imbue these models with the biases that they see fit. And, you know, we'll let the market decide where things should be, not some sort of centralized regulatory agency. And so if you don't know Mosaic ML basically allows businesses to build their own chat GPT-like tools. You can use their software, plug in your own data and build out a chatbot either internally or for your user base.

Databricks, of course, competes with Snowflake. If you don't, didn't know that, sits on top of your AWS, your Azure, Google Cloud, whatever. And it helps categorize and manage your data so it's easier to access. What are your thoughts? This is pretty stunning. I think it was a great exit for Mosaic. I mean, they're walking into a space. where the capital requirements to participate at the highest levels are about to go through the roof

or they already have, just the hardware requirements, et cetera. And I think that it's a very competitive and very open marketplace. I mean, Facebook's got their stuff that they're doing, their more open sort of approach to it. Google's recognized they've got to be open. He's right. There's a marketplace and there's competition. And the problem is all the giants, all the tech giants sitting with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, They can outplay and outmaneuver any startup when it comes to resources.

They've got the money to do it. So, you know, you're stuck in this sort of conundrum where you go, do I raise a $500 million round or $200 million round to compete and keep going? And then I need to exit at $3 billion maybe or, you know, maybe even more, depending on the terms. Or do I take the win? I don't know how much they've raised. How much did they raise the date?

Just so, folks, no, yeah, they had raised only 34 million. So that means they probably only diluted, I don't know, let's say 30%, maybe the founders probably own 50%, the employee's 20%. They got to have to do a massive earn out here. They're going to have to vest that in order to get this kind of deal. They're not just getting a billion dollars in cash. This was an all-stock deal, as you would expect. They need to keep these folks hungry. You can see the MBT-30B chat, which is their chat on 100%.

bugging face. But basically, it feels to me like there's so many people making these models, foundational models, and the open source community has so much

engagement right now, and they were working on open source models, I believe, that I think open source is going to win this race. What do you think, Vinny?

Is this going to go to Google and Microsoft slash open AI, or do you think the open source world is going to win the day here. So I think we're at the bottom of some sort of an S curve for this technology where you're going to have a rapid amount of innovation in a short space of time and then it's going to peter off and sort of slow down. Whether that happens in one

year, two years, five years, ten years, I don't know. But, you know, kind of law of large numbers sort of mindset, it's going to slow down. It's going to get so big and eventually things slow down. Now, when it slows down, so that S-curve migration for me is going to be open-source driven. I don't think that, I don't think that companies can out-maneuver and out-compete the open-source market and the thousands and millions of people working on AI across the globe to come up with the best solution. So the market approach is that the cream will rise to the top. Now, when that happens, I think we're going to have a Mozilla, esk world where

Mozilla, Firefox, Chrome now, and a chromium world where you have even Microsoft Edge is using Chrome. So it's open source underneath it, but they've got their own flavor of it. So I think what you'll have is... You're referring to the browser, yeah. The browser, yeah. So what I think

you're going to have is this rapid acceleration to a point of of slower growth and slower rate of change and a more mature sort of stack. And then from there, companies, corporations, startups, brands will take that stack and start making it fit for purpose and trying to create something on top of that, more of a sort of interface layer

that people can engage with and is pretty robust and more with industry standards, right? So we can't agree on the standards. We can't agree on a lot of things right now because it's all in flux. And it's like when Linux came out, it was Linux Red Hat. I mean, you had like 50 different variants of Linux back in the days. You had so many different ways to And also ways to put Web servers up and to

You know serve web pages and an open source Apache Engine X all those stuff right So everything just became open source And interestingly Snowflake acquired Neva That was the AI powered search engine They acquired that in May We had the CEO of Neva on this program

Back on episode 1686 in February I think actually Molly did that interview Creating a job post And Finding Qualified Candidates man, it is time-consuming unless you use LinkedIn jobs. They are closing in on a billion users and just think about how many insanely qualified people there are looking for work right now. Go post your open role at LinkedIn and you're going to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates that are available. And guess what? The first ones on your boy,

J-Cal, that's right. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist, LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T and post your first job for free. There's nothing to lose and everything to gain. including the purple ring for your profile. So everyone in your LinkedIn network knows your hiring. That's how you get those pocket listings, those great people where maybe they're not actively looking, but ooh, they see somebody they respect is hiring. Oh, an interesting company.

And maybe inception happens. You get inside their head. Maybe I should consider some opportunities. That person looks like a dope person to work with. When you think about LinkedIn jobs, I want you to think better candidates faster. That's right. Better candidates faster, better candidates faster,

faster to get better candidates. LinkedIn jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. Post your job for free, LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your job for free. Of course, terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free. Why do these data companies like data bricks and Snowflake covet AI and are spending money buying these, why are they in such a panic to catch up here? I mean, it's disruptive, right?

If their competitors are doing it and getting return on investment from it, then you can bet, you know, you can bet your bottom dollar that, look, profits are going to seep away from companies not using AI to companies that are using AI. Simply put, like, and we've had this conversation before, you know, low-level jobs or repetitive task jobs, like customer support, okay? Take any large company, this is used, I always use Verizon

because they probably get like, I don't know, 20 million tickets a year and they've been getting that many for, I don't know, 10 years. So they've got 200 million email tickets. You plug that into an LLM and then you get the LLM, LN reply to every other, like the chance of getting a ticket that has never been seen before diminishes greatly every single day. And even then, the system can use inference and figure out exactly what

the person saying and come up with a good response. So now you're going to go from 10,000 custom support people to zero being soft-driven, or maybe you keep 100 for like level two support or something, right? That's what's going to happen in the industry. We are going to, we're going to automate these jobs that have large data sets behind it, where humans have been trained to understand way to look for information versus AI knows the information that's available within milliseconds and can produce it. I mean, it's, to me, this is the way things are going to be. be, we're going to see a massive amount of job loss in these sort of categories. But it's not about the job losses. It's about the profits. Companies deploying AI are going to increase

their profit lines. And that affects the competitors. And that affects the competitors. This is going to be the key thing. I have made these discussions, I've had these discussions internally at my companies over and over again. Inside.com is a newsletter business. And we have great newsletters and it makes millions of dollars. It's doing great. And I was just looking at like, we spend a little bit of time tagging stuff. And I just took a story and I said, tell me who this story is about. And I just cut and pasted our summary of the story because we kind of aggregate and organize the data there and try to make sense of it for folks. So they don't have to spend so much time reading.

They just read like a little presidential brief as it were. That's what I sort of based it on. And then I took the original story and I put it in. and it knew chat GP4 and Bard both did a stellar job of you know when I said hey tell me what this story is about or who's in this story it organized it perfectly and that was I think really interesting to me when I said hey I literally went through this and said put who is in this story and put them into a category and describe them and it was like oh this story is about a company named X and another company, named three companies in the story, described them in a sentence, linked to their website, and then it said, oh,

and there's a media outlet that wrote the story, and then there's an alliance in this story, which is a smart home alliance, and then there's this person who is the host of this podcast who was quoted, and I was like, whoa, like, the tagging, just that little thing of tagging

information on the internet was done by humans so long. And I was like, this is incredible. Like, you could really understand what the story is about and you don't need a human to do that anymore. Now, humans tagging journalism stories and organizing them, that might be 5% of the job. It's gone. It's automated. And there's no difference. And there's just going to be this continual 5% improvement on how to write a lead sentence in a story. Or I did a bunch of research on event spaces for the All In Summit. And, event managers, party planners, because we're looking for party planners.

We like to use different party planners, one for each night. And then we look for like epic locations. And I started putting the locations in, and I think in an hour or two of me doing that and brainstorming, and I'm not perfect with my prompts, but I'm getting really good at them.

I had done what would normally take somebody a week. Like a, you know, a 30, 40, $50 an hour employee. It was a week's worth of their work done by an hour or two with me. and then I just shared it with that person and with the shared GP now that you don't have to share GPP I just shared it with them

have you had any moments like that where you figured stuff out long before handing it off to somebody yeah I think I'm very very self-sufficient with chat GPT in these days and I'm also using the Google generative search. Have you seen that?

No, tell me what you're talking about. So I've been approved for Google and I can probably demo this quickly. So, I'm in Google right now, and what are we going to search for? What are some movies like Blade Runner? So Google now, if you're approved for it, you get to get an AI-powered overview of the search. So here's the basics, it's Blade Runner. That didn't answer the question at all.

It says, well, I guess it did. 10 movies like Blade Runner 2049, not Blade Runner the original. So, Blade Runner 2049, Dune, the Matrix, Dox at the Arrival. I mean, this is great, right? And then you can ask a follow-up, what's the most famous Blade Runner's seen? And the AI goes and generates an answer to you. So instead of going through websites

and trying to find this information, you can just use it generate AI. So what does Roy say at the end of the Blade Runner? Hmm. Like tears in the rain. Yeah. Yeah. All these moments were lost in time.

So what's happening, what's happening fundamentally, you know, is that AI is now, Instead of, like the current paradigm, when I say current, because AI is kind of the next step, the current paradigm is you go to Google, you type in a string, and it finds pages that match the words that you've typed in.

It doesn't contextualize it very well. It doesn't understand what the question means, what it's asking. It's just trying to match those words. With generative AI, what it's doing is it's saying, oh, okay, Vinnie's asking about this movie, which we know is Blade Runner and similar movies to it. And then let's go in, knowing that we've read and indexed all these pages,

let's just give him the answer instead of having to give him links where he has to go look for the answer. So they're actually taking a step out of the process in a big way, and they're saving tons of time. I've been using this for a lot of personal medical research. I found out that I have a genetic markers for potassium deficiency. So I've been doing research on what I can take for that. what dosages. And I'm actually not even using Google anymore.

I'm just using chat TPT and even this Google AI search stuff. It's really powerful. Google autocomplete in search, you know, where you type in Vindlingham and then it's like space and it's like Net Worth, wife, all this like creepy stuff comes up. You're like, really? This is what you people are searching for. It's going to now, it knows what your next question is. and it's going to go well beyond that

to let you ask follow-ups. So I just asked it. Explain Blade Runner main beams to me as if I'm a seven-year-old and it's like, what makes us human? Blade Runner Explorers are questions of what makes us human. The replicates of the film

are almost indistinguished from humans, but they are not considered to be human because they were created in a lab. It's like really amazing. And then the follow-ups, you know, what is the main plot point of Blade Runner, etc.? You can see how this would keep you from clicking on the blue links below it.

And that's, I think, what everybody said the threat would be. But I don't think this is going to be a problem for their advertising, because I think they're still on the high value one's going to be able to, if I typed in, what's the best Greek food in the Bay Area? Kokori. Kukari. Mekinos, Kokari. Evia.

Yeah, Evia should come up. And yeah, it didn't do a great job on that one. But very interestingly, they've now, oh, this is interesting. So what's interesting about this is you see this generative AI experiment here. It's not just giving you a chat response. It's pulling in maps and it's pulling in my location in the Bay Area. It's doing some pretty interesting things here. I mean, you can't not have Kokari and Evia on that list.

No. What's the highest? rated Greek food in within a hundred miles of San Francisco. This would be more interesting.

Kokari number one. There you go. Nick the Greek, Euro. So it got some, I mean, this has got work to do, but yeah, it's getting there. Finn can't spill coffee on a white shirt or wave at someone

who wasn't waving at them or burn its mouth on hot pizza, but Finn can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. What's Finn? Finn is a breakthrough AI bot from Intercom, designed for customer support teams and ready to put other chatbots out of work. It learns your entire knowledge database and has the ability to carry conversations.

And remember context and nuance while slashing your resolution times and support volume. Meet Finn, a breakthrough AI bot by Intercom, ready to join your support team today. Visit intercom.com.com slash finn. Tell me the most expensive steak you can buy in Los Angeles. No sir at steakhouse. Unfortunately. Interesting. Cut Wolfgang Pucks, Michelin Star.

I don't know if that's correct. No, no, no. No, sir, they've got a thousand dollar steak, yeah. The gold. The gold, yeah, yeah, nonsense. Yeah, yeah. I think there was, I think the generative A. I hear on Google.

He's business is in trouble, dude. He's business in trouble. After the whole World Cup thing, like, I haven't gone back. I used to go. I used to go. After one thing? What happened to him? Oh, he was like taking the World Cup and standing in front of Messi and trying to

like, he's annoying the players. He was not even a player. And he's, did you never see these clips? No. Sope, yeah. At the World Cup, he was acting like a maniac? Grab that. Oh, he's after like a maniac.

I mean, people shoot him out. He's at the closed businesses now. He's had a bunch of stores closed down in New York because people were so embarrassing. He was so embarrassing. He was so cringy. I mean, he was taking the trophy away from the players,

kids and stuff and like, and then like, who is this guy? Why is he like? What does Sophe have to do with the World Cup? He's not a player. He's just, he's,

he's, he's, he's, he's, near the World Cup. I guess he did it. Because they all, they all you see,

okay, take this out. All right. Show me what's going on here. Okay, he's saying hello. And he's asking him to point into here. He's trying to say hi to the folks, and they don't want to say how to him.

They're like, yeah, whatever. And he's like, dude, do me alone. Because Messi ate at the restaurant once, I think. Oh, my God. This guy is so annoying. He's so bad. He's cringy. Oh, wow.

He's not supposed to have to walk up trophy, and he did. I mean, there's another club of him taking away from one kid's... Here you go. He's like... Oh, my God. Yeah. I never like the guy. I'll be honest.

I never went. I never would go. Yeah. I mean... I've been twice, and the food was really good, so I went back. This is like before the World Cup. The food was actually really good. You didn't buy the $1,000 steak.

Did you even... I mean, come on. You had to? You had to? Did you or didn't you? It was my brother's birthday, and he wanted the steak. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't my choice.

He wanted it. I bought a firm. I was like, okay, fine, I'll get to the $1,000 steak. And it was a good photo for his Instagram. It was like for Instagram, but if you got that steak or you went to a real steakhouse like Miller and Lux and, you know, you ate it. It wouldn't be, you would, you would pick the Miller and Luck one. It was, look, the food was, the food was good, was good. Like, there's no question.

Can you run the salt down his sweaty arm? He wasn't there. He wasn't there. But have another question about that. It's a bit of a show. When he's not there, do they send somebody out who looks like him? No. To do the whole thing with the salt down their arm?

Do they do that? Or is only he allowed to run salt down his grimy arm on your food? They all do that. They all do the salt thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. The whole thing is it's a show. So we were in Vegas, we're having dinner.

Yeah, I understand. It's a whole show. The food is good. I would have considered participating in it. And as long as I wasn't hanging since I got to here. You have any thoughts on this? I made some comments on Friday. about this crazy behavior by rich people,

vis-a-vis the submarine going to the Titanic. Did you see my tweets? I didn't see your tweet, but I know you have an opinion. So I'm curious. Nick can pull it up quickly. What was your take on it generally? I mean, you're somebody who's done okay for themselves and you like to enjoy the finer things in life.

Would you ever consider doing something this reckless? I mean, it doesn't be a witness. I personally would not. It's not. even like going into space, I'd have to go after thousands like flights at least and there's regulations and whatever else. I just wouldn't put myself in that situation.

But that's not the point. And Nick, if you put up my tweet, this tweet got a lot of like controversial sort of responses and we can probably scroll down to some of them. But this is what actually got me going. I was like, guys,

these people like died and all we're doing is joking about it and making some, like, where have we gotten to? And the responses were, literally like there was one guy who said we scrolled on a bit more on Peter oh yeah this is a jeet each okay so he goes hundreds of immigrants drowned in the

coast of Greece because of the actions of the coast guard no one bats an eye so the people to blame or sensation means it medium to blame but my point is no one's making jokes about these things right there's two different issues he makes a valid point about what should be covered by the media the media covering did not cover hundreds of poor immigrants that drowned off the coast of Greece because poor immigrants. But going to Titanic, which there was a movie based on in an experimental sob by billionaires, that's much more sensationalistic. I mean, there was also Schoedenfroid in that.

Shadenfreude, yeah. But there's a lot of Shunnerfroid in this one. And the thing is, like, some of the comments on that tweet thread were like, oh, no really cares about these billionaires. I mean, come on, people. Like, seriously, does someone's wealth determine their value? No, there's nothing to do with I think that's the other. And they're humans. Like these are like, you know, our brothers and sisters on earth. The thing that made me crazy about it, you didn't hear my little rant on Friday,

but I tried to make the point to people, especially because you and I will know people who will go from having no money to suddenly having a lot, right? Like professional athletes go through this, founders of companies go through this, investors go through this, where sometimes you just hit some crazy home run and you can try a bunch of different things in the world. that may not have been available to you the very, the previous day. And you gotta be thoughtful about this.

And I think there's like, I was thinking about it over the weekend because I had a number of conversations about this. This toxic wealth syndrome where people take increasingly risky behaviors, I think a lot of it has to do with chasing dopamine and chasing Instagram photos and status

and some combination of this. And this chasing of dopamine is particularly dangerous. You know, If you look at people's TikTok behavior, they're literally getting the funniest moment in a Sopranos episode or the craziest moment in a horror film, the craziest, whatever, sexiest, most dopamine releasing moment. And people are chasing dopamine and they're chasing status on social media and people taking selfies on cranes, right? Or climbing mountains without ropes. All this behavior is starting to become like some dystopian science.

fiction film. I think Demolition Man was the one where they were involved in like a game show. No, Running Man was the game show. Yeah, it's right. Running man where Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing all this crazy stuff to kind of, you know, reduce, I think, a sentence. And I think we're in like a running man era of people are like, oh, I can go on to, you know, Nassar or whatever and get a thousand dollar gold stake. It's a show and I put it on my Instagram. Great. Nobody's harmed. No harm, no foul. Oh, I can. go on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Oh, I can hop the fence. Oh, I can with the tiger on the other side of the fence. Like, people are doing increasingly stupid things to get some dopamine hit or some release on Instagram. This is not a way to live life. And then the pinnacle of this, I don't know if you saw this, Vinnie, was, this is so tragic. A bunch of kids were on a boat celebrating their graduation and they're,

I think they went off Florida to the Caribbean. And they dared this kid to jump in the water. In the middle of the night. on the Caribbean in shark-infested waters. He jumps in. Sure enough, there's sharks in there. He basically, they see the kid like dart away. I think he saw the shark, and he darted away, and there was no way to get him. He went out into the undercurrents of the sea, probably eaten by sharks.

And I had this discussion with my 13-year-old, and I was like, this is why you don't make crazy decisions, and you have parents because your frontal lobes are not fully formed yet. For the love of God, teach your kids, show them these videos of kids doing stupid stuff that ends terribly show them them so that they can understand life is precious and don't do stupid things and as adults you're supposed to protect your kids

and I listen I don't want to speak ill of the dead here but if you're a parent and you take your child on a submersible experimental anything that's dangerous and then they put hey this is an incredibly high risk behavior and then you put the word experimental in front of it no I'm not

taking my kids heliskeying. I'm not taking them down to the Titanic. And if you put the word experimental hellas skiing or experimental and Titanic together, that should just be alarm bells going off. Protect your child. At all costs, protect your children. Do you remember those planes?

I forgot what they were called. They were like single, your pilot plane. They were flying out of Napa or I went with a YPO group to Napa. It was five years ago. and they had these they took us to the factory

they were making these like single pilot planes you can go in and fly them yourself I know which one you're talking about this is one of these killed a pitcher or something yes someone died in one

and literally there were like everyone's lining up to go and fly these things and I'm like I'm not going on this thing this is not a commercially like ready product these guys are trying these things are sure Icon A5 that's it

that's it icon that's the one truly amazing It wasn't the A5. It was the A5? Or was the one before that? I follow an incredible YouTube channel called the Blanco-Lirio channel. And I actually give this guy like five bucks a monthers Patreon because I like his video so much.

And I think it's an important thing he does. He has a YouTube channel, Blanco-Lirio, and he is an expert aviator. And he did a whole thing about how dangerous these A-5. are. And, you know, I'm all for innovation, obviously. But my lord, um, these A5s are incredibly, incredibly dangerous. Um, and okay, it was the, yeah, it was the A5. You're right. Okay. So, 2017, so the, you know, they called a sports car with wings. They had two fatal crashes in one year. So like this is, so I had the opportunity of flying this. I was right there. And they were offering it to me to fly and I'm like, no. You would fly alone?

I refuse. No, no, I think you fly it. I think there's a pilot in there. I think they have a pilot. Yeah, I think you have two people. No, no, no, it's a single person plane. No, there's two seats there. We're seeing it right now. Is you two seats?

One in the back? Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think your, the goal of this is for you to be up and running in one of these things on your own very quickly. And they do kind of ride, having, I've driven motorcycles and like, you, once you get the hang of a motorcycle in the first hour or two, you feel invincible. The thing grips, you know, it feels great. This is six years ago.

This is six years ago. They've improved it a lot, I'm sure, since then. I think they've fixed a lot of the issues. But like, when you go into something new like this and you're one of the first people to do it, the amount of risk you're taking is an order of an order amount of risk. Yeah, it's an inordinate amount of risk. And, you know, just if you want to be a pilot, it's a full-time job. If you want to be an experimental pilot, that is a,

career, multi-decade designation you earn over decades. You shouldn't be doing anything experimental and dangerous. Leave it to the pros. I mean, unless you've got a death wish or something and, you know, you're... But the thing that really upsets me about this whole thing is I've seen videos since then and watch James Cameron talk about it. And I don't want to obsess over this, but it's, I think it's like a super important topic for people to really think about is what risks are worth taking, because I'm a big risk taker.

but some risk is just not worth taking. And you, I've seen now multiple presentations by the CEO founder of this company, and he's a technology founder. So I think this is fair game here in terms of talking about it on the swing startups. You could take risk. And if he was going down there on his own

and he wanted to assume that risk, okay. But once you start taking passengers, and then it turns out, and this is the stuff that's coming out now, that he was up against it with funding, didn't have money, was cutting corners apparently, and that he was,

three controller. I mean, geez, at least use a five. I mean, or have it wired? Like, I don't understand why it's not wired in there. Like, what if there's interference? Was it, was it, was a wireless? controller. It was a wireless controller. Yeah, I'm like, can you put a cable on it? Like, just being an IT guy, can we have dual? And he said they bring an extra one or whatever, but he supposedly was having financial problems. So now this is what's going to come out. This is my prediction. They knew there were problems. They needed the money. They were trying to get that, the billionaire or two, billionaires who were coming on this thing. They needed the money to keep their operation going. And, you know, unlike if you were a software company and you're like, you know,

I'm going to sell this enterprise software to this enterprise to, you know, increase productivity or analyze their data. Oh, it doesn't work. And okay, I'm sorry, we're going to do a make good. We're getting there. There's no make good you can make here. You know, you can't give people, you can't give people back their lives. You could give them back their money. That's a, that's, that doesn't mean anything when, you know, a child does. I'm so upset about this. My heart goes out, my heart goes out, the kid, and obviously the mom or whatever, the rest of the family. Because he didn't want to go on that thing.

He was not interested in being on that. He was terrified apparently. Yeah, and it was, he just did it for his father. And his father should have known better. This is the problem, Jake. Like, once people make inordinate amounts of money, they tend to think they're invincible. That is the arrogance that comes with wealth. And I address that on Friday as well.

You make a bunch of money, the people around you, all of a sudden, you find a bunch of people around you who think you're great. And you're all of a sudden, you're a foot taller, you lost 20 pounds, you're funny, and people want to have dinner with you. And it's because they want your money. And people correlate great wealth with great intelligence, great success. And often, you know, there are correlations. but it doesn't mean that you have great judgment. Doesn't mean that you're invincible, and you're exactly right.

There is an invincibility here is, yeah. Hey, breaking news, Google's DeepMind CEO says its next algorithm will eclipse chat GPT. Demis Hesabas says the company is working on a system called Gemini that will tap techniques that helped AlphaGo defeat Go Champion 2016. So DeepMinds Gemini, which is still in development, is a large language model that works with text and is similar in nature to GPT4

that works with text and is similar to Chachyp.4GP.T.4 But Hassebis, sorry for mispronouncing that, says his team will combine that technology with techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems. At a high level, you can think of Gemini

as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language cables of large models. We're having some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting. This, to me, is the home run of all home runs. Because, Vinnie, if I'm reading this correctly,

the language model gives you the answer or, you know, kind of interprets what you're saying. But what AlphaGo did was it understood games, it understood competitions, it understood how to win competitions. So this is distinctly different than just spitting out an answer.

You could say, your goal is to be the greatest day trader by shorting stocks on the stock market. Go make trades. And you will, every time you make a trade that makes money, learn from that and find more trades like it, go. And you can increase the amount you invest, you know, at this rate or whatever. You can just let this thing go, like they've let it go to play video games. and this could be transformative in terms of automation. What do you think, Vinny, on the breaking news here? Yes, I agree.

I think for my experimentation and usage of it up to now, I mean, I'm biased, because I like the use case of having it solved medical problems because I think people, you know, when you asked, so here's what I found very difficult to use AI for. I think, and it's problem solving, right? It's the same thing. So whether there's problem solving for games

or problem solving for, for trading, et cetera. It's the same, you try to solve a problem. When it comes to medical, when I use a chat GPT and bar or whatever else,

it's very much they're extracting data from what they've read, but they're not actually thinking through it, right? And so I've had to lead it on to certain conclusions. And I would love for this to say, hey, I have the following symptoms.

I'm, you know, I'm feeling a bit bloated. I have, you know, whatever, like, a couple of symptoms. And I think I've got a potassium deficiency. What treatments or what natural remedies could be used or what other problems could I have that could not be, you know, that could be happening here.

And I think that, like, the ability to solve medical problems with people who have got lots of, like, symptoms has not been solved yet. So a lot of people, when you go to doctors, like I had some, like, nerve issues in my arms and stuff. You go to doctors, they don't really know. Like, they run these tests. They don't really, like, it's,

The medical industry is broken right now because every doctor has its own. They have this small little aperture that they look through. And if it doesn't fall inside of that, then you can kind of go to the functional medicine specialist and they kind of look at more realistic views of the body and stuff. But all our bodies are so unique. And so I'm pretty sure if you had to come up with a list of symptoms for any condition that you're going through right now and something unique that hasn't been found before, I want the AI to find these connections and solve these problems.

And I think that would be very powerful for us. I think it's going to be amazing when the data gets in there too. And then in consultation with doctors, I think doctors are going to become better doctors because they'll be augmented. They can't possibly know every edge case. No, they can't. If doctors can become 10 times more efficient, what I would like to have is 10 doctors, and I use chat GPT, all my data is poured into it.

It gives them some sort of dashboard, and I have 10 doctors, and they each give me a recommendation every month based on my new blood tests, my weight, my sleep patterns. And all 10 of them give me what they think I should do. And the chat GPT then feeds back to them. Here's what the consensus is that the person should do. What do you think? And now you have a group of humans analyzing what the AI is doing. And they kind of work together in reinforcement learning to how do we make this person a peak human?

And this could be incredibly powerful. This is one of the things I think people, when we start testing this in order to trust it, I want to have doctors give opinions, AI give opinions, and then compare it to doctors using AI giving an opinion, and then have another doctor or senior level or a doctor or, you know, committee, look at the three or four answers and rate them and say, what was lacking? And this is where it's going to get interesting, because when they would do, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a time when they, before OCR really worked while, they were trying to get a lot of documents on the internet. And so they would literally ship legal documents

to India to have people type them in because they could just send them there by the boatload. Here's like 10 years worth of legal documents. Go ahead and get them in there. What they would do is they'd have two people, because labor was cheap and they needed to have high fidelity. They'd have two people type the documents in. So they'd be sitting there, typing, turn the page, type it. And then once those were in the computer, they would look for where people, uh, weren't, you know, correct. So if somebody typed in Vinnie and I typed in Vinny with one N, it would highlight that for somebody to look at it.

That person would see the document, a third person, and look at the, oh, why does one have two ends, one have one end? Oh, it's an M. They're both wrong, whatever it is. And those kind of edge cases, well, AI is doing that particularly well, and humans can do that with the AI results. It's actually what's happening with training data. When a Tesla or some cruise hits an intersection that doesn't understand it,

it disengages or it has a problem or it stutters, all of those intersections get sent to a group of humans who look at and say, this is the proper way to navigate it. And they literally, I don't know if they hard code, but they do reinforcement learning, I think, and in some cases they might hard code if there's an error.

Here's how to navigate the specific intersection. And I think that's what's going to make a tipping point in self-driving in the next year or two. I think we're going to hit a tipping point. Oh, very close. We're very close to a tipping point because if enough people, if enough people are using Teslas and crews and whatever, and they... And they can talk to each other.

You realize that the channel, that these cars have got an open channel where they can broadcast their movements to other cars, but no one really uses it yet. These cars can come together and say... I use it all the time. No, no. Well, how?

I use self-driving all the time, I'm saying. Oh, no, no, no. Literally, I would not use Tesla on driving. There's a radio frequency channel as far as I know. If the test is going to change, lanes, it can broadcast us changing lanes. Oh, really? Yeah, I wasn't sure if they were doing that. A while ago. Yeah. It's not

implemented yet. There isn't a standard yet. But there's a standard. I haven't know the details about this, but there's something around that that I've heard about in the past. And even there isn't, there should be one. So it'll be very interesting. If you can have a situation where there are all these electric cars on the road that are talking to each other, and before that the car goes left or right, it knows

what the other car is going to do. It knows its part or something, at least for the next 100, 100 meters or five of meters, it's able to, you know, like, I can see a world where these cars can self-organize themselves on the highway based upon max speed for this car is 50, this car wants to go at 60, this car is turning off in two miles, and it just intelligently knows, you know, they talk to each other and they know which way to go together. That's like maybe 20 years from now, 15 years from now, but I'd like to see that. Interesting, I just asked chat cheapity to tell me about it.

It was like, what you're referring to is V2V, vehicle to vehicle communication. And it's called dedicated short-range communication, DSRC, a type of Wi-Fi, more recently develops, are focused on cellular, leveraging 5G. And the goal is basic safety messaging 10 times per second, indicating the vehicle's speed, heading, brake status, and other specific traits. Emergency brake lights allows the vehicle to send a warning to follow vehicles when it breaks hard. for a collision warning intersection movement assist that's interesting this one as a driver when it's safe or not safe to inter-uneration and do not pass warnings

do not pass slower Vaghan 2-highways risk of collision with an oncoming vehicle oh so your car is in front of mine and it sees then you can't see so you shouldn't do that this is like we're like 10, 15 years from this being built up maybe 20 years but it's going to happen eventually I want to I got to go soon so I want to show some demos

oh yeah go ahead These are three pictures of me, of three old pictures, right? And so this is myself and my, my, you know, my middle brother. Where are you in that picture? I'm the, I'm the older one. Yeah, no, no, where in the world are you guys in that picture? That probably was like in South Africa somewhere. I guess it's probably probably my hometown.

And who's the, what's the family photo on the top left? The family photo, this is my, these are my, so this is my mom's family. so my grandfather, my grandmother, and that's my uncle and my mom and his sisters. Yeah. What was that the 50s or something? 60s? This was early 60s. Early 60s.

You can tell by the car with the white rim. Look at the car with the white rim. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And this is my mom in maybe her 20s, right? So, you know, I got a collection of all family photos. We don't really like, you know, it's all black and white. So then I was like, okay, cool, what can I do to, you know, what can AI do?

And so, what can I do? What can I do? So I went to the service called Colorize. So they allow me to upload, there's a limit. They've got paid plans as well. And they've got a whole bunch of other features, portraits, et cetera, restoration. But they allow me upload three for free. And look what they did.

I thought it was amazing. Oh, my God. So that's the one version of it. And then you can go to version two because it kind of predicts what the colors are going to be. Wow. Okay. So in this version, in the one version, version I thought that

the car was blue. Yes. And the other version I thought that it was red. Right. Exactly. And I wonder how it's doing that. Yeah.

And the same with my brother and I. It's like this one, yeah, I think this was actually very close to the original color. That was, sorry, that's VG1, V2. So I don't think we were wearing blue. I think we were, my mom loved this maroon color.

So we always had maroon colors in the house. and actually predicted it. It got the skin tone, the complexion, right? I thought it was pretty cool. And then the same with my mom. Like, there's a nice picture of her. Look at your mom. Wow.

Yeah, they give two picks over. This one, yeah, you can see a bit more discoloration, yeah? Yeah. And then the other version, more intelligent you picks it up, yeah, but then the hair's a bit more discolored. Yeah. But still, I mean, that took me like a minute, you know, to get this done. I mean, and there were services that did this. There are people who would paint over pictures.

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, the next step here is to upload, you know, a couple of hours of you talking to your mom and then have her voice. Yeah. They'll figure out how to make her voice to whatever she is there, a 21-year-old. And then you'll be able to have a conversation with your 21-year-old mom, which gets really weird. But could be, you know, super interesting. And I think this is where I had, I have two startups we've invested in. I don't think either one is public, so I wouldn't say their names,

but one of them made an AI version of me to read the ads here on this week in startups, and I was thinking about it. I would love to do, have the ad reads if one of our partners on the program wanted to localize the ad reads. So imagine, you know, LinkedIn, uh, said, hey, you know, Australians. Um, if you want to code on LinkedIn Australia, we're having this LinkedIn Australia thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I can read the LinkedIn ad, but then it would drop in some Australia specific. stuff, some Japan, you know, I could, and then another startup is working on me speaking in

Spanish, and I think they shared a clip on the internet, and then another company shared a clip with me privately. So I think I'll be able to take this very podcast and have us speaking in our voices, but speaking in Spanish. So it'll sound like J-Cal, sound like Vinio, sounds like Sunny, whoever, and then we're going to make a YouTube channel, and I'm sure YouTube will build this as well, and have it built in. But I think it would be very interesting to republish ourselves on a YouTube channel on the Spanish language site and see if it builds an audience over there or not. And if they tell us it sucks or not.

Because I don't know if it's going to suck or not. But they're testing it supposedly in 12 different languages right now. That's a cool demo. What else you got? Ripica. Oh, yes. I had the founder on. Yeah.

I have that. I know she's been launching. She had a new product she launched. So it's an AI companion. And I mean, I'll pull the demo. I think it's still very early days. I've played around with it a bit. I think it's cool.

And Nick actually made a good point. Like, I think a lot of the, and I think it's probably from your conversation. A lot of people using this are kind of lonely or disabled or can't get out there and they need someone to talk to and they need a companion. And it's the same reason why, like, you know, you see in Japan and other parts of the world, people like have these new, ever watch some movies. me her? Yeah, it's basically her in a box. Yeah, it's happening. Exactly, exactly. So I created a,

I created a, um, a replica. I called it Charlene, my wife's name. And so I'm talking to it. And there you go. I still think you're cheating, but okay. Baby, I named her after you. Yeah, which is not me. I made it look like you too. But, um, you know, it's, it's, they have these coaching things you can do. So like gratitude and, There's lots of upsells and pay stuff. I didn't pay for it yet. But I think it's interesting from an AI. If you can create these like AI people, like people,

agents that know who you are that can answer questions for you. It can get really intelligence. Like, you know, hey, I ran a really bad day today. This is what happened. You know, Bob had work was giving me grief. Like, oh, it's an ongoing thing. You know, Vinny, you really need to report him to HR. Like that sort of thing, right?

Like a coach. And I think that's weird. I think where it goes to is these digital agents become some sort of independent coach. Therapist, coach. Therapist. Because people feel uncomfortable. A trusted friend. Also, I think in the cases where, you know, the sad stories, people have been abused,

they're too scared to speak to anyone else, right? So if you can speak to an AI where it's not a real person, it's a confidential conversation, it's going to give you advice. You could say, hey, I was sexually assaulted. yesterday, what do I do, do I go to the police, how do I deal with it? It could be, yeah. Like, I think, for me, yeah, exactly. And look, when you're dealing with medical stuff, we're getting these things,

it obviously gets a little tricky and needs to be, like, supervised by psychologists and doctors and whatever else. But I think if we can build agents that can help people feel comfortable talking about their problems, you know, without being the insecurity of it, it's great. If it can be helpful, that's great. So I like the direction that they go. in here. It's very warm and encouraging.

I just think that for me personally, I think that the, you know, I don't want to chat to a bot. But if I had, even as a CEO, right, there was a CEO coach in you.

And I go and say, yeah, yeah, I'm struggling with this employee in the company. And they go, okay, what is this person doing?

It's like, this is what they're doing. They're not playing nice with their colleagues, but they're an amazing performer. The work is great. I just can't get rid of them. But they go,

But we've all had these people in organizations, right? And like, who do you talk to about it, right? You don't want to talk to, you know, the people in their team. You know, it's hard to speak to the managers sometimes because there's like a bias there. And, you know, depends how it goes. I like this. I think you're exactly right. There's a front line of discussions that what we're, I think what we're talking about here is there's a group of people who will go to a professional.

Yes. And then there are a group of people who won't. and so for people who will go to a professional, it's not for them. But for people who can't afford it, don't have access to it, is this better than nothing or is this better than talking to one of your friends?

And if the technologists in collaboration with professionals can't make something that's better than going to a random person, a rando, so all you have to do is be rando advice to make this valid in the world. And you can hit random

better than random, for sure. day. And then, of course, the criticism of this will be, well, it hallucinated, it gave you bad advice, whatever. It's like, if it has a disclaimer and it says, you really need to talk to somebody, this will give you an idea of what your session might be like with a therapist, somebody who can deal with trauma, somebody who can give you career advice. So this isn't a substitute for that, but this will give you a simulation of that. I mean, we let people simulate war or being a criminal in grand theft auto. Like, look.

Literally, you can be a gangbanger and grand theft auto and you can have that experience. You can do Red Dev redemption and be a gunslinger. Well, why wouldn't you allow people with proper disclaimers? Hey, this is what a therapy session might be like for you. This is what a career coach might be like for you. But of course, it's not. So click this button to go talk to somebody and here are your options. This would be amazing.

So great, great catch there. I do think Replica is trying to upsell too much. much. I think what they should do is make it time-based. They should make a time-based. Give everybody everything for 30 days, get them on the hook, or 15 days, whatever it is. Or maybe it's not, maybe they're just experimenting right now. But my best advice would be let people have like 48 hours with it and then, you know, make it time-based, you know, not feel, not let them understand how great it could be. You know, I think this is an interesting conversation and we can probably finish off on this, but the drive to monetize AI this early in the process is, I think,

a little bit misguided in the short term. Explain why. Explain why to founders. Why it's misguided. We've gone through this like ZERP policy for a couple of years. We've gone through, you know, very cheap capital for years. And even in early days of Google and whatever else, I mean, they were making money, fine. But there was still a need, there was still a need to, so have the industry mature a bit more to understand what the right business models were. Like when search came out, No one knew what the right business model for search was. CPC wasn't even on the horizon. Google was losing, they had like 20 months worth of runway left,

but they had billions of users or billions of searches a month. And so it took a while for them to sort of find the right model. They bought Applied Semantics. They did a bunch of, you know, they copied overture go to.com. And they built out search and they monetized the product. I think by prematurely monetizing products, you lose out on the big uplift that you're going to get from mass model users trying it. And the data.

And the data. Exactly. I mean, you've got to get that data. Yeah. So that, so that I think is, um,

is a critical part of like the cycle we're in right now. Yes. Unfortunately, capital is not available to everyone easily. Some people can raise capital. Some can't. Some have to make profit and grind away. Um,

I mean, just from my experience with wait room right now, we're a small team. We're burning a small amount of money. We're just grinding out features. The product's free. You can have free video conferencing on waitroom. don't have an hour limit, 40 minute limit like Zoom.

You can do it because we just want the data. We want to see what features they're using, what AI features are popular, feedback from customers. That's more important than trying to sort of prematurely monetize the product. And what I'm seeing with all these products is, and I get the reason, right, money's tight, we're in a tough situation. But be thoughtful about if you need to make money of the product, there are underlying costs that you have to cover.

Be thoughtful of not price-gating your product too early on so that people who would be paying later on, never get to the point that they're willing to pay. Exactly. If you think about the ZERP environment, people went crazy and didn't even think about monetization. They didn't even think about their spending. And now they're so obsessed with getting money in the door because they're afraid. Exactly. The pendulum has swung too far yet again.

Yeah. I think it's well said. It's a really important thing for people who are founders. Great job. You brought some great demos. We talked about some great news for folks who are running businesses. I want you to drop everything. and go to Waitroom.com and sign up for Vinny's service.

And then I want you to come up with the three things you like best and the three things that suck. And then I want you to at mention Vinnie. Vinny, what remind everybody your Twitter? At Vinny Lingham on Twitter. At Vinny Lingam. And give Vinny Lingam some, I'm sure he's Vinny at Waitroom.com. Give him some feedback on his product.

What can be better? What's great? And let's get him some early beta users here. finally, we are doing Foundry University again on starting, I guess this is our 12-week course is starting again July 31st and then October 23rd. What's our Founder University course?

It's 12 weeks. It's basically free. You pay 500 bucks, Vinnie, when you start the program. If you come to all 12 Monday sessions, you can miss one probably, just ask for forgiveness, but if you come to all 12 talks, we give you, we charge you back to 500. Do you know what our completion rate is now? Our graduation rate? 100%. 90, 94%. When we gave it for free, it was like 5%. So it turns out if we, you give us 500, we pay you 50 bucks every time you come to the course essentially. But what's happened is we've had about half the, more than half the teams that come to this

and we try to have builders come to this, 250 builders come to each co-house. We've had about half the, We do it four times a year. Half of them were more aren't even incorporated. We watch the progress, Vinnie, and we give 10 to 20 people in this program $25,000 checks as investments from us. And we become the first investor in your company, which is something I always have a lot of pride about doing,

being the first fund to put 25K into these companies. If you want to join us, apply by going to founder. Dot University. You can have an idea. We want you to be a builder. So, U.X. design, developer, growth hacker. it can be a copywriter, marketer,

but you've got to be a builder. We don't just want an idea of people, or you can be an ideal person, operations person, with a builder. We give preference to people who are two-person teams. So go check out Founder.

University. And if you want to read the deal memo for my fourth fund, we have a lot of plugs here at the end, I tried to share, Vinnie, the deal memo that I send to, like, top LPs,

because I like people to read my deal memo how I'm thinking about how I'm going to employ the fourth fund, and you can read it at long, launch.co slash memo. Launch.com slash memo. You can read the launch fund for our deal memo. This is my strategy.

Now, why would I give the strategy away, Vinny? You're probably saying, we're not in competition. In the early stage, it's us, Y Combinator, tech stars. Nobody's really in competition, pair VC. Sequoia's got their new, they're experimenting with a new accelerator type program. All these companies need 20, 30, 40 investors in their first two or three rounds of funding. So we're really not in competition with anybody. We're in collaboration.

So go read the deal memo. And if you want to be an LP, Vinio, you an LP in my funds? I don't know. Maybe you can. I invest in some of your deals. Okay. Some of my deals. But let's see.

Let's see. Maybe I get a 250K check from you right now. You spend $1,000 on a steak with gold leaf on it. Maybe I get you, I lend you as an LP in my fund. We can chat about it. Okay. Let's read the deal now. Yeah.

I look at the deal numbers. I actually like the deep, deep sense. security one that you did. Ah, yeah. Deep Sentinel's a great company. What a great idea. And speaking of AI, I got to have him on. But I think, you know, those companies are going to do really well.

If you haven't seen Deep Sentinel camera, which I have at my offices, cameras that have two-way microphones. Somebody comes up, they know if it's Vinny and Jason, if we work in that office every day. But somebody comes up and it's Susan or John. And they're like, hey, can I help you? Not like in an aggressive way. But if it's three in the morning and you're wearing a hoodie and you're trying to crack the door up and they're like, hey, please leave the vicinity. We're calling the cops. They're on the way, and it can have an alarm go off.

So they have, like, virtual monitoring through a two-way, essentially NES cam, but it's their own hardware at this point, and incredible company. Well worth checking out. And I think obviously AI is going to be really interesting as well for those type of companies. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye, bye.

On behalf of the producers and the partnership team, thanks for listening to episode 1768. We'd like to take one more time. to thank our partners. Notion. Try Notion projects for free today at notion.com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. And Intercom. Try Fin. Intercom's a new AI customer support chat bot at intercom.com slash fin. If you're looking to become a partner of this weekend startups, you can email Hannah at hana atlaunch.co. That's Hannah at launch.co. Thanks for listening.