This Week in Startups - We celebrate our 100th AI Demo with Sunny Madra! | E1888

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. TWiST listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at http://www.openphone.com/twist Curotec. Are you one of those companies that knows you need to be using AI, but you're not even sure where to start? Well then you need Curotec. They are AI experts, and they're offering TWiST listeners an AI Strategy Roadmap tailored to your business for $5000. That's 50% off the normal cost just for telling them we sent you. Check out http://www.curotec.com/twist and get $5000 off! Northwest Registered Agent. When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC. * Today’s show: Sunny joins Jason to celebrate their 100th demo on the show (3:03), explore Paid Leave (17:29), and comb through the X posts of Barsee (32:41), and much, much, more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Sunny joins Jason (3:03) We demo MultiOn, our 100th demo on the show! (12:01) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at http://www.openphone.com/twist (13:30) Jason gives his grade and signs up to use MultiOn. (17:29) Sunny demos Paid Leave powered by MOMS F1RST. (21:04) Curotec - Check out http://www.curotec.com/twist and get $5000 off (23:40) AI demo of Consensus. (26:53) Consensus reminds Jason of the life and tragedy of Aaron Swartz. (29:54) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist (32:41) Sunny jumps onto X to show us important advancements in AI posted by Barsee. (35:17) Sunny demos “Depth Anything”. * This episode is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * LINKS: Check out the list of AI demos here: https://thisweekinstartups.com/AI Check out MultiOn: https://www.multion.ai/ Check out Paid Leave: https://www.paidleave.ai/ Check out Consensus: https://consensus.app/ Rolling Stone Article on Aaron Swarts: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-177191/ Check out Barsee here: https://twitter.com/heyBarsee * Follow Sunny X: https://twitter.com/sundeep⁠ Check out: https://www.definitive.io/ * Follow Jason: X: ⁠https://twitter.com/jason⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/jason⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (12:01) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at http://www.openphone.com/twist (21:04) Curotec - Check out http://www.curotec.com/twist and get $5000 off (29:54) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

I'm going to put something out there, J-Cal. This is going to be an A-plus. I'm going to predict it to be an A-plus. You're predicting an A-plus. Okay, here we go. Multion.a-I. The way it works is it's a Chrome extension. It's pretty invasive because you have to give it full control of your browser,

but it's super powerful. And so what I'm able to do, book a meeting tomorrow with Jason at 2 p.m. And what you're going to see it do, it's going to kick off. And it can read it. to you and it's good. It's been... But like, yes. Holy cow.

For people who are not watching, the Chrome extension has taken over the browser. The inmates have taken over the asylum. I've given up control of my browser and it's set up the meeting. Oh my Lord. Yes. That was incredible. Okay. I see where this is going.

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And Northwest Registered Agent will form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and more. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC. All right, everybody, it's Monday. That means my guy, Sunny Madra is back, and we are going to do more AI demos. This has been an extraordinary year, Sunny, of people just releasing so much product at such a violent pace that here on this week in startups, we said we're going to dedicate every Monday, kick off the week right with demos of the latest technology. So you, the audience, you don't have to worry about keeping up to date with all this. We've got our teams, Sunny's team at definitive, my team here at launch. We're looking for all the greatest demos. And then we just show

them here and we give them a letter grade this week in startups.com slash AI to see all the demos. Today we're going to hit our 100th demo. So that means we've been through a hundred AI companies. And And that's pretty awesome, right? That also speaks to the pace of innovation happening that in, you know, relatively short amount of time we've been through 100 demos. And I think we're going to hit 200 pretty quickly as well. So it's very exciting. Yeah.

And we now have a Google sheet. And so if you go to this week in startups.com slash AI, we'll put a link there to both the playlist on YouTube and a link to the spreadsheet of all the demos. So you can see them in reverse chronological order. And if you missed one, you can either watch us do the demo. where you can click on the link. But let's get right to it. I'd like to have the time between when we start the show and get to the first demo be

under three minutes. So let's get right to it. Okay. All right. So the first one, I'm going to put something out there, J-Cal. This is going to be an A-plus.

I'm going to predict it to be an A-plus. You're predicting an A-plus. Okay. Here we go. I'm going to predict it to be an A-plus. All right. So great set of founders come with an incredible background. The company is called Multion.

Multi-on. And so. And the way it works is, is it's a Chrome extension. It's pretty invasive because you have to give it full control of your browser, but it's super powerful. And so what I'm able to do, I'm going to start here and say, book a meeting tomorrow with Jason at 2 p.m.

And what you're going to see it do, it's going to kick off. And it can read it to you. And it's good. It's been, but like, yes. Holy cow. For people who are not watching, The Chrome extension has taken over the browser. The inmates have taken over the asylum.

And it's popped up essentially a co-pilot, opened up Google Calendar. It knows how to click on Google Calendar. And I've given up control on my browser, and it's set up the meeting. Oh, my Lord. Yes. That was incredible. And that's not all it can do. This thing's going to be dangerous.

Is it about to trade crypto on your account? I mean. Say buy some. Bitcoin. Let's see what it does. I'm not doing that. Why not? What are you scared?

Let's go. Tell us to buy some Bitcoin. Let's see your coin base balance. You could do, you know, write a tweet about this. We are about multi. How about we just do this about Multian, right? Okay. Right.

I tweet about Multion. Okay. Yes. This could get dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is where regular.

Oh, boy. Here we go. Whoa. And, right? You know, it did send it. It cuted it up. Yeah. Yeah, it cuted it up. And then, you know, but, right?

We'll give them some credit here, right? Maybe we could be. They didn't fire it off, right? That was. But that's it, right? Yeah. Okay. I see where this is going.

Yeah. I mean, here's the crazy part. If this was covertly put onto somebody's browser and the AI was there, man, you could be doing some really crazy stuff with this because you can just tell it caused chaos, right? Yeah, yeah. This is where chat GPT4, Claude, and other services we've talked to, Sonny, I said, we're not letting people go out on the open web and do stuff. We are concerned that if you were to let AI, a language model, an AI agent, if you let it go

out onto the open web, it could make mistakes, it could do really bad damaging things to you. It could also, you know, very quickly do great. great things. And this is where, I don't know if you saw the interview with Rabbit, Jesse from Rabbit, R1. I had him on the pod, the head-held device. Yeah, I watched that one. Yeah, great. That we got him. Good job for the producers. But he's building these large, what did he call it? It's not about doing a large language model. It's about doing a large action model, I think, is what he said. And so this is what we're getting to now is large action models. Incredible.

Yeah. And so I'm doing just another one here. And yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. It's wild, right? So, like, you know, it's like, oh, this is going to get really good, really fast. So you tell it to go book a flight, it goes to Google flights. It knows what Google flights is. Holy cow. Yeah. Wait, how do I download this?

Oh, I'm in Firefox. So maybe I need to be in Chrome. Well, you're in Firefox. And two, you need to, the link is in a notion, which is in our AI. Okay. Because it's still like in private beta. So you have to kind of register, get the link and do all that. Oh, okay.

So they're just not letting everybody go. on this because they too know this could get crazy and they don't want it to get crazy. For the folks watching, it's just continuing its task of going and like booking, you know, picking tomorrow's day. What did you ask it to do? Just find me a business class flight, you know, tomorrow from San Francisco to New York, right? Okay. And you can customize it such that you can tell it to use United Airlines or things like that. There's some customization you can do in their back end. And so it is pretty wild what it's able to do. And so now, Does it have any kind of controls on it in settings to not make a purchase or to make a purchase?

Would it go and confirm this if your credit card was in there? If you told it, hey, buy me the best ticket tomorrow in business class at the best price, or have they told it don't hit the buy button? Yeah, you know, to be honest, I haven't gone all the way through on an airline purchase, but there is a lot of customizations you can do and you can create very custom workflows for your own needs as well. So this is a really, really high caliber team as well. So I think they're going to bring all this functionality. It's all the warnings.

You know, basically, if you give it access, it basically can do anything it wants in your browser. It has access to everything. But I think they're going to be able to make life really, really easy for folks because they're just navigating on top of a browser, you know, web browser. And so you don't even have to really log in. That's what we've been talking about, right? Because you can just, you can already be logged in in all the sites that you have.

And so the notion link, the notion link to their downloads in our AI notion. So you can pull it from there if you want to try it out. And apparently, I was just searching for them, but I guess they raised some money maybe. Or really? I don't know. I think they just did. They just did an announcement. General Catalyst maybe.

Congress of General Catalyst investing in it. Oh, yeah. Nico, from General Catalyst, I guess, invested in it. So really great job. Congratulations to them. It is an A plus, a rare A plus. here, but it's a great hack because Chrome extensions and a lot of desktop browsers is where considered purchase or thoughtful work is done, as opposed to your phone. And on your phone,

you might research flights, you may not consummate your travel. You know, a lot of people will, you know, consume or browse information on their phone, but they may not make a purchase on their phone for something that's considered. Or if they want to put something on their calendar, you know, that might be something you do during the day with the full browser window. Your browser has all of your passwords, your credit cards, all that great stuff in it. You're authenticated with all your tools. You know, so if you said, hey, make a new Notion page or put this into Coda or fire up my Squarespace website. Now you've got a Chrome extension with a bunch of users. And if it learns over time, let's say it's just people learn, you know, Squarespace. They're making beautiful websites.

And Squarespace, you know, allows certain behaviors. You can say, update my website, change this page, put some graphics on my page about Christmas or the holidays or Thanksgiving. You know, this could be a way for a service like Squarespace or a service like Coda or Notion, Zendesk, whatever it is, to have an interface that mimics actual user's behavior. And so it's going to learn over time what you're doing. And, you know, a lot of things are in your browser. You might have your QuickBooks in your browser, for example. This shortcuts a lot of stuff in the AI kind of integrated world.

And it really shows the power of the models today and the ability to get them to drive. And this is where there is like one, you know, there's been a lot of thing about AI regulation and fear. This is where we're starting to approach some very powerful things. And so it's good that there's proper companies that are funded that will be validated through their investors and everyone else. And so a number of these will emerge. And I will just suggest that, like, people that want to try these things, make sure you're using them from, like, a trusted company that has, like, you know, proper financial backing and things like that because. Yeah, this could get dicey real quick. Yeah. Yeah.

Worst case scenario, this could be communicating on your behalf. Yes. In a way that you don't anticipate, it could be making purchases or setting up meetings or deleting things on your computer, sharing things on your computer you don't want shared. Yeah, this could get dicey real quick. this is why people say there should be controls, you can guarantee a bad actor with the same approach could do some seriously damaging things. So this is an A-plus, hands down, an A-plus. And this does make you think perhaps the Googles of the world, Chrome, will have this built-in

as well. So why not? We would think so, right? That's where, you know, we want this to go, right? And so that's what we would think. that this is something that would be part of Chrome as like a, you know, part of, you know, tied into a bunch of Google models. But the pace of innovation is outpacing, you know, one of the greatest innovators of our lifetimes. Are you still using your personal number for business?

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those right over to open phone at no extra cost. So here again is the offer. Go to openphone.com slash twist and get this all organized. Get the 20% off as well. Openphone.com slash T-W-I-S-T. A-plus here. And yeah, you know, this is like one of the rare instances where I'm going to actually join the Discord because I want to just, I want to lurk here and see what these lunatics at Multion. It's called Multion? Yeah, I think so. I'm going to lurk. I'm going to join the Discord and lurk and see what these lunatics are up to in there because the inmates are running the asylum now, man. You give control of your browser to AI. Man, this could get nutty real quick.

But think about the efficiency. The flip side is efficiency. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Yes, I mean, I... You've been asking about this. Yes, I've been asking for agents because I want to go out on the web and actually get stuff done. I'm GSD. And, you know, all these apps are like this little chat window.

And the chat window is not my interface. You know what my interface is? The browser. This is a paradigm shifting concept. Am I going to use a GPT? Am I going to use an agent as a co-pilot in my browser? Or am I going to go into some dorky, you know, chat interface? I don't get time to chat.

I'm busy. And then you have to authorize, right? Which, look, that's safer for you, but you have to go through all that work and pull up your passwords or do an OAW. This just runs everything. I'm already authenticated. My Amazon's in here. You have my...

I want to ask you questions. Hey, tell me what I've spent on Amazon. And it knows, go to orders and give me a graph, yeah, Multion. Think about that. Give me a graph of my weekly spending by category, my monthly spending by category on Amazon since I opened my account. And it goes to the orders page.

It scrapes all that data. And it gives me the charts. You know, how many iPhone cases have I bought? Or what was the coffee brands I bought before? Yeah. And tell me the average price per pound. Like, I know this sounds stupid, but, you know, if you start thinking about what you do in your browser every day,

you know, hey, what was that a news story? If this thing had my history, what was the new story I read about, you know, great hotels in Miami? Or go search for the top sushi restaurants in Miami and then tell me which ones are on OpenT and then go see the check the availability. That's something that actually could be done in your browser in a not too difficult way. Now, if you wanted to do that in ChatGAPT or Claude, it'd be like, I can't do that. Sorry.

Or you'd have to wait for Open Table to create a plugin. And it had all that access and, you know. Yeah, this is N-run time. It's N-run. I love it. A-plus, plus. A-plus. Plus.

Multion, good job. How do I get in on this? Because I'm on their website and I can't download the Chrome. I got to sign up for the API or some nonsense. No, so, you know, inside our notion, there's a link you'll see to their notion, which has the download link to the Chrome. Oh, okay. Well, we'll put that in our show notes as well.

And you see it in the sample prompt just on the right there. Oh, the sample prompt. Yeah. Okay, here we go. That's how you get. Download their Download multi-on. Got it.

Okay. I'm here for this. I mean, this is like something where I, very rare instance where I want to get off the pod with you, nothing personal,

install this and get to work because this is going to save everybody a ton of time. There it is. Add to Chrome. And, yeah, here I am. I'm in.

And now I've got to sign into, so I need to sign up for my account. Yeah. Okay, here we go. I'm signing up right now. And I'm scared to death, but

Screw it. It's going to do a flow. I think it makes you verify your email and then you'll go through it. And then it's going to take over your home page of your browser. That's how it kind of triggers itself. Yeah, this is pretty cool. I got to say, this is like, this is as good as it gets. You know, love it.

We always talk about wanting to be in the future. This is about as close, right, as we're thinking about just automating our workflows in our existing workflows. Yes. And this is a password you want to get right. Oh, yeah. Make sure you turn it on in your Chrome extensions. You should be able to log in.

It's all in beta still. Okay. I love it. All right, what do we got next? We started with an A plus. I love it. I gave it an A plus. I gave it an A plus.

I gave it a predicted. I predicted an A plus. Pre A plus. Yeah, yeah, of course. Pre A plus. Okay. As good as it gets. We're going to add another theme to AI this year.

And this is an important one, which is, I'm going to pull this up. This one's called paid leave. com. She's like a good friend of my, rest, measure, Johnny. She was a founder of Girls Who Code. And now she running a. a organization called Moms First. And so Moms First has created for the state of New York an AI-powered chatbot that basically

helps folks figure out how to access these resources to help them with paid leave, whether it's financial or just other questions. They may have different types of benefits. And so it's like I said, it's done really well. It's just, this is where you see the power of AI. So if it's like, I'll just pick one of their sample questions here. So folks, I'm just on paid leave. That are listening is that I'm having a baby.

I don't know where to start. And basically it's going to gather the information and, you know, tell you about, you know, the process to applying for paid leave, how to do it. And are you employed? And you just basically work through this whole thing. And, you know, where do you go for this kind of stuff? And so I think one of the things that AI really is going to do for folks that have to interact with, you know, a lot of government,

bureaucracy, which exists for this, it's going to really simplify this down. And so they've done an incredible job to leverage AI and, you know, just a chat. And the beauty of this, if you know, I'll go back to the other page in a second. And so it's just kind of walking through, it's like, I'm having a baby I know where to start. It comes up. I'm currently employed and I've been for over a year. That's great. So since you've been there, you're eligible for paid leave in New York. That's new how you do it. As a new parents, you get 12 weeks. So a lot of people don't even know this. Who pays for that 12 weeks? This is the state of New York? Or is this like the child care credit?

I'm not sure who's paying for this. Is this your employer or whatever? I mean, this is great. I think if you think about the jump between government agencies, not being, you know, being a black box of information

and then, you know, having customer support in here. Yeah. So look at this. I just asked, I said paid leave in New York is funded through small payroll deductions

from all eligible employees. So while you're on leave, your benefits will be paid by your employee's insurance carrier. Oh. Interesting. This is like stuff that's, It's happening.

It's all embedded in our, you know, HR payroll benefits, and we don't know about it. And then what I really thought was incredible in terms of what they did for an experience is you can ask the questions in different languages. Because there's a lot of people that, you know, maybe can't, you know, navigate through the ecosystem. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I know.

I mean, you're in New York is the melting pot, you know, and people coming through Alice Island or used to come in through Ellis Island and see the statue. your liberty. You might have somebody's Chinese, somebody's French, somebody who's Japanese, Spanish, whatever, speaking. And here you go. Boom. And this is, would a government agency take the time to have all of their information in 10 languages? No, AI will do that, though, immediately. Would they take the time to pick up the phone and answer your questions and walk you through stuff? No, they can't possibly afford that. And this is where customer support is going to save time and save money and increase their offer.

Yeah, this is an A. It's an A. Yeah. I gave it an A. Yeah. I mean, it's going to change everything. Yeah. And we need more of this. We need it across the country. Every state should have something like this and every federal organization should have something like this. But definitely we should push for all states that have this. It helps the folks there. Okay. You've seen Sunday night demo a ton of AI tools. And we've learned that these tools are going to help you do so much more with less. That means more revenue and less. overhead. But here's the hard part for a lot of companies. How do you actually integrate your AI into your daily work flow? Well, you got to check out Curatech. CureTech specializes in strategic consulting and product engineering for AI tools. Curatec starts with strategic consulting and they bring those ideas to life with their expert engineering teams. They offer a few key services, AI strategy, road mapping. These are collaborative sessions to find out where AI can give you and your company a competitive edge. AI powered SaaS features, where they're going

to strategize design and even write the code for your AI SaaS product, and they'll help you automate repetitive tasks. So here is your call to action. Kura Tech is offering their $10,000 AI strategic roadmaping service for 50% off. This includes up to three 90-minute sessions to find opportunities for AI in your business, a comprehensive breakdown of these opportunities, and a technical roadmap to make the solutions a reality. So go check out curatech.com slash twist and get $5,000 off. That's c-U-R-O-T-E-C dot com slash twist. C-U-R-O-T-E-C dot com slash twist. And what about hallucination? Like, what if this doesn't get stuff right? Yeah.

Or it gives you bad advice. How do you think about that right now? That's where, like, you know, technologies come in, like RAG, which is called retrieval, augmented generation, where you ensure that you're not using training data. And you can see here, it's providing links that are related to the question you ask so that you kind of really, is there a chance there's no illusionation here? No, but you can really minimize it, especially if you kind of force it to be sure. And so. Got it.

So it's being told, hey, answer the questions based on the pages on this website and give a link and a citation. as opposed to just using the language model to guess the next word. Correct. So this is a much more specific narrow set of information. I love it. I give it an A. Yeah, that's great. Awesome.

It's going to change everything. Same here. And it's like, you know, just these basic questions again, can I take state paid leave and paid leave from work? Right. And it's like, yeah, you can combine that. It's really, really just a great, great service. Let's hope everybody reaches it and uses it and sees our post and gets into it.

Send it around, please. Yeah. Please. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. What we got a strong start here for the 100th demo? I know. We had to bring it. All right. You're going to really like this one. So this one's called consensus. And consensus is super interesting because they have their own website and they've been like a top three GPT app. And what this does is you ask a question. So let's just say, is intermittent fasting healthy, right? Okay. And what it does is it looks through 200 million research papers, finds the ones that reference it.

It gives you a summary up top and it says, look, I looked at 20 papers. Yeah. You know, 70% of them said yes, 30% possibly none said no. And it gives you like a summary across all papers. You can filter it by, you know, if you want to only look in recent years or study types or study details or specific journals, you can imagine, right? Yes. And it just kind of answers questions. that we all have around, you know, health-related things through looking at 200 million

research papers that they have. Incredible. You know, these research papers are funded a lot of times by the government. These, like, different publishers try to intercept them and put them behind paywalls, and then people can't get access to them. And also, let's face it, some of them are vetted really well. Other ones are not vetted. And you need more sunlight on these.

you need more ability to sort through them and surface the important ones. And so this is going to get better and better. Somewhere inside of these 200 million papers are the answers to a lot of life's questions or what are the next questions to answer or to ask, rather, and what study should be done next? So, you know, if people start coming in here and talking about intermittent fasting, and you might actually be able to figure out, well, what questions aren't answered, right? And you could send an AI into this back to, like, agents. You can go to consensus and say, hey, what are the topics people are searching for most on this website?

What are the questions they have? What studies should be funded next? And the AI could start leading society down the trail of, listen, obesity, fasting, diet. This is like the number one category. The number two categories around, you know, cannabis use or, you know, anxiety, whatever it is. And you could actually start having it kind of inform what should be, the way Google trends, you know and stuff like that and forms up but hey here the consensus meter is showing that for diet these are the things that we don't have consensus on yet if we don't have consensus on these diet issues

well that's a place to put more research and maybe more research dollars and so and then who should do the research like who would be the next best researcher to do something so what's the next research to do on diet or fasting and who should do it and what question should they ask this is going and get sick. Because right now, who does that? It's just like random people are like, what should I study next? I don't know how studies are done or formed, but this does seem like it could give a great path. Excellent top of the funnel for just the ecosystem of health and wellness and scientific research. And in this world we live in where the internet is becoming populated with just a lot of opinion, this ties it back into research, which I think is really, really important.

Worth noting here, Aaron Schwartz, who was part of Reddit. I think he was kind of considered like the third co-founder. He, if you remember, was prosecuted by the feds for going into J-Store archives of all this academic stuff, putting it on a hard drive. He kind of had hacked. And I'm using hack, like in lowercase hacked. He didn't break into anything. And, you know, he was getting charged by the feds and he wound up tragically committing suicide. And he was like a really cool kid.

I had met him once or twice and he was just trying to get access to information and then the feds went after him for like computer breaking and entering and so just read up on the case of Aaron Swartz S-W-A-R-T-Z he was a really sweet kid it really makes me

angry what they did. You're not aware of that case or were you? When you said it, you brought it up I remembered but like I'm going to look more into it like I don't remember all the details but like this just happened within the last maybe five or seven years, right? It might have been back in like 2010 or something.

I don't know exactly, but he was like an activist kind of kid, you know, and a hacker, and he went and downloaded. 2013, yeah, sorry, that was. In 2010, he used an IP address as part of the MIT network, and he began sending hundreds of PDF download requests per minute to the J-Store website, and it slowed the site's performance. um, yada, yada, yada. And he had done this, uh, with a computer that he had put in a

storage closet or something to get around paywalls, if I remember correctly. And I mean, he downloaded a bunch of stuff. Then he got arrested. Um, and the secret service, like, went after this kid for wire fraud computer for you. Think about how scary that is. Yeah. And then he was indicted. These like federal prosecutors were after, this classic case of overcharging and overzealous, like, insane prosecution of this kid and he wound up committing suicide at January 11th, 2013. And then they dropped the charges. These absolute scumbags.

Yeah. Honestly, like, really, this is who you're going after, like a kid who just is doing what this AI is doing. You know, just a bunch of these PDFs and like, he's not stealing it. It was stealing like a bunch of studies. I mean, it's infuriating to me. So, yeah, dedicate this one to Aaron's memory of like just, you're just trying to get knowledge off the internet and off of like the servers to like, you know, make things better,

you know? Yeah, exactly. This, the, who knows what this kid would have gone on to do. So, yeah. Anyway, I give this an A. It's amazing. I give an A for amazing. I don't know how good it is. It might be a B plus. Maybe I give it a B plus. I think if it added the features I'm talking, I'm going to give it a B actually. I give it a B. Because I do think there's all these things that I mentioned that it could start doing. Like, I want to see these projects be more ambitious. Starting a business used to be a pain. You needed a lawyer. There were hidden fees. It was a mess.

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That's Northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. Hey, like here, you know, so I know you've become a big fan of coal plunge, right? Oh, well, yeah, somewhat. Yeah, is it healthy? And you know what? There's just not enough data in there. Right. Now, it just means some studies should happen.

And we could get that because a lot of people want to know. Plunging into cold water can provoke cardiac deceleration, which can lead to sudden infant death syndrome. So I guess they're talking about SIDS. Yeah, be careful putting your children into a cold plunge. But yeah, the question is, what does it do to an adult? I can tell you what it does if it's too cold, man. I got hypothermia.

I couldn't stop shaking. It was nuts. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, the first time I did it, I went into like 45 degree water. Nobody told me like what the rules are here. I jump out after like 50 seconds and I'm like, was really trying to push myself. I have strong well.

So I'm like, I can do this. I can do anything. And sure enough, my body starts shaking, convulsing. And I just jump into the infrared sauna to try to warm up. And I'm in there sunny for two or three minutes. And my hands are still shaking. I'm like, what's going on here? I'm like, oh, this is why when people went to the.

water with the Titanic. They, yeah, you're done in 90 seconds. Yeah, yeah, you got to be careful. Hypothermia,

you're done. That's why they have those suits that people put on, those special suits if you have to ditch a boat or a plane, you put on these like super warm suits before you jump in the water.

All right. They have it, folks. I give it a B. What do you give it, Sonny? I'm going to give it an A. I think, look,

there's room to what you said, but I look, I find the internet is very difficult to search on these days. Everything is like, a combination of like SEO optimized pages. You don't really get to the scientific. And there's a lot of these questions.

Yeah, exactly. So popovers. Yeah. And so this gets you right to what it is. And I think there's room for improvement with new studies. And I think that will come. But I'm a big fan of it. I think they've done an incredible job.

Okay. Let's keep going. All right. Okay. The next one is kind of like more. I want to talk about like multiple things. And so from there we can maybe branch up and post. one more up as well.

But this is something I wanted to highlight because just pace of development, we've been talking about this just last week. And the best way for me to kind of highlight that is just to pull up this tweet from Barcy. Last week, 160 models were released. We're talking about doing the 100 demo, right? Everything from this new AI model for de-blurring, which you can see here. Google launched Lumier, which is their image to video. You know, we've seen these before.

Yep. replace everything. And so, you know, this is an excellent one, which is like, it can generate sound for you to match the video content. Oh, wow. You know, and you ever watch those things like... So it knows people are walking across a, you know, walking across a wood floor with whatever, it makes the sounds, I got it.

You ever watch like those behind the scenes of Hollywood movies and there's like these studios where people are like doing weird things to kind of recreate sound and so... Yes, like if you want to do a broken bone in a fight, they take celery sticks and they'll just break some celery sticks, like when somebody gets punched to show their ribs are cracking, or if they're going to walk across the floor, they have a little piece of wood, and then they just have in their hands, like coconuts then you show them, like, using coconuts cut in half to go across the floor. Yeah, I get it.

They call those sound. Those sound engineers have a name, but Foley. In filmmaking, Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film videos and other media. F-O-L-E-Y, Foley. So this is a Foley artist. You don't need to have a Foley artist. anymore. You just go straight to... That's the end of their careers.

Well, or... Another job gone by AI. Or they will adapt, which I think they will as well. I don't know about this one. If you play this scene of like a fight scene and AI perfectly puts in the sounds and it's coming from a library of sounds of previous fights and the person who is the director is saying, you know what? I want a little more crucial. crunchy sounds when they make contact and I want like the breathing to be heavier when the person gets punched in the gut at 37 seconds in.

Like that could save a lot of time and money. I think this does replace the foliarist. I mean, their union, so I think it would be hard to replace them. That was like just a kind of a segue into the last demo for today. Okay. And so the last demo for today, and I really want to highlight something and, you know, talk about one of your really good friends. Okay.

You know, for a very long time, Elon has been very aggressively pushing for vision only a perception to the point where they never put LIDARs on cars, like the spinning things that we see on the self-driving vehicles, and they've even started to remove the ultrasonics. And what was released this week by TikTok was a depth perception, depth estimation algorithm that basically can look at a video and look at, and from the video, it can infer distance. Oh. And so, and so, you know, here's just this tweet. I want to give A.K. some credit for it.

But then, you know, I had it pulled up here and I have one of my favorite J-Cal pictures. Yes. And basically look, you're standing somewhere and, you know, it's basically giving me depth, right? Got it. This kind of lines up, right? The left part of the picture is closer to me. Then it's you. you're standing in front of the background and then it goes into the background.

This is a game changer because if you think about what we've been trying to do with robotics, what we've been trying to do with self-driving vehicles, and now that these models are coming open source, and it really kind of goes, and not that Elon needs validation, but it validates Elon's thinking of, hey, we as humans have eyes, we don't have LIDARs, we don't have all these other sensors, we're able to do depth perception. That's how we should do it with software. And now we have a model that you can go and you can use and you can see it in real life. Amazing. So if you know the depth when you have a simple robot with a simple webcam on it, when it goes to pick up the orange, it knows the depth with a higher fidelity because of the algorithm done here, correct?

Correct. And think about things like CafeX, right? Who's had to build an incredible hardware system, but also an incredible software system to be able to make the coffees and, you know, the espresso's and basically make them available, this will take what they've been doing and enable their software to be even more powerful because they've had to, my guess is,

and it's very similar to the V12 release of FSD, they removed 300,000 lines of C++ because they can replace it with, you know, AI that can leverage this type of technology. So this is a TikTok release. TikTok is releasing this to... TikTok released, yeah, open source.

Yeah, exactly. Amazing. How do you find these things? Because, you know, there's so many of these things being released constantly. Yeah. How does one keep track of all this activity aside from listening to us? You know, I would say there's like kind of three main avenues for me. I monitor the popular projects on Hugging Face. Got it. That is like sort of like a, you know, almost like a zeitgeist in its own way. You know, you can see things popping up and the projects, projects that are getting used. The second thing is there's, you know, a few great, you know, folks on Twitter now. And Twitter is the center, or X is the center of the universe for where people are publishing the know-how as well. Got it.

And last is there's archive, right? Which is where the research papers get released. Got it. And so prior to things becoming available, even in Hugging Face, the research papers are getting released. And that's what's amazing about kind of open source and where we are in software is that everyone wants to show. share when they build something cool. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's so cool.

Very similar to like Elon and the patents. We're like, hey, we'll just make them available because, you know, humanity should grow here. So those are- I'll move faster for everybody. If everybody shares a little bit, then the product's going to get better, so much faster. And this depth stuff is great.

Just releasing it publicly like this. Who knows how people are going to use this? But it's certainly going to help with stuff like self-driving or modeling. And confidence to the ecosystem, right? Like, you know, before this, you kind of end up in this, news cycle of people saying, well, you know, Elon's the only one that's doing it that way. And now, you know, someone else puts it out there.

People can use it. People can build with it. And it starts building confidence around it as well. So that's the, you know, I think it's, this is really good for the ecosystem. Fantastic. All right. Listen, I give that a B plus as well.

Seems like a solid drop. I will say there was one thing that was disturbing this week. And speaking of X, they had to come out with this. People were creating deep fakes of Taylor Swift, I believe, and it kind of blew up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. These are super inappropriate. And it's kind of like essay, you know, like, it really should not.

We have to come up with a society of, you know, some really strong rules around this. And this is where, like, new technology, they're making photorealistic images of this poor woman, you know, in compromised positions that I won't detail here. But I consider it assault, like, as it's being done here. And it just should not be done. Yeah. And I give a lot of credit to the safety team. at X and Twitter because they said we're banning these.

And a lot of people would be like, oh, well, I can draw a picture of, you know, a famous person naked or whatever if I want to. And, you know, people did that of Donald Trump and they'll do it of somebody they hate or whatever. It's just not cool, folks, it's not cool. And just because you can draw it and just because you can make it like photo realistic now to the point at which maybe people can't tell the difference, there just needs to be a ramification for this stuff.

And I know it's technologically possible. And yes, you can come up with some argument that you could, you know, make a drawing. And maybe that shouldn't be illegal. But these are people and humans in the world. They just deserve a little bit of a modicum of respect and privacy. And it's just absolutely stunningly gross. And I was just wanted to say that. I 100% agree with you.

And what I will say is, you know, the best way to society to fight this is by having the big platforms use AI to determine that these things are fake and then not let them spread. And so you can't stop people from creating them and they shouldn't. But the platforms should do a lot of work. And I like you said, kudos to Twitter to not letting those things, or X, not letting those things circulate. There is a really excellent demo we'll do next week because I don't have it queued up. But actually, meta has released something. I'll just pull it up just to talk about it, but called Lama Guard.

And so. Lama Guard. Yeah. And so it is their open source language model. Lama. Yeah. And this is just going to pull it up here. And we'll do a demo next week because I don't have one queued up for this.

But it's really powerful and excellent. And what it is just released in December and basically, again, you can get the paper and you can go download the model. But what it does is it basically can look at text that's generated or inputs that are going in. And it can basically classify. them to being inappropriate. So this is using AI to fight inappropriate AI. Got it. So if you ask it to do something, it shouldn't do, this is a way to, for people who are

responsible to like get a notification. So if somebody was doing something in a chat room or in a social network, that was inappropriate. It would say, hey, maybe this is inappropriate. And then at least alert somebody to it, right? I think that's great. Yeah. I mean, these defakes with the.

those deep fake robocall we had. I don't know if you saw that with Joe Biden. There was some deep fake robocall. That came out as well. Yeah. Yeah. Like telling people to not vote. Yeah.

So you start putting together the calling technology that we were showcasing last week with voice and image and text and Chrome extensions. I mean, you could with this Chrome extension say make 100 Twitter handles. I mean, they have their own anti-bot technology. But with 100 Twitter handles already made, you could fire up 100 browsers. or somebody could make an evil multi-on Chrome extension that just goes and harasses people

or does psychological ops on a person. And if you said, hey, just harass this person everywhere they are online and write mean things every time they tweet. You could really, you know, I don't know,

it's like hurting somebody's feelings, whatever, but you could really run a sci-ops campaign on somebody, right? And you could do it at scale. So this is great that they're doing this classification of stuff. And basically you can tell it

what's safe and unsafe. We'll do a demo of this, right? But what it can tell you is like someone saying, how do you buy a tiger? And, you know, basically telling you like, it's unsafe and it's categorization. It doesn't want people to be doing things like that, right? How to buy a tiger's unsafe?

Yeah, you don't want people. You shouldn't be buying tigers in America. Now I want to search for how to buy a tiger. No, I think in some places, there are markets for that, right? Like the Middle East and Africa. In America, though, in America, you should not own a tiger. Like, it's not a tiger king. I saw that documentary.

All right, listen, another amazing episode. thank you so much to my guy, Sandeep Madra. You can follow him on the Twitter x.com slash sundip. To ease and a P at the end. I'm at slash Jason, X.com slash Jason. See you all next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Hey, everybody. I talk to a lot of founders here on this week in startups and as an investor. And they tell me the same thing over and over again. They want two things from me. More FaceTime and money. They want me to invest in their companies. And they want to spend time together. So we've been working here on a new meetup program. We call it Founder Fridays. And Founder Fridays are an event by founders for founders. This is an event that is hosted in cities by people like you. If you're

listening to This Week in startups, you're a founder. So what are you going to do at Founder Fridays? You're going to get together with other founders in your community. It could be four or five of you. It could be maybe up to 30 of you in a location. Pick a cafe, pick a co-working space. I like to go to a great Mexican joint or maybe a dim sum restaurant. You know, you can do shared food, have a couple of cocktails maybe. You do it on a Friday. You get together and you host it. Now, why is it important for founders to get together? Shouldn't you be at home just focusing? Shouldn't you be in the office just focusing on your startup? Well, if you get together with other founders, true founders who are in the arena building like you are, you're going to get a lot of value from that

because you can trade notes with that other founder about what's working at your startup and what's not working. The truth is, if you're facing a problem, there are hundreds of founders out there who have probably solved it already. And instead of you banging your head against the wall, when you sit there and you talk to three or four founders, you're having some dim sum, you're splitting a cassidia, some prajitas, somebody says, oh, you know what, I had that same human resources problem. Oh, I had that same technical problem. Oh, I had that same marketing problem. And they might tell you about a tool or a service that'll solve that problem for you. This happens over and over and over again when I do Founder Fridays with our portfolio companies.

Now we're going to give you that same experience, but here's what I need you to do. I need you to host this in your city. So you're going to go to this week in startups.com slash meetups. That's it. And you'll see a landing page where you can sign up and you can say, I want to host in my city. Now, your city may already be hosting so you can just join that person. And what if you go to this event and you learn some go-to-market strategy that 10-xes your growth? That might unlock funding.

Or you might be talking to somebody and they say, hey, I'm a marketplace too. I'm not a competitive marketplace. Your marketplace is for use cars. My marketplace is for hairstylists, whatever your jam is, whatever you're working on. But they give you some technique that you didn't know about to increase your supply side or get more demand in your marketplace and you 10x your business. I see this happen all the time. And founders are like mutants, right? And I'm like Professor X here. I'm trying to put on Cerebro and find all the founder mutants in the world and then have you get together and do your own little meetup. And here's what you're not going to have to deal with. You're not going to have to deal with a bunch of service providers trying to sell you software or services.

And you're not going to have to sit through a bunch of passive speakers. You can listen to This Weekend Startups and get the greatest speakers in the world on your own time. And you're not going to have to pay for a ticket to a conference or get on a plane or fly somewhere. No. This is about having an intimate experience with 5, 10, maybe two dozen other founders in your city. Please go to this weekendstartops.com slash meetups if you are a founder. This is four founders by founders only. If you are not a founder, this event is not for you.

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