Which $Billion AI Startup Would You Short?
Newcomer PodNovember 25, 202500:49:1945.16 MB

Which $Billion AI Startup Would You Short?

MongoDB.local San Francisco is happening on January 15th. Learn more and register here → http://mdb.link/sf-dot-local At the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, we surveyed more than 300 founders and investors with one question:“Which billion-dollar AI startup would you short?” The answers were… blunt.In this episode, Eric, Max Child and James Wilsterman break down the most surprising picks, what they reveal about the state of AI in 2025, and the shifting mood inside the industry. We also revisit the biggest moments from the summit — from agentic AI to the sustainability of today’s valuations.


00:00:00
During this Rebel Valley AI Summit, we asked a group of

00:00:02
founders and investors which billion dollar AI startup would

00:00:05
you short and their answers caused a bit of a stir.

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Joining me today are my Cerebral Valley AI Co host and the Co

00:00:17
founders of Volley, Max Child and James Wilsterman.

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We'll also be diving into some of the insights from our

00:00:23
panelists throughout the conference.

00:00:24
My interview with Mike Krieger, the Chief Product Officer at

00:00:27
Anthropic, former Co founder of Instagram, about the problem

00:00:31
with sycophancy and foundation models.

00:00:33
My wife got her first like you're completely wrong.

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And she was like, yes, this is great.

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And I think we should have more of that we.

00:00:39
Looked at a clip from the mayor. Whoever the politician, 11 the

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adoration of the crowd. No one should be asking someone

00:00:47
that's been in a job for 10 months for advice.

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And we ask, is Mecca Hitler inevitable On stage with Jimmy

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BA, one of the Co founders of Elon Musk's Xai the Mecca Hitler

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in the room. Yeah, Mecca Hitler a model had

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an episode. This is the newcomer podcast.

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All right, I'm excited. We've had some time to rest

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since the Cerebral Valley AI Summit.

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Max has been resting life flat. What?

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Literally just got home from Dubai I.

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Believe literally 10 minutes got off a 16 hour long flight over

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the world's greatest hits like Tehran and Moscow.

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I I've got my seven week old. So back back to the parenting

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minds, though it's been a joy. James, what you're are you all

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rested or how are you feeling? I'm not well arrested Eric.

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I have been solo parenting my 2 year old for.

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Where's your wife? Where's Brazil and Mexico?

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Nice. Yeah.

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So we've all got our own reasons.

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To be we're at the exact level of delirious that the viewer

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should want here because we just had this River Valley AI summit,

00:02:06
right? We host this twice a year.

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Big AI, you know, 300 person event, top AI founders,

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investors, real insider thing. We sent out a survey, became a

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point of media fascination, like sources, Business Insider wrote

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about it. I think random Indian media

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outlets for reasons that we'll explain as we progress.

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We had 300 attendees at the thing.

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I want to be clear, like, you know, some of these things we

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didn't. Everybody did not fill out this

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anonymous survey. This was not academic research.

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This is you can count the dots for yourself and sort of infer

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how many people did this. I don't know what are we saying?

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Like 30 to 40 people. I just want to be transparent.

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But it gives you a sliver of where this highly engaged

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audience thought things were in. Part of the fun was that Max and

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I were on stage sort of reacting to the survey results.

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Anyway, so we're going to dig into the survey.

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James, this is really your brainchild.

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Anything I missed about it or you want to start ticking

00:03:00
through the questions? Yeah, I guess one Part 1 fun

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part of the game that we played on stage was the you and Max had

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to guess what the audience would think the answer to these

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questions might be. And I have to say, Max kind of

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ran away with that game on stage.

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He did well. I.

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Think I won 5141 some Max. Max did well, Yeah, it was a

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some of them were close. Let's go through.

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We can talk about. Yeah, you did.

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Very. Well, we can.

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We can react to the reactions. Myself, despite Max's dominance,

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I think I had AII, had my ear on the pulse still.

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All right, Should we start with the the beginning?

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Yeah. So the first question was what

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will open a eyes annualized revenue be?

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At the end of 2026, the audience median was 30 billion.

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And it's a 20 billion 2025 is the expectation, right?

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Yeah, over 20 billion already. So this is pretty low estimate

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in my opinion. And I said like 40 or what did I

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say? Yeah, I forget who said 40 and

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one of us said 40 and one of us said 41.

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I did be one of you. Yeah, Yeah, I went higher, maybe

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41 or something. I was surprised.

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I think that given we're exiting this year at 20 in open, AII

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thought the effusive Glee and bubble talk of the conference

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would would flow through to a growth.

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Video. It'd just.

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Be earning AI. Things are going well.

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We're round tripping all day. Everybody's making money.

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Revenue is not the problem. Mere 50% growth for open AI I

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think would be like considered in a truck at this point in the

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bubble cycle. So.

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I'm betting on 40. If this actually happens, I

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think the bubble is over baby. What's your bet Max?

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Yeah, I think 40 is what I, yeah, I said on the last podcast

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I think we discussed. I mean I think 2X year on year

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makes makes sense to me unless the bubble collapses.

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I'm curious, where do you guys think the next 20 billion comes

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from? Like is it business as usual or

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do they need to create new products or?

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I don't know copy Harvey, you know, going to legal anything.

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It's like, I think, you know, they should lean into the API

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business through this sort of general purpose foundation

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model. So I, I don't necessarily think

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they need to go after an application directly, but if

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they were really hungry for revenue, you'd think they'd

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figure out who their best partner is and say screw it,

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we're going to cannibalize them to find the revenue.

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We. Need kind of seems like they're

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gearing up for that yeah, Palantir model or you know, find

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the biggest pockets of money in the world and, you know, consult

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on how to adopt AI in those companies, right?

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I mean, I think there's a lot of headroom on the consumer

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subscription business as well. I just think that, you know,

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they haven't necessarily monetized, you know, a huge

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percentage of the people who use AI every day and they just keep

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adding value to that consumer subscription.

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And so, you know, if you even if you just got a doubling of that,

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that you know, that would get you pretty far along the route

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here. All right, next question.

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What will NVIDIA be worth at the end of 2026?

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On the day we took this survey, it was 4.8 trillion.

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They just had earnings. I'm not actually sure what it

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is. The day we're recording it up,

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is it? Yeah.

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It's pretty. Close.

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They had they had pretty good earnings, I think, but I don't

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think Wall Street. Yeah, I checked the stock's like

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4546 right now or something. 4.35 trillion.

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So down 35 S, down a little bit, yeah.

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Yeah. All right.

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Unless they always they beat earnings and then they still,

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you know, the expectations are so insane.

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I said five, I think Max. What?

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Did you say? I said 6, which was dead on the

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money, if I recall. Yeah, yeah.

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Yep. So the audience, the audience

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had a median of 6 trillion. Very few outliers on the high

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end there. 5 was the next biggest grouping.

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Also interesting median was just so large is that's really it's

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just so many. If I was think it was average.

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Well, average is obviously thrown off by this like 100

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hundred trillion as a troll, but forget that one.

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I think based on the performance of the recent earnings, I think

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this is actually high for reality.

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Like they crushed the recent earnings as we discussed and the

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stock barely went up on a multi day period.

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So if they're not going up, you know, 10% a quarter, essentially

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they're not going to hit this number.

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And I just don't see that if those earnings aren't moving the

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stock up. So this actually feels high for

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reality to me. 5 is hard because you're sort of like you're

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chickening out on saying it's all going to blow up.

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And you know, it's, it's like, what is this reality where

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either it's like, oh, the mania has continued or there's a

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pullback. In some ways my 5 trillion feels

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like sort of a weird sort of same.

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Middle ground sound. World.

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But yeah, who knows? Obviously, if you could, if you

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knew the answer to this, you could be unlimited, you could

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have an unlimited amount of wealth.

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So nobody knows, but this is what a couple people think.

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What year will an independent committee of experts, as

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dictated by the Microsoft Open AI Agreement, declare that we

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have reached AGI? I thought this was a funny

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question because at once it's such a like, silly idea, like,

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oh, we're gonna have AGI, but like, there's an actual

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contractual agreement between Microsoft and Open AI that

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there's a committee to resolve this and big business when, you

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know, dealings hang on in. So it's a specific question,

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which is sort of funny. This was one of my favourites

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because you guys were trying to guess what the audience will try

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to guess what Microsoft and Open AI will will decide as AGI, as a

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lot of layers of prognification going on here.

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What do you guys say? You said much higher.

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I said 2035. Yeah, I said 29.

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So I was pretty close to the median of 2030.

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What do you guys think in retrospect?

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Like is this is too early or? I just feel like a theme of

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Cerebral Valley in the beginning, you know, we started

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in 2023, in March 2023 after your Chachi BT that was probably

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the conference. We talked most about AGI and

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then we talked about it less and less every time.

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You know, it's like there was so much enthusiasm when the models

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came out and now we're in the sort of like, oh man, this is

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exactly like self driving cars where you feel really close and

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then there's a lot of like edge cases to hammer around.

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And so I just think AGI pessimism has gone way up and

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you add to that Andre Carpathy sort of thing, and it's just

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like, I don't know, I don't think the insider vibes are like

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AGI tomorrow unless you're talking to Daria or something.

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I think the, I think the interesting thing here is that

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there's basically just two buckets of people.

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One is 2030 or sooner, which are like the accelerationist and

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then one is like 2045 or never, which is like the

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decelerationist or the pessimist or whatever you want to call

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them. Maybe, maybe the realist.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas you sort of hit this

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exact, I thought that basically nobody was, which it was 10

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years from now or whatever. But like it's still gonna

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happen. Which is an interesting like,

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yeah, that you sort of found the middle of this smiling curve

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where you're either an optimist or you're a pessimist, and you

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kind of tried to hit the middle and it didn't quite.

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Yeah, that's interesting. We have more optimists at our

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conference was the end was the end result.

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That's why Max beat me. He understood, though.

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That was the psychology, the answer right there.

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Yeah, exactly right. Optimistic Conference.

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There's something slightly interesting comparing it to the

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self driving car world like you said though Eric, because self

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driving cars are basically useless until they reach parity

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or capability of human drivers. Right, this is not like that.

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This is not. It just happens to have all

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these other very targeted, more verticalized use cases that are

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super valuable but. 100%. With the full human replication.

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Yeah, which is why we're you know, I was negative about self

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driving cars because it was annoying because you need them

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to actually work, whereas this I've been very enthusiastic.

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So yeah, I I agree that's what's beautiful about text versus

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safely delivering humans places, which thankfully now way MO is

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good at and we can celebrating it.

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But you know, 10 years ago or whatever, it was annoying

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marketing. I like that.

00:10:54
OK, next question, Which venture capital firm's AI portfolio are

00:10:58
you most jealous of? I think this was kind of a

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shocker, right? Neither of you guessed A16Z,

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which tied with Khosla for the lead here.

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Obviously this. We both said thrive, right?

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Yeah. And then we both.

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And then we decided to tie a. 2nd pick or something.

00:11:14
No, I said Sequoia. Sequoia and I said.

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And that's why you won this. Yeah, I got the kicker on that

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one. Yeah, that was a good pull.

00:11:20
Max, how did you decide to pull Khosla?

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Just open AI or? I did some ChatGPT research

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before and. Then goes with the first in Open

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AI, first venture investment, Open AI, yeah, but that round

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has gotten significantly diluted and I'm sure they'll be

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reporting overtime. I don't know how much they've

00:11:37
done secondary. It was one of these fantastic

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investments but it feels like they just they got squashed down

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by later stage rounds and all these negotiations.

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I think we can all agree though, the Andreessen, you know, tie

00:11:51
for victory with Khosla is pretty bizarre because like I,

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you know, there's not a lot of really notable successful

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Andreessen AI of investments compared to most of these other

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firms. I mean, I got a text from

00:12:02
somebody when I shit on Andreessen on stage, which is

00:12:04
funny, which is what's wrong with.

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This like live on stage. Right after I went off, but I

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which it's like, oh, people are paying attention.

00:12:13
Yeah, I don't know Andreessen. I mean, they have I I can't list

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they had character. They have like SSI mean, I'm

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sure they have a ton. Some of them are later, you

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know, it's like they're in Open AI, they're in XAI.

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I just think the lesson of our draft was like the only thing

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that matters is basically being heavy in Anthropic X AI or Open

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AI and like they're not really in any any of those, right?

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I mean, it was my understanding. Probably big in XAI.

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Are they big in XAI? I think that they're in X, but I

00:12:44
don't think they're huge. Yeah, these are all.

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Growth Sequoia was pretty big, yeah.

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Sequoia has some money all. I'm saying is yeah, they to me

00:12:51
it feels like the PR of Andreessen generally is sort of

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overwhelming the actual portfolio.

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It's like, oh. You know, I think Drive is doing

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really well. They've done these huge bets in

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open AI like big yeah, pre all the markups.

00:13:05
So I bet they're doing really well and would like to

00:13:08
substantiate that Thrive reach out the I mean all the you know,

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they've mentioned a bunch of firms like, you know, it's like

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a lot of Gil who we had on stage is obviously great Index

00:13:20
ventures. I mean some of these like who

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knows, some partner, you know, set them.

00:13:23
I'm personally jealous of this slag because it would be a great

00:13:26
cap table for a start up. Just have all these.

00:13:30
Things. I mean every.

00:13:30
Single person. On the slide here.

00:13:32
Yeah, yeah. Sounds good and benchmark

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doesn't make sense to me necessarily for AI portfolio,

00:13:38
you know, but I mean they have Mercore now.

00:13:41
Mercore Lang chain, I don't know.

00:13:44
But oh, OK, as I'm about to preview, I do think brand, like

00:13:48
having a big brand, you know, who gets an answer on a survey?

00:13:53
Somebody who's has large mindshare.

00:13:55
And This is why surveys are imperfect.

00:13:59
Yeah. What research mechanisms?

00:14:00
So we're about to see name recognition is everything here.

00:14:04
If you could put money in any private technology companies

00:14:07
today, what would they be? So the top 10 by far was the

00:14:13
first was Anthropic, followed by Open AI and then Cursor.

00:14:19
Those are the top 3. Rounding out the top five was

00:14:23
Andereal and SpaceX. Open evidence is interesting,

00:14:28
then perplexity replit stripe, XAI Max and I both said

00:14:31
anthropic right? Yes, yes.

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I feel like the tiebreaker, First of all, I was idiotic on

00:14:36
the tiebreaker because I picked a really random company.

00:14:39
Nobody was ever going to pick. I said fireworks, which was

00:14:41
clearly just like if I were going to make the bet.

00:14:44
I don't know what I was thinking.

00:14:45
Max you picked cursor. Cursor, cursor.

00:14:48
Yeah, well, with the momentum play.

00:14:50
I I think we got, we had one pick this tiebreaker thing.

00:14:53
I was not pre negotiated. I didn't come in with a

00:14:55
tiebreaker, so I didn't. Do so.

00:15:02
But you both kind of agree with the audience on Anthropic.

00:15:05
I mean, it's an interesting question because Anthropic is

00:15:08
only, you know, valued at, you know, what is it 350 billion

00:15:12
compared to opening eyes 500 now, right?

00:15:14
They're they're starting to get pretty pricey comparatively

00:15:17
speaking. And I know their revenue growth

00:15:19
has been unbelievable. And I think they're mind share

00:15:21
in Silicon Valley again among developers.

00:15:23
And there is this sort of like undercurrent of like they're

00:15:27
like the ethical AI company, quote UN quote with the, you

00:15:30
know, cool hip branding in the West Village.

00:15:33
It is a bit strange to me that they're substantially bigger,

00:15:39
you know, than open AI and the votes here, because I just think

00:15:41
that the hipness of Anthropic is maybe outweighing the fact that.

00:15:45
Well, Silicon Valley is more bullish on Anthropic than you

00:15:50
know, most of America clearly of.

00:15:53
Course, yeah. But I, I just think, yeah, if

00:15:55
you were an honest assessment of the valuation compared to the

00:15:58
revenue versus open AI would would say like, hey, you might

00:16:01
just want to take the momentum plan bet on open AI.

00:16:04
So it was a bit of a yeah, let's guess what the hip Silicon

00:16:07
Valley one is. And you and I both correctly

00:16:09
guessed the hip Silicon Valley 1 was anthropic.

00:16:12
Yeah, what global companies model will top the LM Arena web

00:16:16
development leaderboard at the end of 2026?

00:16:20
We had an excellent conversation with some insiders in the data

00:16:24
labeling space the night before who said that LM Arena is an

00:16:29
incredibly gamable metric and it's because it's basically

00:16:32
voting from users whether or not they liked the response or not.

00:16:37
And so it's very susceptible to, some might call it glazing,

00:16:41
others might call it sick of fancy towards the user.

00:16:44
And their belief was that open AI was heavily over optimizing

00:16:48
to glazing their users and therefore was continuing to do

00:16:52
well in these types of rankings. Which I thought was an

00:16:54
interesting point, which is why I think I chose open AI for

00:16:56
this. And did well one the answers are

00:16:58
open AI, Anthropic, Google, Gemini X AI and then Alibaba.

00:17:02
We made sure to say global to try and induce some Chinese

00:17:05
answers, but didn't get they didn't rank high.

00:17:08
I just think this was basically what the rankings were during

00:17:13
the day the survey was taken like nobody was really going out

00:17:17
too far on a limb that this would be radically different

00:17:20
next year. But I think that's interesting

00:17:22
because my understanding is now Gemini ranks higher than open

00:17:26
AI, you know, a week later, right?

00:17:28
So I bet you'd, I bet you know, you'd see a lot more people

00:17:32
guessing Gemini. 'S insiders needed to be more

00:17:34
aware, yeah. Yeah.

00:17:36
Man, I wish Gemini come out before the conference.

00:17:39
So, yeah, well. Why do you wish that?

00:17:44
Why? Just think Google would have

00:17:45
leaned in and talking about it. It also would have been giving

00:17:47
us like a current. We had plenty to talk about.

00:17:50
It was one of my favorite events, but you know, it's

00:17:53
there's a lot of big. Happen a week later.

00:17:55
World that happens a week after it's like, oh come.

00:17:58
On, Yeah, All right. If you could short a $1 billion

00:18:01
valuation startup, which would it be?

00:18:04
Before before we yeah, before we answer this question, let me say

00:18:08
having just gotten off the 16 hour plane ride from the United

00:18:12
Arab Emirates, this was brought up to me multiple times apropos

00:18:16
of nothing in conversation world with venture capitalists and

00:18:22
investors are anonymous service of all stripes.

00:18:24
They had no idea I'm associated with the conference.

00:18:26
They had no idea that this was something that I was personally

00:18:29
like on stage for the reveal of this information.

00:18:33
So this not just went viral, this literally traveled around

00:18:37
the world faster than, you know, as fast as the speed of light.

00:18:40
The the answer to this question. And I think other journalists

00:18:43
probably made millions of dollars off of this.

00:18:46
And Eric, maybe just no, well, I don't know, money.

00:18:48
Do you think we will make off? Stories.

00:18:51
Maybe not, maybe not. Price.

00:18:53
We'd be lucky. If they made 10, I mean they

00:18:55
didn't make any. Money I meant.

00:18:56
I meant Business Insider. I meant business.

00:18:58
Ties it to the tune of $20 all.

00:19:01
Right, All right. I meant, I meant Business

00:19:03
Insider. If they have a sub plan, which I

00:19:05
believe they do, sure converted hundreds of Subs off of ripping

00:19:09
off our survey. So Congrats to Business Insider.

00:19:13
Yeah. So yes.

00:19:13
We're with that you get the coverage to be clear.

00:19:15
Thank you, Ben. Thank you for the coverage.

00:19:17
Thank you, Eric. How does this make you feel

00:19:19
about lists and rankings and types of stories you might?

00:19:24
Write We played it as a fun game on stage, and I think our

00:19:29
coverage in the newsletter reflected that.

00:19:30
It was like a fun game. And that's what we're talking

00:19:33
about it here. This was not an academic survey.

00:19:35
It was sort of provocative and it's funny.

00:19:37
I mean, some ways the media should be a little looser.

00:19:39
It's like, oh, some insiders think this thing, but just like

00:19:42
when things are turned into like journalese, it feels like

00:19:45
official, like Silicon Valley has turned on perplexity.

00:19:48
It's like, I don't know, so random people would decide to

00:19:51
fill out a survey, you know, that's what they said.

00:19:53
But and perplexity was on the bull list, you know, way lower.

00:19:57
And I, I do think this means something that it was #1 short,

00:20:00
I mean perplexity, why is it #1 super highly valued and doesn't

00:20:04
have that gateway to the consumer.

00:20:06
And people have tried to do browsers forever.

00:20:09
You know, it's like people have failed.

00:20:11
And you know, Google Chrome and Safari and Explorer dominate.

00:20:16
So it's it's a very hard space. So yeah, there are some

00:20:20
investors that are super bullish, but I think most people

00:20:22
are like, how do they get distribution?

00:20:24
Yeah. The the reason it's a short

00:20:26
right is, is valuation I think to a large degree, right.

00:20:29
It's valued at $20 billion, right.

00:20:31
And whatever leaks have come out about the revenue from the

00:20:35
inside, you know, there's some debates of whether or not

00:20:37
they're counting free trials that are a year long as part of

00:20:41
revenue if you read the information story about this

00:20:43
kind of stuff. But anyway, even if you just

00:20:44
take it on its face, the revenue that they're leaking or stating

00:20:48
this is like 100X revenue multiple which is sort of

00:20:52
ludicrous on any company. I mean even the wildly

00:20:56
overvalued companies were talking about earlier like

00:20:58
Anthropic and Open AI are only multiple 25X revenue.

00:21:03
So this thing is worth, you know, the, the excitement around

00:21:07
it from a valuation perspective is roughly 4X Open AI or cursor,

00:21:11
right, if you were to just sort of do the math there.

00:21:13
And so I think that's the reason it's a short, it's just that the

00:21:15
valuation is just out of control.

00:21:17
And to your point, they don't have their own models.

00:21:20
It is a search engine. And obviously Google and Open AI

00:21:22
are trying to own the search space.

00:21:23
And now they're getting into the browser thing.

00:21:25
And it's not clear that even this that AI browsers are even a

00:21:28
space. Yeah.

00:21:29
So most votes, most shorts was Perplexity, followed by Open AI,

00:21:35
and then tied for third was Cursor Figure, Harvey, Mercor,

00:21:40
Mistral and Thinking Machines. I, I answered, I think open AI

00:21:44
on the belief that oh man, popularity and Max got this dead

00:21:48
on. So kudos to Max, which was a

00:21:50
great pick, but I, I got the number 2 and then I think we did

00:21:54
a second. Did we do a second?

00:21:55
I said thinking machines also, which was third.

00:21:57
So we we, we were on the pulse. And that and that was that was

00:22:00
before thinking machines got marked out to 50 billion.

00:22:04
That was it came in 3rd when it was a $10 billion company.

00:22:07
Now it's 50. So that to me would have been

00:22:10
the the pick maybe. You know, Cerebral Valley survey

00:22:13
went viral with Indian media because Perplexity founder is

00:22:16
sort of a high profile Indian founder and I think there's

00:22:19
interest and how it goes. So it really, really travelled.

00:22:23
I think perplexity hangs on, you know, it could sell to Apple or

00:22:28
somebody to save their AI strategy, I think because they

00:22:31
have a big distribution problem. And then some people really

00:22:34
believe in the founder and some people don't.

00:22:36
All right, any final takes? Well, I was just curious about.

00:22:40
I was curious about cursor because you said that you had a

00:22:43
a. Oh, I just wanted to not talk

00:22:45
about it until we revealed that it was.

00:22:47
Short of the shorts, I don't. Know Max What's your take?

00:22:50
Are you bullish or bearish? I mean, I don't know, probably

00:22:56
bullish given the momentum they're seeing on revenue and

00:22:59
revenue growth. I think if you just take the

00:23:01
brain dead case that lots of revenue is good and lots of

00:23:04
revenue growth is good, they have a good business.

00:23:07
I think they're much more likely to exit to someone for near

00:23:09
their current valuation than Perplexity, for example, where I

00:23:12
think that buying it for 20 would just be absolutely insane.

00:23:16
But yeah, I mean, ultimately there's this whole debate with

00:23:19
Cursor that they're repackaging other people's models and their

00:23:22
gross margins are terrible and yadda, yadda, yadda.

00:23:24
But you know, ultimately someone may have to cave and just buy

00:23:27
them to own the IDE space. You know, Microsoft being an

00:23:30
obvious candidate. So it'll be.

00:23:31
Interesting and now now Google has anti gravity which is their

00:23:34
right. That's more their clawed code I

00:23:37
think. I.

00:23:38
No, no. I.

00:23:38
Downloaded it. No.

00:23:39
Anti gravity is is a cursor clone in many ways but I mean.

00:23:44
OK I I have it on my computer. It has terminal access.

00:23:47
It's trying to come. Up with.

00:23:49
Well, it's designed more specific.

00:23:51
I guess you could say it's cloud code.

00:23:53
To some degree it's because it's.

00:23:54
So does. It felt like cloud code because

00:23:55
I do stuff in the terminal I haven't actually known the

00:23:58
cursor. I'm not a coder so I don't know,

00:24:00
but when I it felt like cloud code.

00:24:03
You shouldn't have to use terminal that much for anti

00:24:07
gravity like versus cursor. I don't know.

00:24:09
I don't know. You wanted me.

00:24:10
You built my website and then I was like, build the website and

00:24:14
then I was like, OK, go in the terminal and run it.

00:24:16
Yeah, so that's what cursor would do too.

00:24:18
That's what cursor would do. Because you're just, it's like a

00:24:22
level above lovable or something, right?

00:24:25
Where it's like it's forcing you to.

00:24:26
Actually more yeah, minor speed is repple it even Dumber than

00:24:30
that. I think I need to try repple it

00:24:31
like. I think you'd like Repple.

00:24:33
It's like in between. I think Repple it has a little

00:24:35
bit more pro. User I want the dumbest feature

00:24:37
lease coding you know. That's probably I think.

00:24:40
I think lovable is the yeah is the version.

00:24:43
Well, I beef with lovable because they have Yeah, try

00:24:46
repple it, you know? Yeah.

00:24:47
Repple it but they say. They fix actually what you

00:24:50
should try as of, you know, yesterday is I think Gemini in

00:24:55
AI Studio. It's like they've built a

00:24:58
lovable kind of thing. Classic Google man Jesus Christ,

00:25:02
how many names you even how to find it like that name is

00:25:06
insane. Yeah, Gemini in.

00:25:09
Gemini inside AI Studio. Inside AI Studio.

00:25:13
You're not. You're not a daily daily driver

00:25:16
of AI Studio. Specific specifically.

00:25:20
Specifically the build, The build menu, the build.

00:25:23
Within, yeah, you're. Not up.

00:25:26
You're not up in Vertex every day, Eric.

00:25:28
That's that's a real name of a Google product, by the way.

00:25:31
That's related to AI. Yeah.

00:25:34
All right, let's do some clips. Let's do some clips for founders

00:25:38
and developers building modern data-driven applications.

00:25:41
Mongo DB's local event series is coming to San Francisco on

00:25:45
January 15th, and it's designed to help you focus on innovation,

00:25:48
not infrastructure. You'll learn about technologies,

00:25:51
tools, and best practices that make it easy to build and scale

00:25:55
modern applications without complexity.

00:25:58
Plus, attendees will hear directly from experts and

00:26:00
innovators who are using Mongo DB to power the next wave of AI

00:26:04
applications. Mongo DB dot local San Francisco

00:26:08
January 15th, Learn more and register at MDB dot link forward

00:26:14
slash SF-DOT dash local or click the link in the description.

00:26:19
Our first clip it's me, Eric, interviewing Mike Krieger, the

00:26:23
chief product officer of Anthropic, who is the Co founder

00:26:26
of Instagram. Before that, returning to sort

00:26:28
of my core philosophical question, like the sick of fancy

00:26:31
question, like what is your view on that and how much to enable

00:26:36
sort of everybody likes to be flattered, like it's a reality

00:26:39
of human beings versus an effort to be direct?

00:26:42
And how do you think about those tradeoffs?

00:26:44
Yeah, I think there's like a wide gulf between like true

00:26:47
empathy and then like sick of fancy.

00:26:49
And it's interesting that Materialize is not just in, hey,

00:26:52
I'm having a conversation with Claude about like some coaching

00:26:55
or personal goal that I have, but it also does encode as well.

00:26:58
When we were testing Sonnet 4-5, one of the things that people

00:27:01
got most excited about was when Claude was like, this idea is

00:27:04
bad like this, you know, not that you should feel bad about

00:27:07
it, but like this idea is like not a good direction.

00:27:09
I can go and implement it if you really want to, but I would

00:27:11
suggest that we try this other thing instead.

00:27:14
So there is something like that. Pushback is not just valuable in

00:27:18
a personal relationship with AI sense, it's actually like how

00:27:21
you get good work out of the models.

00:27:24
But you know, for a long time our models have been like, I

00:27:28
think like appropriately empathetic, like they're they're

00:27:31
like if you're going through a hard time, like I was dealing

00:27:33
with the death of a pet and I talked to Claude a lot about

00:27:34
these different things and it always started sounds like, Hey,

00:27:37
that sounds hard, like sorry to hear.

00:27:40
But then I'm going to give you like a factual answer.

00:27:42
I'm going to go research these pieces, but still with the place

00:27:44
of empathy as well. And so I think when we look at

00:27:48
it internally and we're just evaluating it ourselves, it's

00:27:50
again, not that like empathy, it's not even like the

00:27:53
likeability of the model. It is, do you like, does it show

00:27:56
up in the way that you'd want a good conversationalist to show

00:27:59
up and then continue on its AI journey around what it is going

00:28:02
to do with you as well? But I think it's it spans

00:28:06
everything from that like initial response all the way to

00:28:08
like how it evaluates an idea as well, you know?

00:28:12
Yeah, Claude, especially previous versions were kind of

00:28:14
like known for being like, you're absolutely right when you

00:28:16
correct it. And my wife got her first, like

00:28:21
you're completely wrong. And she's like, yes, this is

00:28:23
great. And I think we should have more

00:28:24
of that. Like, kind of like less San

00:28:26
Francisco. Yeah, less San Francisco, a

00:28:28
little more direct New York. You know, I'd set up this big

00:28:31
theme, you know, that he'd been at a social media company,

00:28:33
Instagram. Now he was an AI company.

00:28:36
Social media companies were built on user optimizing for

00:28:40
user engagement through machine learning and AI companies at

00:28:43
least started off chasing the truth and chasing these

00:28:46
leaderboards. But like sick of fancy is a, you

00:28:49
know, it shows that these models and open AI is famous for the

00:28:54
sick of fancy issue and people's attachment to GPT 4, which was

00:28:59
the one that really sucked up to everybody and people didn't want

00:29:02
to see it go away. You know, clearly these model

00:29:06
companies have to think about how much to pander to the egos

00:29:12
of their users, Would you guys think?

00:29:14
I mean, it's interesting because it does sort of spiritually

00:29:18
align with the fact that Anthropic has almost no consumer

00:29:23
adoption compared to open AI. I mean, like if you look at the

00:29:27
market share of each of these AI for consumers versus businesses

00:29:30
and enterprises, Anthropic is just crushing it with, you know,

00:29:34
B to B use cases engineers like, you know, all these kind of work

00:29:38
based applications and has very, very low consumer uptake just

00:29:45
like shockingly low. And I wonder if that's because

00:29:48
of this, you know, unwillingness to optimize for engagement and

00:29:53
sick of fancy and glazing or if it's just that the, you know,

00:29:56
opening eye got a head start and they figured, why even chase

00:29:58
these metrics? But it is sort of interesting

00:30:01
culturally that they're right not chasing engagement.

00:30:05
And obviously Opening Eye came out with Sora, which is sort of

00:30:08
a shameless. Like, give users something fun,

00:30:11
who cares about. Yeah.

00:30:13
What is the meaning behind it? I mean, I thought it was

00:30:16
interesting, this sort of a tangent, but my other favorite

00:30:19
moment from this interview is Mike Krieger saying that he came

00:30:22
to anthropic thinking, man, text box cannot be the main way to

00:30:26
interact with AI. And now that he's been there a

00:30:28
while, he's like text box. Pretty good way.

00:30:33
Well, especially if you're like the best coding model and the

00:30:35
best like. Whatever.

00:30:37
Probably like best. Legal model, It's great, yeah.

00:30:39
It's like, oh, it turns out all these work applications involve

00:30:42
parsing, you know, summarizing and generating.

00:30:45
I think that my reaction to that was like, nobody would be like,

00:30:47
oh, books, just, it's just a book, you know, it's just text.

00:30:49
It's like, yeah, text is great. I don't know, James reactions to

00:30:52
you. I don't know either the input

00:30:54
model or the truth. I think that actually, you know,

00:30:58
whether it's anthropic or open AI, like I am skeptical that

00:31:03
they have been like attention jacking, you know, optimizing

00:31:09
for flattery. Just intentionally.

00:31:12
Like a lot of what happens is that they throw an AB test up.

00:31:16
They like literally show you 2 results from the model and then

00:31:18
people pick right And so I think that they were just caught off

00:31:22
guard more than they were purposely trying to optimize for

00:31:26
this. I've also been hearing that

00:31:29
there's just general problems with multi turn conversations in

00:31:33
the training sets of these things.

00:31:35
Like most of the models are trained on one shot, the data of

00:31:39
like, give me a good answer to this thing.

00:31:41
And then once you get into multi turn, there's just less and less

00:31:45
data, right? It's like kind of makes sense

00:31:46
intuitively cuz you start branching off of conversations.

00:31:50
And I think that's another sort of flaw of these models is they

00:31:54
can kind of, they can just be more sycophantic.

00:31:59
In some ways what you're saying is they're not savvy enough yet

00:32:01
to really make this trade off and they're just trying to like

00:32:04
stumbling through the dark a little bit.

00:32:06
Yeah, Yeah. A more interesting question is,

00:32:08
will they change their tune on this from, you know,

00:32:11
capitalistic pressure to, you know, maximize shareholder

00:32:15
value? I'm yeah, I think that's an

00:32:17
interesting question. I'm just like skeptical that

00:32:19
that's what's been happening. All right, this is my interview,

00:32:22
last interview of the day with Jimmy BA, one of the Co founders

00:32:25
of Elon Musk's XAI, a very mysterious foundation model

00:32:29
company, the Mecca Hitler in the room.

00:32:32
Like what is your reflection as sort of a truth seeking

00:32:36
organization? What happened?

00:32:38
Like we, you know, like I think on the past to be maximum true

00:32:43
seeking, there's not without any hurdles, of course, like so we

00:32:47
like yeah, Mac Hitler is one of them.

00:32:49
Like we, our model had an episode that week.

00:32:54
It's actually a reference to the Wolfenstein game, right?

00:32:58
So, but I think very quickly that the perfect world we want

00:33:02
to be in is like, yes, the model is going to make mistakes, but

00:33:04
how can we get the feedback loops to actually train these

00:33:07
models to stay, you know, grounded to understand, hey, I

00:33:10
actually made a mistake in this journey and let me correct my

00:33:14
courses and go back into the sources.

00:33:16
So the way, you know, very quickly what happened after my

00:33:19
color is I would look at the, you know, the committee notes,

00:33:22
right? Committee notes is a great tool

00:33:24
on the platforms that allows everyone to kind of chime in and

00:33:27
provide learning signals for this AI, right?

00:33:29
So the vision we have is like, you know, like with the Grog PDA

00:33:32
is like kind of another step towards that.

00:33:34
So now like instead of doing an ask Grog, do all the online

00:33:39
computation, we learn our lesson.

00:33:41
We're like, hey, a lot of these problems are really hard about

00:33:44
the world. Like why don't we just, you

00:33:46
know, take this computation offline and spend as much

00:33:50
reasoning as possible using the entire cluster.

00:33:52
We're building benefits to like, look over all the primary

00:33:55
sources, combine only the primary sources, and dish that

00:33:58
information back. To is that so?

00:34:00
Is the media out of the calculus there?

00:34:01
It's you want primary sources, Yes.

00:34:04
Are you totally discounting news articles or how do you treat

00:34:07
news articles? I mean, majority of the Internet

00:34:10
is flooded with second hand and third hand information.

00:34:15
And we, we believe that, you know, the only way to get to the

00:34:18
bottom of the issue is, you know, directly get information

00:34:24
from the information source. And right now the X platform

00:34:27
has, you know, most of the outbreaks of the news and you

00:34:30
know, the the world leaders today are making the first hand

00:34:33
announcement on X platforms rather than anyone else.

00:34:36
After this interview, what happened this week is that Grok,

00:34:40
Grok has been telling everybody that Elon is the best at

00:34:42
everything in the fucking world. Better than better athlete than

00:34:46
LeBron James. I think he can get it to say

00:34:48
he's better giving blow jobs, and I don't know.

00:34:50
But anyway, Elon is great in every domain whatsoever.

00:34:54
And so I think what's galling about XAI is that they are the

00:34:57
loudest truth, truth, truth, truth.

00:34:59
We're are seeking the truth who knows how.

00:35:01
And then they're the ones who have like Mecca Hitler.

00:35:04
They're the ones who have, you know, they're bot glazing their

00:35:09
CEO like it's just like, yeah, it's very Trumpian, where you're

00:35:14
the opposite of what you profess to be.

00:35:16
Yeah, I find this whole maximally truth seeking argument

00:35:20
to be just the biggest pile of bullshit I have heard in a long

00:35:24
time. It is.

00:35:25
It is so absurd. To your point, it is almost the

00:35:27
opposite of what's happening. They are giving themselves

00:35:29
credit for failing in public while every other company goes

00:35:33
through all this hard work of failing in private so that they

00:35:36
don't have massive fuck ups in public.

00:35:37
It's like, obviously I'm sure some crazy version of, you know,

00:35:41
Chachi, BT and Claude existed in the labs that probably did stuff

00:35:44
that was equally stupid as Mecca Hitler, but they don't fucking

00:35:47
release it. They fix it before it goes out

00:35:49
to the public. That is, that is maximum.

00:35:52
I was very excited. Like talk to Jim.

00:35:54
I, I was very excited to talk to Jimmy because these guys,

00:35:56
they're so inaccessible. And I, you know, I asked him

00:35:59
later on, like, what is reasoning from first principles?

00:36:01
And I just think it's like so incoherent.

00:36:04
You know, it's like a thing you hear in Silicon Valley,

00:36:06
reasoning for first reason. But how are you going to like

00:36:08
derive like entire encyclopedia articles from first principles?

00:36:12
Like AI is clearly not smart enough to really think these

00:36:17
things from the ground up. And some of the things it has to

00:36:19
learn about are human phenomenon.

00:36:22
So you have to rely on human sources and they don't rely on

00:36:26
the media. And that he, he literally says

00:36:28
something that he thinks like X is more reliable than like the

00:36:32
media, which I, you know, obviously I find absurd.

00:36:35
And I just think any reasonable person would be like, if you're

00:36:37
trying to figure out a fact, you know, would you take the

00:36:41
distribution of answers on Twitter or would you take the

00:36:43
answer on like Wikipedia or in the New York Times?

00:36:45
I would certainly take Wikipedia or the New York Times.

00:36:48
Yeah, I don't know. I just find this whole like

00:36:50
getting feedback from community notes as like a solution to

00:36:54
maximal truth. Right.

00:36:55
It's like afterwards, it's like we're going to fuck up on

00:36:57
everything and then community notes will clean up.

00:37:00
Some of it it's like, it's like the only way our maximally truth

00:37:03
seeking AI system works is if we fuck up on such a massive scale

00:37:07
that a mob of people online says this is a yes, you have to fix

00:37:11
this. And then we like take the notes

00:37:13
on, you know, we're like, oh, yeah, that that's a good point.

00:37:15
Actually. Elon probably wasn't better than

00:37:17
Michael Jordan in the mid 90s. Thank you, community notes.

00:37:21
Like, it's like, that's not maximally truth seeking.

00:37:24
That's just like fucking up on the most maximal possible scale.

00:37:27
Like it's such an absurd line of thinking.

00:37:30
And I find it so offensive that they frame it as such.

00:37:35
Yeah, I guess. James is gonna offer the

00:37:38
contrarian viewpoint I'm so excited to.

00:37:40
Hear you disagree or James is gonna steel.

00:37:43
Man this take, I love him. I just feel like I'm going third

00:37:48
here. I gotta do the steel man.

00:37:49
So I think that maybe they, they are way ahead of their skis on

00:37:57
this. But if I'm giving them the

00:38:00
maximal credit here, like I think there are interesting

00:38:03
things you can do with like first principles reasoning in

00:38:07
training, right? So you can hire these pH DS, you

00:38:11
can like, you know, almost like create axioms and like create.

00:38:16
Reasoning changes get it that Like who is the philosopher king

00:38:19
at ex like if not Wikipedia like is there some guy or like and

00:38:24
the guy? Thinks that's what they're doing

00:38:25
or that's like, but like that's what they're planning to do or

00:38:28
doing, you know, like basically hiring lots of people to but it.

00:38:33
Feels like somebody is just like actually like, you know, racism

00:38:36
isn't bad, like you know, it's toy the thing you know it's just

00:38:40
like but it won't own it. It's like, if it's true seeking,

00:38:42
you have to like, Oh my God, like.

00:38:45
And it's probably Elon, right? Maybe, maybe a lot of this is

00:38:49
just Elon messing with the system prompt, right?

00:38:51
Like maybe the training is great and then and then Elon goes in

00:38:54
and and edits the system. And I think, you know, XAI is

00:38:57
very proud of its work in coding.

00:38:59
I think they're seriously competitive there.

00:39:01
But I think one thing we're seeing with these models is that

00:39:05
just because you're a genius in one domain doesn't mean it's

00:39:07
sort of like an all-purpose genius.

00:39:09
It means you like did a lot of reinforcement learning there.

00:39:12
You worked really hard. And so it's it's not like it's

00:39:15
not like what they think, which is like, oh, the smartest math

00:39:18
genius in the world. He's gonna have, you know, the

00:39:20
best views on like, you know, social issues of the time.

00:39:23
You know, it's they're they're pretty disconnected, just like

00:39:26
with human human like Bobby Fischer was like an anti Semite.

00:39:29
You know, it's like you can be a genius in one domain, it doesn't

00:39:32
necessarily make you super competent in others because

00:39:34
there are different ways of gathering information and

00:39:36
understanding what's happening. And so I think they're

00:39:38
delusional that they're going to have this.

00:39:40
Yeah, first principles machine. That's great just because it's a

00:39:44
great reasoner. And therefore it's it's just

00:39:46
going to be swamping the other models by ignoring conventional

00:39:51
human sources. Yeah, it's like it's kind of

00:39:54
weird. They're trying to, like, invent

00:39:55
new branches of philosophy that can like, cover all human.

00:40:00
Without having any respect for the past.

00:40:02
Thing right? Exactly the way.

00:40:03
You do that is you're sort of like, you know, the Uvra.

00:40:05
And then you're like, yeah, we, we read it.

00:40:07
We disagree. They're sort of like stumbling

00:40:09
and blind. They're like these these

00:40:11
intellectuals. They're like idiots.

00:40:12
We're going to code it anyway. Next, Next clip.

00:40:15
All right, here. Here's another one.

00:40:17
I talked with the mayor of San Francisco.

00:40:19
Have you had a conversation with Zoran Mamdani or any

00:40:22
observations on his election? You've been able to maintain

00:40:25
this. Great.

00:40:25
We, we, we, we, we, We spoke the morning after he won.

00:40:29
I congratulated him. I, I said, you know,

00:40:32
congratulations. Anything I can do to be helpful,

00:40:35
Great. I, I, I met my wife in New York

00:40:37
City. I worked at the Robin Hood

00:40:39
Foundation. I love New York.

00:40:40
I want New York to succeed. Did you give them any advice?

00:40:43
No, no, no, no one should be asking someone that's been in a

00:40:47
job for 10 months for advice. I, I unfortunately have been,

00:40:52
you know, here in San Francisco, not unfortunately like, but I

00:40:56
haven't been able to travel to New York for almost 2 years now.

00:40:59
So all you all here, you want me focused on San Francisco.

00:41:05
You don't want me talking Sacramento politics or DC or New

00:41:08
York. You want me focused, San

00:41:10
Francisco. Well, Eric, as the San Francisco

00:41:12
native, what do you what do you think about the mayor?

00:41:15
Yeah, yeah. I live in New York.

00:41:18
James is the only true San Francisco native anymore.

00:41:21
I I skip town for the suburbs. You should probably give your

00:41:24
take on the mayor. Well, I I generally like the

00:41:27
mayor a lot, and I think he's been doing a really good job.

00:41:31
I think, yeah, he's in a tough situation with these like

00:41:35
national politics issues. I think he really doesn't want

00:41:41
to deal, doesn't want to become the main story around the Trump

00:41:45
administration and national politics.

00:41:48
He wants to just focus on San Francisco, which I appreciate as

00:41:51
he was very. Politician.

00:41:53
He was like safety, safety, safety.

00:41:55
He just came back to that a billion times.

00:41:57
I, the audience loved him. I mean, politicians are better

00:42:00
speakers than CEOs. I, I think so the people liked

00:42:03
him. People were rooting for him.

00:42:04
He's talking about values, which often companies fail to speak

00:42:07
about. He's not mum Donnie though, like

00:42:10
I, I, yeah, he didn't. He's not like fighting it.

00:42:14
It was also interesting. I kept saying, you know, like

00:42:16
the business community loves you.

00:42:17
Like why is that? Even though like, you know, and

00:42:20
what advice would you give to mom Donnie and blah, blah, blah.

00:42:23
And then he sort of said at one point he was like, well, they

00:42:26
didn't love me at first, which I did think was a funny point

00:42:29
that, you know, it's like they came around to him pretty late,

00:42:31
but. Yeah.

00:42:32
I mean, I will just say, say that, yeah, as someone who has,

00:42:35
you know, lived in the Bay Area for 15 years, in San Francisco

00:42:38
for like a decade, like it is still sort of shocking to hear

00:42:42
the mayor express, like, excitement and appreciation for

00:42:46
the main industry in his city. Like, it's like, it's like, it's

00:42:50
like if the mayor of Los Angeles was up there and like being

00:42:53
like, I, I think this Hollywood thing is pretty good for the

00:42:56
city. And you were like, whoa, no

00:42:57
one's ever said that before. And reality is in San Francisco,

00:43:00
I have not heard a politician express any sort of positive

00:43:04
viewpoint about technology as an industry for 15 years.

00:43:07
And so it is, I think, you know, he has a 73% approval rating or

00:43:11
whatever. I think that the positivity

00:43:13
about what's happening in San Francisco is what really shown

00:43:16
through in the interview to me, including in this Benioff answer

00:43:18
where he was saying, hey, things are getting better.

00:43:20
We still have a lot of work to do.

00:43:21
But like, I believe in the city and I believe we can invest to

00:43:24
make it even better in the future, right?

00:43:25
And maybe Mark was a little off his rocker on calling for, you

00:43:28
know, the. Federal dimension a little,

00:43:29
yeah, there we. Go.

00:43:30
But it's just, yeah, the just the whiff of optimism about the

00:43:34
city and technology is is so unique in the last 15 years of

00:43:37
San Francisco politics. But he has universal approval in

00:43:41
the city because, you know, it got so bad.

00:43:44
And then pretty quickly after he got elected, like there was

00:43:48
noticeable improvement. Like I it's not that he was.

00:43:51
Yeah, he's doing an actually good job.

00:43:54
And there are a lot of obvious things that he could do to

00:43:57
improve quality of life in the city, and he's doing them.

00:43:59
And that, that's the success story.

00:44:02
Will it always feel like AI is this kind of tool?

00:44:05
Agents are useful, used by humans.

00:44:07
Christina, you said, you know, a smart person who knows how to

00:44:10
use AI might replace someone who doesn't know how to use that.

00:44:13
Or will we reach a point where these AI agents are really

00:44:18
approximating full workers in the enterprise?

00:44:22
Oh, I think they're yeah, there's definitely some full

00:44:24
workers, but I'm I'm people will just do other things like a

00:44:27
Vanta contacting example, and we were talking about it earlier is

00:44:30
one part one thing of GRC team does again is like evaluates new

00:44:34
vendors, new software vendors that are coming in.

00:44:36
And today often is someone's job to evaluate the high risk

00:44:40
vendors. Like they can't even do all of

00:44:42
them, but they are just like vendor evaluator.

00:44:44
And I think that is a great thing to give to an agent.

00:44:48
And then that and that agent can go to Erin's point, go and do

00:44:50
all of the vendors, not just a subset of them, because the

00:44:53
agent doesn't take PTO and doesn't get tired and, you know,

00:44:56
works 9/9 more than 997. And then the person becomes like

00:45:01
a vendor risk portfolio manager and thinks, OK, a given all

00:45:04
these, you know, inputs and given what I know about business

00:45:07
context, how do I like make better decisions?

00:45:10
But the person still has a role. It's just not as kind of in some

00:45:13
ways manual and tedious as what the agent is now doing.

00:45:16
I guess my reaction to this is just that what she's describing

00:45:22
is to some degree a job replacement.

00:45:25
I mean, she's saying that this role will no longer exist and

00:45:27
that this person will be doing a different job that she thinks

00:45:31
that person is capable of. But my question is like, is that

00:45:34
true? Like this person will be able

00:45:36
to, you know, become a portfolio of agents manager?

00:45:41
I don't know. I'm, I'm just maybe a like more,

00:45:43
a little more skeptical that it just so, so easily, you know,

00:45:47
transitions into this next era where everyone who used to be a

00:45:51
software engineer can just be an agent manager of software

00:45:54
engineers or everyone who, you know, was a lawyer can be a

00:45:59
manager of agent lawyers. Like, I don't know, it just

00:46:02
feels a little too neat to me that that's how things are going

00:46:05
to evolve. Yeah.

00:46:06
I mean, I think it's I think to to offer the sort of

00:46:10
conventional take on job replacement.

00:46:12
You know, 100 years ago, I think over half of Americans were

00:46:16
farmers, right? And today it's like 2% of

00:46:18
Americans are farmers, right. So we replace like literally 10s

00:46:21
of millions of farmer jobs over that time frame.

00:46:24
Now, I think, you know, the alternate and those farmers

00:46:27
ended up being lots of that we never would have imagined 100

00:46:29
years ago, right? Yeah, we're not all like.

00:46:31
Tractor managers, hopefully. Yeah, we're not all tractor

00:46:33
managers, we're not all combine harvester maintainers, right.

00:46:37
Yeah, Like they're, they're sort of as a layers of abstraction of

00:46:40
new types of jobs. So that's sort of the

00:46:42
conventional economics take. And I think I do basically

00:46:44
believe that. But I think that still means

00:46:47
that in the short run, especially with the pace with

00:46:49
which AI can do things that humans could do, you know, just

00:46:53
a year or two ago, like there there are new jobs since then

00:46:56
that now AI can suddenly do. It does feel like there's going

00:46:58
to be very rapid displacement, right?

00:47:00
Like the the invention of machines for farming did not

00:47:04
like overnight just completely obliterate everything farmers

00:47:08
were doing, which it does feel like AI is like just

00:47:10
obliterating huge chunks of knowledge work like basically

00:47:13
overnight. And so I think that they could

00:47:15
be sort of a shock to the system in the way that maybe

00:47:18
traditional automation is not. And it seems like as long as

00:47:22
Trump's in charge, nobody's stopping this putting the horse

00:47:25
back in the barn. Like, states aren't even gonna

00:47:27
be allowed to make regulations about it.

00:47:29
So it's like. Nobody's putting the horse back

00:47:32
in the barn is perfect like for perfect analogy like to the dawn

00:47:37
of cars, you know, like exactly. Yeah.

00:47:41
We. I think the other thing that was

00:47:44
interesting to me is just that she, she also, you know, sort of

00:47:50
is making the assumption that the job of agent manager won't

00:47:53
be be run by an agent like like how many lawyers you know?

00:47:58
Yeah, I don't know at what point does.

00:48:00
The I mean, progress. People want human to me, people

00:48:03
will want humans for something like I'm, you know, I would love

00:48:06
to have human, you know, caretakers for the elder.

00:48:09
Yeah. You know, there are lots of

00:48:10
important human things to do. I don't necessarily agree with

00:48:13
her. Like you're saying that humans

00:48:14
will just slot into the agent hierarchy.

00:48:17
It's like very possible agents run agents.

00:48:20
I think the big question is just like, well, so much value accrue

00:48:23
to the people who own these agents relative to the average

00:48:26
American worker, then, you know, the wealth inequality will get

00:48:30
get so terribly skewed. I think humans will have value

00:48:34
and therefore, if the economic system is working, there should

00:48:36
be money for them to make. But maybe, you know, people who

00:48:39
control these agents will just be far, far too powerful for any

00:48:43
sense of an egalitarian society. All right, I enjoyed the

00:48:48
conference, I think. Yeah, let's keep it tight.

00:48:50
This was a blast. I really had fun with this one.

00:48:53
Yeah, yeah. Thank you guys so much.

00:48:55
Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the podcast.

00:48:58
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