All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - GPT-4o launches, Glue demo, Ohalo breakthrough, Druck's Argentina bet, did Google kill Perplexity?
Episode Date: May 17, 2024(0:00) Bestie Intros: Recapping Phil Hellmuth's birthday weekend (7:38) OpenAI launches GPT-4o: better, faster, cheaper (29:40) Sacks demos Glue: How AI unlocked his Slack killer (40:12) Friedberg wal...ks through his major breakthrough at Ohalo (1:01:35) Stanley Druckenmiller bets on Argentina and Javier Milei: strategy, roadmap for the US (1:13:54) Jason's bet on Athena, how AI will change company building (1:22:21) Google launches AI summaries in search Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://twitter.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@all_in_tok Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2024/05/phil-hellmuth-60th-birthday-bash-las-vegas-45984.htm https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1790130703721521305 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1790089513387143469 https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/mmlu/v1.3.0/# https://www.businessinsider.com/inflection-implosion-chatgpt-stall-ai-consumer-chatbot-problem-2024-3 https://www.opencompute.org https://glue.ai https://ragie.ai https://ohalo.com https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-billionaire-investor-stanley-druckenmiller-speaks-with-cnbcs-squawk-box-today.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2024/03/23/summers-inflation-reached-18-in-2022-using-the-governments-previous-formula https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1378034932006592512 https://www.athenawow.com/jcal https://calacanis.substack.com/p/startup-productivity-in-the-age-of https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEzRZ35urlk https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG https://startuptalky.com/apple-failed-products
Transcript
Discussion (0)
All right, everybody. Welcome to your favorite podcast in the world's number one podcast,
the All In Podcast. It's episode 1790. Oh, wait, that's just how it feels. Welcome to episode 179.
With me today, of course, is your Sultan of science. I don't know if that's a movie background or it's
just his favorite vegetables. What's going on there? What's the crop? That's AI generated.
It's AI generated crop. Okay.
I'm trying AI backgrounds. I'm going to try it out for a while with different crops.
Your fans are going to be crushed that you're not doing deep movie polls with us. Of course,
man about town DC, new products being launched. David Sachs, the Rain Man. Yeah. How you doing,
buddy?
Good. Good. Yeah. Good week. Lots going on. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely a good week.
Shambhav Palihapatiya, chairman, dictator.
He puts the chairman and dictator.
I would like to take this opportunity to wish my child a happy birthday.
I absolutely f***ing love you.
Well, now the rest of us look like.
Yeah, great.
I've never done that before.
Zach, in your desk is a piece of paper
with your children's names and their birthdays.
You want to pull it out and see?
I got three birthdays a year and I've never done one. No, no, no, but I'm saying it rarely lands on the same day.
Today is the day.
Today is the day.
Today is the day.
Today is the day.
Okay.
Congratulations, child.
Oh, congratulations. How old, Chamath?. Today's the day. Congratulations, child. Oh, congratulations.
How old, Chamath?
No gender name or any other specifications, folks.
We can't tip anybody off.
No pronouns.
No pronouns.
Yes, absolutely.
So how are they, fam?
But this child?
Experiencing their birthday.
This child has experienced a wonderful life,
and this child is an incredible person
for whom I have tremendous admiration and love
and compassion and hope for the future. All right. And did you order them some chicken
fingers? I cannot comment on who this person is.
Are you talking of course about Phil Hellmuth?
Can we please talk about last weekend's festivities? What a disaster he is.
Oh my God.
Guys, just so you guys know.
So we missed you last weekend.
We missed you last week.
So much fun to make.
Timoth, we missed you on Saturday night.
Saturday night was really fun.
I had such a lovely time coming home,
to be totally honest with you.
We had a cabana set up on Saturday,
played blackjack by the pool.
I missed you guys too.
I had a FOMO.
It was fantastic.
I saw the videos.
It was so fun. Well, you don't have to have too much FOMO
because Phil sent the entire group chat
to pokernews.com.
They did an article on the book.
Run it twice.
Theflop.org, Poker Dash, updated.
Yeah, there's like five stories.
He kept tweeting all weekend.
And he leaked every single person who's there
and the jets and the jet numbers.
He's like, look, here's me and Elon.
Elon came by for my dinner.
No, no, no, it was worse than that.
No, it was worse than that.
He's like, I got to hang out with our guy Elon
for 10 minutes and 14 seconds.
Oh my God.
Wait, what?
He typed it.
He intercepted him at the valet.
Oh my God.
Wait, what?
How many minutes? 10 minutes and 14 seconds. He had the exact time down to the second.
Oh my God.
Well, listen, I want to wish Phil Helm with a happy birthday
because I did miss his 60th party.
Yeah, it's coming up actually.
His birthday's not that good.
The good news is it wasn't actually his birthday.
It was Bill Gurley's.
So we just hijacked Bill Gurley's birthday.
I also got to enjoy for my first time ever
the experience of Baccarat, which I've decided
is the most degen game on Earth. It's literally the most degen game on Earth. Please burn. I also got to enjoy for my first time ever, the experience of Baccarat,
which I've decided is the most degen game on earth.
It's literally the most, you just flip a coin.
More than craps.
It's flipping coins.
Well, craps is really, there's a style.
You make betting decisions.
All you do in Baccarat is you say think or player,
and then you freak yourself out about how you flip the cards.
And the smartest people I know on earth
are all sitting around this table
at two or three in the morning saying,
turn this corner this way.
No, no, no, no, no, turn it this way.
Turn it this way, there's two dots.
And they're debating the right way to flip a card over.
The boggart sweat is the most incredible performative act
in the casino.
Don't have to.
Yeah, you're right.
Everyone's got their own little technique
about how they bend the cards.
Exactly.
It's all destroyed by the end of the deck.
They get thrown out.
I go lengthwise.
I go like this, and I try to see.
Oh, like you're curling your mustache like an E out of this?
It's the E like this.
And then you call it, oh my God, no spotter.
If you see a no spotter, we're two across.
So great.
And then you get to decide whether the bank turns over
their cards and when they turn them over.
Then you lose a small house and then you're like,
yeah, you're convincing yourself that you have all this
control and ways to change the outcome.
Right, right.
You're literally flipping a card.
It's high card.
It's high card.
That's all it is, it's high card.
It's even worse than that.
You're basically sitting down at the casino's table
and then they tell you whether you've won or lost.
And in order to convince yourself that that's not what's going on, you have to play with the card.
But really, they just tell you, you either win or lose.
Yeah. And I'm watching the smartest guys we know staring at the window at the little
machine that tells you whether bank or player won, and they're studying it,
doing an analysis. It's been four reds. It's gotta go black.
Hellmuth's like, I'm calling it now,
bank, bank, player, player, player.
And all the guys are like, let's do it.
And then everyone gets to you.
Heads, heads, tails, tails, tails.
So Hellmuth asked us to play
in the high stakes poker game on Poker Go.
So it was me, Hellmuth, Stanley, Sammy, House,
and then Jen Tilly and Nick Aireball and Robel. So most of the guys from the house came
plus Jen Tilly and Nick Aireball. Jennifer Tilly is amazing. What a great human.
Listen to this hand. Literally the second hand of the actual poker game. Jen Tilly is in the big blind.
No, sorry, she's under the gun.
She raises, House and Bold three bets.
It comes all the way around to me on the button.
I look and I have pocket Kings.
Oh, even.
I ship the whole cheeseburger, comes back to Tilly.
She ships, House ships, listen to these hands.
Jen Tilly has aces,
Jeff Hausenbold has kings, I have kings.
Oh my God.
I've never seen a cooler hand like this in my life.
All the outs.
And the second, in the second hand of the game anyways.
Wow.
Don't worry guys, I came back and I won.
So Gentilly, basically-
She tripled up.
She triples up and then into lockdown mode.
The first time I ever played with her, I showed up to this game.
Then I stacked her right, anyways, I don't want to reveal the game, but it was wonderful,
this one.
I show up at a mutual friend of ours game and there's a beautiful Porsche or something
in the driveway.
It's a really notable car.
And I noticed on the license plate, it says Degen, but it's spelled with a J. And I'm
like, oh, degenerate.
What a great license plate.
I wonder who's that is.
I go in, it's Jennifer Tilling.
Her license plate is degenerate.
She is so cool.
She's very charming.
Great actress.
She's very cool, very charming.
Great actress.
Shout out to the Chuck E series.
What was that movie she was in?
Bound.
Bound, that's what it was, yeah.
You don't have to ask me twice.
Yeah, exactly.
That is Toward the Force.
What a great gangster film.
Yeah.
With Gina Gershon. I mean. Gina Gershon, great gangster film with Gina Gershon.
I mean-
Gina Gershon, that's the old Gina Gershon.
That film, that film, oh my God.
Well, let's not get canceled here, okay?
It is quite a film.
All right, speaking of action,
big week, the AI industrial complex is dominating.
Our docket here, apologies to Biden, Ukraine, and Nikki Haley, but we got to go AI right now. Open AI, Launch Chat GPT-4.0, 4.0. Monday, three
days after Samwise came on All In as a programming note, and we'll go to Freiburg about this,
we probably made a bit of a strategic or tactical error in not postponing his apparent appearance.
In fairness, Freeberg Samwise did tell us originally he was coming on to talk about
those things, but then it got pushed back. Anything you want to add to that as a programming
note? Because people are wondering what happened. I've been talking with Sam for a while a year
about coming on the show. And every time I see him, we're like, Hey, you should come
on the show. He's like, I want to come on the show.
Okay, let's find a date.
We never got a date that worked.
I saw him in March and he said,
hey, I want to come on the show.
I said, okay, well, come on, let me know when works.
And then a couple of weeks later,
he's like, what about this date in May?
And I'm like, yeah, that's fine.
We can make that work.
He's like, well, I've got a big announcement
we're going to be doing.
And I was like, perfect, come on the show.
That sounds great.
And then the night before he asked me, he told me he texted me, he's like,
Hey, we're actually not going to have this announcement happen tomorrow.
It's going to be delayed.
He didn't tell me how long and I'm like, well, is it chat?
Is it GPT five?
He's like, no, it's not GPT five.
And I was like, OK, well, you know, come on the show anyway,
because he didn't tell me when he's doing the announcement
or when it's being pushed to.
So it didn't seem like that big a deal.
And I thought we were just going to be able to have a good chat anyway.
So it's really unfortunate, I think, the fact that the announcement
happened two days after and he had to stay quiet about it during our interview.
But that's the story.
I think in the future, if someone says they've got a big announcement to do,
we should probably push them if they have to go away or something like that.
But don't beat yourself.
But I don't think we're going to be doing a lot of these interviews anyway.
I think people clearly don't love them and it's better for us to just kind of hang out and talk.
Yeah.
I think if we had just gotten Sam on the day after the launch of Cheap T4 Omni, as opposed to, what was it, three days before,
we could have talked much more freely about it and it would have been interesting.
Yeah. It was supposed to happen same day.
So it's unfortunate this all worked out this way.
The other little trick is to say,
you can tell us under embargo,
but my understanding is they were still doing the videos
over the weekend.
So I think those videos and stuff,
they were still figuring them out.
And so, yeah, lesson learned.
In terms of the interviews on the show,
just to recap for people, we've done a dozen.
Half of them have been presidential candidates.
Sometimes they break out, sometimes they don't.
We follow our interest and our passion here on the pod.
It's got to be interesting for us too.
So if we think this person is going to be interesting,
we do it.
And yeah, we understand you miss a news subject,
but yeah, it is what it is.
And to your point, a lot of the people that come on
and increasingly a lot of people ask to come on
because they know we're not journalists.
And so for all of those folks that expect us
to be journalists, that's not what we are.
We're for entrepreneurs, we're for business people,
we're for friends, we're for technologists,
we're for curious people, we're for poker players,
but we're not for journalists.
And so we're going to ask whatever we feel like asking. Sometimes those things will touch a
chord because it's what you wanted to have asked. And sometimes we won't go to a place
whether we didn't have time to or whether we forgot or whether we chose not to.
And I think it's important to have that disclaimer. Like, we have day jobs and this is what we do
to coalesce a bunch of information
in the way that we're thinking about the world.
So we are not journalists.
So please don't have that expectation.
Right, and I think what that means is
that if the guest doesn't wanna talk about something,
we're not gonna start peppering him with gotcha questions
and things like that.
I appeared at a conference a couple of days ago
to promote Glue, which we'll get to.
And the first half of the conversation
was like a normal conversation about what we were launching.
And then the second half was basically the reporter
peppering me with fastball questions, which is fine.
I knew what I was signing up for.
It's a totally different style.
It's a totally different style than coming on the podcast
and having a normal conversation.
But it's not really our job to make somebody open up
if they don't wanna talk.
What was the spiciest question, Sax?
What was the fastball?
Anything come close to your head?
No, I mean, it's not worth really getting into.
You can watch it if you want.
Yeah, I was just curious.
Look, I kinda like sometimes
when reporters pitch me fastballs
because yeah, you can strike out
or you can hit it out of the park when they do that.
That's an important part here. I think, you know, as a former editor-in-chief journalist myself,
I sometimes like to ask, I would say, a challenging question in a respectful way. I did that,
for example, vague, you know, just clarifying his thoughts on trans and gay rights. Wasn't
disrespectful, was thoughtful. Would you consider it spicy or hardcore? I
don't think it was hardcore. He likes to talk about it.
No, but that's because you asked it from a position of curiosity. You weren't trying
to catch the guy.
No.
You see the difference?
I'm actually interested in his opinion.
No, this is my point. That's why it comes out differently. And that's why I think people
enjoy these conversations. And sometimes we don't get to the other kind of answer because
I'm not interested in trying to gotcha somebody
that's working hard.
I always have the same conditions when I do interviews,
which is I don't clear questions
and I don't let people edit it.
But everybody's got a different view on how to do interviews
and feel la difference.
If you like it, you like it.
If you like Lex Friedman's version or Tim Ferriss' version
or you prefer Fox or CNN, go watch those interviews there.
You can have a whole range of different interviews and interview styles available to you in the
media landscape.
We are but one.
Sam Weiss mentioned on the pod last week that the next big model might not be called GPT-5.
So on Monday, they launched GPT-4-O. The O stands for Omni.
It's everything you love about tech.
It's faster, it's cheaper, it's better.
But from my perspective,
the real show was the massive amount of progress
they made on the UI UX.
The O stands for Omni as in omnivore.
It takes in audio, text, images, even your desktop
and video from your camera to inform what it's doing.
We can consider it like 360 degree AI. Producer Nick will show a couple of
videos while I describe them here before we go to the besties for the reaction to the announcement.
First, they made great progress in solving the CB problem we mentioned last week. That's where like
when you use Siri or any of these tools, you say, you know, Hey, JetGPT, what's two plus two over,
and you have to wait. And then if you talk over each other, it breaks. They now have that
working much smoother. They did an example of counting where
they said speed up slow down, they did a translator that
worked really well. I would like you to function as a
translator. I have a friend here who only speaks Italian, and I
only speak English. And every time you hear English, I want
you to translate it to Italian. And if you hear Italian, I want
you to translate it back to English.
Is that good?
Perfect.
Mike, she wonders if whales could talk, what would they tell us?
They might ask, how do we solve linear equations?
They might ask, how do we solve linear equations?
Certainly, yes.
Certainly, yes.
Great. Looks like it works.
I think Du Lingo stock took a hit during that. Most impressive,
to me at least. And also I had Sandeep Madhra on my other podcast and we talked about it was their desktop and iOS app.
What this app does is fascinating. It watches your desktop on your Macintosh or on your iPad
or iPhone. And it does things like adaptive learning. Here's a clip of Sal Khan from Khan Academy and his son,
basically using a drawing app to do some arithmetic
or geometry.
And it does adaptive learning
and basically makes a personal coach
because the app is watching his son try to solve a problem.
I'm here with my son and I'd love you to tutor him
on this math problem, but don't give him
the answer.
You can ask questions and nudge him in the right direction, but I really want to make
sure he understands it himself.
And he's here in the room, so you can talk to him directly.
Can you first identify which sides of the triangle are the opposite adjacent antipotenuse
relative to angle alpha.
All right. So I'm pretty sure this is the angle alpha right here, right?
Fict. Correct. Now, looking at the triangle, which side do you think is the hypotenuse?
Remember the hypotenuse?
I'm not totally sure. I think it might be this one, but I really am not sure. This side AC?
You're close. Actually, side AC is called the adjacent side to the angle alpha.
The hypotenuse is the longest side of a right triangle and is directly opposite the right angle.
Can you find which one is the hypotenuse?
Oh, okay, I see.
So I think the hypotenuse is this really long side
from A to B.
Would that be correct?
Exactly, well done.
It can also participate in Zoom calls,
explain charts, all that great stuff.
And so it's gonna be your guide on the side.
It's gonna be a present personality
while you're using your apps.
It's really impressive, I have to say.
So I guess let's start, Freeberg,
with your takeaways on all of these innovations that we saw.
I think it's become quite apparent
that there's an evolution underway in model architecture.
And I think you may remember, we talked about this briefly with Sam last week, but we're moving away from these very big,
bulky models that are released every couple of months or quarters and cost a lot of money to rebuild every time they get
re-released towards a system of models.
a system of models. So this multimodal system basically leverages
several models at once that work together
or that are linked together to respond to the inputs
and to provide some generative output
and that those individual models themselves
can be continuously tuned and or continuously updated.
So rather than have, you know,
hey, there's this big new release that just happened,
this new model just got trained,
cost $10 million to train it, it's been pushed.
These models can be upgraded with tuning,
with upgrade features,
and then linked together with other new smaller models
that are perhaps specialized for specific tasks,
like doing mathematics or rendering an image
or rendering a movie.
And so I think what we're gonna see is soon
more of an obfuscation of the individual
models and more of this general service type approach where the updates are happening in
a more continuous fashion.
I think this is the first step of OpenAI taking that architectural approach with GPT-4.0.
And what's behind the curtains, we don't know.
We don't know how many models are there.
We don't know how frequently they're being changed,
whether they're being changed through actually upgrading
the parameters, or whether they're being fine-tuned.
And so this seems to be pretty obvious.
If you look at this link, one of the criticisms
that initially came out when they released GPT-4.0
was that there was some performance degradation.
And Stanford actually runs this massive multitask language
understanding assessment.
And they publish it, I think, daily or pretty frequently
on how all the models perform.
And you can see the scorecard here
that GPT-4.0 actually outperforms GPT-4.
And so this goes counter to some of the narrative
that in order to get some of the performance improvements and speed improvements they got in 4.0, that they actually made the model worse. So it seems actually the opposite is true that the model has gotten slightly better. It still underperforms cloud three. Opus, which you can see here ranks top of these charts, but there's lots of different charts, all the companies published on charts, they all claim that they're better than everyone else. But I like Stanford because it's independent. Chamath, any thoughts after seeing it in combination with our interview? Do you think chat GPT is
running away with the consumer experience? Or do you think this is like neck and neck
with some of the other players?
Not to tell tales out of school, but somebody that we all know in our group chat, hosted
something about the fact that the consumer growth had stalled. I don't know how they knew that. Maybe they got some data or maybe they're
an investor. You guys know what I'm talking about. And they said that they're trying to
reinvigorate growth into the consumer app, into at OpenAI. I mean, I think this is-
Any insights as to why it might be plateauing in your perspective? I wrote this in my annual letter, but there are these phases of growth. And when you look at
social networks as a perfect example, Friendster was magical when it was first created.
And then you had MySpace that just ran circles around them because Friendster didn't really
invest the money and the quality that it took to create a moat.
And then MySpace really wasn't able to compete.
So we were, you know, Facebook,
we were the eighth or ninth when we showed up on the scene
and we ran circles around everybody.
I think what it means is that there are these phases
of product development which exist in many markets.
This market, I think, is going through the same thing. And right now we're in
the first what I would call primordial ooze phase, which is
everybody's kind of like running around like a chicken with
their heads cut off. There's all these core basic capabilities
that are still so magical when you see them. But we all know
that five and 10 years from now, these things will be table
stakes, right. And what Friedberg just showed is a table of many companies and many trillions of market cap, all effectively running to the
same destination. So I think where we are is probably within two years of where the basic
building blocks are standardized. And then I think the real businesses get built. So I will maintain my perspective here,
which is the quote unquote Facebook of AI
has yet to be created.
Okay.
And here it is, ChachiBT web visits,
as you can see have plateaued.
This data is similar web.
I would agree with you Jamath,
it seems like the use cases and the looky-loos
who were just trying the software because they
heard about it, they've gone away and then we have to find actual use cases.
Sax, I'm wondering-
But our friend Jason, just to kind of complete that, said something about the premium conversion,
right?
That's what he said.
I don't know how he knows that.
Yes, paid.
Paid version.
Paid version.
Well, yeah, so to be clear, paid versus free.
And then what Sam said on the podcast last week was it seems like whenever they come
out with something new, the old stuff becomes free.
In my talk with Sunny this week, he mentioned that these new models are so much more efficient
that you actually can throw the old model in the garbage because it's so inefficient.
And these are now becoming about 90% cheaper every year, which means every two years these
things are going to be 90% cheaper every year, which means every two years, these things are gonna be 99% cheaper and better.
Yep. Yep.
And it might be that OpenAI SACS on a strategic level
is going to make all this free or close to free
and maybe just charge for multiplayer version.
That seems to be where it's heading.
You don't have to log in to use 3.5.
You don't have to log in to use Google.5. You don't have to log in to use Google
service. No, you do have to log in still on Google services. But I think these are going
to just be free. So on a product basis, what are your thoughts? And then maybe you could
talk about free to pay? Do you think everybody in the world is going to pay 20, 30, 40 bucks,
500 a year, 200 a year to have one of these? Or are they just going to all be free?
Well, I think you're assuming there that the long-term business model of open AI is in
B2C subscriptions.
I think that's probably the least attractive business model they have available to them.
It's the first one and the most obvious one because they put out ChatGPT and then it's
pretty easy just to roll out a premium version.
In my experience, B2C subscriptions, it's just not a very attractive business model
because consumers just aren't willing to pay a lot
and they have high churn rates
and there's no possibility of expansion really.
So I suspect they're gonna move
in more of a B2B direction over time
because that's where the real money is.
And probably the way they do that is by monetizing
all the apps that are built on top of it.
And I think that in that sense,
GPT-4.o is a really important
innovation
By the way, the the O stands for omni, which I think stands for omni channel
I think you may have said omnivore. Well, I'm gonna tell me yes. It's on me
Yeah, which means all the different media types are current currently
Coming in right like there. That's the difference. It's not like you just give it an image or give it a video.
It's absorbing all those at the same time in parallel,
I believe.
That's right.
So there's three big innovations with this model, right?
So one is omni-channel,
which means text, audio, video, and images.
Second, it's more conversational.
Like it understands the tone of people talking
and understands sort of sentiment in a way it didn't before.
And then the third thing, which is really important,
is that it's just much faster and more performant
than the previous version, GPT-4 Turbo.
In the speed test, they say it's twice as fast.
We've played with it at glue.
We can talk about that in a minute,
and it feels 10 times as fast.
It is much faster.
But it's the combination of all three of these things
that really makes some magical experiences
possible. Because when you increase the speed of
processing, you can now actually have conversations within a
much more natural way before it was the the models were just too
slow. So there'd be a long delay after every prompt. Yeah. So
now, like you showed, it can do things like you point the camera at
a blackboard or something with math equations on it, and it can walk you through how to
solve that problem. Or two people can be talking and it does real-time translation. There's
that old saying that every Star Trek technology eventually becomes true. They've just basically
invented the whole natural language, real time, universal translator.
So anyway, those are some interesting use cases.
But I just think they're going to be able to unleash a whole lot of new applications.
And if they're metering the usage of the models and providing the best dev tools, I think
there is a business model there.
And this thing is moving so fast.
They're in Leonardo DiCaprio mode.
Every two years, they throw the old model away.
Okay. Let's keep. Thank you. Sax.
Did you write that ahead of time?
One point on that is there are a whole bunch of startups out there that were creating virtual customer support agents.
And they've been spending the last couple of years working on trying to make those agents more conversational, quicker, more responsive.
I think their product roadmaps just became obsolete.
Now that's not to say there isn't more work for them to do in workflow in terms of integrating the AI with customer
support tools and doing that last mile of customizing the model for the vertical specific
problems of customer support. But my guess is that hundreds of millions of dollars of
R&D just went out the window. And probably this is the best time to be creating a customer
support agent company.
If you're doing it two years ago, five years ago, your work has just been obsolete.
Well, I mean, that is the thing about this pace.
You used to have to throw away client server stuff or whatever.
You had a web-based thing.
You get an app out.
You throw away some of the old code.
But this is like every 18 months, your work has been replaced.
If you're an app developer, the key thing to understand is
where does model innovation end and your innovation begin?
Because if you get that wrong,
you'll end up doing a bunch of stuff
that the model will just obsolete in a few months.
I think you're totally right.
I think that's such a really important observation.
That's why I think the incentive for these folks
is going to be to push this stuff into the open source.
Because if you solve a problem that's operationally necessary for your business,
but it isn't the core part of your business, what incentive do you have to really keep investing
in this for the next five and 10 years to improve it? You're much better off. Like Klarna, for example,
we talked about the amazing improvement and savings that Klarna had by improving customer support,
release it in the open source guys, let the rest of the community take it over so that it's
available to everybody else. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck supporting it. And then if and
when you ever wanted to switch out a model, you know, GPT-4.0, 4 to 4.0 to Claude to Llama,
it's going to be near impossible and it's going to be costly.
So I also think, Sachs, the incentive to just push towards open source in this market, if you will,
is so much more meaningful than any other market. Yeah. I mean, listen, you were there when I think
you were there at Facebook when they did the open compute project and they just were like,
sorry, talk about torching an entire market.
Explain what it is. So there was this moment where when you were trying to build data centers,
you'd have these like one you rack mounted kind of like machines that you use. And what Facebook
observed was there was only a handful of companies that provided it. And so it was unnecessarily
expensive. And so Facebook just designed their own and then released the specs
online, just kind of said, here it is. And they went to these
Taiwanese manufacturers and other folks and said, please
make these for your cost plus a few bucks. And it was
revolutionary in that market, because it allowed this open
platform to sort of embrace this very critical element that
everybody needs.
And I think there's going to be a lot of these examples inside of AI because the costs are
so extreme, so much more than just building a data center for a traditional web app, that
the incentives to do it are just so, so meaningful.
Yeah.
And I just showed it on the screen.
Sax, you've actually been dancing along this line.
Last night I was using your new Slack killer or code just around. I'm not sure. It feels like a Slack killer to me
because I'm moving my company to it on over the weekend. We're moving to glue and you and I were
doing some very, I think I may need to wet my beak on this one. We want you to wet your beak.
It feels like a hundred bagger to me. I'm in. It is a slide in. It is slide killer. That's the way we're thinking about it.
It feels killer-esque because-
J. Cal, can you do that again
in Christopher Walken voice, please?
I need to wet my beak.
It feels like a hundred X.
Slide in 500.
Wow.
Sax, tell me about product decisions.
Where does the AI end?
And your product begin.
Yeah.
Well, it's a good point.
I mean, I think where the AI ends, we want to use the most powerful
AI models possible and we want to focus on enterprise chat.
So you could think of us as for sure a Slack killer, Slack competitor.
It says that Slack wasn't built for the AI era.
Glue is AI native.
What does that mean? No channels. You know, I showed this to Chamath the first thing he Glue is AI native, what does that mean?
No channels.
You know, I showed this to Tomas the first thing he said
is you had me at no channels, right?
People are so sick of channels,
you have to keep up with all these hundreds
and hundreds of channels.
And the real problem with channels is,
there's one thread in a channel that you wanna see.
In order to see it, you have to join the whole channel
and now you're getting all this noise.
People just want the threads.
So if you look at what's the chat model
inside of ChatGPT, it's just threads, right?
You create a topic-based thread in ChatGPT,
the AI comes up with a name for it,
puts it in the sidebar, and then if you want to talk
about something else, you create a new chat.
That's exactly the way that Glue works,
it's just multiplayer.
You just put the groups and individuals you want
on the thread, let me just show you real quick. Here's my glue here and you can see that in the
sidebar I've got all the threads that I've been involved in. Like I said, you
can address them to multiple people or groups and then you've got the chat here.
Now we've also fully integrated AI and so Nick, who's our producer, just in this
thread, said at glue AI what countries does does Saks talk about most in episodes?
Episodes is a group we created to be the repository
of all of the transcripts of our episodes.
And so Glue did a search and it said,
David Saks frequently discusses Ukraine the most.
Yeah.
So then Nick said, be more specific about Saks' stance on Ukraine-Russia war.
Oh, boy.
It's going to overload the server.
Well it said here, David Sachs has articulated a nuance and critical perspective on the Ukraine-Russia
war across various episodes of the All In Pod.
Here are some key points encapsulating his stance.
And it like nailed it.
It's talked about prevention through diplomacy, opposition to NATO expansion, humanitarian
concerns, skepticism of military
intervention, peace deal proposal.
I'll copy and paste this onto TwitterX later today.
The point is it nailed it across all these different episodes and then this is a feature
of glue.
It provided sources.
It cites where it got all the information from.
Imagine, we're doing this for the all-in pod,
but you could imagine that instead of it being transcripts of a podcast, it could be your work
documents. You now have in your main chat the ability just to ask, hey, at Glue AI, remind me
where we left that project or tell me who the expert is on this subject matter or who's contributed
the most to this project. I've actually figured out using Glue AI
who's contributed the most deal flow at Kraft.
It's pretty amazing.
Now let me show you some of the-
Uh-oh. What's the answer?
What's the answer?
What? Yeah, what's the answer?
I'm not gonna say here.
I think it's Brian.
Okay, now. Brian's my guy.
Those two guys?
Brian is my guy.
I wanna hire Brian. No, no, no, no, no.
If I gotta get Sax, I go Daniel and Brian.
Boom, boom, boom. No, I wanna go-
That's how I get Sax on the line.
Okay, you take Daniel, I'll hire Brian.
I would even reconstitute craft.
We'll call it craft. Absolutely.
All right, look, let me show you a couple.
Hold on a second.
Saks, I just looked at the chat GPT-4 Omni server,
and when you did that query, it actually rolled its eyes.
Keep going.
Okay. Hey, Ol. server and when you did that query it actually rolled its eyes keep going okay hey so so we talked about how chatgbt4o understands sentiment in
conversations and I think this is a really good example so Evan who's my
co-founder at glue was just testing this for us and he asked what is each besties
personality type based on conversations and episodes and first of all it
figured out who the besties are. Like we didn't program that.
It just figured it out on its own, which is pretty impressive.
And here's what it said about each bestie's personality.
So it says Jason Calcantes' role,
the moderator and entertainer, personality traits,
charismatic, humorous, lively, and the glue of the group.
Say more.
Often praised for his ability to make the podcast entertaining
and keep the conversation flowing. Jason's energy and ability to bring humor into discussions are key elements that his ability to make the podcast entertaining and keep the conversation flowing.
Jason's energy and ability to bring humor into discussions are key elements that define
his role in the podcast.
Comments he's acknowledged for his role in bringing the group together.
Chamath Palihapitiya, the visionary and hustler, personality traits, insightful, driven, persistent.
Chamath's relentless drive and ability to hustle are admired by his peers, making him
a core part of the podcast and lecture discussions.
I'll skip me, but does Freberg, the pragmatic scientist
and realist, pragmatic, methodical, and a bit reserved?
Oh.
Freberg's often the voice of reason,
bringing a scientific and realistic perspective
to the discussion.
He focuses on analysis, logical reasoning.
And then it cites where it got this from.
And it says here, overall, the dynamic between the four besties
creates a well-rounded and engaging podcast
with each member bringing their unique strengths and personality traits to the table.
I think that's pretty incredible.
How woke is this?
Have you put any rails on or is this just pure chat GPT-4.0 combined with the data?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what we're doing here is we're wrapping chat GPT-4.0 with Glue features that we've implemented to get the most out
of the conversation.
There's things we have to do to scope the prompt.
And then we're using a retrieval augmented generation service called Raggy, which does
rag as a service that basically slurps in our transcripts and makes them accessible
to the AI.
So that's basically the stack that we're using.
But as the models get better and better, glue just gets better and better. Again,
can I just make a comment on this? It's just so clean. Jcal was the key for me in abandoning
Slack. He told me two or three years ago, he called me and he said, I have, you can tell me
the exact channels. I eliminated some channels that were random.
There was like two or three channels that you have the random channel.
Your Slack instance wasn't allowed to have.
And I was like, this is genius.
And I went in and I was like, all of our companies should just eliminate these channels.
And we could only get like 20% or 30% compliance, but it really started to turn me off Slack
because I would get caught in these threads that were just so totally useless. And I thought, why aren't people
working? And this is really great because you cannot blather on about nonsense and glue,
which I find really useful.
Well, this is what happens when Slack in...
We use it at 80, 90, just so you know. So we were the...
When you get into Slack too much, people start to think slack is the job
And replying to slacks and having conversations is the job when there's actually a job to be done
There's a job to be done. Yeah, and so it's important and what I liked about this implementation facts was it's like the ability to make
a feed
or a data source
inside of your communication platform
So the fact that you imported all of the episodes
and the transcripts is great,
but what I want is like our HubSpot or our cell CRM.
I want our Zendesk.
I want our LinkedIn jobs and our LinkedIn job applications.
I want our Notion.
I want our Coda to each have the ability.
And when I was using it last night,
what you do is you use the at symbol to evoke
and to summon in a way. It's like summoning beetle juice. So you summon your AI, but then you tell it
what data set you want to go after. So you say, you know, at AI, let's talk about, I don't know,
how do you manage your deal flow at craft? Do you use software like CRM software to manage deals?
Brian, Daniel.
We just do it all in Glue.
But we do it all in Glue, so it's already right there.
But you're right.
So the first thing that Glue AI has access to is all of your chat history, which is amazing
because you get like, you know, that we can look at all your attachments and we've got,
I think, six integrations at launch, there'll be more.
So yeah, like all of your enterprise data will be there.
In the short term, you're right,
you have to summon the repository by app mentioning
because the AI needs a little bit of help of where to look.
But in the future, it's gonna figure it out on its own.
So it's just gonna become more and more seamless.
It'll insert itself.
So we have a discussion about sales
and then you might have a sales bot that says,
hey, by the way, nobody's called this client in three months.
Well, that's where I wanna go with it is I call that promptless, which is I want the
AI just to chime in when it determines that it has relevant information and can help the
team even if it hasn't been summoned yet. But we need some model improvement for that,
frankly. I mean, we'll be able to get there by GPT-5, but that's totally where this is
headed. I'll show you just one more fun example. If I could, let me just show you this.
So I asked it to write a letter to Lena Kahn
to be a guest at the All In Summit.
And I told it, mention positive things we've said
about Lena Kahn in episodes of the All In Pod.
And so it wrote this letter, dear Chair Kahn,
we hope this message finds you well.
On behalf of the host, the All In Pod,
we are excited to send an invitation for you to speak
at the upcoming All In Summit.
And then it says, in our conversations,
we have frequently highlighted your impressive credentials
and the impactful work you've undertaken.
For example, in episode 36,
we acknowledge your trailblazing role.
And so the letter was able to quote
episodes of the All In Pod, just without anyone having to go do that research
and figure out what would be the best.
Because I told it, only say positive things.
Don't say anything negative.
And then it said warm regards, and it
said who the four besties were.
Again, we never told it who the besties are.
We just said, write us a letter.
So it's pretty incredible.
Now, this is an example with the all in pod. Think
about any work context where the AI has access to your previous work documents. It's pretty
amazing what it can do.
Well, I mean, it is kind of in the name, like this is glue, put you together and Slack is
where you slack off. Makes total sense. The brands give you a little bit of a tip, but
we should have seen it coming with Slack.
Totally. We have a breaking news story.
It's a breaking news story.
It's an all in exclusive today on the program.
I got breaking news coming in.
Friedberg, your life's work.
Sax did his product review.
Now it's your turn, Friedberg.
We got breaking news coming in.
I did promise you that when Ohalo decides to come out of stealth and explains what we've done and what we're doing,
I would do it here on the All In pod first before the...
And All In Exclusive.
All In Exclusive. So basically, by the time this pod airs, we're going to be announcing
what Ohalo's been developing for the past five years
and has had an incredible breakthrough in, which is basically a new technology in agriculture.
And we call it boosted breeding. I'm going to take a couple of minutes just to talk through what we discovered
or invented at Ohalo and why it's important and the kind of significant implications for it.
But basically five years ago, we had this theory that we could change how plants
reproduce and in doing so we would be able to allow plants to pass a hundred
percent of their genes to their offspring rather than just half their
genes to their offspring.
And if we could do that, then all the genes from the mother and all the genes from the father
would combine in the offspring, rather than just half the genes
from the mother and half the genes from the father. And this
would radically transform crop yield, and improve the health
and the size of the plants, which could have a huge impact
on agriculture, because yield the size of the plants ultimately drives productivity per acre
revenue for farmers, cost of food, calorie production, sustainability, et cetera.
So this image just shows generally how reproduction works.
You've got two parents.
You get a random selection of half of the DNA from the mother and a random
selection of half the DNA from the father.
So you never know which half you're going to get from the mother or which random selection of half the DNA from the father. So you never know which half you're gonna get from the mother
or which half you're gonna get from the father.
That's why when people have kids,
every kid looks different.
And then those two halves come together
and they form the offspring.
So every time a new child is born,
every time a plant has offspring,
you end up with different genetics.
And this is the problem with plant breeding.
Let's say that you have a bunch of genes in one plant that are
disease resistant, a bunch of genes in the other plant that are
drought resistant, and you want to try and get them together.
Today, the way we do that in agriculture is we spend decades
trying to do plant breeding where we try and run all these
different crosses, find the ones that have the good genes, find
the other ones that have the good genes and try and keep
combining them. And it can take forever and it may never happen
that you can get all the good genes together in one plant
to make it both disease resistant and drought resistant.
So what we did is we came up with this theory
that we could actually change the genetics
of the parent plants.
We would apply some proteins to the plants
and those proteins would switch off
the reproductive circuits that caused the plants, and those proteins would switch off the reproductive circuits
that cause the plants to split its genes. And as a result, the parent plants give 100%
of their DNA to their offspring. So the offspring have doubled the DNA of either parent. You
get all the genes from the mother, all the genes from the father. And finally, after
years of toiling away and trying to get this thing to work
and all these experiments and all these approaches, we finally got it to work. And we started
collecting data on it. And the data is ridiculous. Like the yield on some of these plants goes
up by 50 to 100% or more. Just to give you a sense, like in the corn seed industry, breeders
that are breeding corn are spending $3 billion a year on breeding,
and they're getting maybe one and a half percent yield gain per year. With our system, we are
seeing 50 to 100 percent jump in the size of these plants. It's pretty incredible. Here's an example.
This is a little weed that we make you do experiments with in agriculture called Arabidopsis.
So it's really easy to work with. And you can see that what we have on the top are those two parents,
A and B. And then we applied our boosted technology to them and combined with. And you can see that what we have on the top are those two parents, A and B.
And then we applied our boosted technology to them and combined them. And we ended up with that offspring called boosted A and B.
So you can see that that plant on the right is much bigger.
It's got bigger leaves.
It's healthier looking, et cetera.
Free work, can I ask you a question?
Does that mean that the boosted one has twice the number of chromosomes as A and B?
Exactly right.
So is that like a new species then?
Yeah. So, um, it's how does it survive with twice the number of chromosomes?
Yeah, it's called polyploidy.
So we actually see this happen from time to time in nature.
For example, humans have two sets of chromosomes, right?
So does corn, so do many other species.
Somewhere along the evolutionary history, wheat doubled and then doubled again, and
you end up actually in wheat having six sets of chromosomes.
Wheat is what's called a hexaploid.
Potatoes are a tetraploid.
They have four sets of chromosomes.
And strawberries are an octaploid.
They have eight.
And some plants have as many as 24 sets of chromosomes.
So certain plant species have this really weird thing that might happen from time to
time in evolution where they double their DNA naturally. And so what we've effectively done is
just kind of applied a protein to make it happen and bring the correct two plants together when we
make it happen.
And so-
So this could only happen for a plant, right? This could never happen with an animal?
It wouldn't work in animals. It works in plants.
Okay.
And one way you can think about plant genetics is all the genes are tools in a toolbox.
The more tools you give the plant, the more it has available to it to survive in any given
second to deal with drought or hot weather or cold weather, etc.
Every given second, the more tools or the more genes the plant has that are beneficial,
the more likely it is to keep growing and
keep growing. And that plays out over the lifetime of the plant
with bigger, bigger leaves and bigger, you know, grows taller.
But more importantly, if you look at the bottom, the seeds
get bigger. And in most crops, what we're harvesting is the
seed. That's true in, you know, corn and many other crops. And
so seeing over a 40% increase in seed in this little weed was a
really big deal. But then we did it in potato.
And potato is a crazy result.
Potato is the third largest source of calories on earth.
And so we took two potatoes that you see here in the middle, A, B, and C, D. We applied
our boosted technology to it, to each of them, and put them together.
And you end up with this potato A, B, C, D. That's the boosted potato.
And as you can see, these were all planted on the same date.
And the boosted potato is much bigger than can see, these were all planted on the same date, and the boosted potato is
much bigger than all the other potatoes here, including a market variety that we show on
the far right.
That's what's typically grown in the field.
Now here's what's most important.
When you look under the ground and you harvest the potatoes, you can see that that A B potato
only had 33 grams, C D had nine grams.
So each parent had 33 and nine grams potato, but the boosted offspring had
682 grams of potato. The yield gain was insane. And so you could see this being obviously hugely
beneficial for humanity. You know, potatoes being the third largest source of calories.
Indian potato farmers are growing one acre of potato. In India, they eat potato two meals a day.
potato farmers are growing one acre of potato. In India, they eat potato two meals a day.
In Africa, potato is a food staple.
So around the world, we've had a really tough time
breeding potatoes and improving the yield.
With our system, we've seen incredible yield gains
in potato almost overnight.
And the other key-
But how big are those potatoes?
Those are normal sized potatoes that you see there.
Those are like, you know, table potatoes.
Basically that looks like a russet potato right there.
That's like a normal sized russet. I can tell you, you know, table potatoes. Basically that looks like a russet potato right there. That's like a normal size.
But it started as like a little,
it started as like a little creamer potato basically,
and you blew it up into a russet potato.
Yeah, so the genetics on AB,
you can see they're like little purple,
tiny little purple potatoes.
The genetics on CD are like these little white,
you know, tiny little ball potatoes.
But when you put those two together with Boosted
and you combine all the DNA from AB and all the DNA from CD,
you get this crazy high yielding potato, ABCD,
which by the way is higher yielding
than the market variety that's usually grown
in the field on the far right.
So why not just grow Russet potatoes then?
We are.
And so we're working on doing this with Russet.
We're working on doing this with every major potato line.
Sorry, the improvement you'll see is actually in yield. So it's not the size of the potato, it's the number of potatoes
that are being made. And so you'll see-
Per hectare acre or something like that, like the Dwarf Week projects in the 60s and 70s.
Shemaf, you know how you can tell? Freberg's onto something here. You got David Sachs to pay
attention during it. This is going to be a deca-cord and Sax is awake.
Sax is like, how do I wet my beak?
Sax is interrogating the potato lines.
I've never heard of it.
What's going on?
I think Janak is interesting.
But so have you tried these potatoes?
They taste different?
Oh, no, they're awesome.
Yeah, they're potatoes.
And we do a lot of analysis.
Have you ever sprouted any horns yet or anything like that?
No.
I mean, again, one of the other advantages
of the system that we've developed,
let me go back here,
and I just wanna take two seconds on this.
One of the other things this unlocks
is creating actual seed that you can put in the ground
in crops that you can't do that in today.
So potatoes, the third largest source of calories,
but the way we grow potatoes,
you guys remember the movie, The Martian,
you chop up potatoes and you put them back in the ground. Because the seed that comes out of a potato which
grows on the top in the flower, every one of those seed is
genetically different because of what I just showed on this
chart, right, you get half the DNA from the mother half the
DNA from the other. So every seed has two different
genetics. So there's no potato seed industry today. And potato
is like $100 billion market. With our system, not only can we make potatoes higher yielding and
make them disease resistant, what we also make is perfect
seed. So farmers can now plant seed in the ground, which saves
them about 20% of revenue, takes out all the disease risk, and
makes things much more affordable and easier to manage
for farmers. So it creates entirely new seed industries. So
we're going to be applying this boosted technology that we've
discovered across nearly every major crop worldwide. It'll
both increase yield, but it will also have a massive impact on
the ability to actually deliver seed and help farmers and make
food prices lower. Is it more expensive?
No, it's actually cheaper. So
lower cost. Do you need more water?
Less water, less land, less energy.
Do you need more fertilizer?
Fertilizer usually scales with biomass, but these sorts of systems should be more efficient.
So fertilizer use per pound produced should go down significantly as we get to commercial
trials with all this stuff.
And we're doing this across many crops.
So there's a lot of work to do in terms of like,
how do you scale the production in the field?
Tell us about the patents
and how important patents play a role in this
because isn't it like one of Monsanto's big things,
like they just go and sue everybody into the ground
or whatever, like.
I'm gonna answer you one second.
I'm just gonna switch my headset, it just died.
Wow, we went from Saks's bots to Freeberg's crops.
I'm glad we're doing him second
because all of a sudden,
group chat doesn't seem very important.
Yeah, wow.
He just solved the whole Ukraine crisis here.
I wouldn't be able to grow wheat in the desert
and in the rainforest.
He solved the world food problem.
Yeah, Sax, what did you do for the last six months?
Yeah, we made Enterprise Chat a little better, but.
Yeah, we added AI to Enterprise Chat.
We cleaned up your slack.
So yeah, when you invest, we've invested a ton of money.
This was stealth for five years.
We put a ton of money into this business.
So when you invest like,
I mean north of 50. 50, a hundred?
North of 50, yeah. 50 million, five years, and mean north of 50, north north of 50. Yeah.
50 million, five years and you don't have a product in market yet. Wow.
That's some deep tech. We actually have some product. Yeah.
So I haven't talked about the way we've been making money in some of the
business we've been doing. Okay.
Let me just make sure this is like clear.
So that last photo you showed with the different types of potatoes,
you had created the super huge ones,
but you're saying that the the
yield benefit here is just you create a much bigger heartier plant that's capable of producing
many more potatoes.
Yeah, the size of potatoes doesn't change.
You can control for that when you breed.
So the selection of what plants you put together in the boosted system allows you to decide
you want small, medium, large.
That's all part of the design of which plants do you want to combine?
Okay, because your goal is not to turn like a russet potato into like a watermelon or something like that. want small, medium, large, that's all part of the design of which plants do you want to combine.
Okay, because your goal is not to turn like a russet potato into like a watermelon or
something like that.
No, no, the goal is to make more russet potato per acre so that we use less water, we use
less land, farmers can make more money, people pay less for food.
That's the goal.
And so it's all about yield.
It's not about changing the characteristics.
There are some crops where you want to change the characteristics, like you might want to
make bigger corn kernels and bigger cobs on the corn, which is another
thing that we've done. And that's actually been published in our patent. And the reason,
by the way, I'm talking about all this is some of our patents started to get published
last week. And so when that came out, the word started to get out. And that's why we
decided to get public with what we've done, because it's now coming out in the open. Howard Bauchner You mentioned something briefly there about
where different crops can be planted. You know, we had these big talks about wheat and corn.
They're only available in very specific parts, you know, north of the equator, the campy and
jungles campy and obviously polar or desert extremes. So if you're successful, what would this do for
on a global basis where these crops are made? Because remember this whole discussion about
Ukraine, the wheat belly of Europe, the cradle of wheat.
Yeah.
It's a great question. I'm so glad you asked it because that's one of the key drivers for
the business is that we can now make crops adapted to all sorts of new environments
that you otherwise can't grow food.
Today there's close to somewhere between 800 million and a billion people that are malnourished.
That means they are living on less than 1200 calories a day for more than a year.
But on average, we're producing 3500 calories per person worldwide in our ag systems.
The problem is we just can't grow crops where we need them.
And so by being able to do this sort of system
where we can take crops that are very drought resistant
or can grow in sandy soil or very hot weather
and adapt cooler climate crops to those regions
but through the system, we can actually
move significantly where things are grown
and improve food access in regions of-
How, Freebird, when you look at a potato,
how do you figure out what part of their DNA
is the drought resistant part?
Yeah.
And then how do you make sure that that's turned on?
So even if you inherit that chromosome,
is there some potential interaction with the-
Generally, if we can, so these are what are called markers,
genetic markers, and so there are known markers
associated with known phenotypes. A phenotype is
a physical trait of a plant. And so we know lots of markers for every crop that we grow,
markers for disease resistance, drought resistance, markers for big plants, short plants,
etc. And so what we do is we look at the genetics of different plants that we might want to combine
into the boosted system. And we say these ones have these markers these ones have these markers
Let's put them together and then that that'll drive the results one of the other interesting things we're seeing which I didn't get too
much into in the slides
It's not just about combining traits, but it turns out when you add more genes together
Biology figures out a way to create gene networks
These are all these genes that interact with each other in ways that are not super well
understood, but it makes the organism healthier and bigger and live longer.
This is like when you bring like why mutts are healthier and live longer than purebred
dogs because they have more genetic diversity.
So there's a lot of work now in what's called quantitative genomics, where you actually look
at the statistics across all the genes, you use a model, and the model predicts which two crosses
you want to make out of hundreds of thousands or millions of potential crosses that the AI
predicts. Here's the two best ones to cross because you'll get this growth or this healthiness.
So how do you want to make money, Friedberg? Are you going to sell the seeds?
Are you going to become the direct farmer?
Are you going to become food as a service?
How do you make the most money from this?
We're not going to farm.
Farmers are our customers.
And so there are different ways to partner
with people in the industry who already have seed businesses
or already have genetics and help them improve
the quality of their business.
And then there's other industries like in potato where we're building our own business of making potato seed, for example.
So every crop and every region is actually quite different.
So it becomes a pretty complicated business to scale.
We're in the earlier days. We're already revenue generating.
I would like a sweeter blueberry. No comment, no comment.
I get tilted by the quality of the Driscoll's blueberries.
Let me tell you something about the Driscoll's blueberries.
Also the Driscoll, I've had only one batch
of a Driscoll's strawberry that was just off the charts.
And every 19,847 other batches I bought
have been total sh**.
Now you want the European small ones
or the Japanese ones from
Hokkaido because they're rich and sweet and they're not these
like monstrosity of giant flavorless strawberries. What's
that about? Seedless? Could you do a seedless mango? Yes, don't
cut it.
So you can just cut it. Oh my god, how great would that be?
Spoon it out.
Work for a bite on a mango is like the worst ratio.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Well.
Somehow we made it about us.
Yeah, no, no, look, I think that's,
it is all about you guys.
Tell us about the blueberries, sorry.
Well, no, every year Driscoll's puts out a special
labeled package called sweetest batch.
And they just had the sweetest batch of strawberry
and blueberries.
I don't know if they're still in the stores,
but they only last for like a week or two.
And that's the best genetics only grown on a small
number of acres. Really incredible going as soon as this
is there. See if they have it. So I got it a few weeks ago. It's
quite delicious. Anyway, we know let's just say we know the
berry market very well. My co founder, CTO, Judd Ward, whose
whose brilliant idea boosted breeding was many years ago, who I met because they had a New Yorker article on Judd,
I cold called him and said,
hey, will you come in and give us a tech talk?
We started talking and Judd came up with this idea
for boosted breeding.
And so we started the business with Judd
and Judd ran molecular breeding at Driscoll.
So we have a lot of Driscoll's people that work at Ohalo.
We know the market really well.
Can you go back to the patent stuff?
Like are you, will some seed person- So we've spent 50 million well. Can you go back to the patent stuff? Oh yeah, sorry, that was the question. Will some seed person sue you?
We've spent 50 million bucks plus on this business to date.
We have filed for IP protection so that people can't just rip us off.
But I would say, I think that the real advantage for the business arises from what we call
trade secrets, which is not just about taking patents and going out and suing people.
That's not a great business.
The business is how do you build a moat,
and then how do you extend that moat?
The great thing about plant breeding and genetics
is that once you make an amazing variety,
the next year the variety gets better,
and the next year the variety gets better.
And so it's hard for anyone to catch up.
That's why seed companies generally
get monopolies in the markets,
because farmers will keep buying that seed every
year provided it delivers the best genetics. And so our business model is really predicated on how
do we build advantages and moats and then keep extending them rather than try to leverage IP.
So I'm a big fan of like building business model advantages. This is going to be a credible,
Sachs. If you think about, you know, geopolitically what's going on in Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, those places
have tens of millions of people, I think hundreds of millions collectively, who are at risk for
starvation. If you could actually make crops that could be farmed there, Friedberg, you would change
humanity. And then all these people buying up farmland in America, that could devalue that farmland
if that wasn't as limited of a resource. You have, Freeberg?
No, I think, so first of all,
farmland in America is mostly family owned.
It's 60% rented, actually.
So a lot of families own it,
and then they rent it out because they stopped farming it.
But the great thing that we've seen in agriculture
historically is that the more calories we produce,
the more food we produce,
the more there seems to
be a market. It's like any other economic system. What about wheat and rice? Yeah. So those are
calorie sources one and two. And there's certainly opportunity for us to apply our
boosted systems there. The big breakthrough with potatoes, we can make potato seed using
our boosted system in addition to making better potatoes. McDonald's is the largest buyer of potatoes, yeah?
So in the US, 60% of the potatoes
go to French fries and potato chips.
McDonald's buys most of the fries.
PepsiCo under Frito-Lay buys most of the potato chip
potatoes.
40% are table potatoes.
In India, 95% of the potatoes are table potatoes.
They're eaten at home.
And the Indian potato market's three to four times as big as the US potato market. In Brazil, it's 90% table potatoes. They're eaten at home. And the Indian potato market's three to four times
as big as the U.S. potato market.
In Brazil, it's 90% table potato.
So all around the world, potatoes are different.
The U.S. is, you know,
unusually large consumers of French fries and potato chips.
I speak on behalf of J. Cal and I said,
we will gladly invest a million at a 10 cap
in both of your businesses.
Absolutely, yes.
We will break our way into this.
J Cal and I will do the deal.
We will wire the money.
We'll wire the money, a little million
to each of you guys at a 10 cap, thank you.
Absolutely.
You're in, it may not be a 10 cap though, but yes.
Breaking news, Chamath and J Cal have secured the bag.
So breaking news, Chamath and J Cal have secured the bag
from the besties actually
doing work.
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you guys letting me talk about it today.
Yeah, congratulations.
I'm excited to share it.
I'm excited to share it with both of you. I love it.
It's been a, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Building stuff is hard.
So great, guys.
There's always risk. It's a lot of work and a lot of setbacks, but man, when you get stuff
working, it's great.
We're each doing the things we do best. Freeberg is solving
the world's hunger problem and I'm making, I'm cleaning up your
Slack.
Making your enterprise chat a little better.
All right. Stanley Druckenmiller has got a new boyfriend.
Druckenmiller's got a boyfriend and his name is Javier and they
've eloped to Argentina. Druckenmiller's got a boyfriend and his name is Javier and they've eloped to Argentina. Druckenmiller professed his love
Tom Cruise on Oprah's couch. In a CNBC interview this week, the
only free market quote, leader in the world right now bizarrely
is in Argentina of all places. He cut social security 35% if he
came to office, they've gone from a primary deficit of like
four or 5% to a 3% surplus, they've taken a
massive hit in GDP, basically a depression for a quarter. And
his approval rating has not gone down. truck and Miller has
explained how he invested in Argentina after seeing malaise
speech at Davos, which we covered here's a 30 second
clip play the clip Nick,
by the way, do you want to hear how I invest in Argentina?
It's a funny story.
I wasn't at Davos, but I saw the speech in Davos
and it was about one o'clock in the afternoon in my office.
I dialed up perplexity and I said,
give me the five most liquid ADRs in Argentina.
It gave me enough of a description
that I followed the old Soros rule, invest and then
investigate.
I bought all of them.
We did some work on them.
I increased my positions.
So far it's been great, but we'll see.
Yeah, that's quite interesting.
He, quick note, you hear Druckenmiller mentioned ADRs.
For those of you who don't know, and I was one of them, they stand for American Depository
Receipts, basically a global stock offered on a US exchange to simplify things for investors.
Yeah, I mean, he didn't sign a prenup here. He just went all in and he bought the stock
chamath and then he's going to figure it out later. Tell us your thoughts on this love
affair, this bromance.
There's a great clip of Millet. He goes on this talk show in Argentina
and the talk show host, she's just so excited
and greets him and then they start making out.
Have you guys seen this?
What?
They're just so full on.
Guys out of control.
Full on French kissing each other.
It's hilarious.
Yeah, I mean, like Soros has been very famous
for this invest and investigate thing.
It's like a smart strategy for very, very liquid public market investors that have the
curiosity that he does.
I mean, I don't have much of a reaction to that.
I think that the thing with Argentina that's worth taking away is when you've spent decades
casting about and misallocating capital and running your
economy into the ground, the formula for fixing it is exactly the same. You cut
entitlements and you reinvigorate the economy. And so the thing we need to take
away is if we don't get our together, that's probably what we're gonna have to
do.
Sax, the influence of Millay on American politics.
Will there be any, it seems like he has paralleled
what Elon did at Twitter, Facebook,
and Zuck did at Facebook.
Do you think that this experiment he's doing down there
of just cutting staff, cutting departments
will ever make its way into
American politics
Probably not I mean not until we're forced to
But what Malay did he comes in and they've got a huge budget deficit and they've got runaway inflation and they're debasing their currency And just practically overnight he just slashes
government spending to the point where he has a government surplus and
Then as soon as he gets credibility with the markets,
that allows them to reduce interest rates,
inflation goes away,
and people start investing in the country.
Magic.
It's magic.
So there is a path.
It's obvious, listen, I mean,
you can't run deficits forever,
you can't accumulate debt forever,
it's just like a household.
If your spending exceeds your income, eventually,
you got to pay it back or you go broke. And the only reason we haven't gone broke or experienced
hyperinflation is because we're the world's reserve currency. So there's just a lot of
room for debasement. And there's not a ready alternative yet. I mean, everyone's trying
to figure out what the alternative will be. So we've been able to accumulate more and
more debt, but it's reaching a point where it's unsustainable. And what we've already seen is that the feds had to
jack up interest rates from very low, practically nothing to five and a half percent. And that
has a real cost on people's wellbeing because now your cost of getting a mortgage goes way
up. I mean, mortgage rates are over what? Seven and a half percent now.
Yeah. Six, seven percent, depending on how much net worth and your credit rating.
Right. And so it's much harder to get a mortgage now. It's harder to make a car
payment if you need to borrow to buy a car. And if you have personal debt, the
interest rates can be higher. The inflation rate actually doesn't take
into account any of those things. Remember, Larry Summers did that study
where he said the real inflation rate would be 18% or would have peaked at 18% if you include a cost of borrowing. That's
why people don't feel as well off as the unemployment rate would normally suggest. So people are
hit really hard when interest rates go up in terms of big purchases they need to make
with debt. And then of course, it's really bad
for the investment environment
because when interest rates are really high,
that creates a higher hurdle rate
and people don't wanna invest in risk assets.
And so eventually the pace of innovation will go down.
And Druckenmiller made this point
in his next set of comments.
He said that treasury is still acting
like we're in a depression.
It's interesting because I've studied the depression, you had a private sector crippled
with debt basically with no new ideas.
So interventionist policies were called for and were effective.
He said the private sector could not be more different today than it was in the Great Depression.
The balance sheets are fine, they're healthy.
And have you ever seen more innovation ideas that the private sector could take advantage of, like blockchain, like AI? He says, all the government needs
to do is get out of the way and let them innovate. Instead, they spend and spend and spend. And
my new fear now is that spending and the resulting interest rates on the debt that's been created
are going to crowd out some of the innovation that otherwise would have taken place.
I completely endorse Drucker Miller's's view of binomics and actually,
I mean, this is what I said way back in 2021.
Victory lap, here we go.
Little David Sacks victory lap, we need a little graphic for that.
Druckenmiller used the word binomics and said, I give these guys an F because they're still printing money and spending money like we're in a depression,
even though we're in a rip-roaring economy.
And when they started doing this back in 2021, you know,
I tweeted it, bionomics equals pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into a
rip-roaring economy. I'm not gonna pretend like I know what's gonna happen next,
but never tried this before. What happened next was a lot of inflation and
that jacked up interest rates. According to even Keynesian economics, the reason
why you have deficit spending is because you're in a recession or depression. And
so use the government to stimulate and balance things out.
You don't do deficit spending when the economy is already doing well.
So this spending, there's no reason for it.
Yeah, it's like showing up to like a party that's going crazy and being like
putting gasoline on the fire.
Yeah, I mean more importantly it should limit the approval or action of certain programs
that you might otherwise want to do in a normal environment, but in an inflationary environment,
you don't have the flexibility to do them.
Student loan forgiveness is a really good example.
Is now the time?
Of course not.
To do student loan forgiveness, or do we wait for inflation to temper a bit?
Is now the time,
you know, so so there's just a lot of these examples that actually the opposite should
be true.
But none of all of those things get you votes.
Before we move on from this, look, what we have coming out of Washington here is a contradictory
and therefore self defeating policy.
You've got the Fed jacking up rates to control inflation, you move across town, and you've
got Capitol Hill on the White House House spending like there's no tomorrow,
which is inflationary.
Why would you do both those things?
Choose what your policy's gonna be.
It's like driving with your foot on the brake
and the gas at the same time.
It's not a great idea for the car.
Let me just make one comment, J. Cal,
before we move on about the Druckenmiller
investment statement.
Of course.
And I just wanted to say, like,
I think what it highlights about Druckenmiller
and call it a rift in
investing philosophy or skill is the difference between precision and accuracy.
What I mean by that is precision really references that you do a lot of detailed analysis to
try and make sure you understand every specific thing that is going right or could go wrong.
But the problem, and so that means you, for example, might do a ton of diligence on a company
and make sure you understand every dollar, every point
of margin, all the specifics of the maturation of that business
and where they are in their cycle.
But you could be very precise, but be very inaccurate,
for example, if you miss an entire trend.
Someone could invest in Macy's back
when Amazon was taking off and have done a lot of precise analysis on Macy's margin structure and performance and said, this is a great business.
But they missed the bigger trend, which is that e-commerce was going to sweep away Macy's and consumers were simply, that's not possible in the analysis that they were doing.
Let's be honest, Freeberg. Nobody can make that stupid of a trade to say Macy's versus Amazon
over the next 10 years.
Oh yeah.
And so like, and then, and Jake,
Do you want to show that who,
No, no, no, no.
Do not poke the tiger.
Let's not get into it with other podcasters.
The worst spread trade in history.
Yeah, let me just finish the statement.
But the other one is being accurate.
And accurate means you get the right bet,
the right sentiment, the right friend. The problem with being accurate and accurate means you get the right bet, the right sentiment, the right
friend. The problem with being accurate, you could have said in the year 2000, hey, the
internet is going to take off and you could have put a bunch of money in. But the problem
was you were right. You just had to have the necessary patience. And so accuracy generally
yields better returns, but it requires more patience because you
can't necessarily time how long it will take for you to be right.
So a guy like Druckenmiller is making an accurate bet.
He bets correctly on the trend, on where things are headed.
He doesn't necessarily need to be precise, but he has the capital and his capital structure
that allows him to be patient to make sure that he eventually gets the return.
And to build on your thoughts, having watched this movie a couple of times,
and I overthought the Twitter investment as but one example. I had the opportunity to invest in
Twitter when it was like a single digit millions company. I just thought, you know what? This thing
is only like the headline. And I told that like, it's the headline. It's not like the entire
blog post. It'd be a cacophony of idiots. This thing is going to be chaos. And I told them like, it's the headline. It's not like the entire blog posts. It'd be a cacophony of idiots.
This thing is gonna be chaos.
And I was right, but I was wrong, right?
Great bet, but my wrong analysis.
And so you can add precision to other aspects,
like when you sell your shares or when you double down,
but you have to get the trend right,
which is Evan Williams, great entrepreneur,
Jack, great entrepreneur,
Twitter taking off like a weed, just make the bet, right?
And then I think-
No, the problem is you knew too much about journalism.
Yes.
And publishing.
You knew too much about the space they were trying to disrupt, and that can be a mistake.
Correct.
We did PayPal.
None of us knew anything about payments.
That was one of the reasons we were successful.
All the payments experts told us it couldn't be done.
Right.
Absolutely.
So that happens a lot.
I had never even know, I didn't even know what a Facebook was when I joined Facebook.
It's an American college phenomenon. No, seriously, you don't have that in Canada.
But you knew, Zach, and you saw some growth charts and you saw some precision in his ability
to build product. And that's the way to go. I mean, the great thing about network effect
businesses is there's a trend line that sustains because it builds if it's an appropriate network
effect. So you can be accurate about buying
into the right network effect business.
You don't need to use all of this diligence
to be perfectly sound around the maturation
of the revenue and the margin structure and all that stuff
as long as the trend line is right.
And you're willing to be patient to hold your investment.
I think Druckenmiller's point is incredible.
He took a look, he very quickly made a macro assessment. From a macro perspective, what Millet is doing is significantly different than what
we're seeing in any other emerging market, let alone mature market, with respect to fiscal austerity
and appropriateness in this sort of inflationary global inflationary environment. And he said,
you know what, I don't see any other leader doing this. This is a no brainer bet. Let me make the
bet. And as long as he's willing to hold this thing
for long enough, eventually the markets will get there
and call it a spread trade against anything,
he'll be proven right.
Well, so not to, but speaking of bets,
Jay Kyle, you told me this week
that you just made your largest investment ever.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, so I've gotten very lucky now
because a lot of my founders
from the first couple of cohorts
Of investing I did when I was a Sequoia Scout have come back and created second and third companies
and so, you know that happened with TK uber and the cloud kitchens that happened with role from
Reported then superhuman and then it happened recently just in the past year my friend Jonathan who's the co-founder of thumbtack
Asked me to come to dinner and he said,
hey, you know, you were the first investor in Thumbtack.
Will you be the first investor in our next company, Athena?
And I said, sure, what do you do?
And he explained it to me.
And we put a seven figure bet in,
which is rare for us as a seed fund, right?
Normally our bet sizes are 100K, 250, you know,
it's a $50 million fund.
Why did you do it?
Yeah, it's very simple.
It's the fastest growing company I've ever seen. And I'm including Uber in that it has been growing at, you know,
a rate that I'll just say is faster than Uber and Robin Hood when we were investing in the
tens of millions of dollars. It's a very simple concept. When Thumbtack was building their
marketplace, they used researchers in places like Manila,
et cetera, in the Philippines, knowledge workers.
And what they realized was the 0.1% of those knowledge workers were as good or better than,
say, Americans at doing certain jobs.
And so they've created this virtual EA service.
You can go see it at athenawow.com.
And we now have two of them inside of our
company. It turns out Americans don't want to do the operations roles. So it's kind of
like AWS. You just give them $36,000 a year. They give you essentially an operations or
an EA. And they have ones that are kind of chief of staff-ish. And this company is growing
like a weed. So I am working with them on the product design as well.
So imagine having, you know, two or three of these
incredibly hardworking people who are trained
with MBA class level curriculum.
They spend months training these people up.
They pay them two or three times
what they would make at any other company.
And then they pair them with executives here. And it's kind of been an
underground secret in Silicon Valley because it's only by invitation right now because
they can only train so many people. But if you've tried to hire an executive assistant,
I don't know if anybody's tried to do that recently.
You hooked me up, so I will be guinea picking the service soon.
And I have two of them. And so it is just the greatest that you
can have an operations person on board.
Are these people powered by AI tools as well?
Yeah, so that's the kind of secret sauce here
is they're training them and they watch you work.
And then they will learn how you do your job.
And then how quickly you can delegate and get stuff off
your plate is the name of the game.
So we have an investment team with researchers
and analysts in it, we have a due diligence team. And then you
have like executive functions in our fund. They have now started
shadowing, you know, you know, highly paid Americans in an
investment firm ours, and then train them up and now our due
diligence, our first level screening, you know, and our
tracking of companies is being done by these assistants for what I'll say is a third to a fourth of the price
I was paying previously.
So what that does in an organization is we're just delegating away and then moving our investment
team to doing in-person meetings and doing higher level stuff.
And so-
Yeah, you're 80, 90.
So at 80, 90, we have this funny thing where we've made a derrb.
Whenever you see somebody doing high quality work at a quarter to a tenth of the cost,
we say, oh, you just 80, 90'd it.
Correct.
So you're 80, 90'ing the investment team.
I'm 80, 90'ing the investment team. And you know what? It was scary as hell for them because
they're like, am I going to lose my job? It's like, no. You now get to, instead of doing
a check and call once a month, you can do a check and call every other week or every week, or instead of doing 15 first round interviews a week,
you can do 25 because you have this assistant with you doing all the repetitive work.
The way that companies will work in five and 10 years. I don't think guys, any of us are going to
recognize what it's going to look like. This is where I go, I mean, like watching Sachs' demo earlier, how much progress
and how seamless that product works
with the features it has enabled by the underlying models.
You just get to thinking how all of these
vertical software applications become completely personalized
and quickly rebuilt around AI.
Totally, totally.
You know, it's so obvious.
Can you imagine how long it would have taken John
to write a letter to Lena Conn to, like, if we said,
John, invite Lena Conn, but be sure to reference
all the nice things we said about her
on episodes of the pod.
Oh, it'd be 10 hours of work.
You gotta go find the episodes, listen to it.
You gotta listen to them to figure out
what the best quotes are.
And you got it done in five seconds.
It's incredible.
Totally.
And then imagine building that same sort of capability
into a very specific vertical application
that's specific to some business function.
And you can probably spend a couple of minutes
or an hour building that function.
And then it saves you hours a day in perpetuity.
Yeah.
And I think that's why these tools companies
or the tools products that Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
and a few others are building
are actually incredible businesses
because so many enterprises
and so many vertical application builders
are gonna be able to leverage them
to rewrite their entire business functions.
I got myself and my co-founders at 8090,
we get this stream of emails of companies that are like,
or people that are like, we have this product idea,
or we have this small product.
One of the emails I got, this is crazy,
was from a guy that's like, oh, we've 80 90 Photoshop.
So like, we have like a much, much cheaper version
of Photoshop and the guy was doing like a few million bucks
of ARR and growing really nicely.
But then it turned out that somebody saw that
and then 80, 90'd it.
So then there was an open source version of that thing.
And so to your point, Fieberg,
none of these big companies stand a chance.
Yeah.
It's everything is gonna get cheaper and faster.
Not because the products aren't good,
but like Jcal's gonna go off and experiment with this.
SAC's gonna go off and build a product. You know, as every time that you're at a boundary
condition, we're all going to explore, well, maybe we could do this with AI, maybe we shouldn't
hire a person, not because we're trying to be mean about it, but it's because the normal,
natural thing to do. And the opex of companies is just going to go down, which means the
size of companies are going to shrink, which means the amount of money you need is going to go down. And that's just going
to create the ability for these companies to sell those products cheaper. So it's a massive
deflationary tailwind. We had the same thing happen with compute, and now it's happening
inside of organizations. I wrote a blog post about this on my sub stack called ADD. This is
the framework I came up with.
I told my entire team,
look at what you got done every week.
And I want you to ask three questions.
How can I automate this?
How can I deprecate this?
How can I delegate it?
And you know, the automate part is AI
and what you're doing, David.
The delegate part is athenawao.com.
And then the deprecate is,
hey, just be thoughtful.
What are you doing that you don't need to do? And that's 8090 something like there are things inside these products that you don't actually need. What's the core functionality of the product? You know, make it as affordable as possible. And then what's going to happen for people who think this is bad for society, you've got it completely wrong. We're going to have more people be able to create more products and solve more problems. The
unemployment rate is going to stay very low. We're just going to have more companies. So the idea
like there was somebody who was working on very small like software, I want to get pitched on
very niche ideas. I want to create something where people can find people to play pickleball with,
right, like a pickleball marketplace. Now that didn't wouldn't typically work because you would
need $5 million a year to build that product. But if you can build it for $500,000 a year,
well now you've only got to clear that number to be profitable. So a lot more smaller businesses,
a lot more independence, all these little niche ideas will be able to be built. And
a VC who says, I'm not giving you $5 million to build that app will be like, but I will
give you 500 K. And that's what I'm seeing on the ground in startups, the same startups that had a request of $3 million
in funding five years ago are now requesting 500 to a million. It's deflationary all the
way down. Did you guys see the Google thing? Did you guys see the Google Gemini stuff?
Chat GPT Omni launched at the same time or perhaps strategically right before Google
dropped its latest AI announcements at IO.
The biggest announcement is that they are going to change search.
This is the piece of the puzzle in the kingdom that they have been very concerned with and
they're going for it.
The new product and they have like 20 different products.
You can see them at labs.google
where they put all their different products.
But this is the most important one.
They call it AI overviews.
Basically it's perplexity for most users
by the end of the year, they're gonna have this.
Here's how it works.
And you can see it on your screen.
If you're watching us go to YouTube.
Here, they gave an example.
How do you clean a fabric sofa?
This normally would have given you 10 blue links.
Here, it gives you step-by by step guide with citations and links. So they're preempting,
you know, the issue of people getting upset. And as I predicted, they're going to have
targeted ads, here's the things you need in order to clean your couch. You can only use
this if you're using your Gmail account, if you use like a domain name on Google Docs, it won't work there. So go to labs.google. But they're doing citations. And I think that
we're going to see a major lawsuit here. Those people who are in those boxes are going to
look at the answer here and realize maybe they don't get the click through and that
this answer was built on that. And now we're going to have to have a new framework. There's
going to need to be, Sachs, a new company that clears this content so that Google can do answers like this.
The workflow stuff in Gmail also kicked ass. The demo that they showed was you get a bunch of
receipts and the person giving the demo, she said something to the effect of, well,
wouldn't it be great if like, you know, the AI assistant were able to find all the receipts
and then aggregated them and it puts them in a folder and then also actually generated an expense report
or like a spreadsheet on the fly. It's crazy. I got to say, I think that it's free to change
your mind. And so it's good to do that. And I think that Chamath in a rare moment of reflection
might do a, are we going to have a re underwriting?
Is this a re underwriting?
I change my mind all the time. I just, I mean, you know, cause I'm,
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news, Chamath is re underwriting his Google train.
Sorry. I know how to blow your ears out.
I think the Google thing is pretty special between last week's announcement of isomorphic labs,
which let's be honest,
that's just a multi hundred billion dollar company.
So you're saying there might be many-
Think about it this way, right?
Multi billion dollar opportunities sitting there dormant inside of Google that AI unlocks.
Look at a company like Royalty Pharma. So Royalty Pharma, it's a phenomenal business
run by a phenomenal entrepreneur, Pablo Lagareta.
But what is that business? That's buying 2 and 3% royalties of drugs at work. And you can see how
much value that those guys have created, which is essentially 90% EBITDA margin business. It's
outrageous because they're in the business of analyzing and then buying small slivers.
I think something like isomorphic ends up being
of that magnitude of margin scale,
but at an order of magnitude
or two orders of magnitude higher revenue.
So if you fold that back into a Google,
if you think about what they're doing now on the search side,
these guys may be really kicking some ass here.
So I think that the reports of their death were premature and exaggerated.
Absolutely. And the report of their death, Freiburg, was based upon people don't need
to click on the ads. But as I said on this very bogus, my belief is that this is going
to result in more searches and more knowledge engagement because once you get how to cook
your steak and get the right temperature, right, for medium rare,
it's going to anticipate your next three questions better.
So now to say, hey, what wine pairing
would you want with that steak?
Hey, do you need steak knives?
And it's just gonna read your mind
that you need steak knives
and Chamath likes to buy steak knives,
but maybe you like to buy mock meats, whatever it is,
it's gonna drive more research and more clicks.
So while the monetization per search may go down,
we might see many, many more searches.
What do you think, Freiburg?
You worked there.
And when we look at the future of the company
and the stock price, Nick will pull it up,
man, if you had held your stock,
I don't know, did you hold that?
I bought some.
No, your original stock. Did you clear it at stuff. Oh, no, I sold all my stock back
when I started climate because I was a startup entrepreneur and needed to live. So which, you
know, I recently did the math on it. It was pretty, it'd be worth, it'd be worth a lot.
It would be worth billions or tens of billions? No, no.
Would it have been a billion?
No, no.
OK.
You know, I was not like a super,
I was not a senior exec or anything.
I think what you said is probably true.
So that's a creative.
I think the other thing that's probably true
is a big measure at Google on the search page in terms
of search engine performance was the bounce back rate,
meaning someone does a search, they go off to another site and then they come back because
they didn't get the answer they wanted. And then the one box launched, which shows a short answer
on the top, which basically keeps people from having a bad search experience because they get
the result right away. So a key metric is they're going to start to discover which vertical searches, meaning like,
hey, cooking recipes, that kind of stuff like you're referencing. Travel, sports.
There's lots and lots of these different types of searches that will trigger a snippet or a
one box that's powered by Gemini that will provide the user a better experience than
them jumping off to a third party page to get that same content. And then they'll be able to
monetize that content
that they otherwise were not participating
in the monetization of.
So I think the real victim in all this
is that long tail of content on the internet
that probably gets cannibalized
by the snippet one box experience
within the search function.
And then I do think that the revenue per search query
in some of those categories
actually has the potential to go up, not down.
Explain, give me an example.
You keep people on the page, you get more, more search volume.
There you get more searches because of the examples you
gave. And then when people do stay, you now have the ability
to better monetize that particular search query, because
you otherwise would have lost it to the third party content
page.
So for example, selling the steak knives is another, you know, it's kind of a good example
or booking the travel directly and so on.
So by keeping more of the experience integrated, they can monetize the search per query higher
and they're going to have more queries and then they're going to have the quality of the queries go up. So I think it's all in.
There's a case to be made. I haven't done a spreadsheet analysis on this, but I guarantee you, uh, going back to our
earlier point about precision versus accuracy.
My guess is there's a lot of hedge fund type folks doing a lot of this precision type analysis,
trying to break apart search queries by vertical and try to figure out what the net effect
will be of having better AI driven one box and snippets.
And my guess is that's why there's a lot of buying activity
happening in the stock right now.
And I think they're probably all missing,
Chamath's point, a lot of these call options,
like isomorphic labs.
I can tell you Meta and Amazon,
Meta and Amazon do not have an isomorphic lab
and Waymo sitting inside their business
that suddenly pops to a couple hundred billion of market cap.
And Google does have a few of those.
So other bets could actually pay off.
These are long.
Look, I mean, there's Calico.
No one talks about Calico.
I don't know what's going on over there.
Life extension, yeah.
Let me get Sax involved in this discussion, Sax.
When we show that example, it's obvious,
Google is telling you where they got these citations from
and how they built there, how to clean your couch,
how to make your steak. Those Those they were in a very delicate balance
with content creators over the past two decades, which is, hey, we're going to use a little
bit of your content, but we're going to send you traffic. This is going to take away the
need to send traffic to these places. They're going to benefit from it. To me, this is the
mother of all class action lawsuits because they're putting it right up there. Hey, we're using your content to make this answer. Here's the
citations. We didn't get your permission to do this, but we're doing it anyway. What do
you think is the resolution here? Does all of these content go away because there's no
model? Does Google try to make peace with the content creators and cut them in or license
their data? What's going to happen to content creation when somebody like Google is just going to take wire cutter or these other sources that
are not behind a paywall and just give you the goddamn answer?
Well, look, this is the same conversation we've had two or three times where we're going
to need the courts to figure out what fair use is. And depending on what they come up
with, it may be the case that Google has to cut them in by doing licensing
deals.
We don't know the answer to that yet.
By the way, I do know a founder who is already skating to where the puck is going and creating
a rights marketplace so that content owners can license their AI rights to whoever wants
to use them.
I think that could be very interesting.
That's smart.
I had a call with him yesterday and you and I will be on that cap table together once
again.
Okay, good.
Yeah.
So I don't want to say who it is
because it's gonna let him announce his own round,
but I'm only participating in the seed round.
Look, stepping back here, it's interesting.
If you go back to the very beginning of Google,
the OG Google search bar had two buttons on it, right?
Search and I feel lucky.
I feel lucky was just tell me the answer,
just take me to the best result.
And no one ever did that because it kind of sucked.
Then they started inching towards with OneBox,
but it wasn't, you didn't get the OneBox very often.
It's very clear now that Gemini powered OneBox
is the future of Google search.
People just want the answer.
I think that this feature is gonna eat
the rest of Google search.
Now it's a little bit unclear what the financial impact of that will be.
I think like you guys are saying, there'll probably be more searches because search gets
more useful.
There's fewer links to click on, but maybe they'll get compensated through those relevant
ads.
Hard to say.
You're probably right that Google ultimately benefits here, but let's not pretend this was a deliberate strategy
on their point.
They got dragged kicking and screaming into this
by innovation and perplexity and other companies.
They had no idea.
They got caught completely flat-footed.
And they've now, I guess, caught up by copying perplexity.
And sucks for perplexity.
I think they're kind of screwed now, unless they get it.
Yeah, it's over.
And an acquisition deal.
But perplexity came up with the idea
of having citations in your-
Having a comprehensive search result, yeah.
Which was something-
Search result with citations and related questions.
And they did it extremely well.
And quite frankly, all Google had to do was copy them.
Now they've done that.
And I think it does look like a killer product.
And by the way, this was all something
that I saw 15 years ago when I did Mahalo,
which was my human powered search engine,
and which I had copied or been inspired
by Naver and Daum in Korea.
They were the first ones to do this.
You know it, Chamath,
because there were only three or four markets
where Google couldn't displace the number one.
Korea, Russia, Japan, Russia had
was the Russian search engine.
God, I can't remember now.
Japan had Yahoo Japan, which Masayoshi-san had carved out.
It was never part of it and they were loyal to that and very nationalistic Koreans and
very innovative folks at down and Naver just made search.
That was so amazing.
You do a search and you'd be like, here's music, here's images, here's answers, here's and Naver just made search that was so amazing.
You do a search and you'd be like, here's music,
here's images, here's answers, here's Q and A.
It was awesome.
But you know, it just shows you like,
you need to have a lot of wherewithal
and timing is everything as an entrepreneur.
My timing was 10 years too early
and the wrong technology.
I used humans, not AI,
because AI didn't work 15 years ago.
One thing I would say about big companies
like a Google or Microsoft is that the power
of your monopoly determines how many mistakes you get to make.
So think about Microsoft completely missed iPhone.
Remember they screwed up the whole smartphone mobile phone era.
And it didn't matter.
Didn't matter.
Satya comes in blows this thing up to a $3 trillion public company.
Same thing here with Google.
They completely screwed up AI.
They invented the transformer, completely missed LLMs.
Then they had that fiasco where they had-
Black George Washington.
Black George Washington.
Doesn't matter.
They can make 10 mistakes, but their monopoly is so strong that they can finally get it
right by copying the innovator, and they're probably going to become a $5 billion company
now. Sorry, $5 billion company now,
sorry, $5 trillion company.
It reminds me, you know,
the greatest product creation company in history.
I think we all know who that was.
And take a look down memory lane.
Here are the 20 biggest failed Apple products of all time.
The Apple Lisa, Macintosh Portable.
We all remember the Newton, which was their PDA. The 20th anniversary Macintosh portable. We all remember the Newton, which was their PDA,
the 20th anniversary Macintosh super sexy.
People don't remember they had their own video game.
I was at a conference a couple of years ago
that Jeff Bezos spoke at.
I think he's given this talk in a couple other places.
You could probably find it on the internet.
But he talks about Amazon's legacy of failure
and how they had the Fire Phone and the Fire This
and the Fire That.
And he's like, our job is to fail.
Big swings.
We have to make these blunders,
but what makes us successful is that we learn
from the failures and we make the right next decision.
Yeah, but I say if you're a startup
and you make big failures,
you usually just go out of business.
One and done.
Yeah, but this is how you stay competitive.
If you're a big founder-led tech company,
the only way you're going to have a shot at staying relevant
is to take big shots that you're going to fail at.
I just don't know.
The iPod, Hi-Fi, you have to do things that you're going to fail at.
Right.
Remember this boombox?
This is one of the huge different stream startups
and big companies is that big companies can afford to have a portfolio of products, they have
a portfolio of bets, some of them will work and that keeps the
company going. Startup really has to go all in on their best
idea. Totally. I always tell founders just go all in on your
best idea. They're always asked me for permission to pivot. And
I always tell them do go for the best idea. Don't don't hedge.
Don't try to do five things at once. Just go all in on your best idea. Yeah. And if it doesn't work out, you reboot and start with a new cap table.
Go all in.
You're going to go all in.
So to speak, another amazing episode is in the can.
The boys are in a good mood.
You got your great episode.
No guests this week.
Just all bestie all the time.
And very important, the March to a million
continues halfway there.
You got us there, fans.
We hit 500,000 subbies on YouTube,
which means you all learned a live Q&A
with your besties coming at you.
In the next couple of weeks,
we're gonna do it live on YouTube.
So if you're not one of the first 500,
get in there now so you get the alert.
We're gonna take your questions live.
It's going to be dangerous.
Any questions?
No questions are offered.
Who knows what could happen on a live show?
And by the way, I just want to let you know that Phil Hellmuth, breaking news, Phil Hellmuth
and Draymond Green just resigned from OpenAI.
We didn't get into that, but the OpenAI resignations continue.
Phil Hellmuth has tweeted he's no longer with OP&AI.
You guys like my baby cashmere pink sweater?
That's pretty great. Are we going to get summer Chamath soon? Are the buttons coming down?
Are you going to go with linen? When does linen Chamath show up?
The unbuttoning is about to happen in the next two or three weeks.
The great unbuttoning. This is how you know. It's kind of like Groundhog Day. You know
that summer's here when
Buttons almost Memorial Day when after Memorial Day Memorial Day the button can come down. Yeah, we're gonna go three buttons down
my black tee
sax will still be blue blaze or blue shirt red tie and
Freberg in fields of gold look at Freberg and fields ago taking us out staying fields of gold coming Look at Freiburg in fields of gold, taking us out, staying in fields of gold, coming at you two for Tuesday. See you all in the next solid pod for the Sultan of Science.
The Rain Man, David Sachs and Chairman Dictator, IM, the Z100 Morning Zoo DJ. We'll see you next
time. Love you, boys. Bye-bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. We'll let your winners ride.
Rain Man David Sack.
I'm going all in.
And it said we open source it to the fans
and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you, Westies.
The queen of Ken Wives.
I'm going all in.
I'm going all in.
I'm going all in.
I'm going all in.
I'm going all in.
I'm going all in.
Besties are gone.
I'm going all in. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. What your winners want? What your winners want? Besties are back!
This is my dog taking an English in your driveway.
Sex!
Oh man!
My avid Azure will meet me at the end of the road.
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless.
It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
What your the B?
What your the B? What your the B? release. And now the plugs the all in summit is taking place in
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