TBPN: John Coogan on personal agents and advertising

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The best day to get a Christmas tree was ten years ago. The second best day today, no matter when it is. Only ninety one days away. So get ready. Anyway, Meta Connect yesterday. Late. Zuck likes going late. He 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern for the keynote.

He wanted roll straight from the keynote into some beer pong.

Oh, that's true. We will get into that big hot debate on the timeline over his beer pong strategy. But really really tight keynote, very well organized, Very clear. Didn't overstay its welcome. Did three live demos.

Last year, there was a hiccup with a live demo WiFi and I believe Boz triggered everyone's agents by using the wake word. So this time he deliberately stayed away from using that wake word and used like the name of his agent. So he didn't cause a lot of chaos in the in the dome or in the in the studio, wherever they were. But bunch of great announcements, really good pacing, really tight one hour keynote. And it it was it was fun watching Zuck like sort of do the live demos and be like one down. Like, this is high stakes. Like, it was clearly high stakes for him. But he got through it all. No mistakes.

Yeah. He had a funny line. He was like, and we love live demos here.

Yeah. It's funny because like he totally could just not do live demos but he like wants to. No. I

think you need to.

Do you?

I think you absolutely need to. People have bought so many random hardware devices True. Haven't met expectations.

Yeah. And I guess there was that

hardware if you want people to buy it, you have to do a live demo.

Yeah. There was a there was a demo of a Gemini model running like two years ago that was like sped up in post and and and that faced a lot of criticism. And so I think, yeah, just demoing things as they are available in the real world is is very valuable. And I think in general, like, the thesis for the products was, like, meet people where they are, delivering tomorrow's technology with today's constraints. And that's just what I kept seeing as a theme was like, what do people want?

And of course the best it basically created a huge dichotomy between like the the the crazy super intelligence RSI, ASI, PDoom, X Risks crew and then just like Muse, it's a helpful agent. Neeraj Agarwal summed it up well. Anthropic marketing, we built a god only we built a god only we can control and gave it a wet lab. Muse marketing. Hey girl, I know you have dozens of unpaid parking tickets. Let's get that cleaned up. And it's it's funny because it's it's actually working. I think that if you went back to a couple months ago, the the the consensus was like popularity of AI is turning. It's deeply unpopular. You need to just be quiet or not lean in or just like apologize like what a lot of the lab leaders are doing just being like, yeah, is bad.

I'm sorry. But Meta has taken a very different approach. They're not fear mongering. They're just like, it's cute. It's lovable. And and they actually are successful. Mean, The New York Times yesterday Jensen and Ezra are duking it out over like x risk and and acceleration. Do we need to slow down? Meanwhile, the New York Times published like a a really positive review of Muse. They like they love it and like they're a tough cookie to like win over basically. So success there. And it's interesting because it's been there's been a few strikes for Meta over the past two years. The vertical AI Slop app vibes quickly disappeared. I don't even know if it's available anymore. It might have been quietly shuttered or tucked behind a couple different tabs.

The core Meta chat app that was sort of just like a Gemini a Chat Chateappity clone, I don't think that ever really took off.

Over over the last year, you have massive spending. Yeah. Clearly massive focus for Meta. But the strategy was at most times completely incoherent. It was scattered.

It was not legible to the markets. It was not legible to

It was do everything.

Yeah. You had

But nothing was really Muse,

you know, Muse Code. You had them buying and then having to undo the Manus acquisition. Yeah. The meta vibe. The first thing and again, this this was an unforced error.

The first thing that they did post the whole talent raid

Mhmm.

Was release like the short form slop video Yeah. App, which wasn't even

It was mid Yeah.

It was basically a mid journey rapper. Yeah. And we're and everyone was like, okay. Like Yeah. This doesn't align to the to what you're putting out which is this like personal super intelligence Yeah.

Narrative. Yeah. And so really yesterday, like everything felt like it came together really nicely. Right? Tying in all of all of the hardware investments, tying in personal making personal super intelligence feel a bit more real. Right?

Totally.

AI that that hustles for you. I think I think that's smart Yeah. Positioning. But it really felt like things came together for the first time.

Totally.

And I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to give them full credit as like, if you're really gonna give them full credit for like this was the master plan all along. Oh, yeah. Then there's a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't have done unless you were just trying to confuse the market. Yeah. You're trying to just confuse people.

Are we doing coding? Yeah. Are we are we doing, you know, a knowledge work harness? Are we doing short form swap, right?

Yeah.

And and so I think So you're not

giving him the benefit of the four d chess?

No. Okay. No. No. Tricky.

But Going out comes razors.

Total credit comes total

Outcomes four d razors.

Total credit to them for like figuring out how all the pieces connect together. Yeah. And then putting that in a one hour presentation Yeah. That actually like makes sense.

So what are the pieces that come together? Why does it make sense for Meta's business? Why are they seeing success here when the models haven't jumped to the frontier? The benchmarks have always been a little there's been a lot of confusion on are they going to sell compute, sell tokens, sell you know, go after the coding market, desktop agents, all these different things that they were testing. This seems to be working.

And I think there's sort of four key points that come together to make this make sense. So first is like they have scaled and secured systems for years. WhatsApp encryption is a great example. They have a lot of compute and so they can offer a VM for millions of people that is secure and also well resourced. And they won't be losing sleep over cost because they already have a lot of the compute built out. And the question was like when will the demand come? Are those GPUs sitting idle? Are those is that infrastructure getting used efficiently? They're building a lot more of it. Do they need to? Well, they got to find a product to actually distribute all that through, and it seems like they have. Two was they have the distribution to continually educate people about features and benefits of Muse through big ad placements across the family of apps. I think that there is the is the world where they've been able to funnel what like half a billion people over to threads. It's not a particularly differentiated app. Obviously, it's different community and it's done well.

But it's a different challenge because with threads, you can just show someone a text post. People know what that looks like. It's more content. They go over their Jobs finished once you show someone. All you need to show is that their community exists over there. They're scrolling Instagram watching basketball highlights and you say, hey, there's some basketball commentary going on in threads. You hop over there. With all the AI agent products, the capabilities change so rapidly that you have to reeducate the consumer on what it's capable of. Like, can it actually deal with parking tickets? Like, if it can, you need to confidently tell someone that. And that capability might change. It might not work one week and then the model updates and then all of a sudden you can do that the next week. And so ChatGPT came out and it was like, it can answer Google searches. It can do your homework. Then it was like, it can write some code.

And there's this constant like reeducation of the community. Obviously the early adopters, the enterprise, the business, the startup community tests everything. But consumers don't. Consumers just they need to be told the new iPhone has an ultra wide camera, the new iPhone has Memoji. Even though Memoji was not a wildly popular feature, Apple told everyone what it was. We know what it is. Everyone sort of knows that concept because they ran billboard campaigns and Meta has the ability to actually go and tell everyone what Muse is capable of and run an ad campaign across the whole platform to get people back up to speed on the latest and greatest feature. The third is that no one needs Wait. Their

It says deal quote deal with parking tickets. Hack me out of it.

Then we are talking. Well, no, no. So the thing is that they are behind on the frontier. They're not dominating all the benchmarks but it actually doesn't matter because no one needs their personal AI agent to solve a Millennium Prize math problem or secure their enterprise infrastructure from cyberattacks. Like that's not a requirement.

The model is definitely good enough for a lot of this. They obviously will increase the model and the capabilities, but it's not what consumers worry about. Consumers don't care about benchmarks. They don't understand them. The benchmarks are often hacked or not indicative of the feel of using a model. And so it leans into the capabilities. They have near fear, near frontier intelligence. They have good enough intelligence. And so if it's good enough to do this, you just roll out the capability and the harness is what matters. The integration, the distribution, that's what matters. So they they did they actually didn't launch watermelon. They've been teasing that for a while. There's been some leaks. It totally could have happened here. But they made the decision to either not rush it because maybe it does just need more time.

But also even if it was ready, I don't think they should have launched it here because Meta Connect is not for that audience. They don't care.

Yeah. The watermelon might scare people.

Yeah. Yeah. You probably don't want it to be powerful. Then fourth, they of course already have a business model that's heavily aligned with this type of use case advertising. We've talked about this idea that brands would love to sponsor agentic workflows.

You open up a personal AI agent and it says, hey, you know, the new Nathan Fielder movie is coming out in a couple months. I saw that you were scrolling reels. You seem to be a fan of this. You shared the movie trailer with your friend. Do you want me to get tickets, text some of your friends, share it on WhatsApp, share it in your Instagram DMs and actually make that happen, send a calendar invite, do everything necessary to take care of that. And I think movie studios are just one example of a business that would happily pay for placement for extra attention around that particular workflow that they can monetize through the traditional pathway. And then, of course, like small businesses will buy pixels anywhere. So, you know, if you open it up and there's a full bleed ad Yeah. Like, that's fine. Yeah.

People will pay for that.

So Yeah. The other the other kind of examples that get pretty crazy is your personal agent, for example, knows that you have home insurance that's set to renew in three months.

Mhmm.

And it's like, do you want me to go get three competing bids Yeah. Before we renew? It's like, yes. Right? And that that's like a Yeah.

Opportunity for for some type of paid placement as well.

For sure. So the vibes, not the app, but the actual vibes at Meta internally, how are the employees feeling? I feel like this is a turning point. I feel like if you're at Meta you're like, okay, finally there's a thing to align around. We have a strategy.

As long as I do something that's in in in support of Muse and what's going on with the personal super intelligence mission that the CEO and founder has laid out, I'm good even if I'm on Facebook Marketplace team and I feel like I'm going to get steamrolled because of the Nikita Beer take that everyone's going to be negotiating and low balling on Facebook Marketplace. Well, the Facebook Marketplace team, they can say, okay, well now we're going to build tools for sellers to make that not annoying. And so there's more work to be done and it's more aligned with the overall mission. The vibe should be good. At the same time, The Verge ran a story that said the verbs the vibes are internally way off still at Meta, that people are upset about the scattershot nature of the approach, that they're they're still reeling from like the metaverse misadventures.

But I I feel like that was that was like the last hit piece you could write about Meta. And I think things It's

hard to feeling that bad when the stock's up 38% Yeah. In the last month.

Yeah. And so I think I think it's pretty pretty easy to align all the efforts across what's happening personal super intelligence. And even if you were on like the glasses team, there's a whole narrative of like, well you were trying to build VR, you came, you were in the division that was building the cool Oculus stuff. It's evolved and now it's kind of just a GoPro on your face. There's been some negative, oh these are just for, you know, people to spy on each other blah blah blah.

But now they even have a version without cameras and it's very aligned to what the users want. And so the top line hero initiative even if you're like just on the glasses team and you're like, oh, like building the data center and that's not really anything to do with me. Or they're working on a coding model and like that's not really relevant to like getting more people to wear the Oakleys or the Metairie bands. Well now now you are aligned. Now you are on the same team. You're rowing in the same direction. And so I would expect the vibes to to get better I I think. And yeah. This is all good news. Super reflected in the timeline.

But I'm even more excited about the VR glasses. That was the highlight for me. It was the one more thing. I was hoping that we'd get a new VR headset last year. We didn't. And no one was speculating that this would drop this year, but it did. And it's very very cool. So the headline is $1,300 VR glasses. It's a 100 grams, which is the the weight of a pack of deck of cards. And if you go back, John Carmack was the CTO of Oculus working with Palmer Lucky. He came into Meta through the acquisition. He's the creator of Doom. Legendary computer scientist now running, keen, working on AI. He wound up leaving. Very very disappointing to not have him realize his his vision there at the company.

And he had been pounding the table at Meta. And actually I I there were some leaks and there was like, oh, this is like a source of frustration because his his goal and his mission was to get to a 100 grams for the headset, very light, at a $100. He said it needs to be cheap and light and then it can go everywhere. Then you can see mass adoption and then you'll get the developer ecosystem, etcetera. Obviously, $1,300 is not a $100. There's been a lot of inflation, but not that much inflation. But it is half the price of the Apple Vision Pro, basically. You're in a more accessible

Half the price of specs?

Oh, yeah. It's half the price of specs. And it's I think it's less than 1% the price of a Ferrari Lucha. So Yep. There's that if you're if you're in the market.

You can just put that on and imagine that you're driving a electric Ferrari. But

The glasses in the car sound the same.

Oh, yeah. They're both very quiet. But he but he pitched it as three key things. It's a cinema, it's a workstation, and it's a gaming console. You can play VR head VR games on it.

Almost felt like they were listening or just like same line of thought as Ben Thompson Totally. Because they're rolling out a bunch of like a 100 experiences, it sounds like a year Yeah. Where you're going to be able to get some entertainment, live entertainment value from your headset.

And specifically, sports. Sports. Sports.

Sit anywhere in the stadium.

Yes. Yes. Yes. And you can pick your seat and I don't think they will be doing the crazy frenetic editing or the cut downs. They have a great deal with UFC.

Obviously, Dana White's on the board. But it seems like they also rolled out partnerships with so many other leagues to get that there. They also put the compute and the battery pack on a puck that you wear on your belt. I love that design. It was very controversial, very un Apple when Apple Vision Pro did it and everyone was like Steve Jobs never would have stood for this. Well, like that's the reality of the technology. It doesn't make sense to put a battery on your face and so put it on put it in your pocket. I've never had a problem with the way the Apple Vision Pro works with the Tether. And they did a good job in the in the promotional videos of like hiding the puck, like you can't even see it there. So they're clearly aware that you want to forget about it.

And I think in the best case, you actually can. So very good there.

The other Sorry. Other dynamic tabletop typing. So if you have a flat surface in front of you. Bad. Bad?

Bad.

No one wants to do that.

Says it's insane.

I don't think I don't think it'll

I trust him with my life.

Okay. Okay. Maybe. I I I think people will either connect this to to a computer and just be using their computer or they'll just be using voice. I I think that that's like a half measure like the writing and I think I think it won't be it'll be 99% of the way there so in a demo you'll be like, oh, this is pretty good.

But if you're thinking about actually wearing this for work hours a day, you'll be like, yeah. Let me get a $20 keyboard. It has tactile feedback. Like you can actually feel the keys the keys move. I don't know. It's good that they did it. Like it it it's clearly cool. It's possible. And especially if you're in a situation where you can't bring a keyboard or a laptop, like that makes a lot of sense. That is a glimpse into the future. I would be surprised if that has if that's the dominant input the input, like way people input stuff. They'll either just talk to it because the voice models are good or they'll be locked in at a computer Yeah. With an actual keyboard.

This is just awesome

Good to have.

This is an awesome step forward to, you know, humanity living inside a world owned and controlled and monetized by Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah. The wire heading feature. Yeah. No no no p doom around wire heading. That is one of the X risk things.

Remember, don't forget about that. It's not just bioweapons. It's also we all turn inward and lock into the VR worlds and then stop reproducing and that's the end of humanity.

The better is only three hours though. So you can't even watch all of Lawrence Arabia. Like how how can you beat wire heading in?

It's very easy because that puck you plug it in. You plug it in. And that's what you do when you have the USB C. The USB C is also really important because Palmer Lucky was in the promotional video and he's he's getting his mind blown. He's saying they you can do display port over USB C and what that means is that you'll be able to just take a USB C cable from your laptop into the into the actual puck.

It's charging your device. And then also you're getting zero latency. Because the latency of having to go from screen sharing on your computer to your WiFi router back to your glasses in Apple Vision Pro, I was trying to game on it. I did all these crazy things to try and wire up a PlayStation into it. It was a huge hassle. It never really worked. There was always a ton of latency. This this cures that. I'm not exactly sure how the the game consoles support USB C, but I know all the Mac products do really really easily display port over USB C. So it looks like a USB C cable, but it's basically an HDMI cable. So zero latency and so you just get a huge screen with whatever you want on it. So it doesn't matter if the developers don't show up and they didn't bring GTA six to the meta VR glasses, which are probably going to sell less than a million units in the short term and it doesn't come out for six months. But will you be able to play GTA six on this thing? Absolutely, right? Because it has display port.

And so if you want that experience, it'll be available to you. It won't be a fully immersive VR experience. But if you're someone who only has $1,300 and can't afford a movie theater or can't doesn't even have space for a huge TV, you get this, you plug it into a laptop or a gaming console and you have a movie theater available to you. So very, very excited to try it. Very disappointed that it doesn't come in that they have to wait until spring of twenty twenty seven. That's a long way away. But the road to Meta VR glasses begins today. So start counting down. Hundred and eighty days or so. When when is the end of spring? When would that be? I guess the end of spring is what? May? Right? Then summer starts.

So so we're up in like two hundred and thirty days or something like that. But it'll be it'll be fun to see what people actually do with it. It's still the dominant platform for developers in VR even though everyone's pivoted.

The thing that's interesting to me in positioning of of it being a computer

Yeah.

It's a small like tweak. Right? Yeah. I don't remember them ever calling previous Yeah. Devices like, this is a computer.

Yeah. But it's easier for people to kind of imagine it as Yeah. Hey, this is a device that I can do a bunch of stuff.

And this is the thing with the iPhone. Like the iPhone was a phone, an iPod, and an Internet communicator. Basically a web browser. And it was like, we know that at the very least people like phones. So if we can be as good as a phone as what they have right now, and so it's like, if we can be as good as a home theater, then people will buy it.

And so instead of trying to purely position it as like this entirely new thing, metaverse that you live in and VR and everything's immersive and full full like immersion, instead you're like this can replace your triple monitor display. You're like, yeah. You know what? I was in the market for a triple monitor display. It was going be $2 across three monitors. Why don't I pick up this instead? And if they can deliver on that, I still think this might be v one and and it might be the second one that that actually gets the breakout success and and really broad adoption.

The Yeah. He did say this is a glimpse of the future. Yeah. Anytime you hear that, you're kind of thinking, okay, like, I'm gonna get some cool demos. Yeah.

It's not gonna be dailying it.

Yeah. I mean, it'll take take a while for the ecosystem. But it was the same thing with the iPhone. Like the first iPhone didn't have an App Store, didn't have three g, but it kicked off the beginning of of a big revolution and this feels like it could be that. Also, the the pixel density, they haven't shared the exact specs.

It feels like it might be five k per eye, which is about 53%, about half as much as the Apple Vision Pro. So there's a world where in six months we're talking about, it's still not that high fidelity to actually do work on for a full day. A lot of people are running five ks for a single monitor that's only in this much of your vision. You're talking about five ks spread over your full field of vision could be a little bit of a setback. But I think that that is something that definitely gets resolved on the next iteration because the display technology

What do we think about hologram calling?

Let's discuss it after I tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. I think it's cool they they they did legs in VR. It's very difficult to do legs in VR.

Boss took the victory lap on that and I think it blew people away. I think it's cool. I think I I did an Apple Vision Pro call with someone who got one the same week. It didn't really it never really took off because there was never a broad install base. It's all it's all based on like do they sell millions and millions of these things. It's always been hard for for Facebook to develop like a new network that requires hardware distribution. Yeah. It's much easier to to go from a friend in real life to we're texting each other, we have each other's emails, and then we're also sending Instagram reels to each other on DMs. Much harder to be like, oh, did you get the device? Oh, I no.

I don't have it. Oh, I don't have it set up, you know. But of course, you can portal into someone with a which is WhatsApp or or or anything else. So Well it does seem good.

There's one thing that is a 100% sure, which is that you will be buying these and I will not.

That is 100% true. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go through the time line, react to some of the reactions. Mark Gurman loves it.

He says they're incredible. Half the price of the VisionPRO, one sixth the weight external pack. He's stoked on it. What else is going on? They launched in spring twenty twenty seven. The interface is basically the same as the Vision Pro, but it has an absolutely bonkers tabletop virtual keyboard that blows the Vision Pro keyboard out of the water. Yeah. Because the Vision Pro keyboard like hovers there. You're not supposed to really use it. It's a terrible keyboard. But also I I don't the the tough thing with the keyboard is like the the the moments when I was using VR, I wanted to be on a couch. I wanted to be on a on like a a chair that didn't necessarily have like a flat surface in front of me. So it requires a little bit of a different workflow to to go actually go to the coffee shop and sit down at the table and have a flat surface in front of you. So there were the the with the Apple Vision Pro there was never a moment where I was like, oh, I would love to be able to put this down onto flat surface because I usually wouldn't use it on on a flat surface. So we'll see we'll see how that we'll see how that goes out.

What else is in here? I underestimated Zuck's game, Ryan says. It's a hearing aid. You can't tell me I can't wear my metaglasses anymore or else you'll be going against ADA, the Americans with Disability Act. I don't know that that's actually what's going on here, but that is sort of crazy that there's all this backlash to smart glasses. Maybe there will be a next wave of like restaurants and bars that say, no, you can't wear those there. But if you say, no, it's my hearing aid, you can't, that's some that's some four d chess. Are you giving are you giving Mark Zuckerberg the benefit of Occam's four d razor on this one?

No. I just think it's I think it's cool.

I think it's just cool and independent. I don't think it's

actually pair of I was meeting meeting with an older Yeah. Friend the other day and his hearing aid set up was like this like, you know, seemed like kind of clunky. And if you could just throw on it. He was wearing glasses. If you could have just thrown on a pair of glasses and be like, cool, I'm in business.

That would've been awesome. So I think, again, what many people forget about glasses is that smart glasses are way more appealing if you have a need for them outside of just wanting smart glasses. If you just want, you know, if you need help with your vision or you need help with your hearing, I think these are going to have much stronger product market fit.

Yeah. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Don't you think if you're wearing if you're wearing camera glasses, VR or AR, you know, Metairie bands and it has a camera there, it should be it can see your hands.

Right? It can see your elbow. So if you're playing beer pong Yeah. It could tell you, hey, back up

should be flashy.

You're going lose a point. It could go to your agent and and kick off an agentic workflow to schedule you with a professional beer pong coach, have them come to your house and do hours and hours of drills so that you never make that mistake. Is this vaporware if it if it didn't happen? Because we saw Mark Zuckerberg get caught with his elbow over the line

Way over beer the

beer pong. I don't know.

I just don't understand why glasses smart glasses CEOs go out in public without wearing the smart glasses. Oh, he's not wearing them. And it's like Evan Evan is doing interviews all the time without you know wearing you

know Yeah.

Yeah. Speaking you know at places like Sun Valley not wearing the glasses. Zuck is, you know, all the time out in public doing things not using the glasses. I mean, they they make clear versions of them, right? So if if the glasses are if the product's so good and everyone should buy them, shouldn't you have them on at least half the time that you're out socializing?

I personally think if if you see Jensen at a conference, he should be having an NVL 72 in a backpack. He should have a rack he should be No. Carrying it I did notice so he was wearing a very special watch and everyone's obsessed with Mark Zuckerberg's watch collection. He always debuts a new unique piece every time he's on stage. But I think the watch thing, it's getting a little old.

I would like to see him get into cars a little more. And I'd like to see him drive on to on stage on like, you know, Gordon Murray t 50.

And do a and burn and do a quick burnout.

Quick burnout. Yeah. Exactly. Something to show that he's not he's not one dimensional. He's not just Yeah.

Into watches. He's also into very special cars. Pull up in a tourbillon. You know, you got the tourbillon on your wrist. Why not the Bugatti tourbillon drive into the onto the stage, get out. No. My hot take about this beer pong elbow violation is I don't care about these. I think that people who play beer pong and worry about elbow violations are pedantic and annoying. And I think that it violates the spirit of the game. So I think that there's no problem with this at all. Think if Yeah. You're the type of person that's like, oh you you put your elbow over your nerd and you're not having fun and you're ruining the fun for everyone. And it doesn't actually make that much of a difference whether you threw from two inches forward or two inches back.

It's I mean, does make a difference, John.

Makes a massive difference. But but the is

spirit is

like the gentleman the gentleman is not you might address it if it's habitual

Shane is saying clearly Shane is bringing Shane is bringing up the bungee in the chat. I think Zuck is gonna have to get a proper setup, get down in the bungee, spend two three years in the bunkie Beer pong. Practice beer pong.

Okay. Yeah. No. I I think the I think I think the gentleman's beer pong game cannot it doesn't need to be policed on a shot by shot basis. If there's a habitual stepping of the line and it's actually creating an unfair advantage because one person is following that particular rule and the other person is clearly violating it for increased performance, then yes, it's worth calling out.

But one minor shot, slightly over the line, I don't care about it.

I think cheating is wrong.

Okay. Hold the line. Law and order guy over here.

Look, you you gotta respect the spirit

of the game.

You can't break the rules.

Yeah. But then you can wind up in this thing and be, oh, were two millimeters over. It turns it into

I mean, this is blatant. This is blatant.

It's not that blatant. It's still a long table. It's fine. He's he's not like really leaning over that far. He could be doing so much worse.

His elbow is over but he just That is his leg. Walked up to the table and threw the ball. And also, my man is down nine cups to one. Okay? Give him a break. Do you see the score?

Now when you're down, just start cheating, I guess.

And the other team

This could have been a celeb show.

Has has five. He is he is losing so badly. Give him a little break. It's his event. He's throwing the party.

He paid for the beer. You said the nicer guy. And Ryan Ryan gave extra inks on the chef.

Not a big deal. See, you you miss you miss the you miss the the aesthetics and the and the dignity that comes with somebody who's hosting, they're hosting. Are you doing the are you doing the voices? I I don't have the IEMs now. I can't hear what you're doing.

Has the

whole thing been

Chad or the Yeah. Tyler's Chad voice. You're so

Okay. Okay. Okay. I gotcha. Well well played.

Well Well played. Anyway, there's a bunch of fun things. Alex Wang on stage, dripped out. People are speculating that it's that it's, you know, high fashion. In fact, he corrected the record. It's not. He's thrifting. He's not buying Gucci and Prada pants. He's just wearing Crocs. Real tree Crocs. It is it is a big reverse because Alex Wang was on the cover of Fortune or Forbes in Louboutins and had his feet up with the red bottoms there. And it was like a very when I saw it I was like that's just a sick photo.

It's the barbell.

Yeah. But I but I it does seem like he like burned out on the high fashion. It's not like he's so he's always like, yeah, I'm just gonna dress like this. I have my own style which I think is very cool. So good to see Alex Wang on a run and delivering, yeah, just like big announcements, big progress at one of the biggest companies in the world.

Good stuff. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Where should we go next? We got a

Charm. Oh, The charm. The charm. The tomagotch. So this was added at Mike Isaac says, Mark does a one more thing with a new hardware device AI agent called Muse Charm.

Voice activated and palm sized. Out in time for the holidays. This feels super smart. People already think Muse is super cute. It's it's It's Laboo enabled Laboo Boo. Yeah. Basically.

Which is extremely popular. Like the most dominant consumer product the last couple years. And so it's it it it's distinctly sort of like outside of the tech bubble. The the the the quirky, libooboo is is is not like the refined edge of like a cyber truck or even an Apple product. But Meta has been sort of not blinded by the the the the clean aesthetics and instead they're like, yeah, this is just a cute fun thing.

And so people will actually like this. They know what people like. So

Avi, over a friend responds. The market has spent billions trying to compete with me and I'm still winning.

Let's go.

That is the right attitude. Right attitude. That being said, I don't see people really using the Muse charm that much over over time. Like, think it's like a fun I think it's a fun kind of like toy gimmick thing. But I think it's the kind of thing that people get.

It's funny. It's worth doing for Meta because it should be

Yeah. But they'll still be on phone a lot of the time.

But It'll be mean, it's it'll be splice it'll be viral

and You can talk to it.

Yeah. I'd like to

get these these like narrow one off hardware devices for, like, one interaction. Also, it's just like, it's a it is it is a more wide open space for them to sort of try and come into devices. Start you like, you have the glasses, then you get this. And it's like slowly they're eating into more of the device footprint in people's lives even if it's at the

And again, I I would expect them to sell this just at a loss. It's like good marketing for the core product.

Do we have a price? I don't think we do yet. We don't have a

price yet. But this feels like something that Yeah. At most you price at like Yeah. $99. But probably he tries like, again, he's selling a lot of hardware at at gonna

wear this as a watch potentially? Like you're gonna wind up with the the AP swatch thing

Yeah.

A where people wrap this.

For your most swagless friend. Brutal. Give this give give this as a gift with a watch strap to your most swagless homie Yeah. This holiday season. It's only ninety one days till Christmas.

But the timing here is is amazing. I'm I'm so I've I've no real insight, but like clearly they were working on a personal agent for a long time. Yep. Unclear when when this whole like personal agent meets LaBubu thing became part of the strategy. But it feels like yeah. They're they're they're clearly like they have the hardware team set up. They can move super quickly on this kind of thing. And I think it's I think it's fun.

Mount them to glasses so you can look straight at it and then brain rot on your face.

Let's talk about some of the downstream.

Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with agents. What do

you want

to talk about?

The chaos yeah. Well, coming away from this, real challenge for instinct. Mhmm. Everyone everyone building personal agents. Right?

Mhmm. We we talked about this a bit, but Meta has their own models

Yep.

That they can serve themselves Yep. At the cost of

Yeah.

Of, you know, Right? And and all all this CapEx.

They design their own server racks. Like Yeah. That's how vertically integrated they are. And also they have they've done a ton of stuff talking

And so

data centers they're building, like benefiting communities. They have this whole story about all the teachers in a school district got like a pretty large cash bonus when the data center came to town. Like, they've done a lot.

Yeah. And they were they were kind of born to navigate through this kind of era because of what they went through in the twenty tens. Right? Yeah. Like the most like veteran Totally.

Like crisis Yeah. Comms. Yeah. How do we navigate and position ourselves? They're already getting attacked by the social media addiction.

Can you imagine when a data center's coming to town and the muse guy comes in like the Michelin man?

Yeah.

And he's just like, don't worry about it. I don't like I don't even like water. What are you talking about?

So Instinct Yeah. Wonderful product. It's growing like wildfire Right? I'm still having getting texts from friends that are barely in tech being like

Hey.

I'm inviting the product. He asked me to text. Do you wanna grab a beer? But anyways, instinct. Very, very, very, very expensive to serve.

Mhmm. They're they're not charging right now.

Mhmm.

So they're losing a lot of money on a per user basis. Mhmm. They probably will be for some time. Mew's coming out and they can afford to lose money forever, basically. And even for them, they're sort of like gating onboarding in some ways.

Like, you sign up for the product and and you're not necessarily ready Sure. To like fully go live. And so, even for Meta, Muse is gonna be expensive to scale while they figure out these sort of monetization strategies. Of course, Meta's in a really good position to figure out how to make money on this. Yep. But very very challenging for for Instinct. I expect that Instinct's gonna need to find like a real dance partner of sorts. Right? You could imagine Google?

No.

Rufus? Rufus? Yeah. Do

you hear that? That's Rufus. Amazon Rufus. What?

No. You could imagine, you know, a Google being like, hey, we can't build products that people like, we have a lot of products that people use.

Sure.

So maybe that's an option. Yep. You could see Amazon as well. But for them to be competitive in this full onslaught by Meta, it's gonna be a lot. And same same with OpenAI.

Comms advice for Noah. Should he be going toe to toe trying to ratio Alex Wang?

Oh,

yeah. Because Alex is coming for it. He's like

Well, yeah. It was crazy because Alex has started punching down. You know, there's punching up, there's punching Punching up is when you're a startup and you're like taking shots at at the at the hyperscaler. Yeah. And punching down, we haven't really seen from a hyperscaler No.

In a long time. Right? But but Alex is out in the on the timeline just Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, he's he's he's in a good spot. He's in the strong position. So, you know, let him know if you're gonna try and come for me. You better not miss.

I'm the king of this.

Then, of course, the other challenged competitor coming out of this is obviously Snap. I think I that don't know how long the specs project can really continue. Mhmm. Especially because I don't think that I don't think these these VR glasses are gonna be I don't think they're gonna be like a mass market hit where you're just all of your friends are using them. Right?

I think it's gonna be like a base hit. Right? Another step in the right direction. Not as popular as the regular meta, like, smart glasses. Right? But like, a cool entertainment product, they're gonna sell some units. Snap is gonna sell I would be surprised if they sold more than 10,000 units. Right? And the market is just gonna keep punishing Snap as long as they keep trying to force specs to work when unless they have some version that that we can't see that is already way better than Meta, like, I just don't see how they can really stay in the game after this. Especially because Apple is gonna try to come over the top with their own smart glasses as soon as possible.

I mean, they should do Visionaire. I I I

No. But I'm not I'm not expecting like Visionaire. I don't even think that's what it'll be called. I think it'll just be called Apple Glasses.

I just think everyone everyone is in consensus that Apple should basically wind down the Mac project and the iOS project and focus fully on VR. Like, probably that would be a good thing for them to do.

I don't think that

No. No. They're going do glasses. They're going to look nice. I don't know.

I But in the cool thing for Zuck is that he's beating them to the punch on, like, it functions as a hearing aid. Right? Mean, the AirPods AirPods already yeah, yeah, yeah. But but in the glasses format, right? Oh, Like coming being being first Yeah.

Is is that's the best chance he

has. And they've been doing some good good marketing around that with a number of users that are hearing impaired. And it's just a it's it's it's such a minor technology, but it's huge for someone who's actually affected by hearing loss. And then they tell a human story. And it's, oh, what is AI doing?

It's just slop. Well, it's helping people that are suffering from hearing loss here. Like that's magic. That's amazing. That's actually it's medical. I mean, it's FDA. It's it's a medical innovation. So very, good stuff. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. What's going on with Australia and OpenAI? Tyler, you dug into this? So Jordy shared like the high level news which is that as part of like the hugging face rogue AI agents going all over looking for everything on the Internet that Australia had been hacked. But what actually happened here?

Yeah. I mean, I I think a lot of the details are still not like fully revealed. The Australian prime minister was like really up in arms like, they hacked and they didn't tell us for for, you know Sure. Weeks on end. Yeah.

But it seems like the consensus now is that, well, like the the hack was essentially that there were some like unlisted files Mhmm. That were still like publicly accessible Yeah. But they're just like not listed anywhere Yeah. And then the agent like found those. Yeah. And so they're saying like, oh, they hacked into us but you know, there's no like real personal identity revealed at all. Yeah. And like these are they're private in the sense that like you can't just like Google navigate

them. There's no link if you just click a button. Yeah. But if you

But if you're scraping

Yeah.

If you're doing some kind of

in 2012, I had a buddy who was, you know, I don't know, hacker hacker ish software developer. Not not actually like hacking into things, but just capable with with computers. And he he was scraping the I think it was maybe Boston Dynamics, but it might have just been like a humanoid robot company at the time. And there was a there there's a tool where you can go and get like a list of files and URLs on a server. You can just ask for it as a web crawler.

You don't actually need to, you know, click through all the links and look at the HTML. You can just see what does this server actually have. Let me go browse it. And one of the images was like a artist rendering of the humanoid like with a gun like full like murder bot mode that never made it to the to the like publication. It was never like, yeah, we're gonna do that. Because it was like, we're still in friendly mode. We were like, wow. Like that's that's wild. So this I mean this stuff has happened, you know, years ago. And so not quite a hack You

are saying hacking equivalent of elbows over the table.

Oh. Yeah. I think that's accurate. Well, Jordan, do you have did you have another one that you wanna run through or should we go to the all important new new car launch from none other than Bentley.

Let's go over to this notification from HP Smart.

What happened? Oh, yes.

It says you're low on ink and then never run low on ink again.

It does sound like a threat.

Tyler Wolf says is this an ad or a warning?

It sounds like a threat. Just never do it. 8,000 likes. FAFO. Very funny.

Flock safety is weighing whether to sell itself. Very interesting. I mean, obviously, public backlash for that company. We've talked to Garrett about it. Very interesting technology, but very very controversial. And Who a lot of would cities are kicking

What kind of acquirer would solve solve the problem?

I mean, a rebrand and then also like a a taser company or something, you know. Because there are companies that compete with them directly. Like, there are there are

plenty of Axon and

Axon, like, military and and police, you know, product companies. Somebody was saying yeah. Zach Weinberg was saying, honestly, Flock should just rename itself to the license plate scan company since that's actually what they do and the problem might just go away. I don't know. It'll actually go away.

I think people are pretty deeply embedded. They'll chase this around for a while. But

Well, that's that's the thing. I just feel like Flock is having the most insane comms crisis of any company that I can ever remember. Yeah. Right?

No, it's serious.

And who wants to inherit that crisis and get that attention pointed to them? Totally. Yeah.

Well, Bentley's first electric car is set to be half the price of the Ferrari Luche. The launch of the luxury car maker's Torcal SUV is aimed at younger and first time customers. What do you think? Are they over their skis with an EV at a time when people are sort of moving away from it? Or does it work for this particular luxury SUV buyer?

If there's any place where having the the silence of an EV, a Bentley sort of fits. This is the the thesis with the Rolls Royce Spectre. You take the engine out. Yeah. There's some enthusiasts who might be upset, but most people aren't buying it because they wanna red line it. So it can potentially work. Do you think we'll be seeing a lot of these or will it be passed over for the Urus and the new McLaren SUV potentially?

Well, don't think we're going to be seeing a lot because Okay. Bentley is just not selling a lot of cars right now.

But Yeah.

I think the car looks great minus the grille.

Minus the grille.

The

grille is is completely It

looks a

little completely insane.

Rolls Royce to me. It looks a little bit more squared off than what I'm what I'm used to with Bentley.

Well, it's specifically like whatever lighting pattern this is.

Oh, just so it might look different in sunlight, you mean?

Well, no. Just think it looks horrible. Okay. Well, it's smaller than the Bentayga, which was the first Like you have like you have this like Twenty twenty fourteen. Sort of very clean, sporty feeling car

signature diamond pattern. Okay? Put some respect on it apparently. I'm just learning this.

No. I know. But it but it would just imagine how good this car would

look. How would you describe the design overall? Would you say it's muscular? Because that's how they're designing it describing it. Is it a muscular design?

I think so.

Okay.

I think

I would agree with that.

Muscular. I'm just saying I I think

the car looks amazing minus this light

Do you think it should have some more vascularity? Maybe in a wrap, you could add some rippling veins to it to give it more more of a muscular design. No. Instead of recreating the v eight engine noise, the EV has a propulsion sound handcrafted by musicians with a unique blend of sounds from percussion, crystal glass, birds and the tapping of leather. So as you drive it, it sings you a song.

The Volkswagen owned luxury brand said it had also completed a 350,000,000 investment to design and build the Torcal at its plant in Crewe, bringing the total investment in The UK automotive sector to more than $1,000,000,000 The EV launch comes in a challenging period for Bentley as it struggles with slowing demand in China, fallout from Middle East conflict, higher U. S. Tariffs. As with the broader VW Group, Bentley has slimmed its workforce as profits and vehicle deliveries have declined. It's serious. We have to bring back the competitiveness. We have to be quick. We have to work harder. You can hear. This is the sound it makes when you drive it. I suppose. You hear the oh, it's the finger on the edge of the glass. Can you hear that? Imagine driving.

Well, with that sound.

Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is secure. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches, and we are ready for our first guests. Let's

bring them in.

Joe from a stealth AI security lab launching today. Welcome to the show. How are you both doing? Oh, we are going Blossom. To the timeline.

Back to the timeline. There's other news. Oh, okay. We are good. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Hello.

Hey. Thank you for having us. Nice to see you.

Thanks for hopping on. Please, since this is your first time on the show and first time talking about this topic, please introduce yourselves and the company.

Hey. So my name is Shalev and this is Romy. We're actually siblings. Yeah. So I come from a decade of AI research.

Mhmm. Worked on reasoning and computer use way back. Sort of started doing AI research when I was 16. Sort of finished my courses early. Work. I worked on search navigation and then reasoning models and then verification of LLMs and then AI and security. Yeah. And how foreign actors might target AI infrastructure and stuff like that. And that's how sort of we got to where we are now with this company on my end. But Romy is really the true genius, I'd say.

Well, I come from quantum security and quantum computing.

Oh, cool.

And so for the past few years, I've been working on enhancing the security of quantum communication networks. This was prior to the company. Yeah. So quantum communication networks are imagine a computer network, but at each endpoint you have a quantum device. And so there's lots of vulnerabilities that come alongside that.

So I invented protocols to enhance their security. Before that, I worked on advanced methods for breaking encryption schemes, quantum machine learning for climate prediction, a bunch of stuff. And both of our backgrounds in security kind of brought us to this really exciting time in AI security. What's going on right now?

There another sibling that's also cracked or is it just you guys?

I don't know. Doing rocket We

we said we needed a third co founder. That's our parents' fault.

I would

say the third one maybe do robotics or something.

Yeah, robotics or rocket science.

That'd be good.

Where is the biggest opportunity in security and AI? I mean, Ilio was posting about the importance of securing neo clouds. There's obviously everything from prompt injection to application layer security, securing the weights so those don't get stolen. Yes. Like Yeah.

How do you see the both the risks and the opportunities for the business? So

security is a very large stack. In AI, there's the model behavior part of security where, you know, prompt injection, the model's going to get some prompt and do something you don't mean it to do. That's that. Also, would put alignment probably also in that category.

Oh, yeah.

Then there's the AI infrastructure security which I think is a huge opportunity. That's where we operate a lot of. You're having this massive AI infra build out and it's just going so fast that security can't keep up. And we're deploying these massively important models which are approaching, you know, AGI or ASI on these systems that have limited security. And that's not good because then it exposes you to three main risks which is the sabotage of the models themselves.

You know, degrading performance, sleeper agents, you know, inserting back doors into models, data poisoning. And then it also exposes you to models that are that can escape. You know, like we've seen in Hugging Face, and the German Wiki,

and Yeah.

You know, we just heard about the Australian government yesterday. Yeah. And then the third is theft. So this is an external actor, you know, let's say a very sophisticated intelligence service that is breaking in to steal these weights which compress billions and billions of dollars of investment into a few terabytes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right? So that's a huge huge problem. So I'd say there's a model behavior side and there's the AI info side. Those are two big pieces of the pie.

And where are you guys starting? Are you just like going to do the whole thing?

So today we released a report Yeah. Called Secure Acceleration. So secureacceleration.com. Basically, what it is, is there's been a lot of talk for the past few months about AI security since the Hugging Face incident started. It seems like every week there's another incident that has happened.

And it's precisely because everything is moving quite quickly and the infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

Yeah.

The point of accelerating securely is, you know, AI is going to advance and we need to secure the stack while it does that.

And how are you thinking about the business? There's a world where you do all of this as a nonprofit. You engage deeply with all the labs. Mean, Diogo Amade was calling for independent auditors. There's a world where you live there.

There's also a world where you're competing with CrowdStrike and you're selling solutions to users who are maybe independent of the labs.

So it's actually it applies to almost the frontier labs to the neo clouds, compute providers, hyperscalers, model developers. Everyone really touches the compute stack and the data center stack. And this is a you might think, you know, data centers are secure. They've existed for many years. But they have not been designed to contain super intelligence.

Mhmm. Right? Yeah. So now we have civilizations as we saw in Hugging Face incident. We have civilizations within these data centers developing. There's like multi agent systems And there if you think in cybersecurity, there's a Swiss cheese model. The more agents you throw at a system, the more loopholes they can find. And so, in the report, talk about something called the cyber swarm, right? So, what we saw is the cyber swarm in hunting face. And the sabotage, escape and theft model is actually it encompasses the risks we are going to be seeing and we've already been starting to see from these types of cyber swarms and cyber super intelligence.

And this is very important for all of these players to think about.

Well, congratulations on launching the report. Where can people find it again? Can you give me the URL one more time?

So it's secureacceleration.com.

Okay. Secureacceleration.com. Everyone should go and give it a read. It's a it's a white pill. It's a solution.

I know. I wanted to

have We can do it.

It is dramatic. Yes. I like it. Like it. It's important that we work on these things.

Please work on that whole wet lab thing too.

That was risky. But congratulations and thank you so much. Yeah.

Great to meet you. I'm sure we'll talk again

soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Cheers, guys.

Goodbye. Bye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app service database and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

And coming back on the show, we have Leaf from public.com, co founder, co CEO. We're very excited. Anytime he gets a chance to join the show. Leaf, how you doing?

My man. What's up?

Is it cold in LA?

Mhmm. It's always cold in the Ultra Dome. We have no light. It's windowless room.

It is.

It is.

It's a windowless room. So I get to pretend like any any there's whatever conditions outside.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's like 72 and sunny today. Let me actually check the weather. It's 78 degrees, Jordy. It's not cold at all.

But it is a little chilly in here. How is it in New York?

It's fine. It's getting

a little

cold right now.

It's crisp. I like when it's crisp out.

It's crisp. It is crisp. That's how I would put it.

Is it putting you in

I'm still I'm still metric system, so

it's like

18? Yeah. 17? Is it putting you in putting Is

in the Christmas spirit?

Of course. 91 I can't wait.

91.

91 business. 91 business. Well, lots to do between then and now. What are you launching through the end of the year? What did you just launch?

Take us through the latest in world.

So today, we've launched AI agents for prediction markets. Like, our take on that's twofold. Number one, again, public is a multi asset investment platform as your ad read likely stays every single day, hopefully. And as part of that, obviously, prediction markets, aka event contracts, is something that people are also asking for. Our take on that is no sports, no entertainment, but essentially events that could impact your portfolio.

Right? Events that moves the market. So, you know, economics, things around companies, you know, and so on. But then on the other end, obviously, we have AI agents built into the platform, and so that combination creates some really interesting things. Like, the one example I right now always make all day long here is, you know, if you see that the market or the where the probability of a rate hike goes above 70%, sell my treasuries, for example. And so you can suddenly, you know, not just trade the events as you can do, you know, in many places, but you can also use the kind of real time probability Mhmm. You know, data as a signal to do other things in your portfolio. It could be trades. It could be alerts, risk management, whatever you might wanna do.

Yeah. That's so that's so interesting because that that rate example makes a lot of sense. And yet, I go to that, like, Reddit meme of, like, it's all priced in. Everything's priced in. And because the the the the yield curve of the treasury market, it is a prediction market.

And so you could just trade the underlying asset. But at the same time, psychologically, people do go to prediction markets for this thing in in in in the very real sense. So how do you think about the way the user actually engages with this? Is this something that was like customer pull, like they were already doing this behavior, makes sense to centralize it? What are the benefits of actually having it all in one place?

Yeah. I mean, number one, yes, we have obviously some people asking for it. You know? As new as this instrument is, I think it very quickly also becomes something that at least certain people are expecting you to have. You know?

Do know

that, Frank? And then secondly, obviously, four AI agents in public with everything we add to the platform adds basically power and capability to the AI agents. And so any asset class we launch, any data source we add, you know, just makes it more encompassing and, you know, makes it smarter in a way and, you know, creates more opportunities for people to do something with it. And, obviously, like, we can't predict every single thing someone will do with these things because it's very open ended, but it kinda, you know, creates more kind of tools at the arsenal for people to be creative with it. Obviously, like, when it comes to these markets, we always say, like, it is o signal, not just the signal, you know.

So as much as they're called prediction markets these days, you know, I would I would still, you know, put it as a it's one signal, it's not the signal Sure. That it can predict. But

Talk more about the decision not to do sports markets because it's one of those things like this feels like like a principled decision staying true to to the mission of the company because even though you guys feel might feel a certain way about sports markets, I'm sure you have hundreds of thousands of users that actually would like you to have them and would use them if you Mhmm. If you offer them, but it doesn't feel like you think that's in their long term best interest.

Yeah. I would say it's it's always important that you know who you're designing for. Mhmm. And you might have other customers as well, and you might acquire those customers, but I think it's very important to know who you're designing for. And for us, we're designing for, like, the top quartile in The US.

Right? Like, people that have money left over at

the end of the month, they

can put into the markets. We handle people's life savings, you know, and so these are folks that take their investing seriously, and they, you know, truly, you know, manage their all encompassing portfolios and retirement funds and all that in a public account. And so with that, there's a certain seriousness that comes with it, and I would argue that, like, things like sports entertainment contracts is more like entertainment finance. Right? And so we think it's it's it is it is just logical for that to kinda have an arm's length from your actual, you know, portfolio and so on.

And then the kind of principle that we look at, again, is this notion of events that could have an impact on the markets and therefore on your portfolio at large. And there, you know, there are certain use cases where it makes sense to engage in these markets, you know, and like one example we always make is if you, you know, we've, like, we've all been in this moment where we had, like, a very defined specific idea on, like, an earnings call of a company. Right? And we ended up being right, and the stock still dipped, and we lost money on the trades. And it was not because, you know, we were wrong on on on on what we thought would happen last quarter Sure. But it was because the CEO said something stupid on the earnings call or, you know, the outlook that they presented was different than the analysts expected or like Oil prices

spiked that day, and so there was an Exactly. Factor. Yeah.

And so sometimes for people to the the ability to kind of dissect the company's performance and their KPIs and being able to place a trade on a very specific kind of sub KPIs of a company can have a very good, you know, kind of use case as well. And so those things for us make sense. Right? And I would tell us a little story of, like, I've used Kalshi myself the other day when we were at the US Open, and I had my German homeboy, Zweberf, who was obviously, you know, killing it. And I was sitting there, you know, placing these trades, And, like, as, you know, as amazing as this backhand is, like, it's not moving the markets.

Yeah. Right?

And so I think there's a very clear kind of line to be drawn there. And, again, you can have long discussions about where do you draw the line between speculation and gambling, and everyone will have their subjective kind of, you know, arguments on on where that should be drawn. But we feel like there's a very obvious line to be drawn for us in these markets, and that's basically there.

What about the New York Knicks? They're owned by Madison Square Garden. It's a public company. If the Knicks go on a crazy run, then maybe the stock moves. Manchester United also publicly traded, so you can own the actual asset.

Yeah. I would definitely, more sports better should get into just owning the teams. I feel like that's where the money's made. You see it

Just steadily compound.

Yeah. Just steadily compound for sure. Sounds very funny. What what is what is driving top line growth for you these days? Are there specific channels?

Is there anything like secular trend going on in the market? What what's actually working in terms of in terms of just

overall As obvious and stupid as it sounds, but like AI agents for us is that they're obviously, like, it's the main core topic. We see a lot of large, sophisticated accounts come in. Like, we had a guy come in who was with UBS Wealth Management, fired his wealth management team, moved $50,000,000.05 0, into a public account, now has AI agents managing his portfolio, mostly basically doing, like, covered calls and,

you

know, generating income and then, like, on on the back of that. Yeah. And I think and and those are things that we see happen every single day, and it's interesting to see how kind of that first cohort that actually sees the most use in it in the AI agents in public have been very sophisticated, wealthy people that have these complexities and have these idea for these specific strategies that they want to execute on and so on.

And it's

typically because they were historically paying management fees to get those capabilities and then they're realizing like, hey, this is basically like software code that I'm paying

for No capabilities are just like the actual execution strategy. And so if you have an AI agent that can do that for you on a repeat basis, yeah. You Yeah. Can Exactly.

Like, Texas harvesting is another great example. Like, we have people who basically just do portfolio wide Texas harvesting using an agent.

Sure.

Yeah. And it's a very simple strategy that, you know, people wanna wanna wanna put in their portfolio. But, again, tax loss harvesting makes most sense if you have a sizable portfolio where the tax losses actually make a difference in your life. And so, again, it kinda applies more to people who are, you know, who have decent account size and, you know, some sophistication.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch and the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great. I actually have

Point

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Fantastic. Great to see you. Excited to hang Have

a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have the founder of TypeSafe AI. You saw Jev launch massively viral launch, and we have the founder and CEO here to break it down for us. The new model's faster, structured decisions, software can use it directly.

Lot of excitement, lot of questions to answer. So let's bring in Diogo. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

You win so great, so sleep deprived

Oh, really?

And so excited.

Yeah. Sleep deprived because you're

No time to sleep.

Everyone's onboarding and everyone's and demand is through the roof. Is that what's going on or is it fundraising?

Everything. Everyone wants to talk. Every like, everything. Every customer wants it. Like, as far as I know, all the companies I've ever heard of are using us.

Yeah. And the systems are on fire on dimensions I've never even known were possible. And I'm like a back end guy. Yeah.

So I imagine Wait.

But but back up a little bit. When when you launched this, like, where where what was your expectation? I'm assuming you felt like, you know, you had something pretty cool.

Polish launch.

It's gonna be a hit. But

I don't think that this launch could have been expected if I'm, like, totally frank. It's like, I've planned for a lot of scenarios. It's above a hundredth percentile. People are calling it like a chat GPT for developers. Sure.

And that shouldn't even be possible Yeah. Because chat GPT is a consumer product. Yeah. Right? Like, why how is it this happening? And I have my own hypothesis, but it's it's insane. You know?

I imagine you've, at this point, honed the the the elevator pitch. But just for anyone who who is not familiar with Jev and the product and the value, how are you breaking it down for people these days?

Oh, I I have not honed the elevator pitch. No. I I will try. I will try. Please.

People just tolerate my, like, over like, overly intense teching.

Sure.

But I would say the simple version is make AI actually fucking useful for automation. I hope I can hear this. But I think AI under promise, over deliver over promise, under deliver has been a major issue, major issue for years, and it's been, like, automating almost nothing. Yeah. And I think people are, like, super fucking frustrated with that.

Okay. I saw I saw people like, there are trade offs when you go for speed and reliability and you wanna over deliver. What are you giving up? What can Jev not do? When is it not the right tool for the job?

Oh, there's a couple of dimensions for that. One of them is it doesn't generate strings. So, like, it will not write code for you, and it will not address the largest market for LMs right now, which is coding agents. Yeah. I think that that's perfect because, actually what I wanna do is, like, not the superhuman math Yeah.

But the really boring automation. Yeah. You know, like, why can't, like, simple data entry be solved in accounting and customer service? Sure. Another trade off is it's not it doesn't do what we call system two thinking, like mathematical reasoning. Sure. It's really focused on instinctive judgment.

Okay. So then, instinctive judgment can be subjective. One company can have a policy they wanna automate their accounting workflows one way. They have a definition for what is GAAP profit. The other one has a different one.

So how much, like, you know, one shot or or, like, preloading into, like, a context window is happening versus, like, talking to you, doing some fine tuning? Like, what what what terminology actually does carry over from Uh-huh. What we know and what is entirely new?

So I would say, like, the former is the most accurate thing.

Okay.

But the real thing that's happening is this logic actually would go in code. Okay. So LLMs don't play nicely with code. Sure. Usually, like, a lot of properties about LMs, and the logic you're describing should happen in code instead of, like, in a system message.

Sure. The classic example of this is LLM does something bad, and the way to prevent it is say, pretty please don't do that in the system message on top. Yep. And you just have to pray it doesn't get context rotted out of it, and it keeps on listening.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these things were sort of, like, begging for JSON, begging for it to be structured the right way, and it's not guaranteed to be that way. It it it might be that way very reliably, and people have worked around that, but it's not a 100%. Right?

Exactly. And we are not a 100% either. That would be, crazy to guarantee intelligence.

Sure.

But what we try to do is we try to encourage the best practice, and we try to be calibrated. So this is another problem with AI. It might be able to be Einstein 95% of the time, but mister bean the other 5% of the time. But if it doesn't tell you if it's in Einstein or mister bean mode

Yeah.

Like, how are you gonna automate anything? Right? But, like, calibrate

reference. It's just a funny reference, but I love it. It's just really funny.

Thank you.

Yeah. Einstein shot at Salesforce, mister bean AI. You need that as well. So, yeah, where so you're are you I mean, you mentioned, like, the servers are on fire. Are you compute constrained in the same way?

Are you looking for, like, large, like, GPU clusters and systems? Or or does some of the are some of the knock on effects of, the speed of the system that I've seen on display, can it also run on, like, more commodity hardware? Are there any different elements to how you should think about your compute scaling? Or is it or is it going to look like any other Neolab?

Extremely different from other Neolabs. Like like yeah. You know, people know that about a year and a half ago, you raised less than $40,000,000. Yeah. You can't get to Neolab compute with less than $40,000,000.

Yeah. And also, you can't build a profitable AI company with that, yet we have because we are just innovating. You know, we're just doing different stuff than everyone else is. Sure. So we have extremely different compute needs. Actually, the bottleneck changes every single day. I think it's just growing pains of scaling a system. Like, you can't grow at the rate that we're growing without realizing, like, hey, our system was not designed for this level of stuff.

Got

it. So it's a it's a constant battle there.

I I saw some pushback that I didn't really fully understand, but I'd I'd love for you to sort of break down what people are saying and and how you'd respond to it. This idea that, like, this is innovation, but it's also a return to a prior era, a classifier model. Some people are like, well, we've always had this. And like personally from a business perspective, don't care because if we need to pull something old off the shelf and it's amazing and it's delivering value, that's great. But is that is that real?

Is that a good criticism? Is that completely misinformed? How do you process that idea that that this is actually building on the the shoulders of giants from years ago?

Or a lost art.

Or a lost art.

Yeah. Yes. So I can curse. Right?

Please. We we we we tend not to, but but do whatever you need

to. It. Do it.

Yes. Just just rip it.

Heck yes. Okay. It's fine. It's fine. I'll try to be controlled.

I'm sorry if it gets off the rails.

It's fine.

I love this question so much. Heck yes. Heck yes. It's classifier. Is it just a classifier?

No. But classifiers are awesome. Classifiers were not constructed because, like, a mathematician would think it's, like, a fun thing to do. Okay. A classifier is designed to make intelligence useful in systems. Yeah. Right? That is why everything was classifiers before Gen AI Mhmm. Because it was made for usefulness, not for demos or playing around. Mhmm. And actually, we don't take all of the ML one point o concepts. Mhmm. Right? Some of them don't apply. What we do is we try to unlock the best that, like, AI of today has Mhmm. And some of that doesn't apply. But, like, the other stuff definitely does. This calibration thing of, like, telling you when it doesn't know, that is table stakes for simple automation. How can you have it, like, run-in the background and process something that would require like, normally require an accountant if you don't have, like, extreme guarantees on how smart it is? So Yeah.

Absolutely, it's a classifier, this is the kind of thing that I think ML people really don't get with our launch. Like, this is a launch for developers.

Yes. Yes. I I I totally get that. Is is there a version of this? You know the the story, I mean, you would know whether or not it's apocryphal of, like, Google had LLMs.

They invented the transformer. They had a product that was similar to ChatGPT, and they didn't launch it that quickly. Is there a world where a technology like this maybe exists inside of a hyperscaler and they just haven't actually gotten it out into the world, or or do you think that that's less likely to be the case?

I would guess that it either I'm a clown or it's extremely unlikely.

Okay. We

worked really hard on this. Okay. Like, when I started, I was one of the best in the world at pre training Yeah. Post training. Sorry.

And I thought it would take a week. Mhmm. I would be Classic. And actually, when I first yes. When I first started, I thought this is such obviously the way to go. Okay. It's so obvious that for sure Anthropics working on this already, OpenAI is cooked. I was at OpenAI when I first started thinking about this direction. And it just seems so obvious to like someone who's at the intersection of developer and researcher, but so non obvious to pure researchers.

Mhmm. Yeah. Wild,

what what what's this what's this thing that you're wearing?

Oh. It's true. Pinker than a shirt.

Oh. Oh.

Our it's our tainted shirt, anti language language model. Technically, it's not a language model, but it is a Sikh brand, so we wear it.

There we go.

And this is this is my classic, Temu $20 pink fur coat.

There you go.

Very good. Well well, thanks so much for coming on the show and breaking it down. Congrats on the I

can only imagine how how busy you are. Good luck with with I'm sure Look back to it. Serving all that demand.

We'll talk to you soon. Heck. Have a good one.

Heck yeah.

See you around. Bye. Yeah. See you. That's a lot of fun.

Great energy. Up next, we have the co founder and CEO of Solco Industries, Hooman Reza Nezhad. Let's bring Hooman in to the TBPN UltraDal. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

What's going on?

To see you all.

Good to see you.

What what was that? We just made our announcement today. Tell me about it. Metals. Soon.

Yes. Wait. So yeah. Sorry. Reset.

What is the announcement? Take us through it.

So so Kuva is a a rare earth earth metallizer. We produce the metals of power and motion. The metals that go into any electric car, any fighter jet, data center, your phone, wind turbine, and we are completely unable to make these metals in the West. Silcova is changing that. We just raised 75,000,000 for our Silico 1 project.

It's our it's our 500 ton per year rare earth mineralization plant in Nevada, and it's the first step we're taking, taking to market.

How much of this is, like, the Redwood materials playbook where you're using, rare earths that have already gone through, been used, and you're recycling them versus engaging with mining companies to get new raw materials out of the ground and then refine them?

So when we when we chatted the first time I was I was on here, we were a recycler. Yeah. So almost all of our production was from rare scrap. We would take material from hard drives, from cars. Yep.

About a year ago, we moved to primary metal making. So now we work exclusively with mines. We take virgin mined ore that has been refined, and then we convert that to metals. We did that because of scale. It's just hard to get the volume of recycled material we need. So today, we do a little bit of recycling for for a few customers, but almost all of our production is is primarily virgin material.

What is the state of rare earth mining in America? Everyone's heard the catchphrase like the rare earths aren't actually rare. They're just stuck in the ground and we don't really mine them. But it feels like the timeline to set up a new mining capability in America would be longer than your timeline. So there's some sort of mismatch there.

So how much is that a reality? What are you running into? Where are the bottlenecks? What's the state of the American rare earth mining industry?

So contrary to popular belief, we do mine in the West. Okay. Right? We we have we have an enormous rare earth mine in in Australia. There's one in one in in in The US and California.

There is other dozens of projects scaling up across the West. There is mineral sands deposits in The US and elsewhere. The actual raw feedstock is not rare. It is produced in the West. The bottleneck is what you do after. It is the processing. That is something that we're completely unable to do in the West. Now Yeah. We actually invented these processes in America. Right? America has a history of of incredible work in in metallurgy. The example I gave in the announcement was Charles Martin Falk with Alcoa. A 22 year old, a witch out in Ohio. He drove the price of aluminum down 98%. The technologies used to make rare earths in China today are American technologies from the Manhattan project. So we did this at one point, and we built this technology and these these systems, and then we shipped it to China. Yeah. And China dominated. They matured it. They took over. And and now in the West, it has become incredibly difficult to be able to bring those technologies back in a way where we can actually compete in the free market.

There are

two It's very expensive. It's very dirty.

Yeah. There are two stories that people tell about why this capability went to China. One is labor cost was cheaper over there. They were developing nation and it was able to, you know, new new people coming out of poverty so you can pay much lower wages. The other one is more about the effects of industrialization, ecological effects, the fact that, you know, nimbyism, no one wants a mine in their town that's dirtying up the water, so put it halfway across the world.

Which one of those speaks to you more? Is it a combination? And how are we overcoming those in America?

Well, it's both. The first thing that happened was the environmental repercussions. Right? There was there was the enormous moly corp moly corp deposit in in in The US. That was one of the one of the first major virus projects in the world.

There was a lot of scandals and a lot of a lot of issues several decades ago regarding the environment. And we have deposits of thorium in them that can lead into the ground. So one of that's one of the initial triggers that actually shipped a lot of that production to China. And then we effectively gave all the technology to the Chinese. Right? And Chinese Chinese companies sort of buying up buying up American various companies, and and they were able to take it, scale it. And once that happened, there was the economics that took over. Right? Yeah. Their cost of labor is is 10 times less. Their cost of power is a third. So we really just could not compete with China if we were just copying that same technology stack again. It was impossible. The economics don't close. And still to this day, the economics the economics don't close.

But the geopolitical considerations sort of overweigh that. Like, there's a lot of defense companies that have to buy American, and so the the the indigenous supply chain is is is pulling forward. Correct?

A 100%. But defense is only one part of the market.

Right?

At the end of the day, we want to beat China at scale. We wanna be the de facto rare earth producers around the world. Yeah. And as that demand as that demand surges, we have to be able to compete in a free market. We can't just subsidize forever.

And I think the only way we do that and the only way we can win that next industrial era on on the merits of our technology is is we develop that technology. Right? And if we can drive the costs down and there's a lot of room for improvement. Right? Rare earth processing today is very inefficient. There's no reason it should be done the way it's being done today. It just happened to have been status quo in Interesting. In the eighties and that that's what we're copying again. So Zuck's Law, our vision is we need a new generation of much more effective technology. And that's what we did with our first chemistry that we're now scaling in at Zuck's one in Nevada, and then we're planning to continue doing that as as we go forward.

Yeah. Jordan, please.

Super impressive last year for you. Yeah. I I I'm assuming it's been about a year since you were first on the show, but but how how have you grown the team? Where where are you guys based? It sounds like this new hub in Nevada is not where, like, the primary, you know, the the engineering is gonna be, but but what's the what's the status of everything?

This

building I'm in right now is Sulacoa Almeida. This is our engineering, r and d, pilot operations hub. This is where we where we've been for the past year, and then Nevada is just production. That's just about three or four hours away from us today. So this is still the the primary base of Sulacoa.

This is where we're developing a new generation of processes. And then once a process is matured and ready, we we deploy it to our to our Nevada site.

Amazing. So you're you have the money. You raised $75,000,000 for this new facility, 500 tons of material for permanent magnets. When is that coming online? Who will you sell it to?

Is are you already doing biz dev deals with car makers, robotics companies? You mentioned defense being just one small piece of the market. Is there a 800 pound gorilla in the on on the buying side that everyone sort of needs to, you know, figure out how to work with, or is it a a very diffuse market? Defense is is a smaller part

of the market, but it's a it's a very important part of the market. Right? So so it has two products. We make NDPR for the auto sector and also a little bit for defense, and then we make samarium. Samarium is almost exclusively used in defense.

It's using f 30 fives, etcetera. Interesting. Using these high power, high temperature magnets using guided missiles. China is one of the only producers of samarium. China banned the export of it. So there is this enormous shortage in the defense market right now for samarium, which is which is why we we launched that product and why we're selling that. And then NDPR, the majority of that goes to the auto sector. Right? So we sell to magnet makers, major auto companies. We sell to the defense market. And all of that all that starts at scale in

in July July fourth of next year when we're commissioning Silicon One for both of those products.

But it sounds like they're like, the supply chain is so deep and complex that you're not calling Ford to get your magnets in the next Mustang Mach E. You're going to go to a, you know, motor manufacturer, electric motor manufacturer, and then they will wind up supplying to Ford or something like that.

We we we do both. So after China's restrictions in April of April of last year, there was a significant shortage, and there still is a significant shortage of materials. Ford, you mentioned, shut down a factory

Yeah.

Because they just couldn't offer sure enough of these materials. So Rough. The automakers we find are actually becoming very involved in the upstream. They're actually sourcing the raw oxides and raw metals themselves

Yeah.

So they can have a stockpile and have that access to that, have control of

that part of the supply chain, and they can

then pull it through

their magnet production partners. So we

work directly with automakers. We work with the magnet makers directly with the with primes. So we're we're involved across across all components of that of that downstream supply chain.

I love it. I love it. Well, congratulations, and thank you

so much. Impressive.

You you you are announcing fundraising today. Is that correct?

That is correct.

How much did you raise? 75,000,000.

Thank you for doing what you're doing. It's very important. Thank you. Amazing progress.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to soon. Talk soon. Goodbye. Up next

What a year.

We got Jordan Nanos from Semi Analysis coming back on the show. We're gonna get to the bottom of this whole AI thing. Do you think there's anything there? We'll we'll figure that. Jordan

Here he is.

This this AI thing people are talking about, you think is there a there there?

Yeah. I think so. Okay. A little suspicious,

but Yeah.

I've been using it.

You've been using it? Okay. Gotta it out. I gotta try it out.

But I use it eight hours a day.

Check it out. Now things are good. Reset on cluster max and then let's go into three point o. How long have you been working on this? What does it take to actually rank all of the neo clouds, which, of course, is a semi analysis coinage, which I think is awesome.

But and then how do you deal with all the all the pressure that you get from every neo cloud probably following you around and threatening to break your legs if they don't make it into platinum tier?

Yeah. The words in the Cambridge dictionary we found out as of last year. We're proud of that one.

Yeah. Acquaintage. That's so good.

Yeah. It's been four, five months of hard work on ClusterMax three. The last major version was November of last year. So the big focus was the new b 300 GPUs and 800 gig networks. That was, yeah, a lot lot of work, testing with everybody.

Neo Clouds are at the center of the world right now. So many of these companies that you guys have on the show Yeah. Raise tens, hundreds of millions of dollars and then give like 90% of it to a Neo Cloud and trust them as a partner. So the decision they make is super critical and, you know, we're proud to give our take on our experience doing hands on testing and talking to all these guys.

Yeah. How much of it is there's a spec sheet that comes from a Neo Cloud, then you have to fact check that. You actually have to run a test with them. Are you also doing the occasional site visit and actually seeing what they what their infrastructure? Like, what is the process for assessing the claims?

Because every every Neo Cloud's gonna say they're the best. Right?

Cheapest, fastest. Yeah. All the above. Thinnest, newest. Probably biggest.

Best looking.

Thickest.

Best dressed.

Yeah.

We have done some site visits, I mean, it's part of our consulting business more so than the ClusterMax research itself. I think for ClusterMax, yeah, it's a bit about validating that the claims that they're making publicly are real when we do our hands on testing. It's also about getting in there and putting the cluster through its paces. So we do a bunch of performance testing, and most recently for this one, we've also been digging in on some research of how to simulate failures and see how the providers respond. Mhmm.

Probably the most critical piece of like decision criteria that people use when it comes to really big providers who might have roughly the same GPUs, the same amount on the same schedule for a similar price, it's like, who can I trust? Who is going to be reliable? And so we simulate failures, we identify how long it takes them to identify when a failure occurs, how long it takes them to recover, and the spread is massive, top providers do this in twenty minutes end to end, they have hot spare pools available so that they can make these changes. Some of the providers down the list, we simulate a failure or we actually induce real hardware failures on certain ones when they let us, and it'll sit there for hours, days, they don't identify it, we have to let them know to make the replacement, when that happens it takes hours, maybe even a day or longer sometimes. That's like, you know, time is money in the world of Neo Clouds, and if people don't trust you to make these replacements, it's, you know, that's a big issue.

Is there a fear that they know you're gonna be checking them out on a particular day? They're gonna be on their best behavior and you mean to the next version of ClusterMax will be more of like a secret shopper program? You come in dressed as just a Neolab through a partner and then all of a sudden a failure happens and they're like, yeah. Like, I'm I'm I'm pretending to just be an average customer.

Yeah. I mean, that's why in our imagery, we have the Michelin Man Yeah. Cutting off a nice piece of Neo Cloud to see how they're gonna rate on the three stars.

Yeah. Well, to me to me, it's notable that, you know, that this is these Neo Clouds are opting in and then they're having issues and they know they're having they they should know they're having issues or they should be paying more attention because they're getting graded and there's still that gap between a twenty minute fix and a multi day fix or having to be notified that there's an error, I I would expect that I I think that's probably just because there's so much demand everywhere and they're saying like, why is this customer paying me like, you a billion dollars a year and then I have you who's just like grading me and technically like, you know, it's hard to say like who's more important. Right? Is it the customer should probably come first but at the same time, this will impact future relationships. Overall, outside of these like edge cases and errors and reliability and things like that, is there what can you say about, like, general performance?

Like, is the is the gap growing between different providers or is it shrinking? I'm curious if it if it ties at all to what we're seeing, like, at the at the frontier, whether it's closed or or open models where there's different points where you feel like the gap is shrinking or it's or it's growing, and I'm wondering if there's any ties to this.

Yeah, for sure. So in terms of performance, I think the biggest thing that we see change between providers is just the network design. The difference in how you set up a network for 100,000 GPUs is quite different than 10,000 and even smaller. And some providers are going with non standard networks, in other words, they don't buy the switches and the NICs from Nvidia, instead they build them themselves, I'm looking at Amazon EFA as an example there, but others are just deciding to go with InfiniBand instead of Rocky, two different Nvidia options. This can really affect performance.

The other thing is just configuration.

To the downside?

Yeah, to the downside. And it's it's it's not necessarily that the physical hardware has any significant issue in it, it's that, let's say you are a customer and you're trying to use some open source piece of software. So, VLLM or SGLANG for inference comes out and they've got some new feature, the people who have developed that software have likely been using an NVIDIA network, almost exclusively they use NVIDIA networks. So how long does it take for you to get that software supported and performing well on your custom network? I mean, this delay can be months and again, time is money.

So do these guys wanna wait and think about their network for four months waiting for that new feature for KV Cache offloading to be supported?

Mhmm.

People get frustrated and so they want the Nvidia standard on the networking and it's this balance between like a proper design upfront, while also having the skill set on the team to be able to set things up, make upgrades to software, to firmware, support people with what they're trying to do And reliability plays into this too. If you're constantly having hardware failures, like I said before, all of a sudden jobs are failing, they're not finishing, researchers are getting frustrated. So, I think reliability underpins a lot of that, but software support, network design, even storage can really affect performance as well.

What is Nebious doing so well that they made it to platinum?

They're serving this middle tier of the market. CoreWeave has set the standard. I mean, they are the best in terms of technology, this reliability stuff I'm talking about, they just have so much data for monitoring. I mean, guys deploy 10,000 GPUs a week at the peak when they're like building data centers and so that, you know, that's incredible, but like, their balance sheet is full. There's only so many people that you can marshal in resources to build out another gigawatt when they're going to 1.5 and beyond.

So Nebius has really capitalized on this middle tier of the market, which is not small. Like I said, this is customers who are coming to us and saying, hey, I saw you write such good things about CoreWeave, I just have a $100,000,000, I'm trying to give it to them. They're telling me they can't accept it until May of next year because they're backed up and

Sure.

Therefore, Nebius has been capitalizing and they've also executed very well, like the technology that they've developed is strong, we think that managed clusters are approaching like this feature complete world where it's hard to tell the difference in quality between Nebius and CoreWeave. Certainly, testing experience has been really solid on both of them. And our experience with these providers is actually that they're moving to other aspects of the business, so they're they're going into these big bare metal deals at which, you know, we are not ranking bare metal here.

Yeah.

Naviance and CoreWeave, are differences there.

Sure.

And then inference endpoints, RL infrastructure, all sorts of stuff that we're gonna be testing in the future where there is differences and and these guys are not necessarily the household names and inference endpoints as the leaders right now. Sure. They have the offerings, but Yeah. There's others that are ahead of them.

Yeah. This seems really relevant to that mid slot of the market, inference heavy companies, NeoLabs, but are the big labs able to take something valuable away from this? Or are they doing things at such a unique scale that this is maybe a little less relevant because they're going to be talking to one of these providers as like we're gonna build something together. And it it's gonna be exactly to our specifications. So we're not even really interested in what your your your stock configuration is.

Look, the Frontier Labs read ClusterMax, they take it into consideration. I'm not gonna say they like outsource their thinking to us, but they they certainly do their own due diligence. Yeah. But look, they they have everything. They have their own self build

Sure.

Sites that are a 100,000 to 400,000 GPUs in size and then they also Okay. Have smaller cluster

you're here for both, yeah, because they're doing they're doing everything. That's very interesting.

So it comes into play, I mean, especially in a world where there's so much demand. This is why we've seen SpaceX basically pivot and become a Neo Cloud and sell to Anthropic and Google so successfully, because those guys are buying from anybody who in this case could turn on 200,000 GPUs overnight, so therefore they paid like a three x premium to get in there.

Yeah. Is SpaceX on ClusterMax? I I actually didn't see.

Yeah. We threw them in the unavailable tier. We were ready to test them when they are ready to have have us tested. Yeah. Okay.

That's exciting. Well, we're we're rooting for them to to make

Last from for me for now. How has there been like crazy Neo Cloud talent wars? Like, imagine the smart thing to do a year ago if you're spinning up a new Neo Cloud is to try to poach as much as you can from CoreWeave and, like, try to take over some of that, you know, knowledge and expertise.

Yeah. And it's across the entire supply chain. So we see this in, like, the SREs you might think about that command like million dollar salaries and a bunch of equity and get this idea that they should start a Neo Cloud for themselves and some have, and some are being successful there, kind of going out on their own. But we also see this in like electricians, data center technicians, operators, the All of this stuff depends on being able to build a facility and, like, salaries for electricians in Louisiana and Abilene, Texas, and all these other places that we're tracking are, like, up three to five x. Crusoe just came in and paid these guys so much more money, and they're they're out of people, they need to train.

And I think this is just what we're seeing across the entire industry, no matter what job we're talking about, people just need to be trained, and that's the most, the most successful neo clouds that we are seeing have this pipeline to take talent from other related areas and get them contributing to the, you know, Neo Cloud Management Day two operations world, where a software engineer can start to work as an SRE on one of these teams, somebody who's good at front end can work on back end performance and stuff like that. And I expect we're gonna see Well, we are definitely seeing cross training of people who do real work on the ground, like electricians and stuff like that as Yeah.

On that on that, like, reallocation of of capital, labor, resources, It feels like the first big narrative around the Neo Cloud boom was like pivoting from crypto mining to AI inference and GPU compute. Is there another wave coming? Is there another source of Neo Cloud talent and energy and capital? Or is every Neo Cloud it feels like have all the crypto miners pivoted at this point? Are there still some holding out?

Well, I think the next the next wave is is the, like, inference platforms Mhmm. The the base tens, the modals, like they're gonna have to own chips And and so I would And and do you expect those players to do when as they move into spinning up their own sort of like

Dudesense.

Power shells and and getting their own GPUs? In some ways, it feels like they'll be very well positioned because they're already used to working with different providers and seeing the the pros and cons of different approaches, but what's your view?

I agree with that, and I think that the people who have been customers about Neocoloud know exactly what a good service is that they should be offering, and so I think they'll have good opinions. I also think that they are driven to do this by, like, real customer demand, and so in some ways they don't have an option, they just have to buy this stuff for themselves. I think they will, you know, be successful, some of them already are going to that mix of managed capacity versus self build. The other thing I think you might be overlooking is the chip startups. So like, Cerberus has become a Neo Cloud, Grok, the remain co after the NVIDIA acquihire, is buying NVIDIA GPUs and spinning up a Neo Cloud.

Others like SambaNova are doing this themselves, we see OpenAI Jalapeno that's gonna go into self build sites. I mean, if companies are like, not only do I need to battle in the supply chain for allocation at like TSMC and the memory providers, I also need to go get my data centers set up, I need to learn about construction, I need to learn about day two operations. Who's gonna train people to repair a cerebris wafer scale engine in their two fifty megawatts of compute they're bringing on in the next couple of years? Yeah. Well, it's them. It's them. They need to build that capability in house. And frankly, I think they're gonna realize a bunch of benefits to their margin profile for doing this instead of having this like stack of other people that you depend on. Do it all yourself, I mean, it end to end. AWS, Google, they already prove you can do this with TPU and Trainium.

Yep.

I think this chip startups are gonna do that as well. Interesting. And then last comment throwaway is just that there are lots of crypto miners to unlock, and there's also these like legacy clouds that haven't gotten into GPUs, I'm thinking about Cloudflare should be unlocked, Akamai, we just saw Iron Mountain, the guys who do all the tape backup, they're gonna do GPUs. I mean, all of these companies that have experience running data centers, why not run GPU data centers too? You should be getting into this as well.

So just gonna keep seeing more and more people take this seriously and try to make money off it.

What is the state of the mixed GPU Neo Cloud? How many are pure plays? They're NVIDIA shops or they're AMD? And then how many are trying to actually rack multiple chips? Even if it's in multiple data centers, they they at least have both available.

And does that give them leverage? Like, what what are what are you actually seeing? And then what is the strategy?

For the guys who play it well, it seems like they basically partner with Nvidia on the way up and then they start partnering with others Sure. To get some negotiation leverage and Yeah. And they do both. Mhmm. You know, hyperscaler would be the goal where you could have a self built chip program and you can also buy from Nvidia and get preference there.

Sure.

But you gotta be big to do that. Mhmm. And so people who try to do this from the start, I don't see them being as successful because you need that partner to help you grow to start.

Yep.

And, you know, if Nvidia starts showing preference to certain people and not others, I mean, that's like they make or break your business in some ways. Yeah. Makes sense. Maybe another thing.

Yeah, please.

Yeah, maybe another thing about the, like the custom chip programs and stuff is just that the the way you build a Neo Cloud is like driven by the workload, and so big pre training clusters can look a lot different than inference clusters and there's a whole bunch of people building for RL right now and I, like, we look at environments and sandboxes as a really big important thing that you need data centers full of chips that are not GPUs because they're mimicking the behavior of your phone or your laptop during training. And so there's lots of ways to get into this space if you understand the workload, you don't necessarily need to deploy the latest and greatest NVIDIA GPUs. And for what it's worth, semi analysis, we're gonna be testing all of it in the coming months.

Yeah. I think there's reporting that OpenAI bought like 10,000 Mac minis or something for maybe computer use stuff and you could imagine like a Neo Cloud of Android phones in the future, Neo Cloud of iPhones or something as people trying

100%.

Do more RL. Fascinating stuff. Congratulations on the launch. Very cool. Great see you again.

We'll have Give our best

to the team.

Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. Will do.

See you soon. Goodbye. Up next, Pioneer Labs cofounder and CEO Erika Alden and David Nezhad. Welcome to the show. Let's bring him in.

How are

you doing? Hello. Welcome.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

For having me. Nice to meet you.

Yes. Great to meet you.

Congratulations on the launch. You took over the timeline. But for those who have been living under a rock on Earth, break it down for us. What are you building? Introduce yourself, please.

Yeah. So I'm Erika. I'm the CEO of Pioneer Labs where we engineer life for Mars so that we go there and breathe and eat and have flowers and have an awesome life.

Okay. What is

Okay. I saw a picture of Mars on the timeline

Mhmm.

Maybe a week ago. Mhmm. It didn't have the orange filter.

Okay.

What was going on there? A lot of the the a lot of the the images of Mars that I've seen in the past have this sort of like orange

Okay.

Coloring. This one didn't. What's going on there? Was there am I normally am I used to seeing Mars?

Is the red planet really red? Yeah. That's my Yeah.

Currently, yes.

Okay.

Mars like sucks at the moment.

Okay.

So, I mean, Mars taking us back 4,000,000,000, Mars was really similar to Earth. It had liquid water. It by all accounts like should have been a place that could have hosted life. Yeah. And then three and a half billion years ago, like the two planets, their paths diverged and Earth evolved photosynthesis and we have this amazing biosphere that breathes out oxygen for us all day every day along It's enough for us.

Other Exactly. We and everyone ever alive is like so lucky to live in this Yeah. You know, live on the one example we know of. Yeah. Like a functional planet. And Mars, it's a little

It's smaller dysfunctional our planet.

Yeah. Things went sideways for Mars. Mhmm. It is now really cold. And still has the raw materials necessary for life.

So much of its northern hemisphere has permafrost. Just below the surface, there's a glacier of water. But it's frozen. Sure. And there's other problems too. Like the dirt on Mars over billions of years of having a lot of surface radiation now has weird toxins in it. That would be very toxic for us if we grew potatoes in it directly.

Got it. Okay.

So there is work to do to go there at all or even more work to do to live there permanently or in great numbers.

So how

do we fix it and how do we make money off of it?

There we go.

Yeah. So we over the past sort of two years, we've tried to break this big problem of how do you make Mars nice down into an actionable first step. So what we announced on Tuesday was that we had engineered the first microbe that can we can take it to Mars and it eats basically Mars dirt, water and air. That's it. And when it eats those materials, turns them into bioplastics, which is this super useful category of materials that in this case we suggest a good first application is to build houses with it.

So you

can pack your Starship with equipment, you can go to Mars, you can unpack it and you can continue to just convert local resources into materials to build houses and build like a small city in about two years. Oh. Because we now have life that eats the nutrients and the dirt and that's it.

That's amazing. And I was joking earlier. The company is a nonprofit, but if I get in early, I imagine that there'll be a for profit conversion at some point. Just kidding. But why why That is

the traditional path trodden by OpenAI,

isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the new playbook. But why nonprofit?

Yeah. Listen, there's no customer on Mars. Okay. It's Makes a little early. I mean, what's cool about this research is that many more people have started working on it just in the past couple of years because the technology is maturing enormously.

And lots of other headwinds are sort of in favor of actually going to Mars and having there be biology. Notably, there's an enormous amount of investment going into space data centers along with all of the other reasons that of Earth's launch capacity has increased over the past decade. Yeah. And so I think it's hard for the average everyday person to feel it.

Mhmm.

But like humans are going to space, like materially. Yeah. And so the case is building for there being one day a customer on Mars who's going to care that you could make the planet not kill you immediately when you go outside. Or even that in the first contained human mission, can have food and water and oxygen to breathe and stuff like that. So we're a non profit because it's early.

Yeah. And I think if this stuff continues to mature at this rate, then yeah. Maybe you get to the point where you can start executing in a in a few years.

So is the if I map out the next five years, I mean, or ten years, I imagine that that that, you know, NASA will be doing important work. They're the most recent visitor to Mars. They put a helicopter there a year or two ago. And then also you have SpaceX building the, you know, private company capability to actually get there reliably economically on the future. Is the idea that if you if you have some breakthrough, you would be fine with the implementation happening with either organization?

Is there sort of like a an MIT license for some of what you do that might get picked up by NASA and experimented with further? Or do you want a deeper collaboration with either side of the two organizations?

I think the way you kind of describe this is like almost as if space is this monolith that it's like NASA and SpaceX do stuff. Yeah. And that's not how it will be. Right? As we start doing more stuff in space, there will be many different sorts of industries that develop, right?

Sure. So NASA has like cornered the market, let's say, for like human spaceflight. They are currently the best at it. Yep. They're not the only ones. So they have now competition from others who can also successfully execute human missions. SpaceX is currently vastly wiping the floor with everyone in terms of launch capabilities. Yep. But again, they too have competition.

Yeah.

From, you know, relativity So and the space like all of these different components of space like are hopefully going to continue to mature into like a competitive ecosystem. Sure. And I would say like the thing I'm doing, which I'm excited about, is like doing the biotech is its own totally separate independent slice.

Yeah.

That like I'm lucky to sort of get in early and there's a ton of low hanging fruit.

Mhmm.

But like that itself is like a whole another slice of the space ecosystem that I hope one day will have many competitors. Right? All Yeah. Trying to figure out how to do it better. And of course, we'll rely on networks of others to provide infrastructure and launch and human flight and like all of that.

Yeah. Quickly, like what what are what what timelines are you working off of? I think it's refreshing to ask somebody about space timelines that's, you know, not currently running a for profit business that, you know, is public or needs to be public.

Yeah. Quite so. I don't have valuation to guide my answer. Yeah. So we've it took us about two years to make this first organism for Mars.

There are five organisms we need to make to, like, have a way to go to Mars and scalably make, like, livable area on Mars. And the sort of general timeline for that is I think we will have some version of all five of those by the end of the next three years, which puts us in, like, twenty twenty nine ish. There's a launch window in 2028. NASA is doing some stuff. It would be really awesome to also have like a search for life and a test so that we can grow our first Earth organism. Mhmm. Like in that 2028 launch window. There's another launch window early 2031. And that's the one where maybe we could actually like go there and and and demonstrate something. And SpaceX, I'd be shocked if they don't try to get to Mars in 2028.

I think they might succeed in 2031. Yeah. I mean, longer term, I think like technology broadly is accelerating. Yeah. And so, there's a lot of investment going into space close to Earth and on the moon. And and much of the interest in the moon is because it's like it's

like

the close testing ground for going farther out. But there's a lot of reasons why the moon itself is not necessarily the spot we want to set up shop forever. It has like fewer natural resources to make use of than other places we could go including Mars. And so I would not be surprised if we start seeing, you know, first human mission to Mars in the twenty thirties and like substantial build out of like the robotic precursors to that, like sooner.

Yeah. How do you how do you grapple with NASA's historical preference for leave no trace when going to celestial body? They, you know, the rover in a clean room so there's no, you know, earth microbes or Yeah.

We need be talking about pioneer safety. The idea of dropping a bunch of microorganisms on a far off planet and saying, have at it. So, yeah. Some people are worried about scenarios where, you know

Becomes more powerful than us.

Becomes more powerful and they they decide to to come back.

Maybe. Maybe.

Left you left me here to die.

Yeah. Yeah. And I survived. But yeah. I mean how do you deal with like I don't know if there's laws around what you can do, if there's just conventions.

There's certainly people that are impassioned on both sides. I'm super excited about this. But it is a departure from the way humanity has been engaging with Mars to date.

That's absolutely right. So I mean we've gone to Mars the narrative for why we've gone to Mars for the past twenty years has been searching for life.

Yeah.

And so going there with the intention of like having humans live there for example is a huge philosophical departure. Yeah. That there's a lot of inertia like against that and for that. Obviously like many want to go to Mars, it would be super awesome and kind of inevitable. Yeah.

In terms of law, so basically the law that governs space is relatively underdeveloped and all of the activity, all of the private space activity is stressing the system. And I think folks recognize that we need to think a lot more about space law. There's a line in the 1970 outer space treaty, which I kid you not, is kind of the most recent. Yeah. Like, outer space law effort. And the line says, basically, thou shalt not contaminate planetary bodies with harmful not not harmfully contaminate planetary bodies

Sure.

Which at the time when they wrote that, that meant thou shalt not test nukes in space radioactive stuff everywhere. Yep. That has now been in the modern era interpreted to also mean like don't contaminate places that might have life with Earth life. Like don't put invasive species places willy nilly, which is a really important thing to do. And it poses a big problem for the first human mission because humans are covered with bacteria.

We have a skin microbiome and a mouth microbiome and a gut microbiome that is like, we can't be sterilized in the way that robotic science missions have been sterilized to date. And so there's a body called COSPAR amongst other organizations that are trying to figure out what the policy should be to assess risk when we have the first human mission. And actually, as part of our announcement, we published a paper that's like a suggested framework for how to gather data on like, here's an organism we're proposing to send to Mars. Let's actually measure whether or not it could possibly be invasive. Yeah.

Which is possible to do for like the biomanufacturing organisms we've made because they're like well characterized, you can take measurements. And spoiler, if this organism gets out of its bioreactor, it's going to be so dead, so fast that it can't even evolve. This is not the one you would worry about. But even without example, it's unclear how to apply that to humans. Our microbiomes can't be rigorously safety characterized in that same way. And so the discussion continues about how to handle that. Because it really would suck to go to Mars and interfere with life there if it exists, which is like not looking likely, but still is a big a big concern.

Right? Well, look forward to your future speeches at the UN General Assembly. Sure you'll be there breaking it down for everyone with all the progress you've made. But congratulations on on

Yeah. Really really cool point of

view. Yeah. What yeah. What a

Come back on as you make progress.

Yeah. We'd love to talk again soon. Cool. Have a have a great rest of your day.

Cheers.

Bye. Goodbye. One last piece of car news. One more.

Twist my arm.

Porsche is working on a successor to the 09/18 spider hybrid supercar, and it will be powered by an engine not seen since the sixties. That's according to Germany's Handelsblatt, which reports that the new model will be powered by a flat eight engine, eight cylinders. The suspected price tag, €05,000,000, $575,000 U. S. The reporting also states that the project is known inside Porsche as code name S1 and could be revealed to investors as early as October 7, just five days or seven days after the Tesla Roadster announcement, Porsche will be responding with a

There's gonna be so much demand for this Yep. It makes me sick. Yeah. The suspected price tag of $575,000 Yep. I mean, this thing's gonna trade Yep.

Up. I would expect it to trade up at least two x instantly, probably. Yeah. The question Hard is hard to say, but I mean the the we have no idea what it looks like. These are just like made up renders.

Some of these are are I think based on the the previous project that they were potentially working on, which was an EV successor to the 09/18 Spider, the lineage with Porsche is the Carrera GT, then the nine eighteen. Everyone is waiting for the next thing, the next supercar, the next really special unique car not in the not built on the nine eleven platform. This should be it. Although, of course, there's a lot of nine eleven styling and heritage in there. But yes, if it's anything like what they're pitching here, it's going to fly off the shelves.

Do you think they do a manual? Are they going to go that far? If they ripped out the EV, they went to the flat eight, you know, combustion engine, are they doing turbos? Are they doing naturally aspirated? Are they going to go as far as giving somebody just, you know, pretty close to Carrera GT experience? I don't know. We'll see. It's going to be exciting.

Yeah. A lot of questions, but I can't wait.

I can't wait.

I can't wait.

Was there anything else we need to talk about? Congratulations to Huberman Lab. Andrew Huberman is number one on the New York Times bestsellers in advice, how to, and miscellaneous. For protocols, an operating manual for the human body. You can go pick it up everywhere books are sold.

And I think that's it for today. Jordy?

That's our show. Anything else? It's been an honor and a privilege and we'll be we will be back.

Also a new sleep. The pod six is live. The sixth generation of eat sleep's intelligent sleep system redesigned for every kind of bed. The new hub is small enough to fit under your bed frame. More powerful than ever.

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Take solos. You and your tie, go smash the gong and we'll be

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