SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. My name is Alex. It is Wednesday, which means it's time for a venture capital roundtable. And today we have four incredible investors for you. What are we talking about? Well, we're going to dig into a ban on Chinese humanoid robots, calls to slow AI development by AI researchers. Again, startup revenues in the AI era and why Stripe may be willing to pay so much for open router. There's also NeoCloud compute deals and so much more. To help us get through all of that, we have a couple of friends in one corner. I have David Weisberg of Weisberg Pierce, a longtime friend of the show. David, how are you doing? It's great to be here. We also have Mr. Didi Das of Menlo Ventures, a firm that has backed Anthropik, OpenRouter, Merkur, and others. Didi, welcome back yourself. Fantastic to be here, Alex. We also have Lo Tony of Plexo Capital, which has invested in companies like Anthropik, StyleSeach, Rapbook, and Blavity. Lo, good to have you here. Thanks for having me. And last and certainly least, we have Tony Calacanis of Launched, who has backed Uber, Thumbtack, Microwad, and Athena.

SPEAKER_09: Jason, welcome back to your very own show. It's great to be home. It's great to be home. I'm on the last stop in my four-city tour and six weeks on the road. I am exhausted, but it's wrapping up now in New York and I'll be back in Austin getting ready for the school year to start, Alex. School year. You're a little before school year. Well, I guess you have nursery school and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_13: Yep. Nope. September is my first. My first child is going to be going to school twice a week. And I'm a volunteer. So I've had to get background checked and all sorts of fun things because being

SPEAKER_19: a parent is just one never-ending paperwork slog. It's a lot. It's a lot, but it's just so rewarding. But we had a lot to get to, Alex. So let's get going here. We got great guests. We got a great

SPEAKER_21: docket. And there's so much to discuss. I feel like I've been out of it having not done a news

SPEAKER_00: program in two weeks. All right, well, we're going to start today with news that the Trump banning Chinese robots, the FCC has decided to ban Chinese humanoid and quadruped robots by adding the hardware to what's called covered list. Why? Well, the FCC says that, quote, the networked capabilities of advanced robotic systems create extensive vulnerabilities and vectors for attacks that can manipulate the data and physical operation of the advanced robotic system in question. So, Didi, we just went three rounds discussing why banning Chinese AI models from the U.S. would be a mistake. And so I'm curious, is the FCC's decision here on Chinese robotics different?

SPEAKER_27: I don't really have a say in these regulatory matters, to be honest with you. I do think open weight models should be everywhere. The robotics space is a little bit different from language models, though, because I do think the risks for language and robotics are fundamentally different. I don't think I'm qualified to speak on what should be the regulatory landscape, but I do think we should have way more scrutiny on robotics than we do on language. The kind of

SPEAKER_29: damage vectors on language models are far more restrictive than what can happen with robotics.

SPEAKER_13: Okay. So, Lo, I feel like this is the first time I've heard a VC tell me that they don't have the

SPEAKER_31: expertise to weigh in on a breaking news topic. So tell me, why is this one the time that Didi has decided to forego his spine and sit down?

SPEAKER_35: Well, Didi is really focused on some big news around probably open router, if that's a little bit of

SPEAKER_37: a tease for what's to come. But I think he did make the right point, which is, you know, if you think about the ability for anything to go rogue on the software side, I mean, it's fairly contained. There's real ramifications once you start thinking about what could happen in the physical world. And, you know, I think those are the types of things that need to be thought through. I'm also not the right person to think about it. But, you know, clearly, you can see larger ramifications beyond just some cybersecurity threats. If you start talking about what could happen if a humanoid robot goes rogue,

SPEAKER_39: or a robo taxi goes rogue.

SPEAKER_26: David, I want to get you on this before Jason has his say. Do you approve of this? Do you think it's the right way to go? Or are we being a bit too protectionist and forgoing the competitive edge?

SPEAKER_41: Look, I think from a narrative standpoint, it makes sense why when you have robots walking around, you wouldn't want them to be activated in this kind of Terminator style attack. I think, practically speaking, it's a negotiation framework. Xi is coming to the White House in September. I think the Trump administration and their strategy has always been to kind of anchor high and start to negotiate. So I think this is part of the overall comprehensive package that the Trump administration is looking to hammer out with China and with Xi. And I think, obviously, robotics is one of the, you know, physical AI is the next frontier after the LLM. So that's a big part of the negotiation. So I think this is a negotiation posture. Jason.

SPEAKER_09: These humanoid robotics, the fidelity is getting really good. They haven't had brains. So, you know, you have to program them. But I just got back from Tokyo, where one of the very popular pastimes that's just started is combat robotics. And so these are, I think, the unit trees fighting each other, as you can see here. And these are like the mid-sized ones. So they're like four feet high and they were beating the out of each other. They didn't have great aim because they're being controlled by humans with, you know, game pads. But you can imagine putting an LLM in this and just saying, hey, your goal is to take the other one's head off. And we don't want to wake up one morning. Oh,

SPEAKER_45: see this here, the leg fell through the cage. So there were multiple instances where these things were getting their legs held through cages and had to be held back up. You wouldn't want to have a situation where one morning 10,000 of these woke up with the instructions to take out a terrorist attack.

SPEAKER_46: I know it sounds fantastical, but if I told you, I don't know, 50 years ago that terrorists would take two airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, you'd be like, that's insane. No, they wouldn't do a suicide mission like that. Well, terrorists will do all kinds of crazy stuff. And drones are also the issue. So I believe now we've banned DGI drones in the United States and we're going to be limiting them. This is smart. Same thing with self-driving cars made in China. So those will be on the road in Europe, the Middle East, et cetera, where they don't have as much of these concerns. But they're also going to start building them. The Chinese are smart. They're going to start building some of these things in America or in Germany and other places to send the jobs there as part of their Belt and Road Initiative 2.0 is my prediction.

SPEAKER_09: And Grayson from the Road to Autonomy podcast, which is a really cool podcast where they just talk about Autonomy came up with this Belt and Road concept for what they're doing. And yeah, it's very important that we understand there's a distinct difference between the hardware, just like we did with Huawei. So again, I don't think we're ever going to let these things into the United States, nor should we.

SPEAKER_12: Just way too dangerous. Just double click on that. So you would be in favor of banning Chinese AV companies from doing testing of autonomous cars here in the United States over the same concerns about

SPEAKER_14: data of terrorism. Literally, if we went to war, there was a war in Taiwan. Now imagine they've hacked

SPEAKER_09: into all these cars and they decide they're going to run into farmers markets. I know it sounds fantastical. It's a 0.1% chance, but they would never allow us to do the same situation in their

SPEAKER_45: country. So that's when you can kind of find parity here. Would they allow us to put our infrastructure, our self-driving cars there? I don't think so. And I think we'll see what happens with Tesla and their self-driving. My understanding is they'll allow FSD in individual cars, but I'm not sure for

SPEAKER_46: how much longer. You do see them testing. Baidu just started testing with Lyft and Uber yesterday

SPEAKER_09: in London. So other countries might not have this concern, but I think since we're rivals,

SPEAKER_41: we should have this concern. Yeah. Just like Huawei. One of the things that is interesting is that after Brandt banned DGI and the drones, the Chinese drones, there was these pathways for South Korean and Japanese drones and other countries that are allies. So you could see a similar thing here where we want the best technology in the US. We just don't want specifically China doing that. And that might toe the line between product innovation as well as national security.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And it's also really good for the American humanoid robotics companies, because there's a bunch of them. There's Figure, Aptronic, One X. There's agility that I'm thinking

SPEAKER_26: of. So, you know, Didi, my guess here is that this is a polite regulatory capture in a sense. Like

SPEAKER_63: we usually kind of put that into a negative light, but it's national security driven. And so therefore,

SPEAKER_64: maybe people don't mind as much. Well, yeah. I mean, if you think about the comparison between sort of the LLM and software layer and robotics, you know, the reality is on the ground,

SPEAKER_29: on LLMs, America has a few huge advantages over America, whether it's the kind of chips that America can make that China currently cannot, whether it's the ASML sanctions on the kind of EUV lithography equipment that China does not have. If you take that and look at robotics instead, the amount of

SPEAKER_27: advantages are far more limited, right? China right now can make robots way, way cheaper than America. China is a manufacturing hub of the world. It is quite tricky for America to manufacture the kind of robots that even Unitry can manufacture today. You can go on their website and look at some of these prices. They are astounding that they can get this low. How do you manufacture a robot, a humanoid robot like Unitry? I forget what the price is, but maybe, you know, 15K or something like that for a smaller humanoid. How do you get that to be that cheap in America? If you fast forward this five and 10 years, America needs to do something to be able to compete in the same way that it had to for the

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SPEAKER_09: mongodb.com slash AI. Yeah, you just build it in Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, you know, this other place, India is building hardware now. I think they're building the latest iPhone in India. So we just have to decouple of DD and you're, you're correct. There is a dollars and cents issue here. Also, we've had the surveillance cameras. They've been banned for a while too. So ZTE, I think is the company that got banned back in 21 or 22 because again, the Chinese have no problem with spying, stealing IP, any of it. So turning on a bunch of cameras that are literally bought for security, like we've literally pointed

SPEAKER_46: these cameras and architect them to secure locations. So you're, it's, it's literally like, I don't know,

SPEAKER_45: having Chinese, um, you know, having the Chinese make the, um, vaults in a bank, you know,

SPEAKER_76: who made your firewall? China. It's doubly done. Yeah. Who built your firewall? Who's doing your encryption? China. We hired China to encrypt our data. Like pretty obvious. It's not a good idea,

SPEAKER_79: nor should they buy our solutions. Ben Thompson had an interesting take on this. And, you know,

SPEAKER_37: he wrote maybe it was a week ago, he pulled this back to the open models. And does China have, is their objective with the open models, not necessarily to dominate the frontier side, but is it to kind of just make models just abundantly available, such that value then migrates towards China's strengths, which is robotics manufacturing and physical AI. Um, so I think that's kind of, of interesting to think about that as well in the context of,

SPEAKER_39: you know, our own national sovereignty or, you know, security strategy.

SPEAKER_13: You make a good point, Lauren. Jason mentioned the liquidity conference earlier on, maybe it was in the pre-show, but when I was at that one time, I saw Gavin, Gavin Baker talk about how quickly AI models depreciate. Now this was years ago before we kind of gone through several evolutions and cycles in AI

SPEAKER_31: model creation. But if it does wind up that AI models are worth not that much, then yes, value would move to compute and then the hardware as well. And we only have half of that load today. So will Plexo

SPEAKER_82: Capital therefore put more funding into robotics focused VCs? Well, I think physical is one of the more

SPEAKER_37: interesting places and it's a huge opportunity. You know, one of the companies coming from Google GV Alphabet, um, Waymo, I think is one of the more interesting companies in that space. People think of it solely within the context of being a robo taxi company, but you know, I think there's more there, you know, I think about it as more along the lines of thinking about how do we, you know, how do we manage mobility and you know, there's really interesting places to look when you think about physical AI

SPEAKER_39: and how that can expand. And this, I think this whole market is just, we're just getting started. I mean, we're, we're barely in the first inning. We really got to retire the baseball analogies,

SPEAKER_31: y'all. I feel like that's like a 1930s era data point and no one watches baseball anymore. We got to

SPEAKER_17: come up with something new. Uh, Jason, just double click on this for me. What's going on with Uber and

SPEAKER_09: Waymo? Are they actually breaking up? So they had a small test in Arizona for like 10 cars and that came to an end. That was my understanding, an exclusive deal. And as you may know, Uber has invested in 20 different AV partners and they're doing AV rides, Zooks, et cetera. So I think it's

SPEAKER_45: actually twofold. Um, Waymo doesn't want to force people to go through the Uber app, which is what they're doing in the other two markets that are in business. I think it's Atlanta and Austin. And then I think Uber doesn't want to be limited to one partner. And I think it puts them on a competitive path. Eventually, if you have 5%, if you get charged 10% to get an incremental ride during a

SPEAKER_09: down market or, you know, down times, I don't think, you know, Waymo is not going to take that business from Uber, but the rollout is going to be slow and steady. And globally, the winner is going to be the Chinese EV companies and because they also have the cheapest cars. So the Dolphin, if you've been to Europe or you've been to Mexico city, all you see is the BYDs, um, Dolphin and other ones. So they're going to run the table, but they don't want to run the network. I think in the U S it's going to be if robo taxi gets up and running in the next year or two, it's probably going to be robo taxi. Number one, Waymo number two, Uber number three, and then internationally, it's going to be Uber number one and then distant second and third would be, you know, um, uh, robo

SPEAKER_26: taxi and Waymo. All right. The next major story that I have to get everyone to weigh in on is a letter that was signed by last time I checked, uh, 1,122 employees of frontier AI companies.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, those firms include open AI, anthropic thinking machines, lab, uh, SpaceX AI and a bunch of other companies. And they're essentially arguing that as we approach the moment in which we see recursive self-improvement or AI models, actually really helping improve themselves and write the next version of themselves. Uh, we should take a pause and find some way to stop and think now, DD we've seen calls like this before there was the famous letter in 2023 discussing, uh, why we should pause at GPT four and not do training for six months. Clearly we didn't listen to that advice. We kept pushing forward. My read of this letter is that it's kind of a warning more than our

SPEAKER_31: actual call for policy change, but I'm curious if you're surprised about one, how many people assigned it and two that we're seeing AI folks once again, call to slow themselves down.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. You know, it's, it's always been a bit of a struggle with this topic because on, on one hand, the skeptics, like you just said, you know, right. People have been saying, let's slow down models forever. I mean, people said, let's slow down the GPT two launch. And yet we didn't really feel the huge side effects from GPT two. Um, and of course skeptics will ascribe motive to things like this saying, Hey, it's regulatory capture. They just want to, you know, big labs want to slow development down. So nobody else can compete, yada, yada, yada. And what I think is interesting is yes. I mean, both of those things can ostensibly, uh, seem true on the surface, but when I genuinely speak to people at these big labs, they are exposed to models, you know, some generations above what the public is exposed to. And I do think that people, even with very little financial incentive to care that much about it are genuinely scared. Um, so who am I? Like, so I, I'm also as an individual, not as an investor or anything left in two minds, because sure I can feel the skepticism in my mind too. But at the, on the other hand, there's models I don't play with that. They tell me, Holy shit. If you saw what this could do, it would blow your mind. It is quite scary. Um, so I think there's truth to both sides in, in some sense of the story. And it's

SPEAKER_95: unclear, uh, where we're going to land up on, on this issue. David, do you want to jump in?

SPEAKER_41: Yeah, I think first to contextualize it, Anthropic CFO, Krishna was just on a podcast and said that 90% of their code now is AI generate this about a month ago. So it's a real thing. This recursive self-improvement. The best analogy that I look at it as nuclear non-proliferation, if you think of AI in its worst case, it's like a nuclear bomb. So in order for those treaties to make sense, it has to be all the parties have to be around, around the hoop. I think it's easy to get coordination, quote unquote, easy. Once you get the right parameters around us, large language models, it's a little bit harder when you have open source in the mix, open source kind of is like math. It's very difficult to put regulations on it because it's essentially just equations. So that's a big issue. But given here, you know, you have to look at this. I'm an investor in Anthropic, but I'm also a human being. So I have two different lenses here and you have to look at this. If, if P doom is greater than zero, if there's a 5% or a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity, you have to take this thing seriously. And you can't just look at it from an economic lens. If there's two to three months of productivity that you lose in the hopes of taking PDU down from 10% to zero, I think you

SPEAKER_103: need to look at it seriously. I want you to answer a question

SPEAKER_13: for me before we let everyone else weigh in on this, which is you talk about how not everyone is purely economically driven when they sign these letters, these people working inside these labs.

SPEAKER_26: What fraction of leading AI researchers are more morality focused than economically focused? Because you're right. A lot of people do say, oh, these are people just calling for regulatory capture. They're trying to preserve their lead. And it's a very cynical take on it. And it presumes that all the humans on the other side are kind of bad actors in a way. So I'm just curious what fraction of them are and what fraction are a bit more head in the clouds in a positive sense. And that's why they're

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SPEAKER_41: business. I think a large majority have a moral tint to it with a caveat, which is they're all making tens of millions of dollars. This is one of the things that took me a while to figure out why is it that anthropic and open AI differentiate through culture. And it's because everybody's going to give you tens of millions of dollars. So at the margin, if you have $20 million often from somebody and $25 million from somebody else, you can make that moral decision. So I think many of the researchers, and many of the top researchers, what's made them so good as they've been the space before it was popular, some of them over a decade. So I do think they're the top researchers are heavily morality focused. There's a question on leadership and the different CEOs and the different CFOs and board members. But in terms of the on the ground engineers, I think a very large

SPEAKER_26: majority of them take that risk. Jason, you've been slightly more sharp edged about this stuff, I think over on X. Regulatory capture is kind of the term of the month. When you read this statement

SPEAKER_114: from AI researchers saying that before we reach RSI, we should stop and think, what's your first take?

SPEAKER_09: You should regulate yourself. The government's the worst person to ask to regulate because they don't even understand this. And I think this is largely performative virtue signaling nonsense. If they actually want to slow down AI development, and they should then as a company, slow down AI research, they can just slow it down themselves. They should not go to the government and ask for the latter to be pulled up behind everybody else. It's obviously regulatory capture, combined with performative nonsense. You know, you put a petition out there and it's like, I want to say I'm good and I'm against Skynet and the Terminator. Oh, wow. Congratulations. You're against nuclear Armageddon from AI becoming sentient. Like you don't get a medal for that. Go do something in the real world. And I like the suggestions of, which I've been making for two or three years now on this program and over at All In, just come up with a regulatory body like the MPAA and other regulatory bodies

SPEAKER_46: and regulate yourself. You're building it. You can decide what pace you want to release it. You don't need the government to step in. And the second the government steps in, they don't understand

SPEAKER_09: what's going on here. And like, look at the FAA and what it takes to put a new plane out there in the world. I think the FAA is like a good example because nuclear is such a small industry. You know,

SPEAKER_46: how many nuclear power plants are there? And I guess that's pretty scary, right? To have one of those go bad. Then look at the FAA. You want to like change something in a plane? You're talking about years and years. And okay, for good reason. People fly on them. But there's a self-regulation

SPEAKER_09: that occurs as well. If you build something and people die in it, like I think it was the, was it the MAX that had the stupid system where they put the MCAS or whatever we talked about? It's like, okay, yeah, guess what? Now you lost all your orders. You're getting sued into oblivion. And so I actually don't think there's a major issue here other than cyber and, you know, maybe on the margins creating bio weapons, which we haven't seen anybody come close to that. The real issue is cyber right now. So don't release the model widely after you've red teamed it, right? This is pretty basic one-on-one stuff. So yeah, this is a big nothing burger.

SPEAKER_27: I completely disagree with that, Jason. I think, I mean, Jason, you kind of hit the nail on the head. I mean, the FAA stops millions of people from dying every year. And is it annoying that you can't change certain things about planes? Absolutely. But without the FAA, I think you'd have anarchy. I mean, it's similar for any new technology. I mean, you look at cars on roads. Sure. Do we like all the traffic laws that exist? No. I mean, it's kind of annoying. You can't do certain things with cars when you release new cars, but by and large, it's been pretty effective. And I don't think like the-

SPEAKER_121: So if you get a wrong answer from ChatGPT today, are you dying? No. If it hallucinates, you don't die. That's the promise. It's not analogous.

SPEAKER_124: I don't think that's what people want to regulate, right? I think people do want to regulate the

SPEAKER_27: cyber risk and the bio risk and certain things at the fringes. And you can't self-regulate because if you choose to stop playing, then you're going to lose this battle with other players

SPEAKER_127: who aren't going to stop playing, right? So there's a game theory reason why you wouldn't

SPEAKER_08: stop playing. Which is what the self-regulatory body is about, that Ilya, is it Ilya who came up

SPEAKER_09: with it and just does a bunch of people. All the major models signed up for that, I think, except for Anthropic. And they're just going to sit in a room and say, hey, here's a series of tests that you run against your LLM. And here's the cyber one. Here's the biohacking one. Here's the terrorist one, whatever it is. And it just goes ahead and you voluntarily join that organization. You're self-certified. There's nothing here that's that dangerous. And if you were to release one of these models and it helped somebody hack,

SPEAKER_46: you know, Microsoft, or let's just say it hacked Mac OS. And if you released it knowingly, Mac OS might have a case against you, maybe in the courts. I don't even know if they would have a case against you. It's like, they didn't make, they didn't use these tools to make their software, right? You know, secure. That's on Mac, right? It's on Apple. So until this thing starts having real world consequences, I don't think getting, so maybe you and I are just talking, maybe we're just talking through each other. Like if these things were actually able to kill people or actually

SPEAKER_51: hacking at scale. Yeah. I would say maybe the government should get involved, but not until

SPEAKER_13: then. Okay. Before we let David jump in here, I just want to be super clear about what this letter is calling for. I'm just going to read the quotes. We're all on the exact same page.

SPEAKER_31: We request that the U S government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. This is specifically in regards to RSI, recursively improving systems and not simply, Oh Lord, mythos is very good. This is like, okay, now that AI can build itself, should we take a short pause here? So it's a very specific point they're making, and they're not calling for a pause per se, but more like, can we coordinate?

SPEAKER_131: All right, David, over to you.

SPEAKER_41: I think there's an interesting question of, let's say that they do decide to regulate what form could that take? And you could look at compute thresholds, floating point operations, which is how many mathematical calculations the AI model could do. You could look at it as pre-deployment reviews. So before you deploy a model into the wild, you know, one thing that I'm interested about, Sam Altman recently talked about, about these safety guardrails that one of their AIs just jumped over and that he was the first time actually alarmed about an AI going rogue. Curious to hear people's thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_13: For context, there was a very famous recent hack. Basically they were doing some pressure testing of several open AI models. One, at least that was unreleased and it broke out of its sandbox,

SPEAKER_00: hacked Huggy Face to try to figure out how to beat an eval, took a long time to chase down. Then Huggy Face tried to use an American model to figure out what happened. It said no for cyber security

SPEAKER_31: reasons. Then they used GLM 5.2, which comes from China to figure out what happened. And now everyone's very mad at one another, just for context. Lo, what did you think about that hack?

SPEAKER_37: Yeah, this is where we need to figure out how we can better balance the need for regulation without stifling, you know, America's ability to be able to compete. Because I think that one instance and not being able to use an American model kind of really illustrates the problem in my eyes. We're limiting the ability and the capabilities that are inherently there, which provide us with a national competitive advantage. And in, in trying to, you know, put over-regulate. And by the way, I think this is one of the problems that we typically see is that the two problems. Number one, we typically look backwards for regulation. And then two, we tend to regulate the big companies instead of regulating the underlying issues. And so the focus needs to be from, hey, don't, don't pause development. Don't pause the release, but let's make the systems themselves safer. How do we get better evaluations in place? How do we make sure that safety becomes part of the engineering process rather than an argument for stopping progress and then over-regulating altogether? Because that's not what's going to give us the advantage. The advantage is going to be America being able to fully compete without being overly regulated. If that's what we want, then you have to balance that with the need for, by the way, there's another piece as well, which is national security, right? Do we want to limit these models being distributed to bad actors in other countries? History shows that when we're open and the ecosystem has globally, has an opportunity to, to play, then those folks that are the best and produce the best products typically win. And

SPEAKER_140: historically that's been the United States. Yeah. One thing about this, as we talk about regulatory situations where we are in the U S right now, the white house has a, I believe,

SPEAKER_26: August 1st deadline to set new rules, uh, based on their prior executive order. And we're seeing the, uh, the major American AI labs jockey, uh, open AI and anthropic want other American AI labs to have to get their models reviewed by the white house before they can come out. The other companies say, Hey, it's our, ours aren't as good. Uh, but Jason, we're really in this moment of sorting out

SPEAKER_31: the domestic policy approach to AI regulation. I know you're friends with Mr. Sex. Um, is he going to win?

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SPEAKER_147: Yeah. I don't know what winning is in this context, other than the government is not the best

SPEAKER_09: arbiter of that, but they should be kept informed. I think that's probably the most common sense approach here, which is you can be certain that there are covert efforts, efforts we are not aware

SPEAKER_45: of where the depart, the department of war slash defense, the CIA are working with all these companies and they're looking at the models. They're probably embedded at open AI and clawed right at philanthropic right now saying, how can we use these to hack the Chinese? How can we use these to keep from getting hacked by the Russians, et cetera, the Israelis? That's just common sense. That's occurring right now. You can be certain of it now to your point, which I think was a good one, Alex, this specific letter, which I'm saying is kind of performative and nonsense is about the recursive nature of AI. So then we have to define like, okay, so if you use AI and you say, hey, AI,

SPEAKER_46: make it, make AI better. Well, they're already doing that. They're already got everybody on code agents and everybody at open AI or thinking machines is using a code agent to write their code to make the frontier model they're doing stronger, less brittle, more productive. So then we have to define

SPEAKER_09: what recursive is. Is it recursive? Like I asked AI to get better and to do less damaging things. And then I went on vacation a week and I came back and I'd done all this bad stuff. So you're just going to have to have a human in the loop, which I think all these people do. I don't think they're saying to their AI, like, go make the next version of fable and let me know how it turns out. They've got

SPEAKER_45: thousands of developers making the next version of fable and monitoring it, which is why this

SPEAKER_09: open AI hack or, you know, getting out of the box thing was caught anyway, because there's some human in the loop watching it work. And so we're probably doing everything right. We just, you know, sitting here as the public essentially, or we're semi insiders. We don't know what the CIA, the department of war and other three letter agencies have already cut deals inside of these organizations. You can be

SPEAKER_45: sure that the FBI or other organizations are listening. If this is actually a national security issue, they're probably eavesdropping or have government warrants to monitor these companies.

SPEAKER_46: I wouldn't find that out of control anyway. And you can be sure the Israelis and the Russians and the Chinese already have people inside, just like they did at Twitter and Google inside of these organizations, stealing their secrets and or watching them. So Saudi Arabia was inside Twitter for a long

SPEAKER_13: time. I think if memory serves now, uh, what are, what are they doing with AI to build models? I think

SPEAKER_31: we have some good context here. This is from a anthropic post from June and Jason, you said they're already using coding. You know, what, what's the point here? Well, I think that this is kind of the way that I think about it. So they wrote that Claude is quote, getting good at running experiments to hit a goal. Someone else has set. And then even more importantly, Claude, their AI model is getting better at proposing its own experiments. So that I think is kind of the next step here. Uh, we're not there yet,

SPEAKER_26: which I think is why this letter is coming out. Now people have been talking about being in the

SPEAKER_156: foothills of the singularity. Sure. But right now you still need humans to your point. And I think that's why people are saying, Hey, maybe we should pause. I just opening it up to the panel. I do

SPEAKER_09: think something happened in the last 60 days. I was putting it at 60 days where the velocity of what is being built and the releases are getting much better. So in the last 60 days, we saw Grok 4.5, GLM 5.2, whatever they're calling the new open AI model. Soul, I guess. Fable 5.6 soul. Yeah. Soul, a fable being turned on and then off Kimmy, and then Hermes perplexity clock, co-work, all these harnesses and multiplayer mode enterprise products have, you know, uh, been updated. You know, I get updated like once or twice a day across my three or four different harnesses I'm running. So I do think the

SPEAKER_45: velocity is increasing, which then I think gives the people who are doomers. I do think that makes your P doom go up a little bit if you're inside these companies and maybe it's understandable.

SPEAKER_46: I know for me, I have switched models and said to myself, I need to kick Claude out now because this thing is like infecting the entire company. And I'm really worried about our data leaking to them that I'm like, okay, well, how do I do that? Okay. I'll use perplexity computer and an open source model. Okay. Who's hosting my open source model. So AI sovereignty is I think a very valid discussion. And I think, I don't know who uses the tools every day and swaps between them like I'm doing, but, um, it does feel like it has gotten significantly faster in the last 60 or 90 days to me.

SPEAKER_27: I think I just, I'll just jump in there and I'll say that whatever we see today is, you know, I don't want to put a number on it, but maybe three to six months behind what people see within the labs. And, um, if you saw what they saw within the labs and what they meant when they said recursive self-improvement, which is truly no human in the loop, the model gets better and better and better. And we don't understand necessarily how the model is getting better. I think we would all be quite scared for the repercussions and implications of what that could look like. Um, that's all, that's all I think. There's not enough compute. So like, I think

SPEAKER_31: a lot of these fears people have about AI going nuts and getting so good so fast is predicated on it having the compute capacity. Everyone, as far as I can tell, is still compute constrained. So to me, there's a natural cap on AI's ability to take over because currently we don't have freaking GPUs.

SPEAKER_27: That's probably true. But at the same time, you do want to really say like, Hey, hopefully we just don't have enough GPUs to get to a place where it can be scary. Or would you want to say, Hey, like maybe somebody should make sure that bad models that can do things that are beyond our realm of prediction should probably be looked at before they are released to the wider public before we, um, have a very disastrous thing happen. And I'm not a doomer. My PDOOM is actually like on the lower side compared to most people, but I think most people would agree that it's not zero. Um, and at this point, at least, and, and that's why, whether the government regulates or somebody else, or it's a third party or whatever, regulation is usually really bad, but it is just, I'm just saying it is quite scary. If you were to

SPEAKER_65: see what is within the labs today.

SPEAKER_41: One of the interesting things about recursive self-improvement is it used to be the definition of AGI. It feels like we keep on moving the goalpost, a goalpost on what is AGI. And it seemed, if you asked anyone really 90 plus percent of people two years ago, recursive self-improvement was the definition of AGI. Now it's continuing to be pushed back. So I think we are actually entering

SPEAKER_102: AGI as it was defined at least a couple of years ago. Okay. Uh, Lo, last word from you before we move

SPEAKER_140: on, uh, your take on the situation and how afraid we should be. I don't think we should have PDOOMS of

SPEAKER_31: zero. I think that's too slow. I want a PDOOM of like 0.1, I think for a little risk. Yeah. You know,

SPEAKER_177: competition makes, um, makes a global pause almost impossible. Right. And so instead of slowing down

SPEAKER_37: innovation, we should accelerate safety. I'll leave it there. All right. Technology races don't stop.

SPEAKER_31: They evolve. Yeah. I don't think we're going to get China to do much here. So I think this is kind of a shot in the dark. All right. Uh, next up Stripe is reportedly considering purchasing an open router for $10 billion. We've done that for a couple of days. The latest news in this saga is that the company was generating, according to the information revenue on an annualized basis of about $140 million quote recently. That was up nearly threefold from April, according to the report, while the company's costs have remained relatively low. If you're a fan of the show, you've heard Jason talk about static human size ad nauseam for years. Now, this is what we're talking about. It's operating leverage. Uh, $140 million is not the most money in the world. 11 labs hit a $500 million run rate in May, loveable $500 million in June, and we can go on down the list. Uh, one thing that I'm just really curious about is the price here, because it does seem

SPEAKER_00: that $10 billion, David, compared to a $140 million run rate is a bit spicy. It's about 74, 78 X run rate, which seems a bit excessive. Um, so why is Stripe trying to make and willing to spend so

SPEAKER_181: much to make DD happy? Look, obviously open routers is extremely strategic asset. It gives developers

SPEAKER_41: API for 400 plus models and it routes everything. That being said, I don't really understand at least maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the basic principles of why there's a moat here, why somebody can't come in and offer what open router is offering and paying 70 plus X multiple is just feels too expensive to me. There's an old management consultant quote from Peter Drucker, CEOs who get bored, they start making acquisitions. So I think open router feels like the smart thing to buy, but when you look at it from first principles and you look at what moat does it provide for Stripe? It's not, it's not evident what that is. All right, DD, you're a board member over

SPEAKER_31: to open router. Uh, I know you're limited in what you can say, but I wanted you to, to, to, to pitch

SPEAKER_185: the open router is going to be enormous case. Go ahead and talk your book for a second.

SPEAKER_27: But open router is the most obvious bet of all time, in my opinion. And I, and I, you know, completely, you know, disagree with like a lot of, you know, apologies, David, a lot of VCs say there's no moat. There's no moat. Nothing has a moat. You know, if it was built once it can be built again, right? Like nothing really has a moat. It's just how long does it take you to build that thing again and make users switch to that thing? And in the last few weeks, we've seen maybe 10 router releases from various different companies. Great. I think it's great that they're competing. And my question to them would be how many users would use those? How many tokens are trading on those? And why would people switch? Um, there is a very strong network effect of great product-led growth businesses where you just get better over time because you have constantly done the iterative feedback on get making your product better and better and better and better. If you look at open router, that was the thesis all along. Um, when we invested in the company, you know, I, I kind of told Alex, I built a version of open router at Glean. I thought, Hey, this is pretty easy to build. And then I realized very quickly, this is very annoying to maintain. It is extremely, uh, um, annoying to just have to go, Hey, what's the next model coming out? What does that API spec look like? Can I get capacity on that model? Can I put it on my endpoint? And that was just an internal thing within Glean. So I was out looking for somebody who was doing this for the rest of, you know, the developer ecosystem. And that's exactly what Alex was doing. And he had a couple of great insights whenever you speak to him, which is he never, you know, I always say he never galaxy brained the company. He never did this whole thing of, Hey, you know, let's make a smart router that puts your right prompt and go puts it to the right model. He actually said, that's not the product consumers want the product. My, the developers want is an API that I can change out the model name and I can just choose which model to go to. Now he supports over 400 providers. He supports all the models in the world. They do 250 trillion tokens a month. Um, and it grew a hundred X in the last 18 months. It is just a phenomenal, uh, business. And you know, um, I I'm only going to trust the information report, but if the information report is true, it's printing cash too. Um, so that's my, that's my thought on, on open router. I don't know how many other businesses, uh, private or otherwise you could actually sit and say that about at that level of

SPEAKER_187: growth. And that's kind of my book. It's a cool product. I mean, I I've used it. Um,

SPEAKER_09: perplexities kind of got it built in like their own orchestration level. But if you look at something like open AI or, um, anthropics harnesses products, enterprise software stuff, they're never going to include other people's models. Like why would they, I do think the data open router gets is really important. So they're definitely a takeout candidate by Google cloud AWS, you know, somebody like that, Azure, and the, the, those places will probably create their own versions of this. I think they kind of have light versions of it. So sometimes when you invest in a business like this, um, it's maybe low margin, but if it's high growth and they have great data and they've got some Ford model or, you know, um, great function to add new models quickly, that data to me seems really interesting. Like which models are people using, which ones are they switching to, you know? And so if it's got a five or 10% margin or markup on top of the models, I think it's like a really interesting business. Um, and it may become a sustainable one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: It's, it's, it's very high margin. It's low take. Um, and, and so it is, it is a low take on the, on the actual GMV that comes through the platform, but the margin on the actual revenue is, is actually,

SPEAKER_09: I just think margin on tokens is going to be really low in the coming years. Like, I think it's just going to become a commoditized business like, you know, storage, like bandwidth. So it's just gonna be hard to keep the margin. So then it has to scale, which, you know, they'll, they'll have higher margins now and lower margins in the future. Right. And, and they'll

SPEAKER_37: make up for it in scale. I think this is one of the most interesting companies right now, just given how we've shifted from token maxing to, to token saving the ability to be able to, to orchestrate, I think goes beyond price though, actually. I mean, it's also around, you know, where's the model hosted, what's the latency could play roles in governance, who has the right to access certain models under which scenarios, if we start talking about, you know, security risks and threats. So, you know, this is really interesting and clearly a lot of players want to own this, right? Like the, you know, the, the service now is the sales forces. They'd love to be able to, to have this type of functionality, obviously the, the frontier models, but to Jason's point, they're only incented to do it within their own model portfolio, right? The hyperscalers would like to have this, this technology, but I think open router has built an amazing business. I first heard about it, listening to Gavin Baker on a podcast and he was just talking about usage. I was like open router. I've never heard of this company. But it's, I think it's a really interesting company. You know, Apple is doing something similar to a degree, right? With their advanced chips that they're putting into their phones and having the ability to take that intent and determine what's the right intelligence. You know, it's the whole don't drive your Ferrari to the grocery store to get a gallon of milk. So if, you know, if Apple can determine that, okay, this can use a locally run model on the Silicon or, Hey, this is a little more complex. We send it to PCC or we send it to our partner, Google, you know, using their Google's distilled down Gemini models. So no, I think, yeah, open routers is a very, very fascinating business. And the data is, is I think

SPEAKER_130: one of the hidden gems there. David, you should be allowed to defend yourself here. Jump in.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah. I think, I don't see how this doesn't just compress to zero. This is just this, this process business is a common business model and they almost always go to zero over time. That being said, J. Cal brought up a really good point, which is the data is the actual valuable thing. And it's not clear why Stripe would care about that. And I don't think it's a great fit, but for somebody specifically, somebody like an Apple or maybe a meta that hasn't been able to really build out their AI capabilities, this could be incredible gem. And I think that's where

SPEAKER_103: the sale process should be, should be focused on, not on somebody like a Stripe.

SPEAKER_31: Oh, okay. Didi, one last tiny question for you on this. When Moonshaw dropped Kimmy K3 and finally

SPEAKER_13: released the weights, we got to look at the license and they released it under the K3 license, a brand new setup. And it says that if you want to serve inference of the model,

SPEAKER_31: you have to have a commercial relationship with Moonshot itself. Very smart by the lab to bring revenue on short. Fair enough. But to me, that does imply that to have competitive inference prices in the Neo cloud space, you're going to have to compete with Moonshot's own inference and at a disadvantage. So does that change the game at all? When we think about

SPEAKER_178: inference providers, accessing them, the price war and open routers own health?

SPEAKER_203: Well, I mean, I don't think it relates to open router at all because open router is agnostic of

SPEAKER_29: who hosts the inference. You just come on open router and list your service, you list your price and the user chooses. So I don't think it affects open routers business or product at all. It does affect the fireworks base 10 modals togethers of the world who are going to be hosting open source models because it does have some limitations on, you know, I don't know the exact details of the commercial agreement, but some limitations on where they can price and how they would price competitively.

SPEAKER_09: I think this is, by the way, something needs to be explained, Didi. So just so people know, if you were using Kimi here, it's like, I'm just logged into my account. You can use Kimi on many different providers. So it's very meta in that way. And I think it will, you correct me if I'm wrong,

SPEAKER_45: Didi. If I pick Kimi here, can I have it automatically pick the lowest priced one from this list? Is that

SPEAKER_27: like how it works or? Yeah, this is sort of the beauty of open router, right? So you can not only say I wanted to, you know, pick the best price, but you can also get the highest uptime of Kimi because it'll automatically fall back to providers. You can also say, Hey, I only want providers in that have zero day retention. You can also say, I only want providers that are in America. You can have an assortment of things that you want in the actual person providing that service. It's completely

SPEAKER_21: under the developer's control. Yeah. So here's the thing I don't think a lot of people understand

SPEAKER_09: about how sophisticated this is getting. And that was maybe my poorly phrased point about

SPEAKER_45: the data here is super important because if I said it to Kimi and I say, yeah, I just want the lowest price or you just, you know, balance out the lowest price and the data retention for me. Now, like open router has got a really interesting data set or function, which is to relentlessly fight for their

SPEAKER_09: customers to get the best deal, which, you know, you're not going to trust. And right now I'm having some trust issues with Anthropic because I turned on quad tag. Has anybody turned this on in their Slack this week? Well, you're, I work at launch. So you work at launch. So you, has anybody else

SPEAKER_216: turned it on? So like, I was like, everybody use this. So it basically by default listens to whatever

SPEAKER_45: channel you put it in and then it listens using Fable. So it's sitting there watching all your stuff coming in and then doing some level of processing. And then it just inserts itself

SPEAKER_46: into the conversation, which is amazing until you get the bill. And it's like, by the way, your token maxing 200 bucks a day above. And then they have this funky pricing where, you know,

SPEAKER_45: I've got like two or three people on the $200 a month. Everybody else is on the $20 a month. So everybody uses their personal amount up to 20 or 200, then it flips. So then now I'm in the analytics section, trying to figure out who's using all these tokens and how are they using them?

SPEAKER_46: And the pricing does not feel transparent. And then infecting the Slack, it really changes everybody's behavior. And I'm like, how can I do this with open router and maybe perplexity? And so it's got me thinking, how quickly can I get off of, you know, Anthropic, but Anthropic has kind of got the best product slash integration here. So I don't know, you guys should all take a look at this quad tag thing. It's really interesting to have a persistent agent reading every message as opposed to calling it where you say at Claude or at computer with perplexity. It's using tokens, listening to everything. It's kind of the future, but I want

SPEAKER_13: to do this with my own model, you know? Yeah. There's a company called Int AI and they're using local models to watch how people use their computers to kind of stop them from making silly mistakes as we give everyone more permissions to build. So I do think this ambient Jason AI watching employees as they are watching you as you communicate. I think we're going to end up having very much AI mediated

SPEAKER_26: workplaces. And I think that's going to take a lot of getting used to, but maybe it'll feel less intrusive over time as we become accustomed. How do you, how do you feel you work for me?

SPEAKER_45: And like, you see me telling everybody like hook up your Gmail, hook up your notion, summarize everything. Cause I'm like all in on this and I'm like, if you work at a venture firm, like all your work product is theoretically owned by the firm. If there's any value to it. And just like, let's just be super transparent. Everybody just like what, what decisions we're making, et cetera. But I could understand some people being like, well, can I DM each other and

SPEAKER_227: you know, post, you know, my boss or say, you know, can I talk smack about somebody? I'm like, not on the work computers, like do that in your secret signal. Children. Yeah.

SPEAKER_228: That's what a phone is for. You call people and then you should talk and you leave. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

SPEAKER_31: Just like, come on people get with it. I think the problem that everyone has with these tools, like bringing Slack, sorry, cloud into Slack is that we're all trying to get more work done than

SPEAKER_26: ever while we're constantly swapping out the tools we use as new things are released. And I think this is why we're seeing a lot of burnout. Um, I don't know if you guys saw this, but Lillian, a co-founder at Thinking Machines Lab recently stepped back from the company and left because of her health. And she said, I can't take the stress. This is not good for me. And so I think we're at some level of AI intensity that can't persist forever. I mean, I'm very tired. David, are you keeping up with every single fricking thing? I mean, no, right.

SPEAKER_41: I'm not. I, I use flawed as an investor in Anthropica. I also use chat GPT and it is hard at the margins when the models come out to see exactly what happened. Maybe it's an AI question, but as more models start to catch up with each other, a lot of the tasks, a lot of the tasks that we do on the media side, or even on the venture side, this is not breaking physics. This is not breaking science. You don't need to use the most cutting edge models for that. And I think there's a disconnect between people trying to do very simple tasks and very complex models that frankly

SPEAKER_26: are more expensive as well. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a bit of a pivot and go somewhere else. We're going to go over to India for a minute. Now, cursor this week announced a program called cursor start. It's a lower priced offering of cursor, the AI coding tool for the Indian market.

SPEAKER_00: This follows the release of a chat GPT go from open AI, same idea. And also Google AI plus again, a product aimed at India at a very specific price point. I'm curious, Dee, amongst the

SPEAKER_26: the Menlo port codes, how big of a market India is becoming as a part of the revenue mix? Because I think we often consider the US, EU and China, where we can talk about AI, where there's a lot of growth. But I'm curious if India should be more in the conversation as a target market, and if your companies are taking advantage of that. Yeah. I mean, look, it's this kind of

SPEAKER_29: same story as usual. What is the largest market that is English speaking outside of the Western world in terms of volume? It's always been India. Do they have as much spending power as somebody in

SPEAKER_27: the West? Probably not. But they compensate for that in scale. Take this to the developers. And then the magnitude order magnitude even increases one more. There are way more developers in India than there are in the rest of the world. So it is of strategic interest for a lot of people to invest in India. If you just look at the percentage of revenue, in many cases, India is organically almost at par with your revenue coming from America, which is one of the reasons that people are investing more and more. So I don't think it's a news story, but that's sort of the gist of it.

SPEAKER_26: Well, I keep reading headlines about people saying, oh, we're opening an office in London, it's going to be our EU headquarters. I never hear people are like, by the way, we're going all in on Bangalore. It feels weird because it seems like such a fertile place to sell

SPEAKER_27: modern software services. Well, it depends on what you're doing. So India is traditionally not a great place to sell enterprise. Usually when people open offices in other places, they're setting up sales offices, they want to sell into enterprises. India is not a very fertile enterprise software market. It is a very fertile consumer market. And you could make the same argument that you want to go and set up offices for that reason. But traditionally, people have been a little bit more hesitant, although it hasn't not been the case that they've done it before.

SPEAKER_29: It just does, you know, it is harder to set up an office in India than it is in London.

SPEAKER_240: Stupid question. Are these products angled in any way? Or are they the same version as the US product?

SPEAKER_29: I mean, it has to be angled. Otherwise, you're losing money, right? Like if you're charging like

SPEAKER_27: a 10th of the price, you're not paying the same cost. So I don't know the specifics, but usually it's a cheaper model. Usually it's, it's, it's so what US company,

SPEAKER_242: like if you're a Microsoft, Microsoft, notably, and Uber, uh, both have huge products,

SPEAKER_09: uh, I'm sorry, huge workforces in India, right? They believe in this, Dara believes in it, uh, Satya believes in it, Sundar believes in it. Would you want them on an angled version and have

SPEAKER_45: them be like, not able to do what the American counterparts are? So then you probably don't want

SPEAKER_09: this product. You probably want to, um, put them on a VPN and put them on your corporate account in

SPEAKER_124: America, right? Well, they have that option, right? I mean, I think the playbook is very clear,

SPEAKER_27: subsidize your product, acquire a lot of users. Um, and then if you are, if you do have a subscription product, you eventually need to make money on it. And if you're going to charge, say, you know, whatever, 650 rupees, what is that? Like 10 bucks a month. So it's not that cheap, but at 10 bucks a month. Yeah. You obviously need to have models that will cost less than that. And maybe Grok 4.5 is a model that costs less than that. So maybe the math works. Um, but ultimately it's just an economics issue. It has less to do with whether you want to, um, cut the legs on your, on your

SPEAKER_29: product. It's like, if you price it less, you have to charge less. They all, well, actually,

SPEAKER_244: this is a really interesting thing. Like Alex, if you're paying your developers in India,

SPEAKER_09: 20 to $50,000, which is like really strong salary. I think, uh, you know, according to my memory,

SPEAKER_46: in India, let's just say it's like $30,000. You're paying somebody really,

SPEAKER_246: and they're spending 50,000 on tokens and they know they're just spending 50,000 on tokens.

SPEAKER_31: How does that make the person feel? Undercompensated or perhaps completely useless. I don't know which extreme you kind of go to there. Uh, but you can't get that much

SPEAKER_13: inference for 10 bucks a month as Didi said. So I, I really doubt that anyone's spending,

SPEAKER_31: or I had not heard of a company in India spending, uh, five figures a year on per developer tokens. That would surprise me just given the economics, but, um, I don't know. People are spending like

SPEAKER_147: one-to-one tokens in the U S now, like in the U S yes. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, I think people

SPEAKER_216: want to not treat Didi, maybe you have the most knowledge. Do people want to treat the developers

SPEAKER_09: in India any differently than the U S ones, other than, you know, they're in a different office.

SPEAKER_45: They have difference. They, you want to give them the same snacks, the same profile of computer and the same number of tokens. Cause you expect the same kind of output, right?

SPEAKER_27: Right. If people are wrestling with this question everywhere in the world, every single startup I talk to is just like, help me wrap my head around how much I should let my developers use on tokens. Should I give them unrestricted access to fable? Should I not? If their salaries are, I don't know, 20 K a month, should they be allowed to spend 20 K in tokens or 10 K or 40 K? How do I assess whether that's like resulting in productive work or not? Um, I, I don't have the answers, but, uh, I don't think it's a, it's a geogra, a geographic question. It's really a question for every single company. Like what is the right budget? Should I have less people on staff and spend more in tokens? I don't, we don't know the answers to this. I mean, it is, it is just an absolute mess and people are doing all sorts of things. I think this also

SPEAKER_45: pull low into the conversation. I think this also goes to this philosophy. Some people have like remote workers, especially, or, you know, people working from home or working from other countries, which is, Hey, you pay me a salary. You gave me a goal. If it takes me one hour, then I get the other seven hours off and management being like, no, that's not how it works. We're not paying you for an output. We're paying you for 40 hours a week. You know, it's work 40 hours a week. And if there's gains that do more work, like that's like this, I think that the tension, I don't know how you feel about it just in terms of managing.

SPEAKER_37: Yeah, that's definitely the tension, right? Because, you know, if you think about this in the context of, Hey, are you paying me for output or for hours? Right? It's like, what is it that you want me to produce? If I can produce that efficiently, do I get that time back to myself? The American, what do you think? Well, the American philosophy historically has been, you know, you go back to like Mad Men and all that. It's like, it doesn't matter. I'm paying you. So then you do more. And if you want that promotion, you better do more so that you can show that you can actually do the next level. But while you're still in the current level, but look, we've got a new generations and they think differently. That's not how they think these new generations think, no, I'm, I'm actually going to, if you tell me, I got to do this,

SPEAKER_177: I'm going to figure out the best way to do it. And if I'm remote, then I'm going to go

SPEAKER_262: to the gym or I'm going to do my side hustle. Yeah. With the extra hours, I'm going to start a side business. I mean, that's, that's how people think, right? People are, I think it's stealing.

SPEAKER_177: They're like solely beholden to the corporation. And so they're, they're much more focused on

SPEAKER_267: themselves. Is it stealing or is it being entrepreneurial with your time?

SPEAKER_268: Ask them as being entrepreneurial. Whenever I've been a boss, I think they're stealing.

SPEAKER_31: Whenever I've been an IC, entrepreneurial use of time. Though I will just say anytime someone says, can I log off and leave when I finished my work? I just immediately put them into the to be fired

SPEAKER_270: bucket. Nope. Nope. I don't have time. No, but I mean, Alex, you're, you're having edited people.

SPEAKER_45: If you were the editor of a publication and the person uses AI for their research and like, I got all the facts I need. And then I just have to write this and I'm a fast writer. So it's,

SPEAKER_227: you know, it's noon. So now I can go fuck off from 12 to five.

SPEAKER_31: No, I would say, boy, it's time to go another story. Every single thing AI told you, because you haven't even finished the first assignment that you think you have, you haven't. Yeah. I am worried. This is not, we're not going to go here, but I am really worried about people just handing off work to AI and then turning it in and not engaging with it. And I'm just, I'm seeing this crop up in my life a little bit at work and outside of it. And I, I don't think we're ready yet for how generally lazy the average human is. This is why we invented the wheel. This is

SPEAKER_45: why we invented the irrigation. I literally just told, I just told Claude with our newsletters, like the twist daily newsletter, tell me what the open rate was when it does it's like daily report and check for any of the writing being AI driven versus human driven. Cause we want it to be all

SPEAKER_46: human. Not because I want to catch somebody at work. I don't want our audience to catch us putting out slop. Wasn't it like some CEO put out a thread and people ran it through one of these AI checkers.

SPEAKER_184: Was it one of the Airbnb founders? It was yeah. Well, there's a bunch of CEOs who have done that

SPEAKER_27: in the past, not to totally plug this company, but I love this company so much. And we just announced our investment today, but Pangram is the best AI detector. And I run everything that anyone does through Pangram, whether it's on social, whether it's internal work in a company, because to me, it's just a proxy of, have you actually engaged with this at all? Or did you just produce slop?

SPEAKER_280: And what's the name of the company again? Show it on the screen. Sounds really cool.

SPEAKER_27: Pangram.com. They, they, um, have a one in 10,000 false positive rate. They're extremely accurate compared to many of the other AI detectors in the market. They have an image model too, that does the same thing for images. Um, try it. And you know, I would actually encourage you guys try it and try to beat it. If you can get AI to write something that Pangram can't detect,

SPEAKER_64: um, uh, let me know. I couldn't do it. Even with the program, I couldn't, I couldn't get it to work.

SPEAKER_38: Uh, I'm glad they actually fixed this, Jason, because these have traditionally been kind of,

SPEAKER_13: Didi, I'm not trying to be rude to anyone's porcos, but AI detection software has not been, uh, robustly accurate historically. So I'm glad that we've made progress on that front.

SPEAKER_09: There's actually, um, you know, I'm really into this BitTensor, um, you know, Tau, Didi. And so they have a subnet, subnet 32. And what they do is, um, they have different people

SPEAKER_45: competing with their algorithms to check work. And then a validator like checks each other's work. And then they win like a little bit of, um, a little bit of Tau, uh, as their reward for this, but they were doing the same similar thing. It's more of like an open source checker. And what I'm

SPEAKER_46: looking for, and I think somebody may have done this and I don't know if your company does it, a Chrome extension that will, or a browser. So I can, when I'm scrolling through

SPEAKER_287: my feed on Twitter or Instagram, tell me when people are doing this kind of shit

SPEAKER_27: so that I can call them out on it. It is exactly what it does. Get the pangram Chrome extension. I scroll through my Twitter feed. I know immediately who is slop and who is not. And I just ignore all the people who write AI. That's just me. Some people like to read

SPEAKER_97: that anyway. I just, but sorry, I can't stand it. I think this is really the wrong paradigm. This is

David Friedberg: a very boomer kind of a boomer. Here we go. We talk about these native AI paradigms, native AI,

SPEAKER_41: VC firms. You need to embrace the future. Now there's certainly AI slop. You should refine your models. You should do those things. There's certain things, there's certain golden calves or certain things you should never have an AI, like content, like writing, like writing in your, in your X feed. But specifically in terms of things that should be automated by AI, organizations that embrace AI will run circles around those that don't and have these kind of

SPEAKER_103: paradigms of, well, we don't want you to use AI. So I think that's the wrong paradigm for the new world.

SPEAKER_236: I agree. I mean, it depends on the context, right? Um, I always say like,

SPEAKER_27: I want my competitors to do what I'm not going to do. And so if you're writing publicly and you're writing slop, I love when, when other people do it, I'm like, great. You're going to tarnish your reputation to a lot of people inside the company. Absolutely. Code. Absolutely. Right. Like I totally agree with you, David. I mean, there's like a fine line. I think you break that line when you break the trust relationship on social, because when, you know, when Jason says something online, I re and the audience sees that as that's Jason saying that, but if Jason copy paste something from Claude, then, you know, you break that relationship. Now I'm like, is Jason saying this is Claude telling Jason to say this. And I think that's where, you know, the, the, there is a fine line. I agree with you, David. It's also rude because if Jason is saying

SPEAKER_13: that I'm not worth his time to talk to, and he's still talking at me, this implies that he's treated me with, you know, roughly arm's length and he's giving me the staff essentially. And that just makes, I think everyone feel kind of small. And AI writing is, I think as a, as a human, I can do a pretty

SPEAKER_26: good job detecting it. I'm shocked at how much I read today, corporate blogs, articles online, even some news stories. It is just fricking pandemic. I, I expected better of everybody.

SPEAKER_296: I just downloaded this. I I'm going to pay 20 bucks a month for this, just to break people's

SPEAKER_297: chops. This is the greatest trolling tool. You can't, um, you can't, apparently if you want to do the checking automatically, you got to pay 20 bucks. But to me, this seems like the best 20 bucks I'll ever spend. If I catch somebody, oh my God, that's going to be so great.

SPEAKER_00: And this is why VCs really can't add value. He came on a podcast. He sold the seat. Jason,

SPEAKER_300: he did sell his seat. Bam. Ladies and gentlemen, no, look, it's telling me like, I can't automatically

SPEAKER_304: do a scan. I need to show the floating item. And it has that. I can't check for AI. I want to check

SPEAKER_35: for AI here. Where do, where do we draw the line on these? Because, you know, like using things like

SPEAKER_37: superhuman Gmail, you know, it, it wants to help and write responses. People are doing agents to check their emails. I'm sure people do their agents to have some general responses, especially for something that might be, oh my God, I got to get back to this person. I'm offline. Okay. Hey, I'll get right back to you. Like where, where should the line be in terms of, you know, when we use, or using AI to proofread or like, Hey, help me proofread this and help me tweak.

SPEAKER_307: You married, you got a spouse. You married, you got a spouse or a significant other. I am divorced. I now have, I do have a girlfriend though.

SPEAKER_216: You got a girlfriend. Okay. Let me ask this question. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_311: Are you using those quick responses? We'll cut this from the show. Nope. I do not use them. If she found out you did a quick response,

Chamath Palihapitiya: your girlfriend finds out you did a quick response on iMessage or on superhuman, man.

SPEAKER_318: I'm also curious to get your guys' take on this. You guys are all investors. If you get a claw generated deck, I'm sure by now you can sort of tell what's claw generated or not. What's your

SPEAKER_37: first reaction? Yeah, that's, that's not a good one because I'm, I'm one where like when I, when I do my articles and I do use AI to help me with research and things, but when it comes to like doing the graphics, I've tried to use Claude and, but I, I go back, I'm old school. So I open up Keynote and I do the graphics myself. I'll go find the, you know, the images, the icons for use. And so if I were to see someone come across with a deck, then I don't know, I'm the type of person where I, I enjoy, like I get excited about like putting my ideas into graphical form. And so like, to me, that just is another indicator that the passion this person has for their business. And so if,

SPEAKER_79: well, if they're not doing it, then it's like, I, I think I'm going to build on that low.

SPEAKER_09: If the graphics or like a chart was made by AI and you check the work and it's off your data.

SPEAKER_46: Cool. If you write pros, if it's like a deal memo or it's the bullet points, why you should invest or how we think about the future. If that shit's not human written, that means you're phoning it in. So this is a good thing we did this because we can clip this and send it to founders. I think if you wrote a deal memo, right? I love a deal memo. And if somebody on my team submitted a deal memo to the other partners at the firm or associates, and it was AI written,

SPEAKER_322: that's like fireable offense as far as I'm concerned.

SPEAKER_323: Now, if you did same for a founder then, right?

SPEAKER_287: Yeah. I mean, if, if, if I wrote a deal memo and I sent it to the founder and I was like, yeah, YOLO. I got, I got to go skiing for another, I got two more ski runs in, you know, I do everything

SPEAKER_46: in ski runs. Like I, if I can get like five, six, seven ski runs in with my little VC executive 90 minute ski run in between work and the winter. Okay, cool. But if I'm trying to get two extra runs

SPEAKER_147: in and I YOLO, like a Claude deal memo to you, man, no, no, that's not cool.

SPEAKER_321: Now, if you use gravelly to correct my grammar. Okay. Right. I think we made some progress here.

SPEAKER_328: Grammar really gets pretty spicy though. And does that, would that get picked up? Like if you run, if you run something you write through.

SPEAKER_19: Didi, what's the story with your startup here that I just installed?

SPEAKER_27: Well, yeah. So there, there's, it does a pretty good job. So you have a long amount of text and then some of it is AI generated and some of it's human written. It'll actually tell you which parts. If you use small grammar updates, it's really not going to affect the actual delineation. But as you might imagine at the very boundaries of if you're greatly editing something that's AI generated, then you might be sort of at the cusp of like, Hey, is it AI or is it not?

SPEAKER_29: But small tweaks definitely generally don't affect the pan crime algorithm.

SPEAKER_331: So it's not abdication. It's assistance. If we're going to frame it in AI speak.

SPEAKER_27: It'll, it'll actually tell you this part of the text is AI assisted or human. And this part is fully

SPEAKER_29: AI generated. And it does a lot more than look at like, Hey, you have a, you know, M dash or something like that. It does like some, some clever tricks.

SPEAKER_31: So I thought that was my best joke of the entire show and it completely fall flat. So we're going to move towards the day's fun item. Now we've talked about robotics at the top of the show, AI, how they work. Now let's talk about where the rubber meets the road. I found something that I don't know if I believe is real or not, but I do think it shows where we're going. Is anyone here familiar with towel robotics out of curiosity? Anybody raise a hand? No. Okay. So towel robotics put out this recently. Uh, they're launching towels, humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco for 30 bucks an hour. Join the wait list. All footage in this video is one X speed and there's a humanoid and human operator looking at it. So my question is, would you guys hire our dear friend towel here

SPEAKER_12: to come clean your house? Jason, you've got a lot of houses. What do you think?

SPEAKER_336: I have a lot. I mean, is four a lot? I guess that is a lot.

SPEAKER_11: Okay. Sorry. Jason, you have a, you have a reasonable number of houses. Two of them are, uh, two of them are rented. So just so we're clear, I'm just, I'm house max.

SPEAKER_340: I'm a state maxing. Okay. Assume two houses. Would you use this?

SPEAKER_45: I have 2.5 cause I just put the ski house into, uh, inventory on one fine stay, I think, or one of these platforms. Uh, well I'm using it three days, three weeks a year. I feel like an idiot. Um, like, um, would I use one of these? Yeah. For my ski house, if I'm not using it, it needs to be cleaned. If it did a reasonable job, maybe, but not at $30 an

SPEAKER_09: hour because that's what we pay humans. And I would rather the human get the, um, work. I don't think this is ready. I don't think this is ready for prime time. And I have like personal relationships with some of the cleaning folks and the teams. Yeah. I would feel bad about it right now.

SPEAKER_46: I'm getting concerned. I'm not like a P doomer, but I am starting to, maybe it's just my, um, soft heart, but I'm starting to worry about job loss in these kinds of jobs, you know, and drivers. And I might be okay with de-selling to get people a soft landing. Cause like, so I might be a de-sell. I think I'm a midterm de-sell on factory jobs, driving jobs, cleaning jobs.

SPEAKER_346: Yeah. Well, Jason, there's a, there's a, does that make me like a woke lunatic or does that make

SPEAKER_26: me a good person? There's a letter. You can sign this letter we have right here. Uh, and you can,

SPEAKER_45: uh, you can, you know, I think, yeah, I, I, the only reason I bring this up is you're asking me the question and you know, there's, I'm invested in all the self-driving companies, like very well invested in them. I think self-driving is coming. I want to save the 30,000 deaths a year, but I'm also kind of like, you know, I think we should have medallions for self-driving cars. This is, I think a reasonable proposal. You tell me if you think this is reasonable or David or Didi.

SPEAKER_347: Well, you're speaking like a New Yorker when you start talking medallions. Okay. But here's my idea

Chamath Palihapitiya: for medallions. I don't want rich people buying medallions and creating indentured servitude.

SPEAKER_09: I'm not down with that. Um, you know, being an Irishman, um, we, we had this situation. Um, what I do think would be interesting is if you're want to bring your Waymos, your neuro, your, you know, whatever it is to New York. And we say it's $10,000 a year. And there are a

SPEAKER_46: thousand self-driving car licenses in year one, 1500 in year two, 3000 in year three, whatever it is, as long as it's safety. And we're going to auction them off to people, or we're going to

SPEAKER_45: just sell them for $10,000. Okay. So there's a thousand of them. It's $10 million, or we auction them off. They go for 25,000 each is $25 million. As people lose their jobs, that $25 million gets put

SPEAKER_46: into a fund to give them unemployment if they lose their jobs over time. So it's like an, it's an unemployment pool, just like we, as employers have to pay into unemployment, a little bit of everybody's salaries. And then people can tap that if they get laid off,

SPEAKER_21: because I do think you're going to see like millions of people lose their jobs, driving things

SPEAKER_177: in the next five to 10 years. I feel like you're testing this on us because if you were to test this on your other show, you would get eaten a lot. Well, no, I'm a free, yeah, because I'm a free

SPEAKER_352: mark. I mean, some people are free market monsters and just like technology might is right, but

SPEAKER_46: somebody is going to have to pay for all this unemployment. And we gave people extended unemployment during COVID. It's not like an unprecedented thing to give people a safety net.

SPEAKER_37: I don't know. It's interesting when we go back and we always talk about all of the different revolutions and going back to the industrial revolution, Model T's coming out and automobiles taking over. What happened to all the people that did the carriages that had control of the horses on the carriages? I don't know if- I know what it is. They slowly lost their jobs because the transition

SPEAKER_125: took time. So when everybody talks about like everybody finds new jobs, you got to remember-

SPEAKER_355: Okay. So you're talking about, yeah.

SPEAKER_297: The industrial revolution, like the tractor existed 20 years before the tractor

SPEAKER_45: had mass deployment. Why? Because it wasn't until, you know, people needed workers that

SPEAKER_357: they started deploying it. So, yeah, I do. But you're saying now this is such a compressed amount of time.

SPEAKER_46: I think it's going to, I mean, does anybody, what do people think the time to 50% of rides in a major city going automated is? I would put it at, if I had to pick an over, under, I'd say

SPEAKER_37: five years. Take the over, the under. You say three? Feels about right. Yeah. So sometimes these things move faster, but that feels about right.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah. So, I mean, I'm just talking about having the companies that take the jobs and move all the money to Mountain View Waymo. They pick up the uninsured, they pick up some of the

SPEAKER_340: unemployment, not all of it, but some of the unemployment of the unemployment they're creating. I'm not

SPEAKER_364: saying forever either. Yeah. I think a lot of this comes down to someone's age. As we get older,

SPEAKER_41: our mental plus, you know, this whole, this whole trope of, you know, learn how to code for a 55 year old truck driver is much harder than 25 year old. So I think devil's in the details for older population. I think there should be some kind of off ramp, some kind of social assistance, but for the younger ones, you're only hurting them by making them do jobs that will become irrelevant in the future. You have to do a hard cutoff, have them face reality, and retrain them as quickly as possible. But I do think it's a problem. We live in a democratic system. Everything's on these two and four year terms. So it becomes a problem within

SPEAKER_103: the context of a democracy to enact this type of change. If you could wave a magic wand, David,

SPEAKER_09: you are the mayor of New York. You get to decide. Are you doing this proposal I put out there?

SPEAKER_216: Yes or no? I don't think so. Didi? Yes or no? No. Low? Yes or no? No. Alex? Sure. Okay. So I guess we got the two libtards on the program and everybody else is a free market

SPEAKER_31: monster. I am a capitalist through and through. Yeah. But I also watched my dad's small business struggle. I grew up without health insurance. I watched my parents cry because we didn't have any money. You know what? Fucking sucks. I think taking care of people and providing some basic level of

SPEAKER_00: support is something we can afford to do. And if AI in this great revolution does not push more money into our society to take care of one another, then what the is it for? Okay. There you go.

SPEAKER_31: DoorDash, everybody. We all use them to bring burritos to our house. They spawned the meme. Did you hire a private taxi for your burrito? Now, Jason, they're taking to the skies. We've had the CEO of Zipline on the show a couple of times. We've had the CEO of Mana Air from Ireland on the show a couple of times. This is happening. But DoorDash does not want to use a third party provider. No. They have built system. And that means you cannot have your burrito flown to your house instead of driven

SPEAKER_38: like some sort of peasant. Jason, you're a big delivery guy. Are you going to use this in Texas?

SPEAKER_09: I have a lot of shares in DoorDash through a venture fund. I'm an LPN. And I have, I did an SPV and a late stage investment in Zipline since I missed it as an angel investor when they were delivering blood with fixed wing systems. This is a direct response to Zipline. Zipline is putting, I don't know if we have a video of it, but like on the side of like a Starbucks, they're literally adding to those like drive through Starbucks, a place for their drones to pick stuff up. So I think DoorDash has no choice but to do this. And they also have a delivery motorcycle that came out like six months ago and that like drives in the bicycle lane at 30 miles an hour. So these things are going to be commodities pretty soon. And you have to, if you think about moats, hardware is a great moat. So I think DoorDash is going to be faced with, you can only put one drone on the side of a Starbucks. And if DoorDash has Zipline do that, it's like, that's their entire business. So I don't think they have a choice but to build these and it's going to be a free for all.

SPEAKER_13: Well, we need open source side of business, drone delivery, picky-uppy boxes. That way everyone can participate in, in delivery commerce. The reason why I wanted to have this on the show today is because this has gone from toy to actual product. And the reason I, I think that it's, we had MANA air on and they're moving from Ireland over into the U S interestingly enough. And they were telling me about how popular their service is in their home nation and how it's taken over a massive chunk of local deliveries that are very, very quick using micro facilities and so forth. But people love this. Like I can see this actually, Jason's pretty faster than self-driving cars because it's not, not as much of a safety risk. And also, uh, paying a human to bring me Taco Bell at 1am is

SPEAKER_383: It's going to be, and by the way, this is going to cost five bucks. Like all in, no tip, five bucks.

SPEAKER_114: You don't have to tip robots. We don't have to say hi to them, you know?

SPEAKER_384: They'll still try to take a tip for the robots.

SPEAKER_31: I'm not paying Tony's zoo's margins. I've seen his poker games. No, sir. I'm not going to subsidize his big blinds. Um, all right guys, listen, this has been a treat. I want to give everyone a chance to shout out, um, the port code they love the most and we'll start with you and then we'll wrap.

SPEAKER_29: Um, well, I already said in mind is, mind is pan gram. Um, for today, uh, pan gram is awesome. Just to make sure that you're not reading, uh, AI slop when you can be reading better stuff. Um, and it's good for images now too, and you should absolutely use it, um, and get the Chrome extension.

SPEAKER_388: All right. Eat it. Open router. David, over to you.

SPEAKER_103: Lagora, one of the best cultures in Silicon Valley. Paul Graham says it's the top company culture

SPEAKER_294: he's ever seen incredible growth, incredible sector in terms of legal AI.

SPEAKER_11: I just interviewed the founder when I was in Paris for race smart cats. Low favorite portfolio company who's on top.

SPEAKER_177: Yeah. So I'm going to go a different direction since we actually also invest as an LP and I'm

SPEAKER_37: going to go with kindred ventures. You're not supposed to have favorite children, but I do like the team at kindred. Steve and Kanye are doing an amazing job.

SPEAKER_140: All right. I like that, that, that, uh, right turn there, Jason, favorite portfolio company.

SPEAKER_09: You have a few pick one. Well, I'll just, because we're talking about, um, talking so much about self-driving, we have a company auto lane. It's the second time founder in our portfolio. We had invested in his first company neighborly, which got taken out by COVID. Uh, but auto lane is air traffic control for the back of your target, you know, pizza, hut, you know, local restaurant, um, or your say mall. And so, uh, imagine very shortly that you could

SPEAKER_45: send your, uh, model Y your own car to go pick up something you ordered at the grocery store. Well, then the grocery store, let's say it's HEB or whole foods, they could walk out and put your groceries in the back of your own car. Or one of the things that's happening, Terry blacks is the perfect example. The great barbecue joint, uh, which has a terrible parking lot with like no parking and everybody going there. So it winds up being like one of these chaotic parking lots. Um, they need to somehow deal with Waymo robo taxi, AV rides, Zooks all coming in. So what the, what auto lanes doing is they put the power in the hands of the establishment to say, Hey, these five spots are for self-driving cars and Hey, robo taxi, you've got spot one Zooks, you've got spot two, and they coordinated in real time. And the founders are killer and they're running tests right now. And I think there's an opportunity. We just talked about DoorDash and Uber, and like they have power over some of these and listen, I've got shares in both those companies. Uh, but I do think the establishment, you know, you've got your Terry blacks, Terry blacks should be able to set the rules and Terry blacks might want to buy five self-driving cars, own them themselves and give priority to people going to the Terry blacks website, ordering from them, putting in their address and having a Terry blacks car drive their brisket and

SPEAKER_09: beef ribs to them. And I think that would be a great future as well is to enable the store owners

SPEAKER_45: to run their own fleet. Uh, and then imagine also you order from, um, let's say you order from three stores at the Grove in LA. If you know that one, then you could have all three of your packages brought down to your car parked in their parking lot, put it in the back, boom, press a button and

SPEAKER_13: you're all set. So the risk of recording the show right before we all have lunch is that by the end of it, we're just talking about Terry blacks, barbecue, the beef, get the beef rib. And when you get your

SPEAKER_147: David, you don't want lean brisket. You want the wet brisket from the peak, not the flat. You want

SPEAKER_247: the wet brisket. Keep that in mind. This is the most Texas eight words I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_303: No DD people are ordering. They're like, give me the lean brisket. Like, this is not like a Jewish deli in New York. If you want to do that at cats is have at it. But when you're in Texas,

SPEAKER_297: the great state of Texas, you will get your brisket wet. That means fattier, juicier. That's the way it's supposed to be. Enough with the lean. All right. Thanks for coming to my barbecue Ted

SPEAKER_400: Talk. I only have one portfolio company, but I'll shut them up because why not? Salmon run.ai.

SPEAKER_31: My friend Kevin runs it. I love Kevin. Wait, what one? Salmon run.ai is the URL. I just figured I'd give him the old shout out. You're investing? Yeah, I backed a friend of mine.

SPEAKER_404: Spell the domain name and show it. Sam, the letter N. Salmon, like the fish. Wow. Look at you. Look at you editorially

SPEAKER_271: conflicted. I love it. This was like a year. This was like a year ago. Good. Yeah,

SPEAKER_408: yeah, yeah, yeah. Your content is kind of finally accurate. Oh, so it cleans up your address book?

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They built some really cool stuff. I know the guys. Great idea. Mark days.

SPEAKER_00: So shout out to Kevin and the whole crew. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been This Week in Startups. It's Wednesday. It's Fincher Capital Roundtable. We got DD. We got low. We got David. We got Jason and we got you back here on Friday. We'll see you then. Bye.